The Wheel of Fortune

It’s Easter - and the below was written with tongue often in cheek. A knowledge of (British) Trot activities may help in reading the below but isn't, by any means, necessary.

And if you’re a future archaeologist, digging up this text after the 3rd Nuclear War, and as the only remaining source on 20th century Left history - well, then the future (and the past) really do belong to me.

Have you ever wondered why all Left groups - from whatever tradition - generally only make use of an incestuously small pool of similar names?

I mean, if even the Welsh now have more surnames that just Davis and Jones - such as, er, Davies - couldn’t the Left think of a few new brands?

How about ‘RevRouge’ ‘Lefta!’, ‘Commacom’ or perhaps Commo.com?

Python-esque?

Maybe you’ve seen the Monty Python film, ‘The Life of Brian’ in which the ‘comrades’ of the ‘Judean People's Front’ make fun of the ‘People's Front of Judea’, the ‘Judean Popular Peoples Front’ and the ‘Popular Front of Judea’?

Well, that’s just the sort of lying, profit-seeking non-dialectical view of communist organisation that you would expect from the philistine capitalistic, mass (sic) media. It doesn’t advance us one iota in explaining the Left naming phenomenon.

I mean, there’s never even been a ‘Popular Front of Judea’. You just can’t trust Hollywood. Although, admittedly, all three of the other organisations named in the film have existed. And so have another twenty versions of the total possible twenty-four combinations of the names.

To Stalingard

There is reason behind the rhyme of naming. But for that you’ll have to go back eighty years to the time of the exile of Trotsky from the Soviet Union and the repression of the Trotskyists in the communist parties throughout the world.

Supporters in the Soviet Union of what would eventually become the Fourth International (but which was then the ‘International Left Opposition’ [ILO]) were sometimes sent, as in Tsarist days, into Siberian exile.

But others were sent to Stalingrad.

The need for names

The Soviet authorities tasked the ILO supporters in Stalingrad, in that pre-computer era, with devising fiendishly devious chess defensive strategies. The exiled comrades mapped these out with sticks on the top of snow flurries. The later supremacy of the Russian grandmasters arose from this work.

But these comrades also rose silently from their Spartan wooden cots, in the middle of those endless cold winter nights, whilst their guards slept fast under the influence of the potato vodka, to work on a task far worthier - and many times more complex - than their daytime penal activities.

It was obvious to the ILO comrades that soon communist parties would sweep across every territory. But crucially, it was now also clear that there would be different communist parties in each state - groups based upon loyalties to different communist internationals.

And as the accelerating pace of the final collapse of capitalism threw up a plethora of unfolding advancements in concrete conditions, so would be forged manifold new Left organisations at the anvil of class conflict.

And all these parties would need names. Hundreds of names.

The solution

Labouring hard, and despite losing many a finger to frostbite, the ILO comrades set to work on devising an intricate engineering marvel that they could use to provide a practical solution to this problem.

They set their sights on no less than making a tool that could perm any combination of two or three or four words, and from a choice of just seventeen ‘key words’ (e.g. 'socialist', 'workers', 'revolutionary', 'Marxist', etc.) to form an officially authorised name for any Left party e.g 'Revolutionary Workers Party', 'Party of Revolutionary Workers', etc.

All these ‘key words’ had to be either ‘party names’ or ‘key Marxist terms’ that were in use before the cut off date - 7 November 1917. See some of the results here.

And they succeeded. In glorious Bakelite, this wondrous device - the Wheel, as it became known - was able to be fabricated when Stalin’s electrification scheme finally reached the Volga. The Wheel was one of the technological marvels of this pre-war period and presaged an era of Soviet technical achievement that culminated in Sputnik.

And so it came to pass that with the Wheel, the name of any future communist organisation was now able to be determined! Surely the keys to the doors of a socialist heaven rest with those who can determine what parties there are - and what parties are to come!

All the Left

Shortly after the invention of the Wheel, there was an aborted attempt to reach some agreement between the 3rd International and other communists in respect of a few joint anti-fascist activities.

The only ongoing agreement that lasted from this was a decision to utilise the Wheel throughout the whole Left (and Left-ish) movement as the only authorised method of nomenclature. That agreement is still in place. So even today the ruling Spanish social democrats are actually called, in the English translation of their name, the ‘Spanish Socialist Workers Party.’

The mid 30s

In 1933, a Comintern courier, enroute with the Wheel from Istanbul to Yokohama via Cairo and Rangoon was discovered by one of Chiang Kai-shek’s men to be staying in a room above the Ching Cat Club, just behind the Bund in Shanghai. It was arranged, in the club that night, for him to be slipped an opium laden Balkan Sobranie whilst watching Madame Woo dispensing with the ‘Half’ during the ‘Dance of the Six and a Half Veils’. Later in his room, whilst the courier was indisposed, the Wheel was also stripped down to its component parts, photographed and reassembled.

These pictures were then smuggled out via Vladivostok, hidden as microfilm in the hatband of an agent’s Trilby, and onto the S.S. Hamburg that was bound for Bremerhaven. The copy of the Wheel that was later made at Herr Messerschmitt’s factory, based upon these smuggled photos, was subsequently used as the main component in the wartime German ‘Enigma’ coding machine.

The wars

The use of the original Wheel, in the late 30s, included some heavy-duty calculations in the Catalonian half-light during the worst days of the Spanish Civil War. Amongst those taking it for a spin then was the still unmasked ‘Fifth Man’. He was an Oxford Don, with a degree in Engineering, who was in Barcelona fighting for the POUM. The ‘Fifth Man’ made a detailed model of the Wheel using two dozen packets of Swan Vestas.

After Franco’s victory, the ‘Fifth Man’ went on to teach at Cambridge where he took up a homosexual relationship with the British computer pioneer, Alan Turing. The ‘Fifth Man’ took great delight in showing Turing his model of the Wheel. It's Turing who is credited with cracking the Enigma cipher during World War II - and, in some accounts, thus winning World War II. It may not be for nothing that Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges writes ‘after fifty years Turing is still the Trotsky of the computer revolution’.

But the role of those Stalingrad masters of defensive strategy, in ensuring that we Brits didn’t grow up under the rule of König Eduard VIII, doesn’t receive the publicity that it should.


Using the Wheel

A cross Left committee was established to govern the use of the Wheel and to ensure correct naming procedures. I've served on this body for the twenty-one years. The sort of people that have also served on the committee might surprise you. And you’d be amazed at the fundamental effect that a quick twist of a wrist to spin a few Bakelite discs can have on the future development of the international workers movement.

The Wheel committee

I remember my predecessor telling me, possibly with just a little exaggeration, about some of the early postwar Wheel committee meetings. He apparently played badminton in a garden with Stalin and Ho Chi Minh whilst they all discussed some possible names for parties of leftist evolving Nasserites and Ba’athists. Meanwhile, in the greenhouse, a drunken Tito taught Togliatti to sing the Red Flag in Serbo-Croat.

But I personally recall, and with some sort of affection, playing Gin Rummy with Abimael Guzmán (Shining Path) and Ernest Mandel whilst Castro was out in the kitchen teaching Pol Pot and Deng Xiaoping to make mojitos whilst at the same time arguing with them about the nomenclature for Belgian Left communist organisations.

Expenses

The ‘principle’ has become established over time (somehow) that it’s quite legitimate for Wheel committee members to claim ‘expenses’ when allocating new Left names. It was said that Hoxha made a small fortune when he managed to convince Mao that Stalin had indulged in shenanigans with Madame Mao - and this tale later led to the Sino-Soviet split. Hoxha somehow got exclusive rights over the term ‘Marxist Leninist’ and then sold national licences for a pretty penny.

Albert Blenkinsop

A British Trotskyist, Albert Blenkinsop from West Bromwich, undertook a forty year stint on the Wheel committee until he was forced to hand over his baton to me in 1986.

At that time the remnants of the imploding British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) were appearing to be stabilising and seemed likely to remain together - apart from a few Healy acolytes such as the Redgraves. Unfortunately Albert saw an opportunity to make a bit on the side - and just in time to invest when British Gas and other nationalised industries were being flogged off cheap by the government. His judicious circulation of a few faked photos managed to cause more divisions in the WRP - then splits within these splinters and then onto the shards. Each paid a fat fee to Albert for a new name. When it was all exposed, I was asked to take over his responsibilities.

The Wheel in 2007

Frankly, it’s been a long descent downhill for the Wheel since the 80s. I now keep the device in a Lidl carrier bag on a shelf above my washing machine, next to the sink plunger.

There were three of us on the Wheel committee until not long ago. Me, Ernesto Q and Comrade JP Contractor - BA (Chennai) BSc (Jaffna).

I think I have to conclude that Ernesto won’t be contributing anymore. I’m not sure his heart's still in it. I knew Ernesto originally as a Bolivian partisan of the Posadists. But then he later left them complaining that ‘their horizons were far too narrow’.

The last I knew he was living in Asunción. But a recent message, according to the email headers, was apparently bounced off the orbiting wreck of Skylab. The note simply said ‘it really is full of stars’. I tried replying but keep getting a strange error message - ‘no such account exists yet’.

Comrade Contractor has frankly caused some scandal by selling a very close variation of the same name - Sama Samaja - thirteen times to different Sri Lankan Left organisations. I’ve had to ask him to resign.

And even I’m getting a little disheartened. I have made a fair bit of cash from repeatedly splitting the Indian Naxalites but there’s no real money in it nowadays. And even what there is can be hard to collect from a tough bunch of Maoists, tooled up with countrymade rifles in the badlands of Bihar.


Cases

It could be that even some of you time-served Trots have never have heard of the Wheel. But then readers of this site are hardly Central Committee (CC) material and I generally only talk about these things with the inner coterie of the CC, if not just with the owner of the franchise himself (it’s always a him).

But let me be just a little indiscreet and mention some of the interesting cases that you may not know about.

CPGB (sic)

When the ‘Leninist’ crowd, who had previously been in the Communist Party of Great Britain, decided to spin the Wheel the counters pointed to - Socialist Workers Industrial Group.

They walked away in a huff and actually usurped the name of the party that had expelled them. It still causes confusion to this day when they say things in meetings like, ‘as our party said in 1929’.

Not Rosa

Albert never really got over the reverberations of the expulsion of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) from the (US) SWP in 1964. He told me that the RT were the nicest bunch of Trots you were ever likely to meet. They were very self-deprecating about themselves and their politics, never had a bad word to say about any other of their ‘respected Trotskyist sisters and brothers’ and always enquired after his mother.

But Lady Luck slipped the day that he span the Wheel to chose their new name. When the discs finally stopped spinning, it read - Communist Organisation of Proletarian Socialists.

They accused poor Albert of loading the wheels. A slight warping of one of the discs was pointed out to him by one of the American group’s leading theoreticians. It turned out that this guy had spent his early life working in Atlantic City, roughhousing those trying to play craps in Mob casinos with shaved dice.

I understand that they then made Albert an offer he couldn’t refuse. The American group were keen to use a term from the German Revolution of 1919; they even namechecked Rosa herself as the source - ‘Give it to us or else!’ But Albert knew he’d never be able to make the deal stand up - everyone would know this was a term that was first used beyond the cut off date. ‘No dice’, he replied. Rather rashly, I think.

Then all hell broke loose. Denunciations were written of Albert - and in fourteen languages. He said that he saw the previously meek and mild mannered Americans, with their habit of calling people ‘Sir’, change right in front of his eyes. And all this because he'd absent-mindedly left the Wheel for a minute or two on top of the fireguard whilst he was up in the loft releasing his racing pigeons.

Eventually the Americans decided to chose their own name. Forty plus years of obstreperous boorishness from the Spartacists have followed.

Soccy Occy

When Socialist Organiser (a.k.a. the Workers Socialist League) wanted a makeover, their spin of the Wheel came up with the - Workers Action Group.

They were very unhappy with this and even threatened - in jest, I’m sure - to dig up some photos of me and someone called Destiny from the Labour Party Young Socialists camp in the Forest of Dean in 1982.

That is, unless I let them have another twirl.

I replied saying something like, ‘I’m nothing, if not too stupid to be corrupted’. Truth is I was rather hoping that they would leak the photos to Weekly Worker so that I could see them again.

You see I’d lost my copies of these pictures. They‘d been destroyed - along with some stranger’s undergirdle that had got mixed into my smalls by the woman doing the service wash at the laundrette; a very creased napkin signed by Niagara from the band ‘Destroy All Monsters’ (complete with a black lipstick kiss) and an Action Man fashioned to look like me.

All of these things had been ceremoniously burnt, atop the Cerne Abbas Giant, in a Black Mass carried out by a former acquaintance of mine called Wilma.

Anyway, Socialist Organiser stormed off and came back with their current moniker - the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL). I’ve repeatedly told them since that ‘Liberty’ is most certainly a non-approved word and I can't find any mention of it in the sacred texts.

The AWL obviously also felt they need a justification for what was originally just a sulk over a possible unwanted nickname. I understand that they've subsequently tried to copper-bottom it all by borrowing a lot of stuff from Shactman - but they and I (and now you) know what it’s all really about.

Militant

In the early 60s there were complaints, from some Left communists in Grimsby, that the British Revolutionary Socialist League were refusing to acknowledge their use of the name. The Revolutionary Combine of Fish-Finger Packers were keen to change theirs.

After having their ears chewed off, Ted Grant et al walked out of a meeting with Albert and then deliberately broke one of the cardinal rules relating to Left nomenclature. They launched a new paper in 1964, ‘Militant’, that appropriated the name of another paper already in use - ‘Militant’ of the (US) Socialist Workers Party.

Naturally, when you break one fundamental principle, all the other Marxism goes out the window. Hence their later politics - and Derek Hatton.

Workers Power

But some actually took to ‘breaking the rules’ before the Wheel was even spun. In those, ‘let it all hang out and dig the vibes’ days of the mid 70s, what was then the SWP’s ‘Left Faction’ decided to make a deliberate break with tradition.

After considering the name ‘Red Lab’, they went for the very unorthodox ‘Workers Power’. (There’s even a rumour that it was to be ‘Workers Flower Power’ - inspired by the events in Portugal in 1975). The new name went well with their moustaches, sideburns and luxurious manes that touched the bottom of their donkey jackets.

Over thirty years hard work later, and with two members less - their heads of some of those comrades are now a lot more mature (as well as being completely grey and balding). They've been keen to return to orthodoxy and have rectified matters by adopting a term that was first used by Marx - ‘Permanent Revolution’.


Splits

I do sometimes wonder why I bother to keep going with the Wheel. But then I do get to hear about splits before practically anyone else.

I’ve had some very protracted discussions recently with some comrades in Nancy who really appeared to be trying to ‘game’ the system. They stated that they would be happy to keep to the rules but felt that they wanted ‘a legacy from the party from which they are keen to split’. I needed to have some very pointed discussions with them about what you get if you split a ‘League’. I was very unconvinced by their claims that, in English, they could become a ‘cubit’ a ‘span’ or even a ‘furlong’ - but it’s hard going arguing with these intellectuals.

And now they’ve now set off on a new course. In their latest email, they argue that “if a League does exist, then the ‘proof’ of its existence cannot be taken as any ‘proof’ of a negation of the non-existence of the essence of what it is’. Or something. And all in French.

What I haven’t told them is that the warping on the Wheel is now somewhat worse. So if I squeeze my fingers, just so, whilst spinning, they could yet become, in English translation, the ‘French Revolutionary Organisation Group’.

I may be breaking a few confidences here, but let me also tell you about an interesting discussion I had recently with some disgruntled members of the British SWP. These comrades have dug up a few mimeographed copies of a publication that was published for three issues in Minsk in 1912. If I can authenticate it, you can guess the name of the forthcoming split. The paper was called ‘Disrespectski’.

I think I’ll keep on with the Wheel, yet awhile. It's interesting having the destiny of mankind within your grasp.