The history of Stalinism has been one, particularly in the 1920's and 1930's of rapid and large changes of course. In the 1920's, support for bouregois forces such as the Kuomintang, the leaders of the TUC and so on. Quickly followed by the shift to the opposite direction, to the Third Period, where everyone other than the Stalinists was described as some kind of fascist. That was followed by a rapid shift back to the Popular Front, and so on. Not only was each dramatic shift accompanied by terrible defeats for the working class, but each shift was presented as though, the fundamental analysis underlying each position remained in place. It was as though each change did not of itself demonstrate that the original position was wrong!
That same feature of Stalinism and Centrism, of continual zig-zagging has been a feauture of the Stalinists of the AWL. And once again, the shift of position is presented as being completely in tune with what has gone before. The latest example is the AWL's shift of position on the LP. See: The Unions, Labour, AWL, and the Crisis: a Debate .
Having for some time like most of the Left deserted the working class and its political struggle inside the LP, in favour of various party building stunts and orientations to one after another petit-bourgeois milieu, Sean Matgamna, and so necessarily shortly after the AWL itself, has decided that its time to re-evaluate the LP. The AWL's membership apparently do not understand the the AWL's complex history and attitude to the LP - I wonder why that might be?????
They do not understand that the AWL has NEVER considered that the LP was dead. Really???
Sean says,
"The correct and necessary emphasis in all our recent commentary on denouncing New Labour may even mean that some comrades have not understood our basic "line" on the Labour Party. They may think that our assessment has been identical to that of the Socialist Party - that the Labour Party is dead. That is not our position, not even in the latest AWL NC document for our conference, which (extrapolating as it does more or less in a straight line from recent years' developments) I now think to be seriously off-balance."
Perhaps, what might have confused the AWL's own cadre were the stories that the AWL carried in its paper last year, when it collapsed into support for the SWP/Hezbollah - you know that organisation that Sean describes here (Their cavalier attitude to the existing labour movement, essentially their blinkered and sectarian "build-the-revolutionary-party" indifference to that movement, has been one of the roots of the sectism that grips the ostensible revolutionary left in Britain - its shaping influence) - which said "The Labour Party is a Stinking Corpse"!!!!
The Labour Party is a Stinking Coirpse
In that Editorial either written by or approved by Sean the AWL wrote,
"Look back over the process of change, and the fact hits you full in the face: the Labour Party founded over 100 years ago by some unions and socialist organisations is dead."
It concluded,
"The central conclusion from the history of the fragmented responses to the Blair-Brownite coup in the Labour Party is that only a coherent Marxist organisation can in itself act to co-ordinate in any thoroughgoing way the different responses evoked in the labour movement. We, as a living organisation, have to respond to the “fragments”. AWL has to co-ordinate our different fields of work — trade union, youth, students, in No Sweat and Feminist Fightback — integrating them both politically and organisationally as we build a new broad movement for working-class political representation."
In other words the AWL had to build itself as a Party.
What we have then is that old Stalinist politics whereby mistakes are never acknowledged, and whereby about faces in position are presented as a continuous line of march. A proposal to now orientate to the LP is not at all inconcsistent with the position of the AWL, because you see the AWL never did consider the LP dead like those sectarians in the Socialist Party. And here probably is the real reason for the change of course. The SP has linked up with the CPB in the reactionary, nationalist No2EU. As I have stated elsewhere, Marxists should not give any support to this reactioanry lash-up, but its clear what the SP's reasons for it are. Having seen the tide of working class feeling, and on the back of their success at the LOR strike, the SP see the possibility of breaking out of their electoral and organisational doldrums. By utilising the links of the CPB Stalinists with the TU bureaucracy, most prominently in the role in No2EU of Bob Crow, the SP hope to be able to pull off the same kind of trick that the SWP attempted with RESPECT, not only thereby getting a higher profile, but also creating the kind of milieu in which they can again Party build. At its most fantastic they hope that such an organisation might become a kind of Labour Mark II, in which they can udnertake the same kind of role their predecessors - the Militant - undertook in the LP.
But, the AWL along with a number of other small Left groups have been banned from joining No2EU. The AWL must fear that whatever the limited success of No2EU that space it occupies will severely stifle its own potential recruiting sphere. It makes perfect sense under such conditions to look instead to work once more inside the LP. In fact, the AWL has been marked in recent years by its maverick approach which amde a virtue out of taking an opposite stand to almost everyone else on the Left on any question you care to think of. Again a turn now to the LP would fit that approach. What is clear is that the real reasons for turning to the LP are not those presented in the article. The idea that the current "crisis of Capitalism" has brought about fundamental changes in the relationship of the working class to the LP, or of the LP rank and file to the Leadership are ridiculous.
If the AWL does make an orientation to the LP that is a sort of step forward. However, as I've written before the experiecne of the past is that even when the AWL's predecessors DID have such an orientation it was only a certain section of its membership that actually carried it out, and the orientation was NOT based on building the LP as the Workers Party, but was seen just as much as a Party Building exercise as was the method of the Militant. Its unlikely that any future orientation will be any different. In fact, given the degeneration in the politics of the AWL sicne then into that of a Stalinist sect, its likely to be much worse.
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