JOHN THRONE: IRISH MILITANT
Nov 7th, 2009 by Conor McCabe
John Throne was heavily involved with the establishment of Militant Irish Monthly, the newspaper of the Militant Tendency in Ireland. It began publication in June 1973, and a copy of the first issue, as well as some information on the Militant Tendency, is available on cedarlounge here.
The interview below is part of an Irish labour and working class oral history archive, the original tapes of which will be stored with Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. John has asked me to put the interview on the web.
There is a third part to the interview, where John talks about his expulsion from the American branch of the Committee for a Workers’ International. This incident took place around 1996 and is still somewhat of a live issue. John Throne is a regular contributor to Indymedia Ireland, and often the issue of the expulsion and the Irish Socialist Party dominates the posts. Because of this, I’ve taken the decision to post the third part separately, and to leave this post to focus on the history of Militant in the 1970s, as well as John’s personal and political background.
I will be posting the third part of the interview next week.
Part one: 1940s/50s - growing up - family life - school days - Donegal Orange Order - 1960s - working life at home - emigration - Canada - merchant ships - Vietnam - growing politicization - Australia - back to Ireland - 1967/68 - Derry Labour Party - civil rights movement - Young Socialists - Paul Jones and Militant - 1970s - internment and the rise of the Provisionals - end of the Young Socialists and NI Labour Party in Derry - Socialist Labour League - Gerry Healy - the Communist Party and Roy Johnston - Workers’ Party - Stalinism and Trotskyism (48:38)
Part two: 1970s - Stalinism - working in London - the International Socialists - joining Militant - the permanent revolution and Ireland - joining Crumlin Labour Party branch - building up Militant - selling the paper - Joe Higgins - anti-coalition - Northern Ireland - family life - religious sectarianism - development as a Marxist - Young Socialists and Derry in 1968 - Militant Irish Monthly - Irish Labour Party - collapse of Communism - working class consciousness - Trotskyism (1:06:51)
Part 1 is great Conor. I’ve seen John’s stuff on Indymedia and always had him down as an English Trot with a somewhat bizarre habit of posting on Indy. Hearing his east Donegal burr came as a surprise and the stuff about his growing up Orange within a Catholic hinterland of good neighbours well echoes my own experience of living in south Donegal years later, where on one day of the year the ostensibly ‘good neighbours’ would decamp to Rossnowlagh to return that evening pissed, the younger ones spoiling for a row… Bonnie Tyler couldn’t have put it better!
I’ll leave Part 2 for tomorrow…
Cheers anarchaelogist. As I said, the project is really an archival one, but John said to me he wouldn’t mind having it up on the web, and I was happy to oblige.
Really excellent stuff. Matgamna would constitute a perfect comparison (or corrective?!)
The interviews are extremely interesting at several levels. As it happens, I got to know John Throne fairly well about three decades ago, during his occasional visits to our very bohemian student-hippy abode. After closing time, he’d sit abstemiously, engaging individuals in discussion, and watching the rest fall under the influence of home-brewed beer, and home-grown weed. It took persistence, but he succeeded in persuading quite a few of us to renounce the weed, to cut back on the drink, to read a bit more, and to get involved with Militant. It was the beginning of a long-term engagement with trade unionism and/or with left activism for several of the denizens of that house. I think perhaps only one has stuck it out with Militant / Socialist Party over the years, but I met at least half-a-dozen ex-residents of the place at last Friday’s ICTU demo in our provincial town. John Throne was an organiser for Militant, but he was also a missionary for the labour movement, and he must have had an enormous impact, and a long-term impact, on a great number of people during his hitch-hiking expeditions around the country.
Well worth a listen.
[…] is an interview, one of a series conducted by Conor McCabe. It’s on Dublin Opinion and with John Throne, once of Militant. The first two parts are up and are a fantastic insight into how radicalism can develop in the […]
I really enjoyed John Throne’s frank discussion of his life and political work on Irish Left Review website. His personal early story is much more interesting than people who knew him later would have guessed. He is very honest about the failure of the messianic politics of the 1970s Militant Group – “X strike will lead inevitably to the revolution in Ireland in 5 years followed by European revolution in 8 years and world revolution in 15” - as well as the critique of the lack of internal debate.
I find this hard to reconcile with his practice in his years of leadership, but this may just show how organisational cultures can dominate over personalities.
To those of us on the labour left who were in close contact with the Militant in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear that the organisation thrived on secrecy and paranoia. This was how they built internal cohesion and attracted new members, much a religious cults did. I remember a conversation with Joe Higgins outside the British Labour Party Young Socialists Conference in the late 1970s where the Militant majority was using attacks on various minorities in the hall to justify ramming through long, obviously pre-prepared, motions in a triumphalist atmosphere. I remarked that I was disturbed by the group psychology and Joe said ‘there’s no psychology there, only workers hammering out a programme’.
It was only when some of the more senior members began to leave in the 1980s that we discovered that, as well as a disciplined external face, they were also very hierarchical internally. The masonic system of inner and outer circles, strict hierarchy, secret passwords, constant denials that the organisation existed, secret meetings and minutes kept in code etc. were an eye-opener. The biggest surprise was that the type of simplistic slogans used to promote the group in public were also used, and probably believed, in secret internal documents. Denying that their organisation existed also allowed them to avoid questions about their actual beliefs, particularly the role of the revolutionary elite, which might have put off new recruits, and to present themselves to the public as simply more militant democratic socialists.
As members started to defect, we also saw the nasty side of the Militant – harassment of ex-members (as John Throne describes in his own case when he left) which may or may not have been sanctioned by the leadership.
This sense of paranoia allowed the leadership to instill control. Any dissent was seen as endangering the group under siege. It also attracted a lot of new activists, who saw Militant ‘cadres’ as good honest activists being persecuted by made-up stories about who they were.
Any disagreement with the Militant was dismissed as ‘witch-hunting’ or ‘McCarthyism’, rather than discussed. My last encounter with John Throne, who I had known for over a decade, was when he burst in on a political discussion which I was having with one of his supporters to tell him to go to bed and not ‘waste time talking to this unprincipled reformist’.
The justification of this structure is the example of the Bolshevik Party. However, this avoids two issues. (1) That party only adopted military-style structures because of the need to survive Tsarist secret police and (2) these structures led to brutal suppression of alternative voices and, ultimately, of whole societies, which started long before Stalin took power.
I raise these points not to attack the Militant and the Socialist Party, but to try to understand where they are now. Joe Higgins has brought his party to a new level and it now embraces many of the causes which they denounced in the 1970s – feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism and many seemingly ‘reformist’ demands on tax and welfare. He has achieved miracles in uniting settled and Traveller communities and in exposing exploitation of migrant workers. We know that most of the Militant old guard have now left and been replaced by new members who don’t remember their history – but what do they actually believe in now?
It is important for the left to work together across a range of issues, and many of the best activists come from the Socialist Party and other Trotskyist groups. For this cooperation to be genuine, we need to know whether the Socialist Party, and for that matter the SWP, are genuinely interested in the particular cause they are fighting, or if they are just looking for an opportunity to pick up mebers and then split the campaign in order to strengthen the ‘revolutionary party’. We need to know if the inevitable split between the campaign group on most issues which happens to include the SP and the one which happens to include the SWP is based on principle or on factional advantage.
Most importantly of all, we need to be able to discuss ideology, vision and strategy seriously, without accusations of McCarthyism, sell-outs, etc. It should be as legitimate to discuss Trotskyism as it is to discuss social democracy, environmentalism and other elements of the left.
I hope we can have these discussions in a genuinely comradely fashion, leading to a new level of left cooperation, as we have seen in some Euroepan and many Latin American countries.