The RWL Truth Kit

This is a review of John Lister's "The Politics of the American Revolutionary Workers League".

I've actually encountered the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), a radical Trotskyist group based in the United States, with supporters in Britain and Italy. The year was 1992. The group experienced its "fifteen minutes of fame" after successfully recruiting on college campuses during protests against the Gulf War. They were even mentioned in a Swedish daily paper. The RWL's all-purpose auxiliary organization NWROC (pronounced N-Rock) participated in actions against "Operation Rescue" outside abortion clinics.

Although some of RWL's supporters seemed to be pretty nice guys on a purely personal level, their politics were (to put it somewhat mildly) bizarre. They openly supported NAMBLA and had even recruited a NAMBLA organizer in California! NAMBLA is, ahem, the North American Man-Boy Love Association... Uncritical support to the LA riots, opposition to Polish Solidarnosc, anarchistic slogans such as "We have to put the revolution back on our agenda again", attempts to penetrate the Fourth International and odd Spartacist-sounding theories about Marxism not really being proletarian, coupled with a ra-ra-revolutionary style in general, were other features of this group. They seemed like a Militant Tendency youth campaign on speed!

John Lister's "The Politics of the American RWL", written already in 1983, cleared up some things I always wondered about or suspected concerning this particular group. It turns out that they really do have a Spartacist background. That would explain both their "pro-Stalinist" tack on Poland and their idea that Marxism is a classless science. Their magazine "Fighting Worker" was published on an irregular basis and contained few really good articles - the same problem subsisted ten years later.

Above all, the RWL were factional raiders.

They had joined the TILC, an international Trotskyist network headed by Alan Thornett's Workers Socialist League in Britain, in order to capture it and use it for their own ends. The British WSL - the supposed "comrades" of the RWL - were denounced at socialist summer camps, as the American group attempted to recruit WSL members to their own "perspective". On their home turf, the RWL "fused" with another small leftist group, the otherwise unknown SLDC, only to denounce and harass its supporters after the fusion. This is eerily reminiscent of the Spartacist League's methods. They, too, raided other leftist groups or attempted to break groups they had "regrouped" with.

The RWL formed "union caucuses" based on the full, revolutionary program of their little group (compare NWROC ten years later or the union caucuses of the Spartacists). Even the RWL's slogan for a "Workers' Party" (rather than the usual "Labor Party") comes from the Sparts. Lister also accuses the RWL of "middle class guilt tripping", probably inevitable in a group which recruits "politically correct" (White) students to fight for "the specially oppressed".

Yeah, sounds familiar, alright! While leftist polemics are virtually always self-serving, I'm willing to bet my five cents that Lister's analysis of the RWL is correct, as far as it goes. Lister's little pamphlet is the official statement of the WSL against the RWL's destructive factionalism. It was published by the Proletarian Tasks Tendency in San Francisco, a group I never heard about before. There was a small group in Frisco called "WSL" during the 1990's, so I suppose it could be them.

As mentioned above, the RWL - contrary to Lister's predictions - did experience a brief "false summer" of success in the early 1990's. They even created a "Left Faction" within the Fourth International. Then, the RWL and their international network split. The American defectors, the Trotskyist League or TL, sounded like RWL's double, so don't ask me what the split was *really* about. The spoils of the factional raiding parties? Finally, both the RWL and the TL simply disappeared, with an inactive home page on the web being the last ghostly remnant of the RWL about ten years ago...

I might be the only one who still pretends to give a damn, but that's me, at 5 AM in the morning, local time! I think John Lister's, shall we say, RWL Truth Kit, deserves five stars.