Trotskyist History No 1

September 1993

What Happened to the Workers’ Socialist League?

[Note by Chris Edwards (May 2002). War is the sternest possible test for any Trotskyist organisation. While many British organisations failed this test in the case of the Malvinas/Falklands War (e.g. the Militant group with its “workers war” against Argentina position), the British proto-ITO comrades did attempt to defend a principled position against the bankrupt positions of the leadership of its own organisation, the British Workers Socialist League (WSL). This is an account of the tendency struggle over the Malvinas war and many other issues to do with British imperialism. This document was written with the stated purpose of being a “balance sheet” of the tendency struggle. It was somewhat ironic that, Tony G, the author of most of this document, and the person who had played the least part in the WSL tendency struggle during 1982-3, felt himself most qualified to sit in judgement on the efforts of those who had been centrally involved in the tendency struggle. This was despite his insistence that he did not wish to do so at the beginning of this account (see below). In fact one of the barely disguised purposes of this “balance sheet” was to belittle the efforts of the comrades who had been centrally involved in the tendency struggle. This was done in the knowledge that he himself was not a subject of this criticism, since he had only been a candidate member of the WSL throughout most of the period of the tendency struggle. He had consequently played little role in the tendency struggle. It takes a certain amount of arrogance for someone who was peripheral to a tendency struggle to presume to judge the efforts of others who were at the sharp end. One consequent shortcoming of this document was that Tony G was unable to comprehend the dynamics of the struggle and the context in which decisions were made. He had to rely on second hand information and documents, having had next to no direct experience of the tendency struggle himself. What was the context that Tony G underestimated? It was that a circle of young, inexperienced, scattered, provincial, rank and file members, many of whom had never been in a tendency struggle before, who had to take on their own more experienced leadership in the middle of a war. Nevertheless, this is the only account of the WSL tendency struggle of 1982-83 and the subsequent attempts of the participants to regroup after being expelled from the WSL. And despite the overly-cynical approach to the tendency struggle that permeates the document, it nevertheless records the main events and positions taken.]

1. Introduction

This assessment of the history of the Workers Socialist League (WSL) was originally produced by Tony G., the Secretary of the Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL), with the assistance of other members of that organisation. It was endorsed by the RIL Central Committee in 1989. Despite pleas by RIL members it was never endorsed by the International Trotskyist Committee (ITC), the international organisation of which the RIL was the British section, nor were any plans made for its publication. This was consistent with the client/patron relationship between the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), the US section and dominant group of the ITC, and the RIL. The RWL was suspicious of any independent political development, such as the reassertion of the progressive character of the struggle for Trotskyism carried out by the WSL between 1974 and 1980. Such a reassertion might challenge the RWL’s political, financial and organisational dominance of the ITC and challenge its notion that it is the source of modern Trotskyist orthodoxy.

The RWL owed its domination of the ITC to a network of unhealthy clique relationships which increasingly acted as a substitute for published political positions which could then be put to the test in the class struggle. This regime facilitated increasingly sectarian, posturing interventions, particularly in the movements against the Gulf War and for abortion rights in the US and in Anti Fascist Action in Britain and a turn away from the fight to regenerate the Fourth International. The revolt against this degeneration resulted in a split in the ITC in 1991 and the later establishment of the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO). We are now publishing this assessment of the WSL ourselves in an honest attempt to draw up an objective balance sheet of the most positive reassertion of the Trotskyist programme since the Fourth International split in 1953 as well as the WSL’s subsequent crisis and its immediate aftermath.

In fact, although Tony G.’s original document as a whole pointed to the healthy character of the struggle for Trotskyism in the WSL and the short lived Workers Internationalist League (WIL), many aspectsof it tended to denigrate that struggle and those who waged it in order to fit it into an exaggerated role for the RWL. In particular, the fact the RWL’s clients found themselves on the wrong side of the split in the WIL in 1984, in opposition to the British supporters of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee (TILC), necessitated the belittling of the political struggles of those who were in substantial political agreement with the TILC. This included the GBL of Italy (later renamed the LOR) and the TAF of Denmark. The WSL was the British section of the TILC. Therefore the original document has been amended and altered substantially by those comrades now in the ITO who participated in that struggle. The RIL was formed in November 1984 as the British section of the ITC by a group of comrades all of whom had been members of the Workers Socialist League until their expulsion in May 1983 and of the Workers Internationalist League (WIL) until its splits in January 1984 and Summer 1984. Tony G. had been a full time organiser for Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League in the 1960s before dropping out of revolutionary politics until he joined the post fusion WSL in 1982. There is therefore, a continuity of personnel between the WSL and the RIL. Though those who formed the RIL had struggled against liquidationism and national Trotskyism in the WSL and TILC and against sectarianism in the WIL, represented by supporters of Workers Power and of the South American based Fourth International Tendency (FIT), whose sectarian attitude to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) led them to attack the LOR, which had fused with the Italian USFI section to pursue the struggle for Trotskyism.

Producing a balance sheet of a movement or a struggle is never, for Marxists, an academic exercise or a question of scoring points (who was right or who was wrong). It is a serious question of understanding our history by analysing it in its material context, in order to guide our action. The defeat and retreats in the class struggle in Britain have produced a state of retreat and confusion among those forces claiming to be Trotskyist, which have had to pay a terrible price for British contempt for theory. The degeneration of leadership and squandering of cadre have been frightful. The desertion by the intellectuals (helped on their way by philistine economism and activism) has been almost total. There was only one future RIL member on a leading body of the fused WSL, cde. Sue E, and none from the prefusion WSL and only two members of the National Committee of the WIL, nor a single member of the initial WSL break from Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974.

The struggle to develop the original perspectives of TILC and build a section of the ITC in Britain had to be taken up by a dispersed group of rank-and-file and, to a large extent, activist members, in a situation of widespread retreat, major attacks on the working class, and with the enormous weight of the Labourite tradition and its associated economist trade unionism in Britain. The problems makes the theoretical development and rearming of our movement desperately important. The alternative is to use our problems as a source of apologies and complaints: if we take that road, all we can do is try to preserve the memory of the old WSL until “something turns up”. That road leads only to political oblivion. An objective analysis of the WSL (its origins, its relationship to the crisis of the Fourth International, its development, degeneration, and fusion with the International Communist League and also of the struggle of the Internationalist Tendency/Internationalist Faction (IT/IF) and the failure of the WIL to overcome the IT/IF’s contradictions) is essential to the future of Trotskyism

2. The origins and Development of the International Committee Section in Britain

The Workers Socialist League was formed in 1974 as a result of the expulsion by the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of the Oxford based opposition led by Alan T., Tony R., and John L.. While there has been considerable discussion in TILC and in the ITC and elsewhere on the history of the Socialist Labour League/ Workers Revolutionary Party in the context of the crisis of the Fourth International, a summary of the main points pertinent to the development of the Workers Socialist League is necessary.

(a.) The formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1944 reflected (to a certain extent) a sectarian response to the Labour Party class collaboration (the coalition government, etc.) and to the lack of any real Labour Party activity during the war. The problems this created became marked with the end of the war and the revival of Labour Party political life in 1945 and thereafter. Subsequently, Healy led an opposition calling for entry into the Labour Party, but it was essentially an opportunist response to the strength of social democracy and the weakness of Trotskyist forces. These developments took place in a very difficult period for the Fourth International. The Stalinist purges, the assassination of Trotsky, the war, and the Nazi occupation of much of Europe had severely depleted its forces and disrupted its functioning internationally.

It had, nevertheless, come through the war and into the postwar world as a revolutionary international. However, the strength, politically, of Stalinism and the expansion of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s area of control, the beginnings of the restabilisation of capitalism under US hegemony, and the Cold War posed enormous problems for Trotskyists, led in some cases to physical liquidation and generally to their isolation from the masses. Healy’s split from the RCP on the basis of Labour Party entry and the consequent collapse of the RCP was the application in British conditions of the liquidationist course taken by the Fourth International under its International Secretary, Michel Pablo, as it sought short cuts out of its isolation and looked to larger forces that could in some way be substituted for building Trotskyist parties.

(b.) Healy’s group, The Club, practised a liquidationist form of entrism in the period 1948 to 1956 and to some extent down to 1958. It was an early example of Trotskyists’ attempting to create themselves as a centrist current in the Labour Party when one does not exist and adapting to the bureaucratic leaders of left reformist currents when these emerge.” The principal vehicle for The Club’s politics was the journal Socialist Outlook. When this was banned, the arguments of Labour Party legality were accepted without a struggle, and The Club became part of the Tribune tendency.

(c.) In the late 1940s and early 1950s, The Club completely supported the policies of Pablo’s International Secretariat. It endorsed the increasingly confused and ultimately revisionist response to developments in postwar Stalinism including the view that Tito’s nationalist Stalinism in Yugoslavia was a form of centrism. Subsequently there was no attempt to re-examine the lessons of this episode.

(d.) The 1953 split was a response to the effects on national sections of Pablo’s generalisation of his liquidationist orientation to Stalinism. For The Club this meant a clash of liquidationisms Pablo’s liquidation into Stalinism vs. Healy’s liquidation into social democracy. Both sides of the split (Pablo’s International Secretariat and the International Committee of Cannon, Healy, and Lambert) were part of the Fourth International’s centrist degeneration. There were positive aspects to the International Committee’s stand for the political independence of Trotskyists from Stalinism. Nevertheless, the International Committee remained trapped within national Trotskyist responses and thus never conducted an examination of the postwar Fourth International and carried over from Pabloism the objectivist method which, for instance, The Club applied in its Labour Party work.

(e.) The contradictory character of Trotskyist-centrism, and specifically of the International Committee split, was illustrated by The Club’s generally principled and quite successful intervention into the Communist Party’s crisis in 1956. This did not, however, mean a break with Labour Party liquidationist politics, as the politics of the 1958 Rank-and-file Conference indicated. However, it did provide a basis for the “left turn” with the formation of the Socialist Labour League as a public Trotskyist organisation (while continuing to work in the Labour Party) in 1959.

(f.) This “left turn” is particularly important for us, since from its contradictions developed the political tendency identified with Alan T.. This turn did not represent a break with past methods or any political reassessment. The conjunctural basis of the turn consisted of the following elements:

1) the enlargement of the group as a result of its intervention in the Communist Party in 19561957;

2) the overall decline of the Labour left and the difficulties in Labour Party work created by the witch-hunt;

3) the growth of shop-floor militancy on the wages front, as shop stewards committees led largely unofficial strikes to improve living standards independently of the bureaucrats under conditions of full employment and to a much lesser extent, the rapid growth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a mass movement outside the Labour Party but having close connections with the Labour and trade union left. Subsequently these developments were extended by the turn to youth in the early 1960s, as the Labour Party set up a national youth movement, the Young Socialists, in the wake of its third successive general election defeat, at a time of growing militancy among working-class youth. As a result, the Socialist Labour League (SLL) drew to itself (and to Trotskyism, despite its distortions), an important layer of student and working-class youth and a smaller but significant layer of industrial militants.

(g.) However, the general objectivist method was retained and applied to the process of economic crisis and class struggle. From liquidationism Healy’s forces lurched increasingly to sectarianism, especially after the break/ expulsion of the Young Socialists from the Labour Party around the time of the 1964 general election. Objectivism and sectarianism were combined in an increasingly prominent catastrophism the theory of an impending capitalist economic collapse which sees the working class break from reformism. At the same time, the elements of confusion on Stalinism continued and were reinforced by the way the Socialist Labour League reacted to the Castroism of the US Socialist Workers Party (which was the basis for the International Secretariat-SWP reunification that formed the United Secretariat of the Fourth International [USFI] in 1963) by asserting that Cuba remained capitalist. On the other hand, the Healyites were to show their own sort of accommodation to the Maoist Red Guards in China and to the successes of the Vietnamese Stalinist bureaucracy against US imperialism. They also retained their basic confusion on social democracy, a confusion embodied in the call for a Labour government on socialist policies.

(h.) The other side of the SLL’s objectivism was its failure to fight for the Transitional Programme. At best its use of transitional demands and the education of its cadres in the significance and method of the Transitional Programme were erratic. Increasingly the Transitional Programme simply disappeared from the League’s practice. To some extent, this point is made by John L. in an article, “Lessons of Our History”, published in the WSL’s newspaper Socialist Press in 1975 (see issue no. 18, 1 October 1975). In this article which compares most favourably as a serious piece of political argument with the superficial journalistic hack work John L. is currently churning out the abstract sectarianism of the 1974 WRP election manifesto with its ‘maximum demand’ calls for nationalisation, socialist policies, etc., is contrasted with the use of transitional demands in the 1965 SLL election manifesto.

The contrast is correctly drawn, and John L.’s arguments on transitional demands and against Healy’s 1970s sectarianism are well made, but this article illustrates some of the confusions the WSL inherit. In general, it gives uncritical support to the Socialist Labour League of the mid-1960s and traces its abandonment of the Transitional Programme from 1967 to 1974. It does not look at the strengths and weaknesses of the SLL in the early 1960s to mid-1960s in the context of its history as a whole, its previous as well as its subsequent development. Thus, though a rather routine reference to objectivism affecting both sides of the 1953 split is made at the end of the article, John L.’s general view is the same as Alan T.’s in The Battle for Trotskyism: the sectarian turn of the late 1960s and 1970s resulted from the impatience of previously isolated revolutionaries faced by a massive upsurge in the level of struggle worldwide.

(i.) Even during this supposedly best period, the SLL remained trapped by national Trotskyism, as did the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI; the only other section of any size in the International Committee after 1963). Indeed, federalism and national Trotskyism were confirmed by the International Committee’s 1966 World Congress. This prevented the development of international democratic centralism and thus prevented also any international struggle against the weaknesses of the national sections. The International Committee continued as a mere bloc of the SLL and the OCI: the mutual nonaggression pact between them was the basis for their split in 1971, after which the International Committee was merely the SLL/ WRP and its satellite clones.

(j.) Thus, by the late 1960s and early 1970s sectarianism and catastrophism were rampant and increasingly bizarre. These features facilitated the growth of other centrist such as International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party (IS/SWP) and the Trotskyist-centrist International Marxist Group (IMG) British section of the USFI. Neither of these could offer any political alternative to the SLL/WRP. On a number of points (the class nature of the Soviet Union, the leading role of the working class in the revolution) the SLL/WRP was correct over against the IS/SWP and IMG. However, they were able to expand because of the sectarianism of the SLL/WRP, for instance towards the student based movement against the Vietnam War. (Incidentally, the growth of Militant, though less spectacular in this period, was facilitated by the sectarianism of the SLL/WRP, IMG, and IS/SWP on the Labour Party.)

The turn to philosophy (that is, Healy’s idiosyncratic idealism) in the early 1970s served to create a wall between the SLL membership and the real world, with the former dominated by an increasingly brutal internal regime. The transformation of the SLL into a cult was complete. These features help to explain the failure to develop any internal oppositional struggle. Alan T.’s opposition was in reality a belated resistance emerging in conditions where internal discussion, clarification, and struggle were completely impossible.

(k.) Finally, it is necessary to make a general point on the particular characteristics of the objectivism of the International Committee tradition, represented by the SLL/ WRP, since it has an important bearing on the subsequent development of the WSL. This has, in fact, been touched on, in points g and j above. All objectivism represents a denial of the role of revolutionary consciousness, thus of the struggle to build Trotskyist parties as the conscious revolutionary leadership of the working class, through a fight for Trotskyist politics and intervention in the class struggle based on the Transitional Programme. Objectivism substitutes a notion of revolutionary consciousness in some sense or other evolving as part of the objective process. This always involves a rejection of the political independence of the working class from bourgeois ideology and petty-bourgeois ideology (the latter, of course, representing no political independence from the bourgeoisie). This understanding of objectivism was established long ago in the communist movement. It is in fact the core of Lenin’s argument in “What Is To Be Done?”.

Objectivism

Nevertheless, objectivism has been the theoretical basis of the centrist degeneration and consequent crisis of the Fourth International. It has led to the tail-ending of one movement or process after another (the attitude to Titoism in Yugoslavia in the late 1940s and early 1950s being the first clear example of this method). However, there have tended to be some differences between the objectivism followed by those forces which were part of the International Secretariat following the 1953 split and those which were part of the International Committee. The former have tended to adapt to petty-bourgeois forces and tendencies of nationalist or Stalinist origin: the FLN in the Algerian War of the 1950s, Castroism in Cuba, the student movement in Europe and North America in the 1960s and early 1970s, guerrillaism in Latin America during the same period, Sandinism in Nicaragua.

The latter have tended to adapt to the objective movement of the working class. The spontaneous struggles of workers and movements in the trade unions have been seen as the forward movement of workers breaking from reformism. This has led to syndicalist and economist adaptations of Marxism to the present level of consciousness of Rank-and-file movements in the trade unions. It has generally been clothed in the guise of orthodoxy an attack on the adaptation of the International Secretariat/USFI currents to petty-bourgeois movements. While much of that criticism was correct, the orthodoxy itself was poisoned. Fundamentally, it represented a legitimation of the equally revisionist workerism of the International Committee tradition. One particularly important aspect of this form of objectivism has been the attitude of the International Committee currents to the movements of the specially oppressed. At best this has been a nod in the direction of democratic rights for example, on abortion at worst outright hostility for example, to lesbians and gay men .

Movements of the specially oppressed were universally attacked as petty-bourgeois, single issue politics, and a diversion from the class struggle. None of this represented in reality any more of a struggle for the political independence of the working class than the International Secretariat/USFI’s forms of objectivism. As the attitude to the specially oppressed shows, it has left workers open to and even reinforced reactionary bourgeois ideology. It has reflected an accommodation to the prejudices of the more conservative, more privileged layers of the working class.

In the SLL/WRP these tendencies were reflected in adaptation to the rank-and-file militancy of the shop stewards movements in the 1960s and early 1970s and were reinforced hand-in-hand with its increasingly sectarian, catastrophist turn. Indeed, there was a direct link between the objective process of workers’ struggles as conceived by the SLL/ WRP and catastrophism - the crisis and collapse of the capitalist economy pushing the working class further to the left and forcing it to break with reformism. However, this did not immunise the SLL/WRP or any other International Committee currents, from the very same accommodation to bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces that they attacked in the International Secretariat/USFI, so that the WRP was to display an uncritical worship of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Yasser Arafat unsurpassed by anything in the history of Pabloism.

3. The WSL Split and Its Development in the 1970s

It was against this degenerate sectarian distortion of Trotskyism that Alan T. and his supporters formed their opposition. While there is an element of truth in the assertion that the origins of Alan T.’s opposition was pragmatic, it is dangerous and misleading to read back from later developments to argue that he was simply protecting his base in Oxford. It was an intensely political struggle. The pragmatic elements in its origins were the conflict between the increasing sectarianism and catastrophism of the WRP and the actual situation in the class struggle and the destructive effect of this conflict on the work of Trotskyist militants in those areas where they had their most significant base primarily in the Oxford car factories. If that was all, if the opposition had not gone beyond the rejection of Healy’s crazy sectarianism, it would have amounted to very little. It would very quickly have collapsed into some form of syndicalist opportunism. That did not happen because the opposition consciously struggled for a principled Trotskyist response which they based on assertion of the validity of the Transitional Programme, not as an ikon, but in practice in the class struggle. Thus, in the first paragraph of his first oppositional document, Alan T. writes:

“I submit this statement to conference both as a critique of the wrong positions of the party, positions which in my view threaten to liquidate the party, and as an attempt to create the conditions to direct the party back to the founding document of the Fourth International the Transitional Programme.” (Alan Alan T., “Correct the Wrong Positions of the Party Return to the Transitional Programme”, The Battle for Trotskyism: Documents of the Opposition Expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974, 2nd ed., London: Folrose Books, 1979, p.1)

He then goes on to give an account of how his differences with Healy’s analysis of the economic and political situation developed from the time of the 1973 oil crisis, of the difficulties Healy’s analysis and method created in trade union work, and of problems with Healy’s economic analysis and mechanical view of the relationship between economics and politics. While there are significant weaknesses in Alan T.’s own analysis (which we will have to return to), these sections do constitute a wide ranging critique of Healyism, at least as it had developed in the early to mid-1970s Alan T. then turns to the question of the Transitional Programme.

He starts by contrasting the maximum programme approach of the WRP to Trotsky’s method in the Transitional Programme and then goes on to examine in considerable detail the question of workers’ control and its role in the Russian revolution. None of this nor the remainder of the document dealing with the WRP’s sectarianism nor the second document which begins an analysis of the roots of Healyite sectarianism and of its international perspectives can be regarded as anything other than a serious, profound, and political struggle. This second document exposes the myth of Healy’s fight against Pablo prior to the 1953 split and begins a critical examination of the history of the International Committee’s propagandist, sectarian method. It was a political struggle because of the character of its pragmatic origins not the attempt of a senior shop steward or a party functionary to protect his base but of a revolutionary fighter drawn to Trotskyism to overcome the problems which his sectarian centrist organisation was creating for his struggle to win workers to Trotskyism. That this attempt was incomplete and contained a number of important weaknesses was inevitable, but it does not cancel out its predominantly positive character. It is extremely important to recognise this because of the tendency of some exWSL members to denigrate or to minimize the significance of the Alan T. opposition struggle in the WRP. For instance, comrade Aly M., in a privately circulated document intended for publication by the rump WIL, writes as follows:

“It can be seen that Alan T.’s response to Healy’s ultraleftism developed because of the near impossibility of the application of positions that stated that the trade union leaders were ‘corporatists’ and that a military coup was imminent by comrades in positions of responsibility in industry.... In short, Alan T. belatedly took up some sort of challenge to Healy to defend his own position at Cowley.” (Aly M., A Balance Sheet of the SLL, WSL and WIL, 1 May 1986, p. 15)

Aly M. backs up his interpretation in two ways. First he places a one-sided emphasis on the shortcomings of Alan T.’s oppositional documents. Then he makes great play with the links between Alan T. and the Bulletin Group led by Robin Blick and Mark Jenkins. On Alan T.’s weaknesses he makes a number of correct points, to which it would not be difficult to add and to which we will have to add points of more political importance than this balance sheet contains, concerned as it is with Alan T.’s failure to date Healy’s ultraleftism far enough back in the history of the Socialist Labour League. However, this omits any mention of the detailed attention which the documents give to transitional demands and to international questions. On the links with the Bulletin Group (the British supporters of the French OCI, led by Pierre Lambert which was the origin of the Socialist Labour Group), Aly M. has the following to say:

“...to a large extent Alan T. had borrowed political positions from the Blick-Jenkins group to decorate his challenge to Healy. This challenge, though valid nevertheless, was motivated by Alan T.’s desire to defend his base in Cowley from Healy’s ultraleftism. It did not accompany any further efforts to break with Healyism. Here the significance of the authorship of the documents becomes very great as the documents contain quite well developed criticisms of not only WRP political positions but also Healy’s method. These criticisms clearly pointed towards the subsequent formulation of a full critique and break from Healyism through a balance sheet.... Once they had been expelled from the WRP and been forced to set up the WSL the Alan T.-John L. leadership decided in effect that the politics they had taken from the Bulletin group had served their purpose and... embarked on a course of reliving the early 1960s SLL, albeit trimmed of some of its worst features.” (Aly M., A Balance Sheet of the SLL, WSL, and WIL, 1 May 1986, p. 17)

The belief that a break with Healyism could be made ‘through a balance sheet’ (not without one, certainly, but not just ‘through’ one) betrays an idealist approach to political questions. The assertion that there were no ‘further efforts to break with Healyism’ is simply untrue. On the substantive issue of Bulletin Group influence, Aly M. is extremely vague. Even the Bulletin Group’s 1976 document from which he quotes only claims that “substantial sections” (which ones unspecified, in the quotation at least) of Alan T.’s documents were written by a leading member of the group. From this he infers that the politics of Alan T. were taken in totality from the Bulletin Group, without indicating the links between their politics. One is left wondering why the Bulletin Group did not come into the open as the principled fighters for Trotskyism!!

It is necessary to examine this point in some detail, not because we have to defend the past political honour of Alan T., Tony R., and John L. (which they certainly will not do!!) and certainly not because we seek to sanctify our political origins in the WSL, but because important questions of method are involved. First, the approach is fundamentally un-marxist. Second, it is the basis for a sectarian attitude on the question of the struggle for the reconstruction of the Fourth International. It fails totally to understand the contradictory nature of Trotskyist-centrism and is therefore unable to recognise the dynamics of leftward moving oppositional struggles in these movements (of which the Alan T. opposition was, for a whole number of reasons, a particularly important example).

Such currents are simply ‘marked’: so much for effort, but a list of crosses against their bad positions. Hence a sectarian inability to envisage any strategy or tactics to intervene in such developments. It is not, of course, to be denied that the Bulletin Group did have influence and connections with the Alan T. opposition. It is reported that Alan T. himself confirmed this at the public meeting called by the WRP immediately after the expulsion of Gerry Healy in October 1985. It appears that the Bulletin Group were circulating Alan T. and other oppositionists with their material prior to their expulsion and had contact with Alan T., which did apparently include involvement in drafting the documents. Since the Lambertists shared the same objectivist/ catastrophist method as the Healyites, this influence was a political limitation on the opposition.

Evolved to the Left

The two important points, however, are that the Bulletin Group influence was a secondary factor in the emergence of the opposition and that it (the opposition) evolved to the left, not to the right with the Lambertists. The life of the opposition in the WRP was inevitably very short, and, of course, it was impossible to widen the opposition’s impact much beyond Oxford. A good number of those expelled were ‘suspects’ rather than members associated with the opposition. Even some members associated with Alan T.’s opposition went in other directions politically after their expulsion. The new organisation formed after the expulsion, the Workers Socialist League, thus emerged from an incomplete and partially developed political struggle.

The test would be its ability to develop politically as an independent organisation. Turning again to AM’s balance sheet, we find the following quotation from a review by John L. of The Battle for Trotskyism:

“This [the expulsions] immediately confronted the opposition comrades with a dilemma either to immediately organise a centralised grouping, now inevitably outside the WRP, to ensure a continuity of the fight for leadership inside the working class or engage first in lengthy haggling over abstract “perspectives” and “orientation” in the course of which the inherent strength of the movement and cohesion of its forces could be wasted away.” (John L., Review of The Battle for Trotskyism: Documents of the Opposition Expelled from the WRP in 1974, Socialist Press, no. 30, 24 March 1976, p. 4)

This is his only quotation from Socialist Press, throughout its six and a half year history (1975-1981). It is used to maintain the line of argument adopted towards the initial opposition within the WRP, that is, to stress the activism and contempt for theory of the WSL from its origins and to minimise its post expulsion development. In fact, while activism was an aspect of the one-sided development of the WSL, it was by no means the whole story. While the passage quoted contains serious problems (‘continuity’ with what?), it also indicates something of the contradictory character of the WSL, in particular its commitment to the political struggle in the working class.

The strengths of the WSL, during the 1975-1979 period, were its serious orientation to workers in struggle, including its principled intervention in and leadership of a number of important struggles, and to the application of the Transitional Programme in these struggles, while at the same time taking a principled stand on the Trotskyist programme internationally in opposition to Healy’s abandonment of permanent revolution and the USFI’s tail-ending of guerrillaist and Castroite politics. Moreover, what was crucially important was that the WSL broke with the notion that the International Committee or any other fragment of the Fourth International represented the political or organisational continuity of Trotskyism.

Healyite View

In general, its practice recognised the centrist character of these leaderships and asserted the need for a struggle to reconstruct the Fourth International. Its international work was based on this approach, culminating in the formation of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee in December 1979 as the basis for the formation of an international democratic-centralist tendency. In this context, the WSL broke with the Healyite view of Cuba as a capitalist state, recognising it as a deformed workers’ state ruled by an unreformable Stalinist bureaucracy in opposition to the USFI’s view that political revolution is not required in Cuba.

The WSL also broke with the WRP’s essentially British chauvinist position on Ireland and took up the defence of the Republican movement. This is obviously a vital question for Trotskyists in Britain and was particularly important for the WSL, since the section on Ireland in Alan T.’s second opposition document is extremely weak: while it criticises the International Committee’s sectarianism and lack of programme on Ireland, it shows only the most abstract acknowledgement of the application of the theory of permanent revolution to Ireland’s uncompleted national tasks. Thus it ignores the Republican movement totally, while arguing for intervention in the Irish Labour Party and the Northern Ireland Labour Party.

Its healthy development is further indicated by its ability to apply permanent revolution in a principled way in some of the major tests for Trotskyists during that period, particularly the Iranian revolution and the Iraq-Iran War, the Nicaraguan revolution, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The WSL also started to make a genuine break from the backwardness of the SLL/WRP and the International Committee generally on the struggles of the specially oppressed in particular with the development of a cadre of women involved in important struggles and the development of the WSL’s women’s paper. It took important steps to break with the Healyites’ homophobia and to defend lesbian and gay male struggles (the basis of its break with the Communist Internationalist League of Greece). It must be stressed that the WSL did not develop an organic Marxist understanding of the importance of the struggles of the specially oppressed. What was done was achieved without the serious involvement of the central leadership. Nevertheless, the fact that an important layer of women activists and a significant group of intellectuals were drawn to the WSL and were able to have a positive involvement in its development, testifies to its overall healthy character for a period of several years.

4. The Political Weaknesses of the Old WSL

It has been necessary to assert and examine at some length the overall political strengths and positive development of the WSL in order to grasp its contradictory character and its degeneration. It would be a serious mistake to regard the WSL as an attempt to restore the ‘best period’ of the SLL of some period in the early to mid-1960s; nevertheless, the WSL failed to overcome the contradictions of the SLL’s ‘left turn’.

The weaknesses of the WSL have been discussed at some length in the first part of “The Crisis of Proletarian Leadership and the Crisis of TILC: A Balance Sheet of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee” (International Internal Bulletin of the International Trotskyist Committee [IIB ITC]), 1985, no. 2) and to a lesser extent in the ITC founding conference’s resolution on “The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle” IIB ITC, 1985, no. 1), to which comrades should refer.

The weaknesses of the WSL were closely related to its political strengths its intervention in the class struggle and its assertion of the Transitional Programme, as well as its commitment to international work. In Alan T.’s opposition documents it is correctly pointed out that Healy had reduced the Transitional Programme to the recital of its first sentence. The WSL argued for and practised the use of transitional demands, as a bridge from workers’ present reformist consciousness to revolutionary consciousness of the need for the working class to take power and correctly focused on the crucial importance of workers’ control within all transitional demands. However, there were two closely related problems with the WSL’s assertion of transitional demands. First of all, the demands they used were those most closely related to their immediate practical work that is, to trade union work in particular, the sliding scale of wages (immediately important in the conditions of high inflation in which the WSL first developed) and opening the books.

There was little attention to the wider use and development of transitional demands and thus some tendency to concentrate on demands which had the most immediate relevance to particular struggles of trade unionists, which were, naturally, sectional struggles. Of course, sectional struggles will be one of the areas in which it is practically necessary to intervene on the basis of the Transitional Programme. In the nature of things, these will, in most periods, be the most numerous of our practical interventions. But transitional demands go beyond sectional limits.

Within the particular struggle they represent the necessary interests of the working class as a whole: they thus present to workers the need to extend, unite, and generalise their struggles, even where this cannot be immediately realised in practice. This aspect of transitional demands, of the process of building a bridge to revolutionary consciousness, was insufficiently stressed by the WSL or by Alan T.’s opposition documents. It should have led to a consideration of the role of less immediate demands. The WSL’s failure in this respect meant that there was no real struggle to apply the method of the Transitional Programme to work among the specially oppressed. This tendency to restrict transitional demands to those which were of clearest practical relevance to the immediate work of the WSL’s worker militants is related to, indeed, springs from the second problem. The WSL always presented transitional demands in terms of winning the mass of the workers, thus in generally agitational terms. For instance, an article in one of the early issues of Socialist Press contains the following quotation from the Transitional Programme:

“It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between the present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. The article proceeds through reference to the question of workers’ control in the Bolsheviks’ agitation in 1917 to the following statement: It is essential in preparing a demand for a factory meeting or trade union branch that it is not seen just as a resolution but part of this preparation, a part of mobilising the masses. The demand of “open the books” must therefore include an elected committee of trade unionists....” (Our Fight for the Transitional Programme”, Socialist Press, no. 8, 15 May 1975, p. 6; emphasis in original)

This is all completely correct, and we have to be absolutely clear, as this Socialist Press article is, that it is our fundamental aim (to win the masses to Trotskyism). However, the emphasis is one-sided. There is no attention to the educative role of transitional demands in our propaganda work, in situations where it is unlikely that we will win support from wide layers of workers. In other words, there is a failure to consider the importance of the Transitional Programme in winning and consolidating the political vanguard. This was a general problem with the WSL’s political work. Understandable oppositional documents in the WRP or in an early article on the politics of the split, such as the above, the failure of the Alan T. leadership to overcome this problem was to prove a central weakness. The WSL, after all, was a relatively small group, mainly a propaganda group, despite its significance in Cowley and the high proportion of workers among the membership and leadership. It never had much above 150 members. For such a group the question of winning and consolidating the vanguard had to have a very high priority.

This was never properly understood by the WSL leadership. If anything, there was a tendency to brush the question aside, as if it illustrated a sectarian mentality. Thus, the British Perspectives of the Workers Socialist League (drafted in November 1977 and adopted by the WSL’s second national conference in February 1978) contains a lengthy section, “Fighting for the Programme”, which starts with the following comments:

“There is a direct relationship between our understanding of the political crisis and fighting in practice for the transitional programme. In the rarefied atmosphere of sectarian discussion circles, the WSL is termed “workerist”. This is because unlike them we have never seen the central question as abstractly “educating” the class, but as developing workers’ consciousness in the course of action in which our own consciousness is also transformed. In this way we actively combat spontaneity and trade union consciousness within the wider labour movement and within our own ranks. In their eagerness to avoid opportunism, sectarians find themselves scared to get into the water of the class struggle. At most they throw in an exploratory stone or two while sitting on the bank. The WSL however has fought for its principled positions within the mass workers’ organisations. And, though our successes have tended to be confined to one or two areas, we have developed our programme and perspective in this way!! The following thirty two paragraphs detail experience of and plans for these practical interventions:

1. the fight against the Social Contract in the unions and for the sliding scale of wages, including taking the slogan “regain and defend living standards” into the unions at Cowley;

2. support for seamen, Port Talbot steelworkers, and Leyland toolmakers against Phase 2;

3. their role in opposing Scanlon’s rejection of the AUEW mandate against the twelve month rule;

4. the need to set up “at least one exemplary price committee”;

5. the need to set up a national car fraction;

6. and then, more briefly, work in the health unions, among women (very briefly), and youth (NUSS, fighting police harassment, etc.). At every point the key role of WSL comrades and the support they have been able to win in practical struggles are stressed.”

The section concludes that:

“Weaknesses undoubtedly remain in the practical work of the League in fighting for the programme. These weaknesses must be tackled as they arise. But the overall pattern of development of our movement in the class struggle is one of qualitative strengthening in almost every area and the consolidation of a Trotskyist cadre capable of understanding, explaining, exposing, and fighting the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracy at every step.”

At no point is there any mention of the role, on a general national scale, of a group of the WSL’s size and resources. There is no attention to the question of winning the political vanguard, no differentiation in fact between that and winning mass support, no recognition that transitional demands have an educative role in winning political vanguard elements as well as an agitational role in mass struggles. This failure is repeated in the final part of the perspectives document, “Development of the WSL”, which makes it clear that “consolidation of a Trotskyist cadre” really means a cadre of activists/leaders in practical work. Thus:

“The failure to achieve the recruitment we have aimed at for over the past year has reflected itself in a continuing financial problem for the movement and a resultant heavy burden on our full-time workers. Our central resources are stretched often beyond breaking point. A sales drive with the weekly paper coupled to a turn to recruitment can help tackle this problem of development. By breaking the sterile routine of many branches, recruitment of fresh forces has an impact on the movement far more wide reaching than simple numerical growth.”

The emphasis on activity and organisation demonstrated here is repeated throughout this final section. The tone is familiar to anyone with experience of the 1960s SLL. While Alan T. had correctly criticised the bizarre and totally apolitical mass recruitment targets (3,000 new members to be recruited in ten days, agreed in thirty seconds at the 14 September 1974 WRP Central Committee meeting [see The Battle for Trotskyism p. 91]) and the extreme activist routinism of WRP branches devoted to daily paper sales, the WSL leadership never really developed an alternative conception of building a Trotskyist movement.

Thus the unexplained reference to “the fight to develop new members!” could only be seen as a fight to develop activist militants, and the statement in the final paragraph on the need to “ensure that education, with further summer schools and weekend schools, is developed to further steel the movement” has the air of a ritual peroration, with the clear implication that political and theoretical education is some kind of ‘topping up’ process. Of course the old WSL did conduct political education, and there was a great deal of excellent political and theoretical argument in the pages of Socialist Press. But the overall direction of its work was towards a one-sided emphasis on mass work, on transitional demands as agitational demands in the day-to-day struggle. The draft balance sheet of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, referred to previously, rightly points out that the WSL’s strengths outweighed its weaknesses because, with this emphasis:

“...through the Winter of Discontent (19781979) and up to the election of the Thatcher government in May 1979, the intensity of the British class struggle in particular, the industrial class struggle was high enough to enable the WSL consistently to raise transitional demands and maintain a relatively high political profile in its public work. (The Crisis of Proletarian Leadership and the Crisis of TILC: A Balance Sheet of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee”, (International Internal Bulletin of the International Trotskyist Committee IIB ITC, 1985, no. 2, p. 17)

Yet even for the period 19741979 the Alan T. notion of the ‘forward movement of the working class’ was an inadequate description of the state of the class struggle in Britain. And the WSL’s one-sided emphasis on mass work contributed to the limitations it experienced throughout its history in expanding significantly beyond its Oxford base or into industries other than motors. These weaknesses of the old WSL were fundamentally related to serious problems with its understanding of the economic development of capitalism and the relation between economic developments and the political development of the working class. These are discussed at some length, with detailed quotations, in the ITC’s draft balance sheet of TILC quoted above (see IIB ITC, 1985, no. 2, pp. 1017).

The draft balance sheet examines a fundamental confusion in Alan T.s’s first opposition document (see The Battle for Trotskyism, pp. 1011), a confusion which was to remain part of the WSL’s political outlook:

“Healy is presented [by Alan T.] as, in effect, simultaneously “underestimating” and “overestimating” the British working class: underestimating the strength of its immediate capacity to defend itself against capitalist attacks and overestimating the rapidity of its development toward revolutionary consciousness.... But.... the criticism is presented as if fundamental. Healy is accused correctly of a mechanical, economist view of the development of working-class consciousness, which leads him to conclude the working class has already achieved nearly revolutionary consciousness. This, we are told, leads him to “underestimate” the actual strength of the working class in the immediate situation. But, in reality, this strength expressed primarily a trade union militancy under conditions in which the British capitalists still had sufficient economic and political options to head off major political radicalization of the working class and prevent the development of a revolutionary situation. The fall of the Conservative Heath government and the victory of the Labour Party certainly reflected the strength of the working class but also the economic and political options still available to British and world imperialism (and the limitations of the political consciousness of the British working class)

. ...[Alan T.] presents the strength of the working class in its partial struggles and the leftward movement associated with that strength as his major difference with Healy. Yet the real point should be that Healy has misread a situation still limited to partial working-class struggles and still characterized by the capitalists’ ability to prevent development beyond these limitations (as an ultimate crisis of capitalism and an imminent proletarian revolutionary upsurge).

...Alan T. himself with his supporters fails to see the actually prolonged and gradual nature of the period of stagnation and decline into which world capitalism had entered by the mid-1970s that is, a period of long-term and overall but relatively gradual decline, within which ups and downs in capitalist development would continue to occur.

And the Alan T. anti-Healy oppositionists fail to see the inevitable consequence of this: the alternation throughout the world for a substantial period of phases of partial advance with phases of setback and retreat in the class struggle. But more than this. Implicit in Alan T.’s own conception of “leftward advance” through partial working class struggles is a somewhat different mechanical, economist theory than Healy’s, not a complete break with mechanical economism.

Of course, there is in Alan T. a partial break with Healyite economism specifically, with its ultimatist aspects in insisting on the necessity of intervention in the class struggle by the conscious vanguard on the basis of the Transitional Program. But Alan T. seems to see the key to the validity of the method of the Transitional Program in the inevitable leftward motion attending the partial struggles of the working class.

Again, this is, in a very important sense, true. But what does Alan T. offer as the basis of the development of these struggles and their attendant “leftward motion,” if not economic developments? In the end, Alan T. suggests nothing in his original opposition documents which differs fundamentally with Healyite economism. He simply sees the crisis of capitalism as less acute than Healy and the class struggle and workers’ consciousness developing along with this crisis at a slower rate but in no less automatic a manner.” (The Crisis of Proletarian Leadership and the Crisis of TILC, IIB ITC, 1985, no. 2, pp. 1112)

The first two sections of the WSL’s 1978 British Perspectives (“The Crisis” and “Economic Crisis in Britain”), with the first containing an exaggerated account and prediction of trade war and the second dismissing any factors, such as North Sea oil, which might call its analysis into question, indicate that the WSL had not moved beyond the economic perspectives of Alan T.’s 1974 documents (see Trotskyism Today, no. 3, July 1978, pp. 46). And the confusion persisted in the 1979 document, The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle, one of the founding documents of TILC a confusion recognised by the ITC’s founding conference in a resolution criticising this fundamental statement of Alan T. politics:

“The economic analysis of “The Transitional Program in Today’s Class Struggle”.... tends to misstate and overstate this (the extent of general economic decline in the present period), creating the impression of an “ever worsening economic crisis.” The document describes capitalism as an absolute fetter on the further development of production, which is not true. Its economic analysis is an eclectic combination of Yaffeism and Healyism. First, the Yaffeism, the falling tendency of the rate of profit marches in idealist fashion through history. Then, the Healyism, a Wall Street panic breaks out, leading to the collapse of an over-extended system of credit. The document provides no sense of the ups as well as downs of the world capitalist economy even during a period when its overall curve of development is turning down.” (Founding Conference of the International Trotskyist Committee, Resolution on ‘the Transitional Program in Today’s Class Struggle, adopted 27 July 1984, International Trotskyist Review, no. 3, autumn 1988, p. 10)

To the interrelated problems of mechanical economism in the WSL’s view of the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and its effect on consciousness and its one-sided emphasis on the use of transitional demands in mass work, we must add a further point. These weaknesses both reflected and produced a tendency towards economism in practice. In the case of the SLL this has been referred to above (section 2, point k). The SLL’s particular form of objectivism led it to adapt in practice to the shop stewards’ movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was not a political rank-and-file movement, like the Minority Movement of the 1920s. It was rather a number of shop floor based unofficial wages offensives in particular industries, which coalesced rather loosely in resistance, first, to the attempt of the Wilson government of 1966-1970 to introduce antiunion legislation and, subsequently, against Heath’s Industrial Relations Act.

Though the SLL played an important role in challenging the dominant tactics of the Stalinists (a role that was, of course, increasingly hampered by the sectarian policy of setting up their own trade union front, the All Trade Unions Alliance), they did not wage a fight for political development against the syndicalist and economist spontaneity of the movement. As we noted above, this involved a ‘workerist’ hostility to movements of the specially oppressed, students, etc. It was precisely in the milieu of this work that the Alan T. opposition emerged.

Syndicalist and Economist

As stated above, it is essential not to see his opposition as just a reflection and protection of that base, nor even as just the defence of an earlier against a later form of adaptation. Nevertheless, it did continue to reflect the consciousness of that milieu, even though to a lesser extent, and this continued to be reflected in certain workerist prejudices the concentration of demands on those most relevant to trade union work, a tendency to see the most politically conscious workers as equating to the best organised workers, in a certain organisational suspicion of intellectuals (especially after the Spartacist splits) and a tendency to treat full-timers as hacks. In particular, it seriously limited the WSL’s ability to respond to the movements of the specially oppressed as Marxists, to develop programmatically on these questions, either to intervene on that basis in the movements or to take these struggles in any systematic way into the trade union movement.

It is not that no progress was made, but the developments were not made on the basis of an integrated Marxist approach to the questions involved, nor were they fully integrated into the politics of the WSL and fought for by the leadership. There were further problems with the WSL’s positions on Stalinism and social democracy which reflected an incomplete break with the outlook of the International Committee. The ITC resolution on The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle points out that:

“...the document directs most of its fire at the Stalinist misleaders. It criticizes the petty-bourgeois nationalists somewhat less and the social democratic misleaders least of all.” (ITR, no. 3, p. 11) and that: “It stresses the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism to the point where the reader wonders how the Soviet and other Stalinist bureaucracies could have been an instrument for the overthrow of capitalist property....”

The tendency to overstate the role of Stalinism as compared with social democracy was a general feature of the International Committee. In the case of The Club/SLL/WRP in Britain this had covered at best confusion and at worst liquidationism with regard to the Labour Party. While the old WSL resisted the chronic Stalinophobia and social democratic liquidationsim of the Lambertists, it retained much of the confusion on the Labour Party. In his first opposition document Alan T. devotes some attention to the question of a Trotskyist orientation to the social democratic bureaucracy in Britain.

He approaches this first through an attack on the idea that the trade union bureaucracy was ‘corporatist’ (that is, that it was somehow introducing fascism). He then takes up the importance of a campaign around the slogan “make the left MPs fight”, which was a slogan the SLL had used during the Wilson government in the 1960s and clearly had relevance under the 1974-79 Labour government. (This question is also dealt with in the article “Lessons of Our History” in Socialist Press, no. 18.)

He finally moves on to a critique of the WRP’s campaign in the general election of October 1974 (and thus, by implication, of February 1974, too), when the party’s entire resources were devoted to a sectarian intervention in ten constituencies where it was standing candidates, rather than:

“...A national campaign... while the party programme was tuned towards the election, giving workers a perspective and posing the question of leadership to the working class.” (The Battle for Trotskyism, p. 23)

This section of the document constitutes a completely correct attack on Healy’s sectarian and maximalist attitude towards the Labour Party and a correct general statement of a Trotskyist position on the character of the social democratic bureaucracy, the need to intervene in the conflicts in the reformist organisations, and, much less clearly, on the attitude of Trotskyists towards Labour in a general election (the nature of the national campaign and how the programme is to be ‘tuned’ to the election are not spelled out).

“In the second document there is a single ambiguous allusion to the Labour Party question in the course of a discussion of the International Committee’s international work. In Britain, the expulsion of the Young Socialists has meant that no work has been done for a long period inside the Labour Party. Therefore, it seems the entire International must mechanically take this lesson....” (The Battle for Trotskyism, p. 62)

It is far from clear whether Alan T. is implying support for the SLL’s abstention from Labour Party work after 1964, acceptance of it as inevitable, or even some degree of criticism. The ambiguity does, in any case, rather characterise the old WSL’s attitude on the Labour Party. On the one hand, they did follow a correct line of making demands on the bureaucratic leaders and differentiating between left and right reformists in their demands, taking this up to the demand to “make the lefts fight”. (One might argue about the precise wording, but the general method was right.)

On the other hand, their practice continued to display the sectarian approach to the Labour Party shown by the SLL of the mid-1960s For five years there was no intervention in the Labour Party. The WSL’s trade union work was not used as a base for intervention; no work was done within local Labour Party organisations around the question of cuts, for instance; and there was no attempt to intervene in the LPYS to challenge Militant. During those five years the level of trade union struggle was sufficiently high to mask, in a sense, the inconsistency. That is to say, trade union struggles provided the WSL with an arena in which it could conduct agitation around transitional demands and make propaganda for the slogan “make the lefts fight”, without its being too immediately obvious that they were not following the logic of this slogan themselves, that the start made with the criticism of Healy’s sectarianism had not been thought through systematically.

In fact the mask was a tendency towards a syndicalist elevation of trade union work above Labour Party work and, indeed, above all non-trade union forms of work. Of course, there really is a sense in which the trade unions must be acknowledged to be more fundamental than the Labour Party: trade unions are the basic defence organisations built by workers everywhere in their struggles with the capitalists. They are an international phenomenon, and intervention in trade unions is a principle for Trotskyist organisations internationally. On the other hand, the development or non-development of reformist political parties varies widely, and intervention in them is a tactical question for Trotskyists, requiring different answers at different times and places. There is also a secondary sense in which the trade unions can be described as ‘more fundamental’ than the Labour Party in Britain, because it was the unions that formed the Labour Party, which they still dominate through the medium of the bureaucracy.

However, this is not the point being made about the WSL; their syndicalist elevation of trade union work meant in practice an elevation of work around economic trade union issues. Along side this tendency towards sectarianism on the Labour Party, the WSL carried over with them from the SLL/ WRP elements of confusion which contained the potential for opportunism.

Lessons of Our History

In Lessons of Our History Socialist Press, no. 18), John L., in the course of tracing the sectarian degeneration of the SLL and its abandonment of the transitional demands which it was advancing in the mid-1960s; includes the following section on the history of the demand, ‘make the lefts fight’, with approving quotations from the SLL’s Newsletter and its 1965 manifesto. It is necessary to reproduce this section at length to appreciate the extent of the confusion:

“Their the WRP’s current demand, “Make the Labour Government Resign”, is a clear example of this sectarianism. As we showed in our last edition, such a demand turns away from the necessary struggle to expose the fake left MPs to their supporters by pressing them to fight Wilson and the right wing under conditions where they refuse to lift a finger. Our slogan is “Make the ‘Lefts’ Fight Wilson”. It has a long history from the SLL. The demand was central to the campaign run by the SLL, its Young Socialists organisation (after they has [sic] been witch hunted out of the Labour Party), and the League’s weekly newspaper The Newsletter. This carried such banner headlines as: Change Wilson Policy, May 21, 1966) Left MPs Must Learn the Lessons of 1966; Say NO to Wilson, December 31, 1966 and the correct, if rather uncritical, headline: Lefts Must Fight Wilson, April 22, 1967. This policy had been carried forward from the SLL 1965 Manifesto which read: ‘Wilson and the betrayers must be removed and a socialist policy implemented.’ That policy must be bold and direct, and there must be no hesitation in relying on the workers themselves to enforce it along the following lines.” (How to Defeat the Tories for Good, September 11, 1965 Socialist Press, no. 18, 1 October 1975)

The WSL demand under the 1974-1975 Wilson/Callaghan governments (and that of the SLL under the post-1964 Wilson government), “make the lefts fight”, was correct: it is necessary “to expose the fake left MPs to their supporters by pressing them to fight”. (There is, of course, a sectarian danger in treating the left reformists as the ‘main enemy’ and thus letting the right wing off the hook, discounting working class support for and illusions in the Labour Party as a whole, but this was not generally the problem with the WSL on the early to mid-1960s SLL.) The problem with John L.’s argument and the SLL article from which he quotes is the way it runs together particular demands on the left reformists to fight Wilson with vague and confused points about programme and policy.

Make the Lefts Fight

Thus, John L.’s first example of the SLL’s ‘Make the Lefts Fight’ campaign is the headline “Change Wilson Policy”. Regardless of the content of the article (which it has not been possible to refer to), the headline is at best ambiguous. Who is to change the policies? And to what? The implication has to be that the Labour (that is, the reformist) left should, through Parliament, bring in ‘socialist policies’. John L. offers no criticism of the very clear opportunist dangers in this ambiguity - though he objects that “Lefts Must Fight Wilson” is rather uncritical!!- presumably because it did not use the WSL’s favoured formulation, ‘Make the Lefts Fight’. Here John L., while ignoring the opportunist danger that really exists, veers towards a certain sectarianism over a form of words - in reality the choice is a tactical one to be decided on the basis of an objective assessment of the relationship between sections of the working class and the left reformists.

We then see the dangerous confusion compounded by the quotation from the 1965 SLL Manifesto. We again see the demand for the lefts to break with and remove Wilson linked with the suggestion that they should implement a ‘socialist policy’. Coupled with the reference to the right-wing Labourites as ‘the betrayers’, this clearly implies some more progressive role for left reformism. The implication that what is envisaged is a left Labour government carrying out socialist policies through a parliamentary, legislative programme is brought out by the role assigned to the working class. It is to be ‘relied on’ by the lefts to ‘enforce’ this ‘bold’ ‘socialist policy’.

Referring back to the article in the previous edition of Socialist Press referred to above (an article which is a reply to WRP charges that Alan T. believed that a Labour government could be forced to the left under the pressure of the working class), we find a brief but even clearer statement of this confused position:

“Before the lefts can be removed they have to be exposed. The way to expose them is demand that they carry their words into action, fight to remove Wilson and the right wing, form a government and implement socialist policies. (“Behind the Smokescreen”, Socialist Press, no. 17, 17 September 1975, p. 45

What we see here is the confusion involved in the demand for “a Labour government with socialist policies”, simply transferred to the Labour lefts, with the implication that their policies, if only they would implement them, are more progressive than those of the right wing (interestingly, this article shows the continuation of another element of confusion when it quotes without criticism the SLL’s description - in a 1961 letter to the SWP/US - of the “Victory for Socialism!” group of left reformists as left centrists.

The problem was not that John L. or Alan T. - or the SLL of the 1960s - themselves thought that a Labour government, even a left Labour government, could ‘implement socialist policies’ - nor, for that matter, that they did not know the difference between left reformism and centrism. The problem was rather how they saw the task of exposing in practice the nature of the Labourites, right and left. The “Labour government with socialist policies” approach has little in common with the demand for a workers’ government in the Transitional Programme, because it implies the possibility of a Labour government of the left bringing in socialism - with the further implication that this can be, at least in part, a legislative process. There is in the ambiguity of this second quotation at least the possible interpretation that such a left Labour government is a necessary stage in winning the fight for leadership with the left reformists.

We find this confusion maintained if we turn to the WSL’s 1978 British Perspectives document, in a long - and, again, generally correct - section entitled “Break the Liberal-Labour Coalition!!”

“While the workers support Labour we will help them put it in office independently of the openly capitalist parties. At the same time we encourage workers to demand and force measures on Labour in defence of their interests and to break the resistance of the capitalists.

While the specific demands we place upon Labour will vary in particular class battles, the slogan ‘force Labour to implement a socialist programme’ sums up our general orientation in the present situation

In our general explanation of this position the WSL warns the working class not to trust its leaders); explains that a socialist programme cannot be implemented by parliamentary edict; and shows that the task posed is for the working class to impose its rule over the bourgeoisie, smash the existing state apparatus, and institute a planned economy.

In no sense does the fight to force Labour to implement a socialist programme “sow illusions”, as sectarians would have it. On the contrary it is the best means through which the working class can test out its leaders and organisation and develop a new, revolutionary leadership for the task of seizing power.” (Trotskyism Today), no. 3, July 1978

Once again we see a confusion between the correct orientation in the first and third paragraphs quoted here and the confused position put forward as the ‘general orientation’ in the second paragraph, ending with the attempt to run the two together in the fourth paragraph.

The ITC resolution on The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle points out that something of the ambiguity we have referred to on the workers’ government issue affects that document, too. The Transitional Program in Today’s Class Struggle correctly states that:

“the culmination of the struggle for [the workers’ government] demand must in the final instance - as in Russia in October 1917—be the definitive break with and destruction of the political forms, institutions, and state machinery of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the (dictatorship of the proletariat)” (Section 9; ITR, no. 3, p. 31).