Two letters on "Trotskyist infiltration"

Submitted by AWL on 15 August, 2016 - 11:58 Author: Daniel Randall

Two letters replying to articles in the Guardian, on alleged "Trotskyist infiltration" into the Labour Party, both by Daniel Randall (Islington South and Finsbury CLP and supporter of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty).


There's much to object to in John Harris's risible, ill-researched, and ignorant article ("If Trotskyists are on the march, there's chaos ahead", 11 August). He may well have had an unpleasant experience with Militant in the 1980s, but Militant of the 1980s are not the sole representatives of Trotskyism across all time. Their successor organisation, the Socialist Party, does not even advocate an orientation to the Labour Party, maintaining a strategy of standing candidates against it.

His explanation of the "transitional method" is a caricature and a distortion. The point about what Trotskyists have called "transitional demands" is not that they are un-winnable, but precisely that they are winnable; a means by which working-class movements can develop political confidence and build bridges between immediate struggles and the fight for a different society.

The Trotskyist tradition, "Trotsky's legacy", if you like (although ours is not a Biblicist reverence for one individual), is that of democratic-revolutionary, internationalist socialism. Our tradition, like other socialist traditions, has every right to be party of the broad party of the working class.

Alas, however, there are far fewer Trotskyists in the Labour Party, and we have less influence, than the fevered imaginings of John Harris, Tom Watson, and others suggest. What influence we do have we hope to win through open debate and discussion, persuading fellow Labour Party members and winning support for our ideas.

The conspiracy theories and fear-mongering of Harris and others confirm only that they are frightened of open political debate within the party.


The Guardian continues to promote Tom Watson's claims of "far-left infiltration" into the Labour Party ("Tom Watson claims proof of far-left planning to infiltrate Labour", Sunday 14 August).

Perhaps because his own methods are those of a factional hack, schooled in backroom manoeuvring, Watson cannot imagine other political tendencies operating differently. But the Alliance for Workers' Liberty is not "infiltrating" the Labour Party: our supporters are hardworking activists in constituencies across the country who are open about our ideas, and who hope to persuade others of them through discussion and debate.

The publicly-available documents from our 2015 AGM, which Watson circulated as if he has uncovered some secret plot, "expose" nothing except our commitment to working in the labour movement to promote revolutionary socialist ideas: hardly a surprising thing for a revolutionary socialist group to do.

The real issue here is political. Watson and others on the right of the PLP oppose many of the radical policies now gaining ground in the party: taxing the rich to fund public services; free education; reversing welfare cuts; scrapping Trident; abolishing all anti-union laws; and public ownership. His pretended outrage at his "discovery" that Workers' Liberty wants Labour councils to "refuse to implement cuts" show that his is not an honest democrat's concern with secretive infiltration (in which we are manifestly not engaged), but a political hostility to the advance of radical ideas.

Rather than challenging those ideas in open political debate, Watson and his allies attempt to undermine them, and a leader who supports them, by promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories.

It is a desperate act by a political tendency whose control over the Labour Party has been decisively broken, we hope for good.

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