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The Union Boss. If any one figure epitomizes the new aggressiveness of the organized Marxist left, it is "King Arthur" Scargill, the militant president of the Yorkshire Miners. A strong contender to become president of the powerful National Union of Mineworkers next year, Scargill, 43, is baldly contemptuous of the Labor Party's right wing. Says he: "We need them like a tree needs Dutch elm disease." Scargill grew up poor in Yorkshire, where in 1961 he spent his first date with his future wife at a Young Communist League debate. He has turned the Barnsley constituency in southern Yorkshire into an extension of his union fiefdom by waging all-out war on Labor right-winger and 27-year parliamentary veteran M.P. Roy Mason. "The last Labor government failed to carry out basic socialist policies," says Scargill. "It failed to impose a wealth tax, failed to abolish the House of Lords, failed to take into common ownership the means of production." Staunchly anti-American, Scargill blasts the U.S. for stationing troops in Europe and accuses the CIA of fomenting the workers' rebellion in Poland. Says he: "They're trying to overthrow socialism."
The Ideologue. Ted Grant, 67, a South African-born revolutionary, is the spiritual leader of Militant Tendency, the group of perhaps 5,000 activists that helped engineer the leftist putsch against Labor's moderates. Militant Tendency claims that it draws its strength, in part, from the backing of some 95% of the Young Socialists' 10,000-odd supporters; it is also credited with at least some control over nearly half of Labor's 635 local constituency parties. The genial Grant is confident that the time has come for the Marxist left. "There was a time when we were a tiny handful of voices crying out in the wilderness," he explains in his spartan office in London's decaying East End. "Now there is a crisis in capitalism on a world scale. When the Labor Party and trade unions are controlled by Marxists, a peaceful transformation of this country will be possible." And if the government should deem it necessary to use force against insurgent leftists? "Then we'll defend by force," he says grimly. Grant attributes to Leon Trotsky the dictum "Nobody, nobody can change the will of the working class to change society!" In fact, he says, the only place society really worked was "in the early days of Russia, from 1917 to 1923." He favors dismantling the British monarchy, but insists he would not want the royal family abandoned altogether. Says Grant with an ironic twinkle: "We would give them jobs as caretakers looking after the palaces."