British Elections. TUSC. Jesus H. Christ.

Better Days?

Sean O'Torain.

Comrades, Please excuse the uncultured speech. But sometimes it just gets too much. I have not heard all the results for the TUSC (Trade Union Solidarity Coalition) in the British elections yet, but this much is clear, they have been a disaster. They have been a catastrophe. And let us be clear the TUSC is overwhelmingly the brain child, please forgive me for calling it this, of the CWI. So I would like to pose this as a challenge to the CWI which is the main grouping in this TUSC. The challenge is this. 

The CWI (Socialist Alternative in the US is affiliated to the CWI) and its British section led the battle in Liverpool in the 1980’s and was the main force in the Liverpool City Council.  The CWI helped bring down Thatcher and led the anti-Poll Tax campaign that got 17 million people to refuse to pay it.

The CWI was a main emerging left force in Scotland with M.P.'s in both the London and Scottish parliaments and was a force in Britain's largest civil service union, recruited hundreds of miners and had 8,000 members and hundreds of full timers. Now the CWI in Britain is reduced to a remnant of a rag of a left sectarian outfit led by people whose egos are completely unharnessed to the needs of the working class and the revolution.

The need above all for the CWI now is to insist that the leadership and all sections of the CWI openly and publicly admit their mistakes which have brought them to this low, and from this open up a democratic public debate involving its members and all the workers with whom it is in touch to analyze the mistakes and develop a way forward. The need above all is to discuss the mistakes that reduced the CWI from these heights and  to not allow the bureaucratic leadership  to hide behind the excuse that it was all the objective situation.  

As well as left sectarianism there is ultra leftism. To carry out a revolution in a country like England or countries like England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, needs a revolutionary organization of millions, perhaps tens of millions. It needs a program which can reach out to such mass numbers.  I state the following with complete certainty, but also with deep regret, there is no possible way that the CWI with its present policies and its present internal life and its present undemocratic leadership around Peter Taaffe and Lynn Walsh can build such an organization. I would argue that the same applies to all the long-standing socialist organizations.

An entirely new and collective organization has to be built, an entirely new and collective leadership has to be built. An entirely new internal life and culture has to be created. To achieve this, strong honest fighting members in the CWI have to step up, analyze what has gone so wrong in the past years, demand that they be heard and form a faction to see that they are heard and to fight to change things. Unless this is done the CWI will go into deeper crisis. And when it does so it will draw the present more successful sections like the USA, Ireland down with it. 

To all members of the CWI and ex members of the CWI. All the good work that this organization did in the past must not be wasted. But it will be if the old methods of internal life, the suppression of alternative views, the slander and lies aimed at those with alternative views and their expulsion continues.. And we have to add emphatically that the question of women’s oppression not just in society but within left organizations has to be taken up in a serious way.  Nothing will change if the the present leadership remains in place. A new collective leadership and a new internal life and culture has to be built. 

John Throne. Former 25 year member of the CWI, then expelled, former 10 year member of the IS of the CWI.