So, who are these "Albanian Goatherders"?
So, who are these "Albanian Goatherders"? (The picture above shows two Albanian
goatherders interrogating a member of the UNISON United Left)
Many years ago in my dark and distant past, when I was a supporter of the trotskyist group, the Lambertists (see http://www.parti-des-travailleurs.org/index.php), there was an alliance with the Albanian Goatherders (the CPB/M-L). This was around Maastricht and a newspaper called Labour News.
The following sparked a debate in Bob Pitt's journal, What Next (http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages///Back/Wnext14/Letters.html)
Towards an Assessment of Lambertism
WHILE BELIEVING that What Next? is a good journal with a valid contribution to make and a valuable role to play in the development of Marxism today, that does not mean that I do not have disagreements of a quite serious nature with it. One such disagreement is with the journal’s failure to deal adequately with the politics of the Lambertist current, a subject close to my heart as I spent several years of my political life around that current and think a reasoned debate on its faults might be quite fruitful.
My purpose is not to uncritically defend the politics of "Lambertism" (as it is commonly known, after the historical leader of this current, Pierre Lambert), but rather to offer an alternative perspective to the usual denunciations by Phil Hearse – now a political renegade in exile in Mexico – or Earl Gilman, as well as former members of Lambert’s own group such as André Langevin or Pierre Broué (who, though a noted Trotskyist historian, dumped the Fourth International years ago!).
Whilst there are millions of workers and militants in this country who have never heard of the Lambertists, there are nonetheless many so-called revolutionary socialists around who are out to smash them. One must ask the question "why?" Why do certain people in this country fear the Lambertist current so much? What is it that causes a problem for so many British left groups?
Although it is clear that the theoreticians of the Fourth International/International Centre of Reconstruction (FI/ICR) in Paris are quite capable of defending themselves, they are not in a position to argue with the left here, as their main theoreticians are based in France and in the USA. Sometimes they send their "emissaries from France" to meet with the trade unionists and MPs that they are engaged in "united front work" with, but their small numbers dictate that it is almost impossible to engage in debate with the British far left.
It is far more important to have an orientation to the labour movement than to the Diaspora of the fifty different tiny Trotskyist currents. However, this means that attacks against the Lambertists are allowed to go unanswered within the far left in Britain.
A recent "study" entitled This Strange Mister Blondel, published by Bartillat Editions and written in the name of one Christophe Bourseiller, purports to "dish the inside dope" on the Lambertists. The book, which is meant to be about Marc Blondel, the leader of the CGT-Force Ouvrière trade union, was reviewed in Workers’ Liberty by Martin Thomas, who used it to mount his own attack on the FI/ICR. In the same journal an anti-Maastricht rally organised by the Lambertists in London in 1997 was reported by Colin Foster under the sneering title "The Circus Is Coming to Town".
There also needs to be a response to the pieces carried previously in the pages of What Next? by Bob Pitt in issue No.4 ("Stalinophobia and the SLP"), by Martin Sullivan in No.5 ("In Defence of Al Richardson") and by Earl Gilman/Jack Davis in No.11 ("A Lambertist Conference in San Francisco"), all of which are heavily critical of the Lambertists.
If the FI/ICR ignores such attacks in the journals of the British far left, it is because it has more important opponents to deal with. In France the FI/ICR section has in recent years been savagely attacked on at least four occasions. The first was by Pierre Broué in 1987. Then Munir and Samir Mansour attacked it in 1993 over its positions in relation to Palestine – something with direct ramifications, as Munir was a prisoner in Ramlah jail and his family was financially supported by the FI/ICR at the time. The third recent attack was also in 1993, by a Morenoist faction within the FI/ICR led by Pedro Carrasquedo, who denounced Lambert quite savagely in the leftist press for his opposition to ETA’s bombing campaign in the Basque country. And the most recent attack was by Bourseiller in the book mentioned above. The French USec grouping, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, which continually attacks the Lambertists, has a good 2,000 members. They and Lutte Ouvrière recently had 5 MEPs elected to the European Parliament.
The attacks on the FI/ICR in What Next? are quite problematic to deal with. They are based not a reasoned critique but on gossip and innuendo. If comrades wishing to engage were to criticise the Lambertists for their work with the supporters of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), or for their lack of activity within the Campaign for a Fighting Democratic Unison, this would be helpful. Instead we get tales of rumours, and rumours of rumours.
According to people I know in the FI/ICR, there is a debate within its ranks over what the leadership mean by defence of "national sovereignty" in relation to the Maastricht issue. We should be engaging the Lambertists on these subjects. How is it they can ally with a Maoist group whose catch phrase is "Rebuilding Britain"? A group who have had members on the NEC of Unison (Moz Greenshields) and NATFHE (Geoff Woolf and Jacqui Johnson among others) but done nothing to build the left?
The one thing that should be said of the Lambertist international current is that they are growing. How can people criticise them for that? Especially small groups of two or three people! The French section of the FI/ICR has some 4,000 members, and the broad Workers Party (PT), of which it forms the core, has about 6,500 members. We are talking about an organisation that is considerably larger than anything currently existing in Britain. The Lambertists are not building a "cult of mystical influence" as Bourseiller and Martin Thomas claim they are. Thomas’s own group is stagnant – at what, 200 supporters maybe? – and split over the Labour Party. That is not exactly a prescription for us all to follow!
The International Liaison Committee, the body set up in 1991 by the First Open World Conference held in Barcelona, also seems to be growing and is possibly the largest regroupment of its kind since the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Argentina. The 1991 Conference was attended by representatives of significant forces embarking on a process of wide regroupment at an international level. These forces included expelled leaders of the Brazilian Communist Party, representatives from the Soviet Union, Palestine, the USA, most European countries and other places where the FI/ICR had a presence. It included many forces not close to the FI/ICR. This process has broadened and deepened and a Fourth Open World Conference is taking place in San Francisco in March 2000.
There has been a significant growth in the last eight years in the numbers attracted to the projects of the Lambertist current. This is a fact – not an opinion! They have recruited a large number of militants and fractions that are breaking from the Stalinist and Social Democratic milieu – not least recently on the issue of opposition to Maastricht and around the welfare state strikes in 1996. Only in January 1999 there was a conference in the northern area of the Pais de Calais on this very issue.
The Lambertists have also recently begun to produce a regular newsletter or bulletin of the partisans of the Fourth International. This has begun with a number on the Labour Party and the 1997 general election, followed by one on the Northern Ireland Peace Accords and a third on the need for a working class solution in the Balkans.
The Fourth Internationalist Bulletin on the Labour Party contains a very reasoned defence of why militants should work within the Labour Party – a much more positive approach than that of many left groups in Britain today. The piece explains the position of the Lambertists in the aftermath of the election of the first Labour Government in 18 years. It analyses the rise of Blairism and goes as far as explaining how they see the development of a potential split in the British Labour Party. The document goes on to explain how such a split in the Labour Party can open up huge opportunities for worker militants but also what the role of Trotskyists should be in relation to it. It defends positions similar to the ones articulated by some people associated with What Next?, among others, in seeing the importance of the trade union-Labour Party link.
Although their analysis was written a year or so ago, it clearly stands in stark contradistinction to those who have jumped off the edge of the political world into the fantasy island of the so-called Socialist Alliances. It underlines the important point that comrades who are committed to building an open organisation and comrades inside the Labour Party organising to defeat Blairism should not put up artificial barriers against collaboration.
The Lambertists may or may not be all the things their critics in other organisations such as the USec say they are. It may be that they did or didn’t do all the things their enemies accuse them of! In any case, political currents can change – they are not set in stone. Like people, they develop with experience. Indeed, a number of healthy critiques of Lambertism have been written by their own supporters, such as François DeMassott and Jean-Jacques Marie.
There is a need to reassess the place of Marxism in today’s world – not in the contemptuous manner in which Blair speaks of the traditions of the Labour Party, but in a way that will take us all forward in the current period. One must assess what it is that the far left seeks to achieve in the conditions before us today.
Is our task to be one of abstract propagandism ... a la Militant circa the 1980s? When they were confronted with the realities of power on a local level they flunked it big time (just look at the debacle of Liverpool). Or, do we seek to construct a world-wide party based on the transitional method that is capable of helping the working class to resist the hammer blows being rained on it by the capitalist class? The recent war in the Balkans clearly illustrates for us that the choice facing humanity is one of socialism or barbarism. You can follow the new realist path of New Labour into the realm of barbarism or resist.
Those on the far left who continue to bury their heads in the political sand, quoting from the great texts but keeping their banners bright and sparkly clean, will achieve nothing. We cannot advance without trying our best, with our limited resources compared to the capitalists, to build mass socialist organisations in every country. No-one ever said this was going to be easy!
Whatever happens to the far left, and those who talk good socialism or write good theory, the working class always finds ways and means to resist. In this respect, organisations come and go, and in the last 60 years a lot have gone. Surely our role as Marxists is to try and orientate ourselves within the actually existing labour movement – as it is, not as we wish it to be – putting our politics on the basis of democracy and letting the working class movement decide: "The emancipation of the working class will be the task of the workers themselves."
Frank Wainwright
Many years ago in my dark and distant past, when I was a supporter of the trotskyist group, the Lambertists (see http://www.parti-des-travailleurs.org/index.php), there was an alliance with the Albanian Goatherders (the CPB/M-L). This was around Maastricht and a newspaper called Labour News.
The following sparked a debate in Bob Pitt's journal, What Next (http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages///Back/Wnext14/Letters.html)
Towards an Assessment of Lambertism
WHILE BELIEVING that What Next? is a good journal with a valid contribution to make and a valuable role to play in the development of Marxism today, that does not mean that I do not have disagreements of a quite serious nature with it. One such disagreement is with the journal’s failure to deal adequately with the politics of the Lambertist current, a subject close to my heart as I spent several years of my political life around that current and think a reasoned debate on its faults might be quite fruitful.
My purpose is not to uncritically defend the politics of "Lambertism" (as it is commonly known, after the historical leader of this current, Pierre Lambert), but rather to offer an alternative perspective to the usual denunciations by Phil Hearse – now a political renegade in exile in Mexico – or Earl Gilman, as well as former members of Lambert’s own group such as André Langevin or Pierre Broué (who, though a noted Trotskyist historian, dumped the Fourth International years ago!).
Whilst there are millions of workers and militants in this country who have never heard of the Lambertists, there are nonetheless many so-called revolutionary socialists around who are out to smash them. One must ask the question "why?" Why do certain people in this country fear the Lambertist current so much? What is it that causes a problem for so many British left groups?
Although it is clear that the theoreticians of the Fourth International/International Centre of Reconstruction (FI/ICR) in Paris are quite capable of defending themselves, they are not in a position to argue with the left here, as their main theoreticians are based in France and in the USA. Sometimes they send their "emissaries from France" to meet with the trade unionists and MPs that they are engaged in "united front work" with, but their small numbers dictate that it is almost impossible to engage in debate with the British far left.
It is far more important to have an orientation to the labour movement than to the Diaspora of the fifty different tiny Trotskyist currents. However, this means that attacks against the Lambertists are allowed to go unanswered within the far left in Britain.
A recent "study" entitled This Strange Mister Blondel, published by Bartillat Editions and written in the name of one Christophe Bourseiller, purports to "dish the inside dope" on the Lambertists. The book, which is meant to be about Marc Blondel, the leader of the CGT-Force Ouvrière trade union, was reviewed in Workers’ Liberty by Martin Thomas, who used it to mount his own attack on the FI/ICR. In the same journal an anti-Maastricht rally organised by the Lambertists in London in 1997 was reported by Colin Foster under the sneering title "The Circus Is Coming to Town".
There also needs to be a response to the pieces carried previously in the pages of What Next? by Bob Pitt in issue No.4 ("Stalinophobia and the SLP"), by Martin Sullivan in No.5 ("In Defence of Al Richardson") and by Earl Gilman/Jack Davis in No.11 ("A Lambertist Conference in San Francisco"), all of which are heavily critical of the Lambertists.
If the FI/ICR ignores such attacks in the journals of the British far left, it is because it has more important opponents to deal with. In France the FI/ICR section has in recent years been savagely attacked on at least four occasions. The first was by Pierre Broué in 1987. Then Munir and Samir Mansour attacked it in 1993 over its positions in relation to Palestine – something with direct ramifications, as Munir was a prisoner in Ramlah jail and his family was financially supported by the FI/ICR at the time. The third recent attack was also in 1993, by a Morenoist faction within the FI/ICR led by Pedro Carrasquedo, who denounced Lambert quite savagely in the leftist press for his opposition to ETA’s bombing campaign in the Basque country. And the most recent attack was by Bourseiller in the book mentioned above. The French USec grouping, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, which continually attacks the Lambertists, has a good 2,000 members. They and Lutte Ouvrière recently had 5 MEPs elected to the European Parliament.
The attacks on the FI/ICR in What Next? are quite problematic to deal with. They are based not a reasoned critique but on gossip and innuendo. If comrades wishing to engage were to criticise the Lambertists for their work with the supporters of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), or for their lack of activity within the Campaign for a Fighting Democratic Unison, this would be helpful. Instead we get tales of rumours, and rumours of rumours.
According to people I know in the FI/ICR, there is a debate within its ranks over what the leadership mean by defence of "national sovereignty" in relation to the Maastricht issue. We should be engaging the Lambertists on these subjects. How is it they can ally with a Maoist group whose catch phrase is "Rebuilding Britain"? A group who have had members on the NEC of Unison (Moz Greenshields) and NATFHE (Geoff Woolf and Jacqui Johnson among others) but done nothing to build the left?
The one thing that should be said of the Lambertist international current is that they are growing. How can people criticise them for that? Especially small groups of two or three people! The French section of the FI/ICR has some 4,000 members, and the broad Workers Party (PT), of which it forms the core, has about 6,500 members. We are talking about an organisation that is considerably larger than anything currently existing in Britain. The Lambertists are not building a "cult of mystical influence" as Bourseiller and Martin Thomas claim they are. Thomas’s own group is stagnant – at what, 200 supporters maybe? – and split over the Labour Party. That is not exactly a prescription for us all to follow!
The International Liaison Committee, the body set up in 1991 by the First Open World Conference held in Barcelona, also seems to be growing and is possibly the largest regroupment of its kind since the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Argentina. The 1991 Conference was attended by representatives of significant forces embarking on a process of wide regroupment at an international level. These forces included expelled leaders of the Brazilian Communist Party, representatives from the Soviet Union, Palestine, the USA, most European countries and other places where the FI/ICR had a presence. It included many forces not close to the FI/ICR. This process has broadened and deepened and a Fourth Open World Conference is taking place in San Francisco in March 2000.
There has been a significant growth in the last eight years in the numbers attracted to the projects of the Lambertist current. This is a fact – not an opinion! They have recruited a large number of militants and fractions that are breaking from the Stalinist and Social Democratic milieu – not least recently on the issue of opposition to Maastricht and around the welfare state strikes in 1996. Only in January 1999 there was a conference in the northern area of the Pais de Calais on this very issue.
The Lambertists have also recently begun to produce a regular newsletter or bulletin of the partisans of the Fourth International. This has begun with a number on the Labour Party and the 1997 general election, followed by one on the Northern Ireland Peace Accords and a third on the need for a working class solution in the Balkans.
The Fourth Internationalist Bulletin on the Labour Party contains a very reasoned defence of why militants should work within the Labour Party – a much more positive approach than that of many left groups in Britain today. The piece explains the position of the Lambertists in the aftermath of the election of the first Labour Government in 18 years. It analyses the rise of Blairism and goes as far as explaining how they see the development of a potential split in the British Labour Party. The document goes on to explain how such a split in the Labour Party can open up huge opportunities for worker militants but also what the role of Trotskyists should be in relation to it. It defends positions similar to the ones articulated by some people associated with What Next?, among others, in seeing the importance of the trade union-Labour Party link.
Although their analysis was written a year or so ago, it clearly stands in stark contradistinction to those who have jumped off the edge of the political world into the fantasy island of the so-called Socialist Alliances. It underlines the important point that comrades who are committed to building an open organisation and comrades inside the Labour Party organising to defeat Blairism should not put up artificial barriers against collaboration.
The Lambertists may or may not be all the things their critics in other organisations such as the USec say they are. It may be that they did or didn’t do all the things their enemies accuse them of! In any case, political currents can change – they are not set in stone. Like people, they develop with experience. Indeed, a number of healthy critiques of Lambertism have been written by their own supporters, such as François DeMassott and Jean-Jacques Marie.
There is a need to reassess the place of Marxism in today’s world – not in the contemptuous manner in which Blair speaks of the traditions of the Labour Party, but in a way that will take us all forward in the current period. One must assess what it is that the far left seeks to achieve in the conditions before us today.
Is our task to be one of abstract propagandism ... a la Militant circa the 1980s? When they were confronted with the realities of power on a local level they flunked it big time (just look at the debacle of Liverpool). Or, do we seek to construct a world-wide party based on the transitional method that is capable of helping the working class to resist the hammer blows being rained on it by the capitalist class? The recent war in the Balkans clearly illustrates for us that the choice facing humanity is one of socialism or barbarism. You can follow the new realist path of New Labour into the realm of barbarism or resist.
Those on the far left who continue to bury their heads in the political sand, quoting from the great texts but keeping their banners bright and sparkly clean, will achieve nothing. We cannot advance without trying our best, with our limited resources compared to the capitalists, to build mass socialist organisations in every country. No-one ever said this was going to be easy!
Whatever happens to the far left, and those who talk good socialism or write good theory, the working class always finds ways and means to resist. In this respect, organisations come and go, and in the last 60 years a lot have gone. Surely our role as Marxists is to try and orientate ourselves within the actually existing labour movement – as it is, not as we wish it to be – putting our politics on the basis of democracy and letting the working class movement decide: "The emancipation of the working class will be the task of the workers themselves."
Frank Wainwright
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