How British Trotskyism began

In August 1932 Reg Groves, Harry Wicks and Henry Sara were summoned to the regional office of the Communist Party of Great Britain. They were there to answer charges. The three, along with other CPGB members in South London, had been producing and circulating a paper of the Left Opposition in Britain, The Communist (no relation to today’s). What followed was a show trial led by Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the CPGB and a diehard Stalinist. Sara refused to take part and was suspended in absentia; Groves and Wicks were expelled. The Balham Group, the Left Opposition in the CPGB, was “liquidated”.

Years before, during the General Strike of 1926, Groves was seventeen, not an organised socialist but swept up in the fervour after Red Friday (July 1925). As calls grew for a general strike against the government’s next attack, Groves and his comrades read Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? and later Lessons of October, finding an analysis for the political moment they inhabited, though they were not propelled to the Left Opposition until much later. With an increasingly Stalinised party, they knew little of the controversies surrounding Trotsky.

After 1917 Trotsky had been widely regarded as one of foremost leaders of the Russian Revolution, including in the nascent CPGB. From 1923, however, as Trotsky spoke up for the working class and Bolshevism against Stalin, he was increasingly vilified from Moscow.

The British Party remained relatively insulated from that struggle until Moscow’s control over the Comintern had tightened. Where is Britain Going? was Trotsky’s analysis of the revolutionary potential in Britain and quickly became a counter to the official slogan “all power to the [TUC] General Council”. Trotsky described the TUC leadership as “the most counter-revolutionary force in Britain” and argued for a revolutionary party.

The TUC’s capitulation and abandonment of the miners in May 1926 left the labour movement reeling. Union bureaucrats accepted deals cutting jobs and wages in the pursuit of “industrial competitiveness”. Groves and his comrades became convinced of the need to organise and for a revolutionary party. They joined the CPGB in 1927, as the only show in town for organised communists. Groves recalled early meetings where members were asked to condemn the Russian Left Opposition. Opposition material was available but only sandwiched between official “correctives”.

Some level of debate and disagreement still operated in the British Party, though or perhaps because the theoretical level of the party was lower than many of its European counterparts. Groves and his comrades could abstain or vote against the official line without rebuke.

By 1927 the Party was in ill health: membership and sales were down in the wake of the crushing defeat of the miners’ strike which continued for months after the General Strike.

The CP had, on Lenin’s advice, sought affiliation to Labour, but especially from 1925 Labour expelled communists, barred them as delegates and expelled constituency parties which refused to exclude them. The CP organised a National Left Wing Movement which drew communist activists into sustaining local Labour organisations, though the CPGB remained deeply confused over electoral strategy.

Encountered

In August 1928 Comintern delegates James P Cannon and Maurice Spector encountered Trotsky’s critique of the Communist International’s draft programme, with George Weston smuggling a copy out of the Soviet Union in a teddy bear. It was an important breach in the censorship surrounding the Russian Opposition, though several years passed before the Balham Group encountered it.

Groves met Henry Sara in 1929. Sara was an industrial unionist, Marxist and early party member, who had been conscripted during the First World War following an arrest for anti-militarist campaigning, had visited revolutionary Russia, and had become a communist. Also in 1929, the CPGB completed another sharp turn, adopting the Comintern’s so-called “class against class” “Third Period” line. Labour was now a “third capitalist party”. The CP tried to create new “Red Unions” as rivals established trade unions, further isolating the CPGB from the workers’ movement.

Groves was invited to the Lenin School in Moscow, and to work at the Marx-Engels-institute. He declined. Those who went, he later recalled, returned with their “critical faculty atrophied rapidly”, dependable servants through every lurch and contortion of the Comintern line.

The new line did little to settle the Party. After its poor showing in the 1929 election, dissent reached even the Central Committee, with some advocating a vote for Labour. When Moscow demanded a purge of “right wingers and conciliators”, the London Regional Committee, on which Groves sat, challenged the secrecy surrounding debate in Russia and the Comintern. Moscow responded by demanding that the CPGB “submit implicitly” to its decisions. The leadership duly fell into line.

Groves, Wicks and Sara grew increasingly sceptical of the Comintern and Stalin, but still hoped a new leadership might right the Party. Meanwhile the world economy slid towards the Great Depression.

Overhauled

At the 10th Congress in January 1929, the leadership was overhauled. Only twelve old Central Committee members remained, while twenty-three replacements were selected through the Party apparatus. The old “social democratic methods of election” gave way to selecting those best able to fulfil the CPGB’s “obligations” as a section of the Communist International. The Congress was ill-tempered. Old leaders publicly confessed their errors, while London delegates were hauled before Comintern representative Walter Ulbricht to explain their opposition to a Central Committee member.

Yet Groves and his comrades stopped short of confronting what this meant. By his own admission they avoided looking too closely at Stalinisation, rationalising events in Russia while distrusting the capitalist press. Instead they buried themselves in Party work. Groves hoped that “in struggle and action differences could be resolved, errors in all [their] parts corrected, experience and understanding enlarged.”

Groves wrote a “Workers’ Notebook” column for the Daily Worker in 1930, but abandoned it after repeated editorial interference. Later that year Wicks returned from three years at the Lenin School and joined the circle around Groves and Sara. Having witnessed the struggle against the Left Opposition in Russia, he sharpened their criticism of the leadership.

The CPGB’s isolation was exposed further by its 1931 “Workers’ Charter” campaign. Of 316 organisations at its conference, around 240 were the Party or its fronts and only some sixty trade unions and cooperatives. As Groves put it, “the freedom of thought and action required by a revolutionary party to change its points of emphasis and adapt to the swiftly moving events no longer existed.”

Meanwhile the Depression deepened. The Labour government turned to cuts and collapsed in August 1931. Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald seceded to lead a mostly-Tory National Government. That same month Groves wrote to the Daily Worker calling for wider Party discussion. Two of his three letters went unpublished and he was censured by the Political Bureau.

Unable to influence the militancy around them through the increasingly isolated CPGB, Groves and the CPGB South West London Branch linked up with other socialists and workplace militants including branches of the Independent Labour Party (previously a component part of the Labour Party, the ILP formed a separate parliamentary group in October 1931 and disaffiliated from Labour in 1932). Public meetings across Brixton, Clapham, Battersea and Tooting formed the nucleus of the Balham Group.

In late 1931 Groves encountered the Trotskyist paper The Militant, and other literature from the USA. Drawn to The Militant, he circulated copies among the Balham Group. They discovered communists arguing much as they had begun to themselves: against the strangling of Party democracy and Moscow’s command over the Comintern, and for internationalism against “socialism in one country”.

Correspondence with the American Left Opposition followed. The Balham Group resisted forming a British Left Opposition, fearing immediate expulsion. They recognised themselves increasingly in the Trotskyists’ politics, particularly Trotsky’s opposition to the Stalinist claim that social democracy and fascism were “not opposite poles but neighbours”, and his call for a united front against Hitler. Yet they remained determined to fight inside the CPGB.

US Trotskyist Arne Swabeck agreed they should avoid a split but recommended “organisation in a preliminary sense”. The Balham comrades feared expulsion before making their case to the membership, leaving the Party machine free to bury their arguments beneath charges of deviation and disloyalty. They were also politically and personally embedded in the CPGB.

Trotsky pressed them further: “the British Left Opposition must begin systematic work.” He urged them to establish a centre of operations, set up their own publications and organise supporters. Albert Glotzer and Max Shachtman came from the USA to reiterate the message in person, Shachtman telling them: “Someone has to go to the altar, someone has to be sacrificed.” The Balham Group remained unconvinced about going public.

Reversal

In January 1932 the CPGB performed yet another reversal, turning back to unions it had recently dismissed as dead ends. The Balham Group’s response was refused publication in the Daily Worker for “incorrect and unhelpful opinions”. They formalised their criticisms in an April resolution challenging the latest union line, the silence over the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and over Germany, and the continued delay of the Party Congress. The Secretariat responded with the confidence of a leadership pretending its previous line had never existed: the Balham comrades were chastised for “underestimating the unions” and their substantive arguments ignored.

On 3 May the Balham Group again confronted Party officials. Sara, Wicks and Groves were charged with accusing the leadership of “trickery”, “cowardice” and opposition to criticism. They disputed the quotations but demanded open discussion on the state of the Party. The Secretariat answered not with discussion but denunciation: their resolutions were the work of “well-known sectarians”.

The Balham Group battled on for the long-delayed Congress and pre-congress discussion. But their conflict with the leadership increasingly centred on the catastrophe developing in Germany. In May 1932 they published the first The Communist, containing Trotsky’s Germany, the Key to the International Situation, and publicly constituted themselves as the British Section of the Left Opposition.

Ordered to oppose an unemployed organisation established by Wandsworth Trades Council, the Balham Group instead worked within it. They were castigated for a policy the CPGB would later adopt itself. Cooperation with the ILP brought further hostility. Yet they still regarded Moscow’s zigzags and departures from Marxism as temporary aberrations. The Party, they believed, might still be put right.

Their final campaign inside the CPGB centred on Germany. With the Clapham ILP they organised meetings across South London arguing for a united front of Communists and Social Democrats against Hitler. The Daily Worker reported their warnings about fascism while carefully omitting the demand for a united front. Party officials publicly rebuked them. Eleven days later (31 July 1932) the Nazis polled more than thirteen million votes, roughly equalling the combined Social Democrat and Communist vote.

On 9 August the Balham Group wrote to the Central Committee condemning its paralysis: “We would ask that… the Party fulfils its duty to the world revolution.” They also attacked the Comintern-backed World Congress Against War for resting on “non revolutionaries”, pacifists and “social patriots”.

The leadership had heard enough. Sara, Wicks and Groves were summoned. Sara refused to participate and was suspended in absentia; Groves and Wicks were expelled. The following day the CPGB finally opened the pre-congress discussion they had spent months demanding. Other Balham members were summoned to “comradely discussion”, denounced, and interviewed individually in an attempt to break the opposition.

The Balham Group was “liquidated” but refused to disappear quietly. 13 members were ultimately expelled. The group’s appeal to “state its case openly before the party membership” went unanswered. They instead circulated To Our Comrades in the Party from the ‘Liquidated’ Balham Group, published another Communist containing Trotsky’s Letter to a German Worker, and regrouped as the Communist League.

The CPGB’s 12th Congress in November demonstrated what remained of the Party democracy they had fought for; delegates rubber-stamped resolutions already settled by the leadership and Comintern. Outside the Battersea conference hall, the oppositionists painted “Not National Socialism, but world revolution”, “Reinstate the expelled left” and “Release Rakovsky and Return Trotsky” on walls facing the entrance. Groves and Wicks distributed their Appeal to Congress Delegates from the Balham Group while Party loyalists snatched copies from delegates’ hands.

Pollitt closed the Congress with all pretence of comradely disagreement discarded. He demanded “contempt, hatred and loathing” for the “miserable gang of counter-revolutionaries” outside and warned sympathisers who dared “raise their heads inside our movement”: “We will smash and destroy them.” Some comrades later apologised privately and conceded the Balham Group’s criticisms were correct. Publicly, opposition had been silenced.

Independent

Outside the CPGB, the Communist League struggled to find its footing as an independent organisation, though the members remained individually active and influential in the labour movement. Cut loose from the Party which had shaped both its politics and opposition, and subjected to Stalinist attempts to isolate it, the group nevertheless retained support among London trade unionists and the unemployed.

Groves attended the International Secretariat of the Left Opposition in February 1933, days after Hitler became Chancellor. On 27 February the CPGB tried to expel the former Balham comrades from a local anti-war committee for advocating a united front with the Social Democrats. The motion was defeated. That night the Reichstag burned. Hitler gained emergency powers and the German Communist Party was driven underground.

As Groves put it, “Consumed in flames, too, was the disastrous policy imposed by Stalin’s men and the Comintern on the German party.” Over the next year or so, the line changed again and everywhere Stalinist parties moved towards the Popular Front policy, until of course, the line changed again with the advent of Stalin’s blood drenched deal with Hitler, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.

But vindication did not solve the problems facing the British Trotskyists. What was a small revolutionary organisation actually for: propaganda, intervention in the labour movement, or both? The CPGB’s belated turn towards what looked like united-front work further narrowed the space in which the Communist League hoped to grow.

In August 1933 Trotsky urged the Communist League to enter the ILP and fight for its members. Much of the old Balham Group resisted. The dispute split the organisation, with supporters of entry forming the Marxist Group inside the ILP. British Trotskyism had barely been born before confronting what would become a persistent problem: how a small revolutionary minority should relate to the wider workers’ movement.

Nor did the founders remain together. Groves, increasingly disillusioned with Trotskyist infighting, gravitated towards Labour and Christian socialism and later declined James P Cannon’s invitation to join the leadership of the Revolutionary Socialist League formed as a regroupment of Trotskyist splinters in 1938. Purkis likewise returned to Christian socialism. Sara passed through several Trotskyist groups, serving on the RSL executive in 1938 before drifting away in the 1940s. Wicks also became disillusioned, but returned to revolutionary politics through the International Socialists in the 1970s and later helped form the Workers’ League. Trotsky himself observed that the early British movement had fallen into “a state of constant strife”. The leaders of British Trotskyism when it became a more sizeable (still small) group around the end of World War Two were mid-1930s immigrants from South Africa (Ted Grant, Millie Lee) and their associate Jock Haston.

The early opposition by Groves and his friends was often reactive: they recognised what was wrong with the lines imposed upon them before developing a coherent alternative, and realised too late that Stalinist control could not be dislodged through patient internal criticism. As Wicks later put it in those early days, “They were not left oppositionists; in the circumstances of that time, the insularity of party politics, it could not be otherwise.”

He was right. Even as they struck out further, they were smaller, and further behind, the American and European Left Oppositions, at times they resisted the guidance and counsel of those movements and Trotsky himself. They did not enter the CPGB as Trotskyists, nor become Trotskyists through methodical instruction of outside influence. They arrived there through fighting their own leadership, bureaucratic command, Moscow’s political zigzags and the suppression of criticism. In that struggle lay the beginnings of organised British Trotskyism and in those people the kernel of a revolutionary spirit; the conviction that, “when the struggle is one for great principles, the revolutionary can only follow one rule: Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra” — do what you have to, come what may. [Trotsky, My Life, 1930].