A further response to Dave Spencer's article and letters in WW.

by Gerry Byrne

Dave Spencer’s extraordinarily self-serving explanation in the WW is that Workers Fight /ICL /WSL was all fine and then turned overnight into a sect – the AWL. That’s not how I remember it. Dave allows that none of the attempts at uniting the left were predatory exercises, that they were entered into sincerely.

So how did Matgamna (the evil genius behind the sect-turn) transform genuine unity-seeking revolutionaries into sectarian ‘hand-raisers’? As a materialist, you would expect quantitative indicators before that great qualitative leap into sect-dom, and surely these things have a dynamic. How to explain why the AWL is formally more democratic, enshrines more minority rights within its constitution, than it was in 1983/4? That hasn’t happened with any other sect as far as I know.

The examples he quotes: the SLL/WRP, which could mobilise thousands in defence of its Young Socialists in the mid-60s, is now small, splintered and barking mad. The IS/SWP is a million miles from the loose relatively democratic group of 1968: it tolerates no internal dissent. 18 years is a long enough time for the sectarian degeneration of the AWL to reveal itself. So how is it, not just formally but in practice, the most democratic group I’ve encountered on the left?

And contrary to Jack Conrad’s silly snipes, it is not a Matgamna-Thomas duarchy. It’s perfectly possible to tell them they’re wrong.

And ‘anarchist free spirits’ suffer nothing worse than an irritable exchange of emails.

It’s worth taking up Dave’s rather strange version of events, because it has implications for future unity. I am sorry it didn’t work out between the AWL and cpgb. I’m even more sorry about the cpgb’s lurch into popular frontist alliance with islamism: it’s not nice to see comrades race to join up with class enemies. But to put the failure of unity down to this myth of Matgamna-ite sectarianism, without any evidence, is just stupid.

At a time of the greatest ferment since 1968, when the need for unity, much wider than the SA project, is pressing, Dave does a disservice to the whole movement. In allowing himself to be used as a cover for Conrad pettiness, he strikes a blow for dishonesty and disunity.