AWL history

Either-or: Labour's muddle-along option closes down

An article from Workers' Action (a forerunner of Solidarity: no.153, 22 September 1979) on the prospects, as we saw them, from the big upheavals then underway in the Labour Party. The outcome will probably determine the character of the Labour Party for decades. Either the left will go on from a victory on democracy at Brighton [Labour Party conference, 1979] to consolidate the Labour Party as a genuinely socialist party seeking to overthrow capitalism on the basis of the class struggle of the working class, and build up a mass membership around such policies. Or the left will be purged and...

Labour democracy and the fight for a workers' government (1980)

Introduction to the December 1980 pamphlet published by Socialist Organiser, "Labour democracy and the fight for a workers' government". This pamphlet contains a selection of articles from the newspaper Socialist Organiser. The Organiser is published fortnightly by a national network of supporters' groups, consisting of individuals in the Labour Party and trade unions whose politics cover a wide range on the far Left. Socialist Organiser has played an important role in the labour movement in the last period. We initiated the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, which united most of the Labour...

Editorial of "Permanent Revolution" no.1, spring 1973

The editorial from no.1 of "Permanent Revolution", a journal published by Workers' Fight (forerunner of AWL) in 1973-5, discusses how we saw ourselves then in relation to the Trotskyist spectrum and to the prospects for the British labour movement. We publish Permanent Revolution, a Trotskyist discussion and theoretical quarterly, to help the working class in Britain prepare for its biggest battles in 50 years. The labour movement, constructed over two centuries by the dedicated activity of millions of proletarian fighters, will in the coming period either be tamed, broken and completely...

Workers' Fight on general strike and the call for a Labour government, 1972-3

Workers' Fight (forerunner of AWL) on calls for a general strike, and for "kick the Tories out", 1972-3... There was a mass strike movement in July 1972 against the jailing of five dockers under Tory anti-union laws. The TUC called a one-day general strike, though the Tories found a legal loophole to release the dockers b,efore it came to that. Agitation for a general strike had been widespread on the left since 1971, and continued through to 1974. "To argue against the slogan of a general strike on the grounds of the inadequacy of political leadership in the British labour movement is to...

"Workers' Fight: One Year On" (1972-3)

This is the editorial which marked the first year of publication of the AWL tendency's first newspaper, Workers' Fight (1972-3). Workers' Fight had appeared as a mimeographed magazine in 1967-8. In late 1968 our group took up a unity call to merge with the SWP (then called IS, and different in many ways from what it is now). In 1968-71 we were a minority tendency in IS. In December 1971 IS expelled us, and from January 1972 we published our own paper. With this issue of Workers' Fight, no. 21, WF (new series) is a year old, having appeared on average once every two and a half weeks since 14...

"What is an Action Programme?" (1976)

An article from the preparatory discussion for drafting the manifesto of the I-CL (forerunner of AWL) in 1977. From "International Communist" no.2/3, January 1977. Click here to download as pdf , or read below. What is an "Action Programme"? If you attempt to work up a document of answers, slogans, action projects, either you are guided by 'inspiration' , pet ideas, or some other arbitrary and subjective approach; or you attempt rigorously to draw practical conclusions from a Marxist analysis of reality and general codifications summing up the experience of the working class so far, focused on...

"The Nature of our Action Programme" (1976)

The section from the 1977 "manifesto" of the International-Communist League (forerunner of AWL) which explained our idea of transitional demands and transitional programme. Click here to download as pdf , or read below. A socialist programme of action is neither an option nor an arbitrarily chosen weapon for a party with the politics and the goals of the I-CL. Its nature sums up the essential content of our politics - proletarian self-liberation. It expresses the most advanced lessons of the attempts by the proletariat between 1848 and 1919 to hammer out a political practice which linked the...

LAMENT FOR FALLEN COMRADES

LAMENT FOR MISSING COMRADES Call back the dead! My hero friends of old Who fled their place in our unequal war And sank in private Iife; those who grew cold To our endeavour, chilled by grief or fear, Too old to bear, at twenty-five, or nine, The forceful cutting winds that howl along Our promontory, anxious to realign With brutish wage-slave masters seeming strong. "But Trotsky led to Stalin!" Self-effacement! No fine disinterested search for truth But stricken-hearted knowing self-abasement Beside the poisoned tree still bearing fruit. Soul wrecked, they make their peace, poor contrite...

Marxist texts and Marxist method (part 2)

Part One ... And Argentine nationalism? Argentina suffered British and French intervention some 140 years ago. Modern Argentina, however, has essentially taken shape over the last 100 years. Argentina had no war of liberation. Its population is, to within one per cent, of European immigrant origin — most from immigration within the last 100 years. Its mass popular nationalism dates from the 1920s. This nationalism was, especially in its labour movement manifestations, shaped and consolidated by Peronism. Peronism was not and is not fascism. But corporatism and fascism are its essential...

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