Why I am writing for 'Solidarity'

Submitted by Matthew on 19 January, 2011 - 10:55

Long-term members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty will presumably be even more surprised to read me in these pages than I am to find myself helping to fill them.

It’s fair to say that I have had my disagreements with you lot in the three decades since I came across the group formerly known as Socialist Organiser, after joining the Labour Party Young Socialists at the start of the Thatcher period.

The first time I was mentioned by name in Socialist Organiser’s press, for instance, I had just taken a job as a journalist for rival Trotskyist newspaper Socialist Outlook. For whatever reason, this was considered noteworthy, leading to the description of me as possessing ‘a public schoolboy sense of humour’.

Since that obvious class slur has never been retracted, I’ll just take this opportunity to put the record straight at 20 years’ remove. I had a blue-collar upbringing absolutely normal for its day, and I am entirely state educated.

Then there was that time outside a pub in Blackpool one Labour Party conference week, in which a leading Socialist Organiser full time worker repeatedly and loudly denounced me as “a state agent” for writing something uncomplimentary about Arthur Scargill. That’s okay, guys; we’d all had a few beers, and it’s probably too late to apologise now.

I bring these matters up not because they deserve any special place in the already voluminous annals of Trotskyist infamy, but to underline that the AWL is not immune from the small-change stupidity that renders the entire British far left, as presently constituted, not fit for purpose.

Let me just add that I don’t even consider myself a Trot any more, properly speaking. The idea that the USSR was a degenerate workers’ state always struck me as unlikely even when I argued for it in public, and the continued vitality of capitalism — until 2007, anyway — surely disproves the theory of permanent revolution.

Building a democratic centralist cadre outfit of 200 or so members in the expectation that it will be catapulted into government by unspecified future events strikes me as a pointless exercise. And I am increasingly persuaded by the philosophy of analytical Marxism, which holds that dialectics is essentially obfuscatory mumbo jumbo.

All of this being the case, why I am writing for Solidarity, and far more importantly, why is Solidarity offering me space? Well, there are always those important things on which we do agree.

If Marxism has got a future — and sadly, I don’t take that as a given — it is as a democratic, rationalist, humanist doctrine able to win mass support among the exploited and the oppressed of this planet, giving them the necessary intellectual framework for their fight against their exploiters and oppressors.

No existing organisation on the left instantiates what is necessary to bring this about. But in a period in which it has been extremely difficult for Marxists to find the correct orientation, the AWL has emerged as obviously the least worst option.

Crucially for me, it hangs on to the unfashionable notion that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself, a proposition once axiomatic among revolutionary socialists in this country, but now largely honoured in the breach.

The AWL appreciates the corollary that there is a difference between anti-imperialism and fawning deference for any group that points an AK-47 vaguely in the direction of the US armed forces. It does not cheerlead for the remaining outposts of Stalinism, and recognises demagogic third world nationalist rhetoric as neither more nor less than what it is.

I am, as I mentioned, a journalist by trade. I have penned columns for both political and non-political publications over many years. In my experience, the format works best when a columnist either resolutely reinforces readership prejudices, or manages gently to challenge them.

In writing for Solidarity, I am going to try to achieve a bit of both. But there is an element of risk involved here, as much for me as for the paper. In short, what you are reading is the first instalment of a political experiment that may or may not work. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

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