Come The Revolution

COME THE REVOLUTION: A Memoir

By ALEX MITCHELL

Newsouth, 2011, 536 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Growing up as an Anglican choirboy and then working as a Murdoch tabloid journalist in Australia’s conservative ‘deep north’ (regional Queensland) did not stop Alex Mitchell from going on to serve fifteen years as a leading cadre with the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), once England’s largest Trotskyist party.

From being a “reporter with leftwing views”, Mitchell was thrust into active socialist politics via Vietnam War protests in England during the sixties. Uninspired by the Moscow-line Communist Party of Great Britain, Mitchell was attracted by a resurgent Trotskyism, joining the Socialist Labour League (the WRP’s predecessor) in 1971.

Mitchell had walked away from a safe but unsatisfying career with the bourgeois media to become editor of the WRP’s daily paper. His Fleet Street colleagues said that Mitchell was giving up his professional ‘freedom’ but he instead found himself liberated to thoroughly explore topics which his corporate media peers had to tip-toe around.

The particular organisation Mitchell joined, however, came to contradict Mitchell’s political ideals. The party’s founder, Gerry Healy, had seduced eager, passionate recruits with the illusion of joining a mass party able to challenge for state power in a capitalist system riven by an apparently perpetual crisis, and seemingly imminent political collapse, an unrealistic worldview that flowed from, and reinforced, the party as (though Mitchell rejects the label) a cult.

The WRP became “hermetically sealed”, says Mitchell, from wider public appeal under the arid formula of carrying the one, true banner of revolutionary socialism under the authority of an unchallengeable leader. The party, he concludes, suffered from “an attachment to the notion that a small vanguardist party could substitute itself for the mass movement and ‘will’ the revolution to happen”. Healy’s authoritarian cult leadership, and volcanic rages, ensured that inner-party debate was confined to reaffirming the Healy line, replete with ‘unanimous’, Stalinist-style, party voting.

This attitude also involved a sectarian rejection of patient joint work with the rest of the left and progressive movements. Healy regarded the peace, feminist and other ‘middle class protest movements’ as only good for prized recruits who were otherwise the object of the the party’s scorn, including high profile establishment media professionals like Mitchell, and other celebrities (especially if they were cashed-up, like the actress, Vanessa Redgrave).

The party’s sectarianism also meant demonising other left wing parties as insufficiently revolutionary, indeed counter-revolutionary – Mitchell unreflectively recycles the WRP’s tawdry slander against the Trotskyist US Socialist Workers Party leaders for being agents of Hoover’s FBI and Stalin’s GPU in the assassination of Trotsky.

Mitchell was still a Healy loyalist when the WRP spectacularly imploded in 1985 after Healy was accused of exploiting his position of power for sexual favours from dozens of party women and expelled amidst an outbreak of factional warfare involving “day after day of treachery, disloyalty, hysteria, moral panic, verbal threats, physical intimidation, rage and anger”.

Mitchell regards the allegations as “outrageous slander” (an unsurprising stance from a Healy loyalist, although Healy had a long record of sexual impropriety) and interprets the anti-Healy coup as a “state-organised political provocation to destroy Healy and the WRP” which may be more plausible - Ken Livingston (Labour left Mayor of London) also thinks that the split in the WRP was the work of MI5 agents planted in the party.

Mitchell concedes, however, that the “one-man domination of our inner-party life was an explosion waiting to happen”, but the party’s demise goes beyond personality ructions to a rotten politics which placed the interests of the sect above political principle and made the party ripe for the slightest nudge from malevolent outside forces.

The Healyite rituals of producing a financially unsustainable daily paper and calling dogmatically for a general strike were articles of political faith uncorrected by experience, as were the party’s international politics. Mitchell, for example, was accused of identifying Iraqi student oppositionists in London to Saddam Hussein’s regime for execution on their return to Iraq (an unproven allegation, although Mitchell’s News Line notoriously justified the execution of Iraqi communists by the Ba’athist regime).

Mitchell had been the party’s “roving Middle East envoy”, forging WRP alliances with Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, offering political support in return for money to fund the party’s paper. “Shameless humbug”, says Mitchell of “London’s radical chic” who “criticised us for dealing with despots” but what Mitchell is defending is the rank opportunism of cosying up to dictators (under the guise of supporting anti-imperialist, radical bourgeois nationalism) for their dough.

Mitchell returned to Australia in 1986, has resurfaced in the Murdoch press and still claims to be a socialist. His memoir, although enlivened with fascinating, if factionally partisan, personal portraits of party life, leaves unanswered the legacy of political sects such as the WRP. Overall, their political influence on the left has been an adverse one, involving a needless waste of the talents and energies of the genuine revolutionaries who fell under their spell of a cult.