| Alliance for Workers' Liberty | |
|---|---|
| Leader | Executive Committee |
| Founded | 1966 |
| Headquarters | London |
| Newspaper | Solidarity |
| Ideology | Third Camp Trotskyism |
| Political position | Far left |
| International affiliation | See text |
| European affiliation | None |
| European Parliament Group | None |
| Official colours | Red |
| Website | |
| http://www.workersliberty.org/ | |
| Politics of the United Kingdom Political parties Elections |
|
The Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), also known as Workers' Liberty, is a Trotskyist group in Britain. The group has a complex history but has always been identified with the theorist Sean Matgamna. The AWL publishes the newspaper Solidarity.
The AWL is registered with the Electoral Commission as a political party, for which purpose it has listed various executive committee members as officers: its leader as Cathy Nugent, its nominating officer as Mark Osborn and its treasurer as Martin Thomas.[1]
Contents |
The AWL traces its origins to the document What we are and what we must become,[2] written by the tendency's founder Sean Matgamna in 1966 in which he argued that the Revolutionary Socialist League, by then effectively the Militant tendency, was too inward looking and needed to become more activist in its orientation. The RSL refused to circulate the document and, with a handful of supporters, he left to form the Workers' Fight group. Espousing left unity, they accepted an offer in 1968 to form a faction within the International Socialists as the Trotskyist Tendency.
The Trotskyist Tendency (TT) clashed with the leadership of the International Socialists (IS) over many issues, for instance Britain's membership of the Common Market, on which the IS leadership itself was divided, and the use of the "Troops Out" slogan regarding Northern Ireland.
In December 1971, the leadership of the International Socialists called a special conference to "defuse" the TT. The TT described the "defusion" as an "expulsion" given that they did not wish to leave.
Outside the IS, increased in size, the group resumed publication of Workers' Fight, now as a printed paper, not as was previously the case as a duplicated journal, began publication of a theoretical journal entitled Permanent Revolution and made efforts to publish a small number of workplace-oriented publications in specific industries.
At the end of 1975, it fused with the smaller Workers Power group, formerly the Left Faction within the IS, to form the International-Communist League. A small group of members in Bolton and Wigan opposed to the merger formed the Marxist Worker group, which later fused with the International Marxist Group. Workers' Fight was renamed Workers' Action and went over to a weekly publication schedule and the group's quarterly magazine was now entitled International-Communist. It joined with other groups that considered themselves to the left of the USFI in the Necessary International Initiative. In 1976, two-thirds of the ex-Workers Power group's members left in a dispute over Labour Party work and resumed a separate existence. The I-CL increased its activity within the Labour Party, and in 1978 helped set up the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory. This campaign proved relatively popular and initially involved a range of figures on the left of the Labour Party who wrote for and supported its paper, Socialist Organiser. After a dispute over whether local government rates should be increased to offset cuts made by the Thatcher government, most of the Labour left figures - including Ken Livingstone - withdrew from Socialist Organiser until the I-CL was the only force involved in what was now its central publication. Both Workers' Action and International-Communist were by 1979 discontinued, reflecting the group's entrism into the Labour Party.
In 1981 the I-CL fused with Alan Thornett's Workers Socialist League which had now also entered the Labour Party. The new organisation, also called the Workers' Socialist League, mostly worked through the Socialist Organiser Alliance. It also produced a theoretical journal, Workers' Socialist Review. In 1984, the groups split apart. The key issue was the Falklands War: most of the former I-CL argued for the defeat of both sides; most of the former WSL supported a victory for Argentina. The tensions had also been strained over questions of internal democracy and differences over the national question.
The Socialist Organiser Alliance grew from the broad left Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory. By 1983 the paper was dominated by Matgamna's supporters (by then in the Workers Socialist League) and was clearly identified with that faction leading to a split with independent Labour left politicians such as Ken Livingstone over the GLC's policy of increasing rates to offset cuts in grants made by central to local government.
The group initially decided to organise its student work through the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS), forming Socialist Students in NOLS to campaign within the National Union of Students.
In 1985, after the split in the WSL which led to the departure of what became the Socialist Group, the group reassessed its politics, and adopted a two state position on Israel-Palestine. In 1988, the group's national committee moved from its original position that the Stalinist states were "deformed or degenerated workers states", and opened a discussion on the thesis that they were some 'new exploiting society'. By the 1990s, the organisation adopted a bureaucratic collectivist analysis, with a minority around Martin Thomas holding a state capitalist analysis.
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Socialist Organiser was banned by the Labour Party in 1990 when its application to register with the Labour Party was rejected. The register was an attempt to regulate entryists, but this measure was primarily aimed at the Militant tendency and had little effect on the newspaper prior to 1990. In response to the ban, the Socialist Organiser Alliance dissolved. In 1992 the editors of Socialist Organiser launched an organisation known as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. Since 1999 the AWL has regularly stood candidates in local and general elections, either through left unity initiatives such as the Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform and Socialist Green Unity Coalition or independently.
A small workers statist minority left to join the International Socialist Group in 1992, arguing that the AWL was wrong to support the ban on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the coup attempt of 1991.[3] Subsequently, the AWL adopted a number of other positions associated with Third Camp socialism.
After closing SSiN in the late 1980s, it established and led a number of left opposition campaigns in the NUS, including Left Unity and the Campaign for Free Education. It continues to organise left opposition in the NUS through its activity in the Education Not for Sale network.
Its student work has involved winning elected positions in the National Union of Students on the basis of campaigning for free education and other issues. Numerous supporters have won seats in the structures of the NUS. Kat Fletcher, President of the NUS from 2004 to 2006 was formerly a member of the AWL and the Campaign for Free Education. It has played leading roles in the NUS Women's and LGBT Campaigns, championing its policies on liberation and international solidarity within them, securing their representation within the NUS and working with groups such as OutRage! and Al-Fatiha.
The AWL has published the newspaper Solidarity since 1995. [4] It also published Workers' Liberty as a roughly quarterly magazine between 1985 and 2001.[5] In 2001 and 2002, a second series of the magazine was published in a journal format.[6] A third series of WL started in February 2006, taking the form of thematic collections issued as inserts within Solidarity.[7]
In 2006, the AWL reproduced the Muhammad cartoons that were originally published in Jyllands-Posten on their website, describing it as an issue of free speech.[8] While it opposed the Iraq war, the group did not actively call for the immediate withdrawal of US and UK forces,[9] a position opposed by a large minority within the organisation.[10] These and other positions have led to other far-left groups characterising the AWL as "imperialist" and "Zionist".[11]
The AWL is active in campaigns such as No Sweat, Education Not for Sale, Feminist Fightback, Workers' Climate Action and the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.
The group has international links with the Solidarity Tendency, who are members of the Scottish Socialist Party, Workers' Liberty Australia and supporters within the Revolutionary Left Current in Poland and Solidarity in the United States. Its website also carries links to a number of organisations with whom it says it has "friendly relations", among them the Débat Militant/Democratie Revolutionnaire tendency[12] in the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, Liaisons,[13] Convergences Révolutionnaires[14] and mondialisme.org[15] in France, the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and Workers' Left Unity Iran.[16]