The Lies the AWL Tells Itself: The march that never was

The IMG did not have a “long march through the institutions” line. It had the opposite

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On Tuesday, in a thread about the far left and the working class, Nik Barstow wrote that “the IMG had a policy of a march through the institutions”. His own organisation, he went on, had a policy of “colonisation” (he calls it “a crap term, obviously”): former students went into working-class jobs. He spent ten years in Islington Building Works and became chair of the council’s joint trade union committee. Pete Radcliffe spent ten years at Stanton Ironworks and became deputy convenor. Another contributor offered Tariq Ali, the editor of Socialist Challenge, as the proof of the IMG’s line.

Nik’s record of his own comrades deserves respect, and I am not arguing with it. The claim about the International Marxist Group is another matter. It is not a matter of emphasis. It is wrong, and the IMG’s own papers show it.

Where the phrase comes from

“The long march through the institutions” (der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen) is Rudi Dutschke’s phrase, from the West German student movement of 1967. It borrowed Mao’s Long March as a metaphor. The idea was that radicals would enter the universities, the civil service, the courts and the media and change them from inside over decades. In recent years the American right has revived it as the supposed master plan of “cultural Marxism”.

It was never Trotskyist vocabulary, and when it turns up in the IMG’s world it is either reported or rejected. The Red Mole used it once, in May 1970, in Gisela Mandel’s obituary of the German SDS. The SDS, she wrote, “started with its ‘long march through the institutions’—as Rudi Dutschke called it—on transitional demands at university level”. Her conclusion was that the SDS had died because its leaders never understood that “a purely student organisation was insufficient for revolutionary activists”. Black Dwarf, which the IMG did not control, used it once with approval. On its youth page in May 1969 Clive Goodwin urged readers who had finished with pot to settle down to “joining together to make the revolution and being what Deutschker calls the long march through the institutions”. The name is misprinted. A year earlier, in the summer of 1968, Godula Castles had used it in “The German Students’ Struggle“ for the Bulletin of Marxist Studies, edited by Ken Tarbuck and Chris Arthur for a group that had split from the IMG that year. Its project was very different from Tariq Ali’s. It was close to the Institute for Workers’ Control, and Ken Coates wrote for it. Even there it meant something different from today’s usage. Having broken “the weakest link”, the university, the students were to move on to technical colleges and “stagnent industries”, because “the revolution cannot be achieved without the support of the masses of the working people”. And when the Fourth International’s 1985 World Congress named a version of the idea, “a long march through the majority organisations of the working class”, its resolution listed it among the temptations to be avoided. The IMG’s theoretical journal used a version of it once, to reject it. Reviewing Nicos Poulantzas’s The Crisis of the Dictatorships in International in the winter of 1977, Phil Hearse wrote: “For Poulantzas the only way forward from this situation is a ‘long march’ through the democratisation stage.” He meant it as a charge. It was the Communist parties’ “dogma of the necessity of a democratic stage”, with its “objective dynamic of tying the working class to the democratic turn of the bourgeoisie”. I found the phrase nowhere in Red Weekly or Socialist Challenge. The two later uses I found on the left, both in Labour Briefing (1993 and 1999), describe other people’s strategies.

What the IMG did say about Dutschke was solidarity with a comrade under attack, not agreement. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which the IMG led, condemned the attempt on his life in April 1968 “from the point of view of our close collaboration with him in international activity against the war”, as Martin Turner put it in International that October. Black Dwarf printed an extract from Dutschke’s writing the same month. When the Heath government expelled him from Britain in January 1971, The Red Mole called for students to mobilise in his defence. It was blunt about his politics in the same article. “The fact that Dutschke did not conduct a principled Marxist fight at his trial and seemed to pander to the liberalism of his supporters is irrelevant,” it wrote. What mattered was defending him. Tariq Ali sat on that paper’s editorial board.

What the IMG argued instead

From 1968 to about 1972 the IMG was mostly a student organisation, and its strategy for students was the “red base” or “red university”. That sounds like a march through an institution, but it pointed the other way. The 1970 conference’s youth resolution opened with the proposition that “the decisive battles for a mass revolutionary party in Britain can only take place within the organised workers movement”. The red base was meant to turn colleges outward, as centres of opposition from which students could link up with workers. In February 1972 The Red Mole reported that Essex University had become “the political and organisational centre” of the miners’ strike in the area, with miners and students meeting on the campus every day. That is a university put at the service of a strike, not a career inside one.

By the end of the decade the IMG had decided that student work was not enough. The Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress told its sections to get a majority of their members into industry. The IMG’s national conference of 16–19 February 1980 voted for it. Redmond O’Neill and Valerie Coultas reported in Socialist Challenge (21 February 1980) that “the large majority (78.3 per cent)” had backed “special measures to win a solid base inside the industrial and manual working class”. From that conference, they wrote, the IMG would “centre its work in the industrial and manual unions”.

In other words, the IMG had a policy of colonisation. It called it the turn to industry. Nik’s organisation did not invent the word, and it did not like it any more than he does. At a Fourth International cadre school in Amsterdam in December 1984, Daniel Bensaïd, a leader of the French section, told the room that “the Americans speak of colonization. That’s a terrible term.” In French, he said, they called it établissement. He was speaking in English, his second language. What it meant was simple: “to take non-workers and make them workers, put them in the industry.”

What the turn got wrong

Bensaïd’s talk was a balance sheet five years on. The FI’s target was to get half the members of every section into industry. No European section had reached it. Britain was at 26 per cent. The French section had sent 300 people into industry in 1974 and “lost half of them”. The reason for the turn was sound, he argued. Organisations “proletarian by the program, but petty bourgeois [by their] composition” could not stay outside “the key sector of the proletariat” for ten years or more. He also insisted that the priority for industry did not shrink the working class to its industrial core: “Health workers, mail workers, administrative workers, in capitalism today are proletarians.”

He also put his finger on the weakness. The turn, he said, should never have been sold on “a prognosis we will have a revolutionary crisis in two or three years”. Where it was, “people go with artificial enthusiasm, demoralize, and sometimes drop the job and sometimes drop the organization too”. In Britain it was sold that way. The IMG’s 1980 conference met, O’Neill and Coultas reported, on the assumption “that the class struggle in Britain and the world is very definitely on the rise”, and that “the decisive struggles are yet to come”. By December 1984, in the middle of the miners’ strike, Bensaïd was telling the school something else: “in Europe the situation is difficult … we have to resist austerity plans. It’s more defensive struggles.”

That is the real lesson, and it is harder than the one in yesterday’s thread. The turn coincided with a decade of aggressive deindustrialisation. Bensaïd’s own example was the Swiss watch industry, where the section had sent comrades. Its workforce fell from 80,000 to 24,000 in the same years. Comrades went into the car plants, steelworks and shipyards just as Thatcher and her European counterparts set out to close them. The perspective was an upturn. What came was ten years of defensive struggles that broke the power of organised labour and ended with Labour and most of the unions accepting the new order. Within a generation both were administering austerity.

Each section carried the turn out differently. Bensaïd describes the Spanish comrades sending six or eight people into the new General Motors plant at Zaragoza and leading its union from the start. The German section lost sixty members when the turn became the test of everything else. The best short account of the British case is Mike Macnair’s history of the IMG. It broke up the student, public-sector and women’s fractions that had carried the organisation. At Cowley in 1983 eighteen comrades took jobs together. Then came the sackings and a disorderly retreat. Bensaïd’s warning fits it exactly. With the turn, he said, a leadership is “playing with a life of [militant] people, and a mistake on this ground is much worse than any political mistake”.

Some of what the turn built lasted, mostly where Bensaïd said the working class also lived, in transport, the post, health and local government. Those sectors were privatised and outsourced, but they were not closed, and some of the comrades who went into them in the 1980s are still union reps and branch officers today. Nik’s own examples, local government, the Underground, the railways and the post, are among them. That record belongs to the IMG’s successors as much as to his organisation.

These are real criticisms, and our tradition should own them. But they are criticisms of a policy that is the opposite of the one the IMG is now accused of. A group that sent its students into Cowley was not marching on the civil service.

Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali is the worst possible witness for the charge. In November 1981 he left the IMG to join the Labour Party. The Morning Star hinted at an IMG plot to infiltrate Labour. Socialist Challenge asked the IMG’s national secretary, Steve Potter, to reply. His resignation, Potter said, was “not … part of a sophisticated plot by the IMG to infiltrate the Labour Party. Tariq resigned from the IMG to join the Labour Party against our advice” (Socialist Challenge, 3 December 1981).

Potter’s statement of the IMG’s own view is just as clear. “For us parliamentary activity is not and never can be a substitute for the struggles of working people, without which all talk of socialism is utopian.” The IMG supported Labour’s representation in Parliament and wanted to organise openly inside the party as a current, “and to argue for our programme”. That is a demand for the right to fight inside the labour movement. It is not a plan to take over the state from inside. Labour’s leadership refused Ali membership anyway, and in April 1982 Socialist Challenge was campaigning for his right to join.

Ali’s later life in publishing and television is his own business, and it says nothing about the line of an organisation he had left. One more point is worth making. Ali’s own best-known argument about the generation of 1968 is that its members who went into government and administration ended up as managers of the system. That is an attack on the long march, not a defence of it.

What is true, and when

The nearest thing to a kernel of truth in the charge is in the 2000s. Several leaders of the Socialist Action current then worked for Ken Livingstone at City Hall. Among them were John Ross, Simon Fletcher and Redmond O’Neill, the co-author of the 1980 report quoted above. But the dates matter, and they rule out the charge as made.

The IMG ended in 1982, when it renamed itself the Socialist League. Tariq Ali had left it the year before. Its successor split in 1985, and the City Hall years came fifteen years after that. Whatever one thinks of what Ross, Fletcher and O’Neill did in the 2000s, it was the evolution of one current long after the IMG had gone. It was not the line of the organisation Ali edited a paper for.

Nor is it easy to see its seeds in the IMG of the 1970s. Ross was one of that organisation’s leading writers then. His 1976 Red Weekly series “Faction and Party”, written as James Francis, defended the building of a democratic revolutionary party, and it did not argue for finding a place in the state. The same is true after Tariq Ali left. In the spring of 1982 Ross and Ernest Mandel wrote “The Need for a Revolutionary International“ for the first issue of the FI’s International Marxist Review. It is still a useful outline of revolutionary goals. Its starting point is that capitalism is a world system, so “all concepts of ‘socialism in one country’ are not merely from a political but even from a directly economic point of view both reactionary and utopian”. It has a section on “permanent revolution vs ‘socialism in one country’”. And it says that a revolutionary who does not build an International alongside national parties “bases her/himself … on the false ‘logic’ of the reformists”. Reading the later career back into the IMG years is hindsight, not history.

Nor was that evolution visible as reformism at the time of the split. The supporters of International, the journal of the minority that left Socialist Action in late 1985, explained their reasons in a statement. “The most important political differences,” they wrote, “are to do with programme and strategy in international politics.” The majority on the editorial board, they said, now believed “that the marxist notion of ‘permanent revolution’ in the underdeveloped countries is wrong”. In practice that meant refusing “to raise any serious criticism of the Khomeni regime in Iran” while it killed revolutionaries, and backing the ANC’s programme, “little more than a traditional ‘two-stage revolution programme’”, against forces to its left. They called it “a serious accomodation to the politics of Stalinism”. The statement also had tactical complaints, about the paper’s hostility to Labour left unity and its silence on its differences with Labour left leaders. None of it accused Socialist Action of trading revolution for reform, still less of a march through the institutions. The quarrel was over permanent revolution.

That minority became the International Group, and in 1987 it merged with Alan Thornett‘s comrades to form the ISG.

Why it matters

The label matters because it does the job of an argument without making one. Saying that a rival had a “march through the institutions” line puts them alongside Joschka Fischer and New Labour’s ex-radicals. It skips the real history, which is far more interesting. The IMG went from red bases to industrial fractions, then to Labour, and then split over permanent revolution. Every step can be criticised. None of them was Dutschke’s.

Nik’s comrades went to Islington Building Works and Stanton Ironworks. IMG members went to Cowley and into the industrial and manual unions. The AWL’s tradition and ours have argued ever since about what both experiments achieved. That argument is worth having. It needs the record, not a phrase borrowed from Berlin in 1967.