British unionist recounts path toward Trotskyism

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From Militancy to Marxism, by Alan Thornett, Leftview Books, London, 1987. 280 pp. $16.95 These are hard times for labor militants. Every day we see events such as the defeat of the National Football League strike and the physical attack organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers bureaucracy against Hormel strike leader Jim Guyette at the recent This holds particularly true for those labor militants who see the need for building an organization that can organize and lead the struggle against the bosses—a revolutionary party. A book that describes the daily work of a dedicated group of socialists up to their elbows in the fight with management is therefore to be warmly Such a book is "From Militancy to Marxism," the first volume in Alan Thornett's trilogy on the (Above) Autoworkers challenge strikebreaker in development of the trade-union movement among auto workers at the large Cowley, Oxford, factory in Britain. 1950s. (Below) "Mineworkers struggles were high Thornett was centrally involved in this activity, serving as chair of the Transport and General Workers Union branch and of the Joint Shop Stewards Committee. He also was a leader of the Socialist Labour League (SLL, a predecessor of the Workers Revolutionary Party), a Trotskyist organization at the time deeply involved in the trade-union movement.

This book, therefore, combines a history of the Cowley factory with an account of the work of the SLL.

The Cowley plant was infamous in the British press as a hotbed of "trade-union pigheaded obstinacy" and "extremist militancy" that was meant to be "destroying "From Militancy to Marxism" begins with the first attempts to build up a strong trade-union organization at the Morris plant in the 1950s. The militants faced an uphill struggle just to construct the rudiments of a paperback.

AFL-CIO convention. welcomed.

An uphill struggle the British car industry." The last time we talked was when I visited them both in March of 1981. on the agenda."

They faced employer hostility every step way.

Thornett takes us through all the factory. Of course, Cowley was not Cowley workers took their place big battles at the an island, and the in all the major during the 1960s and 1970s. the coal miners was also high on the agenda.

per year! leader Tim O'Sullivan to calm things down.

situation down. morning.

The decline of Black living standards at the same time Black elected officials increased in number was not a product of irony but of neo-colonialism.

The liberal/democratic bourgeoisie made a coalition with the Black primitive petty bourgeoisie led by Martin Luther King in order to capture and neutralize the Black revolution of the '60s and the Black power movement.

It's true the Democratic Party "Keep on keeping on" lusion and capitulation of the white-led left.

I think your analysis becomes vague at this point because your line is vague. Are you for Black self-determination or not? If there was a Black liberation movement then—then there must be one now.

Things are not just demobilized or don't just decline. Things are a product of the class and anti-imperialist struggle-then and

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