AWL history

The left and antisemitism (1990)

One small incident at the Labour Party Socialists conference last weekend said a lot about current attitudes on the left about anti­semitism, Jews, and Zionism. Speaking in a workshop on Europe, Ros Young pointed to the new rise of anti-semitism. It must be fought, she said; and especially so because it will give grist to the mill of Zionism and lead to more Jews going to Palestine where they will oppress our ''black comrades'', the Palestinian Arabs. The next speaker asked that the discussion be brought back to what the workshop was sup­ posed to be about - attitudes to European integration...

When a class-struggle socialist stood for Labour

Jill Mountford, Momentum national Steering Committee member and campaigner in Wallasey in 1987, wrote this introduction to Workers’ Liberty’s reprint of the pamphlet How to fight elections. For a while it seemed that the front person for the anti-Corbyn challenge would be Angela Eagle, Labour MP for Wallasey, near Liverpool, since 1992. That makes perfect sense. Angela Eagle’s career in politics is inseparable from, and would have been impossible without, the Labour right’s drive to marginalise the left not through political debate but suppressing party and labour movement democracy. She was...

Old photos, documents, memoirs?

Do you have any old photos of the activity or the people of our tendency - of Workers' Liberty, or before that of Socialist Organiser, of the WSL, of the I-CL, or of Workers' Fight, back to 1966? This year is the 50th anniversary of the political current now organised as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. We are planning publications and events to mark the anniversary. Five years ago we systematically collated all the old documents and files we had at our office, and deposited them at the library of the London School of Economics: http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/09/02/awl-archives-lse...

What is a "Leninist sect"? Is AWL one?

In 1990, Socialist Organiser was banned by the Labour Party, apparently on the instigation of Frank Field MP, the same Frank Field who now floats the idea of Labour right-wingers contesting elections as “independent” against democratically selected candidates of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. A challenge to the ban at the 1990 Labour Party conference won a majority of Constituency Labour Party delegate votes, but failed to overturn it. Then, as in the current moves against associates or alleged associates of Workers’ Liberty, the “defendant” received no charges and was given no hearing in which...

The Ice-pick again?

According to Stephen Bush in the New Statesman, the Labour Party machine’s spate of expulsions and bannings in the run-up to the leadership election which Jeremy Corbyn won was talked about as “Operation Ice-pick”. The name echoes the sick in-jokes popular among leaders of the Labour student organisation in the 1970s and 80s; they admired the Stalinist assassin who used an ice-pick to kill Leon Trotsky in 1940. Bush reported that “Twitter [was] ablaze with activists who believe they have been kicked out because they are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn”. The purge was not systematic. According to...

The "Marxists" who call Jeremy Corbyn "ultra-left"

Jeremy Corbyn has joined many demonstrations and protests over the years, and all to his credit. When there have been conflicts within the left, however, Corbyn has tended to shy away, or go with whatever looks most like a broad consensus. Yet on 11 February 1991, Jeremy Corbyn joined another left Labour MP, the late Bernie Grant; ourselves, then grouped round the weekly Socialist Organiser ; and some people now round Socialist Resistance, in a protest sit-in against the manipulation by another left faction of the movement against the Gulf War. The driving force in the manipulation was a group...

The lefts we've had and the left we want

The Labour Party has always had left wings, more or less organised, more or less diffuse. The thing is, up to now, they have always been defeated. A look at the history tells us what we need from a new left. In a way the Labour Party’s founding (as the Labour Representation Committee, in 1900) was a high point for the Labour left. The left wing was embodied in affiliated sub-parties, able to operate regular party structures of their own, without witch-hunts or bans. Until 1918 the Labour Party had no individual members: it was a federation of trade unions (only a minority of unions at first...

Overhaul the Labour left! End bans in the Party!

Tens of thousands of people have rallied to Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign. Older Labour supporters whose left-wing views were not extinguished by Blairism, trade unionists who want a working class-centred politics, radicals who previously voted Green in frustration with Ed Miliband's Labour, far left activists, big numbers of unaffiliated young people and students and many others have got behind Corbyn. To rally and organise a substantial number of these people after 12 September requires the Labour left to go beyond its existing valuable but small organisations and create a more...

How the left became “Little Englanders”

In a 1975 referendum on UK’s membership of the European Economic Community (Common Market), forerunner of the European Union, most of the left argued for UK withdrawal. That was the culmination of a step-by-step opportunist collapse into left-nationalism since the 1960s, when all the would-be Trotskyist groups said the answer to limited European capitalist integration was European workers’ unity, not national withdrawal. This article, taken from Permanent Revolution No. 3*, describes the evolution. “We must never play with slogans that are not revolutionary by their own content but that can...

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