Cliff Slaughter
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Cliff Slaughter is a British Trotskyist.
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[edit] Life
During the Second World War, Cliff Slaughter worked in a coal mine as one of the Bevin Boys. While there, he was injured when kicked by a pit pony.
As a lecturer at the University of Leeds, Slaughter joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He left in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and joined Gerry Healy's group The Club.[1] Slaughter remained with the tendency for almost three decades, during which it became known as the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). During this period, he was regarded as the group's top intellectual,[2] and remained on the Central Committee.
[edit] Split in the WRP
In 1985, Healy faced allegations of sexual harassment, leading Slaughter to team up with Mike Banda in opposition to him. This broadened into a more general criticism of the party's direction. They were able to gain a majority of the group and forced Healy to retire. When Healey again tried to exert authority, Slaughter and Banda led a call for "revolutionary morality" and split the organisation between their supporters and those of Healy and Sheila Torrance.[3]
Slaughter worked with David North's International Committee of the Fourth International to publish a study into the funding of the WRP, which concluded that it had received over £1,000,000 from Libya and various Middle Eastern governments.[4]
Slaughter and Banda formed a new Workers Revolutionary Party and regrouped their international supporters into the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International. However, Banda soon split with Slaughter, repudiating Trotskyism. The members of the group which Slaughter led decided that the idea of a vanguard party, was not the way to build towards socialism. Slaughter remains a member of a loose grouping with other former members of the WRP, the Movement for Socialism, and continues to write. In 2007, his work Not Without a Storm: towards a communist manifesto for the age of globalisation was published, intended as the opening of a discussion on contemporary issues and the responsibility of socialists.
[edit] See Also
[edit] Sources
- ^ "Geoff Pilling", in Glossary of People, Encyclopedia of Marxism at Marxists.org. (accessed 2008-06-08)
- ^ Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter 6. (accessed 2008-06-08)
- ^ Ibid., Chapter 11. (accessed 2008-06-08)
- ^ "The Corruption of the Workers Revolutionary Party", Solidarity, Issue 16 (new series), Spring 1988 (online on the GAUCHE Blog, July 27 2004) (accessed 2008-06-08)
