This edition of Socialism Today has been produced as a commemorative issue marking the passing, on April 23, of Peter Taaffe, the inaugural editor of the Militant in 1964, a leading member of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) from its founding congress in 1974, and the general secretary of the Socialist Party until 2020.
Peter was a prolific contributor to Socialism Today and its predecessor magazine, the Militant International Review (MIR), writing a leading article in the first issue of the MIR published in autumn 1969 on the state of the trade unions in Britain after the defeat of the Harold Wilson Labour government’s anti-union ‘In Place of Strife’ white paper. In total the MIR and Socialism Today, launched as a monthly in 1995, together published 173 original articles by Peter, ranging across every facet of the struggle for socialism in Britain and internationally.
A special edition – a book, in fact – could be produced of Peter’s articles for the magazine that explored the ideas, and explained them for a new generation, of the great giants of Marxism. From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves, to the co-leaders of the Russian revolution Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and the inspirational legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.
More than one book could also be produced of Peter’s outstanding articles re-orientating the Marxist movement in response to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe from 1989-1991. Alongside the victory of the October 1917 revolution and the outcome of the second world war, these momentous events were the most significant turning point in the 20th century in shaping the world balance of class forces.
Although for genuine Marxists the Stalinist regimes were a grotesque caricature of socialism – which is the democratic control and planning of the economy and society not the totalitarian rule of a bureaucratic caste – their demise was used to ‘prove’ that capitalism was the only viable way of organising society.
This ideological defeat, carried on a wave of capitalist triumphalism, undermined the confidence of even the most active, politically conscious workers to resist the demands of the system, in the workplace and societally. This impact on consciousness had consequences for workers’ organisation, in both trade unions and political parties, whose effects are still only beginning to be overcome in the new post post-Stalinist era we are living in. Peter’s articles, not abandoning Marxism but refining and applying it to the new times, were indispensable to the task of re-orientation and remain so to this day.
Clearly then, to produce one representative compilation of his immense contribution within a single issue of a 32-page magazine is impossible. But nonetheless a selection has had to be made.
Theory and action
Marxism is in essence the crystallisation of human experience to point the way to a new, higher form of society, not to create immutable laws of economic, political and social development but a working guide to action. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways”, Marx famously wrote, “the point, however, is to change it”. There can be no greater test of the validity of ideas than in the leadership of mass struggles.
That is why the first two of Peter’s articles in this special commemorative edition feature the struggles against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government conducted by Liverpool city council from 1983-87 and the mass anti-poll tax non-payment campaign that followed it, in both of which Militant played the central, critical role. The first mobilised a city, the latter an all-Britain movement with around a third of the entire adult population facing some form of legal action against them over a four-year period.
Profound issues of theory and action were raised in these defining movements, with Peter always to the fore in their resolution. From the role of trade unions under a socialist council – “analogous to the relationship that would exist between a democratic workers’ state and the trade unions” as Peter puts it in Liverpool’s Historic Struggle on page three, written in 1986 – to how to overcome the seemingly invincible powers of the capitalist state, worked out in the anti-poll tax battle. In every case, with the inevitable debates of a live movement over details and tactics clarifying and amending positions as the struggle unfolds, the test was passed.
“It remains an incontestable historical fact”, as Peter writes in The Great Anti-Poll Tax Victory on page twelve, “that it was neither the official leadership of the labour movement nor small left groups – without a feel for the real pulse and movement of the working class – that provided the leadership for the decisive poll tax victory”, and the same was true for Liverpool too. It was, instead, the also small but powerfully clearsighted forces of genuine Marxism.
The third article in this selection, The Real Meaning Of Thatcherism starting on page 21, written as the financial crisis of 2007-08 was shattering the ‘ideological’ basis of the laissez-faire capitalism which she had epitomised, sums up the period and its lessons in preparation for new struggles ahead.
Also included to aid the reader to follow the narrative argument, for those new to the events in particular, is a summary timeline of the Liverpool and anti-poll tax struggles, on page 20.
A legacy for the new era
The final selection, Corbynism And The Rise Of Left-wing Populism on page 27, is one of the more recent articles that Peter wrote for Socialism Today analysing the experiences, including the mistakes, of the movements that developed in the first revival in the post-Stalinist era of basic socialist ideas on a mass scale.
The anti-poll tax struggle had developed, as stated, against the international background of the unfolding collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the ideological triumphalism of capitalism. This objective fact and its consequences muted the impact of the anti-poll tax movement, and the ‘dress rehearsal’ of Liverpool, and thereby the gains that we could have made in the 1990s and beyond from these living examples of Marxism in action.
But the new era will be completely different to the 1990s and their aftermath, with Corbynism and the other parties and movements that arose internationally after the 2007-08 crisis just a first portent of far greater developments to come. The forces of Marxism can look ahead with confidence to building parties in Britain and internationally that will be capable, as Militant was in the 1980s, of melding with and leading the mass movements of the future.
It is a profound loss to have to face the future challenges without Peter Taaffe’s deeply-rooted grasp – instinctive it almost seemed at times – of the class dynamics involved in any movement and the broader tasks. But his legacy of writings and practice combined will be a lasting guide in the ongoing struggle for a new, socialist world.
A full obituary has been published on the CWI website, available at https://www.socialistworld.net/2025/04/23/obituary-peter-taaffe-international-trotskyist-theoretician-and-fighter-for-socialism/
Donations in Peter’s memory can be made online to a memorial fund at socialistparty.org.uk/peter-taaffe-memorial-fund/