Centralist Faction
WORKERS SOCIALIST LEAGUE:
The Death of a Fusion
ON MARCH 31, 1984, 35 members of the
Workers Socialist League were summarily and collectively suspended without advance notice by a vote of 14 to 8 on the
WSL's National Committee.
They were charged, vaguely and collecwith
"disruption";
specific tively, no breaches of discipline or the WL's Constitution were cited. Thirty-one of the thirtyfive were not even told of their impending suspension until after the event. Two weeks later on April 14, the same 35 members, the non-NC members of whom had no chance of a hearing, were expelled on the same vague charge.
Attempts to invoke the WL's Constitution and convene a Special Conference to discuss the expulsions (backed up in each case by the signatures of the necessary percentage of the membership as required by the Constitution) were twice overruled;
instead the NC majority opted to call a "normal" annual conference of the League for
June 30, at which the appeals of the 35 expelratified the expulsions. of the Socialist Group. centralist organisation. work and forging international links. led members would be heard.
In the event, the appeals were rejected by a majority of 45 with 4 abstentions at the Conference, and the demands for a fundamental change in the WSI's heavily bureaucratised internal regime, argued strongly by the minority Democratic Centralist Faction (DCF) were voted down by a similar margin.
These expulsions were in fact not for any breach of the WL constitution or for any disruptive activity but because the 35 members had political disagreement with the majority and had formed a faction to fight for their ideas. This has been clearly admitted on several occasions by supporters of the majority.
With these unseemly events, carried through by the WL leadership to split the organisation in the midst of the miners' strike, the final nails were hammered into the coffin of the 1981 fusion between the old Workers Socialist League and the International-Communist League.
That fusion has been hailed on both sides as a historic stride forward for British Trotskyism, because it represented both a substantial break from the two "traditions" Socialist Viewpoint, No. 1, Autumn 1984. Page 20
The first, shorter document, is from the minority Democratic Centralist Faction, comprising members from both wings of the fused group, which fought against the expul sions within the WSL, but resigned after its June conference
The second, more extended document represents the political positions of the expelled 35 members, and their general view on the failure of the fusion.
Both groupings, together with a number of additional supporters have since jointly conducted a wide-ranging summer school, and agreed to discuss a common framework for a new organisation, which has adopted the interim name
In mid-August a preconference of the Socialist Group formally opened a 3-month period of discussion preparatory to a November founding conference of a new, democratic
The Socialist Group is committed to focus centrally on work in and around the mass organisations of the working class and the oppressed, and to make a priority of solidarity of Trotskyism (of either standing aside from serious work in the mass organisations of the labour movement or of watering down the programme to adapt to the labour movement), and a major break from the sectarianism characterising so many of postwar Trotskyist organisations in Britain.
expelled,
Among the 35 most were former members of the old WSL, including its group of carworker militants from Bl's
Cowley factories, as well as other prominent trade union and labour movement activists.
But the Democratic Centralist Faction which fought on against the expulisions continued to reflect the fusion; it brought together virtually all the other surviving ex-
WSL members with a sizable number of longstanding members of the old I-CL - and labour movement trade unionists activists of some prominence — who were moved into opposition by the bureaucratic actions of their old leadership.
In the course of the three years since the fusion, the core leaders of the I-Cu succeeded in winning over only two isolated individuals from the old WL to support their methods, while at the same time losing