Awful Slaughter
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Obituary of Clifford Slaughter
I’ve not read any of his stuff, but he was a noise in the WRP, and I believe he played a significant role in their big split.
The above is a typical boots first Trotskyist obit.
I remember him. He was one of the leading theoreticians of the old Socialist Labour League where quite a few CP intellectuals went after leaving the CP over Hungary. Out of the frying pan into the fire. The SLL was notorious for defending Russia’s nuclear weapons as the “workers’ bomb”.
I thought I had debated him once but it turned out to have been with TomKemp, his fellow editor of the SLL’s theoretical magazine “Labour Review”. In any event, both of them defended the absurd view that Russia was a “degenerate workers state” while its puppet states in Eastern Europe were “deformed workers states”, the difference being that the latter never degenerated from once having been the outcome of a proletarian revolution that had established a genuine workers state.
I didn’t follow what he did later but he was obviously in a different Trotskyist sect than the WSWS lot and their website.
According to Wikipedia: “Slaughter and Banda’s group at first called itself the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press). However, Banda soon left the group and repudiated Trotskyism. The international supporters of the group decided to call themselves the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International (WIRFI), and published both the Workers Press and the International journal. In the 1990s the members of a sub-group within WIRFI influenced by Slaughter decided that the creation of an elite vanguard party was not the way to build towards socialism.”
“…decided that the creation of an elite vanguard party was not the way to build towards socialism.
Yes, that rather would invoke the ire of orthodox trots. It seem to be true, according to this interview he gave last year (scroll down to his last few answers).
Ironically, he seems to have reached the same sort of conclusion as those who were expelled from the SLL in 1960 who set up Solidarity
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