AWL archives at LSE library
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The archives of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and our forerunners, deposited at the library of the London School of Economics, are now catalogued and available to researchers.
AWL history
Sean Matgamna reflects on 50 years in the socialist movement. Workers' Liberty 3/26
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- How and why the AWL tendency started in 1966
- Finding my way to Trotskyism, part 1: the "manacles" of nation and class
- Part 2: from "communism" to "orthodox Trotskyism"
- How the dockers won solidarity, and how they lost it
- The AWL: from "orthodox Trotskyism" to the "Third Camp"
- Debating theories of the USSR
- The dilemmas of "communism"
- Sean Matgamna: would my 18 year old self say to me now: "you are on ‘the far right of the far left’"?
- Working Class Life in Ennis in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Sean Matgamna Examines His Own "Roots and Branches"
- What is to be done?
Remembering Dave Spencer
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Dave Spencer died on 24 April 2012, at the age of 71.
Livingstone: goodbye and good riddance
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Conceding defeat in the contest for London mayor, on 3 May, Ken Livingstone said: “This is my last election”. As with many things Livingstone says, it’s not true.
Dave Spencer, 1940-2012
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Dave Spencer died on 24 April 2012, at the age of 71.
As we were saying: The Falklands and the war of 1982
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The Falkland Islands, small specks in the South Atlantic, were annexed by Britain and settled by British people in the 1830s. There had been no previous indigenous population.
Trotskyism or Chameleonism? The Irish Workers Group (1965-68)
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The main document of the Trotskyist side in the faction fight in the Irish Workers' Group in 1967-8.
CONTENTS
I. Vacillation and inconsistency
II. What kind of revolutionary party?
Organisational politics
III. The record: political chameleonism
Eclecticism and nationalism
IV. The present orientation
Shopkeeper
Polemics
Result of the nationalist accommodation
Accommodation to Labour too?
V. The theory of Irish exceptionalism
And exclusiveness
Religion
VI. The internal "regime"
The chameleon at home - a petty bonaparte
Centralism vs. democratic centralism
Subjectivism
The Lawless clique and the Workers' Fight faction
VII. Whither the IWG?
[Notes, 2012]
Click here to download as pdf.
The dispute in the Irish Workers' Group was important in shaping - or mis-shaping - the available Irish left on the eve of the explosion of 1968-9 in Northern Ireland, when thousands of young people sought new revolutionary politics, and most ended up joining the Provisionals, a new version of old and indeed anachronistic militarist/Catholic-nationalist politics.
The Fenians: Rise and Decline
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Article from Workers' Republic 19, mid-summer 1967.
"Taking whose gun out of politics?" Irish Militant, January 1967
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This article, published in Irish Militant of January 1967, demonstrated the confusion of the Irish Workers' Group in relation to Republicanism. It was by-lined for though not written by Phil Flynn, later vice-president of Sinn Fein, a prominent trade unionist in the 26 Counties, and later a high-profile businessman.
Peter Graham
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Obituary of Peter Graham, from Workers' Fight (second series) no.1, 14 January 1972.