Staying Red: why I remain a socialist NORMAN HARDING Index Books London © Norman Harding 2005 Published 2005 by Index Books 16 Electric Avenue, Brixton, London SW9 8JX Typeset by Sumner Type, London SE22 Printed by Trade Union Printing Services, Newcastle upon Tyne A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1-871518-25-3 Dedication This book is dedicated to all those throughout the world who are struggling for socialism, and to all those who are fighting against oppression. We need a society where social relations will mean that adequate food, clean water, clothing, and shelter will be available for all. A society where wealth (for example, oil) will not just benefit the rulers of these areas, but benefit all. A society with no national rulers using military might and superiority to invade any part of the world to steal its resources as is happening now, in 2004, in Iraq. Long gone are the days when a community was simply all the people living in an area, based on a local industry. Globalisation of capital and ownership means that the world is our community. The old slogan Workers of the World Unite has never been more urgent and necessary. Acknowledgements I thank all my comrades and friends of the late Socialist Labour League and Workers Revolutionary Party for their support and encouragement over the five years writing this book. Every attempt has been made to contact all those mentioned. If anyone has not been contacted, please accept my apologies. Special thanks to Clare Cowen and Bridget Leach for their unstinting hard work, devotion and care taken with the finer points that were needed to arrive at the finished product, and to Brian Eley for designing the cover. Thanks and appreciation to Cathy Brown at the Micklefield BT Cyberstation for help and advice. Thanks to Paul Jennings (Australia) and the many others who helped. Thanks to John Davies, Cliff Slaughter and Stephen Drury, who have constantly been available whenever I needed their special skills or just needed a chat. Many thanks to my wife Pauline: without her support I may never have been able to start, never mind finish, this book. Thanks to our family who have always shown an interest in the books progress and some pride in the fact that we will have it on the bookshelves. CONTENTS What this book means to me 1 1 The Hardings 5 2 National Service in post-war Germany 20 3 Finding my feet politically 43 4 My early days in the Trotskyist movement 60 5 The Socialist Labour League 83 6 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 94 7 Work in the tenants and labour movement 104 8 Changing factories 128 9 Loscoe and the Normanton rent strike 151 10 From Executex to the British Museum 169 11 Working in London 180 12 The Redgraves 211 13 London and Baghdad 219 14 Raid on the school, Saturday 27 September 1975 224 15 Miners Strike 236 16 Uncovering and overcoming the horror: 1984 to 1986 242 17 Australia 261 18 Back to Leeds 274 19 Summing up 288 Index 290 WHAT THIS BOOK MEANS TO ME I was born into a working-class family. As a class we are encouraged by the ruling class to think that our role is to do as we are told. To be brought up by our parents to the point of speech and the ability to walk. Then to be educated to just the level required to do the type of work that society needs us for. To expect nothing more than to sell our labour power, for as little as possible, so that the next generation has little choice but to carry on with the process. I wrote this book to show that my life was an integral part of the development and evolution of our species and of the social relations in society. The ruling class created the conditions so that any decisions workers made could be kept under control as much as possible. We get up in the morning, go to work, and earn just enough to keep life and limb together, to enable us to go to work the following morning. And even this low standard of living had to be fought for by previous generations of workers. But a point comes for many workers and intellectuals when they start to ask questions and to learn about the class-ridden society we live in. They break with the theory that class division is a normal way of progress, that war and unemployment are natural developments, human nature. They take a conscious decision that the social structure has to be changed and replaced by communism (that of Marx, not Stalin) or social democracy, and that the historical role of the working class is to do just this. I feel very proud that I am one of the millions who took that 2 STAYING RED decision to fight against capitalism and the global domination it was historically heading for. I am proud to have taken individual responsibility to work for the bringing down of capitalism. My book outlines the development of my life and the kind of individual that I became: compassionate, understanding that the oppressed of the world are part of my community, but never taking my eye off the real enemy, capitalism and its supporters. I began to write this personal history not to record every detail of my life, but to explain my involvement in politics. The early part of the book covers the periods that influenced my future political activity. I then trace the politics that allowed me to spend 31 years (1954 to 1985) in intense activity, building what I believed was the party that would free the British working class and also play a leading role in liberating the oppressed of the world. Grand aims: feeding instead of fighting; building instead of bombing; a society that would use knowledge for progress and not as a means to oppress and make profit for a few. Then in 1985, that struggle for a revolutionary party changed. The organisation that I had been involved in building had to be smashed, and our long-time leader Gerry Healy expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party along with his supporters, on 19 October 1985. To this day the reasons for Healys expulsion have not been understood by many people. After twenty years some comrades still hanker after the old ways of the Healy WRP. They find solace in words and slogans that keep them in glorious isolation and sectarian solitude. Words from past situations. But the world has changed and is still changing. If millions take action against oppression and then find that they have to take on world capitalism, do we participate with them only if they agree with our slogans of the past? The principles described by the word communism are being struggled for in many parts of the world, including the ex-Soviet Union, yet because of what happened in the former Eastern Bloc, communism is a dirty word to millions of people. Should we continue using words that make us feel pure and virtuous, enabling us to go into the working class as prophets with all the answers? WHAT THIS BOOK MEANS TO ME 3 And if they do not listen then thats their problem? The alternative is to do it the hard way: to find ways and means of joining the working class in the looming struggles, to help build stepping stones for the development of the mass movement against capitalism. The break-up of the former Eastern Bloc (all countries run by what we called Stalinism) changed the political map of the world. We Trotskyists can say that our analysis of the Soviet Union has in large part at least been borne out. There are to be no centuries of immovable Stalinism. But the very existence of our Trotskyist party was based on the exposure of Stalinism. The two pillars that held our party up were Trotskyism and Stalinism: we were Trotskyists, but our existence was based on a fight against Stalinism. Then when Stalinism collapsed Trotskyism had to question its purpose. Everything was changing, everything had to be re-examined but not in order to destroy our past. (Sometimes comrades think that to re-examine has something to do with capitulation to bourgeois pressures.) In this context Marxism has to be used as a method of developing our work in the new situation. It is absolutely essential that we do not continue with the old methods, using the same old slogans, raising the same old banners and trying to build the same type of organisation, albeit without the bad bits that we began to destroy in 1985. But I wont go into this in great detail here. It will be hard for readers who did not live through these battles to grasp all the political problems we were wrestling with. I want readers to understand the reasons I spent my life as I did. I hated (and still hate) what capitalism does to people. I came to the conclusion that it needed overthrowing and replacing with socialism. But there was already something in the Soviet Union and elsewhere which claimed to be socialism and this thing was a terrible dictatorship. So less of my life was actually spent in fighting for socialism than fighting against this thing Stalinism which was trying to usurp its name. Mum, Dad and me (above). With my baby brother Keith 1 THE HARDINGS I was singing Lazy Bones sitting on the top step of our home in Shakespeare Street using one of the wheels of my little metal tricycle as the steering wheel of my imaginary car.