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What Happened to the Workers' Socialist League?

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What Happened to the Workers' Socialist League? What Happened to the Workers’ Socialist League? By Tony Gard (as amended by Chris Edwards and others), September 1993 Note by Gerry D, October 2019: This is the only version I have of Tony Gard’s docu- ment, which contains the unauthorised amendments as explained in the rather tetchy note by Chris Edwards below. [Note by Chris Edwards (May 2002). War is the sternest possible test for any Trot- skyist 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 Argen- tina position), the British proto-ITO comrades did attempt to defend a principled posi- tion against the bankrupt positions of the leadership of their own organisation, the British Workers Socialist League (WSL). This is an account of the tendency struggle over the Malvinas war and many other is- sues 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 judge- ment 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 ac- count (see below). In fact, one of the barely disguised purposes of this “balance sheet” was to rubbish and 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 criti- cism 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 pontificate about 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. The result was that it was a largely scholastic document. Subsequent amendments made by those who were directly involved in the struggle made it less so. What was the context that Tony G un- derestimated? It was that of a circle of young, inexperienced, scattered, provincial, and overwhelmingly 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 mid- dle 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. Much of this account may seem excessively detailed and long-winded—Tony G always did like the sound of his own voice. The important point to bear in mind when reading it however, is that the crisis and disarray of the WSL and the opposition which developed within it was precipitated by a very real issue—a colonial war against Argentina. A group of peo- ple struggled to change a reactionary position in their organisation during an imperial- ist war. This document records that struggle]. 1. Introduction This assessment and balance sheet of the history of the British Workers Socialist League (WSL) was originally produced by Tony G, the secretary of the British Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL), with the assis- tance 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 interna- tional 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 which had developed between the Revolutionary Work- ers 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 statements in the balance sheet about the reassertion of the progressive character of the struggle for Trotskyism carried out by the WSL between 1974 and 1980. Such a reassertion was seen as a challenge to the RWL’s political, financial and organisational dominance of the ITC and its notion that it was 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 1991 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 aspects of 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 in- cluded 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 sec- tion 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 (SLL) 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 insular 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 Interna- tional Tendency (FIT). The latter’s 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 his- tory 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 pre-fusion WSL and only two members of the National Com- mittee 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 tradi- tion and its associated economist trade unionism in Britain. The problems make 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 In- ternational Communist League and also of the struggle of the Internationalist Tendency/Internationalist Fac- tion (IT/IF) and the failure of the WIL to overcome the IT/IF’s contradictions) is essential to the future of Trotskyism 2.
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