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.]
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).
However,
the document continues with an ambiguous statement which can be read to imply
that a reformist “workers’ government” is an inevitable step in the development
of the struggle for socialist revolution:
“The
workers’ government slogan thus contains within it the dynamic of the class
struggle in which the working class, gaining in strength and self-confidence,
demands increasingly more of its bureaucratic mass leaders, to the point where
it insists that these leaders break from the bourgeoisie, take power in their
own hands, and implement measures in the interests of the proletariat.” (Section
9, The Workers’ Government Demand; ITR,
no. 3, p. 31
“The
class struggle may develop in this direction - with the intervention of a
revolutionary party. But it may
not. The working class may abandon its
former mass leaders before it demands that they take state power”.
(International Trotskyist Review
[ITR], no. 3, p. 11)
In the state of the class struggle in Britain
between 1974 and 1979 and with the WSL’s orientation to workers’ struggles, the
correct positions of the first and third paragraphs of the previous quotation
from the 1978 British Perspectives document tended to dominate its practice,
rather than the confusion of the second paragraph - despite the claim that this
was the ‘general orientation’.
The
confusion with regard to the Labour Party, and through that to the workers’
government slogan, is connected with the problems discussed above in the WSL’s
orientation to mass struggles, in practice largely trade union struggles, and
its consequent one-sided understanding of transitional demands.
First,
there was in the tendency to adapt the workers’ government slogan in the
direction of a “Labour government with socialist policies”, with the emphasis
on putting the bureaucratic leaders to the test, a strong element of the WSL’s
one-sided emphasis on ‘winning the masses’ and its failure to seriously
consider its own role as a propaganda organisation, in the task of winning and
consolidating the vanguard. Hence,
rather than considering the important role of the workers’ government demand as
a propaganda argument, it tended to concentrate on its agitational use, in
circumstances where this necessarily had limited immediate use. Thus it became
adapted to a form which appeared to have more immediate relevance (the
development was not, of course, original to the WSL Second, as with the economist tendencies previously noted, this
confusion reflects the influence of the current reformist consciousness of the
working class and adapts to it, not just pedagogically but politically.
Since a detailed
examination of the weaknesses of the old WSL has inevitably required more space
than its strengths, it must be borne in mind that the two existed in a state of
tension in the politics of the organisation and that, from its emergence in
1974 down to 1979-1980, it was the strengths which dominated and gave to the
WSL its overall positive and healthy development.
Internationalism
Of course, the
commitment to internationalism leading to the formation of TILC was one of the
healthiest, if not the healthiest, aspect of the WSL. Starting from its break
with the idea that any of the fragments of the Fourth International represented
the political or organisational continuity of Trotskyism, the WSL recognised
the need for a fight for the reconstruction of the Fourth International and for
an international democratic-centralist tendency not as a new claimant to the Fourth International’s title but the
indispensable weapon in the fight to resolve the crisis of the Fourth
International. Even within this, however, there were problems.
There was, at least in
the early part of the WSL’s history, some confusion on the question of
continuity. In the article from Socialist
Press of 24 March 1976 quoted above, there is an ambiguity about its
continuity with the WRP. Our Fight for
the Transitional Programme concludes with the following statement (coming
immediately after an attack on the International Secretariat/USFI):
“Despite the attacks of all kinds of tendencies who attempt to revise
Marxism, there is a continuity of the struggle for the Transitional programme
since Trotsky’s assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. This continuity now
flows through the Workers Socialist League and its struggle to mobilise workers
around the demands and the principles of the Fourth International’s founding document.”
(Our Fight for the Transitional Programme, Socialist Press, no. 8, 15 May 1975, p. 6)
There is a sense in
which it is important to recognise that there has been a kind of continuity:
that there have been repeated struggles for the Trotskyist programme or
important elements of it, some more, some less well developed and that these
have been possible within the framework of the degenerated centrist fragments
of the Fourth International, have even to some extent been produced by them. In
this sense, it is simply an aspect of the ITC’s concept of Trotskyist-centrism.
In these early WSL formulations there is
clearly an ambiguity, perfectly understandable in the circumstances, between a
movement towards this conception and a
sense of some sort of continuity specifically with the International Committee tradition. More important, however,
was a certain ambiguity and even lack of strategy in the WSL’s understanding of
the reconstruction of the Fourth International. The ITC resolution on The
Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle points out that:
“The
document manages to be both somewhat opportunist and somewhat sectarian at the
same time. The opportunism was shown by
some tendency to reduce the crisis to the problem of a refusal by the various
tendencies to participate in discussions. At the same time, we stress the
refusal of any of the main currents of postwar Trotskyism objectively to
examine the roots of the crisis that have split and confused the world movement
and reduced it to its present anarchic state. This refusal to discuss the
experiences of the fight for the programme means that none of the existing
international tendencies is equipped to lay claim to represent the political
continuity of the Fourth International.” (Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle, ITR, no. 3,
autumn 1988, p. 55 [section 15])
The sectarianism is seen in the counterpart to
this opportunism, putting forward discussions between international tendencies
as the main solution. Such a
take-it-or-leave-it approach was not an adequate strategy for an international
tendency. The opportunism was to be
seen subsequently in the WSL’s tendency to give the concept of a “world
Trotskyist movement” an opportunist interpretation (a ‘family of
Trotskyism’). The sectarianism was to
be reflected in a tendency to prioritise national over international work. Eventually, as the ITC
resolution indicates:
“It was
also borne out by the old, prefusion WSL leadership’s conciliation of the
national sectarian ICL leadership and their willingness to abandon their own
international organization, TILC, for
what they perceived to be their national “advantage.” (Founding
Conference of the International Trotskyist Committee, Resolution on, The Transitional Program in Today’s Class
Struggle, adopted 27 July 1984,
ITR, no. 3, autumn 1988, p. 13)
The sectarianism is
seen in the counterpart to this opportunism, putting forward discussions
between international tendencies as the main solution. Such a
take-it-or-leave-it approach was not an adequate strategy for an international
tendency. The opportunism was to be seen subsequently in the WSL’s tendency to
give the concept of a “world Trotskyist
movement” an opportunist interpretation (a ‘family of Trotskyism’). The
sectarianism was to be reflected in a tendency to prioritise national over
international work. Eventually, as the ITC resolution indicates:
“It was also borne out by the old, pre-fusion WSL leadership’s
conciliation of the national sectarian Matgamna leadership and their
willingness to abandon their own international organization, TILC, for what
they perceived to be their national advantage.” (Founding Conference of the International
Trotskyist Committee, “Resolution on ‘The
Transitional Program in Today’s Class Struggle”’, adopted 27 July 1984, ITR
no. 3, autumn 1988, p.13)
5. WSL Politics in Crisis
From its emergence as an oppositioen in the
WRP in 1974 through to 1980, the WSL tendency remained overall a dynamic consistent
Trotskyist organisation, in fact the most significant tendency to reassert the
Trotskyist programme in practice in Europe.
The WSL had taken the most positive steps to break out of the national
isolation which had undermined other battles for Trotskyism - the formation of
TILC. (Only the GBL in Italy had developed a similar perspective.)
Nevertheless, it had failed to resolve a series of related political weaknesses
arising from its origins within the International Committee tradition. However,
it would be idealist to view the WSL’s subsequent political degeneration as the
inevitable working out of its bad ideas over time. The WSL did not simply have
some good and some bad features, the former predominant in its earlier period,
the latter in its later period. These contradictory features of the WSL’s
political development were intimately related. Crucially, for instance, its
positive commitment to a fight for leadership based on transitional demands in
mass struggles had as its other side, its opposite, the failure to recognise
the educative (propaganda rather than agitational) role of the Transitional
Programme in winning and consolidating the political vanguard.
The Turn in the Political Situation
There was a basis for
this contradiction, as we have seen above, in the material situation in the
class struggle from 1974 to 1979 and to a considerable extent through to the
spring of 1980 (the end of the steel strike). The WSL’s orientation to this
material situation was ‘justified’ by its understanding of the economic crisis
and the effect of the crisis on the working class. It was the changes in the
material context of the WSL’s work and the effect of these changes on its
analysis and methods which threw the WSL into crisis. Unable to resolve these contradictions,
the weaknesses rapidly became the dominant features of the WSL: the fusion with
the International Communist League was part of this process. By 1979 the Labour
government had served its purpose for the ruling class. It had, against
considerable but sectional resistance, inflicted a period of tight wage
controls, introduced large-scale public sector cuts, and undermining the shop
stewards’ organisations in key industries. Now while it had nothing to offer
the working class, it was a barrier, in an immediate sense, to the further
attacks the ruling class required, because it had, in the short term, lost its
ability to control the working class.
That was the
significance of the rejection of wage controls by the trade unions and the
strike wave of the 1978/1979 Winter of Discontent - a storm the union
bureaucrats had to ride in order to deflect and dissipate its force. But the
rejection of the Labour Party at the polls by considerable sections of the
working class was not progressive. It reflected these workers’ perception that
Labour could no longer run the country as a viable capitalist government and
offer them reforms (or even safeguard their position) as a result. This
situation left the Tories under Thatcher with the initiative in turning to bigger
attacks on the working class in order to carry through the more fundamental
shift in the balance of class forces and distribution of wealth which
capitalism required.
This was not just a
British phenomenon, of course: throughout the imperialist countries governments
(including nominally socialist governments in France and Spain) have
implemented similar policies. And globally the early 1980s witnessed a series
of major setbacks for mass struggles - Iran, Nicaragua, Poland. Thus, after
1979 there was a steady decline in the level of industrial action and,
particularly after the 1980 steel strike, an increasing sectionalisation. This
was particularly marked, compared with the earlier period, in those areas of
industry where the Alan T. leadership had its traditional base - in British
Leyland and throughout the motor and allied industries. Moreover, there was,
between 1979 and 1987, the development of a strong left movement in the Labour
Party.
Opportunist Direction
The problem for the WSL
was not that it was unable to recognise that these changes were taking place or
that they had important implications for its work. It was, rather, that it was
not equipped to analyse what was happening or to respond to these developments
as a consistently Trotskyist organisation. In these circumstances, its response
was increasingly to accommodate to developments in an opportunist direction. In
practice there was, on the one hand, a more and more opportunist,
liquidationist right wing, oriented to Labour Party and local government work
and fusion with the International Communist League, while, on the other hand,
there was an amorphous and rather atomised left which tended to a somewhat
conservative WSL traditionalism, which meant that, though it defended the
positive features of the old WSL, it did not see the need to overcome its
contradictions, was even inclined to defend its weaknesses and thus had no
alternative to the right wing. Instead it clung to a certain workerist and
economist activism.
The central leadership
of Alan T., Tony R, and John L., not without some differences, straddled the
two wings but in practice increasingly accommodated to the right. The problems
and dangers were indicated in the WSL’s April 1980 British Perspectives
document. In its discussion of the shift of emphasis in industrial struggles
from wages to jobs, of the importance of the fight against cuts, of the demands
to be fought for in these struggles, and of the importance of the general
strike slogan in the context of the steel strike, the document still maintains
a Trotskyist perspective. However, the uncertainty and inadequacy of the
following passage indicate the problems in the changing situation:
“We must understand that the working class is facing massive problems
without the development of such a revolutionary leadership. Old methods of
struggle have become hopelessly inadequate to today’s conditions. The effect of
the betrayals of the leadership which we have catalogued also have an
accumulative effect.
In short, it is a period where, despite (the readiness of workers to
struggle), there can be major setbacks and defeats for the working class. We do
not say that this outcome is inevitable. We do say that a revolutionary
movement must be steeled against such events and must learn to be patient in
the light of them. Historically major outbreaks of class struggle have often
been preceded by periods where the working class appeared to be on the retreat.
Failure to understand that such a period is one possibility, where the attacks
of the employers and the government appear to be successful, will demoralise
our comrades in the way it can also demoralise militant workers. A clear grasp
of this danger will ensure that the movement remains strong, undismayed and
ready to lead to the offensive when the inevitable explosions re-emerge.
(Socialist Press, no. 197, 7 May
1980)
This passage condenses
a whole number of classic WSL confusions and Healyite conceptions in a fashion
which, in the context, was actually and immediately dangerous.
The first paragraph
starts with a more or less timeless generalisation, then moves to a conclusion
about ‘old methods of struggle’ which is hopelessly over-generalised and only
applies to the ‘methods of struggle’ of the working class - not of the WSL.
Nothing specific is said about which methods of struggle have become outdated
or what is to replace them, other than the methods for which the WSL had always
correctly agitated. But, as we can see, the message of the rest of this passage
is that the WSL may not be able to do too much of that in future. However, the
statement about old methods of struggle becoming outdated is misleading.
Workers do not simply abandon the forms of struggle built up over generations
in any case. Moreover, this way of looking at the class struggle ignores the
interrelation of different forms of working-class activity in different phases
of a period of overall disequilibrium in the capitalist system. It also
prepares a disoriented movement to rush after - in practice to tail-end - any
developments it can identify as the new methods of struggle. The second
paragraph indicates the dangers of the WSL tendency to over-concentrate on the
role of the trade union bureaucracy as the source of all the problems standing
in the way of the working class’s fulfilling its revolutionary role - at the
expense of all the conditions of life and political experience of workers
within capitalist society. This emphasis - which is linked to the WSL’s
emphasis on industrial trade union struggles - was in the 1970s the counterpart
to its trenchant hostility to the bureaucracy.
Specially Oppressed
In the 1980s it was
clearly an obstacle (it was, in fact, also a serious obstacle in the way of the
WSL’s relating to the struggles of the specially oppressed). The “forward movement of the working class”
is still there really, in the “readiness
of workers to struggle” only held back by the “betrayals of the leadership”. The logic of this approach is to reduce the crisis of proletarian
leadership to the need for union leaders who will not sell out - a very
dangerous outlook particularly when one appears, like Arthur Scargill!! One can
only wonder how it is that workers are at one and the same time ready to
struggle and, in the fifth paragraph, demoralised. The same failure to come to
grips with what was happening is seen in the fourth and fifth paragraphs, which
maintain that workers only ‘appear’ to be retreating and the government only
‘appears’ to be successful in its attacks. Given this outlook, what can be made
of statements about the movement’s being “steeled
against such events” and “patient in
the light of them”, in the third paragraph.
In a general sense the
statements are true, but nowhere is there any suggestion of what this means,
because the WSL could not provide one as long as it remained tied to the
one-sided emphasis on winning the masses in struggle and to its agitational
view of its political work. The implication, clearly brought out in the last
paragraph, is that the WSL’s cadres should plug away at what activism they
could still find to do and wait until the class struggle hots up and they are
back in business. Being ‘steeled’ becomes a moral recipe for workhorses. The
treatment of the crisis in the Labour Party, while recognising the importance
of these developments, offers no analysis of them. It repeats the old
criticisms of the left MPs and talks of “the
changed mood in Labour’s rank and file” without recognising that these
developments predated the general election defeat and without making the
essential connection with the developments in the trade unions, an odd yet
actually not so very surprising result of the WSL’s economist and syndicalist
tendencies. Without an analysis there is no indication of how Trotskyists
should orient to the situation in the Labour Party beyond the vague statement
that conditions for intervention are likely to “remain good in the months ahead”. Without a proper analysis and a
clear tactical orientation, the way was open to the liquidationist element to
pull the WSL in its direction.
In July 1980, in the
course of an article on the Draft Manifesto produced by the Labour Party
National Executive Committee (NEC), dominated by the Labour left at that stage
- an article which makes a perfectly correct critique of left reformist policies
- John L. makes the following comment:
“Only insofar as it reflects the forward movement of Labour’s rank and
file and offers an opportunity for a discussion and debate on policies within
the party itself does the Draft represent a step forward.” (Socialist Press, no. 208, 30 July 1980)
Here, in what looks at first like a merely
pedagogical adaptation to the Labour left milieu, we see a confused political
adaptation. The crisis in the Labour Party has become “the forward movement of Labour’s rank and file” (a kind of
transposition of the ‘forward movement of the working class’ from the unions
into the Labour Party) and the policies which are alleged to reflect this
‘forward movement’ (described in the article as class collaborationist) are
welcomed as a step forward because of this. Then the issue is presented as one
of debate within this movement.
Once again the
opportunity to examine the real significance of the crisis in the Labour Party
is lost. The WSL leadership has moved one step closer to the strategy of being
close to the left in order to influence them - regardless of whether they saw
themselves moving in that direction consciously.
Yet in a two part
article published in the same and the next issue of Socialist Press, John L. and Pete F. subject the Workers’ Action (International Communist
League) position on the workers’ government to detailed critical examination
from an entirely Trotskyist perspective. They demolish the notion that the
workers’ government we demand could be a left Labour government accountable to
the Labour Party, changed into “a real instrument of the working class” by
constitutional reforms. The second article details Workers’ Action’s shift to the right on these issues and its
consequent liquidation into its own ‘broad papers’ - Socialist Organiser and Women’s
Fightback.
These reflected the
views of the Keith W wing of the WSL which was in the process of collapsing
politically into the ICL. This wing was to become dominant in the period
leading up to the WSL/ICL fusion with Alan T acquiescing to their demands and
Sue and John L and Helen and Pete F fighting a bitter rearguard action against
this perspective which would eventually be unsuccessful
Yet by October 1980, in
a front page article on the Labour Party conference, we find the following
comments on the constitutional reforms:
“Before the very eyes of the capitalist class, there emerges the grim
spectre of a Labour leader elected by, and therefore in the longer term being
made answerable to, the broader labour movement. For employers who for
generations have relaxed in the knowledge that successive Labour leaders have,
the moment they took office, contemptuously brushed aside left-wing Party
Conference decisions and manifesto pledges, this change has come as an unpleasant
jolt. Instead of providing a reliable
second option to direct Tory rule, the Labour Party now threatens to fall into
the clutches of the very workers it has fraudulently claimed to represent for
three quarters of a century.”
(Socialist Press, no. 218, 8
October 1980)
Despite the subsequent comments that this
could only happen under “conditions of
mass action” and that “Socialist
Press does not share” the belief that the working class can move towards
socialism by electing a Labour government under Benn, there is very little
difference between these remarks and the arguments of Workers Action criticised in Socialist
Press not much more than two months earlier. Nevertheless the fact that
John L stated that “Socialist Press does
not share” these beliefs was evidence of the bitter struggle which was
being carried out by himself and others in this period against the crypto-ICL
current.
At least Workers Action had the merit of greater
consistency. After all, if it was really likely that, under pressure of mass
action, the Labour Party could “fall into
the clutches” of the working class and its leaders be made answerable to
them, why should it not become “a real
instrument of the working class”? Why should it not be possible for the
working class to start to move towards socialism, at least, by the election of
a Labour government?
The confusion and, in
fact, adaptation to the left Labour milieu comes out further in the penultimate
paragraph, which refers to their “limited
policies” - as though the only problem with left reformist policies is that
they don’t go far enough. On an inside page of this same issue, the report on
the Labour Party annual conference describes the events there as “telling confirmation of the emergence of a
mass anticapitalist current within the British Labour movement”.
This response to the
autumn 1980 Labour Party conference provoked letters in the next week’s Socialist Press from two Leicester
comrades, Pete F. and William G., attacking the notion that the left current in
the Labour Party was anticapitalist and criticising the enthusiasm of Socialist Press over the conference
events - without, however, suggesting an alternative orientation towards these
developments.
Pete F.-William G. letters to Socialist
Press along with John L’s reply.
“Dear Comrades
Earlier this year Socialist Press published a series of articles by me on
the counter-revolutionary history of social democracy. In those articles, using
the example of Germany in 1919, the General Strike in Britain, the
international crisis of the late 20s and early 30s I tried to show the way in
which reformism’s commitment to as gradual evolution towards socialism within
the framework of a capitalist society had historically drive social democrats
to line up with their own bourgeoises against the working class.
Your article on the Labour Party conference raises, I think, a number of
fundamental questions for Trotskyists, not least the role of centrism. To
describe the events at Blackpool as being evidence of the emergence of a mass anti-capitalist
movement within the organised working class is somewhat premature and also
politically rather dangerous. What we saw at Blackpool was a confused
expression of the frustration and anger within the working class and the
recognition which has begun to develop within sections of the workers that the
right wing leadership within the Labour Party do not represent any formal
alternative to Thatcher and the Tories. Essentially that was the lesson drawn
at Blackpool from the experience of the last Labour government. But being
anti-EEC and unilateralist does not yet constitute anti-capitalist. This
empirical rejection of the bankrupt policies of the Callaghan clique does not
however necessarily constitute the emergence of a mass an anti-capitalist movement, though that possibility
certainly exists as part of that process.
At present the search for solutions remains firmly within the confines of
bourgeois parliamentarianism. In practice the political confusion of the rank
and file members expresses itself in the capacity of hardened centrists like
Benn to head off and channel working class hostility into a series of reforms
within the Labour Party which create conditions for the carrying out the
‘lefts’ alternative economic strategy, which is itself formulated within the
context of the continuation of the capitalist system. Benn’s politics remain
those of social democracy when it betrayed the class struggle to line up with
its own ruling class in the First World War.
His support of a phased withdrawal of troops from Ireland rests on no
principle but rather on the same tactical assessment which led him to argue for
import controls.
As a consequence of this the central task for revolutionaries in this
particular period must be to challenge the rights of the centrists to lead the
labour movement. That Ben and Co. should find it possible and desirable to line
up with Moss Evans at Blackpool as Evans arrived hot-foot from the betrayal of
the Adwest strike shows clearly the counter-revolutionary content of the machinations
amongst the uppers echelons of the labour movement. For a class fighter today
what is fundamental is not the potential for a mass anti-capitalist movement
but the necessity to arm that movement with a programme which begins with the
independent interests of the working class. I would suggest therefore that
rather than being rolled over with enthusiasm for what happened at Blackpool,
Socialist Press should be raising some questions about what didn’t happen!
Fraternally, Pete F. Leicester”
“Dear Comrades,
Your reports of the Labour Party conference at Blackpool in SP 218
contain, I think, some rather dangerous formulations. I refer to the headline
‘Victory at Labour Party Conference and the article on page five which begins
“Telling confirmation of the emergence of a mass anti-capitalist current within
the British labour movement was offered by this year’s Labour Party
Conference.” As revolutionaries we must be clear on what precisely the nature
of this “victory” was. Benn and Co, in
creating the conditions for the removal of the Callaghan/Healey clique from the
leadership, failed in any way to link this to the necessary mass action of the
working class to bring down the Tory government.
Benn and Co’s moves at Blackpool represent, I feel, not such a victory
for the working class, prepared to fight but lacking political leadership, but
rather a victory for hardened centrists, like Benn, to channel and divert the
energies of the working class into a fight for reforms within the Labour Party,
and the continuation of capitalism in the guise of an alternative economic
strategy. On the question of the “mass anti-capitalist movement” we must
recognise that while the Labour Party Conference to both the Tories and to
Callaghan, the emerging mass movement remain fundamentally an anti-Tory
movement!
It is the task of revolutionaries to turn it into an anti-capitalist
movement!
This can only be done by arming the working class with a programme
starting from the independent interests of the working class and by the
building the organs of working class power which cannot only bring down the
Tories but prepare the way for the taking of power. This means building
councils of action, uniting struggles in every area against the Tories as the
prelude for the creation of soviets, not with the limited objectives of “creating the conditions for ousting
Callaghan from the leadership of
the labour Party” (and presumably replacing him with a “left” Bennite
government?) but to lay the foundations for a workers’ government.
Yours Fraternally, William G. Leicester.”
Editor’s Reply
“Have comrades Pete F. and William G.
actually read the letters in Socialist Press to which their letters apparently
refer? The question is worth asking because they solemnly inform us as if for
the first time, of a series of points which were in fact contained within the
original article, while on the other hand they appear almost wilfully to leave
out perhaps the most crucial elements in our assessment. Our article of course
gives no revolutionary credentials to Tony Benn: Socialist Press would not even
grant him the status of “hardened centrist” allotted to him by comrades Pete F.
and William G.
We made it clear that Benn remains a left
talking social democrat, whose quests for reforms and socialism, legislated
through parliament mean that he stands, quite openly, opposed to the mass
action necessary to bring down the Tories. Unlike comrades Pete F. and William
G. however, we also take note of the fact that Benn’s left rhetoric and fight
for important democratic reforms within the Labour Party have reinforced
illusions amongst large sections of workers that such politics can lead to
socialism.
We therefore point, (particularly in our inside
page article) to the kind of approach necessary to show workers the falsity of
these illusions. While there is of course a certain abstract historical
validity in equating Benn’s position today with those of the social democrats
prior to World War 1 it is unlikely that such literary denunciations and
extravagant comparisons are likely to change the minds of more than a handful
of workers. Socialist Press 218 on the other hand pointed out that, in the
terms of a willingness to mount tangible actions to defeat the Tories,
particularly around the cuts question, broad layers of Labour activists showed
themselves at the Blackpool conference to have gone already way beyond Benn’s
parliamentary, propagandist perspectives. In the next period the further
development of this conflict - to the fight in practice for strikes, occupations
and a stand by Labour councils against the cuts - can bring workers in large
numbers face to face with the limitations of Benn and his fellow left talkers,
in a situation where revolutionaries can spell out clearly the necessity for an
alternative leadership.
As our front page article pointed out:
“...the next period offers the best conditions
to put such leaders to the test; by their willingness or refusal to fight for
extra-parliamentary action to defeat the Tories; by their willingness or
refusal to press home the gains of the Blackpool conference and drive out the
right wing leadership, workers can quickly assess the real character of those
who now put themselves forward as opponents of the right wing Callaghan gang.
We offer full support to every step forward
taken by the lefts in the fight for united class action to bring down Thatcher;
at the same time we fight consistently against the limited policies of the
Labour lefts, to win support for the kind of programme that is vital to defend
the interests of the working class in the next period.
In this way we seek to win the most principled
sections of trade unionists and labour activists to the fight for a new,
revolutionary, leadership in the labour movement.” In telling us we must build
such a leadership, oppose Benn’s politics and fight for a revolutionary
programme comrades Pete F. and William G. tell us nothing we did not clearly
say ourselves last week; what they signally leave out is any appreciation of
how or under what new political conditions these tasks must be carried out!”
Lister’s reply typified the way the
WSL leadership tended to straddle the differences within the organisation. In
this case he answered evasively, using the ‘left’ bits of the original articles
to ‘refute’ the criticisms and Pete F.’s incorrect description of Benn as a
centrist to blunt the attack.
Two weeks later - the week after Socialist Press announced the entirely
correct and principled agreement for a united front with Socialist Organiser at the Lambeth conference against the cuts -
the correspondence was taken up by K.W. of Coventry. K.W., a leading member of
the WSL’s liquidationist right wing, reasserted, without any evidence, that the
Labour left current represented “the emergence of a new anticapitalist mass movement.”
Keith
W’s letter to Socialist Press and
John L’s reply.
Dear Comrade Editor,
“The test of any organisation which is seriously fighting to build a
revolutionary party is as much its ability to recognise important political
developments and draw the necessary strategic conclusions as it is to defend
the programme against those who attempt to liquidate it. Recent issues of
Socialist Press show graphically that the Workers Socialist League is able to
do the former as well as the latter. I would like to continue the debate which
has begun since the historic developments which took place at the Labour Party
conference and take up where comrade John L. left off in his reply to Pete F.
and William G. (Socialist Press 219).
It is interesting to note that even comrades Pete F. and William G. seem to have been effected by
the clear manifestation of a significant shift to the left of a whole section
of the Labour Party. Who would have thought that even a few weeks ago such
principled “granite hard” Bolsheviks as Pete F. and William G. would have
referred to Tony Benn as a centrist? Leaving aside whether or not this is a
correct scientific description the important point is the un-challengeable fact
which Trotskyists have to face is that something significant is happening in
the Labour Party. A combination of pressure from the working class, a clear
failure by successive Labour governments to make any impact on the chaotic
effects of the capitalist crisis and the clear decision of the ruling class to
launch a major assault on the working class have produced a major ferment which
reaches right to the top of the left social democracy.
The recognition of Socialist Press of the emergence of a new
anti-capitalist mass movement must be followed quickly by a wide ranging discussion
amongst Trotskyists of what needs to be done now to make serious steps towards
regrouping and politically sharpening that movement into an instrument which
can be used by the working class - a revolutionary party. The central arena for
the fight for a revolutionary programme must now become the Labour Party. The
time when it was necessary to build organisations outside the mass party of the
working class is now over. Trotskyists have always sought to stand alongside
other socialist currents within the Labour Party fighting for our policies and
perspectives. The real “entrists” are those such as David Owen, Shirley
Williams and Reg Prentice - the people who, through their bureaucratic hold on
the party and their openly pro-capitalist programme have witch-hunted
revolutionaries out of have demoralised them into leaving in disgust.
If revolutionaries adopt a
fraternal approach to those who are fighting the Callaghans and Healeys of this
world and debate out the elements of our strategy then the days of left
organisations numbering only hundreds will be over and a new stage in the fight
for a revolutionary programme will be on the agenda. One final comment - the
development of the class struggle test out those organisations claiming to be
revolutionary, also throws into perspectives the differences which have led the
Trotskyists to form different organisations. It is to be hoped the tremendous
opportunities opening up before us will force us all to question the
significance of the many petty differences which have prevented us from
combining our resources for the great task we have to face.
It is therefore particularly
heartening for me to note that Socialist
Press 219 reports the agreement of supporters of Socialist Organiser and Socialist Press to present joint
amendments to the conference called by Lambeth council. Roll on the day when
supporters of these two papers can stop competing and produce one journal.
Fraternally K.W Coventry.”
Editor’s
reply
“It is
only fair to point out in reply to comrade K.W. that Socialist Press and Socialist
Organiser are not so much “competing” with each other as carrying out very
different political tasks. For Socialist
Organiser the perspective is to map out a minimum basis of principled
agreement for the formation of a left wing current within the Labour Party. For
Socialist Press the task we set is to
spell out as fully as possible the full programme for building a revolutionary
party, drawing forces from the whole labour and trade union movement -
including of course many elements who are not currently active Labour Party
supporters.
There are
obviously important areas in which these two different tasks overlap, and joint
work is possible on a principled basis. We welcome such initiatives. But the
outstanding political difference centres precisely on the extent to which
political work in the next period must centre in the Labour Party as such, and
how much emphasis needs to be placed on the development of a Marxist programme
and the building of an independent revolutionary party.
Socialist Press has stressed the view
that the Labour Party is a central arena of the fight for revolutionary
programme: but it is not the exclusive centre for such a struggle! The ongoing
struggle of Trotskyist Ted Heslin against his expulsion from Oxford City Labour
Party for selling Socialist Press
confirms that there are many problems in seeking to wage a fight for socialism
in the Labour Party. If we accept K.W.’s definition of “entrists” then we must
recognise that it is still “entrists” who control most of the machinery of the
Labour Party - while important forces in the fight for socialism remain
alienated by years of Labour Party betrayals and outside its ranks.
To combat
this a campaign against all bans and prescriptions of socialists in the Labour
Party is needed. It can now take place in far more favourable conditions that
previously: it is essential to fight on socialist policies and for democratic
procedures to be broadened to incorporate this demand.”
Keith W. is arguing for a fusion of
the forces of Socialist Press and
Socialist Organiser - that is, the
Workers Socialist League and the International Communist League. Lister’s reply
is as evasive to this letter as to Morrow’s, though with none of the evident
hostility, arguing that the two papers were carrying out different political
tasks but reducing the differences to differences of emphasis on working in the
Labour Party and developing a Marxist
programme.
These articles and letters give a clear picture of a movement in a state
of confusion and conflict and increasingly lacking a sense of direction, except
for that of its liquidationist wing.
The 1981 Miners’ Strike and Benn’s Deputy
Leadership Campaign
An illustration of this
confused slide by the WSL can be seen in its response to two events of early
1981: the success of the brief miners’ strike in February in forcing the
Thatcher government to cancel plans to close thirty coal mines and Benn’s
announcement in April that he was standing against Denis Healey for the deputy
leadership of the Labour Party.
The Tories’ retreat in
the face of the miners’ strike was a purely tactical withdrawal in the face of
a sectional trade union action for which they were not yet ready and reflected
both the undoubted combativity of sections of the working class but also the
government’s careful and flexible tactical approach to its attacks on the
working class, exploiting the weaknesses of an increasingly sectionalised
Labour movement - in other words, its strong overall position.
It was important to use
the opportunity of the miners’ success to argue the case for action against the
government and a struggle to defend jobs, and this Socialist Press did. However, it did it in a way which both
overstated the extent of the victory and understated the government’s strength.
Instead of issuing a warning against government’s strategy and the dangers of
sectional trade union defensive action in combating it (however militantly),
the Socialist Press article adopts a
morale boosting approach which treats the miners’ strike as an exemplary action
to be emulated by others and nothing more. Thus the outcome of the strike was a
“knockout victory” (which it certainly was not), and:
“Were similar action to be taken elsewhere in industry and the public
services, it is possible even more concessions could be achieved. “(Miners’
Victory Shows Workers Can Oust Thatcher, Socialist Press, no. 236, 25
February 1981, p. 1)
While true in a general
sense, this does not give any indication of the actual problems. This approach
is a direct outcome of the notion that workers only appear to be in retreat,
that the government only appears to be successful, that everywhere workers are
ready to fight, and that the problem is just a lack of militancy by the trade
union leaders. And it leads Socialist
Press to take an uncritical attitude towards the NUM officials who:
“...particularly in Kent, Scotland, South Wales, and Yorkshire - prepared
consciously for this fight on closures. They campaigned in the coalfields for a
mandate for all-out strike action. They secured 86% and 90% support - and
created a level of militancy that gave rise to last week’s spontaneous walkouts
which in the event went far faster than the leadership had expected.”
The article includes a
call for a general strike to bring down the Tories, but in the context of the
article it is not related to government strategy or the problems of the labour
movement and is thus posed rather abstractly as the ultimate act of trade union
militancy. Moreover, it becomes, in effect, a general strike to secure the
re-election of a Labour government.
This indicated the extent to which the ICL
rot had infected the WSL. This was particularly evident in the absence of any
demands on the “fake left” to remove the right wing and implement policies in
the interests of the working class which had been the hall mark of the WSL
hitherto. This implied that the existing leadership of the Labour Party could
implement socialists policies:
“...the only guarantee of protection for jobs and living standards is the
mobilisation of the labour movement for a general strike to bring down the
Tories, and to press home the fight for socialist policies from a Labour
government.”
Finally, the article is
notable - most notable - in its retreat from the Transitional Programme. The
passage just quoted is followed immediately by this paragraph:
“Only a planned socialist economy can answer the anarchy of crisis ridden
capitalism and develop the productive forces of society in the interests of the
vast majority of people. Until then a threat hangs over us all.”
This is quite true. But
it is really just the maximum demand. It is the other side of the militant
syndicalism that infects the rest of the article. Moreover, coming directly
after the passage implying that the purpose of the general strike is the
re-election of a Labour government, it compounds the confusion of the ‘Labour
government with socialist policies’ approach. The other side of this mini-max
method is the quite incredible fact that absolutely nowhere in this front-page
article on a major fight to defend jobs is there any mention in any form of
work-sharing on full pay or a sliding scale of hours under workers’ control. It
is impossible to imagine such an omission a year or two earlier.
1981 WSL Conference
While there was no
visible response to this retreat in Socialist
Press as there had been by Pete F. in October, the bitter struggle within
the WSL by the Sue and John L and Helen and Pete F and others continued and
exploded at the 1981 WSL conference around a series of questions including
Afghanistan, women, youth work, and the priority to be given to international
work, and trade union work (as opposed to LP work). The 1981 conference
documents indicated both the wide scope of the offensive by the crypto-ICL
current (e.g. Keith W and Bob S - who had collapsed on the question of
Afghanistan) as well as the resistance on the part of a wing of the WSl
associated with the Sue and John L and Helen and Pete F and even Tony R on
Stalinism. JL and TR wrote the conference document “The Latest Stage in the Crisis of Stalinism” which defended the WSL
line on Afghanistan. This was in stark contrast to Bob S’s dreadful, moralistic
alternative document. Pete Flack coauthored a document on youth work which was
clearly couched as a clear alternative to the ICL’s liquidationist approach to
the LPYS.
Sue L made a ferocious
verbal attack on ICL women’s work in the conference. And John L. made an appeal
for a “class struggle tendency in the ICL”
during the conference. Nevertheless the collapse into the ICL did take place in
spite of these interventions. They did at least serve to warn the membership of
the problems which would be encountered in the fused WSL. The error made by the
Sue and John L and Helen and Pete F and the left of the WSL generally was their
failure to establish a tendency around these elements of a critique of ICLism
right from the start. This would have entailed a break with Alan T’s approach -
something which John L has never been able to do consistently. Pete F preferred
to oppose Sean M by manoeuvre and stealth rather through an open fight until he
was dragged into it by the International Faction later on.
In April 1981 Socialist Press, in a front-page
article, correctly gives critical support to Benn’s standing for deputy
leadership. (It does not, incidentally, once question why he was just standing
for deputy (to Michael Foot!!). The effect of the ICL’s influence was to blunt
the revolutionary, critical edge of the prefusion WSL. Diplomacy towards the
Benn Campaign was the result. The WSL failed to point out that left reformists
and bureaucrats are sometimes capable of dramatic left manoeuvres in order to
stay at the head of the masses in motion. They do so in order to behead the
movement. The WSL failed to do this in relation to the Benn campaign. A correct
application of the “Make the Lefts Fight”
slogan would have been to very sharply criticise Benn on his reformist policies
and governmental record and counterpose a perspective of demanding that he call
for and defend industrial action and class struggle methods. It would have
meant demanding that he go further in the fight to oust the right wing leaders,
to declare himself accountable to the working class in struggle while warning
the working class not to rely upon him.
This article
concentrates on welcoming Benn’s stand and demanding that left talkers in the
trade union bureaucracy and the Tribune group of MPs support him, and then in
the last part of the article comments that:
“There is no doubt that Benn, for all his correct and wide reaching
criticisms of the right wing and of the record of previous Labour governments,
has serious political limitations.” (“Benn’s Stand Tests Labour Left”,
Socialist Press, no. 242, 9 April 1981)
The article then
proceeds to criticise the Alternative Economic Strategy and Benn’s opposition
to immediate industrial action to bring down the Tories but follows with the
ambiguous comment that:
“But despite these limitations, Benn’s campaign against Healey offers to
reinvigorate the struggle for socialist policies against the right wing within
the next six months.”
Following on the rest
of the article the impression is given that politically Benn is moving in the
correct direction, only not yet quite far enough, still ‘limited’. Hence the
convoluted, almost apologetic tone of the criticisms: Benn ‘remains’ committed
to the Alternative Economic Strategy, which ‘certainly contains some
progressive proposals’. “Socialist
Press.. opposes the Alternative Economic Strategy... And we also strongly
disagree with Benn’s position of opposing” an immediate strike to bring down
the Tories. The talk of ‘reinvigorating the struggle for socialist policies’ is
a piece of pure Bennite vagueness. Whose struggle? What policies? To be
‘reinvigorated’ how? Once again we have a kind of objective process: the
forward movement of Labour’s rank and file, in fact.
Of course, Benn’s stand
against the right wing did offer an opportunity for Trotskyists to pose the
questions of socialist policy, but through an intervention which had to pose an
alternative to Bennism, and to place sharp demands on Benn in place of his left
reformist/ constitutionalist vagaries. The weakness of this front-page article
would not have been so bad if it had been combined with any serious analysis or
criticism - but it was not. The emphasis in Socialist
Press throughout the spring and summer of 1981 was on activism in the
Benn-for-deputy campaign, particularly through the Rank and File Mobilising
Committee (which, of course, it was essential for Trotskyists to participate in
on a united front basis.) Only in one issue of Socialist Press is there a brief quarter page article entitled “a
look at Benn’s five points”. At least a quarter of this is taken up by the
five points themselves, so that the critical response is necessarily brief and
general - correct as far as it goes but scarcely presenting an alternative.
(See Socialist Press, no. 244, 23
April 1981.)
The domination of the
pages of Socialist Press by militant activism
proceeded throughout these remaining issues and affected all areas of the WSL’s
work.
Unemployed Work
One particularly
important area of work where the WSL was almost alone in fighting the
Stalinists and right wing Labourite bureaucrats was unemployed work. It was
entirely to the credit of the WSL that it recognised the importance of this
work, taking the lead in building a National Unemployed Workers Movement
(NUWM). The left of the WSL was particularly instrumental in this: Pete F had
contributed the section of the 1981 WSL British Perspectives document
conference on unemployed work. This was an excellent and creative application
of the method of the transitional programme to the neglected field of
organising the unemployed. It called for the unemployed to carry out their own
enquiries into the needs of their communities and draw up plans for a programme
of socially useful public works.
These were to be
counterposed to the existing slave labour government schemes through demands
for workers management and incorporation into the direct works on full TU rates
of pay. While the material in Socialist
Press on the NUWM did not reflect this, the perspectives were published by
a Liverpool Unemployed workers Centre in the form of a pamphlet written by Chris
E entitled Unemployed Workers for a
Programme of Public Works. It was distributed by Chris E at the founding
conference of the NUWM in London and had a very big resonance among unemployed
activists in Liverpool. Even the TUC library asked for a copy of it which
indicated the wide readership of this document. The perspectives were also
later published in a regular column on unemployed work in Socialist Organiser - the column was a result of pressure from
unemployed members of the fused WSL.
Poland
This tail-ending also
affected the Socialist Press coverage
of developments in Poland. Its initial coverage at the time of the August 1980
strike in Gdansk and immediately afterwards was absolutely correct in the way
that it posed the question of political revolution, and coverage always
remained generally critical of the Solidarnosc leadership around Walesa. But
this became increasingly abstract, tending often to amount to no more than
calls for building a revolutionary leadership, with no concrete perspectives.
At one point Socialist Press called
for workers in other countries of Eastern Europe:
“To take action to build their own Solidarity-type unions and overthrow
their own parasitic Stalinist rulers.” (Socialist Press, no. 242, 9 April 1981)
Of course Trotskyists
support and fight for independent unions in the degenerated and deformed
workers’ states, but to call for them as though they are part of the solution,
as though they are the means of overthrowing the bureaucracy, ignoring the
extent to which the transformation of the proto-soviet inter-factory strike
committees into a trade union (or, rather, the only partially successful
attempt to do this) was a step backwards from political revolution. This was
thoroughly confused and objectively an adaptation to Solidarnosc.
It is, in fact, not too
surprising to find that the political disorientation of the WSL was affecting
its attitude to the most acute, critical international struggle of 1981. The
opportunist accommodation to a left Labour milieu and to syndicalist militancy
in the unions, along with its counterpart of activist routinism, meant that the
WSL was increasingly concerned with its ‘main’ work in Britain at the expense
of its international work, which thus became more of an abstraction. Inevitably
it meant a growing hostility to the threat of ‘outside’ interference in its
policies. This had a real practical effect: the WSL leadership were not
interested in devoting time, effort, and resources to or developing
perspectives for international work. It was left to the Danish section of TILC
to make a visit to Poland; comrade Mike J., recently returned from Denmark, was
unable to get the National Committee at the fusion conference to discuss the
question of an intervention in Poland. Similarly, nothing was done to produce a
final English version of “The
Transitional Programme in Today’s Class Struggle” (a task which it has
fallen to the ITO to carry out).
It has been necessary
to examine these developments at length - admittedly at depressing length - and
to do so before turning to the fusion with the International Communist League,
which led to the creation of the fused Workers Socialist League and the
dropping of the public paper Socialist
Press in favour of Socialist Organiser - technically the
paper of the ‘broad group’, Socialist
Organiser Alliance - in order to put the fusion in its proper context. It
was not the cause of the problem. The process of disorientation and
degeneration was under way before the prospect of fusion with the ICL as a
result of that process, though, of course, the relationship with the ICL (and
the prospect of forming a bigger group at a time when the WSL lacked a clear
sense of direction) profoundly influenced the WSL and contributed to its
political decline.
The International Communist League
The International Communist League
(ICL) current originated with Sean Sean M, a member of the Socialist Labour
League in the mid 1960s, in Manchester. Some time after he left, around 1965 or
1966, he joined the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers
Party), apparently with a small group of co-thinkers, and it was within the
International Socialists that their Workers Fight group took shape, opposing
state capitalism, arguing for an orientation to the Labour Party, and apparently
defending an anti-imperialist position on Ireland. After their expulsion
Workers Fight fused with Workers Power, who had emerged as a faction in the
International Socialists, a left opposition to Cliff, initially on the question
of Ireland, and had been expelled about the same time as Workers Fight, still,
in the majority, holding a state capitalist position. The two groups formed the
International Communist League, but the fusion broke down rapidly, with the
departure of the Workers Power leadership and about half their original
membership, with Sean M’s increasing Labour Party orientation apparently a
major factor.
The ICL that then
developed under the leadership of Sean M, Valerie Wise, Martin Thomas, and John
Bloxham, though having a formal commitment to the Fourth International, was in
fact a very sectarian national Trotskyist group with a thoroughgoing entrist
strategy in the Labour Party.
The ICL’s mouthpiece
was the journal Workers Action, an
entrist paper for work in the Labour Party. Socialist
Organiser was launched in 1979 as a broad paper, in collaboration with
Labour lefts such as Ken Livingstone and the Chartist Minority Tendency a small
right-centrist group with some vague Trotskyist pretensions. Subsequently this
group split over the issue of rate increases, the ICL correctly arguing for a
no cuts, no rent or rate rises position, leaving the ICL supporters in control
of Socialist Organiser, which they
nevertheless continued to promote as a broad paper organising a ‘class struggle
left wing’ in the Labour Party, while abandoning Workers Action. (The Chartist Minority took the initiative in
pulling the Labour lefts who split from Socialist
Organiser around what was in fact a far more successful broad paper - in
Labour Party terms - London Labour
Briefing.
Some time has been spent on these details
because of their importance in understanding the fusion. The International
Communist League understood, in a way that the WSL did not, the importance of
the Labour Party question and work in the Labour Party for Trotskyists in
Britain and was quicker to respond to the leftward movement in the Labour Party
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On a number of key issues, moreover, it took
correct, principled positions - on troops out of Ireland, on opposition to
local government cuts and rent and rate increases, and on the rights of women
and of lesbians and gay men.
In place of the rather
confused position of a disoriented WSL, the ICL had quite a clear conception of
the character and purpose of its Labour Party work (and the same was to a
certain extent true of the approach to the women’s movement). Central to this
conception, at least in the first phase of the Socialist Organiser turn, was Sean M’s notion of convergence. This was later to be explained
by Evington, one of the former ICL comrades who joined the Internationalist
Tendency/Faction, in the following terms:
“The idea of convergence as presented by the ICL leadership was that the
Broad groups around SO would over a period of time be drawn into being part of
the WSL. The argument being that there was a layer of militants in the LP who
would not be won directly to Trotskyism but were prepared to work with us. Once
we had them organised around us then we could systematically educate them and
through joint work win them over to the ICL.” (“Crisis in
the British Section”, autumn 1982)
In 1980, according to
Evington, the ICL leadership was arguing for this convergence to take place
within a year. By the time of the WSL/ICL fusion in 1981, nothing of the sort
had happened, of course, but the ‘broad group’ was still central to the ICL
leaderships’ thinking. It was integrally linked to other aspects of Sean M’s
orientation to the Labour Party.
First, Sean M’s
conception of building a broad group in the Labour Party was linked to the idea
that, if the left reformists would fight for their programme, that would be a
progressive step forward and therefore that the role of Trotskyists through the
broad groups should be to build a fight on the reformists’ own programme. As
Evington pointed out this “if”
indicated that Sean M’s theory had nothing in common with Marxism - it rejected
any Marxist analysis of or characterisation of reformism. Programmatically it
meant a liquidation of the Transitional Programme into reformism.
Second, it was linked
to Sean M’s view of a workers’ government as a left reformist Labour government
made accountable to the labour movement through the democratic reforms - and as
a necessary stage in the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus
the Socialist Organiser turn of the
ICL - which, as John L. and Pete F. argued in their July/August 1980 Socialist Press articles, was a turn to
the right - was not in fact a short-term tactic but a long-term strategy.
Moreover, it was both liquidationist and sectarian. The origins and early split
in the Socialist Organiser broad
group make this abundantly clear. It is not that the ICL was wrong to fight
Livingstone and the Chartist Minority on the rate-rise issue but that the method
of involving these elements in what was in reality a front for the ICL was
sectarian and showed a failure to comprehend the method of the united front,
let alone the nature of left reformism.
However, it is easy to
see how the WSL, disoriented and confused over the developments in the Labour
Party would be unable to mount any consistent opposition to the ICL’s method.
The abandonment of the method of the “Make
the Lefts Fight” slogan, which had represented a stance independent of the
left reformists, in favour of a diplomatic relationship with the Bennites and
slogans suggesting that the “Labour government” should implement socialist
policies indicated the bad influence of the ICL. It was not the idealist notion
of the original sin of “the make the lefts
fight” slogan which was instrumental in this degeneration, as has been
argued by some critics of the WSL; it was the material impact of the shift away
from the working class upsurges of the early and mid 1970s ending in the winter
of discontent of 1979 towards a scenario of long-term mass unemployment and
consequent tendency towards defeat and victimisation of the militants. It was
this which was responsible for the lurch to the right and the liquidation into
the Labour Party. The abandonment of the independent slogan of “make the lefts fight” in favour
diplomacy towards Bennism and Scargillism was the effect not the cause in this
process.
The Fusion
The fusion was not
based on any fundamental agreement on programme, perspective, or method,
internationally or nationally. Its basis was purely conjunctural: the WSL and
the ICL agreed that it was necessary to work within the Labour Party and that
in this context there should be a fight against cuts, for troops out of
Ireland, and in defence of the constitutional reforms. As we have seen, there
was not really an agreed basis for this work. Internationally there was
agreement in opposing the USFI’s liquidationism towards the Nicaraguan
Sandinistas and on a dual-defeatist position on the Iraq/Iran War (though from
quite different positions, as the dispute over the Malvinas War made apparent)
- and on very few other issues. Important areas of disagreement were left for
later decision - Afghanistan, the use of the general strike slogan, the EEC.
Very significantly, there was, as we shall see, explicitly no agreement on
TILC.
The ICL orientation
towards social democracy had a profound effect on the fusion platform, coming
out clearly in the section on the workers’ government. In the first draft of
the platform, this section was clearly based on the ICL’s conception of a
workers’ government as a left Labour government, held accountable by a
democratised Labour movement, which was an inevitable stage in winning the
working class to the perspective of revolution:
“Whether the next Labour government in 1984, or earlier if the working
class does as it has the industrial strength to do and kicks out Thatcher—will
be a more or less radical new instalment of the sort of Labour governments we
have had this century, or not, will be determined by two things:
i) By whether a real attack is made on the wealth and entrenched power of
the ruling class, and
ii) Whether or not it rests at least in part on the organisations of the
working class.
The working class itself would only serve and protect its own interests
by organising itself outside the rhythms, norms, and constraints of
Parliamentary politics, expanding its factory shop stewards committees, combine
committees, Trades Councils, etc., and creating new Action Committees, to be an
industrial power that could as necessary dispense with the Parliamentarians.
The Brighton/Blackpool/Wembley decisions to control MPs and to give the
majority of votes on who shall be prime minister if Labour has a majority in
Parliament to the CLPs and trade unions could open the way to a new kind of
‘Labour’ government—a workers’ government, instead of the government of the
trade union party which merely administers capitalism’s own laws....
To get the most out of the breakthrough for Labour democracy at
Brighton/Blackpool/Wembley, we must fight for the next Labour government to act
radically in our interests and to base itself on the movement, not on the
bosses’ state bureaucracy. And at the same time, we must prepare and organise
ourselves to be able to protect our interests however it acts.
We must fight to commit the Party to radical socialist policies and use
re-selection to make sure MPs are held to these policies.... (Draft
Programme of the [Fused] Workers’ Socialist League, 1981, pp. 16-17)
The character of this section is
clear. The whole orientation is towards the constitutional reforms in the
Labour Party, which are in any case grossly exaggerated. The reforms did not
control MPs but only meant that they had to face re-selection as candidates in
a general election during the lifetime of the preceding parliament, and it was
in practice the trade union bureaucrats, not the trade unions, that held 40% of
the votes in the electoral college. The traditional forms of organisation of
the Labour movement - essentially sectional trade union and electoral
organisations - are seen as the key to the working class’s ability to control a
left Labour ‘workers’ government’ and defend itself against capitalist
reaction. “New Action Committees” are
simply tagged on as a concession - meaningless in the context - to the old WSL.
And Trotsky’s insistence in the
Transitional Programme that:
“At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those
transitional demands which should, in our opinion, form the programme of the
workers’ and farmers’ government.”
is reduced to committing the Labour Party to “radical socialist policies” and using re-selection.
Amendments to the original draft of
the fusion document from JL were accepted even though they were in
contradiction to Sean M’s positions. Thus the following was inserted into the
final draft:
“In a situation where mass action
was mobilised that actually brought down the Tories, a totally new political
situation could be created. It would provide conditions of struggle in which a
revolutionary organisation would call for a workers government based on the
organisations of struggle which would have developed.” (Final draft of WSL/ICL Fusion document. 1981.
p. 19.)
This correct
formulation, however, contrasted to the formulation a few paragraphs further on
(in the previous quote) which presented the a left labour government as a
necessary stage and as a possibility rather than as a demand on lefts to oust
the right and implement policies in the interests of the working class
In the period prior to the fusion, objections from the GBL, TILC’s
Italian section, to this section led to the above and other amendments.
However, these did not alter the essential character of the section. Rather,
they toned down the implication that such a reformist ‘workers’ government’ was
an inevitable stage and added points insisting on independent working-class
organisation and the role of a revolutionary organisation. Though these were
positive elements in this section, they did not remove the confusion - in a
way, they just heightened the contradictions - and, given the confusion on this
question in the old WSL’s perspectives document, quoted previously, this is
hardly surprising.
The workers’ government section is
immediately preceded by and linked to a section on the Labour Party. This was
unchanged in the final version of the platform adopted at the fusion conference
in July 1981. It is extremely vague, with such meaningless remarks as:
“The organic connection between the Labour Party and the unions (allows
for the possibility) of large scale working class (participation in) the
party.” (Draft Platform
Document, WSL/ICL Fusion Conference, July 1981)
However, within the combination of
such vagaries with condemnations (“It is
a party which serves capitalism....”) are two formulations of ICL positions
on the Labour Party, not quite stated explicitly but in fact very clear: first,
the contention that a revolutionary party can only be built within the Labour
Party; second, the view that the Labour Party is ‘reformable’ in a
revolutionary direction:
“The WSL asserts that it is organically part of the political and
industrial organisations of the working class. It does not concede that the
Labour Party is ordained to be the exclusive property of its pro-capitalist
leadership. Neither does it concede that only those workers within the
established organisations are of concern to the labour movement. We seek to
direct workers as an organised force to take up their struggles in the Labour
Party to give support to every working-class struggle. (The WSL will build an
organisation based on Marxist politics inside the labour movement), not outside
it and needlessly counterposed to it in the manner of the sectarian
abstentionist left. We relate to the Labour Party by developing the
contradiction between the working-class base and the pro-capitalist leadership
and by attempting to mobilise the working class in struggles which (will create
the conditions for the masses to outgrow and break through) the particular
stage in its development represented by Labourism. We aim to help bring (the
political wing of the working-class movement to a political reconstruction) on
the basis of revolutionary socialist politics, methods, and objectives.” (Draft
Platform Document, p. 18)
Given that the organic
unity of the Labour movement was a basic tenet of Sean M’s approach to the
Labour Party, which he sees as “the political wing” of the movement, the
meaning of this passage is absolutely clear. The Labour Party is where the
political struggles of the working class take place, it is not inevitably a
reformist party controlled by the bureaucracy but can be reconstructed.
Essentially this will happen through an objective process of struggles creating
the conditions for the masses to outgrow Labourism. The role of Trotskyists is
to be in the Labour Party in order to be part of this process. The intellectual
sleight of hand in the first paragraph two sentences about the Labour Party,
then a shift to the term labour movement in the third paragraph) was a pure
manoeuvre to make it easier for the old WSL to swallow the pill.
Of course, the Labour
Party is an extremely important issue for Trotskyists, and it is essential to
take the struggle into the Labour Party, to utilise the relationship between
the trade unions and the party in order to put demands on the leadership, and
to do work in the Labour Party and its left currents. Not to do so would be
sectarian and abstentionist. But this was not Sean M’s argument. What the ICL
(or at least its majority, for there was internal opposition, as Evington’s
document explains) and the WSL right wing around KW and AC were arguing was
that the Labour Party is the mass party of the working class, that all working
class struggles and currents are reflected in the party, and that it is only
within the Labour Party, as part of its left wing, that a revolutionary party
can be built. The WSL’s left wing (and, in reality, its central leaders) did
not share this perspective. However, they did not fully understand the
implications and did not have any clear perspective to counterpose to this -
either on the particular question of the Labour Party or the more general
question of building the revolutionary party.
Stalinism
The other major area
where a key ICL conception was introduced without any kind of struggle was on
the question of Stalinism, specifically, on the character of the degenerated
and deformed workers’ states. This was done via a considerable expansion of the
section on the Stalinist states in the final version of the Platform. The
paragraphs in question read as follows:
“The WSL is for the defence of the Soviet Union - that is we are against
imperialist subjugation of the USSR, etc., and against the return of
nationalised property to private ownership. With Trotsky we hold nationalised
property to be progressive (on condition that) the working class can seize
political control from the bureaucracy and therefore we are opposed to (the
potential embodied in nationalised property) being destroyed. Against
capitalism and imperialism we defend the nationalised economies of the USSR and
the other Stalinist ruled states.... believing that under all conditions the
best way to defend the (potentially progressive survivals) from the October
Revolution... is to overthrow the bureaucratic tyranny and set up the
democratic power of the working class.” (Draft Platform Document, p. 17)
The suggestion that
Trotsky held the view that the socialised property relations in the USSR were
only ‘potentially’ progressive is totally false. The property relations
resulting from the overthrow of capitalism are in themselves historically
progressive. That is the basis for our unconditional defence. Although this
section includes a statement that defence of the USSR is unconditional, the
effect of the underlined passages is to introduce an element of conditionality.
This was soon to become apparent over Poland. The failure of the WSL rank and
file to react to this change can in part be put down to its late appearance and
the lack of time given to read the document (a point made by Chris E. in an
earlier balance sheet of the fused WSL) but also, certainly in the case of the
leadership, it must be attributed to the element of Stalinophobia (already
discussed) in the old WSL .As with the question of the Labour Party, weaknesses
in the old WSL prepared the way for an accommodation to the political line of
the ICL.
Possibly more serious
than any of these questions and especially disgraceful given the past commitment
of the WSL leadership to internationalism, was the treatment of the question of
TILC and the struggle for the reconstruction of the Fourth International. The
brief section on disagreements needs to be quoted in full:
“The WSL openly acknowledges the existence of different views within its
ranks on (historical questions of the Trotskyist movement), on the Russian
occupation of Afghanistan, on the EEC, and on the General Strike. A timetable
has been fixed for a discussion and decision on Afghanistan, the EEC, and the
General Strike. In the meantime the different views will be expressed publicly
in the press of the movement.
Once a decision has been taken by
majority vote, that is then the line of the WSL, and all members are obliged to
support it in practical action. The minority may, of course, continue to argue
internally and to try and change the policy. At the discretion of the majority
public debate may also be allowed.
Since the historical questions are not questions of active political
programme, no timetable has been fixed on them. The WSL will, however, strive
for a common understanding through internal debate and at the discretion of the
leading committees) public discussion.” (Draft Platform Document, pp. 21-22)
What this meant was
that the international political struggle to resolve the crisis of the Fourth
International was relegated to ‘historical questions’, which did not require a
decision. This was another victory for the ICL leadership’s national
sectarianism, but it also represented the serious degeneration of the WSL
leadership into national Trotskyism. The inadequacies in the treatment of the
Fourth International question in “The
Transitional Programme and Today’s Class Struggle”, pointed out in the ITC
resolution referred to earlier, meant that there was a lack of strategic
clarity which made the WSL vulnerable to national Trotskyism, given its
disorientation in a changing political context (and given that the WSL was the
largest section of TILC, which had not yet become a democratic centralist
tendency).
However, the national
Trotskyist transformation of the WSL leadership was not simply a question of
their theoretical vulnerability and their willingness to accept the foregoing
passage (which in practice already put off international democratic centralism
to the indefinite future). The WSL leadership had accepted the ICL leadership’s
insistence that the fused WSL should not accept the TILC founding documents as
part of its own political basis. To quote from the draft Statement of the Trotskyist
International Liaison Committee produced in the summer of 1983:
“The leadership of the ICL accepted none of the founding documents of
TILC. It rejected the TILC analysis of the crisis of the Trotskyist Fourth
International as presented in “The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class
Struggle” and the (9 Point) Fundamental Programmatic Basis, which formed the
political platform and basis of TILC. All this was accomplished with the
agreement of the Alan T. leadership of the WSL. Thus, from the time of the WSL/
ICL fusion, these became documents of TILC but not of the WSL itself. The WSL
therefore through this shoddy piece of political double bookkeeping, became the only section of TILC whose adherence to TILC was not based on
political agreement with the basis of TILC.” (Draft Statement of the Trotskyist
International Liaison Committee,
1983, p. 2)
Such were the political
foundations of the fused WSL. It was inevitable that such a fusion could only
lead to further degeneration and new splits .What should have been done? It is
important to raise this question, not in order to provide a blueprint for the
future or an “if only” scenario of
‘what might have been’, but because of the questions of method involved and to
make a fuller assessment of the fusion.
The links with the ICL
were not, of course, the WSL’s first experience of relations with other
organisations. It had been invited by the USFI in 1978 to submit material to
its 1979 Eleventh World Congress and responded with the document entitled The Poisoned Well , (Trotskyism Today, no. 3, July 1978),
which contained a critical analysis of the development of the USFI. Similarly,
when the Morenoite Bolshevik Faction and the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency split
from the USFI in 1979 and joined with the Lambertist OCRFI in calling an ‘open
conference’, the WSL warned rightly of the dangers of the formation of another
opportunist bloc. It responded positively on the question of an open conference
and refused to participate in the process of closing the discussion by
recognising the BT/LTT/OCRFI as the continuity of Trotskyism. In both cases the
WSL’s method had been principled - though there were problems: its uncertainty
about how to characterise the USFI in 1978, using the unsatisfactory term
‘Pabloite’ throughout, and its failure to publish its documents on the
Morenoites and Lambertists in 1979. Further, of course, its work with the
groups involved in the formation of TILC led to that organisation’s being
established on the basis of a series of programmatic and perspectives
documents, with a clear commitment to a period of further discussion and
clarification in order to set up a democratic centralist international
tendency.
The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class
Struggle
With all the problems
indicated here and in the earlier discussion of The Transitional Programme
in Today’s Class Struggle, it is absolutely clear that there was a world of
difference between the method used in these cases and in the relationship with
the ICL in 19801981 - and equally that the WSL cannot be presented as innocents
conned and abused by the wily manoeuverer Sean M. What we are faced with is a
result and a further aspect of the rapid degeneration of the WSL during this
period.
The relationship with
the ICL was, moreover, not the WSL’s only contact with other organisations in
Britain during this period. Talks were held with Workers Power, which were
broken off by the WSL. Socialist Press
later commented that these had only highlighted the differences in politics and
methods. Such differences, however, can at the very least have been no greater
than those which, formally, should have existed between the WSL and ICL. The
refusal to continue talks with Workers Power, on the one hand, and the
developing relationship with the ICL, on the other hand, reflect the
increasingly opportunist obsession of the WSL leadership with something they
called sectarianism, which they increasingly identified with any criticism from
the left. They were unable to fight or even to recognise the real sectarianism
in the ICL’s method.
The programme of
discussion with the ICL that began in the summer of 1980 and then the ICL’s
fusion proposal early in 1981 thus accelerated a process that was under way
already. Hence the WSL’s increasingly opportunist (and thus increasingly
national Trotskyist) response to it. This reaction is brought out in Chris E.’s
description of the WSL/ICL joint National Committee meetings in the wake of the
fusion proposal:
“At a joint NC meeting in the immediate aftermath of the fusion proposal,
attended by a divided and embittered WSL NC, it became clear that a miraculous
conversion of the ICL to Trotskyism had not taken place, that the right wing of
the old WSL (AC, KW, IM, Traven, et al.) had shifted towards ICL positions, and
that Alan T. and the rest of the NC with exceptions of Pete F. and DC were
passively allowing the right wing to carry out a campaign within the NC in
favour of the fusion....
At the joint NC in Feb. March 1981 it was Pete F. and Todd (as well as to
some extent John L.) who led the political attack on the ICL. On the women’s
issue in particular there was a sharp exchange. It became clear that a prime
consideration for Tony R was the bigger trade union fractions that would result
from a fusion. The political issues were being down-played in importance, and
pragmatic (let’s get on with the job) considerations were being elevated into
first place. This was spelt out most clearly (and most enigmatically) by Alan
T. when he said at the joint NC that a number of political issues might exist
and be a problem, but the ‘day today orientation’ was the key criterion for
assessing whether a fusion was viable. If this orientation was common to both
organisations, then the political differences could be solved within a common
organisation.” (Chris E., Draft Balance Sheet of the TILC, the
WSL/ICL Fusion, and the WIL/WIRG Split, 1984, pp. 4-5)
This description gives a clear sense of the
situation on the National Committee and the response to the fusion proposal. It
also makes it clear that there was opposition to the fusion or at least to the
form it was taking. Sue and John L were particularly important in this respect
as has already been noted:
“John and Sue L. had both been amongst the most vociferous critics of the
fusion. John L had warned at the 1981 conference of the WSL (which voted for
the fusion) against the Traven group’s pro-ICL line on Afghanistan, had warned
about the absence of a class struggle orientation in the practice of the ICL,
calling for a ‘class struggle tendency’ to be established after fusion, had
warned about ICL’s unserious approach to international work, and he made a plea
for comrades to ensure that resources were made available to continue the WSL’s
international work after the fusion. Sue L made an impassioned attack on the
ICL’s women’s work and moved a resolution which effectively denounced it, but
which was defeated at the vote. In the run-up to the fusion itself after the
1981 WSL conference, the Ls had gone through a bitter struggle with Alan T. and
the right-wing elements who were in favour of fusion but found themselves
confronted by a quite determined line-up.... The Ls became very bitter and
increasingly cynical as the fusion was perpetrated....” (Chris E.
Draft Balance Sheet, p.8)
The problem was that
those who were critrical of the fusion process either were not sufficiently
independent of Alan T to challenge consistently his accommodation to the
pro-ICL elements within his own prefusion WSL. Or they were insufficiently
aware of the depth and speed of the degeneration of both the WSL and ICL right
wing (with Alan T allowing himself to be dragged along by them).
Many of them joined the
fused WSl on the basis of an expectation of a nonsectarian struggle for
Trotskyism on the part of the WSL leadership. There was a clear alternative in
the 1981 WSL conference documents on Stalinism (including Afganistan), youth
work (which included an alternative to liquidation into the LPYS) unemployed
work, women’s work and the reconstruction of the FI and TILC. It is possible to
be critical of this or that aspect of these documents, but they are clearly
outlining a Trotskyist response wereas the crypto/ICL were galloping rightwards
at a fast pace towards liquidationism. This clear alternative was abandoned by
Alan T. The very real material reasons for this have already been mentioned
above (the dramatic rise in unemployment and declining prospects for the kind
of successful class upsurges and militant class struggle that happened in the
1970s).
The real problem of the
fusion was that the turn in the political situation in the aftermath of the
election of Thatcher in 1979, which led to a shift in focus from trade union
struggles to a resurgence of the Labour left, opened the door to a right wing
lurch on the part of the Alan T leadership. Trotsky noted in Where is Britain Going? this phenomenon
of the periodic shifts of working class struggle from trade unions to the
Labour Party and back again. There was a chain of loyalties going from Sean M
to the WSL right wing whom Alan T was in turn accommodating. Sue and John L and
Helen and Pete F generally, while posing a clear Trotskyist alternative in the
1981 conference documents, failed to persuade the Alan T leadership. Their
mistake was not to have formed a tendency from the outset. Instead, having
fought a bitter rearguard action they chose to oppose the pro-ICL people by
stealth and manoeuvre. The existence of completely opposed sections of the
final draft fusion document is eloquent testimony to this incomplete and
unresolved rearguard action. They were not independent enough of Alan T to form
an organised opposition, nor were they able to stop the fusion. But they did
resist and the contradictory nature of the fusion document indicates this.
Clearly there were
contradictions within the prefusion WSL. The two Spartacist raids had left Alan
T with a one-sided conception that there was this thing in the world called
‘sectarianism’ which was the root of all political evil. This made him
vulnerable to the right wing overtures of Sean M and his own right wing whose
liquidationist project appeared plausible, in the political conjuncture of the
rise of the labour left and the decline in the level of class struggle. At the
same time the invasion of Afghanistan and the atrocities in Kampuchea had
elicited a right wing Stalinophobic and moralistic reaction in certain
academics such as Bob Sutcliffe and others in the WSL right wing.
This was not representative of all of the WSL
however. The nature of the WSL meant that many comrades went into the fusion
not because of a political collapse along the lines of the WSL right (the
battles at the 1981 conference testify to this) but because Alan T had such
genuine respect and very real (not corrupt as with Sean M) political authority
within the organisation that many found it difficult to imagine that he could
collapse in the way that he did in the run up to and during the fusion. In
other words it took time for comrades to realise the full implications of what
was going on. John L. and his partner, Pete F. and his partner and others
played a positive role in trying to alert the membership. Their failing was
that they did not draw the conclusions from this in terms of organised
opposition.
The Development of the Fused WSL
The development of the
fused WSL was essentially a working out of the dangers clearly contained in the
fusion and of the rightward (if differing) trajectories of both prefusion
organisations, under the impact of rapid changes in the international and
national political situation; the retreat of the Labour left in the face of the
reassertion of bureaucratic control, the imposition of martial law and banning
of Solidarnosc in Poland in December 1981, and the Argentine invasion of the
Malvinas Islands and consequent war with Britain.
It was a very rapid
development, in fact, from the summer of 1981 to the summer of 1982. However,
it has to be stressed that the old WSL could not have continued as it was. The
deepening crisis of the fused WSL could not have been avoided in that way. If
the fusion process had broken down for any reason, that in itself would have
thrown the WSL into a deeper crisis, and the degeneration and fragmentation
would have proceeded as rapidly, if in a different fashion. The fusion was in crisis
from the start. Alan T. and John L. have subsequently made Sean M’s
factionalism and manoeuvring a major issue, in fact, the major issue.
Of course, this
reflects their own desire to avoid a political debate: if Sean M had genuinely
factionalised, that is, formed a faction openly to fight for his full political
programme and perspectives, no one could have objected on that score. Indeed,
it would have contributed to a clarification of the issues. A regime of
manoeuvres did dominate in the WSL from the time of the fusion, and Sean M was
the arch manoeuverer. But there was a political basis to this. Manoeuvres were
the only way an organisation on such a basis as the WSL could be held together,
and since Sean M and the central leadership of the old ICL had a clearer
perception of where they were going, they were in a position to outmanoeuvre
the old WSL leadership, which had subscribed to the political basis of the
fusion in a confused, disoriented, and pragmatic fashion. Furthermore, the old
WSL leadership avoided a political fight against the manoeuvres, accepted this
conduct to preserve the fusion (in reality, because they had no political
alternative), and thus had themselves, increasingly, to manoeuvre against the
old WSL left wing. One of the first issues was the character of the press. It
had been agreed at the time of the fusion that Socialist Organiser should carry WSL sponsorship on its masthead.
This itself was an
unsatisfactory and confused position, a sop to the old WSLers to get the fusion
through but not something the old ICL leadership had any intention of
implementing once fusion was an accomplished fact.
“At the EC on 14 November 1981 [N.B.: three and a half months after the
fusion], John L. proposed a resolution committing the EC to introduction of WSL
sponsorship of SO within one month. The motion also called for a balance sheet
of the success or failure of the SO turn. The motion on sponsorship was
defeated; the balance sheet, though agreed, was never produced.” (Pete F., Statement
of the Suspended WSL Internationalist Faction, May 1983, p. 1)
Pete F., himself a WSL
Executive Committee member, continues.
“At the Christmas 1981 TILC meeting a serious dispute had broken out in
the WSL delegation over Poland. This resulted at the EC of 17 January 1982 in a
request that articles by Sean M should be discussed prior to printing. Sean M
denounced this as censorship and victimisation.....
[Another issue was] whether the day-to-day work of full-timers should be
under the scrutiny and direction of the movement through its leading bodies.
This related specifically to Valerie Wise, in her capacity as women’s
organiser, and Sean M, whose ‘work’ remained a mystery even to most EC members.
Alan T., in particular, was concerned that Sean M was apparently free to spend
his time developing and presenting his own political ideas rather than
undertaking specific work on behalf of the movement as a whole.... (Statement
of the Suspended WSL Internationalist Faction, p. 12)
The old ICL leaders
continued to use Socialist Organiser as
a vehicle for their own views, rather than positions discussed and developed by
the WSL as a whole or its leading bodies, to defend their right to do this, and
to reject the old WSL leadership’s points on accountability of full-timers.
Sean M threatened to reconvene a meeting of the old ICL if these issues were
pressed further. The response of the old WSL leaders was to arrange a purely
organisational compromise.
“At the EC of 18 February 1982, it was eventually agreed to ‘see how
things go’ - with no voting on resolutions presented during the dispute....
What it meant in practice was that none of the questions were resolved.
The report to the NC of 21 February 1982 indicated only that there had
been problems of functioning in the leading bodies. In reality, after six weeks
in which the work of the movement had been savagely disrupted, the gladiatorial
contest on the EC on organisational questions had resolved nothing. There was
no change in the regime of the paper, no accountability on the part of the
full-time party workers. Valerie Wise, given her head, travelled rapidly out of
the WSL towards the reformist bureaucracy via Women’s City. That the occasion
of her departure was a Women’s Commission at which she was pressed to do work
around the NHS strike in Manchester only goes to confirm the value of bending
the constitution for comrades with seventeen years in the movement. Because the
EC in the end refused to fight
Valerie W.’s reformist trajectory they ensured her loss to the movement.” (Statement
of the Suspended WSL Internationalist Faction, p. 3)
There is certainly an
element in its attitude to the role of full-timers of the old WSL’s
increasingly dismissive attitude towards theoretical work and its tendency to
treat full-timers as hacks. It was nevertheless correct to argue for them to
have a clearly defined role. However, they were unable to carry through this
particular struggle because of their general inability to pose any political
alternative. Thus Sean M could always call their bluff by threatening to blow
the fusion apart.
The problem was that
this was the only dispute the leadership was involved in. In fact, there was a
deliberate suppression of discussion. There was a kind of armistice to avoid
conflict and let the fusion settle down. For the first six months there were no
internal bulletins!!
Throughout this whole
period, of course, the WSL, through Socialist
Organiser, was moving rapidly to the right. The paper’s orientation was
clearly and almost exclusively towards a Labour Party milieu. It concentrated
on left reformist struggles in the constituencies, quite narrowly. It did not
go beyond their preoccupations but presented Socialist Organiser as part of their current, the most dependable
fighters for Labour Party democracy and against the witch-hunts, though with
some criticisms of the nationalism of Benn’s economic policies. Thus it could
not give the crisis ridden rank-and-file left reformists any alternative
perspective of struggle. With the 1981 Labour Party annual conference, the
January 1982 Bishops Stortford meeting, the Tatchell affair, and the Greater
London Council (GLC) climb-down over the ‘Fares Fair’ policy, the lefts were
already in a crisis. Instead, it was the dangers of the witch-hunt in the Labour
Party that were used to justify the eventual decision that Socialist Organiser should not be sponsored by the WSL.
Local Government
Part of this
orientation was a serious accommodation to the left reformists on the local
government question. First, the main focus of opposition to cuts was seen as
Labour controlled councils (accountable, of course, to local Labour Parties).
The clear and increasing implication was that the Labour councillors should be
the leadership of this fight. While the demands put on Labour controlled
councils for a policy of confrontation with the government were correct in
themselves, it was inexcusable to leave any impression that the election of
left-wingers to council seats could do more than allow them an important
mobilising role, a platform. However, the role of the working class was always
second fiddle to the councillors. There were no transitional demands against
the cuts, no call for a workers’ plan, no propaganda for councils of action.
Second, this local
government policy led to an ill considered tactic of standing WSL members as
Labour councillors in the 1982 council elections (the old WSL could scarcely
criticise this, since one of their members had previously been elected as a
councillor, with no real political base or perspectives, and had undertaken a
long-term intervention in the borough allotments committee). It was not that
standing as councillors was necessarily wrong, even when it was not possible to
stand on a full Trotskyist programme (which was obviously not possible). The
problem was that candidates were standing more or less where they could,
without any real political basis beyond at best their local Labour Parties, and
not necessarily where the local Labour manifesto contained a clear anticuts
stand. This was a direct consequence of the way the WSL adapted its policies on
local government and the cuts to the left reformists. Having made their
differences of perspective with the left reformists as small as possible, they
had to stand to retain their credibility.
A clear indication of
this accommodation was seen in the Socialist
Organiser treatment of the court case against the GLC ‘Fares Fair’ policy.
While they criticised Livingstone and the GLC Labour Group for raising fares
rather than defying the courts and also criticised London Labour Briefing’s hand-wringing apology for Livingstone,
they were totally uncritical of the individualistic and diversionary ‘Can’t
Pay, Won’t Pay’ campaign led by Valerie
Wise and Briefing. They simply
tail-ended the Labour lefts all the way to defeat.
Later in 1982 the
situation was to get far worse. Having largely adopted as its own, even if only
for tactical reasons, the left reformists’ perspective of local government
work, concentrating on the council chambers and the meetings of Labour Groups
and local Labour parties, Socialist
Organiser inevitably slid behind them as they dithered, allowing Graham
Bash of Briefing to expound yet
another diversionary tactic: ‘majority opposition’ - which they never
criticised. And when the Labour Party brought in the Register of non-affiliated
groups, while Socialist Organiser roundly
denounced it and refused to register, within the WSL Sean M argued strongly
that this was only a tactic, which might have to be reversed. Within a few
months the old ICL leaders were talking of abandoning Socialist Organiser if necessary and selling Briefing or Tribune.
Adaptation to Bourgeois Democracy
But the clearest sign
of the adaptation to left reformism was adaptation to bourgeois democracy,
attempting to persuade the Labour left-wingers that there was not such a big
gap between parliamentary democracy and socialism. This came out most clearly
in the series of articles by John O’Mahony (Sean M) entitled Socialism and Democracy (Socialist Organiser, nos. 67, 68, 70,
72; 7 January - 11 February 1982). The purpose of these articles was to present
the difference between bourgeois and proletarian democracy as almost a matter
of degree, as though socialism was a logical extension of parliamentary
democracy. The articles avoided the awkward fact that bourgeois democracy is a
form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which has to be smashed by the
working class and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The dangers of Sean M’s
position on Stalinism came out around the banning of Solidarnosc. Here at least
a strong response from Tony R checked
Sean M’s course, but his orientation was clearly to the Polish Solidarity
Campaign run by anti-communists Blick and Westoby and associated with
reactionary Catholic Polish emigres. His position of support for Polish
self-determination (rather than for an independent socialist Poland)
effectively abandoned the policy of defence of the workers’ states and implied
that bourgeois democracy would be progressive in Poland. (See Socialist Organiser, no. 66, 16 December
1981, p. 1, for the formulation of the self-determination position.)
Tony R’s response on
Poland was effectively the only political challenge from any of the leading
members of the old WSL, and no lessons were drawn from this experience. To do
so would threaten the fusion. Internal debate was minimal, apart from a few
early internal bulletins with some articles on the general strike, etc.
Thus well before the
Malvinas war, the deepening of the WSL’s crisis was all too clear, yet there
was no organised opposition, no attempt to form a tendency or a faction. The
suppressed internal life, infrequency of internal bulletins and the abdication
by the leadership of any serious attempt at an organised discussion of the
differences that existed meant that the opposition was confined to specific
areas of work. The left was atomised and deliberately kept that way by the Alan
T leadership.
Conflict and Struggle
In spite of this,
conflict and struggle took place from day one in a whole number of areas. The
WSL left was disoriented and unorganised but a rearguard action was still being
carried out. It was paying a dear price for the inability of the left within
the old leadership to crystalise out an organised opposition from day one. Part
of the problem was the still strong, genuine respect for, and acceptance of,
the political authority of Alan T. The WSL lefts at leadership level acted as a
left pressure on, and advisor to, Alan T. They could not bring themselves to see
that sometimes the best way of helping someone is to break with them when they
are about to take a wrong course and go into sharp political opposition.
The clearest opposition
at this stage to the rightward orientation to reformism came from other TILC sections.
The LOR produced a document (Some
Critical Remarks about WSL Politics towards the LP, July 1982), which was
not circulated for many months. The RWL produced a document at the same time,
written by Eric O’Brien, in reply to Sean M’s Socialism and Democracy articles. The attempt to organise a
discussion on this at the 1982 summer school was treated as a clandestine
activity. Otherwise, opposition was confined to specific areas of work. NJ
wrote an internal bulletin article against Socialist
Organiser’s condemnation of Irish Republican Army (IRA) civilian bombings,
and this position was taken by the majority of the WSL Irish Commission. This
was rejected by the NC; the Irish Commission became a dormant body.
The sharpest conflict
was in the Women’s Commission, between old WSL and old ICL women. The latter
had a more or less exclusive orientation towards women in the Labour Party and
a pettybourgeois feminist milieu through the journal Women’s Fightback, which adapted heavily to its audience in the
issues it concentrated on and in its politics. The old WSL women comrades
wanted to maintain their orientation to working-class women in struggle and to
fighting around an action programme. There was a certain element of truth in
the charge of economism, because these comrades shared the general method and
thus the same general problems as the old WSL as a whole, though probably less
than the male trade union activists. On the whole, they were correct in their
arguments against the old ICL women, but they were hampered because, in common
with the old WSL left wing as a whole, they had no developed political
alternatives. They were hit by the same crisis of perspective. Furthermore,
they were so isolated and received no assistance from the old WSL leadership,
to whom this was a secondary area of work which should not be allowed to
disrupt the fusion. As a result the Women’s Commission became virtually
inoperative.
Before we turn to the
Malvinas War dispute, we should indicate one other area of work which showed
the rapid degeneration of the WSL, although this is not strictly in
chronological order. The dispute in the National Health Service (NHS) which
erupted in late spring 1982 and continued through to late autumn, should have
offered the WSL especially good opportunities for a Trotskyist intervention.
The fused organisation had a relatively large and potentially rather strong
health workers’ fraction, with several comrades already in a leadership role at
rank-and-file level and with the experience of the old WSL in hospital
occupations. However, the opportunity was totally lost. A regular bulletin, Health Workers for the Full Claim, was
produced and got a positive response, and some sort of campaign was built
around this.
However, this
intervention was restricted to militant left-wing trade unionism. There was
little in the way of a political intervention. Neither in the bulletin nor in Socialist Organiser was there any
attempt to campaign around transitional demands, nor was there a serious
struggle for rank-and-file control of the strike. Health Workers for the Full Claim became essentially a campaign of
pressure on the bureaucrats. Thus, having organised a quite successful NHS shop
stewards’ conference in September 1982, the WSL opposed and secured the defeat
of the absolutely correct proposal of Workers Power health workers to set up a
national committee from the conference. After the end of the dispute, the
industrial organiser, Levy, could only comment that the WSL had intervened well
and couldn’t be blamed for not having made a single recruit.
This is an important episode,
because it indicates the degeneration of the very area of work, trade union
struggles, which had been the main strength, the proud boast, of the old WSL.
This was a direct outcome of the element of trade union economism which we have seen growing in strength in
the prefusion WSL. And for all their attacks on old WSL economism, it was an
attitude to trade union work shared by the old ICL leadership, the other side
of their orientation to the Labour Party as the ‘political wing’ of the
working-class movement.
Malvinas War
It was the fight over
the Malvinas War which brought the conflicts in the WSL to a head, in one
sense, because of the formation of the tendency by Alan T. and the Special Conference.
However, the Malvinas War debate was also used to stifle and defuse the
development of any left-wing opposition in the WSL. Thus the outcome of the
dispute solved nothing but intensified the crisis of the WSL and its move to
the right.
The Socialist Organiser position of dual defeatism - that is, of
neutrality - between British imperialism and a semi-colonial country and its ‘self-determination for the Falkland
Islanders’ policy was a clear, straightforward abandonment of the
Trotskyist programme. It abandoned the distinction between imperialist
oppressor countries and oppressed semi-colonial countries - and thus between
nationalism in the two cases - in order to justify its refusal to defend
Argentina. Its use of the self-determination demand was a mockery of Trotskyist
support for the rights of oppressed nations to self-determination. The whole
position represented a move to social democratic pacifism - an accommodation to
it in the pages of the paper and a pretty clear adoption of it in the arguments
of some WSL members, like Traven.
This produced both
confusion and hostility in the WSL, mainly but by no means exclusively among
old WSL members. There was a strong reaction to the leadership’s line from
Merseyside and Nottingham. A resolution from the Merseyside branch (initiated
by an ex-ICL supporter and backed by old WSL members including Sue E and Chris
E) called upon the NC to recognise Argentine sovereignty over the islands and
to reverse its line of calling for the withdrawal of Argentine troops. This
received no votes in favour and only four abstentions. Pete F was not present
at the NC but later announced that he would have voted in favour of it.
Self Determination for the “Falkland Islanders”
Pete F. wrote a
document shortly after Easter 1982 attacking the Socialist Organiser line and setting out a principled
anti-imperialist position. The EC briefly overturned the position only to have
it restored by a special NC. He began by voting for Sean M’s line of ‘self-determination for the Falkland islanders’
at a TILC meeting in Paris. There was a huge row nevertheless between Sean M
and Alan T over this issue. The compromise result was to move “self determination for the Falkland
islanders” from the first point to a lower position in the resolution! The
resolution also called for the withdrawal of Argentine troops from the islands
and a position of dual defeatism. Such was the climate of confusion that this
resolution was also supported by other TILC delegates (who reversed their line
at the next TILC meeting in July).
Alan T.’s initial
position had been confused and tending to compromise with Sean M. Though he
moved away from Sean M’s dual defeatism, he did not in fact move to a
consistently anti-imperialist position. Instead, he adopted the confused
position that it was only when the British fleet set sail that Argentine
defencism became relevant. All other TILC sections (apart from the Socialist Fight group in Australia) and
eventually TILC itself took the correct position, which was one of support for
Argentina against Britain from the time of the Argentine invasion of the
Malvinas Islands, on the basis of the general position of support for
semi-colonial countries at war with imperialist countries. This position
applies regardless of the character of the regimes in the two countries and
regardless of who started the war.
Sean M’s argument was
essentially moralistic. Alan T.’s position hovered between that line of
argument and a consistently Trotskyist position. He eventually announced the
formation of a tendency on the specific issue of the Malvinas war without
consulting other members about the basis of the platform - no tendency meeting
took place at any point. The platform spoke of the need to defend Argentina
from the moment that the British task force set sail. At around the same time a
motion from the Merseyside branch to the NC, initiated by Sue E and Chris E,
called for a special conference to decide the question of the Malvinas. This
was carried at the NC. This along with the original motion to reverse the line
on the Malvinas constituted the beginnings of a struggle to clarify the issues
at the heart of the crisis.
Thus he was, in effect,
neutralist as far as the initial Argentine attack was concerned. This led to
confusion and uncertainty in the tendency fight against Sean M’s supporters. At
the last moment, recognition of the legitimacy of the Argentine claim to the
Malvinas was inserted in the Tendency resolution. Yet Alan T. ‘condemned’ the
invasion. Then, under pressure from Pete F., Alan T. changed that to ‘opposed’
the invasion as ‘reactionary’ - unable to distinguish between the objectively
progressive character of the invasion as a challenge to an imperialist power by
a semi-colony and the undoubted reactionary motives of the Galtieri junta.
Anti-imperialist Position
Hand-in-hand with the
confused and inadequate politics of the Alan T. tendency went the anti-Marxist,
anti-democratic, and anti-internationalist methods employed. Thus, following
the general logic that the highest priority had to be given to preserving the
fusion, the main leaders of the tendency argued that the differences over the
Malvinas War were simply about the best way to fight imperialism and that they
had no connection with or implications for any other issues or differences. Not
only was the absurdity of this argument patently obvious to everyone, on both
sides of the argument, not only was it a blatant diplomatic fudge, but it was a
thoroughgoing abandonment of the Marxist method. It argued, in effect, that the
leadership of a revolutionary organisation was making what was a major
concession to national-chauvinist sentiment (not to mention moralistic and
empiricist methods of argument) under conditions of war as a simple isolated
mistake, a difference of emphasis within a common struggle. Inevitably, this
meant that the Tendency fought the Majority with one hand tied behind its back.
Moreover, while posing
as the defenders of an internationalist position on the war (a very limited
one, in fact), the Minority leadership were forced in practice (by the Malvinas
conflict) to turn more sharply to the methods of national Trotskyism and to
manoeuvres in their relations with the other sections of TILC. The important
thing for them was to restrict this to a single issue argument in the WSL.
Hence they were party to the decision to depart from the practice of 1980 and
1981 and change the 1982 Summer School from a TILC school to a WSL school -
unilaterally and without informing the other sections. At the Summer School they
were party to the EC decision to turn the debate on the Malvinas War into a
separate WSL event, with other TILC sections only being allowed to make brief
statements - and not bothering to inform them of the decision. This was later
dismissed as ‘a blunder’ - the visiting TILC comrades only learnt of the
decision because it was secretly leaked to them by Pete F..
The principled
anti-imperialist position maintained by the minority within the TILC who had
voted against the Sean M resolution at the previous TILC meeting which was
adopted by the summer TILC meeting was a threat to Alan T. and John L. because
it implied a fight against Sean M’s position rather than an attempt to play
down the differences. If the fight against Sean M was to be based on the TILC position
and if TILC was to be involved in the WSL discussion, then it would be
impossible to restrict it to the single issue of Argentine defencism (after
all, the other TILC sections were already taking up the questions of the WSL’s
orientation to the Labour Party and to bourgeois democracy). Of course, Sean M
was setting the pace of the moves to national Trotskyism.
1982 Summer School
Thus, for instance,
prior to the WSL National Committee meeting during the 1982 Summer School, the
old ICL leadership convened a sort of private caucus (no question of issuing a
political statement or forming a tendency), which presented to the National
Committee a set of resolutions demanding no democratic centralism in TILC, an
end to attacks on Sean M’s politics in the Summer School, and the winding up of
the Minority Tendency on the Malvinas War. (See “Statement of the Suspended WSL
Internationalist Faction”, p. 4.) Though this resulted in a furious argument,
it seems to have been based on the disruptive character of Sean M’s supporters’
behaviour rather than the political issues involved. Though it appears that no
vote was taken on the motions, this was on the basis of patching up peace. It
would have been better to have had the votes, but this would have ended Alan T.’s
attempt to restrict the struggle in the WSL. Thus politically it was another
retreat by Alan T. which laid the basis for further agreement with Sean M’s
supporters.
As a result of these
manoeuvres, national Trotskyism was further reinforced, TILC marginalised in
the consciousness of most WSL members, the unprincipled character of the fusion
became ever more blatantly obvious. While the effect of this was to atomise
that part of the left closely associated with Alan T in Oxford, there was a
parallel process occurring in which the Merseyside comrades (Sue E. Chris E and
Mike J), the Leicester cdes. (Helen F, Pete F, Charlie S et al.) were beginning
to cooperate in the struggle to change the line of the organisation at the
special conference. This developed into an international collaboration with the
TILC delegates at the WSL summer school in July 1982.
The Merseyside
resolution calling for recognition of Argentine sovereignty and opposing the
line of withdrawal of Argentine troops at the first NC (April 1982) after the
war began represented the earliest consistent position (supported by PF)
against the war in the WSL - in Britain the imperialist belligerent country.
The TILC comrades who later formed the ITC were split on this question at the
first TILC meeting during the war - some voted for Alan T and Sean M’s line,
others including Leland S, the RWL delegate and Fernando V of the LOR, voted it
down. It was not until July, when the war was over, that the future ITC
comrades in TILC adopted a united, unanimous and consistent position on the
war. The Merseyside comrades (including an ex-ICL member), Pete F and other
rank and file members had nevertheless been struggling for a consistent line in
the imperialist belligerent country since the very beginning of the war.
At the Special
Conference there was a polarisation which corresponded almost exactly to the
prefusion WSL/ICL membership. Sean M put forward a resolution defending his
original line and Alan T a resolution supporting defence of Argentina, but
characterising the Argentine invasion as “reactionary”.
It was clear that the vote was going to be extremely close. There was a lot of
very heavy lobbying going on. Alan T’s position was seriously flawed on the
question of the characterisation of the Argentine invasion. The continuing lack
of organisation of the WSL left (and elements of the ex-ICL left) resulted in
there not being an alternative resolution. There was no tendency meeting to
decide the position to be adopted. Those who were unhappy with Alan T’s resolution
were reluctantly reconciled to giving critical support to it because it was
obvious that the vote would be extremely close and they did not want to be
responsible for Sean M’s line being carried.
An amendment to Alan
T’s resolution was moved by Steve H and seconded by Chris E in the form of the
text of the TILC resolution adopted at the July TILC meeting. This
characterised the Argentine invasion as “objectively
progressive” and it was counterposed to Alan T’s characterisation of the
invasion as being “reactionary”. The
suggestion for this amendment had come from the ex-ICL leadership as an attempt
to create division in their opponents camp and Alan T protested at this
suggestion vigorously. Outrage and dismay were expressed by the WSL left because
they felt it jeopardised the chances of winning the vote. The movers of the
amendment, however, who were aware of this, indicated that they would give
critical support to Alan T’s resolution if the amendment fell. This did not
prevent recriminations from the WSL left, who could not see or did not want to
see the importance of the distinction. The amendment got just 15 votes and thus
fell.
None of the WSL left
from Leicester and Nottingham voted for it. Among those who did vote for it
were Sue E., Chris E, Margaret J, Eric J, Richard E. The Alan T resolution was
then carried by just two votes. Because of this, there was no fight throughout
the period of the Malvinas War debate on the basis of the TILC position. [Note
by Chris Edwards (May 2002). This latter sentence is misleading and confusing
since clearly the comrades named earlier in the paragraph, who moved and voted
for the TILC amendment, clearly did struggle for the TILC position. It was
other members of the tendency who did not struggle for this position].
Lack of Democracy
Lack of democracy,
failure to function in any way as an organised tendency in a democratic
centralist movement, was a consequence of the political positions and methods
which the old WSL leadership adopted and developed in the Malvinas War dispute.
Though the initial tendency statement (Against
Neutrality on the Falklands War. Defend Argentina - No Confidence in Galtieri,
20 May 1982), signed by the five old WSL members of the fused WSL Executive
Committee, concluded with an appeal to comrades to join the tendency (solely and exclusively to argue and organise with
a view to changing the current line of the movement on the Falklands/Argentina
[sic] war, of course), this never actually happened.
There really was no
tendency. It had no declared membership, no organisation, no internal life or
decision-making process. It never even had a single meeting. It remained a
group of NC members - in reality, a group of EC members - and was organised on
a basis of contact among them (especially between the Oxford group and Pete F.
in Leicester), with the supporters kept in a passive role. This followed from
Alan T.’s politics, because a fully functioning tendency would have been
impossible to contain and would have been a threat to the fusion. It allowed
Alan T. to close the tendency down without any discussion immediately after the
September Special Conference.
All this meant that the
change of line at the Special Conference resolved nothing, not simply because a
majority of two votes was scarcely a resounding victory but because, rather
than clarifying the real political issues, the WSL had become more confused and
the conduct of the dispute had speeded its degeneration. One consequence was
that it degenerated to a certain extent into a loyalty test between the two prefusion organisations. However,
four ex-ICL members did vote for Alan T’s resolution.
Pete F and others in
the WSL left contributed to the confusion in the organisation. Just as Alan T
oscillated between Sean M’s politics and consistent positions, so Pete F
oscillated between consistent positions and Alan T. He collaborated with Alan
T’s tendency trying to act as a left pressure. Having made an early
contribution to the dispute with his April document, he thus preferred to offer
a united front to Alan T insofar as he was ready to oppose the majority rather
than use his leadership position to crystallise out a consistent alternative.
It was necessary however to organise an independent tendency when it became
clear that the basis of Alan T’s tendency was both irredeemably inconsistent
and undemocratic. The result was that it was left to inexperienced rank and
file members to respond as best as they could to the crisis of the
organisation.
The seriousness of this
failure became apparent in the aftermath of the Special Conference. The changed
position on the Malvinas War never received a mention in Socialist Organiser. After all, Socialist
Organiser was not the paper of the WSL. But the WSL did not even go through
the procedure of taking the retrospective change of line through the fictitious
broad groups, the Socialist Organiser Alliance. The only public statement was a
supplement to Workers Socialist Review,
no. 2, which gave at least as much space to a restatement of the old majority position
as the new and had a very limited circulation. None of the other contentious
issues were taken up within the WSL For some months there was scarcely a single
internal bulletin. The WSL leadership, old WSL as much if not more than the old
ICL, agreed on avoiding political conflict in order to give the organisation a
cooling off period. This was simply a cover for the further political
degeneration and rightward shift of the WSL. Demoralisation and confusion
became widespread and was reflected in declining membership: in July 1981 the
WSL had boasted that the fusion created an organisation of over 300 members; it
is probable that by the beginning of 1983 it had effectively lost nearly half
that number.
In fact, it was in this
situation that, through the winter of 1982-1983, the ex-ICL leadership pushed
forward more openly right-wing positions on a whole range of issues: defence
(or rather, lack of it) of the Republican movement in Ireland, on a united
federal Ireland, on Palestine (the beginning of the move to the Socialist
Organiser’s’ present ‘two nations/two states’ position), on work in the Labour
Party, ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’, etc. This happened still without
any political fight from the old WSL leadership. Yet far from preserving the
fusion, it was stoking up bitterness, confusion, disorientation, and
recrimination, an atmosphere that was driving more and more members out of
political activity or into passive routinism.
Split with TILC
Objectively a split
with TILC was necessary for both wings of the leadership. The old ICL
leadership, of course, had never accepted TILC’s perspectives and, as we have
seen, ensured that the TILC documents were not part of the basis of the fusion.
For Alan T. the logic of that decision, developed by the retreat further into
national Trotskyism during the Malvinas War dispute, forced him to reject the
(already overdue) transformation of TILC into an international democratic
centralist tendency, and was leading him to abandon TILC altogether. This led
Alan T., Tony R., and John L., along with Alan C., to compete with Sean M and
Martin T in manoeuvres, denigration, and outright slanders against the other
TILC sections, sowing further confusion and demoralisation.
Inevitably this
national Trotskyism in its largest section created an increasingly serious
crisis for TILC. Already the possibility of an important political discussion
being developed with the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (an international
grouping which had broken with the Lambertists early in 1979, led by the
POR/Masas of Bolivia and Politica Obrera of Argentina) had been lost because it
would have raised the Malvinas War issue more sharply in the WSL - even though
there was a pro-TILC tendency within the Workers League of Palestine, one of the
sections of the FIT. Whole sections and opportunities of building sections were
destroyed. Particularly disgraceful and directly related to the practice of the
old WSL leadership was the treatment of the Turkish group. The undoubted
problems of this group of Trotskyist exiles in London were exacerbated by the
WSL’s combination of arrogant indifference, chauvinist insensitivity,
manoeuvring, and splitting, leading to its rapid disintegration.
Thus, internationalism
itself, posed concretely by the question of international democratic centralism
in TILC, was raised as a central political issue in TILC and in the WSL by the
process of degeneration of the WSL. Having already taken up the issues of the
WSL’s orientation to the Labour Party and fought over the Malvinas War issue,
the TILC sections took this issue up sharply in the winter of 1982-1983. It was
only at this point that opposition within the WSL took an organised political
form. This developed from essentially the same sources that had come together at
the 1982 WSL Summer School i.e. elements within the WSL left and from the TILC
sections. It was a common international struggle.
6. The Opposition in the WSL
From the autumn of 1982
there were actually three more or less organised groups in the WSL. From November, Alan T. was
organising meetings of his trusted supporters.
In effect, there was a ‘secret faction’ - without, of course, any
declared political programme. By December
at least (when they were first accidentally discovered by a Turkish comrade),
the Supporters of Sean M were holding their own secret meetings. Neither of
these groups operated on a basis of principled politics. Thus neither was
prepared to form a tendency or faction to fight politically within the WSL in
line with the procedures of democratic centralism. Both were manoeuvres,
cliques around a small group of leaders.
In the case of Alan T.
and Tony R. (John L., no longer trusted by either side, was not part of either
group), the manoeuvres were designed to hold together old WSLers on a limited,
activist, ‘workerist’ basis (at the same time as holding back any political
fight or, therefore, linking up with the struggle of the other TILC
sections). It was thus a manoeuvre
directed at least as much, and certainly more openly, against the left and
against the rest of TILC (mainly against the RWL/US and the LOR/Italy) as
against the old ICL leadership.
The third grouping was
the internationalist left, the main part of which formed the Internationalist
Tendency (IT) in January 1983. There
were genuine internationalist left-wingers who, because of subsequent
demoralisations, ties to the Oxford leadership and the mistakes and weaknesses
of the IT, never became part of the tendency. In the main these were women
comrades. Only this tendency fought an open political struggle on the basis of
a platform document and attempted to take the perspectives of TILC back into
the WSL. This was its central
importance and its major contribution.
The formation of the International Tendency (which, correctly assessing
the deep crisis of leadership in the WSL, transformed itself into a faction in
March) was thus a positive, though long overdue, step forward. The response of the leadership - Alan
T./Tony R., John L., and the old ICL
leaders - was, while maintaining their secret manoeuvres, to bloc
together against the internationalists.
It is with the
political development of this current, within the context of the struggle to
turn TILC into a democratic centralist tendency, that this section is principally
concerned. It should, however, be noted
that from January 1983 there was a fourth grouping, far more informal than any
of the other three, but at least more open than the Alan T. and Sean M cliques. This was the group around Traven, which
favoured fusion with the Socialist League, the British section of the USFI.
Rank and file members
of the WSL left had been lobbying for a tendency within the organisation since
the Special conference. In particular the Merseyside comrades (Sue E, Chris E,
Mike J - a former WSL NC member and leader of the Danish TAF which he helped to
found) produced a document (in the case of Sue E and Chris E their first ever) Against Unprincipled Revisionism, Against
National Trotskyism which dealt with all the issues which had emerged in
the dispute over the Malvinas. The differences on imperialism, Stalinism,
Labour Party, Ireland and the Workers Government slogan. It also linked these
to the attempts to ditch TILC which were then surfacing in the Alan T
leadership. The general line of this document was subsequently adopted by the
International Tendency (IT/WSL) at its founding meeting in Birmingham in
January. This played an important role in crystallising out an alternative
political line around which the IT could develop. The impetus for the first
meeting of the IT came from these comrades.
They had to struggle
against Pete F who was still playing an ambivalent role in relation to Alan T.
His approach was to try and draw Alan T into a more oppositional role. He was
hesitant about forming a tendency independent of him because of the effect this
would have on his strategy of trying to draw Alan T away from Sean M.
The RWL played a role
in the development of the IT. When they learnt that the Alan T leadership had
decided not to transform the TILC into a democratic centralist tendency at the
up-coming December TILC conference as planned, they were furious, recognising
as they did that this was because Alan T had decided to preserve the untenable
fusion with Sean M at all costs, including the transformation of TILC. In
particular they recognised that it was because they had struggled against Sean
M along with the other TILC sections at the Summer School - where they had
walked out (along with all the other international delegates) of the Malvinas
debate in protest at the attempts to limit their contribution to positive,
non-polemical statements - that Alan T was now trying to obstruct the
development of TILC into a democratic centralist tendency.
Platform for a Tendency
An informal meeting
between the Merseyside and some of the Leicester comrades took place in early
January 1983 in Leicester to draw up a platform for a tendency (the contents of
this are discussed below). The meeting decided to call a further meeting to
establish a tendency in Birmingham a few weeks later to which other members
would be invited. Pete F and the Leicester comrades subsequently tried to call
the meeting off because Pete F in particular was very ambivalent about the
whole thing. The Merseyside comrades were determined to go ahead with the
meeting however and informed the Leicester comrades that the meeting was going
ahead with or without their participation. Leland S of the RWL who was in
Britain for the TILC meeting was invited to attend the founding meeting of the
tendency by the Merseyside comrades to express the support of the TILC sections
for the tendency. The meeting did go ahead and the Leicester comrades attended
as did a group of comrades from Nottingham. There were around twenty five
people at the meeting which agreed to establish a tendency on the basis of the
platform drawn up at the earlier Leicester meeting. The meeting also adopted
the general line of the much longer and more analytical document Against Unprincipled Revisionism, Against
national Trotskyism.
Pete F. had been an
author of the July/August 1980 articles in
Socialist Press criticising
Workers Actions’s version of the workers’ government demand and of the October
1980 letter attacking the view of the Bennite movement as a mass anticapitalist
current (as well as of many of the historical articles in Socialist Press). A full-time organiser for the Socialist
Labour League in the Northeast in the late 1960s, to 1971 or 1972 (though not a
member of Alan T.’s opposition in the WRP, having left by that time), he joined
the WSL in the late 1970s and was the principal builder of the WSL in
Leicester. By the time of the fusion,
this was the biggest concentration of members of the old WSL outside Oxford.
The IT/IF included only
two other WSL National Committee members: Helen F. and Graves - almost the only black member of the NC (and,
though still in his early 1920s, actually a more long-standing member of the
WSL than Pete F. or Helen F.). To some
extent the IT/IF also crossed the division between the pre-fusion
organisations, though its thirty eight members were predominantly old WSLers,
it included five old ICLers (as well as a small number who had joined after the
fusion).
Apart from the above
named individuals, the IT/IF was essentially a ‘rank-and-file’ tendency, but it
was a particular section of the rank and file.
It recruited no one in Oxford; in London it had only three members (two
from the Turkish group); it had only two members in industrial unions (Chris E.
in TGWU, MJ in EEPTU) The bulk of its members were in Leicester (approximately
twenty) plus six in Nottingham. The great majority of these Leicester and
Nottingham comrades were in their teens or early twenties. Among these were two
black comrades in each city - and two IT/IF members in Birmingham and Coventry
were black students.
The tendency
represented an alliance between the Merseyside comrades, who were largely
instrumental in ensuring that the tendency was formed, the more ambivalent
Leicester comrades some of whom were youth, and the Nottingham youth comrades
whom Pete F had been reluctant to have in the tendency because of bad personal
relations he had developed with them. Pete F had not invited them to the
initial informal meeting in Leicester. They were invited to attend the founding
Birmingham meeting at the suggestion of Leland S who knew them from WSL Summer
School. The youth comrades gave the tendency an important source of dynamism
and energy. The tendency eventually accounted for around 15-20% of the membership.
The personality of Pete
F led to a number of problems in both the Leicester and Nottingham branches.
Despite all his faults he was a very able, committed comrade with basically
sound political instincts which were responsible for the fact that he was the
only member of the NC and EC who took a correct line from the beginning on the
Malvinas and most of the other issues. He along with Helen F had played a
leading role in building the largest branch of the organisation outside Oxford.
He had played a key role in the rearguard action against the WSL/ICL fusion. He
was a leading militant in the NUT and used his abilities to good effect in
manoeuvring Tony G into the national secretaryship of the STA. He played a key
role in the national youth work of the pre-fusion WSL. His problems were a
certain over-ambitiousness, overconfidence, a lack of independence from Alan T
and a certain resentment and inability to cope with independence of his
politics on the part of other comrades including youth.
Stealth and Manoeuvre
He had a tendency as we
have seen to try and achieve his political objectives by stealth and manoeuvre
rather than through straight forward political struggle. There is of course a
place for manoeuvre in politics as long as this method does not become the
dominant aspect or a substitute for political struggle as it did in the case of
Pete F. He was an outstandingly able comrade who could argue politically when
he wanted to, but this was not his preferred method on too many occasions. Such
methods are particularly disastrous when applied to youth. His relationship
with the youth was based on a mixture of soft opportunist relationships when he
was getting his own way and sly manoeuvre when he was not. Unfortunately for
him he had a tendency to end up outmanoeuvring himself.
Thus, for an
understanding of the political development of the opposition, considerable
importance attaches to the way the WSL had been built in Leicester and
Nottingham.
In the late 1970s the
WSL had launched its own youth section, the Socialist Youth League (SYL), with
its own youth paper, Red Youth, which
had a serious orientation towards the then expanding National Union of School
Students and towards anti-racist/anti-fascist work. The chief areas where this was built were in Leicester and London
- most successfully in Leicester, where intervention in the struggles of school
students was crucial. And it was in
turn through this work that the WSL was built. Significantly, Leicester and
Liverpool were the principal areas of the WSL’s unemployed work. In Leicester
the WSL had been militantly involved in leading nursery occupations, in the
anti-fascist work, and in the 1981 youth uprising. (It is also significant that
very little was done to develop any of these areas of work in Oxford - it
appears that despite the apparent opportunities there was little student work
done there either.)
Thus, the IT/IF
membership reflected the recognition by the old WSL or by elements within it,
of the importance for a revolutionary organisation of a turn to the most
oppressed layers of the working class and the attempt to intervene in their
struggles - the struggles of youth, of black people, of the unemployed, and to
some extent of women and lesbians and gay men.
These elements are always
likely, (at least if there has been a serious attempt to draw in the most
militant and politically advanced people), to be the most dynamic (and the most
rebellious) section of a revolutionary organisation. However, there was more to
their role in the WSL opposition than this general truth.
Changes in the Class Struggle
We have noted the
importance of the changes in the class struggle from 1979-1980 in the
degeneration of the WSL. By the end of
1982, with the defeat of the health workers strike following hot on the
betrayal of ASLEF, the defeat of the steel strike, the extremely low level of
struggle and virtual collapse of shop stewards’ organisation in the motor
industry, this situation had become markedly worse. At the same time, the left
movement in the Labour Party had, if not collapsed, been on a rapid process of
retreat, decline, and fragmentation for over a year. And in the wake of the Malvinas War and with the Labour Party
quite openly in crisis, it was clear that the Tories would win the general
election expected in 1983. This could
not fail to increase the rightward drift of the WSL’S liquidationism and the
tendency of many old WSL activists to a
conservative routinism.
On the other hand (and
without dismissing the importance of the continuing contradictory character of
trade union struggles), some of the most important and explosive struggles had
been those of the specially oppressed - particularly youth, black people, the
unemployed, and lesbians and gay men. This
was the period of the youth uprisings, of the rapid growth of YCND as the
biggest youth movement in the country and a militant challenge to the CND
establishment, of the Bradford 12 and Newham 7 campaigns, the People’s Marches
for Jobs, and growing militancy in the lesbian/gay movement. These were the very areas in which the
comrades of the IT/IF were working. It is worth noting that the one union where
the IT/IF had any concentration of members (5) was the National Union of
Teachers, where there was a rising level of sectional militancy, where the left
was making important political and organisational advances, and where racism
and the lesbian/gay struggle were becoming increasingly important issues for
the left.
This had a
contradictory effect on the IT/IF. On the one hand, the militancy of these
comrades reflected some of the dynamism of the struggles in which they were
involved. On the other hand, as we shall see in more detail, it made it
possible for the IT/IF (and its post-expulsion successor, the Workers
Internationalist League) to maintain the one-sided ‘mass’ orientation and thus
many of the contradictions and confusions of the old WSL. Thus, the IT/IF never
really tackled the task of examining and resolving these contradictions. This was fundamental to the weaknesses and
mistakes of the IT/IF, though, of course, the relative inexperience of many of
the comrades made their task more difficult.
It was also this, rather than lack of time or personal ties and
antipathies, that prevented the IT/IF from expanding significantly beyond its base
and attracting either the very important left-wing women comrades or any
section of the industrial worker comrades. And, again, it was this political
weakness rather than any residual ‘faith’ in Alan T. and Tony R. which accounts
for the IT/IF’s relative weakness in criticising the Oxford leadership
The role of these
comrades in Leicester, Nottingham and Liverpool was already clear from the
beginning of the Malvinas war. The Merseyside resolution to the NC (supported
retrospectively by Pete F who was absent) in April, the Nottingham comrades
attendance at this same NC to express their disgust for the organisations’s
line and the subsequent resolution from Merseyside calling for the Special
Conference indicated the opposition that existed which was independent of Alan
T. There was also the vociferous support by the WSL left against Alan T for the
international delegates during the altercation at the Malvinas debate at the
Summer school. These things along with the moving of the TILC amendment to Alan
T’s resolution at the Special conference, indicated that at all stages in the
development of the Malvinas crisis and afterwards, an unorganised,
underdeveloped opposition was evident which was independent of, and went beyond
the limits of, the positions of the Alan T leadership.
Quasi-Cult Ties
The lack of
organisation of this left constantly jeopardised and limited the nature and
scope of this independence and led to a kind of reintroduction of the
pre-fusion WSL quasi-cult ties as Alan T shifted leftwards to form his tendency
under pressure from the WSL/ICL left. This more than anything led to the
absence of an alternative resolution at the Special Conference. The very fact
that the ex-ICL leadership put the TILC amendment on the agenda of the
conference, however, testified to their awareness of the actual existence of
this independent and more consistent view in the organisation - a view which
they wished to bring out, but which Alan T wanted to suppress (each for their
own factional purposes) and which a section of the WSL left was independent
enough to defend despite the enormous pre-fusion WSL quasi-cult pressures not
to do so which were related to the anticipated closeness of the voting. This
represented a genuine, unplanned, reassertion of the independent position
expressed since the beginning of the war. The experience of the Special
Conference, the issues in relation to imperialism which it highlighted, the
closing down of the debate on these issues subsequently by Sean M and Alan T
and the dissolution of Alan T’s tendency without consultation with anyone made
it clear to the future IF comrades that an independent tendency was necessary.
The transformation of
the Internationalist Tendency into a faction
was the result of a number of factors. The experience of Alan T’s
inability to consistently challenge the politics of Sean M which had emerged in
all its “glory” during the Malvinas debate. The realisation that Alan T’s
politics were seriously flawed on a key question related to an imperialist war
in which Britain was the belligerent imperialist country. The development of a
national Trotskyist reaction by Alan T expressed in the pull-back from a
democratic centralist TILC in December. This led to the crystalisation into a
tendency of a layer of the WSL/ICL left which had been in practice associated
with work amongst the most oppressed sections of the working class including an
important group of youth.
In the wake of the
Malvinas dispute, both wings of the WSL leadership were determined to block
democratic centralism in TILC, and throughout the autumn of 1982 were
manoeuvring against this transformation, under the guise of Alan T.’s arguments
for yet another delay. This came to a
head at the December 1982 TILC meeting, which the LOR and RWL argued unsuccessfully
should be an international preconference leading to establishment of a
democratic centralist tendency in the summer.
The WSL position was
carried with the support of Socialist Fight of Australia against the LOR, RWL,
and TAF. The arguments against
democratic centralism in TILC were national Trotskyist to the core: only when
the national sections had sorted out all their problems could they establish an
international tendency. The problems, of course, were in large part the result
of accommodating to the pressures of the national situation in Britain, and it
is only through building an international organisation on a democratic
centralist basis that such accommodations can be fought. Alan T. was opposing democratic centralism
in TILC to protect his own opportunism in Britain.
It was a thoroughly
dishonest manoeuvre, because it demanded a level of homogeneity within TILC as
a precondition for democratic centralism which did not exist within the WSL,
while fudging on the differences in the WSL. It was in practice an argument to
split TILC in order to avoid (unsuccessfully, of course) a split in the WSL.
Democratic Centralism
For these reasons,
democratic centralism was not an organisational question, as both opportunist
(Alan T.) and sectarian (Workers Power and the pro-FIT) currents alleged. It
was a central political issue in the fight against the WSL’s national
Trotskyist degeneration and for a consistent Trotskyist international
tendency. It was for that reason that
the LOR and RWL declared a tendency on the issue (joined by TAF) following the
December 1982 TILC meeting. The IT/IF
was right to make this issue a part of its platform and to demand that it
should be allowed to participate in the international tendency in TILC; if TILC
had already been a democratic centralist organisation, there had would, of
course, have been no question about this, and though that was not the case, it
put to the test the seriousness of the WSL leadership’s intention to move in
that direction. The problem was rather
that in the face of this attack on TILC by the WSL leadership the IT/IF did not
make a more central issue of democratic centralism in TILC).
A WSL internal document
produced for the IT by Pete F. in January 1983, “Towards an International Tendency: Problems and Tasks”, argued the
case for international democratic centralism, together with some practical
proposals, and a resolution was put to the WSL national conference. However, in
the document it appears rather oddly as the eleventh out of thirteen points,
between points on the Stalinist ruled states and the workers government, with
no attempt to spell out its significance or link it to the remainder of the
platform.
This was because at the
Leicester meeting which drew up the platform document there was a dispute
between Chris E and Pete F on precisely this point. Pete F recognised that this
point would be extremely contentious with Alan T. He argued for it to be placed
low down so that it would not interfere too greatly with his attempts to win
Alan T to a more oppositional stance. Chris E opposed this but his position was
defeated at the meeting.
In its main points the IT platform was a
correct statement of Trotskyist positions on central issues in the struggle in
the WSL. The first four dealt with the
need for a primary orientation to the working class and for the Labour Party
and LPYS work to be seen in that context, arguing for a public paper and
against Registration (complying with the Labour Party’s register of
non-affiliated organisations). Points seven to nine dealt with the importance
of an orientation to the specially oppressed, arguing for special forms of work
and defending the rights of women to organise separately, while stressing the
need for a primary orientation to the struggles of working-class women.
On youth work, the
platform argued for a flexible tactic of using groups around the youth paper, Class Fighter, to relate directly to
all layers of youth, while building a revolutionary tendency in the LPYS. Points eight and nine deal with imperialism,
defending Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution, and on that basis supporting the TILC positions on the Malvinas and
Palestine and the WSL Irish commission resolution of 1981 on the military
actions of the IRA. Point ten argues
for political revolution against the bureaucracy and for defence of the
property relations in the deformed and degenerated workers’ states - against
Sean M’s view that these property relations were only ‘potentially’ progressive
and his support for ‘self-determination’ for Poland, etc. Point eleven, as we have seen, argues for
democratic centralism in TILC. Point
twelve very briefly rejects the notion of a workers’ government as a necessary
stage, while point thirteen supports the Transitional Programme and “The Transitional Programme in Today’s Class
Struggle” specifically against the attempt to substitute democratic demands
such as ‘police accountability’ for transitional demands
The platform was a
comprehensive, concise outline of the areas of disagreement with the
organisation. As Trotsky said of his famous 11 Points on which the ILO was
established it is not necessary to have “uniform,
literary and ostentatious declarations” and “revelations out of an inkpot” in a platform document. A concise
statement of differences in relation to the living experience of the working
class internationally is what is required - in the case of the IT this included
centrally the Malvinas, Ireland and the abandonment of the correct use of the Workers
Government slogan in relation to the Labour Party.
Contrary to the
mythology peddled by WP it was not a collection of “abstract principles”: it dealt with such “key tactical” questions as the WSL’s entry work in the MO, the
misuse of the workers government slogan, the method of fighting the witch-hunt
in the MO, as well as the very concrete (not abstract) principled questions
involved in the capitulation to chauvinism on Ireland (about which WP still has
something to learn itself) and the Malvinas.
However, there were
three subsequent documents produced which attempted to develop these
points. Apart from Pete F.’s document
on international democratic centralism, there was the document he produced in
January or February which was the first serious attempt in the WSL to give a
Marxist analysis of the left movement in the Labour Party and its decline and
to start setting out the forms Labour Party work should take (“On the Labour Party: First Part of a
Document of Orientation”, WSL (Internal Bulletin), no. 3). There was also
the January document of Chris E., Sue E., and Mike J., “Against Unprincipled Revisionism - Against ‘National Trotskyism”’.
This document made the
point that the dispute was not really between the old WSL and old ICL , but between the left and right
wings of both, pointing to the role of the old WSL right wing and to Evington’s document of the previous autumn, “The Crisis in the British Section”. The authors saw “the opportunist orientation to the Labour lefts and adaptation to their
backward nationalist outlook” as central to the WSL’s degeneration. This was the only document to develop an
argument on the full range of the programmatic points in the platform. The IT
platform was remiss in the sense that there was no attempt to confront the
economism and adaptation to a narrow trade unionism that was an increasingly
important aspect of Alan T.’s politics and which was also reflected very
clearly in the pages of Socialist
Organiser. (Trade union work was simply
not mentioned) - in the platform or elsewhere - leaving the clear impression
that it was not a problem. The only
exception was Evington’s brief amendment to the industrial perspectives,
dealing with the WSL’s tactics in the health dispute - and this was despite the
fact that the IT/IF had at least seven members very heavily involved in trade
union work.
The same problem was
demonstrated by the activist tendencies implicit in the document. The opening statement, “Our primary orientation is to the working class,” is, of course,
perfectly correct, but, taken together with point three, on the paper, the old
WSL activism is very clear:
“In line with our orientation, our press must be directed towards the
situation of the most militant layers of the class and the mass of workers
behind them. In the present period that requires a clear revolutionary
programme and bold revolutionary propaganda and agitation which can address the
problems faced by these militants, in a language they can understand, providing
an explanation and an understanding of their experience and drawing them
towards an understanding of the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat. In practice this means having a party
paper.”
This is actually quite
a misleading description of the role of a Trotskyist newspaper, which cannot be
summarised as providing an understanding of ‘their experience’, as though this will of itself draw workers to
understanding their revolutionary tasks. A revolutionary press has to provide
far more than an understanding of ‘their experience’ to workers, it has to play
a Marxist educative role, which involves a struggle against all attempts to
limit consciousness to what workers actually ‘experience’. Moreover, this
section of the platform does not address the need to win and consolidate the political
vanguard - a particularly important question for a small propaganda group. This shortcoming was not balanced elsewhere
in the platform document or in other documents of the IT/IF. There was thus a clear continuation with the
one-sided ‘mass’ orientation of the old WSL.
Areas of Disagreement
The platform expressed
its areas of disagreement with the organisation. It was not an analytical or
alternative perspectives document. Its references to MO (Labour Party here)
work were therefore necessarily confined to brief statements of what the
problem was with the existing MO work. A more analytical and longer statement
of the tendency’s attitude to MO work was contained within the other document
adopted by the founding meeting of the tendency “Against Unprincipled Revisionism, Against National Trotskyism.”
When in March 1983 the IT declared itself a
faction, the platform was expanded into a far more substantial document. By
this time there were clear differences within the IF in relation to TILC and
the Fourth International, as well as some less clear differences around
international questions. Although the
great majority adhered to the perspectives of TILC, this was not always with
real clarity - a result of activist orientation, inexperience, and also a lack
of political education (another feature of the way the WSL was built in
Leicester, which we will need to return to later). Three IF members were in political agreement with Workers Power
and thus opposed to TILC and the regeneration of the Fourth International and
holding a sectarian attitude to national struggles and democratic demands in
oppressed countries (for example, Palestine). One IF member, Mike J., was a supporter of the FIT who maintained that
grouping’s sectarian stance towards the USFI, which it regarded not just as
centrist but as counter-revolutionary.
Section twelve on TILC,
considerably expanded from the original point in the tendency platform
reflected the existence within the tendency from the beginning of sympathisers
of Workers Power and the ex-Lambertist Fourth Internationalist Tendency based
in Latin America. These comrades had developed their sympathies during the
crisis of the WSL over the Malvinas. Each was demanding a positive orientation
towards, and discussion with, these organisations. The relations between these
different trends within the tendency were nevertheless comradely and a there
was a willingness at that point on all sides to engage in a process of dialogue
on the differences that existed. It simply never occurred to anyone that there
should be a split with these comrades or that they should excluded in order to
achieve a coherent faction.
On the day of the
meeting however which was to declare a faction, the tendency was faced with an
ultimatum by the supporters of Workers Power that it immediately discuss their
Workers Power inspired draft faction platform document. This generated a
certain amount of irritation expressed by some of the youth present because of
the ultimatistic nature of their demands in relation to the agenda and the way
the platform should be drawn up. It was pointed out by Chris E that the
tendency already had a platform which had been voted for by everyone in the
tendency including the Workers Power supporters. He asked them where they now stood
in relation to this platform which he said should logically be the basis for
any expansion or rewriting. He further suggested that perhaps they might like
to consider moving sections of their WP inspired text as amendments or
expansions of the tendency platform to which they agreed after a caucus
meeting. This seemed to be the most mature way to deal with their ultimatum.
The meeting voted to adopt this procedure. The alternative was to say we are
excluding you from the faction because you have a loyalty to a different
political organisation.
Common Ground
In fact there was a
great deal of common ground in their struggle against Sean M and Alan T -
sufficient to wage a common struggle (as had been demonstrated by previous
common struggle in the tendency), but it was obvious that there was not
political coherence beyond this. That is why point twelve of the faction
platform stated quite openly
what disagreements existed together with a suggested programme and timetable
for an organised discussion on these questions to test out the possibilities
for resolving the differences. There was no alternative to this approach other
than that of a policy of splitting, exclusions and a negative and sectarian
attitude to the possibilities for regroupment in the future.
Having achieved a
common platform in relation to the problems of the WSL (with the Workers Power
sympathisers expressing their reservations in writing on the points where they
lost the vote) the Workers Power comrades later announced that they were putting
their own original document to the WSL conference as well! They subsequently
announced their split from the WSL during the conference and it was obvious
that Workers Power were worried that the IF’s nonsectarian approach to them
might lead to the WP sympathisers not joining Workers Power! Thus the effect of
the IF’s approach was that responsibility for splitting was clearly seen to be
Workers Power’s. They did not succeed in winning a single new recruit as a
result of their intervention into the faction discussion.
The platform
demonstrated an important breakthrough in that it criticised the Alan T
leadership both in terms of its politics and its failure to fight Sean M
consistently. On page 10 of the faction platform was a critique of the politics
of Alan T and the WSL leadership which was located in an incomplete break with
the party building methods of Healy. The critique questioned the WSL’s ability
to adjust its aims and expectations to its small size and resources after the
break with Healy. It also criticised the notion of the “forward movement of the working class” and suggested that this led
to a crisis in the early eighties when the level of class struggle declined
compared to the Winter of Discontent. The platform also attacked Alan T for his
fudged resolution on the Malvinas at the Special Conference (which was an
implied self criticism by those in the faction which had voted for it at the
time).
While this was a modest
and undeveloped critique it was an important development which allowed for the
possibility of winning Alan T’s base towards the faction. The platform also
contained a careful argued analysis of the need for fraction work in the Labour
Party, but not wholesale entry. This was counterposed to the pre-fusion WSL
right wing arguments in relation to the Labour Party. It also polemicised
against the notion that the Labour Party and the trade unions could be equated
in terms of there mass implantation into the working class.
As well as the
documents discussed so far, the IT/IF produced four documents relating to
specific areas of work (and, of course, some responding to the manoeuvres of
the Sean M leadership). The documents on practical work were: the Youth Perspectives produced by Dale A.
and Nick D. (IB no. 44, February 1983); the documents by Brown on future
perspectives for work among young women (IB no. 40, February 1983), by
Maidstone on unemployment perspectives (IB no. 43, February 1983), and by NJ on
perspectives on black work (IB no. 53, April 1983). These documents reflected the areas of work the IT/IF members in
Leicester and Nottingham were especially involved in and thus both the
strengths and weaknesses of the faction. They were essentially documents on the
activist/agitational work of the organisation and expanded on points 1, 5, 6,
and 7 of the original IT platform.
In terms of an organic
overall political strategy, NJ’s document, which was entitled “Broadening Out the Struggles of Black
Workers and Youth into the Mass Organisations of the Labour Movement,” was
the most clear, arguing for:
“...A solid orientation to black workers instead of seeing them as a part
of anti-racist work and also for a method of work that is determined by the
needs and struggles of black workers and putting forward a tactic of building
black workers’ alliances.”
The document on
youth perspectives argued clearly and strongly for work based on the
practice of the Nottingham and Leicester Class Fighter groups and against the
routinist LPYS liquidationism of the ICL youth. They (Aly M. and Nick D.)
argued for an orientation to the crucial struggles of youth, on YOPS schemes,
in schools, in anti-racist struggles, in YCND, of which the construction of a
tendency in the LPYS was one component.
They argued the need to take transitional demands into these struggles.
The documents on young
women and unemployment were rather different. The former was essentially a
reply to the petitbourgeois feminist orientation of the ICL women and contained
a lot of factual information but no clear perspectives for work and no sort of
action programme. The latter was essentially concerned with tactical and
organisational questions and, although very good on this level, contained no
programmatic material beyond having a militant campaigning movement of the
unemployed, independent of the bureaucracy.
Pettybourgeois Milieux
In general, all these
documents expressed a clear sense of the need for a revolutionary organisation
to orient to the struggles of the working class, and particularly of its most
oppressed layers. All were a clear challenge to the Labour Party liquidationism
and orientation to reformist and pettybourgeois milieux which characterised the
old ICL leadership and its allies.
Moreover, all were implicitly a challenge to the economist, narrowly trade unionist
orientation of the Alan T. leadership, which essentially reflected the outlook
of some of the more conservative layers of the working class (the attitude
which eventually led Tony R., in the Socialist Group in 1986, to deny that the
British working class had benefited from imperialism). However, the second
aspect remained implicit, that is to say, undeveloped in the form of an
argument against economism, and with only limited and in some cases no
development of the policies and demands which should be the basis of this work.
The undeveloped nature
of the IF’s critique of the Alan T tradition is hardly surprising given the
dynamics of the struggle against ICLism, a more right wing and obvious target,
and under conditions of struggle which allowed for little time to discuss the
much more complex and subtle contradictions within the Alan T tradition. The
fact that the faction largely came from the Alan T tradition made it probably
inevitable that they would deal with the problems of the limitations of their
former leadership in a gradual, piecemeal way that would only be completed a
long time after the struggle had ended. It would have been unrealistic to have
expected anything else. The contradictions and limitations of Alan T’s politics
emerged only gradually and it took time for the full implications to be
assimilated.
The IF did not produce
a perspectives document specifically for the WSL conference in April 1983. It
had however already adopted the general line of the perspectives contained
within the document “Against Unprincipled
Revisionism, Against National Trotskyism” which sketched out an approach to
Labour Party work, attacked the opportunist use of the workers government
slogan, argued for fraction work and a principled Trotskyist response to the
witch-hunt. This was the central question in the conference. So while the IF
was not properly prepared for it, it did at least have a position expressed in
a document of sorts. The faction coordinator Evington unilaterally submitted
this text as the faction’s perspective document at the last minute without
informing others in the faction because he felt it was the only possible thing
which could have been submitted. Pete F and others in the faction, who had not
been happy about the way this sharply polemical document had been drawn up
independently of him, protested strongly at this procedure perhaps because he
did not want a faction perspectives document counterposed to Alan T. It was
always difficult to know what Pete F was thinking at any given time because he
always seemed to have a hidden agenda. He did not allow for the unilateral
action of the faction coordinator however!
The background to the
IF’s insufficient preparation stemmed from a number of problems. The first was
that the faction meeting immediately prior to the conference which might have
drafted a specific perspectives document was taken up entirely with the debate
with the Workers Power sympathisers over the faction platform. This took up the
whole weekend. This prevented any discussion of a perspectives document at this
meeting.
The second reason was
that the most experienced leadership comrade who had agreed to write such a
document, Pete F, collapsed politically out of activity several weeks prior to
the conference after an NC meeting at which he had been denounced by Sean M for
not having raised previously on the EC and NC many of the differences expressed
in the IT platform. It was also obvious that Alan T was not going to fight and
his whole strategy of trying to prise Alan T away from Sean M was in ruins. He
had not attended the faction platform discussion meeting because he was so
demoralised by this experience. Cde. Chris E went to see him during the weekend
of this faction meeting to retrieve the elements of a perspectives document that
he had written prior to his collapse. He was also given a draft section of the
intended document dealing with the Labour Party written by Tony G. Chris E then
hurriedly typed these elements into a document called “Theses on British Perspectives” and circulated about 50 copies of
it to contacts at the WSL conference in April having missed the deadline for
submission of alternative documents. At the request of Chris E, Leland S also
distributed copies of the RWL’s perspectives document to selected contacts.
Workers Power
In other words the
faction did all that it could (often in an unplanned and in the case of
Evington a unilateral way) to put forward an alternative perspective for the
organisation and in fact succeeded in putting before the conference its views
on the way to proceed in relation to the Labour Party in spite of the
manoeuvres and collapse of Pete F and the time consuming intervention of
Workers Power. The determination and more straightforwardly political approach
of rank and file members thus prevailed over the manoeuvres of Pete F, its
so-called leadership on the NC and EC.
The discussion on
perspectives at the conference resulted in the faction document “Against Unprincipled Revisionism, Against
National Trotskyism” not being debated. The faction was then faced with the
problem of how to vote for Alan T’s document on the Labour Party in IB 48 “On Our Orientation to the Labour Movement”.
The document was a reply to Sean M’s assertion that the Labour party is the “pivot of mass working class politics” in
Britain. IB 48 argued for a shift of emphasis in the WSL’s practical work. The
main line of its argument was for more emphasis on trade union work rather than
Labour Party work Thus, IB 48 sums up the problems of the fused WSL as follows:
“More generally, we have plainly failed since the fusion to amalgamate
the strengths of the old organisations’ work in the unions and the LP. In particular the ability of the old WSL to
connect up with forces in trade union struggles and to focus on demands which
won the active commitment of the best militants while exposing the role of the
bureaucrats and careerists has not been sufficiently developed in the fused
organisation; nor has it been sufficiently adapted to the struggles in the LP.
It would be fatal if our goal now were to be restricted to “organising the
existing left” and solidarity with trade union struggles We must recognise the
need to intervene and raise the political level of local struggles to the point
where lessons can be learned on the role of the union bureaucracy and the
Labour leaders. We must gain
recognition not simply as people who are part of and stay with “the left” but
as a distinct political current
capable of giving leadership in struggles.
Workers must be educated to measure the left in the unions and LP not by
its general “solidarity” but by its ability and willingness to act upon
policies which advance the struggle.” (WSL IB 48, p. 9; emphasis in the original)
Then, after listing
four dangers - the emphasis on ‘organising the left’ promoting an isolation
from the trade union rank and file; the focus on the Labour Party as the pivot
of mass working-class politics directing attention away from workers’
struggles; the lack of any ‘public face’ leading to a decline in recruitment;
and routinist methods of work resulting from inadequate leadership “from the EC and the Centre” (the latter
at least being controlled by Sean M’s supporters, of course) - the authors
conclude that:
“To combat these weaknesses, the
WSL resolves to focus more of its political energies and resources upon the
development of a proletarian cadre, recruited by work conducted (through) the
mass organisations of the workers’ movement into the work places, estates, and
mass activities of the working class. This means that within our broad
publications, which should retain their existing format at the present time, we
will raise our (programmatic) profile as a distinct Marxist tendency with
policies that offer leadership to the working-class men, women, and youth,
which we will fight for in a coordinated way through the unions, LP, and other
relevant organisations of the oppressed.” (WSL IB 48, p. 10 emphasis in the original)
Despite the reference
to ‘programmatic profile’ in the final sentence, it is clear that the focus of
the argument is on the balance between different areas of work, on
organisational issues, and on the sociological composition of the WSL and the
areas in which it worked. Indeed, the
proposal to “raise our progammatic
profile as a distinct Marxist tendency”, in the context of the document as
whole and even in the final sentence, was really a pleas for a ‘harder’ Socialist Organiser, a return to a 1981 Socialist Press without a ‘party paper’ attribution. This was what the authors of IB 48 in fact produced after their own
expulsion in 1984 - Socialist Viewpoint.
The fact remains however that the
document argued for an orientation towards the class struggle on the basis of
the transitional programme, argued against Sean M’s view that the Labour Party
was the “pivot” in terms of the
orientation of the WSL, argued against such liquidationist catch-phrases as “stay with the left”, criticised the low
profile of the WSL politics in Socialist
Organiser and the infrequency of Workers
Socialist Review. Its weakness were that it spoke of the Labour Party as a
primary and necessary “vehicle” for
our intervention in workers’ struggles, only for as high a profile as “possible” taking into account the
conditions of “Labour Party legality”,
the fact that it argued for “SO” to continue as a forum and not a party paper.
It did not link the question of profile to the political content of Sean M’s
politics. Where transitional demands were mentioned, it was to reinforce an
activist orientation and to fudge their character:
“The concept of the LP as the “vehicle” for transitional demands is
completely wrong. Transitional demands as presented by Trotsky in the
Transitional Programme are class struggle demands designed to mobilise the
masses in a revolutionary direction. They are designed to be the demands of a
mass movement making the connection between the everyday problems and everyday
struggles and the tasks of social revolution.
We aim to make them the demands of strike movements and militants in
defence of wages, jobs, democratic rights, etc.” (WSL IB 48, p. 9)
And, earlier in the document,
replying to Sean M’s statement that most strikes are “necessarily tied to fighting individual issues”, it is argued that:
“Every class action relates, by its very nature, precisely to the
“general level of the running of society” - that is what the transitional
programme is all about. That is why
Trotsky stressed so much the importance of developing workers through such
struggles and the application of our programme under these conditions.” (WSL
(IB), 48, p. 6)
The one-sided
understanding of the Transitional Programme which we have identified as a
weakness of the old WSL runs right
through these passages, but it is combined with a political dilution of the
character and content of the Programme, so that transitional demands become
just “class struggle demands” to “mobilise the masses in a revolutionary
direction”. The question of
consciousness, of the significance of the workers’ control element in all
transitional demands, of the incompatibility of transitional demands with
capitalist society, is glossed over.
The process of gutting transitional demands of their revolutionary
content, making the raising of them dependent on the development of a mass
movement, and even of ‘merging’ them into militant trade union demands, which
was to characterise Socialist Viewpoint,
was well under way.
Alan T. was clearly on
the road to the position he expressed at “International’s” October 1986
symposium, that raising transitional demands in the miners’ strike had been
very difficult because Scargill had raised the most important demand of all -
no pit closures. Inevitably they are reduced to a kind of catalyst role in the
objective process of working-class development through the class struggle -
moving it “in a revolutionary direction.”
Pivot
The document also had
some other erroneous formulations. Despite arguing for transitional demands as
an alternative to the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) it put forward a
rightist version of its earlier principled notion of “make the lefts fight”
when it called upon the lefts to implement Labour conference policies i.e.
implement the AES and for involvement in Socialists for a Labour Victory which
was restricted to this line.
Thus the document was
by no means a consistently Trotskyist document. The fact of the matter was
however that, despite all of the above very serious political flaws, the
document did challenge some of Sean M’s most liquidationist proposals in
particular the idea that the Labour Party was the “pivot” and it outlined a shift to the class struggle with some
inadequate notion of struggling for the transitional programme, of increasing
the profile of the WSL in the Labour Party as we have seen.
The faction decided at
a caucus meeting to give critical support to Alan T’s document on this basis
having failed to get its own document carried. Workers Power rejected this
stance and refused to vote for it. However this was a sectarian abstention in
the view of the faction. At the same time the IF comrades made clear their
differences with the Alan T document on the floor of the conference and
explained that they were giving it critical support only. This was felt to be
the best way of maximising the chances of a defeat for the Sean M position,
providing solidarity with Alan T’s base in its efforts to do the same without
being diplomatic on the differences or failing to provide an alternative. In
this way the chances of winning Alan T’s base to a consistent position was
maximised. If the faction had been responsible for the success of Sean M’s
document because it voted down Alan T’s document it would have needlessly
marginalised the faction from Alan T’s base.
Thus, as in the
Malvinas debate at the Special Conference, the faction may have been guilty of
not having been sufficiently organised in the sense of not having had a
specific alternative line document, or in the case of the Special conference an
alternative resolution. The alternative line nevertheless was expressed in both
cases in spite of a certain amount of bumbling incompetence on the part of the
inexperienced faction ranks, political obstacles, inertia and manoeuvres from
Pete F through almost inadvertent, unplanned mechanisms. The point is that the
alternative view did exist; it somehow came through in spite of everything in
both cases.
The IT put forward two
resolutions to the first half the WSL’s national conference, held in February
1983, one on Palestine and one on Ireland. The purpose of these resolutions was
to provide an alternative line to the Magamnaites’ sectarian hostility to these
national struggles. The resolution on Palestine included a call for a
Palestinian Trotskyist party and a democratic secular state of Palestine. The
resolution on Ireland included the following point:
“We criticise the nationalist and militarist limitations of the IRA and
INLA leaderships and counterpose a fight to link the struggle against partition
with an all Ireland class movement, under revolutionary socialist leadership,
(coupled with a campaign of solidarity within the British labour movement). We
do not use the socialist programme on nationalism to avoid taking concrete
positions on struggles led by pettybourgeois nationalists.” (“International
Tendency resolution on Ireland”, WSL IB 4 February 1983).
These were subsequently
criticised by Workers Power on the grounds that they supposedly failed to pose
the question of an independent Trotskyist programmatic line and specifically
because the question of a workers republic was not posed. This was to miss the
point for a number of reasons.
Firstly the key issue
was to reassert the Trotskyist position in relation to the backsliding of Sean
M - the abandonment of the democratic secular state of Palestine and the
parallel abandonment of the united Ireland from the right in favour of a
federal Ireland and a similar formulation for Palestine as a concession to
Zionism and Loyalism respectively. This reassertion was realised in the IT
resolutions and it was important that Sean M’s position was challenged in this
way.
Secondly the Workers
Power line on the role of democratic demands was revealed as the seriously
flawed and undialectical position that it undoubtedly was and still is. The IF
position was later defended in the document by Chris E “In Support of the Slogan of a Secular Democratic State of Palestine”.
(WIL IB No 10 October 1983). The Workers Power criticism revealed an inability
to go beyond the limitations of formal logic and embrace the dialectical
approach employed by Trotsky in a series of articles on China in the 1929-30
period which drew out the lessons of the 1927 Chinese Revolution. In particular
they were unable to comprehend the difference between agitational and
propaganda slogans and rejected Trotsky’s correct use of the term “transitional revolutionary democratic
demands” (Trotsky: Writings 1929. p. 149). Chris E defended the centrality
of the slogans of a “secular democratic state of Palestine” and “end partition
in Ireland” as agitational transitional revolutionary democratic demands in
periods where it is not possible to realise a soviet programme because of an
unfavourable balance of forces. Trotsky’s central point was that the masses
would be unable to comprehend the meaning of demands for a soviet government in
such periods because the low level of struggle meant that workers councils were
a long way off and this demand did not correspond with the workers’ conception
of what was possible and realistic. Hence it was necessary to use democratic
demands to mobilize them instead. This meant in China that the demand for a “National Assembly” was the central
demand.
Workers’ Government
This did not mean that
Trotskyists should not also raise the demand for Soviets and a workers’
government in such periods. It did mean however that they would only have a
role as propaganda demands comprehensible only by the vanguard - not the masses
as a whole. Trotsky argued however that “the
slogan of Soviets as a slogan for the present is adventurism or empty talk”
since they would only become agitational when the unfavourable balance of
forces, after the 1927 revolution had been defeated, shifted back in favour of
the working class.
The debate with Sean M
revolved precisely around his rejection of these transitional revolutionary democratic
demands from the right as a concession to the “national rights” of the loyalists, Zionists and kelpers. Workers
Power were abandoning them from the ultra left. The question of the agitational
use of transitional revolutionary democratic demands involves an assessment of
the period at any given time in the country where they are to be raised. This
is a matter of legitimate assessment and debate. To argue on the other hand as
did Workers Power that the use of such agitational slogans, in an unfavourable
period, is opportunist and stagist unless they are either replaced by or linked
to the slogan of a workers republic reveals an inability to understand the
dynamics of revolution and the role that transitional revolutionary democratic
demands must play in reviving the mass movement in a period of revolutionary
ebb-tide. It also demonstrated once again that sectarians are really only
opportunists afraid of their own opportunism. The opposition to the notion of “a fight to link the struggle against partition
and an all Ireland class movement under revolutionary leadership” in the
above IT resolution demonstrated this vividly.
Of course it may be
arguable that there were occasions during the last few decades in both
Palestine and Ireland where the soviet programme did become agitational. That
is not true for most of this period however. The reason the IT resolution on
Ireland refers to partition is because it is this and related discrimination
and repression questions along with sectional class issues which generally
motivate and mobilise the nationalist community in Ireland not the conception of a workers republic (alas as yet). It is
therefore sectarian to pose this as the central agitational slogan in the
present period. It is something which will only be comprehensible by a small
minority of the population: the vanguard. The WSL, the WIL, the RIL and the
ISG/PD are or were small propaganda organisations and it would be wrong to
imagine that they are not. It is also necessary however to put forward a programme
for the masses as a whole in the present period: in other words explain what
Trotskyists would do if they were the leadership of the working class. It was
obvious from the language of the resolution e.g. “We do not use the socialist programme on nationalism to avoid taking
concrete positions on struggles led by pettybourgeois nationalists” that it
was written in this sense.
At its December 1982
national conference the former International Marxist Group, British section of
the USFI, had changed its name to the Socialist League and decided to drop Socialist Challenge in favour of a
Labour Party entrist paper, Socialist
Action. This represented a victory for the tendencies around John Ross, a
right-wing liquidationist and Bob Pennington, a more ‘orthodox’, left-wing
liquidationist, over the supporters of the SWP/US around Brian Grogan. Pennington had some informal contact with
the old WSL leadership before the WSL/
ICL fusion, and it appears there had been some further contact with Alan T. and
John L. (probably independently) around this time. Shortly after the Socialist
Action turn, the Socialist League issued a proposal to the WSL for
fusion. An element within the WSL, led
by Traven, strongly supported the proposal and argued for it at the first half
of the WSL national conference.
The arguments of the
Traven group were based on the (common) liquidationist perspectives of the two
organisations and a loose, quite opportunist unity of the revolutionary left approach. The attitude of Alan T. and John L. seems to have been based on
distrust of the USFI and a certain ‘workerist’ sectarianism towards it (Alan T.
had denounced the LOR’s attempt to join the Italian section of the USFI as a
sectarian turn), together with a feeling that there were enough problems in the
WSL (John L. warned a London aggregate against thinking that, because we had so
many differences, a few more would not really matter). The reaction of the old
ICL leadership was pure national
Trotskyist sectarianism: whereas Traven saw the Socialist League’s
liquidationism as common ground, Sean M’s supporters saw it as trespassing!!
The response of the IT
was to recognise that this was an attempt on the part of the SL to ape the
liquidationist project of the WSL. At the same time the Workers Power and the
FIT sympathisers within the IT, both of which had sectarian characterisations
of the USFI, were attacking strongly the proposed fusion of the Italian LOR
with the USFI section, the LCR. The majority of the IT on the other hand were
understandably unenthusiastic about the prospect of joining an organisation
which was shifting rightwards to emulate the worst aspects of the Sean M
project in the Labour Party. Many of them were unconvinced of the viability and
realisability of the LOR’s project in relation to the USFI. It is therefore
unsurprising that no one in the IT or its sympathising WSL candidate members
argued in favour of fusion with the SL. It is also doubtful whether it would
have been a practical proposition for the IT at that point to immediately
embark on a long-term faction struggle in the SL/USFI given its lack of
political coherence.
Revolutionary Organisation
What was needed more
than anything else was for it to go through the process of clarification
outlined in the faction platform in order to achieve such coherence. Only on
the basis of discussing through the issues systematically with the minorities
could any hope of coherence be realised. This was impossible during the period
of the faction struggle because there was simply not the time or space to
conduct the fight against Sean M and systematically examine in detail the
issues which divided the IT: it would have been unrealistic to expect
otherwise. The existence of the minorities complicated the development of a
more positive approach to the SL/USFI. No one wanted to break with the minority
comrades because despite the differences there was a genuine sense of
solidarity which developed from the struggle against Sean M. A choice between
discussing through the difference with these comrades and joining the SL was a
no contest choice: completing a process of clarification and dialogue won hands
down and this necessarily meant discussing the faction’s strategy in relation
to the reconstruction of the FI. It also meant that adopting a policy of fusion
with the SL was necessarily deferred.
The problems could not
just be wished away and neither could the existence of minorities either. The
faction was trying to cope with a vindictive opposition as well as sectarian
internal dissent. If the problems of coherence and lack of time had not been
the problem that they clearly were then a different approach to the SL/USFI
unity proposal might have been appropriate. Retrospectively it is possible to
argue that the faction might have missed out on an opportunity to implement
TILC’s strategy of reconstruction of the FI through a process of struggle
within the SL/USFI. Such a view assumes a level of coherence and unity of
strategy which was not there. A strategy of struggle within the USFI was a relatively
new idea for most IT comrades for which no one - even the TILC sympathisers -
were ready. It was very controversial. The realistic viability of it was
questioned. The refusal of the SL to fuse with the Socialist Group later on
suggests that the IT comrades were right to doubt its practicality in Britain.
Nevertheless it is still arguable that in other circumstances the presentation
of an alternative platform for fusion with the SL/USFI would have been a very
sharp and political response to the unity proposal from Traven et al.
Faction Meetings
It was not
realistically practical however to conjure up an instant platform analysing
points of agreement and disagreement with the SL/USFI at short notice. There
were only a limited number of faction meetings which it was possible to arrange
during the few months of the faction struggle. It has already been noted that
at least one weekend was taken up completely with drawing a faction platform
for the WSL and arguing it through with the Workers Power sympathisers. The
only alternative would have been to exclude bureaucratically the minorities in
the name of instant “coherence” or
refuse to discuss and agree on common ground and a programme and timetable for
attempting to resolve differences. The faction correctly refused to do this.
While an alternative fusion platform might have served to concretise
differences with the minorities the faction correctly chose not to approach
differences in such an ultimatistic “take
it or leave it” way. It chose to go through the process of political
clarification as outlined in the faction platform as part an attempt to win the
comrades to TILC politically.
The April TILC meeting
completed the split in TILC. The WSL opposed the inclusion with a vote of the
Chilean supporters of TILC and finally walked out (in fact, the WSL delegation
walked out in stages), over the resolution from the TAF calling on Alan T. to
fight revisionism in the WSL. Members of the IF were subsequently expelled
because they would not comply with the National Committee resolution of 2 May
which demanded, (inter alia), that they repudiate the written statement of the
IF to the other TILC sections calling for a fight against the revisionism of
the WSL, that they repudiate the action of the IF members present as observers
at the TILC meeting, who refused to accept an instruction from the WSL
delegation to leave the room “as a
declaration that as far as we were concerned that TILC meeting was over”
(that is, that they support the WSL leadership in splitting TILC), and that
they “break with the project of the
RWL/LOR, who are avowedly out to disrupt the WSL”.
The IF had not choice
but to reject this resolution making expulsion inevitable. The national Trotskyism was so blatant and
the grounds for the WSL’s actions so dubious that Alan T. himself has not
subsequently referred to them. The WSL did produce a ‘version’ of events at the
subsequent Lutte Ouvriere fete that was so dishonest that it doctored a
quotation from the original TILC “Declaration
of Intent” (see “Statement of the
Trotskyist International Liaison Committee”, Draft, summer 1983) so as to
remove any reference to the original commitment to international democratic
centralism. This was the only attempt
at political justification of their split. In subsequent discussion Alan T. has
either resorted to slanderous fabrications about the alleged Spartacism of the
RWL in particular or has referred to one part of the (supplementary) resolution
of the WSL National Committee of 2 May 1983 referring to countermanded
subscription cheques of IF members.
These methods of argument, ignoring every political issue involved, is
symptomatic of the old WSL leadership’s
desire to bury the whole history of TILC and their own past “Battle for Trotskyism”.
Guilt-by-National-Association
The allegations of
‘Spartacism’ on one level represented a sort of anti-american,
guilt-by-national-association amalgam, pandering to and bordering on,
inter-imperialist chauvinism. In addition, since the pre-fusion WSL and ex-ICL
both had definite cult-like overtones around a central male leader the
allegations of cultism were somewhat hypocritical. It was nevertheless true
that there were problems of cultism in the RWL (as in most left organisations
to one degree or another). This was something to be struggled against. Within
certain limits however it was not necessarily a big deal and could not be a
criterion for characterising an organisation politically or a legitimate excuse
by the WSL to break from RWL. The problem got worse over subsequent years
however and eventually led to undemocratic practices in the RWL which made
continued struggle impossible. (This led to the split in the RWL and ITC in
1991).
In the meantime the
ex-ICL leadership were attempting to repress the IT in the branches. A
scurrilous document was written by one ICL membership who had been sent down
from the Glasgow branch to Leicester to look for dirt on them. Charges were
laid against an IT comrade in Liverpool in relation to a trivial breach of
discipline in which he had inadvertently revealed to Militant during the course
of a political argument that the position of the ex-ICL leadership in relation
to registration of entrist groups in the Labour Party was similar to Militant’s
line i.e. to cooperate with the register instead of refusing to register as the
pre-fusion WSL comrades and the IT were advocating.
This was a minor breach
of discipline but it was hardly the crime of the century. This led to a
witch-hunt at the second half of the WSL conference against both the Leicester
branch and the Liverpool comrade in which the more rabid ex-ICL members were
arguing for them to be excluded from the conference. This was eventually
rejected by the majority at the conference after a long series of heated
wrangles however. This was indicative of the repressive atmosphere of
witch-hunt in the organisation. Sean M wrote a witch-hunting document in the
Internal Bulletin which suggested that the IT was the “RWL Tendency” and implying that it was a hostile, disloyal entry
operation.
The atmosphere of
witch-hunt in the organisation was designed to demoralise and drive out the IT
comrades. Unsurprisingly some IT comrades were less than enthusiastic about the
prospect of remaining in such a rotten, right wing sect for a further extended
period of time. It was becoming increasingly clear that they were not going to
be allowed to by the witch-hunting and repression from the ex-ICL leadership.
In fact a split in a relatively short period of time was inevitable. Given the
WSL’s national Trotskyist intention to break with TILC, its rapid degeneration,
numerical decline and fragmentation, it was not possible to continue to work
within that organisation for any length of time. There was also a legitimate
concern on the part of the membership that serious work in the broader vanguard
was continually frustrated by membership of the WSL. In all internal faction
work a trade-off has to be made between the struggle within the political
organisation and work in the broader vanguard which is often obstructed by that
work. It would be sectarian not to be concerned about this dilemma.
Serious Commitment
The Leicester branches and the left of the
Nottingham branch had been built through a serious commitment to youth work,
women’s work and black work and involvement in a wide range of struggles - not
just trade union and Labour Party work which were the sum total of practical
work in most WSL branches. They did however suffer like the rest of the
organisation from a lack of systematic education and development of the
membership and this particularly affected newer and young comrades. On the
other hand the very fact that these comrades had taken the stance they had
taken in joining the IT/IF and struggling around the issues which had emerged
testified to the fact that they had a reasonable grasp of at least some
politics.
Nevertheless it is true
that some individuals became extremely alienated from the organisation and had
to be persuaded not to be goaded into a premature split by the ex-ICL
leadership provocations. This was successfully done and not one member broke
ranks by resigning. After the Workers Power comrades resigned at the second
half of the WSL conference in April there was a noticeable air of
disappointment coming from the ex-ICL members as the IF comrades re-entered the
hall after a caucus meeting to retake their seats - their expectations of a
split by the IF following on from the Workers Power split were cruelly dashed!
The IF remained for the remainder of the conference and four members of the
faction were elected to the NC on the faction platform (Pete F, Helen F, Sue E
and Neil J).
No decision was taken
to split at any time prior to the April TILC meeting although for some
comrades, particularly the youth, it was clear that they regarded their
position in the organisation as being untenable and it was clearly only a
matter of time before they would resign. They were only persuaded not to do so
by the collective pressure of the faction. It was implicitly recognised that it
was not possible however to keep a group of youth hanging around indefinitely
in an organisation which was clearly frustrating their every political action.
The IF had great difficulty for
example in persuading some youth with very little money to pay up their dues in
order to get into the second half of the WSL conference. The solution of paying
by check and then reneging on it after the conference was a not particularly
acceptable way of dealing with the question. But the fact that the youth were
persuaded to attend despite their alienated state and through this subterfuge
were persuaded to carry through a struggle at the conference, without resigning
like Workers Power in the middle of the conference when the battle was still
being fought, demonstrated a positive attitude towards completing the political
struggle.
It was clear that at the April TILC
conference after the WSL conference Sean M and possibly Alan T would break with
TILC and most and most IF comrades recognised that this would probably be the
occasion for a provocation on the part of Sean M to expel the IF from the WSL.
It was therefore wholly unremarkable that some IF comrades openly discussed the
likelihood of such a development at the IF caucus meeting at the WSL conference
or elsewhere or that they discussed subsequently how to respond to it in
advance of the TILC meeting. The political nature and internal regime of the
WSl had degenerated to the point where
the position of the faction was untenable.
Prior to the TILC meeting shortly after the April WSL conference Pete F
drew up an “Open Letter to the TILC
comrades from the Internationalist Faction in the Workers Socialist League”
without it being collectively endorsed or even seen by most members of the IF
(which did not meet between the April SSL conference and the April TILC
meeting). It included the following:
“At the time of the December TILC conference the revisionism and
political crisis of the WSL was apparent (not least in the positions of the
ex-ICL leadership on imperialism, permanent revolution, Ireland, Stalinism, and
social democracy), but this had not been codified in the adoption of a series
of political perspectives for the organisation. At our National Conference last
weekend, however, the political degeneration of the WSL reached a new qualitative
level in the adoption of a series of political perspectives for the
organisation based on the revisionist politics of the Sean M leadership.... The
WSL leadership has already given notice of its factional, disruptive intentions
by its attempt to cobble up its own pseudo-international faction on the politics of the Matgamna leadership. ...[The] fight
against revisionism is now a life or death struggle for the TILC itself, since
its majority section has capitulated to the revisionism of Sean M, who now
infects the very heart of TILC in the WSL-based TILC Secretariat.”
There is not one word
here explicitly criticising the old-WSL leadership. Sean M is the only person mentioned by name. There is simply the
implication that the old-WSL leadership had been weak in not fighting Sean M.
If the statement needed to be issued, its real audience was clearly in the WSL,
since the TILC delegations needed no convincing and the call in the conclusion
for the removal of the revisionists from the TILC Secretariat was already an
agreed position of the IF, LOR, and RWL, so this was a serious weakness. To put
a demand on Alan T. to fight ICL revisionism and defend TILC was tactically
correct, but to make no criticism, in a statement such as the “Open Letter”, of the old-WSL
leadership’s politics and method was a political mistake.
Polarised
Having struggled in a special
conference six months earlier and two WSL conferences in the space of three
months with little response from the membership, the IF did not prioritise
continued struggle in the WSL or Class Fighter as it was clear that the blocs
within the organisation were polarised and cut and dried fairly solidly. Even
in the youth organisation the factional lines were drawn sharply as a result of
previous struggle and polarisation of the membership meant that the middle
ground was negligible. However more could have done than was done to orient to
and win elements of the WSL periphery.
The key things in the
post-split period were to implement the programme and timetable on an
international level of political clarification outlined in the faction
platform, to engage the organisation in an area of activity without collapsing
into a mini-mass party approach - this was particularly important for the youth
whose activity had been frustrated by the months of factional struggle. In the
meantime it was necessary to avoid the temptation to set up an organisation
before political coherence within the group had been achieved. A failure to try
and sort out or, at the very least, express, acknowledge, and initiate an
on-going consciously organised discussion of the problems before establishing
an organisation and a paper was bound to lead to the informal expression of the
differences within the organisation in a destructive and chaotic way. This the
proto-WIL and the TILC as a whole refused to do.
7. The experience of the WIL
The workers international League was set up in
the summer of 1983. An initial mood of euphoria lasted no more than two or
three months. It was in this mood of getting down to real work that the WIL
immediately set up a far larger number of commissions than any organisation of
35 could possibly manage to maintain (inevitably most of them never really
functioned). In part, of course, this represented a healthy impulse of youth
comrades to intervene in real struggles, but it represented a continuation of
the one-sided "mass" orientation of the old WSL as well. This could
have been corrected, given a leadership that was attempting to overcome those
contradictions and to clarify the membership through a firm but patient fight
for the perspectives of TILC ad against sectarian as some in the WIL.
Instead,
the leadership compounded the problem, avoiding any struggle on sectarianism,
continuing the methods which held back the political development of
rank-and-file comrades in Leicester and Nottingham and using activism to hold
the organisation together. Thus, the proposal from Chris E. at the first
post-suspension national aggregate that the group should set itself a period of
internal debate and clarification so as to decide its future perspectives, was
brushed aside, receiving no support from any quarter. If not exactly in the form proposed by Chris E., the WIL needed
to concentrate at this stage on a debate on the crucial issues unresolved by
the faction struggle in the WSL - a balance sheet of the old and fused WSL, the
question of the Fourth International, and the perspectives of TILC, and its
overall perspectives for Britain, including the method and tactics of a very
small group.
Chris E.’s proposal
recognised that there was a great deal of confusion and important differences
on these issues. Given the past history
of the IT/IF such a process combined with serious attention to the Marxist education
of the rank and file was the only way the WIL could have developed positively.
For this reason cdes. Sue E and Chris E, who had not been present at the
meeting which decided to launch the WIL, refused to join the WIL and wrote to
the comrades to explain that they thought that they were making a big mistaken
setting up an organisation before attempting to achieve political coherence.
The existence of the FIT sympathiser Mike J and two ex-FIT Chileans with an
extremely sectarian characterisation of the USFI as being “counter-revolutionary” was bound to create political problems for
an organisation such as TILC which was in the process of trying to address
itself positively to reconstructing the FI. This had no effect however. After
some months and no response Sue E and Chris E reversed their decision and
joined the organisation against their better judgement in order to help clarify
issues as best they could.
Workers International News
The alternative from
Colin Morrow was to launch a paper, Workers
International News (WIN). Initially this was presented as a trial issue,
rather than a regular publication. However, the national aggregate at the end
of August, by when the problems within the WIL should have been far clearer,
decided that the paper should become a regular monthly. It is not that
launching a paper was a mistake in itself. A group with thirty-five members and
a strong local base in the east Midlands was capable of producing a regular
journal and should have had such a perspective. The problem was that the paper
was a substitute for the theoretical and political development of the WIL, and
consequently there was no discussion on the role and character of the paper.
Though it was, on balance, a promising example of revolutionary journalism, it
reflected the outlook of the IT/IF/ WIL in its very marked, one-sided activist
emphasis. This was brought out in the “Who
We Are” statement in the first issue of the paper, which combined this with
a quite open sectarianism expressed in the one-sided way it attacked the WSL’s
liquidationist orientation to the Labour Party:
“We are a group of revolutionary socialists, some of us active for twenty
years, who have been in the past in a variety of left groups in Britain. Until
recently, most of us were members of the Workers Socialist League (WSL), a
group which, like many others, focuses its main attention on debating with and
trying to change the Labour Party. We rejected that view of politics. In the
WSL we fought to defend a specific view of revolutionary politics, one that
sees the working class and its day-to-day struggles as central to the
development of socialism and sees Marxism as the weapon of real working-class
politics. Above all, we stressed the internationalist character of
working-class struggle. In our view, the struggles of women and men workers in
Britain and Europe are the same, common class struggles as those of the
millions of other workers throughout the world....
We are, therefore, consistent anti-imperialists. We support the struggles
of black workers in South Africa against the reactionary apartheid/ police
regime; of the workers and peasants in El Salvador, Chile, and throughout Latin
America against the military juntas and their imperialist backers; of the
Palestinian masses against the racist, Zionist state of Israel; of women,
blacks, and gays fighting the special oppression (which is fostered and
cultivated by the capitalist state to divide workers amongst themselves.)
In every conflict we side with the oppressed against the bosses, the
bankers, and their military apparatus. From each of these struggles we draw our
confidence and our understanding of the immediate tasks of workers and students
in the struggle for working-class power. But, above all, from these we draw
what we believe is the inescapable
conclusion that the answer to all these problems facing workers lies not in
reforming this or that bit of the system, but in workers revolution....
As the Internationalist Faction in the WSL we fought to preserve this
revolutionary internationalist view and to convince others that the issues
facing workers were (not) the debates in the Labour Party but the real living
issues of closures, cuts, bad housing, unemployment, falling living standards,
racial attacks, police harassment, and the oppression in capitalist [sic] of
women, blacks, and gays. That these were the questions any serious socialist in
the Labour Party would be tackling. And that the solution to these lay not in
some backroom discussion club but out on the council estates, in the hospitals,
and nurseries threatened with closure, fighting for the class interests of
workers. Only from these struggles will a real working-class leadership, made
up of not just loyal trade union militants but tireless class fighters,
conscious of their goal, be built.
A leadership... capable of
creating a directly accountable workers’ government against the bosses to smash
their power. Regrettably, such a revolutionary perspective was not welcomed
within the WSL. In May of this year we were expelled by the WSL leadership as
the rest of the WSL members prepared to trek off to preach support for Labour’s
ineffectual “socialist” policies. Internationally, however, we gained a better
response. The groups affiliated to the Trotskyist Internationalist Liaison Committee
supported our fight for an unambiguous working-class revolutionary perspective,
and we have now joined their ranks.... And, finally, introducing the paper: We
also feel that you will feel that you have something to contribute, that WIN is
a paper you could write for because it isn’t full of university-style
lectures....” (“The WIL - Who We Are”, Workers International News
no. 1, September 1983, p. 8)
It has been necessary
to quote this statement at considerable length because it encapsulates some of
the problems which the WIL inherited from the old-WSL left wing, derived from
its one-sided ‘mass’ line on the role of the Transitional Programme . This
problem had also been expressed in the IT platform with its talk of a paper
addressing “the problems faced by these
militants, in a language they can understand, providing an explanation and an
understanding of their experience”. It demonstrates very clearly indeed
some of the dangers of this whole approach. The agitational approach, the
emphasis on their experience and their language note the implicit
anti-intellectualism of the comments about ‘backroom discussion clubs’ and
‘university-style lectures’ means in practice avoiding ‘difficult’ issues.
The most glaring aspect
of the statement is its attitude to the history of TILC and its internal
struggle. In fact, the Fourth International and Trotskyism (except in the title
of TILC) are not mentioned at all. Despite the talk of ‘internationalism’, the
actual international struggle the IT/IF had been involved in was simply
ignored. There was not a mention of international democratic centralism. The
struggle in TILC is reduced to support for the Internationalist Faction (by
implication, for the activist, economist, and sectarian sentiments in the
statement). The message is driven home in the most misleading fashion, by the
remark that “We have now joined their
ranks”.
Quite amazingly, the
list of examples of international struggles the WIL supports contains no
reference to Ireland, and, despite the talk of being ‘consistent
anti-imperialists’ there was no mention of the Malvinas War. Moreover, there is
not one word anywhere about Stalinism, either in relation to the deformed and
degenerated workers’ movement and national liberation struggles in the capitalist
world, or the specific disputes in the WSL. The serious dangers of economism
come out clearly in two respects. Firstly, with regard to special oppression,
there is a seriously misleading, narrow and one-sided account of its origin and
role.
The emphasis on the
capitalist state ignores the role of capitalist society as a whole and the
needs of the capitalist system of production (it is understandable that a brief
statement could not say anything about the precapitalist origins of special
oppression) and thus concludes that special oppression is simply a device to
divide the working class. This is worthy of Socialist
Worker. So, too, is the second and more fundamental consequence of
economism: three times the statement repeats the revisionist view, roundly
attacked by Lenin in What Is to Be Done,
that revolutionary Marxism is derived from the experience of the class
struggle. The fifth paragraph states,
first, that our understanding of immediate tasks (not to mention our
‘confidence’) is drawn from the struggles of the masses and, second, that our
understanding of the need for proletarian revolution comes from these
struggles. The idea that our confidence is derived from the experience of
struggles contains more than a hint of the “forward movement of the working
classes” - and presumably from the experience of defeats and retreats we draw
our demoralisation!! The eighth paragraph (the seventh quoted) compounds the
previous statements with the declaration that revolutionary working-class
leadership can only be built “from these
struggles”.
An Accommodation
Of course, the WIL
‘knew’ that the position that Marxism comes from the experience of the working
class is incorrect. The WIL leadership did not ‘hold’ this revisionist view.
But their practice and outlook, their failure to tackle and resolve the
contradictory character of the old-WSL and the roots of its degeneration (the
latter done only in the most general and empiricist fashion) compelled them to
give expression to such views. It was objectively, and to some extent
consciously, an accommodation to the present level of consciousness of workers.
It expressed the gap in the WIL between the ‘intellectual leadership’ and the
‘practical workers’ and the role of the former in perpetuating that gap.
The comments on the
Labour Party show, as does most of the statement, that telling half the truth
is a way of stating something that is totally misleading. Once again most of
these comments could have come form the pages of Socialist Worker. We are told that the “debates in the Labour Party” are not the real issues for workers
but “closures, cuts,...”, etc., as though the Labour Party is not only too real
an issue for the working class, as though it does not pervade its response to
all the “real, living issues”, as
though the Labour Party does not have organic links with the working class
established over nearly a century.
Again, it is not that
the WIL held SWP-type positions on the Labour Party; the IT/IF had produced
Colin Morrow’s document, “On the Labour
Party”, and the WIL held a full session on the Labour Party and Labour
Party work at its summer school in July. The problem was rather that its
adherence to the economist aspects of the old-WSL politics involved a de facto
sectarian abstentionist approach to the Labour Party. The result was that in
practice the WIL did not get beyond the old WSL’s confused positions on the
Labour Party, a situation which contained the dangers not only of sectarianism
but of a relapse into liquidationism.
Inevitably, given this outlook,
major political issues were overlooked and there was no reference to
theoretical work - a fairly general problem of the WIL which was reflected in
the overwhelmingly agitational character of all four issues of Workers International News. Since reference
has been made to Lenin’s struggle against economism, it is worth quoting his
remarks on these questions with reference to the party press:
“We have before us two publishers’ announcements. One, ‘The Programme of
the Periodical Organ of the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad -
(Rabochoye Dyelo)’ (reprint from no. 1
of (Rabocheye Dyelo), and the other, the ‘Announcement of the Resumption
of the Publications of the Emancipation
of Labour Group’. Both are dated 1899, when the “crisis of Marxism” had long
been under discussion. And what do we find? We seek in vain in the first
announcement for any reference to this phenomenon, or a definite statement of
the position the new organ intends to adopt on this question. Not a word is said about theoretical work
and the urgent tasks that now confront it.... The other announcement, on the
contrary, points first of all to the declining interest in theory in recent
years, imperatively demands “vigilant attention to the theoretical aspect of
the revolutionary movement of the proletariat”, and calls for “ruthless
criticism of the Bernsteinian and other antirevolutionary tendencies” in our
movement.” (Lenin, What Is to Be Done, in Collected Works, vol. 5, 1977, p. 368)
Of course, it may be
argued, more theoretical material could have been produced through another
medium such as a magazine or a series of pamphlets, given the limited size of
the paper. That would not in any way justify the political character of the “Who We Are” statement.
But, in any case, the
WIL at no point produced or considered other mediums for more theoretical
material, nor was it reasonable for a group of that size at that stage in its
development to do both. What we are concerned with is the whole orientation and
character of the WIL, the political choices it was making and the reasons for
them.
The an accommodation
and confusion on the Labour Party was in fact illustrated elsewhere in the
first issue of Workers International News.
It emerged in the editing of TG’s article on the general election, “Historic Defeat for Labour”. The title
itself is a little misleading, labelling a single electoral defeat as a
‘historic defeat’. The article argues that “Labour
faces a crisis of historic proportions”, which is somewhat different.
Further, following a discussion in the London branch of the WIL it was clear to
the author that this point, the difference between an electoral defeat for the
Labour Party and a major defeat for the working class in action needed to be
made clear. This point was conveyed to Colin Morrow, but the result was a new
opening paragraph starting with the bald statement that “the election defeat of the Labour Party was not a defeat for the
working class”, without any clarification.
The article presents
the WIL’s correct analysis that the electoral defeat had undermined the
bureaucrats’ ability to use the electoral illusions of Labourism among the most
class-conscious workers to hold back struggles, at the very point at which the
Tories had to build on their electoral success to secure sharp victories over
the major sections of the working class in action and to implement the as yet
unused anti-union laws brought in between 1979 and 1983. This analysis was
unique to the WIL at the time: thus the article in WIN points out that:
“It was no coincidence that a list of pit closures was announced within
days of the election. The government wants a showdown with the NUM as a
symbolic front line of the trade unions.”
However, the headline
and opening sentence create the impression that the article as whole is writing
off the Labour Party. And there is no sufficiently clear argument in the body
of the article to refute this impression, which is further compounded by the
ambiguous editing of the penultimate paragraph. In its original form, this
paragraph had presented a statement, in very general terms only, on the need
for an anti-capitalist struggle by socialists in the Labour Party. This was
changed in the editing by the alteration of the opening sentence to read:
Socialists in and out of the Labour
Party will only do that [develop policies for the
coming struggles] when they challenge the very right of the capitalists to make
a profit. (Emphasis added)
The bolded phrase
introduced a question mark over the future significance of the Labour Party and
the importance of work in the Labour Party.
The point of this
discussion is not, of course, to debate who did what to whose article, but to
indicate the very real problems, confusion, and sectarianism over the Labour
Party. This was illustrated even more importantly by the front-page article in
the same issue, on the Labour Party leadership election. This article opposes
giving critical support to the Labour left candidate, Eric Heffer, and takes an
abstentionist position. The important point is not whether the WIL should or
should not have given tactical, critical support to Heffer. It is the extreme
confusion in the WIL on this issue and the totally sectarian character of the
arguments against supporting Heffer.
“...he is trying to exploit the popularity of the left’s democracy
campaign to further his own flagging
career. ...He does not represent anything which goes beyond the limitations of social democracy and on this basis we do not give him our
support. Clearly the race for the Labour leadership is a careerist race and it’s a distraction from the real race, the
one to end capitalist exploitation. None of the candidates has any solution to
the crisis of capitalism. Led by any of them, the Labour Party would fight on a capitalist programme and not even
begin to break out of that framework.” (Emphasis added)
The criticisms of
Heffer are correct, and it was important that they should have been made, but
not as reasons for refusing critical support. The bolded passages are arguments
against ever giving critical support to reformist politicians in any
circumstances.
The basis for the line
of abstention in the leadership election was the one-sided analysis of the
Labour left which had emerged in internal discussions in the WIL, including
especially the confused discussion at the aggregate which took this particular
decision. The article is correct in recognising that the Labour left had
suffered major set-backs and had accommodated to right-wing witch-hunting and
electoralism through 1982 and 1983. And it is also correct in opposing the
general view of most of the liquidationist currents that there would be a
significant revival of the left in the wake of the election defeat and a sharp
struggle against an increased witch-hunt. But the majority of the WIL It
overstated the extent and speed of the rout of the Labour left and as a result
discounted the need for any witch-hunt in the Labour Party. It thus concluded
that Heffer’s campaign had no significance as a focus of left resistance to the
bureaucrats lining up behind Kinnock to begin the necessarily slow process of
dismantling the constitutional and policy gains of the left reformists between
1979 and 1981.
It is no surprise that
Workers Power were to accuse us of writing off the Labour Party as a force in
the working class!! Of course, the WIL had not done that, but its confusion, a
direct product of the crisis of the WSL, was increasingly finding expression in
such sectarian tendencies. The dangers of these tendencies were quite correctly
exposed in a document written by Dale A. and AS, “For a Change of Line on the Labour Leadership Elections”, which
points out the opportunist implications of the sectarian reasons for refusing
to support Heffer. Noting that the WIL and the (WIN) article recognise that it
was right to support Benn for deputy leader, critically, in 1981, the authors
point out:
“If comrades read the paragraph in the (WIN) article, they will see that
it heavily implies that Benn did go beyond social democracy in some sense. We
cannot accept this.” (Dale A.
and AS, “For a Change of Line on the
Labour Leadership Elections”, WIL Internal Bulletin, 7, September 1983)
However, the
liquidationist dangers of the state of confusion were also demonstrated by the
subsequent evolution of some of those who were most strongly opposed to both
articles in WIN, no. 1 (Dale A., AM, Mike J., later joined to some extent by
NJ), who tended to have a mechanical view of the relationship between the
Labour Party and the working class, carried over from the confused positions of
the old-WSL rather than the politics of the ICL. They tended to see electoral
defeats and victories for the Labour Party as defeats and victories for the
working class in a sort of automatic, linear relationship. Consequently they
moved back to seeing the Labour Party and LPYS as, in practice, the principal
focus and arena for the political work of Trotskyists.
They showed this by
their support at the December WIL conference for a resolution stating that the
LPYS should be the focus of the group’s youth work, the evolution of the later
rump WIL of Dale A. and Mike J. around Red
Youth, Mike J.’s decision to joint Militant, and the interventions of AM in
the discussions following the split in the WRP. This was the other side of a
totally undialectical method from their extreme sectarianism on the issue of
the Fourth International. This was demonstrated by their view that the USFI is
counter-revolutionary and their fundamental hostility to the perspectives of
TILC.
This issue had been
present from the origin of the Internationalist Tendency and had never been
properly addressed. It was in fact to become the central explosive issue in the
WIL. The failure of the WIL leadership to take up a serious struggle against
this sectarianism was a crucial factor in the organisation’s rapid
disintegration.
The position was
initially advanced by Mike J. and was shared by Jan H. and a number of
supporters in the Odense branch of the Danish TAF (which was effectively split
into Copenhagen and Odense groups around this issue by the summer of
1983). During the summer and autumn,
Mike J., supported by the Chilean comrade, Ricardo S., won over a number of
youth comrades, including Dale A. and AM. The positions of this group were
derived from the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. This group (now dissolved
and not to be confused with the FIT/US, one of the US sympathising sections of
the USFI) was never, despite its name, an international democratic centralist
tendency.
It was a federation of
national sections which had split from the Lambertists early in 1979. Apart
from the Workers League of Palestine (within which there was, in any case, a
tendency which supported the political positions of TILC), these were all in
Latin America. The principal groups were the POR/Masas (POR/Lora) of Bolivia
and Political Obrera (now Partido Obrero) of Argentina. The FIT had engaged in
some discussions with TILC up to and even during the Malvinas conflict. The WSL
had sabotaged these discussions (for example, the proposal for a joint
discussion bulletin) in order to contain the ‘internal’ dispute over the war.
National-Sectarian Trotskyism
The FIT was clearly on
the left of those international tendencies identifying with Trotskyism. The
POR/Masas has a history of national-sectarian Trotskyism but has genuine and
important roots in the Bolivian working class established over a long period.
Both the POR/Masas and the PO are relatively sizeable organisations. The
involvement in mass struggles has tended to counterbalance sectarian tendencies
(for example, on the USFI) and the development of potentially opportunist
positions (for example, the line that the anti-imperialist united front should
include the parties of the national bourgeoisie). Thus PO in particular has continued
to play overall a positive and healthy role in the Argentine class struggle.
These points must be borne in mind when describing the group headed by Mike J.
and Dale A. What this current identified with was purely and simply the
sectarian positions of the FIT.
During the first two or
three months of the WIL’s existence (from the split to the TILC summer school),
as during the life of the IT/IF, there was virtually no internal debate on
these questions. Only Chris E. challenged Mike J.’s line. Mike J attacked the
Italian LOR and their proposed fusion with the USFI group, the LCR, during an
informal discussion with Chris E in Liverpool in May 1983. Mike J was embracing
more and more strongly the sectarianism exemplified by the FIT’s
characterisation of the USFI as being counter-revolutionary. Chris E defended
the LOR, but was unable to shift him politically. A political argument ensued
which was never subsequently resolved. This more than anything reinforced Chris
E’s view that political coherence had to be established before establishing an
organisation. While this had been impossible during the factional struggle, it
was now both possible and essential to sort out these questions before making
any lasting organisational proposals.
Colin Morrow, who was
aware of the problems and dangers of this sectarianism avoided any struggle. He
treated it on a ‘liberal’ basis as one of a number of issues to be looked at
eventually. Thus, while Mike J. circulated FIT material in the WIL, Morrow
agreed to a meeting, open to all members, with a representative of PO in
Europe, without informing TILC. Of course, it was perfectly proper for Mike J.
to be able to circulate FIT material, argue FIT positions, and get the
leadership to organise meetings to discuss these issues. That was not the
problem. The problem was political: the WIL leadership as a whole did not
examine or discuss these questions (there was never one single discussion of
these positions on the WIL National Committee), there was no attempt to fight
this sectarianism and fight for the perspectives of TILC. Colin Morrow, who
was at this time secretary of TILC, cultivated a ‘soft’, rather opportunist
relationship with Mike J., giving members the clear impression that the dispute
in Merseyside was a personality clash. He did not inform TILC of the
discussions with the PO representative.
Inevitably this blew up
in the face of the leadership, seriously confusing a totally unprepared
membership. The scene was the 1983 TILC summer school and the immediate
oc-casion for the explosion was the LOR’s proposal for fusion with the LCR as a
TILC tendency. At the National Committee meeting on the first night of the
summer school Ricardo S. launched a strong attack on the fusion proposal. The
project of LOR entry into the LCR had in fact been explained by Franco Grisolia
at the 1982 WSL summer school but had never been discussed in the IT/IF/WIL.
The LOR national aggregate of September 1982 had adopted a resolution on fusion
with the LCR as a TILC faction which stated clearly:
“By joining the LCR we aim at developing, in the process of building the
LCR, a political fight for its regeneration against centrist revisionism, with
the objective of acquiring leadership of the same organisation and of bringing
it to join the international organisation of consistent Trotskyism.” (Documents of the Discussion between LOR and LCR/USFI on
Fusion Perspective)
In its approaches to
the LCR, the LOR had been completely clear in its assessments of the LCR and
the USFI and in presenting them-selves as a section of TILC and explaining the
TILC’s analysis of the crisis of the Fourth International - hence the
resistance of the LCR to the LOR proposal and the initial breakdown of talks
(it took the LOR two and a half years to effect their fusion with the LCR). The
opposition to the fusion on the WIL National Committee seized on one phrase in
the LOR’s October 1982 letter to the LCR national committee: the ‘positive
role’ of the LCR. The actual passage reads as follows:
“...Such a proposal should be understood in the sense of the LOR joining
the LCR as a faction, maintaining its own character of section of TILC. The
reason for such a decision is to be identified in our recognition of the
positive role the LCR is playing in the class struggle, as well as of the
potentialities the construction of LCR as a Trotskyist organisation implies for
the common aim, that is, building a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party. Our
own organisation came to this assessment on the basis of overall political
evaluation of LCR activities in the present situation of the workers’ movement,
beyond any occasional tactical disagreements or agreements. This of course does
not rule out a series of political differences on the national field nor major
differences we have with the USFI sections....”
In the December 1982
letter to the LCR the LOR uncompromisingly describes the USFI as:
“...an unstable bloc of two factions, each semi-independently carrying
out its own quite distinct politics.” (Documents of the Discussion between LOR
and LCR/USFI on Fusion Perspective)
The pro-FIT element seized on this single phrase because it was their only ‘evidence’ of alleged liquidationism (they were in fact opposed to entry into the USFI per se). However, it illustrated their own sectarianism, their failure to recognise the highly contradictory character of the crisis of the Fourth International, let alone to look at the specific situation in Italy and the develop