The+original+Right+to+Work+campaign,+from+Denver+Walker

=From “Quite Right, Mr Trotsky!” by Denver Walker, Harney and Jones, London, 1985= Page 40:** … the IS (//International Socialists//) throughout the 1970s began to develop work amongst rank-and-file trade unionists. That phrase, however, meant something different for the IS than it did for others in the trade union movement. “Rank-and-file trade unionist” in IS-ese meant members of IS or readers of //Socialist Worker// formed into tiny groups of people unable to win enough of the confidence of the rank and file in order to gain elective positions in the movement. All the different “rank and file” groups demonstrated their genuine roots within the unions by having identical political lines – that of the IS, or, as it became in 1977, the SWP (//Socialist Worker’s Party//)– and identical publications.

The change to party from group had come as a result of Tony Cliff’s conviction that the revolution was on the cards in the years immediately following the worker’s victory of 1974. The “National Rank-and-File Movement”, formed at a 500-strong (strong?) conference in 1974 was to be “capable of challenging capitalism itself… untrammeled by a reformist bureaucracy”, according to the reborn International Socialism (publication not group) in 1976. It didn’t.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, considering that “our strategy is the building of the national framework of the National Rank-and-File Movement through the **Right to Work Campaign**”, according to Chris Harman at the 1976 IS Conference. As the latter campaign itself never had a real mass base, it’s difficult to see how even that openly manipulative aim was to be achieved.

Indeed, many of the leading activists of the Right to Work Campaign – all of them members of IS and SWP, of course – were people with the sort of qualifications so untypical of the 1970s unemployed that they could themselves have found work in the long-gone relative prosperity of its heyday, until they made themselves unemployable by their public antics. Some were silly enough to give up good jobs to become “unemployed activists”. They may have lived to regret it.

The SWP’s loss of much of its limited base in industry was accompanied by the effective dissolution of its own front organisations, the “rank and file movements”, formalised at the October 1983 conference which ratified the swing towards geographical branches that took place 18 months earlier. They still cling to a semi-anarchist view of “leadership from below” and see their role as “the creation of a network of militants at shopfloor level” – those considered worthy of membership being “those who take Socialist Worker” after a dispute is over. (October 1983 Conference resolutions).
 * Page 108:**

For those who wonder why the above material is included in a book about Trotskyism, suffice it to say that Denver Walker does go into the differences between the IS/SWP and orthodox Trotskyism, and its origins in the US with Max Schachtman’s break with Trotsky in 1938.
 * Note**

From the 1950s to the late 1960s the British IS seems to have been an “entryist” organisation. “Entryism” means the secret or semi-secret penetration of an existing, larger organisation (in their case the Labour Party) by sectarians whose loyalty is to their own secret gatherings. This kind of behaviour is outlawed by the constitution of the SACP as follows:

“6.4 Members active in fraternal organisations or in any sector of the mass movement have a duty to set an example of loyalty, hard work and zeal in the performance of their duties and shall be bound by the discipline and decisions of such organisations and movement. They shall not create or participate in SACP caucuses within such organisations and movements designed to influence either elections or policies. The advocacy of SACP policy on any question relating to the internal affairs of any such organisations or movements shall be by open public statements or at joint meetings between representatives of the SACP and such organisations or movements.”

The IS or Socialist Workers Party still exists in Britain.

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