Workers' Liberty

In the early 1980s, Gerry Healy's WRP - then an organisation of considerable assets, including a weekly paper, Labour Herald, sponsored by well-known Labour left figures, but edited day-to-day by a WRP member - sued Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity) for libel, and ran a big campaign in the labour movement against Socialist Organiser. These articles tell the story.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

So too with labour movements: there are turning points, crises, decisive moments whose outcomes shape the future. The victory of the Thatcher Tories in 1979 was one such turning point. But it was the turning point it proved to be only because of the response of the labour movement and its leaders to the assaults that followed.

This interview on the 1978-9 "Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory" appeared in International Communist magazine, number 9, August 1978.

• How and why the AWL tendency started in 1966

• Finding my way to Trotskyism, part 1: the "manacles" of nation and class
• Part 2: from "communism" to "orthodox Trotskyism"
• How the dockers won solidarity, and how they lost it
• The AWL: from "orthodox Trotskyism" to the "Third Camp"
• Debating theories of the USSR
• The dilemmas of "communism"
• What would my 18 year old self say to me now?
• Working Class Life in Ennis in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Sean Matgamna Examines His Own "Roots and Branches"
• What is to be done?

Or download pdf.

It was very hard to distinguish between criticism of Stalinism - which is what the Communist Party's "communism" was, of course - and basic hostility to the ideas of communism.

Workers’ Fight — the initial group of what is now the AWL tendency — inherited the “orthodox Trotskyist” view that the USSR and the other Stalinist states were “deformed and degenerated workers’ states”. Why did we take so long to move away from that view towards the conclusion that the Stalinist states were in fact a new sort of exploitative class system?

I disagreed strongly with the Healyites’ decision to bail out from the Labour Party in 1963-4. But it’s not really true that I broke with the Healyites over the Labour Party.

Sean Matgamna founded the Workers’ Fight group after political battles with and within the bigger Trotskyist groups that existed in the mid-1960s, the SLL and the Militant. How did he come to do that? Or to become a Trotskyist at all?

[This is an expanded version of the text in Workers Lberty 3/26]

The political tendency now organised as AWL originates from Workers’ Fight, a small Trotskyist group formed in 1966. Why, and how?

Workers’ Fight came into existence as a distinct tendency in response to two linked “crises”.

Workers’ Socialist League/ International-Communist League
Fusion conference, Sunday 26 July 1981. Draft platform document. Read online or download as pdf (see "attachment").

Discussion of the ill-fated cooperation agreement between AWL 'supporters and Labour Briefing in 1995. Read online or download pdf (see "attachment").

In October 1992, after seven years of trade-union setbacks following the miners' defeat of 1985, hundreds of thousands of workers crowded onto the streets of London. 100,000 demonstrated on Wednesday 21 October, and 200,000 on Sunday 25 October, against Tory Government plans for further pit closures. Socialist Organiser discussed the next steps, and disputed the SWP's u-turn from its "downturn" dogma (since 1979) to suddenly demanding that the TUC call a general strike "now".

Three extracts on the debate about working-class strategy in the years of the decline and fall of apartheid in South Africa.

An article from July 1992 stating our basic position in the wars which erupted as Yugoslavia broke up and Serbia tried to conquer maximum territory for a "Greater Serbia".

Article from the magazine edition of Workers' Action (no.182, March 1981) urging that British unions break links with the official state-run "unions" of the Stalinist states and support independent unions there.

Introduction to excerpts from Trotsky, Workers' Socialist Review 3, April 1983.

An article from Workers' Action (a forerunner of Solidarity: no.153, 22 September 1979) on the prospects, as we saw them, from the big upheavals then underway in the Labour Party.

Introduction to the December 1980 pamphlet published by Socialist Organiser, "Labour democracy and the fight for a workers' government".

The editorial from no.1 of "Permanent Revolution", a journal published by Workers' Fight (forerunner of AWL) in 1973-5, discusses how we saw ourselves then in relation to the Trotskyist spectrum and to the prospects for the British labour movement.

Workers' Fight (forerunner of AWL) on calls for a general strike, and for "kick the Tories out", 1972-3... There was a mass strike movement in July 1972 against the jailing of five dockers under Tory anti-union laws. The TUC called a one-day general strike, though the Tories found a legal loophole to release the dockers b,efore it came to that. Agitation for a general strike had been widespread on the left since 1971, and continued through to 1974.

This is the editorial which marked the first year of publication of the AWL tendency's first newspaper, Workers' Fight (1972-3). Workers' Fight had appeared as a mimeographed magazine in 1967-8. In late 1968 our group took up a unity call to merge with the SWP (then called IS, and different in many ways from what it is now). In 1968-71 we were a minority tendency in IS. In December 1971 IS expelled us, and from January 1972 we published our own paper.

An article from the preparatory discussion for drafting the manifesto of the I-CL (forerunner of AWL) in 1977. From "International Communist" no.2/3, January 1977. Download as pdf (see "attachment"), or read below.

The section from the 1977 "manifesto" of the International-Communist League (forerunner of AWL) which explained our idea of transitional demands and transitional programme. Download as pdf (see "attachment"), or read below.

• Illusions of Power - 1
• Illusions of Power - 2
• Illusions of Power - 3
  
  

LAMENT FOR MISSING COMRADES

Call back the dead! My hero friends of old
Who fled their place in our unequal war
And sank in private Iife; those who grew cold

Part One

... And Argentine nationalism?
Argentina suffered British and French intervention some 140 years ago. Modern Argentina, however, has essentially taken shape over the last 100 years. Argentina had no war of liberation. Its population is, to within one per cent, of European immigrant origin — most from immigration within the last 100 years. Its mass popular nationalism dates from the 1920s. This nationalism was, especially in its labour movement manifestations, shaped and consolidated by Peronism.

By Sean Matgamna: from
Workers’ Socialist Review no.2, 1982

Time and again the same quotations from Trotsky have been used to justify a pro-Argentine stance in the Falklands/Malvinas war But the main thing the quotations prove is the pro-Argentine comrades’ lack of grip on the points in dispute.

A funny tale agreed upon?
By Sean Matgamna