One Fifth of WSL Walks Out, Fuses with the iStThe Rebirth of British TrotskyismWorkers Vanguard, No. 200, 7 April 1978LONDONWhen 24 supporters of the Trotskyist Faction (TF) walked out of the Workers Socialist League (WSL) at the WSLs 18-19 February second annual conference they left declaring their opposition to the central leaderships "Pabloite attachment to the Labour Party, their capitulationist attitude to nationalism, and in particular Irish nationalism, their all-pervading economism and minimalism and their parochialism" ("Statement of the Trotskyist Faction," WV No. 194, 24 February). Its aim, said the TF, was to struggle for a British section of a recreated Fourth International. The first step toward this goal was the rapid merger of forces with the London Spartacist Group (LSG), at a conference over the 4-5 March weekend, to form the Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) as a sympathising organisation of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt). This fusion is one of the largest and most important in the 15-year history of the Spartacist tendency. The new organisation already has close on 50 members and a presence both in London and the Midlands. By its comprehensive Leninist programme and clear internationalist perspectives the SL/B is exercising a strong attraction on remaining dissident elements inside the WSL. The same will soon prove true as well toward the numerous small centrist organisations, which will find in the Spartacist League a solidly programmatically based unityin striking contrast to the short-lived, politically promiscuous unnatural couplings which pass for fusions in the highly fragmented British Trotskyoid milieu. The factional struggle in the WSL and the fusion with the TF also vindicate in a powerful manner the iSts policy of revolutionary regroupment. Recognising that many valuable militants are presently to be found in various pseudo-revolutionary organisations, we have fought to regroup the best of these potential cadres for the nucleus of an international vanguard party. It was essentially a process of splits and fusions, both in the U.S. and internationally, that enabled the Spartacist League/U.S. to break out of the national isolation imposed by our expulsion from Gerry Healys 1966 International Committee (IC) conference. But for the WSL leadership around Alan Thornett any polemical combat within the left is "petty-bourgeois"; consequently the WSL has been unable to develop any coherent perspective for international work at all. The goal of our regroupment policy has always been to decisively split the cadre of centrist organisations, in the first instance the Pabloist pretenders to Trotskyism who are the principal obstacle to reforging the Fourth International. This is exactly what has happened in the WSL. Just over four years ago Workers Vanguard sent a reporter to cover the British miners strike. At that time the Spartacist tendency had just made its first isolated recruits in Europe. Only at the end of 1975 were we able to establish a Spartacist group in London, and it took nearly two years of dogged propagandistic activity to achieve the break-through represented by the fusion with the Trotskyist Faction. But today sections of the iSt outside the U.S. make up over one-third of the total membership of the tendency internationally. Bob Pennington, a leader of the International Marxist Group (IMGBritish affiliate of the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International [USec]), remarked last autumn that those who proclaim themselves Trotskyists will have to choose between two "mainstreams," the USec and the iSt. By this he undoubtedly meant to suggest that the "re-united" USec would be "where the action is." But the WSL split and subsequent formation of the SL/B, establishing the iSt as a direct organisational competitor with the USec on the British terrain, has certainly given no comfort to Pennington et a1. It indicates that there are those on the British "far left" who have had enough of chasing after whatever is popular and want to get on with the business of constructing a democratic-centralist, authentically Trotskyist International. As for the workerist WSL, in its main reply to the TF documents the Thornett group initially referred to the oppositionists as "a small part of our movement." From the tone of their subsequent public comments it is evident that they were surprised that nearly two dozen members took the step of walking out of the Workers Socialist League. The WSL will not easily recover from the loss of two National Committee members, three members of the Socialist Press editorial board, three out of four members of its Irish Commission, and several regional and local organisers. With the loss of one fifth of its active membership, the WSL reverts back to its original regional limitationsthe celebrated car fraction at British Leylands Cowley plant in Oxford, the London grouping and a handful of shaky members in Yorkshire. Moreover, Thornetts response to the challenge presented by the Trotskyist Faction was positively pathetic, both before and after the split. Perhaps sensing that he is at his weakest debating politics, Thornett simply waved his Cowley credentials as a talisman to ward off all attacks. In his hour-and-a-half opening remarks to the WSL conference he attended only briefly to the programmatic issues which were about to rip 20 percent of the participants away from him. His allegation that the TF members were only interested in "exciting politics" was hardly an indictment in view of the WSLs apolitical glorification of the "daily grind." And the failure of the majority to present any political perspective certainly contributed to the fact that a relatively large number of the TF supporters were younger rank-and-filers. Rarely has a centrist leadership presided over the coming apart of its organisation so meekly. The WSL from Womb toPrior to the split of the Trotskyist Faction the WSL was already an organisation in deep trouble, its haphazard "international work" come to naught and its domestic prospects cloudy at best. As the TF stated in its founding document:
Yet only three years ago Healys expulsion of the Thornett grouping from his Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) made a big splash among ostensible Trotskyists throughout the world. Thornetts orthodox-sounding defence of the Transitional Programme, his well-publicised industrial militancy and opposition to Healys sectarian practices promised to be an attractive combination. What brought about his demise? In the mid-1960s a large part of the leadership of the shop stewards committee at the Cowley assembly plant (then Morris Motors), including Alan Thornett who had been a Communist Party trade unionist, were personally recruited by Gerry Healy to the Socialist Labour League (SLLpredecessor of the WRP). "The Cowley Fraction" was Healys pride and joy and the major vehicle for the expression of his deformed brand of Trotskyism in the labour movement. But the first time Thornett crossed his godfather, Healy responded with vicious Mafia tactics, including physical intimidation. The Thornett group, including the Cowley fraction was summarily expelled in December 1974 and a few months later became the core of the Workers Socialist League. The iSt assessed the split tentatively at the time: "At present the WSL is most clearly defined negatively . While its future programmatic course is not definitely predictable, the WSLs failure to develop the internal struggle against Healy much beyond the democracy issue, and its rejection of Healyite ultra-leftism while maintaining some of the most rightist-revisionist aspects of the SLL/WRP, would seem to define the WSL as a split to the right from a badly deformed and characteristically English-centered version of fake Trotskyism." The Trotskyist Faction, writing three years later, confirms this diagnosis: "The WSLs break from Healyite maximalism was, in the final analysis, a break towards economism and minimalism" (INDORP). While still inside the WRP, Thornetts opposition (centred in Oxford) had linked up with another dissident clot in London at whose head stood Alan Clinton. Clinton was noteworthy for his rightist grumblings at the WRPs decision to stand candidates against Labour during the 1974 general elections, while Thornett was more interested in resurrecting the transitional demand of workers control of production. The politically heterogeneous lash-up between Clinton and Thornett was an early expression of indifference to programme which in the WSL was later to harden into purposeful confusionism. The combination of the glamour of an influential, although localised, industrial fraction and its claim to defend orthodox Trotskyism attracted to the WSL in its early period a series of leftward moving groups. The most importaint source for these regroupments came from former members of Tony Cliffs International Socialists (I.S.now Socialist Workers Party [SWP]) who were breaking from the I.S. social-democratic workerism in the direction of Trotskyism. The majority of these elementsout of which was to crystalise the core of the later Trotskyist Factionpassed briefly through the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG). The RCG at its formation in mid-1974 had also declaimed loudly on the importance of programme. The initial components of this group originated in the Revolutionary Opposition, expelled from the I.S. in 1973, and had seen at first hand the consequences of a mindless worship of spontaneity which produced an organization whose net caught everything and held nothing. They were joined in the first months of 1975 by nine members of the heterogeneous Left Opposition (also formerly of the I.S.), which had split in four directions in December 1974. Iconoclastically dismissing all past struggles to construct the Fourth International, the RCG under its guru David Yaffe was principally an academic debating society organised as study groups to write a new programme. Lacking a shared programme yet requiring a minimum of common activity, the RCG was easy prey for a trio of supporters of the American SWP who elaborated a regimen of single-issue campaigns on women, on Ireland, solidarity work with Chile and subsequently South Africa. In reaction against this reformist single-issuism and attracted by Thornetts credentials as a workers leader, roughly a third of the RCG left to join the WSL in 1975. Even Alan Thornett, whose political horizons do not generally extend far beyond the shop floor at Cowley, recognised the importance of the recruitment of this layer of cadres, which enabled the WSL to establish branches in Birmingham and Coventry in the West Midlands and in Liverpool. Speaking at a WSL Midlands Aggregate meeting in 1976 Thornett accurately termed this recruitment "the biggest gain the WSL has ever made." This would seem to fly in the face of Thornetts denigration of any orientation toward other left groups, except that the WSL leadership did almost nothing to achieve this regroupment. the London Spartacist GroupIn late 1975 the iSt established in London a small group of experienced cadres, thus fulfilling a long-held aspiration to begin systematic work in Britain. In addition to its intrinsic strategic importance, the presence of Healys SLL/WRP makes Britain one of the centres of ostensibly orthodox Trotskyist groupings. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the SLLs theoretical journal, Labour Review, had begun to elaborate the struggle against Pabloist liquidationism which the American SWP had grievously neglected after the 1953 split in the Fourth International and which it was abandoning altogether by capitulating to the popularity of Castroism. The SLLs 1960 document, "World Prospects for Socialism," moreover, was seen by the Revolutionary Tendency (RTforerunner of the SL/U.S.) of the SWP as an articulation of its own anti-Pabloist views. The RT and later the Spartacist group sought to make common cause with Healy, but were blocked by the little despots insistence on squelching the slightest dissent (as Thornett was to discover years later). Following our bureaucratic expulsion at the 1966 London conference of the IC, Britain remained sealed off to the Spartacist tendency for some time. Beginning in 1975 the London Spartacist Group set out to systematically probe and polemicise with the myriad of groups and grouplets which populate the asteroid belt to the left of the centrist Pabloist IMG and the left-reformist "state capitalist" I.S./SWP. The LSGs fight for political clarity and authentic Leninism frequently upset the cosy chuminess of the British Trotskyoid left. Many were shocked to hear a group which refused to succumb to the charms of the left Labourite "club," to embrace the green nationalism of the IRA or to go along with the charade of phony "mass work" which are common denominators in the intensely parochial and workerist "far left." There were plenty of evidences of crisis in the left-of-the-Communist Party "family." The I.S. had been declining visibly from the time of the general election in February 1974 and suffered a haemorrhaging of cadre in 1975. The WRP had gone off the rails altogether, spending most of its efforts in slandering Joe Hansen (of the American SWP) and more recently in praising Libyas fanatical Muslim dictator Qaddafi. The IMG could never decide how many factions it had, oscillating up towards five, nor whether it would be super-Mandelite or a bridge to the Hansenites. Among the smaller groups the RCG was on the road to becoming a cult, which is currently tailing after the geriatric Moscow-loyal Stalinists. Sean Matgamnas Workers Fight (ejected from the Cliffites in 1971) had just joined with the Workers Power group (a 1975 vintage I.S. expulsion) to form the International-Communist League (I-CL), while covering up differences on the Russian question (Workers Power is state capitalist), the Labour Party and Ireland. The Workers Fight/Workers Power marriage of convenience came apart shortly before its first anniversary, having discovered unbridgeable disagreements over Ireland and the Labour Party. The WSL was in many respects the most serious of the split-offs from the "far-left" Big Three (SWP, IMG and WRP). The harsh contradiction between its claims to Trotskyist orthodoxy and its economist practice clearly labeled the WSL as a group heading for an explosion. And it was initially open to political discussion with other avowed anti-Pabloists. Its October 1975 document, "Fourth InternationalProblems and Tasks," sought to reevaluate the history of the post-war Trotskyist movement and to serve as a basis for discussions with other tendencies, "especially those expelled from the IC" (published in the "Trotskyism Today" supplements to Socialist Press Nos. 21-23). The iSt responded to this invitation with a letter (dated 17 June 1976) pointing to the WSLs softness toward social democracy and focusing on our analysis of the formation of the deformed workers states (particularly the methodologically key case of Cuba), as well as reviewing our relations with Healys IC. The letter also attacked the workerist view that the degeneration of the IC or any tendency could simply be ascribed to its petty-bourgeois composition. Although this was the only reply to the WSLs offer of discussions, the iSt letter was not circulated even to the NC for over a year. However, the aggressive propaganda work of the LSG made it impossible to simply seal off the WSL against Spartacism. The first fruit of these efforts was an amendment from the Liverpool branch to the international resolution at the WSLs first annual conference in December 1976. Although flawed by its attachment to WSL workerism and hence hostile to the iSts regroupment perspective, it nonetheless demanded recognition of the principled approach to the Cuban Revolution taken by the Revolutionary Tendency in the American SWP. This was clearly counter-posed to the Thornett leaderships position that there had existed only two views on Cuba: the Pabloists enthusing for Castro and Healys myopic denial that a revolution had taken place at all. The leadership urged the conference delegates to reject the amendment, not because it was wrong (in fact they claimed to agree with it), but to prevent the resolution from turning into a book. But when the membership voted to include this amendment, the only successful motion against the platform during the proceedings, Thornett and his lieutenants simply buried it, so that the resolution as amended never saw the light of day. Although this issue had no immediate consequence, it was indicative of the WSL leaders frenzied reaction to anything smacking of Spartacism. The CDLM and the Lib-Lab CoalitionHowever, the real catalyst for the amorphous left-wing opposition which was to result in the Trotskyist Faction was the WSLs intervention in the British class struggle. A challenge to the Thornett leadership took shape around objections to the WSL-created Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement (CDLM) and to its failure to place the government question at the centre of WSL trade-union work. This failure was particularly glaring after the formation of the Labour Partys parliamentary coalition with the Liberals in March 1977. In response to the reappearance of this British version of the popular front for the first time since World War II, the international Spartacist tendency called for "a policy of conditional non-support to Labour in upcoming elections unless and until they repudiate coalitionism" ("Break the Liberal/Labour Coalition in Britain," WV No. 152, 8 April 1977). But even though Callaghan & Co. had suppressed even the organisational independence of the Labour Party by openly tying it to the bourgeois Liberalswith, moreover, the acquiescence of every single "left" MP [member of parliament] from Tony Benn and Michael Foot on downthe Workers Socialist League simply concluded that the "lefts" "should have demanded and themselves set up a new leadership based on socialist policies" (Socialist Press, 25 March 1977). Within the Workers Socialist League there was dissatisfaction with the persistently apolitical character of the WSLs trade-union work. A first document, "The WSL and the Governmental Crisis" ([WSL] Internal Bulletin No. 19, 25 May 1977), submitted by Green, Kellett and Piercey, attempted to programmatically generalise the objections: "Although the toolroom strike objectively challenged the Social Contract and posed the removal of the anti-working class Labour Government, the consciousness of the leadership thrown up in the struggle, the subjective factor, did not correspond to those objective tasks. Although the WSL alone recognised that the toolroom strike precipitated a major governmental crisis, Socialist Press failed to make the question of government a central programmatic issue during the strike." At this time Green-Kellett-Piercey had not decisively broken from the WSLs accommodation to Labourism, and were searching to render the perennial Thornett slogan, "Make the Lefts Fight," revolutionary. They called on the WSL to "place demands on the lefts to support the [toolroom] strike against the Social Contract and remove the right wing [of the parliamentary Labour Party]." The Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement, founded in 1976, was an uninspired imitation of the WRP/SLLs All Trades Union Alliance. In practice it turned out to be nothing but a forum for tedious recounting of shop-floor struggles. As it became clear that the rank and file would not flock to the CDLM simply because it put "democracy" in its name, it soon turned into an arena for mutual accommodation between the WSL and other left groups (specifically the IMG and I-CL). Most importantly, the platform of this pan-union propaganda bloclike Alan Thornetts campaign for president of the Transport and General Workers Uniondid not seek to break the mass of British workers from their Labourite traditions and consciousness. The CDLM programme comes down to opposition to wage controls and spending cuts and calls for more democracy in the unions. It even limits the call for nationalisation to those firms threatened with bankruptcy or large-scale redundancies. It does not contain any demand for the expropriation of all capitalist industry, thus placing the CDLM to the right of the maximum programme of the Labour Party on this question. There is no mention of opposition to the presence of the British imperialist army in Northern Ireland or to the Labour "lefts" chauvinist call for import controls, much less of the need for a revolutionary workers government. Describing the reformist CDLM, an LSG leaflet noted that it embodied the central weakness of the British left: " glorification of spontaneous rank and file trade union militancy and political capitulation to British social democracy" ("CDLM: WSLs Short Cut to Nowhere," 27 March 1977). A parallel criticism was raised in the Green-Kellett-Piercey document:
The LSG leaflet also attacked the WSLs justification for its adaptation to shop-floor militancy: "For a small grouping, like the WSL, to decide to shake off propagandism in order to proceed directly to conquering the masses is profoundly anti-Leninist. A revolutionary organisation only acquires the ability to lead whole sections of the proletariat as it assembles a cadre trained through hard principled struggle for communist politics" ("CDLM: WSLs Short Cut to Nowhere"). The Green-Kellett-Piercey document touched on the WSLs policy of shunning polemical combat with centrist groups, although the criticism was largely empirical and put in the mildest terms: "We also showed political weakness in not taking up the IMG adequately at the conference their argument that the CDLM shouldnt (politically) counterpose itself to the Stalinists diversionary initiatives was part of their left cover for Stalinism. The difference between us and the Pabloites was not that they had differences of where and how to fight for programme ; but they are not prepared to fight at all for programme." Neither, it turned out, was the Thornett leadership, which responded: "We are told by the comrades that we did not take up the IMG adequately at the conference. That we should have made a clear statement on their role as a left cover for the Stalinists. Such a course of action would have been a disaster. It would have been certain to drive the IMG out of the CDLM." Workers Government and "Make the Lefts Fight"The French municipal elections and Irish general elections, which both took place in the spring of 1977, renewed the debate inside the WSL on the question of popular frontism, in particular on the question of votes to the workers parties of a popular front. At the WSLs summer school in July this issue was debated both at the session on Ireland and at the National Committee meeting. It was indicative of the scant importance given to such "abstract" subjects prior to this time that even Socialist Press editor John Lister, backed by Alan Thornett, could consider it a rightist notion that any self-proclaimed revolutionary would even consider voting for the workers parties of a popular front. At the NC meeting spokesmen for the opposing positionsSteve Murray for voting for workers parties in a popular front and Mark Hyde and Jim Short againstwere directed to submit documents defending their respective positions. Without waiting for the resolution of the debate, however, Socialist Press went into print on 17 August declaring that it would continue to call for votes to Labour until such time as there were actually joint Lib-Lab slates. And as the faction fight developed, for the first time drawing hard lines on programmatic questions in the WSL, Thornett, Lister & Co. became far more cautious in toying around with positions which had been branded "Spartacist." In the course of the discussions over the question of voting for candidates of a popular front, some individuals switched positions and the battle lines began to be drawn. A document, "The Coalition, Make the Lefts Fight and the Workers Government Slogan" ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 2, January 1978), was written during late autumn by Green, Holford, Kellett, Murray, Quigley and Short which called for a position of "no vote for the candidates of workers parties (like the Labour Party) which are in a Popular Front combination" (Thesis 2 of the conclusion). On the question of the slogan of a workers government the document took the position of Trotsky, who spelt this out in discussions with leaders of the then-revolutionary American SWP: " the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the only possible form of a workers and farmers government." Thus point 7 of the conclusion states: "The WSL advances the slogan of a workers government as a pseudonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its essential contenta government that rules in the interests of the working class and bases itself, not on the bourgeois state, but on the independent organisations of the working classremains, whether or not it is advocated as a propaganda or an agitational slogan." Concerning the question of voting for popular front candidates the document states forcefully that this is no tactical or technical matter. This question is today the dividing line between those who give "critical" support to the popular front, seeking to place it in power, and the Bolshevik policy of proletarian opposition to coalitionism. But this is far from a passive or abstentionist position. The authors of the document wrote:
Whereas in the past the WSL had not taken a clear position on the question of voting for popular front candidates, its capitulation to social democracy was clearly expressed in the standing demand to "make the lefts fight," the alpha and omega of Thornetts policy toward the Labour Party. This policy came under sharp attack in the oppositionists document:
The Formation of the Trotskyist FactionAround the time of the WSL 1977 summer school, some of the emerging oppositionists began to realise that fidelity to Trotskyism required a full scale programmatic combat against Thornetts workerism. In a letter dated 13 July 1977, Green wrote to Holford:
As the document on "The Coalition, Make the Lefts Fight and the Workers Government Slogan" went through successive drafts over two months, the discussions within what had been an amorphous left wing of the WSL showed a growing political differentiation. By the time the jointly written document was submitted it was apparent that the signatories were on the verge of a parting of political paths. The majority (represented by Green, Holford, Quigley and Short) were coming to the conception that, while it was conceivable that much of the WSL membership and even a section of the leadership could possibly be won to the revolutionary programme, this could only be done through the process of insurrecting against the WSLs Healyite-derived practice and tradition, which had to be destroyed. Murray and Kellett, however, pulled back sharply and went on to play a dishonourable role as a left cover for the WSL leadership, sharing many of the programmatic positions of the Trotskyist Faction but subordinating these to their desire not to break with Thornett. This political differentiation was extremely important because it ruptured the personal ties between the ex-I.S./RCGers, establishing unambiguously that programme comes first. Within a short period after this break with the Murray clot the TF had produced its comprehensive political statement, "In Defense of the Revolutionary Programme." INDORP provided for the first time what the WSL had lacked from the beginning, a coherent Trotskyist programme and perspective. It took up many of the questions raised by the iSt letter of June 1976 (Cuba, history of the IC, trade-union policy, "make the lefts fight") and other key issues facing a revolutionary vanguard in Britain, notably the Irish question (see more below). It also drew a sharply critical balance sheet of the WSLs incompetent and opportunistic international work: "Unable to build an anti-revisionist, democratic centralist international tendency on the basis of a clear programmatic attitude to the basic tasks of revolutionaries in this epoch and the decisive issues of the class struggle internationally (opposition to popular frontism, defence of the deformed workers states, political struggle against nationalism and the necessity to re-create the Fourth International), the central leadership has led the WSL into a world of rotten blocs, cover-ups, diplomacy and intriguemasquerading as the fight to reconstruct the Fourth International." In the WSL, "international work" is mainly an extra-curricular activity, and at least some of its international connections have been made without directives by the NC by one comrade who uses his holidays to make political contacts outside this tight little island. Mostly the WSL should just be embarrassed by its international "co-thinkers," the contemptible Socialist League (Democratic-Centralist) [SL(DC)] of the U.S. (referred to in INDORP as "lower-than-reformist wretches who stand in the tradition of one Albert Weisbord against Cannon and Trotsky") and the Pabloist Greek Communist International League (CIL), which last year was engaged in "unity" manoeuvres with the local USec section. However, the WSL is not content with such small fry and is quietly stalking the big game of "the world Trotskyist movement." With his reputation and history, Thornett reasons, he should be able to reach an accommodation with Mandel & Co. or someone in the big time. Currently the WSL is entertaining leading representatives of the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). (Thornetts documents inside the WRP contain sections which closely parallel the OCI conception of a strategic united front.) While the WSL is not attracted by the total liquidation into the Labour Party of the Blick-Jenkins (British pro-OCI) groupsince this would eliminate the independent cheerleading squad to hail Thornetts work at Cowleytheir natural resting place in the ostensibly Trotskyist milieu would most likely be as part of an ex-IC conglomeration within the USec, centring on the American SWP. Confirmation of appetites in this direction can be seen in the Socialist Press (8 March) article on the recent French legislative elections, which replicates the OCI position of calling for votes to the Communist and Socialist Parties (part of the popular front Union of the Left) not only on the decisive second round of voting but on the first round as well. A contribution to the pre-conference discussion by the WSL leadership purported to offer its orientation to "the world Trotskyist movement." The document, entitled "The Poisoned Well" [WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 1, January 1978), presents a version of the degeneration of the Fourth International heavily flavoured by the WSLs workerist perspective. But the key, as the TF pointed out, is that: "The entire thrust of the document The Poisoned Well despite the promised amendments is to attempt to straighten out what the leadership sees as methodological weaknesses of the thoroughly reformist American SWP so as to better equip it for the fight against the centrist ex-International Majority Tendency wing [of the USec]. If agreement can be reached on the uncontentious theses at the end of the document then the reunification (sic) discussions can begin. The EC [Executive Committee] of the WSL is taking the organisation down the road to liquidation into the United Secretariat." [emphasis in original] At the February conference the WSL central leadership tried to claim that the most egregiously capitulationist references to the SWP and the USec were "slips of the pen," and submitted amendments to sanitise their document. Alan Holford of the TF dismissed this by pointing out that four single-spaced pages of amendments hardly constituted "slips." In the debate Socialist Press editor Lister said that while he was not opposed in principle to characterising the USec as centrist, to say so in writing would preclude an invitation to the USec congress, thereby rendering the WSLs prospects "very small." Some prospects! The WSLs attitude towards the Pabloist United Secretariat was accurately captured by Holford in a quote from Tristram Shandy which he included in his presentation as minority reporter: "Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm nor so vague as not to be understood." A Class Line vs. Left Republicanism on IrelandOne of the consequences of the blinkered Cowley-centred economism of the Thornett leadership was that for the first three years of its existence the WSL has not had a position on the Irish questionof crucial importance for any organisation with pretensions of providing revolutionary leadership to the workers of the British Isles. In order to plug this rather embarrassing gap in its programme, the leadership established an Irish Commission which was charged with developing a position for the WSL. In the course of the political struggle within the WSL three members of this four-man commission came to agreement on a class-struggle programme for Ireland paralleling the unique position of the iSt. This was presented as the Trotskyist Faction document "No Capitulation to Nationalism: For a Proletarian Perspective in Ireland!" ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 13, February 1978). In recoiling from the anti-sectarian, proletarian position of the Spartacist tendency, the WSL wholeheartedly embraced the kind of pseudo-socialist "Republican" position on Ireland common to most of the British fake-Trotskyist groupings. The Thornett leaderships document attempted to step around the difficult problem posed by the existence of the separate Protestant people (who comprise 60 percent of the population of the six counties of Northern Ireland and a quarter of the population of the island as a whole) by simply ignoring it and putting forward a call for "self-determination for the Irish people as a whole." The TF document pointed out that such a call "is meaningless precisely because there is no sense in which we can speak of the [Irish] people as a whole," and challenged the vicarious green nationalists of the WSL leadership to "face up to the implications of such a programme. It is in effect a call for the forcible unification of the whole island by the Irish bourgeoisie irrespective of the wishes of the Protestant community," a move which "could only precipitate a bloody communal conflict offering nothing for the proletariat." The majority document clearly confirmed the WSLs alignment with mainstream petty-bourgeois Irish Republicanism: "We do not argue as such for a united capitalist Ireland. But it must be clear that were such an unlikely development brought about in the course of struggle it would represent an historically progressive development." [emphasis in original] The Trotskyist Faction document rejected the leaderships open support to Catholic Irish nationalism, stating that:
In the debate on Ireland at the conference one Thornett supporter after another rose to speak in defence of the majoritys sketchy but clearly Catholic nationalist document, yet felt it necessary to preface their remarks by admitting they knew little about Ireland. In contrast, the position of the Trotskyist Faction, drawing on the considerable collective experience of its members in the struggle in Ireland, was presented by Paul Lannigan, a former member of the Irish National Committee of Healys SLL from 1968 to 1970. Lannigan, who had first-hand experience in recruiting Protestant shop stewards in Derry to the SLL, opposed the leaderships "socialist" green nationalism, which effectively denies the possibility of revolutionaries being able to win Protestant workers to an anti-sectarian socialist programme. Mass Work Fakery, Menshevism and Bundism in TurkeyWith the exception of its loose ties to the Greek CIL and the American SL(DC), the WSLs only work outside Britain has taken place in Turkey. Beginning with a few Turkish members recruited from the WRP, the WSL recruited a handful of raw militants and established two small branches in Turkey. In every respect the Turkish work was a criminal fiasco as a minuscule grouping of politically uneducated militants attempted to translate the WSLs "mass work" approach from chummy England into the harsh reality of Turkish society where labour and leftist militants are regularly set upon and often murdered by fascist thugs. The Trotskyist Faction recruited two members of the WSLs Turkish group in London who recounted the bitter experience of a strike (for union recognition) sparked by the Turkish WSLers: "We were totally ill-prepared to give even good trade union leadership to back up our advice to these workers" ("Enough of Opportunism, Adventurism, Bundism: For a Trotskyist Perspective in Turkey," [WSL] Pre-Conferenee Discussion Bulletin No. 12, February 1978). The WSL leadership wasnt taken aback. True, the majority document admitted, " the strike was isolated, was broken, and all the strikers were sacked." However, "Though the battle was lost, our comrades were developed and new contacts won" ([WSL] PreConference Discussion Bulletin No. 6, February 1978)! Having experienced the dead end posed by the WSLs economist activism, these two militants came to fundamental agreement with the Trotskyist Factions insistence on the centrality of programmatic clarity and the struggle to educate and recruit cadre as key to building the revolutionary party. Thus the TF Turkish document attacked the leaderships Bundist approach to the national question as applied to the Kurds (a national minority presently divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the USSR). According to the WSL majority the Kurds must achieve "national unity first," i.e., the establishment of a bourgeois Kurdistan; consequently Kurdish workers living in Turkey must be organised into a separate Kurdish party. Recognising the Kurds right to self-determination, the TF document attacked this Bundist organisational norm and Menshevik two-stage strategy. On the thorny Cyprus question the faction took a clear internationalist position: "Up until 1974, the Turkish population of Cyprus was nationally oppressed by the Greek populationsince the invasion by the Turkish army, the Greeks have been in the more oppressed position. Because the two populations have been thoroughly intermingled on this small island it is clear that the reality of self-determination for either people can only come at the expense of the other and thus self-determination is not applicable. We call therefore for the withdrawal of all foreign troops (whether Turk, Greek, UN, NATO, or any other) and for the unity of Greek and Turkish working peoples of Cyprus to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers state under the leadership of a Trotskyist party." Thornett "Counterattacks"For the longest time the Thornett leadership sought to ignore the international Spartacist tendency. After a years procrastination, the WSLs sometime resident literary dilettante, Alan Westoby, finally produced a draft reply to the June 1976 iSt letter. This work was so blatantly unserious that the WSL NC rejected it in summer 1977. Since Westoby had left the organisation to pursue his "theoretical" activity, the job of drafting a new reply was commissioned out to someone elsewhose work was rejected for being too soft on the iSt. Finally leadership loyalists like John Lister and Tony Richardson produced their own replywith a little help from their friends in the Murray clique. This shoddy document laconically remarks in the introduction: "In compiling this material we have drawn on notes supplied by cdes. Steve Murray and Julia Kellett, though neither comrade has seen the completed document." (Having rejected the Trotskyist Factions comprehensive political critique of the hardened right-centrist Thornett leadership, the Murray group slid into ignominious disarray at the national conference, with faction members splitting their votes and one even voting for a TF document. With a chronology reminiscent of the career of the vile Tim ["I was a hatchet man for Healy and Hansen"] Wohlforth, Murrays fence-straddling and unprincipled bloc with Thornett earned him only the political contempt of some of his own factional partners [and no doubt of the Thornett supporters as well].) The Lister-Richardson-Murray "reply" is a broken record stuck on the single refrain that the iSt is "sectarian" because we recognise that "a currently embryonic party organisation must necessarily constitute itself in the form of a fighting propaganda group" and we frankly state that the character of our trade-union work must be "exemplary," rejecting the workerist notion of intervening in every daily struggle of the masses. "What type of forces will such a stand attract?" the Thornett group asks rhetorically, answering: "Talkers, debaters, and those disillusioned with struggle for leadership within workers organisations " ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 5, February 1978). At another point they wax indignant: "Your refusal to fight to recruit workers means that your role is reduced to that of political vultures, preying on other tendencies on the left." This absurd chargereminiscent of Wohlforth at his nadir, when sputtering for lack of anything to say he would charge that Spartacists "hate the workers"is consummate dishonesty coming from authors who are not unfamiliar with Workers Vanguard. But at least the Thornett supporters make clear what it is they object to: the authors complain that the London Spartacist Group interventions in WSL public meetings "seem determined to cut across any dialogue with [workers who attend these meetings] and drive them away from the WSL, turning every meeting into a debate on the most abstract level." And just what are these "abstract" topics of debate? The same points that were the axis of the TF faction fight: the need to break from Labourism and illusions in the Labour "lefts"; the need for a proletarian strategy in Ireland, to draw the class line against popular frontism. This is too "abstract" for the Thornett group because they seek to recruit politically raw workers at their present level of consciousness, i.e., militant trade unionism. We, however, aspire to recruit workers who despise the IMGs line of Menshevik "unity" or the SWPs refusal to defend the gains of the October Revolution. The authors of the leadership "reply" to the iSt get carried away with their self-righteous rhetoric about how the Spartacists would be repelled by the "action of thousands and millions of workers mobilised in practical struggles around its [the Transitional Programmes] demands." We are anxiously waiting to hear how the WSL has managed to mobilise these "thousands and millions of workers" around even its reformist minimum program for the unions. In fact, at the conference Thornett admitted that the WSL had been unable to play much of a role in the firemens strike because the much larger Cliffite SWP stood in the way. What the WSL did not do in this situation is polemicise against the SWP. As for trade-union implantation, the WSL has no significant fraction outside Cowley. This compares to the SL/U.S. which gives political support to active groups of class-struggle unionists among dock workers and warehousemen, steel workers, car workers, phone workers and seamen. The one issue which seems to have stung the WSL central leadership into something resembling a political defence is the question of voting for popular front candidates and the nature of a workers government. John Listers document, "What the Fourth Congress of the Comintern Really Decided" ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 3, February 1978), is really just an attempt to institutionalise the confusion sown by Zinoviev and Radek in that discussion. If the WSL really wants to say that it considers a Labour Party cabinet resting on a majority in Parliament to be a "workers government"this is one of Zinovievs five variantsthey are free to do so. We would only remind them of the company they are travelling in. One Pierre Frank, in a commemorative article on the Transitional Programme (International Socialist Review, May-June 1967), congratulated the Pabloist United Secretariat in having "revived and enriched" the concept of workers government to mean something other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. As for the Spartacist tendency, it stands on the "unrevised" programme of Trotskys Fourth International, which states:
A slightly more serious attempt to deal with the question was made by Clinton, Hyde and White (a trio whose opening shots in the political struggle in the WSL were their arguments that the police deserved a "sliding scale of wages"). Their document ("Strategy and TacticsA Reply to Our Petty Bourgeois Critics," [WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 10, February 1978) prints pages of citations to argue that Trotsky in the 1930s did not take an explicit position against voting for the workers parties in a popular front.What these scholastic "theoreticians" ignore is that Trotsky faced situations in France and Spain which were pre-revolutionary, with parliamentary and electoral tactics quite secondary in the context of massive factory occupations and direct military struggle with the fascists. In France Trotsky urgently and repeatedly called for the formation of committees of action (in the context of a strike wave) as the vehicle for breaking the workers from the popular front and splitting the reformist parties. Our snide academics dont mention this, nor does the WSL present any programmatic axis for struggle against the reformist parties and against bourgeois coalitionism. On the contrary it makes a ritual denunciation of the Lib-Lab coalition and then promises to vote for Labour anyway. If ever there were a case of sterile propagandism, this is it. The French Pabloists were consistent, at least, in refusing to characterise the Union of the Left as a popular front; should they do so, said the Mandelites, "This would lead logically to abstention in the [1977] municipal elections" (quoted in International, Summer 1977). The WSLs own policyrefusing to vote for coalitionist candidates only if joint Liberal-Labour slates are presentedis a purely juridical conception of the bloc, which implicitly or explicitly denies the essential fact: that the popular front is a bourgeois political formation. The left oppositionist document on the workers government slogan answered this subterfuge in advance with a quotation from Trotsky: "The question of questions at present is the Peoples Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical manoeuvre so as to be able to practice their little business in the shadow of the Peoples Front. In reality the Peoples Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism ." The heart of the Clinton-Hyde-White document is unadulterated class baiting: e.g., "They appeal to tired petty bourgeois members who prefer academic debate to the class struggle. " Etc. What drives these three (who, by the way, are themselves teachers) into a frenzy is the Trotskyist Factions rejection of the guilty workerism which passes for politics in the WSL. Attempting to be condescending, they only articulate their own philistinism. Moreover, when they finally get around to justifying their all-purpose slogan "make the lefts fight," their mystical glorification of the "daily grind" spells itself out in the language of frank opportunism: "Until such time as significant sections of workers look to alternative revolutionary leaders, we must take the workers through the experience of trying and testing the alternatives that exist." Just as revolutionaries begin with the objective needs of the proletariat rather than its present consciousness in formulating their program, we do not "take" the proletariat through the experience of reformism. If they have not yet broken from the Stalinist and social-democratic misleaders we must indeed accompany them through the experience of exposing these betrayers. But the WSL does indeed mean to take British workers through a new experience of reformismfirst the Callaghans and Healeys, then the Foots and Benns, and then... Results and ProspectsIn describing the loss of 20 percent of its active membership as "A Step Forward" (Socialist Press, 22 February), the Workers Socialist League declares its firm intent to continue in its ostrich-like position. As a result of the split by the Trotskyist Faction it has been reduced to a national network of supporters of Alan Thornetts activities at the Cowley Leyland plant (reverently dubbed "The Factory" by the WSL leadership). The loss of a sizeable number of younger comrades has clearly stung them, as has the departure of a layer of experienced cadres; and the haemorrhaging of the WSL has not stopped yet. For the international Spartacist tendency, the fusion with the comrades of the TF greatly increases the authority of our Trotskyist programme, in Britain and internationally. In Britain today there is oneand only oneorganisation which intransigently fights coalitionism, opposes all brands of nationalism and is part of a democratic centralist international tendency: the Spartacist League. One parting reply to the WSLs embarrassingly empty class baiting: we do not wish to begrudge Alan Thornett his unstinting dedication to defending the interests of the Cowley workers as he perceives them. Under the proper leadership of a disciplined Trotskyist party such mass leaders can perform a crucial role in preparing the working class for revolutionary struggle. But such a party will be far different from the support apparatus for one or a group of trade unionists (the most degenerated example of the latter being the Ceylonese "section" of the USec, which is nothing more than an appendage of a conservative white collar union run by the corrupt Bala Tampoe). It must be a party whose Marxist programme is formulated and tested through the kind of political struggle which the WSL has systematically avoided, whether in the factories, in mass demonstrations, public meetings or the party itself. Yes, the WSL conference was indeed a step forwardfor Trotskyism and the international Spartacist tendency. It was a savage blow, however, to the pretensions of the parochial workerists from the South Midlands of little England. |
Posted: 22 September 2004 |