by Mickey Conn
Origins
The first Trotskyist groups had emerged in the mid-1920s as Communist Party
members grew interested in Trotsky's work. With little contact between
groups, and divisions on factional lines, various small groups grew and
split. By 1937, there were three British Trotskyist groups: the small,
Scottish Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), the Revolutionary Socialist
League (RSL) and Militant.
The RSL, opposed to entryism, included CLR James, while Militant, who were
in favour of entry into the Labour Party included Ted Grant (later to head
the post-war Militant Tendency), and Gerry Healy (later to become enmired in
scandal whilst heading the Workers Revolutionary Party).
The Fourth International
After four newly arrived South African comrades were expelled from Militant,
Ted Grant and Gerry Healy joined them to form a new group, the Workers
International League (WIL), led by Jock Haston. With no clear political
differences from Militant, but opposed to factionalism and resolved to be
more active, they attracted more of Militant's members.
In 1938, the American James P Cannon, followed by Max Shachtman, arrived for
an attempt to unify the British groups for the imminent Fourth
International. He drafted an agreement of international perspectives that
ignored the issue of specific tactics. The RSP, RSL and Militant signed the
agreement, but the WIL opposed it. Officially, the WIL held it to be an
unworkable dilution of democratic centralism, although they may also have
been reluctant to join with a group they had just split from.
The newly merged group, also called the Revolutionary Socialist League, had
around 150 members to the WIL's 30-odd, and at the founding conference of
the FI, the RSL were accepted as the British organisation. The WIL could
not afford to send a delegate, but instead sent a letter, and were condemned
for factionalism.
The war drive
As the war drive stepped up, the Labour Party and the Communist Party
declared it would be a 'war to defend democracy' against fascism. Cannon
and the International Secretariat formulated a position readily adopted by
the American SWP, that:
"as socialists oppose capitalism but 'go into factories and try by working
with the class to influence its development', so it is necessary to raise
the revolutionary plan in the army and call for compulsory military training
for workers".
Both RSL and the WIL expected to be made illegal, and for a rigid military
dictatorship similar to fascism to emerge in Britain during the war. The
WIL trained younger members to fill the positions of leading comrades who
might be arrested and made plans for printing their paper in Ireland, while
the RSL operated ever more clandestinely. In the event, the groups were too
small for them to be banned, and paper was allocated for the printing of
their newspapers and journals.
The early war years
The paths of the two groups diverged during the war. The WIL readily
adopted the International Secretariat's position, and polemicised:
"No worker in this country wants to come under the bloody tyranny of Hitler.
On the contrary, he will fight against this with all his strength. But he
cannot do this. while the capitalist class controls the army and the workers
are unarmed".
"If it is militant British workers fighting for socialism. the German
workers can join them in the fight against Hitler free from the fear of
British capitalism waiting to pounce on them"
The RSL felt that the Secretariat's failure to actively condemn the war was
a dilution of Trotsky's third campism. Presenting their views in an
alternative light, they announced:
'International Socialism is the only way by which war can be ended and the
threat of Fascist domination dispelled'
'[This is an] imperialist war. fought in the interests of the capitalist
class. the working class has no interest in supporting it. the TU and labour
movements to cease helping the government and use all their energy to end
the hostilities'
The RSL position, although to their amazement adopted by one trade union
conference, drove many workers away from their ideas. The WIL position
proved a much more useful slogan for the times.
The groups' differing positions were dramatised by the national debate on
air raid shelters. The RSL condemned the construction of air raid shelters
as 'imperialist war preparations', while the WIL fought for more, more
accessible shelters to protect workers. The WIL campaign was reluctantly
taken up by others on the left, and won them more attention.
Although both groups remained within the Labour Party during the war, as
Labour Party branches became less active, and a no-contest election pact was
established, the WIL group focused on trade union work. The RSL leadership
immersed themselves in their Labour Party front, which other factions in the
group did not join. When this front was banned, the leadership became
inactive and other factions split from the group.
The WIL's union work went from strength to strength. They formed the
Militant Workers Federation with the Independent Labour Party and some
anarchists. This front supported and helped build strikes in the Kent coal
mines, in the Vickers factory in Barrow, and around the Clyde.
Re-unification
The Communist Party changed from supporting 'war for democracy' to
supporting 'peace, even on Hitler's terms', and back to supporting the war,
to the extent of acting as strike-breakers. Although the party grew as
right-wingers joined, many others were driven towards the WIL, which found a
ready audience.
By 1943, the WIL had more than three hundred members and were selling 12,000
copies of their bi-monthly journal. The RSL were reduced to twenty mostly
inactive members and had no regular publication.
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International recognised the
success of the WIL, but were unwilling to simply make them the official
British section, as this would have contradicted the line agreed at the
pre-war founding conference. Instead, the manipulations started. They
demoted the RSL to the status of a faction, and after reunifying with some
small groups that had split from it, held a unity conference, with a vast
majority of delegates being from the WIL. As such, the newly constituted
Revolutionary Communist Party adopted all the positions of the WIL, but due
to the climate did not undertake any entryist work.
The Revolutionary Communist Party
At first, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) achieved successes. They
remained in the Militant Workers' Federation, and when various trade
apprentices went on strike over the removal of various trade apprentices to
mining, they managed to turn them toward the issue of workers' control. The
strike, unprecedented in the war, was 100,000-strong, across Yorkshire, the
Clyde and Tyneside. Several RCP leaders were arrested under hastily enacted
and retrospective anti-strike legislation, attacked by left-Labour and ILP
MPs (but supported by the Communist Party). Later in the war, for a short
while, RCP workers at the Royal Ordnance Factory forced bosses to accede to
workers' control.
But as the war ended, Labour parties revived and NHS and nationalisation
took place, RCP remained outside and so lost ground. Ultimately, Gerry
Healy took a faction into the Labour Party, while some of the leadership
left politics, leading to the break-up of the group. The rump of the party
voted to join Healy's group, which gained recognised by the FI, but Healy,
desperate to retain control, expelled the majority of them on various
pretexts. Ted Grant and Tony Cliff (newly arrived in Britain) decided to
form a rival group, but wide-ranging disagreements - in particular on
analyses of the Soviet Union - led to them forming separate tendencies.
Conclusions
The WIL and the early RCP were successful, because the late war period was a
time of increasing class struggle. The unconscionable positions of
Communist Party drove their left wing away, and some of them joined the RCP,
while the inactivity of the Labour Party and keenness of ILP leadership to
merge also brought people in. The RCP were the most vocal supporters of
industrial action during war, and were very active, and they adopted correct
slogans on many other issues.
Ultimately, the RCP faded away because the Labour Party adopted a new
programme and largely carried it through. Some RCP members accepted
reformism, while some others gave up as the RCP failed to relate to this new
social democracy. Personality clashes within group, including Jock Haston's
weak leadership and Healy's power craze, and confusion over the apparent
resurgence of Stalinism in Eastern Bloc and over the question of support for
Tito in Yugoslavia drove some away. Others moved back to Communist Party,
mistakenly believing that they could further the class struggle there. The
group had been on high activity level for long time, and some members were
exhausted, while the manipulations of the Fourth International and lack of
international structure weakened the group.
Lessons
The real lessons to be learned from this period lie in the positions on the
war itself. Similar debates have arisen among Trotskyists ever since. The
RSL position which proved so unsuccessful in Britain was essentially the
same as the popular position adopted by Sri Lankan Trotskyists and
Shachtman's group in the US. No group at the time argued for support of the
'Allies' as a lesser evil, but that is the logic of the later Shachtmanite
position on the Vietnam War.
Until the late stages of the war, reports of Nazi atrocities were widely
thought to be exaggerated, as reports of German atrocities had been
concocted during World War I. The concentration camps, coupled with the
moderate course of the UK have led some to argue critical support for the US
and UK would be correct.
The picture is again complicated by the war in the Pacific, which was
undoubtedly traditional imperialist war, albeit one in which Japan was an
official ally of the Nazis. The Fourth International said that the Soviet
Union was justified in defending itself, but with our different analysis of
its class nature, can we say it was more than an imperialist actor?
The position of the WIL and the Fourth International on the war were
well-received in the UK, and were broadly correct analyses, but there is
room for debate on the detail.
