WSL and ICL vote to fuse TROTSKYISTS UNITE

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'BRITISH Capitalism is rotten to its foundations, and a very weak link in the chain of advanced capitalist countries; the British working-class movement is one of the most powerful labour movements which has ever existed.

'The combination of these two things means that a working-class revolution can be made to occur in Britain in the period ahead of us. The labour movement is faced with the task of politically rearming itself so that it can respond to what capitalism is doing to us now by taking the necessary action to bury capitalism"

This was the keynote of the discussions and decisions at the fusion conference of the Workers Socialist League and the International-Communist League which was held in Oxford on July 26th. Whatever viewpoint you choose to look at it from, this was a very important event on the revolutionary left.

Invited to cover the fusion conference for Socialist Organiser, 1 found a wide spread of trade union militants, revolutionary youth, and women's liberation and gay liberation activists in attendance. numbering perhaps 270 in all.

There were some, though not many, black people, and a large number of women present.

The conference had a markedly more working-class look about it than the average gathering of leftists, though still the majority were probably middle-class.

Turn to youth

There was a sprinkling of middle-aged workers and a notable number of young people: Simon Hunt, just out of a remand centre after being arrested during the recent clashes between youth and police, made a rousing call from the platform for a turn by the new organisation to youth, whose revolt has erupted far in advance of the revolutionary left's capacity to respond adequately to it.

Alan Thornett for the old Workers Socialist League and Tom O'Keefe for the InternationalCommunist League jointly presented the platform which the conference eventually accepted as the political basis of the new organisation, which is to keep the name Workers Socialist League the better known of the iwo previous titles: its survival is one testimonial to the constructive spirit in which the fusion is made).

Lenin defined the preconditions for revolution as these: that the exploiters should not be able to soci: live and rule in the old ted way; that the exploited une: do not want to go on in capi the old way; and that the best exploited are ready and worl determined to find a new way. time The first two conditions disg have partly come into worl existence - in fact the rece ruling class has had its men right to 'rule' successfully agai challenged on a number onsi of key occasions in the mov last 15 years. Time after reth time the workers have sopt refused to let them rule ine as they did in the past. refor But the Labour government which followed the workers' defeat of Heath in 1974 was the proof that the third condition was lacking: the labour movement was not yet ready with an alternative, because it was led by traitors.

Creating the third condition is really what the present civil war in the labour movement is all about.

Labour's rethink The British workers' movement has very many decades of struggle behind it, struggles within the immensely rich and historically privileged motherland of industrial capitalism. For more than 100 years these have been, usually thougn not invariably, struggles tor better conditions by a labuur movement whose dominant philosophy and al existence commitit to working in an asy partnership with talism, to achieve the deal possible for the king class. nly now, for the first : in over 50 years, in ust at the betrayals of king-class interests by nt Labour governts and in self-defence nst the Thatcherite aught, is the labour ement beginning to ink its political philory and critically examits own history and rmist traditions.

Marxists' task

It is a process of rethinking, renewal, regeneration and reorganisation. If it is brought to a successful conclusion, then there will be a renewed and transformed labour movement.

Whether or not the revolutionary Marxists can organise themselves as a coherent force within the existing labour movement (both trade unions and Labour Party) - that is the decisive question on which will depend the fate of the British labour movement.

Alan • ornen and lom O Keefe both insisted that concretely this was a question of building the new WSL.

In fact, the fusion conterence was the culmination of a seven-day festival of revolutionary 2p/3socialism, an international festival linked to the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, which groups a number of small Marxist organisations.

nucleus The new organisation does not present itself, nor regard itself, as the fully-fashioned nucleus of a mass revolutionary party. It does argue that the best immediate steps that can deliberately be taken towards that goal are for serious working-class militants to join the work of building the WSL.

It criticises the existing organisations of the revolutionary left as being inadequate, and in many or most instances irrelevant to what the working class needs.

The Socialist Workers' Party, containing many good militants, nevertheless continues to be politically maimed by a sectarian rejection (that is, by an infantile pretence at rejection) of the political labour movement that has actually been created so far by the working class and which must be changed before anything decisive can be done to win socialism in Britain. It combines this sectarianism with blunted politics: for example, its comment on the Labour Party conference last year was that the Bennite Left was For itself, committed politically The WSL originated at the end of 1974, when about 200 members of the Workers Revolutionary Party [formerly SLL] were expeled from that extremely bureaucratic organisation. They included the main working-class base of the WRP, around Tony Richardson and Alan Thornett at the Cowley car plants in Oxford.

The experience marked the severing of the WRP's last links with the labour movement.

too far ahead of the working class!

Militant, the most working-class of all the left groups in Britain, continues to be dominated by passive propagandism and by adaptation to aspects of the existing labour movement — its routinism, and its attitudes to minorities and women for example -which serious socialists must oppose and fight to change. The tragic marginality and propagandist irrelevance of the Labour Party Young Socialists (which it leads) in face of the revolt of the youth, shows up what is wrong with Militant.

Early in the week, Alan Thornett, with more than a little justifiction, hit off the International Marxist Group and its international co-thinkers when he said of their latest 'turn to the working class' that it was, for self-proclaimed Trotskyists, at least 40 years too late!

The platform summed up the WSL's alternative to the theories, precepts and practices of the existing forces which it considers inadequate. It deals with the crisis of leadership — the fact that the Labour organisations are almost everywhere in the grip of self-serving officials who hinder the working class in pursuing its interests in calm times and who lead it to bloody defeat in every situation with the bourgeoisie. Chile is the worst recent example.

It deals with the need for a workers' government as the only way forward for the British working-class movement now. It explains that there can be a British working class response to the crisis of capitalism, that the British workers can take power in Britain, but that a purely British solution does not exist: that it is necessary to have an international socialist answer to the crisis of capitalism, which is a world system, and necessary to forge working class international unity to achieve it.

the WSL is to fight to regenerate Alan Thornett is one of the best-known working-class militants in Britain. He has faced repeated attempts by the employers and by the union bureaucrats of the TGWU to get rid of him, and survived them thanks to the solid support of the workers at , The I-CL was created by a fusion of two groups in 1975, but the larger of those groups, Workers' and to reconstruct the world Trotskyist movement, and to develop the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee as a contribution to this longterm goal.

Much stress was laid at conference on the oppression of women, and what needs to be done about it. It was accepted that one of the problems was how to make the revolutionary organisation habitable for women — how to organise things so that the social bias against women - women with families especially -being politically active could be countered, and how to ensure that degrading sexist practices, attitudes, expecta tions and comments did not debase comradely relations between members the of organisation.

Sharp criticism of the I-CL on this score was expressed by Maxine Landis. an activist in Women's Fightback, and the general feeling was that a fight to change things was necessary if the commitments were to be more than pious hopes. Fight, originated in 1966 in a small breakaway from the rightward-moving 'Militant' tendeney.

Politically Workers' Fight had its origins in the early '60s SLL; it considered the SLL irredeemably sectarian from 1964 onwards, after the SLL broke with the Labour Party and attempted to break the November 1964 engineering apprentices' strike in the North-West.

Of the Labour Left the WSL says essentially what Socialist Organiser has been saying: that it is hamstrung by parliamentary reformism, and hypnotised by utopian projects to set up a World War 2 style protectionist British economic system, leaving the essentials of capitalism intact. These projects are probably unrealisable in life, and if realised they would be reactionary.

Above all, the mainstream Labour Left does not ground itself on the struggies of the working class, though it often refiects them in a distorted way.

The WSL and I-CL come from different traditions (see box above)

With such divergent backgrounds, it is to be expected that there should be differences between the two organisations, and that some would continue to exist in the fused organisation.

There are differences on the history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain and internationally.

There are disagreements on Afghanistan:

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Socialist Organiser 30 July 1981 Page JOHN O'MAHONY went from Socialist Organiser to report on the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee summer school and Workers' Socialist League/ InternationalCommunist League fusion conference last week. This week we cover the fusion conference, and next week we will be covering