Fausterella

Close Up: Alan Weaver

Interview by Kate

Coming as I did from a lower-middle background and a Cornish comprehensive school, I never really felt that I fitted in properly at Oxford, but my misfit status was nothing compared to his. For one thing, Alan was 37 when I met him. For another, he was a defiantly working-class Marxist from South London. He’d left school at 16 and had worked in a factory for years before he changed his life completely by enrolling at Ruskin College, from where he was accepted into Corpus Christi. He was a fish so far out of water he was practically living in a tree, and he expected to have nothing in common with any of the other students.

In fact, however, it turned out that drinking, smoking and impromptu performances of The Rocky Horror Show transcended both class and generation, and he found himself a member of a group of friends all 20-odd years younger than he was. In several cases, certainly in mine, his influence was incalculable.

Seventeen years later, the group remains intact and Alan remains one of my best friends.When I decided to conduct interviews with people who had interesting aspects of their lives to share, I knew he had to be my first interviewee. For this article, I’ve chosen to focus on his time as part of Britain’s hard left in the 1970s.

Alan, can you say something about your background and the area where you grew up?
Souf London working class. Dad (a wall washer/painter & decorator) is a working class tory and atheist. Mum (machinist/pie filler/home help) a Labour supporting believer in a strange mishmash of religious believes she defines as christian. And a younger brother. We moved from the ground floor of a back-to-back (outside toilet and no plumbed hot water) into a tower block situated between Brixton and Stockwell. When I dream of ‘home’ I dream of Wayland House; which incidentally was the first tower block in England to have the asbestos removed by workers wearing space suits!

How old were you when you became a Marxist and what prompted it?
One of the things about being on the Left in the 70s was the importance of words and definitions, and this question comes up with a Lulu right out of the shute. A ‘Marxist’ eh? I guess I started to define as a socialist in the first form of my secondary school, in 1969 aged 12. The first ‘left’ book I read was Guerrilla Warfare by ‘Che’ Guevara. Writing to the embassies of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union provided me with bundles of pamphlets, posters and books. The most influential to me at the time was Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung; in part because it was far easier to read than Lenin!

What prompted this? The war in Vietnam was a major influence on my development, and the sense that I was only hearing one half of the story in a heavily polarised Cold War world. I come from a very poor working class background and a sense of the injustice and unfairness of life also led me to find explanations for the many ills in the world and (to paraphrase Marx) to find ways to change them. I shouldn’t downplay my religious influences as well. I was very much a christian at the time, and would be for another two years, and my christianity was of a primitive communist nature, and heavily influenced by the hippy movement of the 60s.But looking back I cannot really define my mishmash of Christian Socialism, Maoism and Stalinism as especially ‘Marxist’. That would come when I left school at 16, started work and joined the WRP.

What’s the WRP, and how did you end up in it?
The ‘Workers’ Revolutionary Party’ (along with its trade union section the ‘All Trades Union Alliance’ and its youth section the ‘Young Socialists’) was the British section of one version of the Trotskyist ‘Fourth International’. At the time of my joining (in 1974) they were riding the crest of a very politicised wave in the country (there being two General Elections that year following a miners’ strike). The WRP had recruited enough around the February election, and when I joined at the time of the October election, that they had three branches in and around Brixton. My personal connection came after they had been in touch with my mother and I joined and became active more or less immediately.

At the time, the WRP was regarded by many as the hard left of the Hard Left. Bitterly opposed to revisionism, Stalinism and all other factions of the Left we regarded ourselves as the only true heirs to the legacy of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky… with some justification! Unlike many parties that defined as Trotskyist we had a large number of working class members and youths (though not students). Marxist philosophy was rigorously taught amongst all members and supporters at very complex levels. And the highest possible levels of activism and revolutionary discipline was insisted upon. I have absolutely no doubt, over 35 years later, that I owe much of my intellectual ability to the training I received in the WRP.

Why did I join them and not the stalinist Communist Party, reformist Labour Party or any of the revisionist parties that defined as Trotskyist? Simple…no one else asked me. And no one asked because no one else was as active as the WRP. And perhaps no one was as active as them because they truly were the only true heirs to the legacy of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

What was involved in being a WRP member?
Campaigning around our daily newspaper (the first national daily printed in colour), various meetings/conferences, current disputes and political issues. We sold the paper outside tube stations, factories and on housing estates. Recruitment of new members and moving them into activism was one of the highest aims. There was also a constant need for money to drive the expansion of the Party. The Party grew very quickly (probably too quickly to be sustainable) in this period, with the colour daily, various magazines, our own education centre, art department, film/drama departments (we were rather good at that!), branches etc. There are many controversies as to where the money came from, but I certainly know that some of it came from the pockets and hard work of the active membership.

Activity was 7 days a week and I remember having to ask permission to take a couple of hours off one Saturday to watch West Ham win a FA cup final. A typical day for me as an activist might be as follows: receive a phone call at work (I was a clerk at the Midland Bank) telling me to go and speak at a Young Socialist meeting after work. I would speak at the meeting and then maybe lead them in a paper sale afterwards. I might return to our HQ (in Clapham) for a regional meeting: these were very intense meetings where we engaged ourselves and fellow activists in rigorous bouts of criticism and self-criticism. Sleep for a few hours on the floor at Clapham and then be driven to Oxford for a paper sale outside the Cowley motor plant, or maybe delivering papers to subscribers.
before being dropped off at work. At weekends there’d be a greater emphasis on street sales in the daytime and pub sales in the evening. The YS would have social events but these were used to recruit and to engage members and supporters in greater activism.

After leaving the Party I found out that this period was criticised by Party leaders for having burned out many, many activists with the never-ending cycle of Party work.

What were the other members like? Vanessa Redgrave was involved, wasn’t she?
Everyone asks about Vanessa! She was in a different branch/region to me, although I found out later that she had given approval for me and the ‘kinda’ relationship I had with a comrade in the YS in her area. The famous actor in my area was Kika Markham. Although we had several celebrity members amongst the acting profession they didn’t really carry much more weight than the many working class members and youth. The most charismatic (and latterly controversial) person in the Party was its leader Gerry Healy. I cannot comment on the charges laid against him in later years and can only say that he was held in the highest possible regard by most party members and especially the youth at the time. He gave many of the lectures on philosophy I’ve mentioned above and his general oratorical style (at first speaking so quietly he was almost inaudible and then raising his voice to an almost shout) was both exciting and inspiring.

Did you feel the Party was having an effect on society?
‘Society’ is affected primarily by economics. What we believed we were doing was building a disciplined party that would lead the Working Class in the inevitable (and soon to arrive) revolution. If I were to criticise the Party (as it was in the mid-seventies) it would be on the two issues of over-working the active membership, and a too rigid belief that the revolution would happen tomorrow. To this day I have no doubt that economic crisis will lead to a revolutionary situation in this country, but at times the Party seemed to take a very un-Marxist line of wishful thinking.

How long did you stay in the Party and how did you end up leaving?
Would it surprise you to say just one year?! It seems like several because my membership was total and much of what and who I am is because of that year. I left due to burn-out having started to have constant recurring nightmares about paper sales and suffering declining mental health. But I did so much in that year and would not change a day of it. Had I been an older member, rather than a rather young teen, I would like to think that I would have risen to a position that would have allowed me to argue against the burning out of activists.

The Party split once during my membership but as I left there were many splits and scandals which overtook it.

On leaving the Party I carried much of what I had leaned into a few decades of trade union activity.

Years later, you ended up reading History at Oxford. Given how different your background was to most of the students, how did you find it?
Before starting I was seriously afraid that I would be totally isolated for three years. But I threw myself into ‘freshers week’ and made friends who I still cherish nearly twenty years later. I was the only working class student, and certainly the only mature student, in my year at Corpus. But the broad age and class range I first experienced in the Party (and later in the broader TU movement) probably helped me to survive in that bizarre environment.

Would you join a political party now?
There are no existing parties I would join today. However when I was active as a trade unionist I was close to the Broad Left within my union and I believe that a new party could be built from a trade union base. We live in a period of economic crisis (again!) and the resulting political conflicts will certainly provide the conditions where such a party could be built. But I am not optimistic, or even hopeful. Lenin once said that the choice facing humanity was between Socialism or barbarism, and I’m afraid that my money is on barbarism…and wouldn’t the 17 year old me despise the cynic I’ve grown into!