Mike Macnair’s two-part assessment of Alan Thornett in the Weekly Worker (part one, part two) is a serious piece of work. Unlike Sean Matgamna’s obituary, it is not a settling of scores. It credits Alan with “a mostly honourable political career”, gets a good deal of the history of the 1980s right, and is fair about the Matgamna fusion. It deserves a serious answer.
The weakness of the second part is a habit of method, and it is seeded in the first. It is the habit we found in his 1986 history of the IMG, which we have reviewed separately: one key made to open every lock. There Macnair praised Alan for breaking with Healy “into an open engagement with the rest of the far left (including the ‘Pabloite’ IMG and the ‘state caps’)”, and for not being attracted to “another Trot caudillo”. Then the same openness, from 1987 on, becomes the “Mandelite swamp” in which his politics “dissolved”. The first part also announced the verdict the second part sets out to prove: that Anti-Capitalist Resistance “has slid towards social-imperialism by way of supporting ‘humanitarian assistance’ in relation to Libya and Rojava in the early 2010s, and after 2022 arrived at the social-imperialist destination with calls to arm the US proxy regime in Ukraine”. “Social-imperialist” is the word Macnair also uses for Matgamna’s AWL, an organisation whose 2004 conference rejected “troops out” of Iraq as a slogan. A term that covers both has stopped telling us anything.
Underneath this is a second habit. Macnair treats “the Mandelites” as a single bloc with a single line that its members either follow or desert, and then measures Alan against it: “left” in 1991, “right” in 2013, “tailist” throughout. But the Fourth International was never like that. It argued in public, in International Viewpoint and Inprecor; its sections and leaders disagreed with one another at every congress; and Ernest Mandel himself changed his mind when the facts changed. Alan was one of the people doing the arguing, not a lieutenant carrying out a line. Several of Macnair’s specific claims do not survive a look at the record.
Gorbachev: “a move to the left”?
Macnair writes that “the question posed was whether perestroika and glasnost represented a move to the left, as the international leadership of the Mandelite FI argued, or to the right”, and later of “the Mandelites’ belief that Gorbachev (and even Yeltsin!) represented movement to the left”. That is not what the FI’s leadership said.
In February 1987 Mandel’s verdict in International Viewpoint was that “if he speaks more and more of a veritable ‘revolution’ being necessary, it is to save the bureaucratic system, not because he wants to overthrow it”, and he called Gorbachev’s regime a “liberal dictatorship”. The International Executive Committee’s resolution of December 1988 said that “the reforms proposed (and even imposed) from above aim to maintain the essential — the (redefined) privileges of a restructured bureaucracy”; that “in the present situation of crisis, the market is more of a life-belt than a threat to the bureaucracy”; and that the establishment of socialist democracy “would mean a revolution”. The 13th World Congress in February 1991 said that “Gorbachev’s project aims at perpetuating the bureaucracy’s rule by making it more efficient”, and that “the liberals have speeded up their restorationist course. They are joined by Yeltsin enjoying a temporary popularity”.
None of that is “a move to the left”. What the FI did welcome was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the space glasnost opened for the Soviet masses to mobilise for themselves. Macnair’s “even Yeltsin!” presumably rests on Mandel’s report of the March 1989 elections. But what Mandel called progressive there were demands, not a man. Among the opposition candidates, “especially Yeltsin and Sakharov”, he found “three general progressive threads”: “against privileges for the bureaucracy, for more equality”, and for a debate on a multi-party system. To say that a campaign against the bureaucracy’s privileges and corruption is progressive is not to have illusions in the politicians who ride it. Socialists can say the same today of the fight against corruption in Ukraine, which is no endorsement of Zelensky. By 1991 the FI was calling Yeltsin a partner in the liberals’ “restorationist course“. And some in the British section were slow to see the restorationist danger: in October 1988 Phil Hearse wrote that perestroika was “not in any way whatsoever a restoration of capitalism”. That was wrong, and the FI said so by 1991.
Macnair is right that there was a debate in the ISG in 1987-88. But it was held in the open, in the section’s own magazine. Socialist Outlook ran Oliver MacDonald, Hearse, and a reply headed “Gorbachev — a turn to the right“ by Sue Owen, who wrote that “overall, Gorbachev represents a turn to the right in the policy of the Moscow bureaucracy”. An organisation that prints its minority’s case under that headline is not a bloc.
And by the 13th World Congress Alan was on the other side of the line Macnair draws. He backed, as did the great majority of the ISG’s leaders and members, the resolution of the Tendency for Building the Fourth International, published in International Marxist Review in the summer of 1991. The tendency was led in France by Gérard Filoche, and its texts were drafted mainly by Filoche, Dave Packer and Phil Hearse. That Hearse, who in 1988 had denied any restorationist dynamic, was by 1990 drafting a sharp critique of the majority’s softness on Gorbachev is itself the point: people in the FI changed their minds in public, as events tested them. It criticised the majority because at the start of the debate it had seemed “to give some critical support to Gorbachev’s policy” and had been “relatively indulgent towards glasnost and perestroika”. The tendency’s own position, it said, had been “closer to the mark, refusing any support for glasnost dictated from above and restorationist perestroika”. On Gorbachev’s foreign policy, where the majority had once seen “positive aspects”, the tendency answered: “there are none. What it confirms is a prolonged subordination to imperialism, from Yalta to Malta.”
The charge that the FI leadership had welcomed Gorbachev was made at the time by a different group of British members at the same Congress: John Ross’s Socialist Action current, the same Rossites whose bloc at the 1985 Socialist League conference Macnair describes in his own article. They called 1989 “the greatest defeat of the international working class since the 1930s” and wrote that the FI leadership had “completely misunderstood” the events in Eastern Europe and Gorbachev, “welcoming them and seeing them as an advance”. It was one side of an argument inside the FI, and the FI published it. Macnair has taken Ross’s polemic as a good faith account of the FI’s line.
Alan’s own conclusion, once the Soviet Union had fallen, was written in 2000 against Tony Cliff’s claim that 1989-91 vindicated the theory of state capitalism. It was Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism as “a counter revolutionary force on a world scale”, he wrote, that was “confirmed so convincingly by the collapse of the USSR”. “You did not have to be a state capitalist to be unencumbered by the fall of the wall. That was for those who attributed something progressive [to] Stalinism.”
1991 and 2013: left, then right?
Macnair says Alan “was a party to left criticism of the policy in the discussions for the 1991 13th World Congress, but to right criticism of a slightly different version of it in 2013”.
The 1991 tendency resolution was not mainly about party-building. Its “heart”, it said, was the international situation. The majority’s draft held that the world had entered “a period of retreat, of decline, of being on the defensive”; the tendency rejected that, and wanted “to continue to talk of the acceleration of the imperialist crisis, of a period of revolutionary crises”. Macnair’s own description of the bloc, as arguing “for trade union work and a unitary orientation towards the mass socialist and communist parties”, does not match the document.
On the world situation the majority was right and the tendency was wrong. The 1990s were a decade of retreat, and Alan said so. In the same 2000 article he described Britain in the mid-1990s, when strikes had “plunged to the lowest since records began”, as “not an upturn or even the absence of a downturn, it was a disastrous situation”, and he criticised the SWP for refusing to see it. If Alan’s view in 2013 differed from his view in 1991, it is because he learned from the decade in between. That is what Marxists are supposed to do. Mandel did it too.
What Alan argued in 2013 is on the record: his counter-report, as Alan Davies, to the FI’s International Committee, published in International Viewpoint on 10 June 2013 as “A contribution to the broad parties debate“ (also on Alan’s site). He opposed the Bureau’s insistence, carried over from the 2010 World Congress, that the parties the FI should help build must be “anti-capitalist” on the model of the French NPA. His case was that the character of a broad party is set by national conditions, “anti-capitalist if possible otherwise radical left, left reformist, or parties based on the unions”. He also argued that the test for joining one is “whether joining such an organisation, and our involvement in it, can advance the struggle of the working class and the oppressed”.
That can be called “right” only if every argument for working with left reformists is right by definition. Two things in the text cut against the label.
Alan objected that the Bureau’s formula was “conflating anti-capitalism with ... revolutionary organisation”. He wanted a clear line between the broad party and the revolutionary current inside it, not a blur.
He insisted that FI sections “should always remain organised within such parties”. He cited the Danish comrades, who could separate themselves when the Red-Green Alliance voted for a budget they had opposed. He cited the Brazilians, who paid “a heavy price” for not staying organised inside the PT.
That is the opposite of liquidation.
Nor was the 2013 debate a two-sided one between the FI and Alan. In the same discussion the Bureau’s line was attacked from the other direction by Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action (US), and by Manos Skoufoglou and Gaël Quirante of the Greek and French sections. Macnair reported all of this himself at the time (Weekly Worker 967, 20 June 2013). In 1991 too there were at least four published positions at the Congress. An International whose members publish counter-reports against the leadership from left and right at every congress is not a bloc.
The SWP and the Socialist Alliance
Macnair’s charge here is that the ISG were “loyal lieutenants of the SWP’s policy” in the Socialist Alliance and Respect. More broadly, he says that by the early 1990s Alan was “fully integrated in the leadership of the ISG as a Mandelite organisation”, “not putting forward a distinct perspective”. His first part prepared the ground: from 1987, he wrote, “the distinctive features of the Thornett group’s politics dissolved in the ‘lovely water’ of the Mandelite swamp”.
Alan’s own writing on the SWP, at the very moment the ISG began working with it, shows something quite different. “The politics of the SWP and its turn towards the Socialist Alliance“ (2000) is a long, independent assessment, and it is not the work of a lieutenant.
It welcomed the SWP’s turn to the rest of the left as “dramatic”, and “undoubtedly genuine and whole-hearted ... at least on the part of its leadership”.
It warned that the turn had been taken “in a relatively untheorised way”, which “makes it potentially politically unstable on the new orientation”.
It pointed out that the SWP “has no strategic view of the longer term future of the alliances”. Unlike the ISG, the SWP had not concluded that the alliances were a stage towards a new party to the left of Labour.
It named the obstacle to any closer unity: “the big issue with the SWP is that of internal democracy. It does not have much that we would recognise”, with a central committee “of 10 – full stop”.
The same article takes apart Tony Cliff’s “downturn” theory with the strike figures. On Alan’s count, 70 million days were lost in strikes in 1970-74 and 65 million in 1977-81: “That was a collapse of militancy of the working class! It beggars belief”. He defended the full-time convenors whom Cliff blamed for bureaucratising the shop stewards’ movement as “an important material gain of the militant struggles”. He also criticised the SWP’s rank-and-filism for treating the union bureaucracy as irrelevant.
That is the voice of the Cowley deputy convenor, not of someone whose distinctive politics had dissolved. Its warnings about an untheorised turn and an undemocratic regime are a fair description of how Respect ended seven years later.
Left Unity
Macnair writes that Alan and his comrades were “strongly active in Left Unity, arguing against it taking on a socialist name and aims”. They argued, he says, for “’humanitarian support’ for the Kurds in Rojava”, for “’safe spaces’ censorship arrangements”, and “for a Lexit policy on the EU (losing the vote; the ACR later reversed its position)”. Left Unity’s own minutes and conference papers say otherwise on almost every count.
The name. No socialist name was on the ballot at the founding conference on 30 November 2013. The four names put to the vote were Left Party, Left Unity Party, Left Unity and Democratic Voice.
The aims. The Left Party Platform, which Alan and his comrades supported, called for a party that would be “socialist, feminist, environmentalist and against all forms of discrimination”, standing “against capitalism, imperialism, war, racism and fascism”. The aims the conference adopted spoke of “a democratically planned economy” and “cooperation and community ownership instead of the chaotic competition of capitalism”. The disagreement with the Socialist Platform, which Macnair’s comrades backed, was not over whether Left Unity should be socialist. It was over whether a fully worked-out revolutionary programme should be the condition of joining a broad party. That is a real argument, but it is not the argument Macnair describes. As Alan put it at the 2014 policy conference: “Of course we all want socialism. I’ve been an anticapitalist activist for 55 years.”
Rojava. Socialist Resistance opposed the US-led bombing. Its writers said in October 2014: “We oppose coalition air strikes.” What they asked for was the means for Kobane to defend itself: in Sarah Parker’s words on the Socialist Resistance site, “The UK Government must provide the Kurdish forces with advanced weapons”. That meant defensive arms for a besieged town, such as anti-tank weapons against the ISIS armour, not bombing and not Western troops. The case for arming the Kurds, from whatever source, is the same case Trotsky made in 1938. It is not a case for an alliance with the United States.
Safe spaces. Socialist Resistance members did support a safe spaces policy. Terry Conway co-proposed the composite in November 2014. It said: “We want free and open speech” and “Respect the person; challenge their behaviour”. A code of conduct against harassment and abuse is what every trade union has; it is not censorship. The Communist Platform, Macnair’s own comrades, proposed a code of conduct of its own at the same conference.
Lexit. This claim is simply wrong, and it can be traced. In November 2014 Fred Leplat of Socialist Resistance moved an amendment to defer Left Unity’s position on a referendum vote to a later policy conference. It was defeated. The Weekly Worker’s report at the time called this an attempt to “sneak in a reversal” of the commitment to remain, and a week later Macnair himself turned it into an attempt to shift Left Unity towards withdrawal. Twelve years on, his gloss has become “a Lexit policy”.
What Alan actually wrote, in June 2015, was: “the right way to vote in this referendum will be Yes”. In November 2015 Left Unity adopted a motion resolving “not to vote to come out but to vote to stay in”. Its key sentence is Alan’s own, word for word: leaving “does not mean that we are obliged to vote for exit whatever the circumstances and whatever the consequences”. In 2016 Socialist Resistance backed Another Europe Is Possible: “We call for a vote to remain.” There was no Lexit policy for the ACR to reverse.
Why remain: the Saar
The reasoning Alan put in that 2015 sentence is the important thing. Socialists oppose the European Union as a capitalist and neoliberal construction, and are for a socialist Europe. Whether to vote to leave depends on what the alternative on offer actually is. In 2016 the alternative on offer was a Brexit driven by the Tory and Ukip right, on an anti-migrant campaign, that would strengthen the right across Britain. Remaining in was, in those conditions, the lesser evil.
Macnair’s own first part supplies the comparison. In the 1975 referendum, he notes, the Oxford WSL ran a campaign for a “leave” vote “on an internationalist basis”, with the local Communist Party and IMG. Forty-one years later Alan argued to remain. That is not a reversal of principle.
In 1975 the question was a Labour government’s referendum, with the Labour left and much of the trade union movement prominent in the “no” campaign.
In 2016 it was a referendum called by a Tory prime minister to settle his party’s quarrel, with the leave campaign led by the hard right and fought on immigration.
The same principle gave different answers because the concrete alternatives were different.
There is a precedent in the Trotskyist tradition for exactly this kind of reasoning. Before the Saar plebiscite of January 1935, the Marxist principle would normally have been for the reunification of an overwhelmingly German territory with Germany. With Hitler in power, the International Secretariat of the International Communist League, the Trotskyist movement of the day, called instead for a vote for the status quo: continued League of Nations rule. It did so “not because we regard the present situation in the Saar as ideal and final”. It did so “although we are far from considering your present masters, the League of Nations, as an instrument of peace”, but “purely for reasons of expediency”: to spare the Saar “all that they have seen for the last year on the other side of the border”. The principle did not change; the concrete alternative did.
Libya
Macnair’s charge of “humanitarian assistance” over Libya does not survive the record. On 3 March 2011 the FI’s Bureau said, on 3 March, that it was “necessary to reject any military intervention by American imperialism”. Its statement of 23 March called for “humanitarian and military aid to the insurrectionists and an end to the imperialist intervention”. That is probably where Macnair’s word “humanitarian” comes from, but he leaves out the second half of the same sentence. Socialist Resistance’s conference that April adopted as its central slogan “Arm the Resistance – Victory to the Libyan revolution – No to the NATO/UN No Fly Zone”, as “an alternative to the NATO/UN No Fly Zone”. It added that the western powers’ “’humanitarian’ actions” could not be detached from “their historic or present role in the region”, including “the misnamed ‘No-Fly Zone’, which was designed and has been used in order to give a spurious ‘legality’ to such intervention”. And it was explicit, in the resolution as International Viewpoint printed it: “We call for an immediate end to the NATO bombing of Libya, and the withdrawal of any undercover forces. At the same time, we call for the arming of the revolutionary forces, in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere, in order that they can resist state oppression.”
The same resolution did say that, “while opposing the NATO/UN No Fly Zone, we also support the right of the interim government to call for one in response to Gaddafi’s threat of massacre”, warning that “the imperialist powers cannot be trusted”. It is worth being exact about what that means. Socialist Resistance defended the Libyan rebels’ right to make their own decisions under the threat of massacre, while saying plainly, of the call for a no-fly zone, “we do not agree with their decision”. That is solidarity with a revolution without dictating to it, not support for intervention.
The Green New Deal
Macnair says the left’s use of the “green new deal” idea is tailism, because the “original Rooseveltian New Deal was both only temporarily successful in mitigating unemployment, and a step on the road to World War II”. This is a weak argument. A programme is judged by what it demands and whom it mobilises, not by the name it borrows. By Macnair’s reasoning one could reject a demand for a “new charter” because the Chartists lost.
It is also not what Alan did. In “Green New Deals must push the boundaries“ (Socialist Resistance, September 2019) he judged the Ocasio-Cortez–Markey resolution and Labour’s Green New Deal by their content, and criticised both sharply.
He attacked “net zero” as “at best a diversion and at worst profoundly problematic – we must aim to eliminate emissions not ‘balance’ them”.
He criticised both deals for being “vague as to what constitutes fossil fuel energy” and for accepting nuclear power.
He made the point about Roosevelt himself, more pointedly than Macnair. Both deals “fail to address the issue of economic growth”, and with the US resolution “this is compounded by the name ‘New Deal’ with its reference to Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression – which was based entirely around growth”.
He defended the Labour motion against attempts “to water it down”, while arguing that it “can be strengthened”. That is critical engagement with a real movement in the labour movement, not tailism.
Ukraine: “our own Fourth of August”?
The heaviest charge is that support for Ukraine has carried the Fourth International “to its own ‘Fourth of August’ – campaigning for arms to Ukraine, just as the pro-Entente socialists in 1914 defended ‘bleeding Belgium’ and ‘plucky little Serbia’”. Macnair is right that Alan supported the Ukrainian resistance, sanctions and the supply of arms; he said so plainly in March 2022. The question is whether that is the Fourth of August.
On 4 August 1914 the SPD voted war credits for its own imperialist government, in a war between imperialist powers, and declared a truce in the class struggle at home. Nothing in the FI’s position resembles that.
Its Bureau’s statement of 7 March 2022 called Russia’s war “a military invasion of the territory of a former oppressed nation by a capitalist oligarchic, autocratic and imperialist regime whose aim is the reconstruction of the Russian empire”.
It supported “the armed and unarmed resistance of the Ukrainian people” and “delivery of weapons on the request of the Ukrainian people”.
In the same document it repeated that the FI had opposed NATO “from its foundation”, and demanded “the dissolution of NATO” and “the liquidation of the US-led NATO and the Russian-led CSTO”.
It called for the cancellation of Ukraine’s debt.
No FI section voted credits for its own government’s war, or suspended the class struggle at home.
The relevant precedent is not 1914 but Trotsky in 1938. In “Learn to Think“ he imagined a rising for independence in French Algeria to which fascist Italy, “motivated by its own imperialist interests”, sends weapons. He asked whether Italian workers should stop the shipments: “Let any ultra-leftists dare answer this question in the affirmative.” The Italian workers would let the arms through. They would warn the Algerians “not to trust their treacherous ‘ally’”, and “continue their own irreconcilable struggle against fascism, ‘the main enemy in their own country’”. As he put it: “In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal.”
That is the position of the FI, and of Alan, on Ukraine: the right of an invaded nation to arm itself, wherever the arms come from, with no confidence in the governments that send them.
Macnair’s first part calls Ukraine “the US proxy regime”. A proxy does what its sponsor tells it, and stops when its sponsor stops. Ukraine has repeatedly done neither.
It went into Kursk in August 2024 without telling Washington.
It kept striking Russian refineries when the Biden administration asked it to stop.
It built its own long-range drones to get round the limits on American missiles.
When the Trump administration paused military aid and intelligence in March 2025 to force Kyiv to the table, a proxy would have stopped fighting. Ukraine did not.
Treating every war as a proxy war of the great powers is what erases the Ukrainians themselves. Macnair’s “our own (US and its vassals’) imperialism against Chinese imperialism and its Russian ally” has no room for a nation fighting for its existence.
What the record shows
Macnair ends by saying that Alan had “a mostly honourable political career – but also one marred by some very serious political mistakes”. Alan made mistakes, and he said so. The tendency he backed in 1991 was wrong about the decade ahead, and he drew the lesson. But the mistakes Macnair lists are mostly not his.
Gorbachev. The FI did not call Gorbachev a move to the left, and by 1991 Alan’s tendency was attacking the majority for being too soft on him.
Left Unity. Alan did not oppose a socialist party, and he did not argue for Lexit; he wrote the sentence Left Unity used to vote to remain.
Rojava and Libya. Socialist Resistance opposed both the US bombing in Syria and the NATO no-fly zone in Libya.
The Green New Deal. Alan made the Roosevelt point before Macnair did.
And the International he belonged to was not a swamp with a single current. It was an organisation that argued with itself in print, with Alan in the middle of the arguments. That is how he should be remembered: not as a Cowley militant who dissolved into someone else’s line, but as one who kept thinking for himself to the end.
A late post-script: I think it's unfortunate that some socialists should object even to humanitarian aid in cases like Rojava and Libya. I am reminded of Che Guevara's phrase about the great feelings love revolutionaries feel for those in struggle. Its part of the human solidarity that powers working class movements.