WeeklyWorker

29.10.2026
Leon Trotsky: go Fourth and multiply

Socialist Organiser to Resisting Socialism

From 1984 till his death, Alan Thornett was involved in almost every broad left front, coalition, alliance and party attempt. All quickly ended in failure, but lessons were never learnt. Mike Macnair concludes his two-part series

In the first article in this two-part series, I discussed the first 25 years of Alan Thornett’s political career, from its beginning at Cowley in 1959 to the end of the Matgamnaites’ smash-and-grab operation against the Workers Socialist League in 1984.

I pointed out that (as his former comrade, John Lister, accepts) fusing with the Matgamnaites was a mistake. It is also questionable whether Thornett was early enough in beginning to make a political fight with the Matgamnaites. Duncan Chapel’s take-down of Matgamna’s smear job on Thornett draws attention to the fact that the WSL-Socialist Organiser fusion agreed to set on one side for later discussion the questions of Afghanistan, the EU, the general strike slogan and the history of the Trotskyist movement.

These decisions were certainly right on the history of the Trotskyist movement (which is a theoretical question without immediate political implications) and the EU (which, as of 1981, was not a major political issue in British politics). But the general strike issue was about to reappear with the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, and the Matgamnaites’ approach to Afghanistan was already pro-US in argument (but with the weasel words that have become usual with the AWL).

Within months of the fusion it was clear that Socialist Organiser, as the (theoretically) broad-front paper operated by the fused group, was in practice continuing as a Matgamnaite paper. Thornett’s decisions in this period were significantly affected by attempting to make the fusion work, while Matgamna’s (and perhaps his co-thinkers’) were governed by a bad-faith salami tactic, to break up the former WSL.1 This bears on Thornett’s decisions in the early period of the International Socialist Group, in 1987-91.

This second part covers a longer period - 42 years from 1984 to his death (he was still writing very shortly before he died2). That does not mean that it has to be longer; most of this history is of the endless, unsuccessful repetition of the Mandelite policy of building ‘parties not delimited between reform and revolution’.

Between 1984 and 1992 the political landscape of the world was reshaped by Gorbachevism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The political landscape of the British labour movement was reshaped by the defeats of the miners in 1984-85 and the printers in 1986-87. And that of the British far left was reshaped by the explosions of Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, and of the Socialist League (formerly International Marxist Group) in 1985, the dissolution of the ‘official’ CPGB into the Democratic Left in 1991, and the 1991-92 split of the Militant Tendency between Taaffeites (now Socialist Party in England and Wales), who initially opened up to collaboration with other leftists before retreating in 2001, and the Grantites, who clung to the Labour Party (as Socialist Appeal) until their recent Healy-style launch of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In this period of transition, Alan Thornett and his co-thinkers can be seen as initially successful. Thornett’s perspective for the miners’ strike, though never actually implemented by any mass forces, won some influence among Trotskyists, leading to a small Trotskyist regroupment in the International Socialist Group.

In practice, however, the ISG fairly rapidly shed both its 1985-87 movement towards ‘Thornettism’ and its non-Mandelite components, leaving Thornett himself and a small layer of co-thinkers becoming substantially Mandelites - or merely activists in sectional campaigning and trade unionism under a Mandelite umbrella.

Since the election in 1994 of Rupert Murdoch’s candidate, Tony Blair, as leader of the Labour Party and his 1995 rewrite of Labour’s clause four to remove the commitment to common ownership, the British left has been characterised by a series of (decreasingly successful) attempts to make or find some sort of left alternative to Labour. Alan Thornett was involved in most, but not all, of these attempts.

Splits

Thornett and his co-thinkers came out of the Matgamnaites’ raiding operation battered, but not, as the Matgamnaites had hoped, eliminated as a ‘centrist obstacle’ to the growth of Matgamnaism.3 On the contrary: the new Socialist Group (SG) included a section of the former Matgamnaites who rejected their leadership’s anti-democratic operations. Their Socialist Viewpoint started publication in autumn 1984, not long after the beginning of the Great Strike.

In this situation, the Oxford WSL’s historic perspective of a central orientation to the trade union movement and trade union struggles, and the general strike strategy, and the idea of moving towards a general strike through building any form of solidarity or coordinated action, had real plausibility. More plausibility than the Matgamnaites’ focus on the Labour left (leaving aside their deepening social-imperialism). The SG threw themselves into the Miners’ Support Committees, consistent with the Oxford WSL’s pre-fusion unitary approach to the practical class struggle (as opposed to the Matgamnaites’ practice of ‘winning the initiative’ by creating Matgamnaite-controlled fronts, which pretended to be broad).

This increased significance of ‘Thornettism’ intersected with the explosions of the WRP and of the IMG-SL - both, in different ways, triggered by the miners’ strike.

The WRP explosion was triggered by sex abuse complaints in July 1985 against its central leader, Gerry Healy - what would now be called a #MeToo story. But Bob Pitt is pretty certainly right to analyse that the underlying driver was the falsification of the WRP’s perspectives.4 For 10 years Healy and his co-thinkers had been holding out the perspective that revolutionary crisis was imminent in Britain, and that with it the WRP would leap to the leadership of the mass movement. Now there was a real mass movement (around a sectional struggle) and to the extent that WRP militants were engaged in it, they were forced to recognise that they were just one among the various competing left groups; meanwhile, the party’s finances were in deepening difficulty, due to attempting to behave as if the WRP was a mass party.5

The crisis led to extremely rapid splintering between, first, Healy loyalists. Second, Northites (who defended Healy’s campaign of slander against SWP US leaders as KGB agents, while breaking with Healy towards a US-led International Committee of the Fourth International). And, third, the WRP-Workers Press or ‘WRP of the four professors’ (Cliff Slaughter, Geoff Pilling, Tom Kemp and Cyril Smith), initially together with the formal general secretary of the WRP, Mike Banda. This last group was more open to discussion with the rest of the left. In early 1986, after the split with the Northites, the WRP-Workers Press ‘opened up’ to discussions with the Socialist Group.6

The break-up of the IMG-SL was less sudden and unexpected, because its factions had an open form as ‘tendencies’, though the particular event that produced it in summer 1985 was a surprise. A little more narrative is necessary to explain why Alan Thornett and his co-thinkers should have elected in 1987 to fuse with a fragment of the IMG-SL after their bad experience with Matgamna.

The starting point was in the international organisation of which the IMG was part: the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International. The strategic perspectives of both the ‘international majority tendency’ and the ‘Leninist Trotskyist faction’ of the USFI were falsified in 1976 by the course of the Portuguese revolution and the crisis and military coup in Argentina in 1976. The international factions were dissolved without any accounting for these failures, and in 1978 the US SWP proposed as the next step a “wrenching turn to industry”: ie, large-scale industrial colonisation. This cost the IMG, which began to implement the ‘turn’ in 1979, about a third of its membership. Its major trade union fractions (teachers, health unions, civil service) and its student fraction were closed down to enforce the ‘turn’. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 led the US SWP to break with Trotskyism towards the line of the Communist Party of Cuba.

The failure of the ‘turn’, together with the left-right battles in the Labour Party, led the IMG in 1982 to engage in full entry in the Labour Party, renaming itself as the Socialist League (intending to echo William Morris, not Stafford Cripps) and its newspaper Socialist Action. But the ‘turn’ was not at first abandoned and in 1983 produced a small disaster, when the SL sent a significant number of youth into Cowley Assembly; they were rapidly exposed as ex-students and witch-hunted, and the entry policy made any open defence impossible for Socialist Action.

The result was a complex and tortuous factional struggle, which by 1985 had produced five factions. The smallest was the supporters of the USFI majority leadership - a group of generals with no army (mainly former full-timers: Brian Heron, Steve Potter, Val Coultas and others). Second smallest was the Outer West London grouping, based in that branch of the IMG, and indirectly politically influenced by the 1975-81 WSL (via Peter Purton). Third largest was the outgoing central committee majority, led by John Ross. This claimed that there existed a new broad left, the Benn-Scargill-Livingstone current, and the job of the SL was to be best builders of this current, not to differentiate themselves to its left. In the Labour Party, they urged supporting Campaign Group News. The second largest was the self-identified faction of supporters of the US SWP: pro-turn, pro-Ortega, pro-Khomeini. The largest minority was that led by Phil Hearse and Dave Packer - in the Labour Party, they urged collaboration with Labour Briefing.

One of the major differentiators was also international: the US SWP, the Ross group and the international majority supporters all agreed that left criticism of the African National Congress leadership was ultra-left. The Hearse-Packer faction was as much animated by the South African question and the defence of ‘permanent revolution’ against the pro-US SWP faction as by British politics; but the Rossites also argued that criticisms of Scargill’s tactics in the miners’ strike and advocating parallel or spreading action was ultra-left. This pushed the Hearse-Packer tendency by dialectical development towards a broadly Thornettite line on the miners’ strike.

The Rossites for some reason (never clear to me) at the last meeting of the SL central committee before the conference (during the pre-conference discussion) proposed the expulsion of the pro-US SWP faction as disloyal. They were persuaded to back down on this; but then, at the conference, entered a bloc with the same pro-US SWP faction on the basis that the Rossites would receive a CC majority. The Hearse-Packer faction, who had expected to receive a CC majority, walked out shortly after the conference, and proceeded to form the International group round a journal of that title. They were followed in late 1985 by the Outer West London faction and in early 1986 by the USFI leadership supporters faction.

Fusion

The SG were now in a position in which they were engaged in talks both with the WRP-Workers Press, and with the International group. There were, indeed, some three-way talks and at least one three-way day school, which I attended. The potential prize would have been substantial. A unification of the WRP-Workers Press with the SG and the IG, incorporating the other ex-SL fragments, would have had serious potential attractive power.

It rapidly became clear, however, that the form of the break-up of the WRP, in which political differences had had no time to develop, meant that the leaders of the WRP-Workers Press were sitting on top of an extremely unstable coalition, and not capable of reaching decisions for a fusion which would carry their miseducated membership with them. The IG leadership was aiming to win the SG, but not to fuse with the larger WRP-Workers Press.

The latter would have liked to win back the Thornett group, but were not interested in the sort of discussion which would be necessary to fusing with the British ‘Pabloites’ leadership.

In fact, Banda’s ‘Twenty-seven reasons why the International Committee should be buried forthwith and the Fourth International built’7 displayed an incoherent combination of Healy dialectics with a critique of the US SWP in the 1940s-50s - a critique which logically called into question the core anti-Pabloite claims, which it maintained. In that sense it pointed towards the future of the core leaders of the WRP-Workers Press: clinging to anti-Pabloism as the essence of Trotskyism, they were to break with this ‘Trotskyism’ in various directions. The SG and the IG were both in Labour Party entry; the WRP definitely not.

The SG leaders seem to have concluded that the dynamic of the IG was towards their views (true, in 1984-86) and went for fusion with the IG, which was completed in 1987. The fusion had some attractive power, and pulled in the SL international majority supporters (the Outer West London faction had already joined up with the IG), the Lambertiste Socialist Labour Group, and the core group of Labour Briefing.

This unity was, however, symptomatic: it was at the end of the day based on agreement on tactics: that is, on the common commitment of the component groups to Labour Party entry and their dissent from both the ‘shallow entry’ tactic of Militant (which they characterised as a sect) and the Rossites’ policy of tail-ending and acting as bag-carriers for the ‘official’ lefts.

The intervention of the ISG leadership majority in the discussion for the 1991 13th world congress of the Mandelite Fourth International continued to reflect this orientation: the ISGers formed a bloc with the faction in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire led by Gérard Filoche, which argued for trade union work and a unitary orientation towards the mass socialist and communist parties.

However, the Hearse-Packer faction had been drawn towards the SG by the combination of the experience of the miners’ strike with the dialectic of the faction struggle in the SL around ‘permanent revolution’ and South Africa. Almost as soon as the fusion had been completed, two developments pulled them in a different direction.

The more historically important was Gorbachevism, and the reforms announced from the 27th CPSU Congress in February-March 1986. 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. The issue was debated in the ISG in 1987-88: the minority - consisting of a significant section of the former SG, as well as a smaller minority of the former IG - assessed it as a move to the right. Thornett stayed with the majority. The fall of the eastern bloc and of the USSR in 1989-91 should have led to a radical reassessment of the political dynamics involved, but did not.

Less important, but more immediately destructive for the ISG was the development of the Chesterfield conferences in 1987-88, leading to the Socialist Movement - perhaps the first of the attempts to create a left movement on the basis of the methods of top-down control, platform-dominated conference plenaries and workshops, which have been repeated since. The involvement of Tony Benn as the central ‘official left’, on the one hand, and of ex-IMGer Hilary Wainwright and the authors of Beyond the fragments as ‘representing feminism’, posed Chesterfield/the Socialist Movement as an alternative to the Briefing project attractive to at least a section of the ISG leadership.

Labour entry

The result was not radical success with the Chesterfield/Socialist Movement process, but it called into question the basis of the ISG fusion in the common commitment to entry. Opposition developed, and the beginnings of a process of flaking off of the forces assembled in 1987 - starting with the Briefing group. Again, Thornett was integrated in the ISG leadership majority, not putting forward a distinct perspective.

Meanwhile, the Cowley Assembly Plant (North and South Works) was run down in 1988-92, and sold for demolition and redevelopment in 1992. The site is now an (incompletely occupied) business park. Thornett was already separated by his 1982 victimisation, but the closure of the plant eliminated the core base of his historical tendency.

By the early 1990s, therefore, Thornett was fully integrated in the leadership of the ISG as a Mandelite organisation, and he continued to be integrated in this leadership down to his death. Hence, in the absence of published criticisms on his part, he can be taken as sharing credit and responsibility for the public lines and tactics of the ISG and its successor organisations - Socialist Resistance and Anti-Capitalist Resistance.

Broad parties

The rest of the story is one of rather monotonous repetition. The pattern is by no means unique to Britain, or to this period. It repeats over and over again, in the last analysis, the policy of Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank in La Commune in the Section Francaise de l’Internationale Ouvrier (French Socialist Party) in 1935-36 and in Marceau Pivert’s Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan in 1938-40, which were condemned by Trotsky: diplomatic approaches to create a broad-front paper, hoping to organise the left and, within the framework of organising on a diplomatic basis, to win militants politically; and which end in failure, as the ‘official lefts’ involved are no more willing to collaborate loyally with diplomatic Trotskyists than with undiplomatic ones. The diplomatic Trotskyists may be used as a weapon against other leftists, but will then be knifed.

The same pattern was visible in Mandel’s editorship of the Belgian broad-front La Gauche in the late 1950s to early 1960s. It has been repeated in Europe in a series of experiences with ‘new parties of recomposition’ between the 1990s and, most recently, Podemos in Spain. I have written about this at length before and do not propose to repeat the points;8 it is only necessary to note that Thornett 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.

Turning to the application of the policy in Britain, Thornett cannot be held responsible for it in Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, since the former SL faction of supporters of the USFI majority leadership broke with the ISG in order to form the Fourth International Supporters Caucus in the SLP. Equally, Phil Hearse and his co-thinkers broke with the ISG to follow Murray Smith into the Taaffe wing of Militant in the 1990s - and from there to the Scottish split and the early stages of the Scottish Socialist Party. This, of course, did not involve actual ‘official lefts’ - only Trots pretending to be left Labourites.

The ISG, however, was concerned in the equivalent policy of the Socialist Workers Party, of the Socialist Alliance pretending to be ‘old Labour’; and the ISG agreed with the SWP on replacing the Socialist Alliance with the ‘broader’ Respect, and were loyal lieutenants of the SWP’s policy in Respect down to the split with Galloway in November 2007 (ISGers as much as SWPers were still denying that the split was imminent a few weeks before). They then stayed with Galloway in the split - but, fatuously, split with him in 2010 when he decided to stand in a by-election in Glasgow, because they retained attachment to the failed Scottish Socialist Party.

They, including comrade Thornett, were strongly active in Left Unity, arguing against it taking on a socialist name and aims: this paper tagged them at the time as “Resisting Socialism”. They argued in LU for ‘humanitarian support’ for the Kurds in Rojava (meaning the Kurds’ misconceived alliance with US imperialism, which duly ended in the US knifing the Kurds in the recent past); for ‘safe spaces’ censorship arrangements; and for a Lexit policy on the EU (losing the vote; the ACR later reversed its position).

In Your Party they endeavoured an intermediate position between the Corbynistas and their left. Simon Hannah quotes a Fourth International document on a “useful party”, that the left should commit to

building parties that are useful in the class struggle. That is to say, parties that can assemble the forces and decide on actions that have an effect and advance the class struggle on the basis of a class-struggle approach and programme, the ultimate goal of such a party being obviously to get rid of the existing capitalist system, in whatever general terms this may be expressed.9

Ecosocialist

Since around 2000 the Mandelite Fourth International has been gradually reinventing itself as ‘ecosocialist’. In 2022-25, it moved to a ‘degrowth’ version of this perspective.10

Alan Thornett was a vigorous participant in this development, and in 2019 published extended arguments in his book, Facing the apocalypse: arguments for ecosocialism. One aspect of this set of arguments was controversial. Already in 2013 Thornett argued that the ecosocialist perspective requires socialists to break with Marx’s and Marxists’ traditional objections to Malthusianism, and make a case for the conscious planning of population.11 He maintained this line in Facing the apocalypse, despite sharp criticisms from co-thinkers.

The reasoning is, in fact, unsound. Thornett argued that the rate of expansion of global population is unsustainable. Present but sidelined in his argument is the ‘demographic transition’, in which the move away from peasant agriculture, plus sharply decreased infant mortality, promotes declining population in ‘developed’ countries, apart from immigration - an issue of concern to capitalist-state policymakers in all the imperialist countries today (and, indeed, in China12).

It follows that socialist transformation will in itself tend to overcome the ‘Malthusian trap’ - a point made by several of Thornett’s critics. In the absence of socialist transition, the incentive structures of imperialism will continue to drive population growth in the semi-colonies and population decline in the imperialist centres.

I do not mean by this to damn Thornett for raising the issue. Many, many sacred political cows will have to be slain in the coming years. We need to talk seriously about which these are; and that makes raising the issue a virtue in itself, even if the answer given is probably wrong.

In reality, this is a problem with the ‘degrowth’ paradigm adopted by the Mandelites as such. Overcoming the ecological crisis requires us human beings to plan production in kind. This planning will in some areas require ‘degrowth’ (notably in motors, aerospace and petrochemicals). In other areas there will need to be growth (notably in the infrastructure of the semicolonial ‘third world’ countries).

What this boils down to is another manifestation of the Mandelites’ tailism towards whatever appears to move - in this case green politics. The same tailism issue is reflected in left use of the ‘green new deal’ idea - which omits the fact that the original Rooseveltian New Deal was both only temporarily successful in mitigating unemployment, and a step on the road to World War II.

War

Here we meet up again with the problem of tailing whatever seems to be moving. The result is an inability to distinguish between a real social revolution, on the one hand, and a ‘well-orchestrated swell of public outrage’ or ‘colour revolution’, on the other. Kyiv in 2014 was the latter.

This problem was already visible in the Mandelites’ belief that Gorbachev (and even Yeltsin!) represented movement to the left; in Ukraine it has carried the Mandelite 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’.

There is an opposition within the Mandelite Fourth International to this line of support for our own (US and its vassals’) imperialism against Chinese imperialism and its Russian ally.13 I have no reason to suppose that Alan Thornett was part of it. On the contrary, in 2022 he argued for a break with fossil fuels as a form of sanctions-war on Russia.14

So, as I said at the start of this two-part series, Thornett had a mostly honourable political career - but also one marred by some very serious political mistakes.

  1. Chapel: redmole.org/p/a-cult-an-egomaniac-and-a-settling. Gard/Edwards: socialistfight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/whathappenedwsl-1.pdf, at pp34-56; the account is negative towards Thornett, where Chapel tells a similar story more positively towards Thornett. The Socialist Group’s own version is in Socialist Viewpoint issue 1 (August 1984: splitsandfusions.wordpress.com/2016/12/12/the-socialist-group-socialist-viewpoint).↩︎

  2. Eg, www.ecosocialistdiscussion.com/2026/10/10/scotland-and-wales-undermining-the-british-state.↩︎

  3. In fact, the Matgamnaites ought to reassess the whole of James P Cannon’s line on this question in the light of their successive failures with Cannon’s policy.↩︎

  4. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/pitt/Chap9.html↩︎

  5. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/healy/pitt/Chap11.html.↩︎

  6. Workers Press Feb 7 1986 pp7-8.↩︎

  7. Workers Press February 7 1986, pp3-6.↩︎

  8. ‘Eurotrotskyism’ Weekly Worker June 4 2003 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/483/eurotrotskyism); ‘The Fourth International and failed perspectives’, June 6 2012 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/917/the-fourth-international-and-failed-perspectives); ‘Strategy and freedom of criticism’, June 13 2012 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/918/strategy-and-freedom-of-criticism; ‘Broad parties: theories of deception’, June 20 2013 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/967/broad-parties-theories-of-deception); ‘Principle not diplomacy’, November 24 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1420/principle-not-diplomacy); ‘Break with diplomatic self-silencing’, May 14 2026 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1585/break-with-diplomatic-self-silencing).↩︎

  9. anticapitalistresistance.org/your-party-and-the-return-of-strategy; see also anticapitalistresistance.org/your-party-consolidates-into-labour-2-0-what-next.↩︎

  10. There is a useful FI narrative of this development at internationalviewpoint.org/The-contribution-of-the-Fourth-International-to-ecosocialism.↩︎

  11. thornett.redmole.org/2013/population-and-the-environment-time-for-a-rethink.↩︎

  12. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c79r7v7qr53o.↩︎

  13. Majority and minority motions from the 2025 18th World Congress are at fourth.international/en/world-congresses/874/europe/673.↩︎

  14. ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2022/03/25/end-the-addiction-to-fossil-fuel%E2%80%91-support-the-ukrainian-resistance.↩︎