A letter from former TILC comrades
TributesDear comrades,
It is with great regret that we learned of the death of comrade Alan Thornett. Of course, his was a long and combative life, and as materialists, we have to take note of the fact that life has an ineradicable limit. But sadness strikes all the same.
This is particularly true for us who lived through an important period of our youth as comrades and friends of Alan. It was between the end of the 70s and the early 80s. This was particularly the case in 1979, with the establishment of the International Trotskyist Liaison Committee (TILC), in which our small organizations in Italy, the USA and Denmark participated together in the British Workers Socialist League, of which Alan was the main representative. Unfortunately, this experience ended in 1984 with a break with him and the great majority of his comrades in the old WSL, which we did not want, and which we still consider wrong. Unfortunately, the twisted history of the Trotskyist movement is full of these, sometimes tragic, sometimes tragicomic, events.
However, we want to add that every time we met again with Alan and his comrades, the relationship was always fraternal.
Today, after having maintained the programmatic and political continuity of the old TILC for 40 years, most recently as the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO), we have entered a much larger organization, the International Socialist League (ISL/LIS), in which we have found an absolute commonality of positions at all levels (therefore for us an absolutely consequent choice with the old TILC). We think, however, that without the illogical rupture of 1984 we could have led to the unification with the ISL of an organization larger than the ITO, and we have also personally missed Alan and the other old WSL comrades of that distant past.
In any case, whatever the events that divided us and the possible divergences that developed in the decades of separation, we remember Alan as an eminent Trotskyist workers’ leader, who was able to place himself with moral courage to a character like Healy, and who will remain in our memory and, we hope, also in the history of revolutionary Marxism.
Franco Grisolia (Italy)
Marco Ferrando (Italy)
Jette Kromann (Denmark)
Peter Solenberger (USA)