Workers' Liberty

Today the left is scattered in different groups,
all fairly small. It has not always been so, and
will not always be so. The fundamental reason for
the left being in bits and pieces, and often very
disoriented, is the malign effects of Stalinism.
In the years ahead the left has to extricate
itself thoroughly from the shadow of Stalinism,
renew itself, and build itself into a mass
movement. Ideas will be central. Through our
militant "Third Camp" ideas - and our ability to
give those ideas muscle and flesh by activity in
the working class - the AWL will make our
contributions to the left's renewal and
reconstruction.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the
previously small socialist groupings were able to
build mass more-or-less Marxist workers' parties
in several European countries. That imposing
movement collapsed when almost all the parties
supported their own governments in World War One.
The Communist Parties set up after the Russian
Revolution won the majority of the old socialist
parties in some countries, and they might well
have gone further - winning over a majority of
Britain's Labour Party, for example - if they had
not so soon been blighted by Stalinism.
Stalinism in power, in the USSR and then in other
countries, provided the Communist Parties with
prestige, encouragement, and funds, and enabled
them to remain mass parties of worker-activists
in many countries despite appalling and
disgusting twists and turns in politics. The
presence of the Communist Parties, laying claim
to the revolutionary banner in a
seemingly-plausible but repulsive way, gave a new
lease of life to the reformist Social-Democratic
Parties. The authentic Marxists, the Trotskyists,
were isolated.
The Trotskyists gained strength in the mid-1940s,
when workers were radicalised at the end of World
War Two and the Communist Parties in the West
were on a right-wing tack, opposing strikes,
joining capitalist governments, condoning
colonial repression, etc. But from the start of
the Cold War in 1947, the Trotskyists were
quickly isolated again. Cold War
"anti-communists" hated them as "communists", and
the Communist Parties and their sympathisers
hated them as Trotskyists. The isolation and the
constant pressure from the Communist Parties,
together with theoretical problems which we've
discussed, led to repeated splits.
Things picked up a bit in the late 1960s, and
especially after the French general strike of
1968. Even then, though, the pulling power of
Stalinism was such that in many countries (not
Britain) the biggest of the new revolutionary
groups were Maoist, and many of the revived
Trotskyist groups were half-Castroite or
half-Maoist. The period from the victory of the
Vietnamese and Cambodian Stalinists against the
USA in 1975, through the disillusionment caused
to many would-be revolutionaries by the
viciousness of the new Vietnamese (and, even
more, Cambodian) regimes and by China's turn
towards the global capitalist market from the
late 1970s, to the crushing defeat of the great
British miners' strike in 1985, dispersed,
withered, or splintered much of the revolutionary
left.
The tendency which is now the AWL originated in
the British Trotskyist movement in the mid-1960s.
At that time Trotskyism in Britain, though weak,
was perhaps stronger than anywhere else in the
world. The Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956
had shaken up the British Communist Party much
more than CPs elsewhere, and some of the many
thousands of activists who left the CP were won
over to Trotskyism.
The most active Trotskyist group was the
Socialist Labour League (SLL), led by Gerry
Healy. Its paper-sellers and organisers made a
mark in many working-class areas, workplaces and
trade unions. In the early 1960s it was able to
win the majority of Labour's youth movement in
battle with the Labour Party machine.
The SLL was "orthodox Trotskyist", and since 1953
had broadly been aligned with James P Cannon and
the SWP-USA, the more anti-Stalinist wing of
"orthodox Trotskyism". But in the early 1960s,
thrown off balance by its own small relative
successes, it cutloose from Cannon and became
more and more sectarian and erratic in politics.
It was already viciously authoritarian in its
internal regime. That speeded its political
degeneration. In 1967 it briefly went Maoist,
hailing the Cultural Revolution in China. In 1968
it issued leaflets at a big demonstration against
the Vietnam War entitled "Why the SLL is not
marching", claiming the march was organised by
"revisionists" specifically to divert attention
from the SLL.
Our tendency originated from a few young
activists who rebelled against that political
degeneration. First they joined the second main
supposedly-Trotskyist organisation of that time,
the Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party).
They quickly rebelled against that group's
approach too, dubbing it "mañana Marxism". They
wrote a critique, entitled "What We Are And What
We Must Become", which we consider to be the
founding document of our tendency.
With others, they formed the Workers' Fight group
in 1967, calling for "Trotskyist regroupment" -
i.e. rallying activists seeking a positive
alternative to the sectarian drift of the main
Trotskyist groups and creating a pole around
which revolutionaries could reunify. They were
also involved in the short-lived Irish Workers'
Group, especially in producing its magazine
Workers' Republic, where they wrote pioneering
critiques of the Catholic-nationalist assumptions
that had seeped into Irish left politics. They
thought they were implementing the same general
approach in the British labour movement as James
P Cannon had developed in the USA. We still
honour and respect Cannon's legacy today; but
over the years we have learned about gaps and
flaws in it, and some other political sources we
need to draw on.
In 1966-7, what is now called the SWP was then
the IS (International Socialists: it changed its
name to SWP in 1977). It was conspicuously
middle-class, but not like it is today. It prided
itself on being "modest", loose, flexible,
open-minded, not Leninist, not Trotskyist. But
around 1968 it turned its face more towards the
working class and its politics to the left. It
grew rapidly. It declared itself Leninist and
Trotskyist. It was lively, and relatively open
for debate. In 1968 it made a unity appeal.
Workers' Fight (but, in the end, no other group)
took it up. Inside the IS-SWP, the Workers' Fight
tendency made campaigning for wider revolutionary
unity part of its platform.
But in fact the IS leaders' switch from
anti-Leninism to proclaiming themselves Leninist
had been made in much the same spirit as the SLL/
WRP's various turns - anything would do, so long
as they calculated it would help build the
organisation. The new IS was still politically
flabby, but organisationally it became more
tightly controlled. In December 1971 the IS
expelled us for challenging the political
about-turn they made that year on Europe,
switching from a longstanding line that "In or
Out, the Fight Goes On" to "keep Britain out" on
the basis that this would enable them to "vote
with the left".
In 1974 this is how we saw things: "In the last
three years IS has degenerated rapidly. Although
IS still contains many excellent militants,
internal political life has been squashed flat,
and the contents of Socialist Worker have become
increasingly trivial and shallow". That was
before the bloodletting of 1975 when IS expelled
most of its old leaders and other oppositionists
and lost its frail working-class base. Some
workers were expelled, some walked out in disgust
over the new policy of "steering left" in search
of "raw youth who want to rip the head off
capitalism".
IS turned to "building the party" as an end in
itself - the same method that the SLL/WRP had
pioneered. Political slogans would be chosen to
"fit the mood" and maximise party gate-receipts,
a process which left little need for considered
debate. We commented: "IS's leaders, who are
neither cowards nor subjectively opposed to
revolutionary politics, think they are being
clever. They believing such 'politicking' will
allow them to 'build the party' - not
understanding that a 'party' so built will be
helpless in any crisis" (Open letter for
revolutionary regroupment 1974).
With the SLL-isation of the IS/ SWP, and the
galloping degeneration of the SLL/ WRP, we
thought there was space for a new appeal for
revolutionary unity. We got a response from some
individuals and small groups, the most
significant of which was Workers Power, a former
"Left Faction" of IS expelled in 1975. Workers'
Fight fused with Workers Power to form the
International Communist League (I-CL). But in
1976 the industrial class struggle - which had
run at a very high pitch from early 1972 through
to mid-1975 - ebbed. The leading Workers Power
people, who had had high hopes of building a big
"agitational" organisation very quickly after
their expulsion from IS, became frustrated. They
split a chunk of their old faction away from the
unified organisation and readopted the name
Workers Power.
Their political differences with the majority
were minimal, their democratic guarantees
extensive. But they couldn't break with the
small-circle approach, knitted together by
relations of personal friendship and deference,
which they had developed in years as a
semi-underground faction in IS. Excessive
rigidity on our part, shaped by the "orthodox
Trotskyist" tradition we had grown up in,
probably made the conflict worse. Over the
following years, Workers Power would rationalise
their separation by dogmatising the "orthodox
Trotskyism" of the early-1950s, in mirror-image
to Workers' Liberty's gradual process of working
back beyond that tradition to purer roots.
When we originated in 1966-7, most of the
Trotskyist groups were active in the Labour
Party, and us too. In 1967-8 that Labour Party
orientation more or less faded away. There was
very little happening in the Labour Party
branches. Many Labour activists had quit, or
stopped attending meetings. And there was a great
deal happening in industrial struggle, in the
campaign against the Vietnam war, and in the
colleges. When we were in IS, we argued about the
long-term importance of dealing with the Labour
Party, but did not dispute that the practical
focus should remain on industrial agitation, the
Vietnam campaign, the colleges, and so on.
After being expelled from IS in December 1971, we
started to do some work in the Labour Party,
mostly in the then fairly large Labour youth
movement. In the late 1970s, internal conflict in
the Labour Party increased, as more and more
workers became angry with the record of the
1974-9 Labour government. We broadened our
activity. With others we launched the newspaper
Socialist Organiser in 1978, and the Socialist
Campaign for a Labour Victory (SCLV), an alliance
of socialists to give the left an independent
voice within the Labour campaign in the 1979
general election. Socialist Organiser became our
voice in the British labour movement until 1995.
After Thatcher won the 1979 election, the Labour
Party exploded. Michael Foot was elected leader
and Tony Benn won almost 50 per cent of votes for
deputy leader. MPs became subject to
re-selection. Right wingers split away to form
the SDP.
We played a key role in these events, initiating
the Rank and File Mobilising Committee (RFMC),
the broadest united front in Labour's history,
which fought for Labour Party democracy. We did
not simply build the movement. We also argued for
a policy - for a "workers' government"
accountable to and based on the labour movement,
which would take decisive measures against
capital.
We took the fight into the unions, which had not
yet been defeated by Thatcher and had immense
potential power. We argued that the rank-and-file
revolt in the Labour Party could not succeed
unless it also created a rank and file movement
to democratise the unions.
We were not strong enough to win. The trade-union
leaders called a halt. Thatcher's offensive,
combined with a rise in unemployment, weakened
the unions. In 1983 Kinnock and Hattersley became
Labour's leaders. After the defeat of the miners'
strike in 1985 Kinnock could clamp down on the
Labour left and start on the road to Blairism.
Meanwhile we had merged with Alan Thornett's
group, the Workers' Socialist League (WSL) in
1981. The people who formed the WSL had been
forcibly ejected from Healy's WRP in 1974 as soon
as they started some critical thinking-aloud.
That was before the Healy group went completely
crazy but after it had been thoroughly sectarian
for 10 years and deeply authoritarian for 25
years.
The WSL was impressed by our success in
developing wide unity of action in the Labour
left in the upsurge of 1979-81. And we saw the
WSL as having (slowly, but clearly) broken with
its Healyite roots. That was the basis for the
merger. But then the Labour left went into
decline; and our perception proved to be an
optical illusion. The WSL did not pose a positive
Marxist alternative to Healyism but a contraction
into disorientation and loss of confidence.
Between 1982 and 1984 the old WSL disintegrated
within the frame of the new united organisation
(also called WSL). It threw off splits, fragments
and individuals, to the declamatory ultra-left
and to the right, as it went. We expelled the
embittered, demoralised rump in 1984 when they
refused a call to order for cooperation at the
start of the miners' strike of the 1984-5 and
instead insisted on a new WSL conference (the
fifth in just over a year!) devoted to "the
internal situation". They had faction rights and
access to the public press for minority views.
But that was not enough for them. In fact, they
wanted a split - at their convenience. The
miners' strike made up our minds that it would be
at our convenience. So we expelled them. (Alan
Thornett himself, and the few of his comrades
still active, have since ended up in the ISG, a
small satellite of the SWP).
We gained something from the experience, because
the incessant conferences and faction-fights
forced us to spell out critical perspectives we'd
developed out of our 1950s-60s "orthodox
Trotskyist" inheritance. But the disappointments
and damaged nerves did cost us. Part of the
problem was naive goodwill on our part.
We assumed that the two leaderships would easily
merge to form a stable core without which unity
and democracy in a revolutionary organisation are
unworkable. But it didn't turn out that way.
Better preparations for the merger through joint
work and public discussion might have helped us
avoid some of the problems.
During the 1980s our comrades rethought many
aspects of what appeared to be Marxist
"orthodoxy", but which turned out to be Stalinist
excrescence. Our paper carried open discussions
and debates with other leftists and between our
own supporters.
In 1982 there was a war between Britain and
Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a small
group of islands in the South Atlantic some 400
miles from the Argentine coast, inhabited by
British people. Argentina's military
dictatorship, worried about growing opposition
inside Argentina, decided to stage a diversion by
sending troops to enforce Argentina's
long-standing (but until then, passive) claim to
ownership of the islands. The Argentine generals
thought that Britain would not respond; in fact,
the British Tory government sent troops and
reconquered the islands.
We opposed the British government, arguing that
the main enemy was at home. But we saw no good
reason to support the Argentine military junta's
"mini-imperialism". We believed Falkland
Islanders had the right to self-determination,
however small their numbers. Finding that many on
the would-be Trotskyist left reckoned that the
war was the same sort of thing as the many wars
to liberate colonies which revolutionaries had
supported across the 20th century, and therefore
supported Argentina, we clarified our
understanding of imperialism, colonial
independence and the role of "sub-imperialist"
powers such as Argentina.
On Ireland, we had long argued for a federal
united Ireland with regional autonomy for the
mainly-Protestant north-east. In the 1970s,
however, the impulse to "solidarity" with the
struggle of the oppressed Catholic minority in
Northern Ireland had drowned political criticism
in a way which, as Northern Ireland descended
into fixed-trenches communal conflict, was
increasingly wrong. We re-debated Ireland in
1983-6. We argued that just calling for "Troops
Out" and a united Ireland was not enough. The
slogan of "self-determination for the Irish
people as a whole" was insufficient given the
existence of two communities (Protestants and
Catholics, British-Irish and Irish-Irish) on the
island. Our policy for a federal united Ireland
had to be put forward boldly, not just tacked on
as a small-print addition.
On Israel-Palestine, at our origins we had what
was then the standard Trotskyist view: for a
socialist united states of the Middle East (based
on the radicalism then widespread in the Arab
world), with rights to national
self-determination for minorities in the region
such as the Israeli Jews and the Kurds. After
1967-9, most of the Trotskyist left was swept
along by the prestige of the newly militant
Palestine Liberation Organisation, and went with
the PLO's new programme, a single "democratic
secular" (but, implicitly, Arab) state in all of
Israel-Palestine.
That "democratic secular state" was either a
benign fantasy, or a cover for the old
Arab-chauvinist policy of "driving the Jews into
the sea". In this scenario neither Palestinians
nor Jews would have national self-determination!
In fact Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews can
unite freely and democratically into a common
state only if both peoples first have the right
to their own national existence.
In 1985 we launched a full-scale debate on this
question, which ended in a large majority
supporting "two states" (an independent
Palestinian state alongside Israel).
In 1987 we launched a debate on the nature of the
Stalinist states. We concluded that the "orthodox
Trotskyist" position which defined these states
as "deformed and degenerated workers' states" was
incoherent. The Stalinist states were class
societies, whether defined as state capitalist or
bureaucratic collectivist.
In 1984-85 British miners embarked on a
tremendous year-long battle to save their jobs
and keep their communities. All our activity for
that year was focused on supporting the miners.
Our comrades initiated the Notts miners' support
group and organised meetings and solidarity
throughout the labour movement. We agitated for a
general strike and for industrial action in
support of the miners. We argued for the Labour
Party to back the miners and for miners' self
defence against police violence.
Here's how Paul Whetton, secretary of the Notts
rank and file strike committee, described our
role:
"Socialist Organiser made a valuable
contribution. It printed information and facts,
not only from Notts but from other coalfields.
Throughout the strike, Socialist Organiser gave
its pages to miners and miners' wives to express
their own views and opinions. It advocated
policies for the strike and commented on events -
but it didn't try to ram it down our throats.
"Socialist Organiser was responsible for many of
the contacts we made. Kent miners were absolutely
amazed early on in the strike when marching into
Notts they found Notts miners on strike.
"It brought news about comrades having struggles
in other parts of the world and understanding of
their particular problems and the way they
tackled them. It was a very valuable contribution.
"But Socialist Organiser's contribution wasn't
just information. It provided political analysis
and raised questions in areas and about things
that many people would not have thought of
questioning. Young people, women, older miners
who had never even contemplated any sort of
political argument had questions posed...
"The paper helped raise questions about the
Labour Party and helped striking miners
understand what to do about it."
The miners' strike was full of lessons for our
class: what tactics to use in strikes (including
general strike action), how to develop working
class democracy, how to build bridges to overcome
division and oppression, the rights and wrongs of
union leadership etc. We also learned the
converse: how the full force of the state's power
is used against the working class when it's
engaged in a serious struggle.
After 1985 the Labour left declined. Our motto
became "Back to Basics". We tried to regroup the
left around ideas of working-class socialism
rather than the "rainbow coalition" politics that
became faddish at that time. In Wallasey our
comrade Lol Duffy stood as the official Labour
candidate in 1987 and almost beat cabinet
minister Linda Chalker. Lol was shunned by the
Labour Party leadership. Frank Field, the Labour
MP in the adjacent constituency, called for
people not to vote Labour. Our campaign achieved
an amazing result - 22,0000 people voted for a
revolutionary Marxist, an increase of 39 per cent
in the Labour vote. Lol came within 279 votes of
winning.
We talked socialism on the doorsteps, in works
canteens, at job centres, at school gates and on
the streets. We mobilised working class people,
union activists, unemployed people and school
students.
But after the defeats in the class struggle, both
in industry and in the Labour Party, came the
proscription of Socialist Organiser. On 25 July
1990 Labour's national executive banned our
paper, without any charges being notified, any
notice or evidence, and without a hearing. We won
one-third of the constituency delegate vote for a
motion to challenge the ban at the Labour Party
conference later in 1990, but the paper stayed
banned.
We did not walk away from the Labour Party, but
some of our people were expelled, and gradually,
as Kinnock, Smith, and Blair did their work, the
political openings in the local Labour Parties
dwindled. Our emphasis shifted more to general
public agitation. At Easter 1991 we launched the
Alliance for Workers' Liberty as a public
political organisation.
In April 1989 (for Scotland) and April 1990 (for
England and Wales) the Tory government introduced
a flat-rate "community charge" (poll tax) to
replace the old "rates" (property tax) as a
source of money for local government. A huge
campaign of civil disobedience grew, and
eventually (from April 1993) the Tories had to
abandon the tax.
We argued for mass non-payment of the tax coupled
with non-implementation by councils and trade
unions. City-wide and at ward level, we promoted
non-payment, founded local committees and
organised meetings. We argued within the unions
and the Labour Party for non-implementation.
In September 1994 the AWL joined with other
socialists, pensioner activists, local groups and
trades councils to form the Welfare State Network
(WSN). Within 12 months WSN had more than 200
affiliates.
The WSN intervened at Labour Party conference in
defence of the welfare state. It lobbied
parliament on budget day over incapacity benefit
and the Job Seekers Allowance. A conference on
the Job Seekers Allowance was held in February
1995, followed by another entitled "From the
Cradle to the Grave" in April.
In October 1995 the WSN organised a march across
the country in defence of the welfare state,
followed by a big lobby of parliament in
November. The WSN made demands on the incoming
Labour government on jobs, health, education,
housing, pensions, benefits and disability rights.
Central to the growth of the WSN was the paper
"Action for Health and Welfare" - shortened to
Action - which quickly expanded to a 16 page
monthly. We stopped publication of Socialist
Organiser and put our resources into Action,
while also publishing Workers' Liberty magazine
monthly.
The WSN launched a number of initiatives after
New Labour was elected in 1997. The Campaign for
Free Trade Unions organised a conference in
Liverpool in July 1997 attended by 220 delegates
from 80 organisations.
In the later 1990s, however, as the Blair-Brown
government rammed through further welfare cuts
without mass opposition, the WSN petered out. We
redeveloped Action into Action for Solidarity,
and then Solidarity, as a general socialist
newspaper.
The attempted genocide in Kosova by Serbian
forces in 1999 revealed sharp differences on the
left. Many believed all they had to do was say
"No to NATO".
The AWL said that the central question was Kosova. Serbia was not faced with
subjugation or the loss of any of its national
rights. We argued for independence for Kosova,
because of the oppression suffered by the
Albanian majority at the hands of Serbia over
centuries. We defended the right of Kosovars,
including the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), to
defend themselves.
We did not support NATO. NATO intervened for its
own reasons - of regional stability - and not out
of love for the Kosovars. But we recognised that
NATO intervention stopped the genocide. We argued
for international working-class solidarity to win
self-determination for the Kosovars, and for a
free alliance of peoples in the Balkans.
Meanwhile, with the Tories more and more
unpopular in a country where the labour movement
had been battered into demoralisation, Tony Blair
had scored a strange double victory - against the
Tories, and against all internal life and
responsiveness to the working class in the Labour
Party. He became prime minister in 1997. From
1998, we started discussions with other socialist
groups about standing independent working class
candidates against Blair's Labour in selected
elections. From those discussions came a
Socialist Alliance (SA) which stood a slate in
the first Greater London Authority elections in
2000 and 98 candidates in the May 2001 general
election. The SA united almost all the activist
left groups in England and Wales - SWP, Socialist
Party, etc., as well as AWL - and drew in
hundreds of the unaffiliated socialists.
In our opinion the SA's average score in 2001,
1.62 per cent, was poor and avoidably so. Still,
some electorates (including those where AWLers
ran as candidates) delivered a little more.
Enough to give activists the courage to continue.
And the mere fact that so many left activists
worked together on a common cause was something
to build on. We called for local SA groups to
combine lively political debate with patient work
to build roots in communities and workplaces. The
SA provided space for some genuine debates, on
Israel-Palestine for example, which represented
more real political interaction between left
currents than there'd been for a long time. An SA
trade union conference in March 2002 drew large
numbers. There were fair-sized SA fringe meetings
at union conferences in 2001 and 2002, and there
were some decent SA results in the May 2002 local
elections.
Basically, however, the SWP (the largest group in
the SA) saw the SA purely as an "electoral united
front". Between elections things just needed to
keep ticking over. In December 2001 the SA's
second-largest component, the Socialist Party,
decamped. It felt that staying in the Alliance
would put at risk one of the SP's major remaining
assets from its old glory days as Militant, its
electoral profile.
By late 2002 the SWP was tiring of the SA, and
looking for a short cut - what became Respect. In
2003-4 it shut down the Socialist Alliance. We
resisted that. We continue to seek out projects
for left unity, debate and united action - such
as the Socialist Green Unity Coalition we took
part in during the 2005 general election.
But we do not wait for unity. With the rise of
the new anti-capitalist milieu among youth and
the beginnings of a revival in the trade unions,
there is much for us to do - building the No
Sweat campaign, producing and distributing
workplace bulletins, organising in the unions,
and maintaining a socialist presence on the
streets and the doorsteps. And, in the longer
perspective of renewing the left, we have an
epochal task ahead of us, of self-education,
self-clarification, and helping to clarify the
rest of the left.