The AWL's history and tradition

Submitted by Anon on 5 March, 2006 - 10:51

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 (and similar defeats in other countries), 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 cut loose 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 and Counterfire).

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 two thirds 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.

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