On 28 April seventy or eighty activists came together in London, at a meeting primarily organised by a group of people (Simon Hardy, Luke Cooper, and others) who had just quit the Workers' Power organisation. The meeting set up an "Anti-Capitalist Initiative".
The initiative will start a website for coordination and discussion; establish a coordinating group; and have a day or weekend school in the summer, a conference in the autumn.
It wants "unity and co-operation"; to "overcome division and sectarianism"; and "wider discussion".
This open letter, addressed both to the ex-WP grouping and to the wider range of activists in the new "Initiative", offers some ideas about how those aims can be advanced and about pitfalls on the way.
UNITED FRONT AND PARTY
Every battle in the working-class struggle, or for liberation, requires broad unity. A strike has to unite workers in a workplace or sector irrespective of their views on the Middle East, China, religion, or even, say, cuts in general.
Anti-cuts, anti-fascist, and similar campaigns require unity, too.
If our aim is not just to fight immediate battles, but to replace capitalism altogether by a free cooperative commonwealth, then, as well as the broadly-uniting campaigns, we also need a political organisation developing and advocating that wider aim.
Marxists argue that the social revolution finds its agency in the working class, and its force in the organisation and self-education that the working class develops through daily struggles. If that is so, then, to be effective, the organisation advocating the social revolution must develop and organise for coherent views not just on the future and general revolutionary aim, but on the strategy and tactics of working-class and other liberation struggles now. It must be an active party and not just a group making propaganda for a future ideal.
In other words, we need two different types of organisation simultaneously, On the one hand, unions and other united-front organisations, which have to be broad if they are to be effective, and which have more limited remits, shorter-term outlooks, and are looser. And, on the other, political party or proto-party organisations, which are smaller, but which, if lucid, may do valuable educational and catalytic work even when small.
Revolutionary-socialist parties or proto-parties, because of their more complex and long-term tasks, are inherently more likely to splinter than united-front campaigns. And those united-front campaigns need to draw in people with different, or no definite, views on longer-term perspectives.
The different revolutionary-socialist parties or proto-parties need to be able to cooperate with each other, and with reformist or agnostic-minded people, in unions and campaigns.
In the new network, we will be proposing that it cooperate with others to:
• Set up a united coordination for campaigns for the NHS;
• Build the new rank-and-file initiative among school workers (conference on 16 June) and, where possible, similar initiatives in other trade-union sectors;
• Revive and continue united anti-cuts committees based on local labour movements;
• Develop the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts among students.
The network would do best to work with others in broad united fronts on immediate active campaigns, rather than constituting itself as yet another "rival" campaign group on cuts, the NHS, or whatever.
We will also be proposing that the network set aside time for self-education and structured debate on longer-term strategic questions, some of which we will indicate below in discussing the ex-WP grouping's statement.
Some participants in the new network think it is a broad coalition, operating largely by consensus, maybe providing a forum for different left currents and unaffiliated activists to liaise and debate in a way they now usually fail to. The ex-WP group's statement suggest they see it more as a "stepping stone" to a party-type group which is (as they put it) "clear on strategic questions".
This ambiguity could be harmful. There is a risk of botching it so as to function well neither as united-front campaign, nor as broad forum, nor as party-type organisation.
WHAT ORGANISATION FOR WHAT UNITY?
The ex-WP statement is centred round the aim of establishing "a new plural and broader anti-capitalist organisation", "a new group" (though "not overnight").
One paragraph states the aim as "a united, plural organisation in which splits can be avoided and the inevitable differences are factored into the day to day practice... debate [but] practical unity where we agree".
If the practical unity is only "where we agree", then the model here is a loose coordination of different groupings, or a consensus-decision-making collective. It's an organisation looser than, for example, a trade union, which often obliges all members to join a practical action even though not all agree. (Few strike votes have a 100% majority).
Another paragraph gives a different line: the new organisation would have "democratic centralism [but meaning] unity in action around democratically determined goals, and free and open discussion".
This suggests something less loose than a union, and maybe more like a party, though maybe (it's not clear) a deliberately loose party which would not strive for clarity on longer-term perspectives but instead agree to differ on such things and confine itself (as unions generally do) to taking decisions where a majority binds a minority only on selected immediate activities.
Another passage offers a third variant, when it calls for "uniting sections of the left around a strategic perspective... clear on the strategic questions", which implies a less loose "party", with a defined and obligatory "line" on strategic as well as immediate issues.
All those variants look like different versions of a regroupment of fragments and individuals broadly on the political wavelength of WP - a new grouping, wider than WP and to one degree or another looser, smaller and slower-paced than the more active revolutionary-socialist groups, SWP, SP, or AWL.
Other paragraphs suggest that the new initiative will bypass and eclipse the whole existing activist left, and catapult itself straight into the status of an electoral mass party, "into the mainstream" of politics, into becoming able to "present a credible alternative to the mainstream parties".
"Galloway's success shows what is possible, as does the support for Mélenchon in France".
Recent polls show long-term mass disaffection with the long-established major parties.
But neither Galloway nor Mélenchon is anti-capitalist in the sense of fighting for the expropriation of the capitalist class and the replacement of market-based economy by a free cooperative commonwealth.
Galloway has said: "my main political mistake, in retrospect, was that state ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, in which I believed, and for which I campaigned, was a false God... I'm not saying, at all, that everything in the private garden is rosy. There's just more flowers than there were in the state garden".
Mélenchon's Front de Gauche programme ("L'humain d'abord") proposes "a public pole" in finance, "public poles" in industry, and, in the longer term, "new powers for workers in the running of their workplaces". It's something like a 1970s Labour Party programme.
Mélenchon's vote represents a constituency of great importance for revolutionary socialists in France, but it would be foolish to read it as showing the rise of a fresh new left. The left-of-SP vote in France in 2012 was smaller than in 2002 or 1995. The main activist force behind Mélenchon is the far-from-fresh-and-new French Communist Party.
Galloway cannot be equated with Mélenchon, who is an honest left social-democrat. Bradford West shows, sadly, that it possible for the current disaffection to be channelled by a demagogue with a horrible record. It is possible for the disaffection to be channelled by the far right, too.
A revolutionary socialist party which had built a sufficient activist base and profile might well be able to use the mass disaffection reflected in the polls to make rapid advances through electoral activity. But not even Mélenchon shows us an example of how to leapfrog the difficulties of getting that activist base and profile in the first place.
We could pretend to leapfrog by attaching ourselves to the coat-tails of Mélenchon, or Galloway, claiming their electoral scores as somehow ours, and imagining that we are catapulted by proxy "into the mainstream". But it would be self-deception. The SWP found that with Galloway in Respect.
In any case, what has the Galloway-Mélenchon tack got to do with the project of an "anti-capitalist initiative"? Nothing much, unless the term "anti-capitalist" be used so broadly as to cover all dissatisfaction with the obviously "capitalist" features of present-day society and desire to alleviate them in some way or another.
The negative term "anti-capitalist" (pro-what?) has drawbacks anyway. In the broadest usage it would notionally embrace a coalition stretching through the soft left to populist Tories and far-rightists.
The ex-WP grouping writes that for them the "anti-capitalist initiative" is "not an end in itself" but a "stepping stone for something greater". Other activists in the initiative should ask the ex-WP grouping to think through, and spell out, more about whose boots will be "stepping" on them, and in which direction.
WHY QUIT WORKERS' POWER?
On the whole, the "stepping stone" seems to be intended to step towards a regroupment of fragments on the broad WP wavelength, "different, more plural, more open, much looser", but "still clear" (by WP reckoning) "on the strategic questions". The Galloway-Mélenchon allusion gives colouring, but has little practical bite.
Whether things will work out in the direction of a broad WP-ish regroupment is another matter. Many, perhaps most, of the participants in local "anti-capitalist" groups - which are scheduled, on current plans, to be autonomous - may prefer otherwise. They may prefer to maintain local clearing-houses for activities and left discussions, of a type that has long existed on and off, in smaller cities especially, rather than be made "stepping stones" towards "clarity" (WP-style) "on the strategic questions".
The ex-WP group's statement says that for them "a parting of the ways" [from WP] "became necessary" because of the WP majority's "conservative intransigence... to alter course on fundamentals".
Oddly, however, their statement expresses no wish for WP to "alter course on fundamentals"... or on any detail of political position.
They say that WP is right on fundamentals. It was from WP, they say, that they "learnt the foundation of their Marxist ideas". They seem just as reluctant as the WP majority to "alter course" on those "fundamentals".
The statement objects (rightly, we think) to WP's rule obliging its members to pretend public unanimity - "revolutionary organisations should conduct their debates in private and only present their conclusions to the class". But now the ex-WP people are released from that rule, and can express their differences of opinion publicly, they apparently have none to express.
Why then the talk of "critique", "re-evaluation", and "blue skies discussion"? The writers paradoxically combine assent to WP's version of Marxism with not-spelled-out doubt about the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition generally and even (as we shall see) about Marxism generally.
They write that they reject "a method of organising exclusively focused on building specifically Leninist-Trotskyist groups". That clause makes sense only if the term "exclusively" is taken as idle polemical flourish and deleted.
Neither WP nor anyone else advocates "organising exclusively focused on building specifically Leninist-Trotskyist groups", nor could they, because it is basic to a Leninist-Trotskyist approach that we also work to build trade unions, campaigns, united fronts, etc. And the rest of the ex-WP statement indicates that they wish to build "a new group", though not "overnight", which will be "much looser" not only than WP's mode but also than "specifically Leninist-Trotskyist" operation.
The ex-WP group claimed that they "showed in the course of the debate that [a more relaxed approach] was the norm in the revolutionary movement in the decades prior to 1917".
That clause suggests a desire to go back to the Second International's model of slow-moving, consensus-seeking "all-inclusive parties" - which, to be sure, was more civilised and intellectually richer than the WP-type regime today.
The Bolsheviks at the time thought of themselves as simply applying in the different conditions of Russia the methods advocated by Karl Kautsky and others in the West. In fact they developed a different method, geared to building a party that was politically sharp and quick on its feet. But they did not crystallise and codify that difference until after 1917.
Implicitly the ex-WP group accept the WP majority's mode as the authentic continuation of the post-1917 "Leninist-Trotskyist" approach. They take the fact of similar regimes to WP's in SWP, SP, and so on, as proof that the left's current poor state is due to us being "focused on building specifically Leninist-Trotskyist groups".
But the problem with the left is not being "too Trotskyist". The SLL in the 60s built an organisation of some clout, far more at least than the new anti-capitalist initiative can hope to acquire short of a miracle. The IS/SWP did likewise in the 70s, and Militant in the 80s.
Those groups collapsed, shrivelled, or fell back not because they were too Trotskyist, but because they were not Trotskyist enough. They inclined to short-sighted opportunism.
We cannot build a large new revolutionary socialist organisation just by a snap of the fingers; but we will serve the young activists of the next big wave of working-class radicalisation very badly if we use these years of preparation to drill ourselves and those around us in the idea of being "looser", less "Leninist-Trotskyist".
We urge the ex-WP group to undertake a broader discussion, with AWL and with others, on this question.
Here as on many other questions, WP's mode is not an authentic continuation of the "Leninist-Trotskyist" approach, but a kitsch compilation of strands and shreds from the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky. It is heavily skewed by the cultural pressure on that tradition, for decades, of Stalinism (and by some of the exaggerations and one-sidedenesses which were introduced into Bolshevik discourse under pressure of civil war in Russia).
A "model of democratic centralism that states revolutionary organisations should conduct their debates in private and only present their conclusions to the class" (as ex-WP put it) is not the only alternative to a loose "all-inclusive" alliance; it is not authentically Bolshevik or Trotskyist; and in any case it cannot serve revolutionary socialists who want to continue and build on what the Bolsheviks taught us about the need for a party which is politically sharp and quick on its feet, as distinct from the model of pre-World-War-1 social democracy.
AWL's constitution states that AWL members are obliged not to pretend to hold views which they don't really agree with. If they are in a minority, they should state what the majority view is, as fairly as they can; they should unite with the majority in action (votes, participation in campaigns or whatever); they should not express their dissent in such a way as to undermine majority-decided action; but they should not pretend that their own views are any other than what they really are.
They are also obliged to express their dissenting views internally. We are obliged always to strive to convince each other and reach the clearest conclusion, rather than to "agree to disagree".
As anyone can see from scanning the files of our publications or the archives of our website, our custom and practice is that minorities have space in our press to present their views publicly (though the majority retains the right to decide how and when: if the AWL majority decision is to continue with a strike but a minority favours a return to work, the minority does not have the right to an article in our paper agitating for a return to work). It is also usual that minorities are given time to speak at our summer schools, public meetings, and so on.
This approach makes our organisation less brittle. Minorities inside AWL are still dissatisfied, of course; but they do not have the additional split-provoking aggravation of being compelled publicly to spout views which they really reject.
And, we believe, it also makes us more effective. If we "only present our conclusions to the class", stripped of the debates that make sense of the conclusions, then we cannot hope to convince workers.
If we are compelled to go through the motions of arguing views which we do not agree with, then that can only corrupt and spoil, in us, the revolutionary ardour for truth which is the basic asset in all effective Marxist agitation.
Only by training ourselves always to use our brains and voices to enlighten rather than to obscure, always to seek for and spread the truth rather than "what will go down well" or what "won't get us into trouble", can we make ourselves effective revolutionary socialists.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN LEFT GROUPS
As well as setting rules for procedure among ourselves, AWL also fights for a regime of honest dialogue among groups on the left.
AWL, like all other groups, learns not only from our internal debates, but from the debate and dialogue we have with those around us. Our rules about our members not pretending to have views other than their real ones are designed also to make us more able to get into real dialogue with people around us; to listen to people around us who may have more knowledge, or different insights, on some issues than anyone in AWL; and thus to learn.
As can be seen from the record of our summer schools and public meetings, we consistently seek debate with other groups on the left.
In so doing, we combat a culture on the left today where most groups wall off their members by caricature misrepresentation of other tendencies.
For all their talk of "critical re-evaluation", "plurality", "debate as a good thing", and so on, the ex-WP people are still caught in that culture.
In a letter to WP, they declare indignantly that "we have never advocated, for example, a unity drive towards the Alliance for Workers' Liberty as part of the new project in Britain, because we recognise that they are a pro-imperialist sect that are very much outside of what we consider to be the proper parameters of a common revolutionary organisation..."
When they left WP and AWL asked to meet them to talk about possibilities for practical collaboration and for debate and discussion, the ex-WP group immediately said that it was "unlikely" that they would agree to any such meeting.
Evidently the ex-WP group fear being denounced by the WP majority as "soft on the AWL". In order to fend off such denunciation, they resort to slander.
In no conflict or question has AWL taken a "pro-imperialist" position. WP's critical support in the 1980s for the Russian occupation in Afghanistan was pro-imperialist if you consider the USSR imperialist, or not if you don't. Assent to Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait in 1990 was "pro-imperialist" if you consider Saddam's Iraq to have been a regional imperialist now, not if you don't. But there is no issue on which the AWL's position has been "pro-imperialist", however wide the range of states you consider "imperialist".
An argument could be made that "Third Camp" positions which we have taken led to insufficient agitational vigour in combatting the policies of the US and its allies in some issues. We would reply that honest, lucid explanation of the issues - including when the US and its allies face opponents which are themselves utterly reactionary or regional-imperialist - is more important. There is a real debate to be had there.
We should have the debate, and not have it pushed aside by a bland statement that AWL is "pro-imperialist" and "outside the proper parameters".
THE POLITICAL PLATFORM
The ex-WP statement includes a paragraph which appears intended to summarise where they stand politically.
"We are committed to taking steps towards an anti-capitalist organisation that is opposed to austerity, privatisation, racism, sexism, imperialist war and supports the Palestinians. We believe that mass strikes and demonstrations are needed to bring down the government. We support the building of a rank and file movement across the unions, an essential goal in the context of the pensions sell out by sections of the union movement. We are committed to working towards unity in the anticuts movement and overcoming unnecessary divisions which hinder our movement. We still believe that the working class is a crucial agent of revolutionary change, though we want to explore new and more creative ways of fusing socialist ideas with the kind of struggles that are going on today".
It is an odd mixture of generalities and immediate tactical positions.
We agree about about the building of a rank and file movement. (That idea is one of the recognisable elements that WP retains from its past when, as the Left Platform in IS/SWP, it was largely formed politically by the influence of our tendency). We agree, of course, about unity in the anti-cuts movement.
Almost anyone describing themselves as "on the left" would agree about opposing "austerity, privatisation, racism, sexism, and imperialist war".
The other elements in the brief statement of political position call for some analysis.
a. "Supports the Palestinians"
In the ex-WP's statement-of-position paragraph, the first sentence states the basic parameters; the next three more detailed, immediate, and tactical positions; and the last one a theoretical overview.
That first sentence is odd. It provides five stances of opposition - to capitalism, austerity, privatisation, racism, sexism, imperialist war - and only one assertion of what the group is for.
The one thing they say are for is not a social principle or project, but... a nationality! They support... one of the several hundred nationalities into which bourgeois society has divided humanity.
Maybe "support the Palestinians" is shorthand for "support the national rights of the Palestinians", and the Palestinians are specially mentioned because they are an oppressed nation? Why then the Palestinians but not the Kurds, Tibetans, Chechens, Tamils, Sahrawi and so on?
For WP, "support the Palestinians" means wanting "to 'abolish' in the course of the struggle" Israel and to subsume the Israel-Jewish nation into a single state covering all pre-1948 Palestine, with a presumed Arab majority and hegemony.
AWL says Israel should get out of the West Bank and clear the way for the Palestinians' right, and majority demand, for a fully independent state alongside Israel.
That democratic programme, recognising the right to national self-determination of both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, is the only way to win Arab-Jewish workers' unity and start building a movement which can create a socialist united states of the Middle East.
We read the phrase "support the Palestinians" in the ex-WP statement as code for "have the WP position on Israel-Palestine". We suspect this specific policy is included in such a short summary paragraph for the same reason that the sentence about "broad unity, but not with the AWL" in their letter to WP.
Better to state things openly, and debate them openly.
b. "Strikes to bring down the government"
The statement's sentence - "we believe that mass strikes and demonstrations are needed to bring down the government" - is nonsense. The government is more likely to be brought down by a routine general election, or by an ordinary parliamentary scandal which disrupts the Tory/ Lib-Dem alliance.
Is the intended meaning that "mass strikes and demonstrations" would be the best way to bring down the government?
A false implication is hidden here, and a question is begged.
The false implication is we should desire "mass strikes and demonstrations" because they are the best way to bring down the government. That is not true.
We desire intelligently-conducted, well-organised "mass strikes and demonstrations" (the qualification is important) because they enable workers to win gains and improve their self-confidence, political awareness, and organisation.
If mass strikes reach such a level that they may bring down the government, then it is vital that they have solid and well-understood other goals than just bringing down the government, goals which they will insist on and continue action for even after the government falls, if it does.
Mass strikes on a scale which makes the government unable to continue constitute a semi-revolutionary crisis. But if leftists have told workers that bringing down the government is the supreme prize even for mass strikes on a semi-revolutionary scale, then they make it easier for the ruling class to evade the crisis by calling elections.
The ruling class can then escape with nothing worse than having to transfer governmental office to the "loyal opposition", such as exists in Britain in the shape of the Labour Party and in all long-established bourgeois regimes in some shape or another. And it may not even have to do that: the experience of France in 1968 and Australia in 1975 suggests that a mass strike wave against a hated government which lets itself be quelled by the calling of elections is likely to lead to a conservative victory in the polls, thanks to the votes of millions of people scared by the strikes but seeing the working class as unable to win any positive social transformation.
For now - i.e. short of semi-revolutionary mass strikes - to install a Labour government in place of the current coalition, and sooner rather than later, would be a step forward. Since the unions still have decisive voting power within Labour, it would open the possibility of enforcing concessions, or advancing working-class political organisation and awareness by sharpening contradictions within the labour movement, or both.
But that "bringing down the government" - i.e. replacing it by Labour - is in fact a step forward depends on an assessment of the Labour Party. Under Blair and Brown, it would have been a step forward if Blair or Brown had been ejected from leadership by the labour movement. It would not have been a step forward if social unrest had led to the collapse of the government and its replacement, inevitably, by the Tories or a Tory-led coalition.
The phrase in the statement begs the question of a serious discussion about the Labour Party.
THE WORKING CLASS
c. "Working class a crucial agent, though..."
The paragraph's final sentence states a theoretical perspective. "We still believe that the working class is a crucial agent of revolutionary change, though we want to explore new and more creative ways of fusing socialist ideas with the kind of struggles that are going on today" (emphasis added).
The replacement of the Marxist idea that the working class is the gravedigger of capitalism by the vaguer term, "a crucial agent", cannot be a writer's accident here, since it is given emphasis by the qualifications "still" and "though..."
The proposition that the working class is a crucial agent of revolutionary change has nothing specifically Marxist about it at all, and would hardly be questioned even by, say, anarchists of Murray Bookchin's stripe, who explicitly reject the Marxist idea of the working class as the only really revolutionary class.
What are the ex-WP group's considered thoughts on this issue? It should be openly discussed.
The qualifying clause is odd: "though we want to explore new and more creative ways of fusing socialist ideas with the kind of struggles that are going on today".
New and more creative ways of promoting socialist ideas are always desirable. How can the idea of better agitation, explanation, and dialogue be a qualification - a "though..." clause - to the proposition that the working class is a crucial agent of change? It makes no sense.
The underlying thought may be decoded by studying the word "fusing", odd in this context. What does it mean to "fuse" socialist ideas with struggles? If the writer means using socialist ideas to guide intervention in those struggles, or winning participants in those struggles over to socialist views, why not say so, rather than using the word "fuse", which does not fit?
Even half-literally, "fusing" socialist ideas with, say, an anti-fascist campaign would mean that campaign becoming completely identified with socialist ideas and socialist ideas becoming completely identified with that campaign. But we do not want that! We want anti-fascist campaigns to mobilise many workers who are not yet socialists, and socialist ideas must be, and be seen as, of much wider scope than anti-fascist campaigning.
Probably the writer has picked up the word "fusing", consciously or unconsciously, from its best-known use in the revolutionary socialist tradition, in Lenin's writings in the Iskra period, 1900-03.
Lenin in turn took it from Karl Kautsky's 1892 commentary on the Erfurt Programme, a text which was the main handbook for socialists across the world in its time.
For Kautsky the term fusion (or merger, or amalgamation, which can also be and often have been English translations of Kautsky's German word) was exactly appropriate. He was talking about the coming-together into a single movement of two previously separate ones, the socialist movement and the organic workers' movement.
In his commentary Kautsky said that the socialist movement first emerged separate from and even partly antagonistic to the organised workers' movement, i.e. primarily the trade unions and worker-dominated movements for democratic rights. The socialists, groups of Blanquist conspirators or Fourierist or Owenite or Saint-Simonian or Cabetist or Proudhonist colony-builders or scheme-sketchers, saw no relevance in trade-union wage battles.
There was a "chasm between socialism and the militant proletariat". "If the socialist movement and the labour movement were ever to become one it was necessary for socialism to be raised beyond the utopian point of view. To accomplish this was the illustrious work of Marx and Engels".
Marx and Engels developed a theory which showed socialism as an organic development of the logic of class struggle within capitalism. That opened the way for more worker-activists to become convinced that socialism was the logical summary and goal of all their detailed immediate efforts, and for socialists to root their efforts in workers' struggles.
"A great change came with the amalgamation of the socialist movement and the labour movement. Now the proletariat has a goal toward which it is struggling, which it comes nearer to with every battle. Now all features of the class-struggle have a meaning, even those that produce no immediately practical results".
Kautsky did not take account of how the fused socialist-and-labour movement would later be bureaucratised and conservatised, but for his argument in 1892, as far as it went, his term fusion makes sense. It only makes sense on the basis of the Marxist theory of socialism as the logic of specifically working-class struggle.
The "though..." clause in the ex-WP statement can only signify that the writer thinks that "the kind of struggles that are going on today" are not working-class struggles of the sort Kautsky had in mind, but more diffuse "social-movement" things. Despairing of finding working-class struggles with which to "fuse" the socialist movement, the writer expresses a vague hope that the socialist movement can instead be nourished by non-worker struggles (although with, still, "a crucial" contribution from the working class).
Revolutionary socialists absolutely should support, intervene in, and seek to win activists in non-worker struggles for liberation. Lenin insisted on that idea in exactly the same writings of 1900-03 in which he constantly referred to Kautsky's "fusion" formula.
But "socialist ideas" can be "fused" with all those diverse struggles only if those socialist ideas are diluted into a vague and generic opposition to oppression.
KITSCH TROTSKYISM
In our view, elements of the ex-WP group's statement of political position derive from insufficiently-rethought recycling of what they were taught as "Marxist ideas" in WP.
And yet the statement contains a passage which points to some of what is wrong with WP's version of "Marxism". "The way that Marxism came to be conceived as a result led to a narrowness; thinkers outside of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Trotsky (and partially Luxemburg) axis tended to be subjected to a form of black and white critique that undermined the kind of engagement necessary for a living and evolving body of thought to develop. This naturally places constraints on critical thinking as the concern to 'get it right' tends to undermine the development of an attitude that recognises that a degree of plurality in the evolution of ideas is necessary to try and uncover objective truth..."
The initial Workers' Power group split away from our tendency in 1976 on the basis not of any large political differences but of a claim that they were creative thinkers with special expertise in dynamic, agitational, industrial mass work, and we were crabby sectarians and propagandists.
That soon rang hollow. So the WP core which "sweated it out" had to construct other points of difference. They did it by cut-and-pasting, one after another, excerpts of so-called "orthodox Trotskyism".
As Clement Greenberg wrote: "The precondition for kitsch... is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes... It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience". It offers up "the miraculous and the sympathetic" in synthetic, easily-satisfying form.
WP became the most kitsch of all kitsch-Trotskyist groups. For it, a narrowly-defined doctrinal tradition became a source of quotabilities to rationalise positions. All theorising outside that canon became items to be ticked or crossed - "black and white" - in somewhat the same style as the name index in old Moscow editions of Marx and Engels would list thinkers, each checked as "idealist" or "materialist".
AWL works to be more "doctrinaire" than the other tendencies, in that we work to educate our members in the Marxist classics and constantly to check our ideas against the classics. We also work to be - and are - the least doctrinaire, in that we are frequently willing to say that a classic "text" is inapplicable to a current problem, or another classic "text" is wrong.
In the 1930s Trotsky analysed the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state". By the end of World War 2, with the USSR overrunning Eastern Europe and the emergence of new Stalinist states, it was clear that the argument had to be reassessed, and in fact Trotsky had been wrong.
"Orthodox" Trotskyists ossified Trotsky's position into a rigid and nonsensical dogma, in which the Stalinist states remained workers' states, whatever the position of the workers, as long as the means of production were nationalised.
The original Workers Power group had drifted away from Cliff's version of state capitalism without settling on an alternative. As it sought to solidify itself after the 1976 split, under vigorous pressure from the then-bustling Spartacist group, it needed an orthodoxy.
It eventually announced that events had convinced it the USSR was a workers' state - and when? Of all times, in 1979/80, after Russian invaded Afghanistan! On that basis it refused to call for Russian troops to withdraw.
Today WP and all its splits continue to maintain that North Korea is a "bureaucratically deformed workers' state", the only place outside Cuba where the working class still somehow rules.
That view skews the WP/ex-WP overview of the whole history of the last century. It skews their picture of where we, they, and the working class are in history. It must have helped nourish the thought that socialist ideas can be "fused" with diverse non-worker struggles just as well as with working-class battle.
And it also sets a template for the WP/ex-WP view on forces like the Taliban, the Sunni-supremacist Iraqi "resistance" of 2004-8, Saddam Hussein, etc.: by virtue of the negative fact of coming into conflict with the dominant advanced-capitalist power, the USA, they fill the role (left vacant by the collapse of most of the Stalinist states) of big forces, 'objectively' on our side, though not as we would wish.
In 2004, at the European Social Forum in London, WP took part in an attempt to ‘no platform’ an Iraqi trade unionist because of the Stalinist/reformist Iraqi Communist Party’s collaboration with the American occupation authorities. They insisted that this representative of Iraq’s really existing workers’ movement, re-emerging after more than thirty years of repression, be not allowed to speak. At the same time they supported the “resistance” militias which as well as fighting the occupation were conducting sectarian terror and harassing and murdering union activists.
The ex-WP group is right to call for "critical re-evaluation" and "open, 'blue-skies' discussion". But if it comes to mean a project of pulling together a loose regroupment, politically broadly WP but tacitly less "Leninist-Trotskyist", tacitly less insistent on the centrality of working-class struggles, that will be wrong.
• WP split statement: http://links.org.au/node/2825
• WP response: http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/statement-resignations-british-section-league
• Decisions from 28 April: http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/3400
• "Anti-Capitalist Initiative" website
