This week we publish in 3 parts a history of British Trotskyism by Martin Upham. This was a PhD thesis on the subject, and while we would not agree with all the points raised in it, we believe it deserves a wider audience, particularly for those interested in the history of our movement. For a more in-depth study of the subject readers are urged to consult Ted Grant's book on the the History of British Trotskyism.

The History of British Trotskyism to 1949

by Martin Upham

PART THREE
(1944–1949)

XII
THE RCP AND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
1944 – 1947

At the end of the war the structure of international Trotskyism was rebuilt. As in the 1930s, its chief presence was in Europe, where the British were the only Trotskyists who had maintained unbroken legal activity throughout the war. In 1944-7 it was the British who proved the most flexible Trotskyist interpreters of postwar political and economic phenomena in Europe, many of which had not been anticipated in the seminal Transitional Programme of 1938. However, international leadership remained in the hands of thinkers unable to break with pre-war ideological categories, and against whom neither the RCP nor other critics were able to assemble a majority. This was the case before and after the return of the World Trotskyist Centre to Paris. For its part, the RCP during these three years failed to compile a rounded alternative analysis to the official viewpoint of the Fourth International.

War destroyed the fragile structure of European Trotskyism. Some national sections were underground or in exile even before 1939. The outbreak of hostilities led to transference of the international centre to the United States. By 1940 the only Trotskyists in Europe operating legally were, to their initial surprise, the British. This is not to argue that activity did not take place in Occupied Europe. The fissiparous French, working at first under exceptionally difficult conditions [1], maintained publication of journals [2] and were prime movers in convening the international gatherings of August 1943 and February 1944. Across Europe, there were other groups working in clandestinity but until these gatherings met they were isolated. [3] The August 1943 meeting brought representatives from five countries to Paris and established a provisional European Secretariat. [4] That of February 1944, again in Paris, had a similarly broad base and elected an executive as well as a secretariat. [5] This was the European structure of Trotskyism at D-Day, which was to bring in its train renewed legality. The IEC elected at the Emergency World Conference of May 1940 barely functioned during the war. It was isolated from the heart of the world movement, which was Europe, and suffered from being dominated by the Socialist Workers Party although, technically, that body could not take part. [6] Its only functioning limb was an International Secretariat divided within itself [7] and regarded, by the RCP at least, as an outpost of the SWP. [8] WIL and the RSL had both been in contact with the International Secretariat through correspondence and occasional visits. [9]After the RCP was launched there was a sharp clash with the IS over recognition for the new Manifesto Group in Italy which was broadly, but not precisely, identified with the current Trotskyist programme. [10] The RCP, with other sections, argued for friendliness as well as firmness with emergent European sections. [11] IS handling of the Italians fuelled general discontent with it. [12] The RCP called for the transference of the World Centre back to Europe while harbouring some misgivings about what the sections on the Continent represented. [13] It also voiced disquiet about the involvement of the IS in party affairs via the backing it provided for the British Minority. [14] In the last months of 1945 the IS seems to have disintegrated from within [15] and lost much standing outside. [16] The body elected by the 1946 conference of the Fourth International – the first representative gathering since 1946 – was quite different in personnel.

The European Executive Committee became a more solid body during 1945 [17], though it did not have to defend its ideas at an international conference until the following year. Like the SWP it nurtured expectations of extreme and immediate crisis: there would be a “relatively rapid” movement to workers’ power or a turn to fascism, a January 1945 resolution of the EEC, declared. [18] Even the slightest demand would, in its view, put a strain on the regimes of Europe. RCP distaste for the American-based IS did not imply any great confidence in the leaders of European Trotskyism. Pierre Frank, who had passed much of the war in Britain, was one of those who did not enjoy good relations with the British, but was a leading member of the Executive Committee. In 1945 he clashed with the RCP, several times over French and European matters, and was one of those who argued that pre-war statements of the Fourth International had a timeless value. [19] The RCP felt that he and others avoided specifics in the guiding resolutions they produced and relied too greatly on attitudes struck in a different era. When the European Secretariat produced its key resolution in anticipation of the imminent conference of the International, the RCP central committee determined in February 1946 to seek a lengthy series of changes. [20] Their drift was that stabilisation and not crisis was the immediate character of affairs in Europe [21] and that democracy would be maintained [22]; that there should be self-criticism of earlier Trotskyist statements on European diplomatic threats [23] and that there should be an unequivocal call for the withdrawal of the Red Army as well as other occupying forces. [24] The Central Committee also put itself on record that the European Secretariat had no revolutionary perspectives for China and underestimated that country’s ability to win national independence. When the Minority moved a resolution condemning Morrow it was voted down nine to two.

The Founding Congress of the Fourth International had given certain international responsibilities to the British. CLR James had a strong interest in colonial questions and had secured agreement that his country should devise a colonial programme and an international colonial bureau. [25] Nothing seems to have come of this and James was, in any case, removed from the IEC within two years. But Workers International League took a special interest in the fate of other sections, notably the Indians [26] and the Irish. [27] Both WIL and RSL members in the armed forces used the opportunity to make contact in foreign lands. [28] In 1944, before D-Day, the most impressive Trotskyist organisation in Europe was surely the RCP although it could obviously take no part in the elementary rebuilding taking place on the mainland. The RCP, like the WIL before it, had played a role in holding together the semblance of an international network and it was, of course, at a peak of influence in its own country. Its absence from the deliberations of the Trotskyists on the mainland contributed to their incomprehension of changes which followed the Allied invasion of Europe. The political thought of the RCP and the Europeans never converged.

While war continued in Europe, Trotskyist thinking stayed close to the forecasts of the Transitional Programme. The Italian Revolution was interpreted by the British and the infant European Secretariat as the harbinger of great events. WIL predicted instability and the impossibility of a democratic era following the war. [29] The Europeans went further and anticipated a rapid collapse of Stalin’s regime either as the result of world revolution or military intervention by the west. [30] The SWP, to increasing disquiet within its own ranks, predicted more or less immediate revolution. [31] As the months passed however, it emerged that there was a different emphasis in these predictions of crisis. The British anticipated progress for the workers’ movement while the Europeans and the SWP emphasised the power of the state and the military and forecast repression. [32]

The RCP grew restive at the failure of the IS to provide theses which would guide the European Trotskyists as Nazi hegemony crumbled. At the time of the Normandy invasion it advanced its own view of the likely course of events. [33] When the next few months brought forth no guidance from the United States, it went further and took up a position on the national question. [34] This entailed criticism of liberation movements, a perspective of democracy in Europe and reaffirmation of resistance to the ideas of the IKD, a German emigré group resident in London. [35] Both the RCP’s D-Day view and its thesis on the national question were criticised by minorities within. [36] By the end of 1944 the RCP position was that there should be independent workers’ formations within the resistance, that they could not be absorbed since history had not been rolled back to the point where only democratic tasks lay ahead. The basic slogans of the Transitional Programme were, the party held, still valid, but there was also a place for “transitional democratic slogans” to arouse the masses. [37] The proletariat would not aim at bourgeois democracy in postwar Europe but bourgeois democracy was what it would get, at least for a time. The RCP predicted counter-revolution in a democratic form [38], but like other European sections [39] was militantly opposed to making a democratic orientation the main emphasis of Fourth International propaganda. [40]

But while there was fairly general agreement that fascism had not levelled all differences, there were distinct emphases in the British and European presentations. The RCP was convinced that the bourgeoisie would lean on “Stalino-reformist agents” and that this would constitute not a democratic revolution but a preventative democratic counter-revolution. [41] A swing to the left was impending [42]: popular indignation at Nazism would bubble over, it thought, into a struggle for economic and social rights. There was little basis on which reaction might develop, but since the proletariat did not yet support revolutionary parties it could not realise its full strength. A period of ideological confusion must follow with “Kerensky” or popular front governments pushed to the fore. That was why the tactical orientation of the Trotskyist forces was of vital importance in the period opening up. [43]

As in the West, so in the East. Trotsky had predicted that Stalinist Russia could not survive the war. [44] Not only did this prove false but the Soviet borders effectively expanded to embrace half of Europe , courtesy of the Red Army. WIL, whose perspectives were to dominate the RCP, had shared this perspective. [45] The RCP attempted to explain Soviet survival and military success with conditional formulae. The Red Army crushed Nazism but also delayed workers’ revolution. Its troops were, however, open to fraternal appeals. The fate of the Soviet bureaucracy remained undecided. One workers’ victory in an important European country would, it believed, “sound the death knell of the Soviet bureaucracy”. Even before that there might be internal conflicts in Russia and it was on these, rather than military intervention, that imperialism relied. The RCP believed therefore that the position of the Soviets was strong, that they were a beneficiary from the shift in the relationship of European social forces in favour of the working class. [46] Soviet power was, for the moment, unchallengeable and the Allies would be “forced to tolerate a deal with it”.

A dozen national sections attended the international conference of April 1946, convened in Paris. [47] The conference had before it the key resolution, The New Imperialist Peace and the Building of the Parties of the Fourth International, discussed by the RCP, central committee two months earlier. [48] It declared the “last possibilities of a relatively stable equilibrium” in the economy destroyed. A third world war loomed, it argued, given unprecedentedly united bourgeois opposition to the USSR, which only the intervention of workers’ revolution could now save. There was no self-criticism in the resolution [49], nor any serious explanation of why given the alleged character of the epoch the FI was so small. [50] The nearest attempt was the argument that defeatism and failure to grasp the phase politics were passing through inhibited growth. [51] Faced with this, and mindful of the central committee discussion, RCP delegates concentrated on projecting three theses: that relative recovery within general decline was taking place; that recognition of counterrevolution within a democratic form should govern tactics of the sections; that Soviet defence, backing for the revolution in Europe against Stalinism, and a clear call for the withdrawal of all occupying armies were essential. [52] They drew up a resolution expressing these reservations and abstained in the vote which approved the main resolution. [53] They stood out for tolerance of minorities within the FI with whom they did not necessarily agree and were themselves the. most persistent critics of the International’s leaders. [54] A crucial election for the International Executive, that was in the end to split the RCP, returned the British delegates Grant and Haston, but there was no British member of the new IS. [55] A fairly sharp division set in within this IEC from its first meeting of June 1946 onwards. The World Congress did not meet until June 1948, by which time the pattern of the post-war Fourth International was set.

The political differences separating the RCP from the new IS and IEC and which dominated their relations over the eighteen months separating the international conference from the British split, may be conveniently grouped into three: the stage reached by the European economy, the strength or weakness of Western European governments, and the ability of the Soviets to survive. The 1946 RCP conference adjusted the party’s economic outlook for Europe to embrace an indefinite period of stability ahead. [56] There was no meeting of minds with the International which, the RCP believed, saw it as sharing Morrow’s views on this subject. [57] The party argued that generalised statements about crisis were of little practical value in the short term, disputed that Europe was suffering a classic crisis of overproduction and denied that there would be a spontaneous collapse. [58] In late 1946 the RCP developed the thesis of economic revival: first (in a curiously Keynesian passage) capitalism would not allow Eastern Europe to outstrip the West; second, since the crisis had been one of under not overproduction, a cyclical upswing must follow. [59] If the FI refused to acknowledge the facts it would be discredited. Nor, in the RCP view, was an upswing necessarily to be feared by revolutionaries. It boosted confidence and combativity within the working class. [60]

One of the countries on which the RCP/IS dispute tended to focus was France, the world centre of Trotskyist operations after April 1946. Grant and Frank had clashed in 1945 over the constitutional referendum held in the autumn of that year. [61] Frank could abide no attempts to undermine the pre-war characterization of the French government as a bonapartist regime and continued to believe in 1946 that the changes which had occurred had not altered its fundamental character. [62] Frank’s general view was that there were no democratic regimes in Europe. Grant countered that Frank’s identification of political and economic developments was crude. [63] Repressive apparatus was retained by all regimes and its existence, therefore, proved nothing. In 1940, the IS had identified Petain and de Gaulle, but the analogy had been palpably false for some time. [64] Reaction might occur, but there was no mass support for it and one did not throw in the towel before the bout. [65]

The 1946 RCP conference upheld the view expounded by Grant, that what were being manifested in Europe were “unstable bourgeois democratic regimes” where capitalism was obliged by the strength of the workers’ parties to rule through them and not by decree. [66] But the economic and political perspectives of the leading bodies of the Fourth International were effectively one. In 1946 and 1947 the IS insisted that in France there was a ceiling on production which it would be impossible to exceed. [67] It denied that the failure of revolution to follow hard on the heels of war meant that stabilisation was taking place [68] and its confidence was not dented by the arrival of U.S. loans. The March 1947 plenum of the IEC complacently reviewed earlier documents and the unwillingness of FI leaders to acknowledge their past errors angered the British. [69] That autumn the guiding resolution for the coming World Congress affirmed the theses of 1946. Capitalism was “incapable of restoring the world market and a balanced development of world trade”. “Increased disequilibrium” would extend the period (largely imaginary) of convulsions and crises. [70]

Perhaps the most difficult phenomenon for post-war Trotskyism to comprehend was that of Russia and Eastern Europe. It was a monster with three heads. What attitude should be adopted to the advance of the Red Army? What were the implications of post-war Soviet survival? What was the social character of the new states of Eastern Europe? Healy, the RCP Minority leader, had in February 1946 supported the call for Red Army withdrawal from occupied territories [71]; two months later he reversed this position. [72] RCP leaders suspected the International of equivocation on this issue and a clear call for withdrawal was made only in June 1946. [73]

But responding to the Red Army was only a minor feature of a larger problem. Writing in 1936 Trotsky had declared that failing socialist revolution elsewhere in Europe, Stalin’s regime must be deposed in a war. [74] Alongside this prediction rested Trotsky’s description of the Soviets as a transitional regime, where planning and the state monopoly of foreign trade had survived but the country was in the grip of a bureaucratic apparatus. On this analysis rested the willingness of most Trotskyists to call for Soviet defence during the war. Soviet survival ought to have called for a full appraisal by the Trotskyists. There were in fact three reactions to it: the supporters of Shachtman continued to believe that capitalism had been restored in Russia; a few sections, and most notably the RCP, belatedly undertook a lengthy examination of economic and political processes there; the majority, led by the IS and supported by the British minority, took refuge from reality by trying to stay as near as they could to Trotsky’s predictions.

The views of Shachtman et al. had provoked a major crisis in the International and especially in the Socialist Workers Party. After the 1940 defection of the IEC to Shachtman’s Workers Party, most Trotskyists remained firm behind Trotsky’s holding formula. By 1946 however, there was a small state capitalist group in the RCP [75], and that same year Morrow and Jeffries were led by their frustration in the SWP to join Shachtman’s party. The British believed that the law of value still prevailed in Russia, and that once the country’s output had saturated the home market it would start to suffer crises of overproduction. [76] At the 1946 RCP conference the Majority and Minority put up a joint spokesman to answer the only Shachtmanite among the delegates. But while Shachtman’s position was consistent, the RCP was fluid, aware that it could not rest content on pre-war formulae. In July 1946 the Central Committee declared that theory must now be measured against social conditions in Russia. [77] After hesitation the party affirmed that capitalism had not been restored there but began to talk of the-country heading towards capitalism. The 1946 party conference somewhat uneasily asserted that in Russia the capitalist state existed without a capitalist class, but continued to see a positive side in state planning. [78] The RCP also insisted that Russia had emerged from the war stronger not weaker, a view the IS felt quite unable to accept. [79]

The RCP minority projected Russia as caught in an economic impasse [80]: faced with a capitalist world and under bureaucratic management it would not fulfil the terms of its own five year plan. But the Minority also rested largely on the pre-war analysis. [81] To the IS Russia was economically weakened by the destruction of its Western industrial regions and faced the prospect of war since “the imperialists have posed the settling of accounts with the USSR as their most pressing task”. [82]

But it was the “glacis” of Eastern European states which provided the greatest conundrum. It was all very well to repeat, as Finch had, the arguments of The Revolution Betrayed, but were the nationalisations in Eastern Europe bourgeois or proletarian? If bourgeois, where was the capitalist class which benefited? And did this permit Marxists to call for them to be defended as they called for Soviet nationalisation to be defended? If these were “proletarian” nationalisations how was it that a degenerate bureaucracy in Russia had, through invasion, destroyed capitalism? Could capitalism be overthrown other than through the agency of the Fourth International, which considered itself the only party of world revolution? The leaders of the Fourth International retreated from these insistent questions behind a wall of repetitious slogans and arid dogma. The RCP conceded that the East European states were “new and amazingly complicated social phenomena” [83], but did not regard this as an excuse for evasiveness. It called on the IS to initiate a discussion throughout the International on the new regimes and began a discussion in Britain. Meanwhile, the RCP position was that public ownership (statification) had to be defended [84], and at least one Minority writer conceded the principle. [85] But when the IS attempted to meet the challenge it equivocated. The nationalisation in the East was quantitatively, but not qualitatively different from that in the West, it suggested. [86] Capitalism still ruled in these states: the Soviet bureaucracy could not achieve the revolution. Its aim was assimilation into the USSR. [87] The only possible resolution of the dilemma – declaring the “glacis” to be deformed from the outset – was not faced. But the more ideologically vulnerable the IS became the more strictly it dealt with those who differed from it. The RCP found itself in the always unsatisfactory position of defending the place within the Fourth International of those with whom it disagreed [88], particularly as it was in 1946 and 1947 perhaps the most trenchant critic of those ideas in whose name discipline was being imposed. [89] The RCP did not, however, back the sharp challenge of 1947 to the proposed constitutional arrangements for the World Congress intended for the following year. [90]

The RCP cannot survive an examination of its theoretical record in 1944-47 without facing criticism. It failed to be bold enough in casting ideological baggage overboard. But this would have required a very radical critique and perhaps a willingness to break with the Fourth International. The leaders of that body were intellectually ill-equipped [91] to deal with a post-war political and economic environment so much at variance with their expectations. To consummate a full and radical inquiry in their company was scarcely possible, but breaking with them would have been a large step the RCP was not ready to take.

Notes

1. When the Germans occupied France Trotsky’s books, unlike Stalin’s were banned. (G. Nollau, International Communism and World Revolution, 1961, 199-200)

2. From August 1940 the French published seventy three issues of La Verité: nineteen duplicated and fifty four printed.

3. They were also, “for the most part ... changed from top to bottom, and their leaderships almost wholly replenished by youthful elements” (P. Frank, op. cit., 62).

4. French, Belgian, Greek, Spanish and German delegates attended in the hope or organising a conference of European sections. Following this meeting two duplicated issues of Quatrième Internationale were published and the journal appeared in printed format from January 1944 (R.J. Alexander, Trotskyism in Latin America, Stanford, U.S.A., 1973, 13.).

5. Delegates from five countries attended, including representatives of three French sections, two Spanish factions and a Greek emigré living in Paris.

6. The Voorhuis Act (1940) forbade labour organisations in the United States to affiliate to an international. The SWP formally withdrew from the FI and appeared henceforth as the “New Zealand” section in internal documents.

7. The IS was reorganised on several occasions between 1943 and 1946. From March 1944 its effective members were E.R. Frank and Daniel Logan, an SWP member and political ally of Felix Morrow. Frank was a supporter of Cannon’s leadership of the SWP, of which regime Logan, like Morrow, was increasingly a critic. Three years later Natalia Trotsky, George Munis and Benjamin Peret deplored the wartime record:

“The IS and the IEC, which had been designated at the emergency conference of 1940 had only a vegetative political existence and led an almost non-existent organic activity during the whole war, the functioning of these bodies having been paralysed by personal and political struggles in the atmosphere of the American section.” (The Fourth International in Danger, 27 June 1947, 7, H.P., D.J.H. 12/79)

8. RCP leaders also saw their own Minority as a fraction of the SWP in Britain (CC Minutes, 1 Sept. 1945). There was a parallel political development by van Gelderen, a supporter of the economic view of the British majority and Felix Morrow: see van Gelderen’s letter of 22, 23 March 1945 to the RCP and his 15 March 1945 letter to the SWP complaining of the “third periodism” of an article in Fourth International. For the emergence within the RCP of a Minority convinced of the need to enter the Labour Party, see Chapter XIII.

9. WIL was in touch with the IS throughout the war and of course had been visited by J.B. Stuart, Lou Cooper and others of the SWP. Grant visited the SWP in December 1943 (A.M. Wald, James T. Farrell: the revolutionary socialist years, New York 1978, photo facing p.84).

10. The Manifesto Group applied for affiliation to the FI after being contacted by van Gelderen, among others. On 2 January 1944 the IS rejected the Group on the grounds that it disagreed with Trotsky’s tentative position on Russia and stood for the FI (implying such a body did not yet exist). In Trotskyism and the European Revolution (Militant (NY), 13 May 1944) the IS sharply criticised the Group and, in the view of one Italian leader, invited other sections to break off relations with it.

11. The RCP wrote that the Group represented “the first concrete signs of an internationalist Trotskyist tendency in Italy” (To the IS from the RCP, 20 May 1944; see also From the IS to the RCP, 20 May 1944, H.P.). The Spanish Trotskyists, currently in Mexican exile projected the IS as an SWP front and reminded it that the Russian question was not closed. Correspondence between the IS and the Spaniards, as well as the Italians’ letters of adherence are in For the Information of the Members, May 1945, H.P., D., J.H. 12/23.

12. The exclusion of the Italians had occasioned a clash between Frank, who favoured it, and Logan. The Spaniards thought IS intransigence likely to lead to the Italians lining up with Shachtman and called for a World Congress to be convened before any further exclusions took place.

13. The RCP political bureau called for a European Bureau, with a decisive vote to the British in view of the Europeans’ lack of basis, to be established in London. The party’s central committee endorsed this call on 11 November 1944 with Betty Hamilton and David James abstaining. News of the European conference must have been known at least as early as the April-May 1944 issue of Quatrième Internationale. The RCP call met with no success.

14. The RCP claimed that the IS did not always deal with its leaders but maintained contact with “selected members in the Party”, and also complained of the circulation in the International Bulletin of a misleading account of the Fusion Conference. In autumn 1945 the RCP central committee resolved, after an angry discussion, “to raise the whole matter of informal contacts at the highest level” (CC Minutes, 1 Sept. 1945).

15. Following a row over the disposal of funds Logan wrote to the IEC and EEC calling for the latter to assume the duties of an international centre. He remarked that the RCP, “is not represented on either committee although it is one of our strongest sections” (D. Logan, To the IEC and the EEC, 20 Oct. 1945, Internal Bulletin, [1945?], H.P.).

16. Munis backed Logan’s proposal (G. Munis, To the IEC and the EEC, 9 Nov. 1945, ibid.). The RCP political bureau informed its Central Committee in December 1945 that a “grave situation” existed in the IS and the committee resolved to support the proposed transfer:

“Europe today is the centre of political life, and the EEC, is the most representative body in the International.” (P.B. report to RCP CC, 1/2 Dec. 1945; J. Haston to Logan, 10 Dec. 1945, H.P.)

17. It held four plenums during 1945. By the end of the year representation had built up to eight sections and the European Secretariat was in touch with Italians, Irish and Danes.

18. “An ‘interim’ era of a relatively prolonged duration up to the decisive triumph, either of the socialist revolution or once again that of fascism is proving to be impossible.” (Fourth International (NY), June 1945, 1i2.)

19. In challenging an assessment of the political character of the French government by Grant, Frank countered by arguing that the Bolshevik-Leninists had since 6 February 1934 declared the French regime to be “bonapartist” in character (P. Frank, Father Loriquet, History of PCI and POI. 1940-44, Internal Bulletin, 1 Dec. 1945, H.P.).

20. Harold Atkinson’s criticism that the ES resolution was defective in generalisation and economic analysis was upheld with only James abstaining (Special CC. 9/10 Feb. 1946, H.P.).

21. Tearse proposed the inclusion of a passage on partial stabilisation, while Haston argued stabilisation was already taking place, albeit within a general framework of decline. James added that the chief factor for stabilisation was US loans. Haston’s view was adopted with Healy and Goffe abstaining (ibid.).

22. It was Lawrence who abstained support for an amendment claiming that the USA was compelled to rely, in Europe, on bourgeois-democratic methods.

23. Harber’s rejection of any possibility that the USSR might collapse this way was resoundingly carried.

24. There was some Minority confusion over this matter. Lawrence moved the need for a clear position on the Red Army. In the division, Goffe voted against but Healy voted with the Majority to help carry Lawrence’s proposal eleven to one. (ibid., 5).

25. Documents, 302.

26. Discussion documents on India prepared by WIL and the Bolshevik Leninists of India were published in WIN in 1942 and 1943. Ajit Roy, a lawyer from Bombay, was a member of WIL’s central committee.

27. The Irish section was established by WIL early in the war at the time of the attempt to set up an alternative centre in exile.

28. Most assiduous in this respect was van Gelderen who contacted Trotskyists in Italy.

29. “A victory for British and American imperialism cannot herald a new blossoming of bourgeois democracy on the Continent of Europe” (E. Grant, Italian Revolution – and the tasks of the British Workers, WIN, Aug. 1943, 3). Grant argued that there would however be no army – except the Americans at first – which would be prepared to suppress revolutionary movements. The WIL Central Committee told its 1943 conference of its belief that the social basis for reaction had evaporated, but that Trotskyist weakness would allow social democracy and Stalinism to be the first beneficiaries of a shift to the left (A New Stage in History and the Tasks of the Working Class, WIN, Sept. 1943, 4).

30. The Transformation of the Imperialist War into Civil War, Fourth International, March 1945, 82. Here it was claimed that the Fourth International constituted “the essential base of the European Revolution”. The other key factors weighed by the Europeans were the advance of the Red Army, and the prospect of revolution in Germany.

31. The SWP scorned “shallow observers and would-be Marxists (who) had predicted a new organic era of capitalist stabilisation and development, and a new flowering of bourgeois democracy” (The Eleventh Convention of the American Trotskyist Movement, Fourth International (NY), Dec. 1944, 358). By this was meant the views of Felix Morrow and others who had from October 1943 challenged, cautiously at first, the party’s simple-minded application of the Transitional Programme to post-war developments in Europe.

32. Thus the SWP resolved fifty one to five at its November 1944 convention, against Morrowite opposition, that the “allied imperialists do not desire the revival of European economy to a competitive level”, that post-war socialist or communist governments would be “unstable, shortlived and transitional in character” (Revolutionary Perspectives, ibid., 367-9). Morrow’s argument was that transitional slogans could not be abandoned, that fascism may have planted illusions in bourgeois democracy, that the rival imperialisms at war in Europe were not equally predatory. (Peter Jenkins gives a useful summary of Morrow’s developing views in Where Trotskyism Got Lost (1977). See also the criticisms made by D. Logan, Morrow’s ally (Fourth International [NY], Feb. 1945, 63) of a draft resolution before the SWP national committee. Logan and Morrow argued that ultra-left formulations must be corrected if the theses drawn up in America were to be of any value to European Trotskyists.)

33. This was a political bureau resolution, Second Front and the Tasks of the Working Class (Socialist Appeal, June 1944).

34. Resolution on the National Question in Europe, 11 Nov. 1944, H.P., D.J.H. 12/10a. The resolution was later published in WIN, July-Aug. 1945, 6-7.

35. Walter Held, an IKD leader killed by the Nazis in 1941, first sketched out their ideas in Europe under the Iron Heel (Sept. 1940). The National Question – Three Theses (WIN, April 1943, 9-11) advanced the view that fascism in Europe was a new social epoch and that the Fourth International would not struggle for a Socialist United States of Europe, but for democratic liberties. WIL published the theses with firm criticism.

36. Arthur Cooper opposed any apparent concession to the view that genuine liberation was taking place: the French masses, he believed, were unwitting tools of American imperialism, (“Opposition Minority Position at the Central Committee, July 1944”, H.P., D.J.H. 12/7, 2c, 2). Cooper abstained when the Political Bureau’s resolution came before the Central Committee in November. But the Central Committee decision was criticised also from the right, by “W.G.”, who thought it analysed national oppression insufficiently deeply (Internal Bulletin, Jan. [1945], H.P., D.J.H. 8B/8).

37. Resolution on the National Question in Europe (WIN, July-Aug. 1945, 6-7).

38. It was this belief which separated it from Morrow who did not see democracy in Europe as a cloak for counter-revolution. Compare E. Grant, The Character of the European Revolution, WIN, Oct. 1945, 8-17, with Morrow’s formulations in The First Phase of the Coming European Revolution, Fourth International (NY), Dec. 1944, 369-77.

39. 1944 had brought renewed activity by the IKD. The European sections rejected its views as “the conception of those for whom at night all cats are grey” and imbued with a popular front spirit (Against a Revisionist Tendency, Internal Bulletin, July 1944).

40. Assistance given by WIL and the RCP to the German emigrés of the IKD and other former German communists who moved to Trotskyism following the dissolution of the Comintern did not imply political support. Peter Nicholls, one RCP member, did back the IKD (On the National Question in Europe, Internal Bulletin, 1945, H.P.). The official view, however, was that of Grant, that the IKD had “succumbed to the pressure of the petit-bourgeois reaction”. The European sections appealed to the IS to take a stand on the IKD but stopped short of calling for expulsion (Against a Revisionist Tendency, loc. cit., 5).

41. E. Grant, The Character of the European Revolution, WIN, Oct. 1945, 8-17. In a draft of the resolution on the national question discussed above, it had been written “the fact that the revolution which is approaching in Europe can only be the proletarian revolution does not exclude the possibility that the Allied European bourgeoisie in their struggle against the revolution may not adopt the methods of bourgeois democracy” (National Question, n.d., H.P. D.J.H. 12/10, 5).

42. There was widespread expectation in the FI that the collapse of Nazism would precipitate revolution in Germany. But Germany was also thought likely to be the only exception to strong communist influence within post-war European labour movements.

43. [RCP], European Revolution and the British Working Class, n.d., H.P., D.J.H. 12/18. A March 1945 central committee meeting demanded that the IS issue documents on a number of world developments on which it had not pronounced (Minutes of the CC, 17 March 1945, 3, H.P.).

44. See below.

45. The WIL central committee resolved, in the middle of the war, that:

“The fate of the Soviet Union rests directly on the fate of the new wave of revolutions. Further defeats and a new epoch of reaction would inevitably usher in the bourgeois counter-revolution in Russia.” (WIN, Sept. 1943, 4.)

46. See the 1945 conference resolution, The Changed Relationship of Forces in Europe and the Role of the Fourth International, WIN, Sept. 1945, 1-14). When this resolution was proposed by Grant at the RCP central committee, there were three abstentions: by Cooper who was in general opposition, by Deane who had differences over the assessment of Russia, and by Betty Hamilton who had had insufficient time to study it. Deane and Lawrence failed to obtain a separate vote on the passage dealing with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Minutes of the CC, 17 March 1945).

47. The conference was in the nature of a holding operation, convened by the International Secretariat and the European Secretariat, to draw together the world’s Trotskyists after the war and cast those who had deviated into outer darkness. A full World Congress was not to gather for another two years, although it had been intended to meet earlier. Though sometimes referred to as an international pre-conference, this gathering did all the things a meeting of full status would have done. It was also taken seriously by the police, who raided it and arrested many delegates.

48. The resolution was published in WIN for November-December 1946.

49. The text declared that there had been no mistake in early assessments by the FI of the character of the epoch, only in guessing the tempo of events. “Only the superficial and cowardly petty-bourgeois mind” could think otherwise.

50. Potential was believed to be greater than before the war, with Trotskyists in countries like England and South Africa, where the communists were not strong, having the best chance of all.

51. See WIN, Nov.-Dec. 1946, 306-7.

52. There were no official minutes of the 1946 conference though Goffe was appointed to take a transcription. The text of this resolution is taken from the report of the international conference given in Report of the National Council Meeting held on 6 April 1946. The abstentions were criticised by Healy who argued that the return of stability was a myth.

53. The resolution, while critical, was intended also to demarcate the RCP from the IKD The RCP, had moved an amendment to a European Secretariat resolution on the IKD, which would have allowed that body to stay within the Fourth International.

54. The Morrowite minority of the SWP, and the PCI minority, voted against a separate resolution criticising the 1944 European conference theses as “mistakes in the evaluation of tempo” and therefore not fundamental, but the RCP again abstained. British delegates were however disturbed at the amalgamation in many speeches delivered by international leaders, of their own views with those of Morrow, the PCI minority and the IKD.

55. The new IEC had two British, two French, one German, one South African and the secretary of the FI (Conference of the Fourth International, April 1946, H.P., D.J.H. 11/22, 3.) Later in 1946, Grant withdrew “for technical reasons” to be replaced by Deane. In January 1947 it was asked that Deane himself be withdrawn because it was felt his industrial experience was needed during the road hauliers strike in Britain (RCP to IEC, 11 Jan. 1947). National sections were expected to provide top level members for the IEC, and to finance their presence in Paris. In October 1947, when the IEC divided the RCP, Deane was finally withdrawn because the party could no longer maintain him in Paris.

56. JB Stuart, the IS delegate to the conference, claimed that the RCP foresaw three or four years of stability in Europe. This Haston denied in his addendum to J.B. Stuart, Report on RCP National Conference, 1946, Internal Bulletin, [1946].

57. A claim made by Grant, who later withdrew.

58. “No matter how devastating the slump, if the workers fail, capitalism will always find a way out of its economic impasse at the cost of the toilers and the preparation of new contradictions.” (RCP amendment to The New Imperialist Peace, WIN, Nov.-Dec. 1946, 324.)

59. The RCP suggested at this point that pre-war output might be surpassed, except in Germany where division and occupation would prevent it.

60. The party wrote of “the harnessing and knitting together of the masses in industry” which might prepare new struggles (ibid., 326).

61. See Grant’s article in Socialist Appeal for mid-November 1945-and, for the referendum, D. Thomson, Democracy in France since 1970, 1969, 232-3. 96.4% of votes effectively rejected the Third Republic for a constituent assembly. The PCI had called in La Verité for a yes vote. The RCP backed it, arguing that this was not recognition of a specific bourgeois constitution, but of a living conflict between bourgeois and workers’ parties. Since no form of workers’ rule presented itself it was, argued the RCP, permissible to favour a democratic republic. (Statement of the Political Bureau on the French Referendum, On The French Referendum, May 1946, 7-8, D.J.H. 15B/54b.) Pierre Frank had favoured a boycott and though defeated on the PCI central committee, received the backing of the IS, which branded the call in La Verité a “typical opportunist deviation of the PCI”. See P. Frank, Father Loriquet (a soubriquet for Grant), 1 Dec. 1945, Internal Bulletin.

62. Frank allowed that post-war bonapartism leaned towards the workers, but insisted that it still possessed “an apparent strength”:

“In the October 21 elections the end of the democratic regime was incontestably demonstrated by the inglorious foundering of the principal formatio0n of the Third Republic, the Radical Party”. (P. Frank, Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe?, WIN, June-July 1946, 215.)

63. “It is a vulgarisation of Marxism – vulgar materialism of the worst sort – to argue that the superstructure of a society is determined immediately by the development of its economy”, (E. Grant, Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe? (A Reply to Pierre Frank), WIN, Aug. 1946, 241-56).

64. Grant allowed that WIL had shared this belief at the time, but claimed that it had been known to be erroneous from 1943.

65. “De Gaulle may yet be a French Franco, but one does not declare the enemy victorious before the decisive battle has begun.” (ibid., 252).

66. Resolution of the RCP conference on the Nature of the Regimes in Europe, WIN,(Sept.-Oct. 1946), 269-70.

67. The RCP claimed this idea had been advanced at the October 1946 plenum (Political Bureau, The Real Situation in Britain – A Reply to the IS, Internal Bulletin, March 1947, 18). O”Daniel challenged this, and made the counter-claim that “Jerome” of the IS had suggested that France on her own would take twenty years to renew her capital equipment (P. O’Daniel, A Note on Discussion Methods, 22 April 1947, Internal Bulletin, 12 July 1947, 3-6). Yet later in the same document O’Daniel wrote:

“It is, in fact, quite conceivable that French production will never, again, in twenty three or any other number of years, break through the level of 100 per cent of comparatively stagnant 1938” (ibid., 6).

68. O’Daniel quoted gloomy forecasts by Ramadier and Lippmann and contrasted them to: impressionistic conclusions drawn from the greater appearance of "normalcy" in 1947 Paris over the grim winter of 1944-45 (or) a sectarian schematism whereby, if the imperialist war were not immediately followed by the successful German revolution, the conclusion must automatically be: stabilisation of the European bourgeoisie. (P. O’Daniel, The Limits of French Economic Revival, Fourth International [NY], Oct. 1947, 252.) This same document gives sectoral ceilings on output from 1938.

69. Germain (Ernest Mandel), a Belgian economist and member of the IS, insisted that a revival had always been forseen but that the secretariat differed from the RCP by not expecting stabilisation to follow it. Even 1938 production, he argued, would only represent a stagnant plateau. (Mandel’s views were quoted in full [from IEC minutes] by O’Daniel [Mangan] in A Note on Discussion Methods, 12 July 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15a/36.) For the RCP reply to all this see the fierce polemic, J. Haston, In Reply to the Discussion Method of Comrade O’Daniel, July 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 36.

70. Taken from the draft resolution, World Situation and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Fourth International (NY), Nov.-Dec. 1947, 274-81.

71. See above. p.391

72. At an RCP national council of 6 April 1946 Healy criticised his vote at the Central Committee of 9/10 February and urged that a distinction must be made between the Red Army and imperialist armies (Report of the National Council Meeting held on 6 April 1946, 6).

73. This occurred at the first meeting of the new IEC.

74. “If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution” (L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1967, 227).

75. Among its members were Ann Keen, the business manager of Socialist Appeal, Bob Armstrong (who had moved from Belfast to London), Ann Walker, Rose Carson and David James. Their emergence reflected, in part, contact with the exiled IKD. They seem to have made no strenuous effort to capture the RCP though they may have been urged to do so by Shachtman, who visited them occasionally from 1947. They argued that a new war would be one of plunder on both sides and suffered none of the Minority’s agonies over the role of the Red Army since they did not stand for Soviet Defence. Henry Sara, a non-aligned Labour Party member by the end of the war, “was approached in 1945 by Albert Gates of the Workers Party to act as its British correspondent”.

76. B. Armstrong and M. Merrigan, In Defence of “Revisionism”, 4 Sept. 1946, Internal Bulletin (20 Dec. 1946), 6-15.

77. CC Resolution on the Nature of the Soviet Union, [July? 1946], H.P., D.J.H. 12/58. This was substantially the resolution upheld at the annual conference of the party a few weeks later.

78. This opinion was advanced in a self-critical resolution which also called for an international discussion on the character of the Eastern European states (Resolution of the RCP Conference on the Soviet Union, WIN, Sept.-Oct. 1946, 267-8).

79. Proposed Amendments to the Foregoing Text, WIN, Nov.-Dec. 1946, 316.

80. See H. Finch, In Defence of the Soviet Union, 17 Aug. 1946, H.P., D.J.H. 11/24.

81. Finch drew a distinction between “proletarian nationalisation” and “bourgeois nationalisation” and thus made it impossible for himself to explain events in Eastern Europe. A French Trotskyist who agreed with the RCP that Soviet collapse was unlikely, argued similar categories of “statification”. (B. Thomas, Remarks on the Discussion on Russia in the British Party, 19 Aug. 1946, Internal Bulletin, 11-17, H.P., D.J.H. 11/26).

82. The New Imperialist Peace (April 1946), H.P., D.J.H. 11/22.

83. CC Resolution on the Nature of the Soviet Union, [July? 1946].

84. The example the RCP gave was of Czechoslovakia, where it would also be necessary to support the breaking up of large estates (CC Resolution, [July? 1946], 21).

85. H. Finch, op. cit., 12.

86. Germain argued that public ownership in Eastern Europe did not affect property relations:

The objects are the same: compensation is to be anticipated; the nationalised enterprises continue to be managed like capitalist enterprises, with administrators nominated by the state as the board of directors (and the Shareholders being sure of drawing each year the same dividend, that is to say never making any losses:); workers” control exists only here and there. (Germain, On the Question of the Countries Occupied By The Red Army, an extract from theses he wrote for the IS under the title The USSR on the Morrow of the War, [1946?], H.P., D.J.H. 15B/68, 3.)

87. ibid., 9.

88. At the IEC of June 1946 a resolution on the projected unity in the United States of the SWP and WP, which backed Cannon’s distaste for it, was passed against the votes of the British delegates and a French Minority. A resolution condemning the PCI stance on the French referendum was opposed by the RCP and the French Majority. A general resolution on entry into social-democratic parties at the same IEC revealed the RCP to be in ominous isolation.

89. The RCP’s rivals as chief critic were Morrow and Jeffries of the SWP. When they were expelled from the SWP the British condemned the expulsion but also attacked their subsequent decision to defy an IEC ruling and join the Workers Party. This attitude was struck on van Gelderen’s proposal which was upheld by twelve votes against those of Goffe and Healy (Report of CC Meeting held on 16/17 Feb. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/76).

90. This was posed by Shachtmanites within the Fourth International: N. Trotsky, G. Munis, B. Peret, The Fourth International in Danger, 27 June 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 12/79. The RCP delegates were part of the majority which rejected this view at the September 1947 International Executive Committee.

91. Trotsky’s perspective was regarded by them as “a literal prediction. of the actual course of events” (P. Jenkins, Where Trotskyism Got Lost, 1977, 1). The alternative argument is that Trotskyists were ideologically ill-equipped and this is the line taken by K. Coates with the argument that Trotsky’s catastrophist prognosis caused the “prolonged atrophy” of the Fourth International (Socialists and the Labour Party, R. Miliband and J. Saville [eds.], Socialist Register 1973, 162).

XIII
TROTSKYISM IN PRACTICE
(THE RCP 1944 – 1947)

The Revolutionary Communist Party was born chiefly out of WIL’s wartime success. It was launched on a wave of optimism that was confounded by the disintegration of the coalition and the political consequences of Labour’s election victory in 1945. The RCP resisted Labour’s centripetal attraction longer than other parties which had flourished in the war. It remained in independence,. intervening wherever it could in industrial disputes. By 1947 it was faced with a period of economic growth which would make further progress difficult; that same year the International Executive split it in two to facilitate the passage of an entrist Minority into the Labour Party.

The RCP expected big things to occur at the end of the war. In the early 1940s WIL had predicted that fascism would follow a British victory. [1] It was certain that peace, as in 1919, would bring with it an economic catastrophe. “A terrible crisis of unemployment” was inevitable. [2] So, every gain the workers could make in wartime against this day would be a bonus. [3] The general belief of the RCP was that militancy would increase in response to economic decline and an employers” offensive. There was a question mark over how far the MWF would play a pivotal role [4], and how far the national shop stewards movement would come to lead it. Socialist Appeal advanced propaganda for a strong trade union movement and warned against breakaways. [5] Unions must be “fighting organs of the working class”, the front line of resistance as Britain moved from being a creditor to a debtor nation and the impetus of arms production died. [6] Maintaining union organisation would, argued the party, be a priority. There was a tremor of redundancies late in 1944 which the party thought was the beginning of a slump. It precipitated internal controversy over what slogans were appropriate to the phase the economy was passing through. In October 1944 Socialist Appeal called for “no one to be sacked until work is found”. [7] This view was taken up by a minority in the party which had first crystallized around a belief that it should join the ILP The party leaders however preferred a policy of non-trade unionists being first to lose their jobs in a period of mass redundancy. [8] A sharp discussion was closed by the RCP central committee at its first meeting after the 1945 annual conference. [9] Even then there was a strong belief that unemployment of .three million was inevitable. The MWF declared its intention to transcend functioning as a coordinating unit and become “a mighty delegates movement embracing factory committees across the land”. [10] Economic revival was to blight the expectations expressed in a conference resolution:

“The problem of reducing costs and wages to ‘competitive’ levels will immediately present itself for urgent solution to the ruling class. In addition, the problem will involve dislocations of industry, mass ‘redundancy’ and transfers of labour.” [11]

The year between the Fusion and 1945 conferences saw no major industrial unrest to follow the movements in engineering and the pits of the first half of 1944. This left the MWF in a vacuum. But expectation of industrial developments was the strongest argument for keeping the RCP out of the Labour Party, and the 1945 conference appointed a National Industrial Committee of Tearse and nine others. The dockers’ strikes, when they began in the autumn of 1945, seemed to the party to be the start of the much-heralded industrial wave. [12] They occurred almost every year until the end of the decade, with that of autumn 1945 the most serious – and therefore the most misleading – from which to extrapolate to other industries. [13] The docks strikes came not only at the right time, but also in a form which suited the RCP: unofficial committees rapidly flowered and looked for support. [14] This was felt to be the result of the trend marked by the party in wartime: when leaders fused with the state, as they did in peace under Labour, every dispute threw up a new industrial leadership. [15] The party was disturbed to find a lack of sympathy for the dockers [16] among the other groups of workers and was in two minds as to what the strike meant. [17] It also found itself the subject of denunciation which recalled its experiences of April 1944 on the part of elected dockers’ leaders [18] as well as union officials. [19] The 1945 conference revealed a twenty per cent increase in membership [20], which was sizeable but not in accord with the expectations of the previous year. Yet this conference also marked the last moment at which the Majority and Minority, as well as the leaders of the International, were unanimously optimistic about RCP prospects. [21]

But 1945-6 revealed that the dockers’ strikes, while they were to continue until 1950, were the end rather than the beginning of large-scale industrial action. The 1946 RCP conference was told that the National Industrial Committee had been unable to meet regularly due to lack of finance. [22] It seems improbable that this would have happened had there been more industrial unrest. The nearest thing to an exception was the movement which developed among building workers between 1945 and 1947. In 1945 the RCP had two builders among its members; a year later builders were “the most mature and strongest industrial faction in the party”, among their number the chairmen of the Glasgow and London campaign committees. [23] Trotskyists – not all of them RCP members – were in the van of rank and file agitation which convened impressive London demonstrations. [24] Yet by 1947, with the original aim of the agitation unfulfilled [25], there were strong internal pressures for dissolution of the Builders Campaign Committee which the party had established. [26] Other disputes in which the RCP involved itself in the post-war years were those of the London Transport workers. [27] Glasgow binmen [28] and at the Savoy Hotel. [29]

In 1945 the party had set itself the target of 1,000 members by its next conference, but it failed even to maintain membership. In 1946 the party was, however, reported to be “overwhelmingly proletarian in composition”. [30] But this could not disguise the collapse of expectations. Not only had there been fewer disputes, but where these had occurred party influence tended to outstrip recruitment. Part of the reason was that a group of workers which was engaged in a strike, while it threw up rank and file committees, did not turn to the MWF This was true of the dockers’ and builders’ movements, and the MWF was by autumn 1946, reduced to keeping in touch with those engineers, formerly its backbone, now dispersed throughout industry. [31] By 1947 the MWF had only a nominal existence. [32] As for the party, it retained a strong cadre of industrial militants, but the high percentage of engineers among them indicates how far this rested upon the wartime successes of WIL. [33] Strikes had been more localised and shorter than expected. Employers, thought the party, were on the defensive and prepared to grant concessions. What was more, strikes had involved not the heavy battalions but “backward and formerly inert sections of the workers”. [34] There was not a general disposition on the part of the working class to support embattled groups. [35] On the eve of the split at the 1947 conference, the RCP claimed to have intervened in every important industrial dispute in the year, but its expectation of-large scale clashes failed to materialise. [36] For Trotskyism to survive at all in industry by 1947 required great flexibility. Even then success was not guaranteed. The RCP was capable of manoeuvring with skill: it put a favourable construction on the vigilance committees which emerged during the Fuel Crisis [37], and detected the new wine in the old bottle of Joint Production Committees demand by the AEU. [38] But there was, unmistakably, a ceiling to industrial unrest which no amount of drive could transcend.

As the British Section of the Fourth International, the RCP was the official representative of Trotskyism in the country. It ran a campaign at the time of the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi War Criminals intended to explode the allegations of links with Trotsky made in Moscow between 1936 and 1938. [39] A good deal of the energy and unity of purpose so lacking at that time in Britain was in evidence [40] but no tangible reward resulted. Haston’s view that Stalinism was now, unlike the 1930s on the defensive, may have been sanguine [41] but the RCP did manage to assemble a useful paper committee behind its objectives. [42] The need to attend to affairs within the CPGB was a secondary argument deployed by RCP leaders for continued independence, but no great impact on the communists was achieved during these immediate post-war years. [43] More scope was provided by the National Council of Labour Colleges which had provided a non-Stalinist platform for WIL in wartime. [44] After the war the attention paid to the NCLC by the RCP and Trotskyists outside its ranks increased. [45]

The key RCP, branches carrying the frenetic activity of the party in these years were often less than a dozen strong. The Tyneside branch had thirteen members at the time of the 1944 crisis and was not significantly larger later. [46] The Southall branch, which enjoyed good relations with the ILP and numbered among its members a leading railway militant, Sydney Bidwell, had about nine members. [47] Liverpool in 1946 had three locals and its own district committee. [48] Yet nearby Manchester had no branch until that year. When the new branch was established in the city it grew to one of the largest in the party, with a strong industrial base. But, as a microcosm of the party as a whole it fell apart by 1948 through factionalism and the impression created by Labour’s progress. [49] It was clear at the 1946 conference that the RCP was marking time. Membership, at 360-70 had fallen. [50] The party had retained a national framework, and in London membership and sales of Socialist Appeal were rising. [51] At a peak the party had twelve professionals [52], but after the 1946 conference the apparatus started to be pruned under pressure of the need to economise. [53] Mid-monthly supplements to Socialist Appeal began to appear irregularly and WIN, which had almost always been published monthly, became bi-monthly. The May 1947 issue of this journal appeared two months late and duplicated. There were further symptoms of decline as 1947 wore on.

The Tyneside arrests of April 1944, coming less than a month after the Fusion Conference, helped to bind the party together and confirm a sense of destiny. But though the old factionalism between the RSL and WIL was conscientiously set aside new internal differences were present from the outset. An “entrist faction” was formed at once [54] with the aim of steering the RCP into the Labour Party. It was a mixture of different Trotskyist experiences which at first gathered only a small following. [55] For a time some of its followers proposed that greater emphasis should be placed on fraction work within the ILP. [56] Party leaders still judged that anticipated revolutionary upheavals would bring a great accession of strength to the ILP but pleaded that their forces for work within it were few. [57] The RCP attitude towards reaffiliation of the ILP to the Labour Party was identical with the view taken by the WIL during the earlier discussions of 1938-9. ILP separation from the Labour Party, In the RCP view, was sectarian: revolutionaries in the ILP ought to support reaffiliation whatever the terms the Labour Party might demand. [58] Reaffiliation would break the ILP between revolutionaries and others and be the quickest way to remove a false revolutionary alternative. This was not the view of Wicks, Dewar and the others who had persisted with the ILP in wartime: Trotskyism, now as in 1938-9, split two ways. Reaffiliation was carried by the ILP but to general surprise the Labour Party rebuffed it. [59] Simultaneously with its discussions with the Labour Party however, the ILP leadership acted against the RCP, supporters within its North-East region and elsewhere. [60] Interest in the ILP within the RCP was maintained at least until June 1945. [61] It seems possible that the IS entertained hopes of a united Trotskyist faction in the ILP. [62] This never materialised and the Wicks-Dewar faction persisted with the ILP during its rapid peacetime decline. [63] RCP attention to the ILP fell away sharply after the 1945 election [64], though the Minority who expounded the need for Labour Party entry continued for a time to be interested in the ILP as part of their tactical proposition.

During 1944 pressures mounted within the Labour Party against the coalition which culminated in a December call for a break. [65] Yet the Churchill government survived until after VE Day, so when a by-election was declared in Neath in January 1945 the electoral truce still prevailed. The RCP resolved to challenge it as the ILP and Common Wealth had been doing for some years. [66] The party ran a vigorous and well-received campaign. Jock Haston, its candidate, addressed large meetings in the town and was given a sympathetic hearing at the pithead. [67] Six full time organisers were moved in, under the direction of John Lawrence and Heaton Lee and paper sales were high. [68] The RCP had a memorable clash with the local communists, who were supporting the Labour candidate, NCLC organiser D.J. Williams. [69] But the decision of the nationalists to stand a candidate blurred the issue and, more significantly, polling day was delayed and fell a week after the end of the war in Europe. [70] Haston came a poor third [71] though the RCP considered the success of its intervention should be measured more broadly than by votes alone. [72]

1,781 votes, even for revolutionary socialism, were a douche for the more ambitious spirits. [73] A year earlier the RCP had planned to put up many candidates in the forthcoming general election. [74] It now found that sympathy for its policies would not easily be transformed into votes. When the coalition broke the RCP could only welcome it: as soon as Neath was out of the way it campaigned on a policy of “Labour to Power” [75]: a few weeks after fighting him, party members campaigned for D:J. Williams in the General Election. In 1944 it had no expectation of a Labour landslide [76], though as the months passed Socialist Appeal sounded confident. The massive Labour victory declared on 26 July 1945 effectively spelled ruin for all parties which had benefited from the electoral truce. [77] Even before that discussion had boiled up within the RCP about possible entry into the Labour Party. The Entrist Faction (or Minority as it was commonly known) argued that the “open tactic” could be justified only by the special circumstances of the war. It had plenty of evidence to argue from with the collapse of third parties and the recovery of Labour Party membership. [78] Healy called for entry into the Labour Party in June 1945. [79] RCP leaders resisted the entrist proposal. Not only a rupture of the coalition, but a definite swing to the radical left through the Labour Party would, in their view, have to be in evidence. It seemed that whereas there was a popular radical mood, the Labour Party was moving rightward. The RCP, they insisted, must expect for the immediate future to recruit from the vanguard of the working class, and these people had “by-passed the Labour Party stage”. [80] They had some proof for their case in the stagnation of the party’s Labour Party fraction. [81] Finally they argued powerfully that the sacrifice of independence could be made only in exchange for concrete gains. [82] The 1945 RCP conference upheld their views. [83] Later that year the RCP put up two of its own candidates in municipal elections. [84]

The party was not completely preoccupied with factional disputes over entry into the Labour Party, but its preoccupation with this debate tended to grow. [85] There was an unsuccessful attempt to close the discussion following the rejection by the 1945 Congress of the views of Healy and Goffe [86], which itself was an endorsement of the view taken in March 1944. [87] Former protagonists of entry – major figure from the defunct RSL – did not, for the most part, pursue the idea. [88] Harber, still a member of the Central Committee, insisted now that no principles were involved and that the short term and long term perspectives should not be telescoped. [89] In view of the history of the discussion, this view was significant. The Minority however had behind it an International Secretariat which was strongly convinced that entry was vital [90], and the discussion continued without interruption into 1946. Party leaders pointed to inconsistent Minority views [91], but built up the strength of the party fraction within the Labour Party. [92] Minority writers now projected their argument more sharply. [93] They called for complete entry into the Labour Party, which they presented as “mass work”. Their thesis was powerfully backed by the International. At its 1946 conference the International determined on an independent presence for its sections in Continental Europe [94], but this was not intended to apply to Britain. [95] It became difficult to distinguish the arguments of the Minority from those of the International since the Minority defended not only its view of entry but its economic analysis too. There was little originality in the case of the Minority which derived from Trotsky what it did not take from its comrades abroad. [96] Its economic belief, like that of the International, was that a severe crisis was imminent. It was this aspect of its thought that was rejected by Harber and also by van Gelderen, who initially supported entrism on his return to Britain that year. [97] The RCP leaders now forced to recognise that they were a “Majority”, and therefore a faction, in their own party, agreed that if economic disaster did loom the case for entry would be “immeasurably strengthened”. [98] Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the Minority could have held on and become a permanent feature of the RCP if that party as a whole had not been stagnating. But the organisational report to the 1946 RCP conference indicated that it was at best marking time. When the Majority explained this by reference to economic conditions, which were not such as to create a radical mood, the Minority saw that explanation as fatalism and renewed its case for entry in order to break free of isolation. [99] Nevertheless, the RCP conference, in August, reaffirmed a principal emphasis on open work. [100]

The RCP leaders had not ceased to believe in the approach of a crisis, but they considered its arrival would be delayed. [101] The results of war, they argued, had been disastrous, but were screened by the fusion of finance capital with the state and American loans. The party clung to a long term perspective of decline but had to diagnose accurately the immediate conjuncture: it now began to recognise that it had previously telescoped not only its political but also its economic perspective [102], and insisted that small unofficial industrial disputes offered it the best chance for growth in membership. But while the RCP adjusted to a world quite different from expectation, the Paris-based International now intervened to challenge its interpretation of the whole British environment. It found the RCP distinction between long-term crisis and immediate revival “rather schematic”, predicted a crisis of overproduction and declared that if a revival occurred it would be unstable. [103] But the IS also believed it detected incipient mass radicalisation, “a deep movement of opposition to the reactionary policy of the Labour Government”, and put its full weight behind entry as the means whereby the RCP might capitalise upon it. [104]

In responding the RCP was inhibited by the forecasts of the Transitional Programme. It had to cover its flank against accusations of belief in a capitalist future [105], but it felt able to insist that Britain’s economic difficulties were attributable to underproduction. There was, it insisted, an upswing: trade was growing, unemployment was low, consumption was at a peacetime peak. [106] It would last “not longer than a few years at most” since antiquated British capitalism would prove unable to take advantage of its opportunities, but while it did, there would be no polarisation of class forces. The IS might insist that there was a “furious offensive” against living standards but “there is, in fact, more purchasing power in the pockets of the workers and the capitalists alike than ever before”. [107] It is noticeable that both sides felt the need to underpin political prognosis with evidence of economic recovery or decline.

From a clash in economic prognosis, the British and the IS built an extension of their different views on tactics. The International saw the rapid expansion of Labour Party membership and insisted that this indicated the direction of the masses. Entry would not immediately bring gains: first there would be a period of shared political experiences during which the RCP, in the Labour Party, would advance and gain support for the Transitional Programme of 1938. Outside the Labour Party the RCP was isolated. Resisting the sweep of the masses towards the Labour Party was placing its future in jeopardy. [108] “The fate of the party as a whole is at stake.” [109] The RCP leaders, argued the International, were far too deeply embedded in their own interpretation of what Trotsky had said about entrism before the war. [110] It advised them to fix their sights upon a different objective:

“the present situation sets new objects for entry: the setting into motion of the entire awakened British working class along the path of revolutionary action, this time within the framework of the Labour Party itself.” [111]

The RCP reply to this was sharp in tone [112] and broad in content. Having challenged the economic outlook of international leaders the party turned to their Labour Party views and concluded “innovations on entry reveal pressure of reformism”. The RCP would adhere to independence. It was not it believed, cut off from the Labour Party in view of that party’s loose structure. Nor did it follow that all political activity on the part of workers was expressed through the party. Acknowledgment of proletarian loyalty to the Labour Party did not suffice as a complete tactical guide. [113] Labour’s revival itself was felt to be only superficially impressive, a fact not readily appreciated from Paris. [114] The RCP firmly believed that radicalisation in Britain would first inevitably create a centrist current, that no tactical dexterity would avoid this, and that it would in any case occur through a deterioration in economic circumstances. [115] When this materialised there would be stirrings not over foreign policy but over bread and butter issues. Before then any Trotskyist current within the Labour Party, once it gathered strength, would be suppressed by the official apparatus. [116] The Minority in Britain which supported the IS view was “a tendency moving to the right and reflecting the pressure of reformism in the RCP”. The Minority, charged party leaders, sought a short cut to reverse the huge disparity, between the RCP and the Labour Party. But no long-term entry tactic could in fact resolve Trotskyism’s British problem. A propaganda presence would have to be retained until the workers were no longer prepared to extend to Labour the benefit of the doubt. There was a hint in the document of doubt about whether the traditional split perspective still held [117] but the RCP rested mainly on a balance sheet of entrism derived from the WIL. [118]

In 1947 the Internal Bulletin of the RCP reflected the Majority case more fully than before. Van Gelderen now reversed his view of the previous year and even outdistanced longstanding protagonists of independence. [119] The Minority in the RCP [120] were unable to break new ground [121] but the debilitating effect of this internal conflict began to be evident in the views of those who were not protagonists. [122] Majority thinking was not hidebound. Both Hunter and Grant acknowledged that politics since 1945 had followed an unforeseen path. Hunter recognised that Labour was implementing its programme. This, he believed was because it corresponded to capitalism’s contemporary needs – a coincidence which explained the lack of resistance from capitalism to nationalisation. [123] Grant, later in the year, contrasted the Opposition to its home policy suffered by the 1929-31 Labour government to that on foreign policy experienced by Attlee. [124] Hunter predicted that nationalisation would not reach beyond iron and steel [125]; Grant foresaw a passive experience of Labour in Power, that there would be “relatively stable economic and political relations”, and that there would be no mass revolt until the next slump. Even before this, RCP leaders were preparing their members for political lull and little progress in building the party. [126]

With the 1947 party conference approaching all contributions to the debate were winched up. [127] The RCP was in opposition to the policies of the leaders of World Trotskyism on virtually all points where they had developed their own views rather than having relied on Trotsky’s pre-war writings. [128] The gulf was reflected within the British party, where the Minority defended all views of the International Secretariat and was establishing a discrete existence. [129] There was no doubt that the RCP was failing to progress [130], let alone fulfil the heady expectations of 1944. Both protagonists had explanations to hand: the Majority in factionalism; the Minority in refusal to enter the Labour Party. [131] Interventions by Pablo, the International Secretary, from 1947 assumed a threatening tone, calling on an authority their author lacked in Britain. [132] In the July Internal Bulletin, Haston published in full his correspondence with the IS, a step which served to reveal the distance between the sides. Pablo’s contribution effectively threatened that if the RCP did not take the right decision the International Secretariat would split the party [133], and countered the British leaders’ presentation of requirements for entry with some of his own which read as if composed a posteriori. His formulation compounded the differences over entrism and economic analysis. [134]

The Minority was faced with its own failure to convince the party membership: seemingly it was confined in perpetuity to 20% of conference delegates. [135] This was the context in which, like the International, it threatened to split the British party. [136] Now as in 1933 there was a constitutional case for arguing that democratic centralism had world not national parameters, but the prestige and achievement of the RCP was far above that of the Communist League, whereas the standing of international bodies was much reduced. Undaunted, the Minority now began to drive the argument back in time, explaining the clash by reference to long standing differences between the former WIL and international leaders [137], and even to the social composition of the RCP leadership. [138] Had the charges carried conviction it would still have been necessary to explain why these middle class types had behind them an essentially proletarian party. [139] The industrial perspective these leaders held out to the 1947 annual conference was “a continued process of considerable ebb and flow”. They warned especially of the penetration of factories by the CPGB, but hoped that the similarity of communist and Labour ideas would discredit the former. [140] Best prospects for the party were still felt to be in industry and in the CPGB. [141] There was no doubt, however, that the party was now in decline. [142]

The conference itself, meeting on the August Bank Holiday of 1947, broke no new ground on the Labour Party question. How could it when one part of, if not the whole, British Trotskyist movement had been arguing over entry for a decade and a half? The arguments were wearily rehearsed: the outcome predictable. What made the 1947 conference different from those of previous years was the clear warning that it would not be allowed the last word. [143] In view of the political composition of the IEC this could mean only one thing. The stand of the Minority and the IS indicated that they would not recognise a national majority vote. [144] This might be justified by the belief that the IS urgently needed to see its convictions converted into reality: yet it was denying that very right to the RCP Majority. [145] It was left effectively with the alternative of walking out of the Fourth International or acquiescing in a split. As it was led by founder members of WIL, it had to suffer more than its share of splitting accusations though these reached the point of provoking many others. [146] But to the IS, whatever the feelings of the British, the RCP was now a living reproach. The IS would retie the historical knot. “False prestige” of the RCP leaders was coming before anything else, declared Pablo. It was a relic of the old WIL contempt for the International, he added. Clearly, it still rankled that the wrong horse had been backed in 1938. [147]

Despite accusations of considering a split, the RCP leaders did not break discipline. All they could do in the face of certain defeat was protest at the use of an organisational club to resolve a political dispute. Haston was unable to head off a resolution at the September 1947 plenum of the IEC for separating the British party, and had to acquiesce in the least odious of the alternatives before him. [148] A special conference of the RCP was convened on 11 October for the purpose of implementing the IEC decision in favour of entry into the Labour Party by the Minority. A Majority declaration urged, for the record, reconsideration of the IEC decision. [149] While this was upheld, the conference had then to distribute RCP property between the factions. Most of it fell to the Majority, though the Minority had on 1 October acquired Militant. [150] From 1 November there were again two Trotskyist organisations in Britain.

The RCP was split by the International Secretariat at the very moment when hardening communist policy created the possibility of growing industrial unrest, usually seen as an argument for independence. [151] It has been argued that the communist turn away from the Labour Party left a vacuum which the Minority filled with Socialist Outlook. [152] But the Minority/IS argument had been that entry was needed to pre-empt Stalinist penetration. The Minority was accused by the Majority of entering the Labour Party with no perspective. [153] The official historian of the Fourth International frankly allows that the tactic was consciously intended to be different from the raiding parties of the 1930s. [154] The IS action can be understood only within the broad context of general RCP criticisms of it. By splitting the RCP the IS emasculated a firm and powerful critic whose arguments it had failed to shake. No great compensation materialised in the shape of rapid progress by the Minority. [155] In 1933 Trotsky and the entire leadership of the International Left Opposition urged the tiny and unknown Communist League into the ILP as a matter of urgency. Yet they discouraged a split and condemned the Minority (whom they supported politically) for carrying one out. [156] Matters stood quite differently in 1947. Although it had largely stood still since 1945, the RCP was well known to active militants in Britain and had a reputation won by WIL’s wartime industrial interventions. Its leadership had proved its ability over a period of time and could point to almost a decade of well organised Trotskyist activity in Britain. Who of the International Secretariat could make a comparable claim? Under the circumstances it might be considered remarkable that the IS was able to secure its objective. This can be explained only by the distaste of the RCP for walking out of the Fourth International despite the low esteem in which it held that body’s leaders, and the existence within the British party of a Minority faction which acted as an uncritical outpost of the IS and, increasingly, embroiled the whole party in an internal war. Finally it must be said that none of this could have come to pass if the RCP had been forging ahead in the years after 1945. [157] As it was, unforseen economic expansion and the radical programme of the Labour government in its first two years confounded all forecasts. No tactical adjustments could set right objective conditions which were quite unfavourable to progress for Trotskyism in Britain.

Notes

1. “Victory for British imperialism would not lead to an overthrow of fascism (even in Germany) but to the establishment ultimately of fascism in Britain as well” (WIL, Military Policy – or Confusion?, 20 March 1941, H.P., D.,T.H. Sa, 8). “The inevitable tendency of British Capitalism after the war will be toward not any high-minded war against disease, poverty, want or anything of the sort, but towards fascism. Nothing else is open to them if they are to live” (A. Scott, “Anglo American Relations”, WIN (Jan. 1943), 5).

2. Socialist Appeal, Mid.-Sept. 1943.

3. RCP leaders even cautioned their members against expecting favourable wartime conditions to carry on (Statement of the Political Bureau on Redundancy, Internal Bulletin, 14 Dec. 1944).

4. At the Fusion Conference the Left Fraction argued unsuccessfully against using the MWF. Trotskyists should, it argued, work within the shop stewards movement until expelled. Only then would a separate movement be justified (A Policy for Industry, [March?] 1944 , H.P., D.J.H. 14c/8m). In November 1944 however the RCP affirmed its industrial perspectives. At the conference its main fear had been that events would overtake the MWF before it was ready. One central committee member, “A.R.” (Reilly?) moved an amendment to a resolution before the November central committee. doubting the future importance of the Federation (Central Committee Report Issued By The General Secretary [of its 10/11 November 1944 meeting], H.P., D.J.H. 12/8) .

5. The next year it warned the dockers that breakaways “would play into the hands of the Donovans and Deakins” (Socialist Appeal, Nov. 1945).

6. Socialist Appeal, mid-July 1944.

7. In an article by Bob Allen, Vic Simms developed an industrial programme a few weeks later when he suggested that transfers should be controlled by shop stewards’ committees, and that there should be a forty hour week and a guaranteed minimum, not dole, for those without work (Socialist Appeal, Nov. 1944).

8. The Minority argued that a “nons first” policy reinforced a division between trade unionists and others when the working class as a whole was faced with a political fight (F. Emmett and G. Healy, The Party’s Policy on Redundancy, [1944?], Internal Bulletin, H.P., D.J.H. 11/66). If sackings were inevitable that did not force the party to participate in putting people on the streets (F. Emmett and G. Healy, The Transitional Programme and Redundancy, Internal Bulletin, Feb. 1945, H.P., D.J.H. 15/B/20). The Majority case was that some redundancy was inevitable and that “nons first” was not a solution but a tactical response to them. In a period of retreats vital positions had to be held. The closed shop gave power over hiring which could also be extended to firing (Statement of the Political Bureau on Redundancy, Internal Bulletin, H.P., 14 Dec., 1944). The Majority also insisted that there was no contradiction between a perspective of trade union advance and minimal demands for trade union defence (H. Atkinson, The Discussion on Redundancy. Defence of Marxism against Infantile Leftism, Internal Bulletin, April 1945).

9. “Redundancy, the beginning of mass unemployment, has reared its head on an ever increasing scale. Employers celebrated VE Day by sacking thousands of workers” (The Aims and Objects of the Militant Workers’ Federation, [1945], H.P., D.J.H. 4/46).

10. The discussion on “Nons” and redundancy was a major internal preoccupation of the RCP between the annual conference of 1944 and 1945. See the bound volume of Internal Bulletins in the Haston Papers: I.B.’s 1945 Nons and redundancy.

11. The Perspectives in Britain, 6 June 1945, H.P., D.J.H 12/26b, 3.

12. See Socialist Appeal (Mid-Oct. 1945). But the paper part explained the strikes as “the aftermath of the strain and privation suffered by the workers”.

13. 1,100,000 working days were lost in a six week stoppage that spread from Birkenhead to all major ports. Large strikes on the docks now became the rule rather than the exception.

14. ”Wherever a strike occurred in a port in the post-war period the ephemeral or semi-permanent unofficial port-workers’ committee which organised it would despatch envoys to other ports to appeal for support. The envoys became accomplished in the art of strike spreading and rarely failed to secure an extension of the strike” (V.L. Allen, Trade Union Leadership, 1957, 198).

A link between RCP industrial and political independence was forged in October 1945 when C. (Mazo) Martinson, a party docker, stood for the Mersey Ward Bootle in a council election and polled 148 votes, just over 10% of those polled (Socialist Appeal, 5 Nov. 1944). But Martinson was the occasion of an attack by the Liverpool strike committee on the RCP when he was accused of representing himself as a delegate from his native city at a London dockers’ meeting. For the text of the telegram of complaint sent from the Liverpool committee, see The Times, 12 Oct. 1945.

15. Dockers had fiercely criticised the leaders of the TGWU and the party concluded that “the labour and trade union bureaucrats” had been exposed in the eyes of the vanguard (WIN, Nov. 1945, 36-8). The dockers, it thought, were “on the road to building a leadership conscious of its tasks”: a permanent rank and file movement to struggle from within against the leadership was needed (Socialist Appeal, Nov. 1945). The RCP also believed there had been resignations from CPGB members among the dockers during the Daily Worker’s original coolness towards their cause.

16. In 1945 and subsequently, the Emergency Powers Act and troops were used during docks strikes without rousing any great indignation. The RCP’s special alarm was due to discovery of hostility among those miners with whom it was in contact.

17. RCPers in Liverpool thought that the docks strike meant the new era had actually arrived: it criticised the London organisation for the way it had intervened (Liverpool District Committee, The RCP and the Dockers’ Struggle, 22 Nov. 1945, H.P., D.J.H. 12/41. See also J. Deane, Reply to the Liverpool Document on the Docks Strike, H.P., D.J.H. 12/41). V.L. Allen found the strike “an excellent example of the inscrutability of dockers’ behaviour” since the rank and file Dockers Charter stated aims already essentially present in union claims to the employers (op. cit., 195). The 1947 national docks scheme provided a fall-back wage and thus offered a step away from casualised labour. This seems to have had the effect of tilting the occasion of docks disputes away from pay issues (E. Wigham, op. cit., 103).

18. The National Docks Group Committee drew attention to the activity of “unofficial elements” in the TGWU and declared:

There is definite evidence that the present stoppage has been seized upon by people connected with certain political organisations who had ready-prepared machinery at their disposal for encouraging and maintaining strike action. We think our members should know this and discard these people and make up our minds to use the constitutional machinery at their disposal. (The Times, 13 Oct. 1944)

19. Arthur Deakin, who was about to succeed Bevin as General Secretary of the TGWU, elaborated Trotskyist preparations for the strike, instancing the hiring of loud-speakers, vans and halls.

20. At this second annual conference, held on 4/5/6 August 1945, there were thirty six delegates. Representation was on the basis of one delegate for ten members, with small branches combining to elect their delegates. It was believed that membership was around 300, with the increase largely comprised of those formerly in the CPGB or in no party, though gains were still being made from the ILP (Socialist Appeal, Mid-Aug. 1945.

21. RCP leaders spoke at this time of “by-passing the Popular Front stage” and of a critical mood on which Trotskyism might build. Socialist Appeal sales, at 12,000 were said to be restrained only by paper controls and not by the market.

22. Party Organiser, Sept. 1946, 8.

23. ibid., 8.

24. Up to 1946, the Glasgow Building Workers Campaign Committee published a small duplicated sheet, The Builders Bulletin. In 1946 the party launched a supplement, The Builders Appeal, which sustained a circulation of 700 in its seven issues between the 1946 and 1947 party conferences (Organisational Report of the RCP, RCP Conference Documents, 1947, 4). The London and Glasgow committees made a strong intervention at the large building workers’ demonstration in Hyde Park on 31 August 1946. On the platform were Jock Milligan, a party member, and Alf Loughton, a comrade of the group of Wicks and Dewar in the ILP. The Trotskyist platform was 3/- an hour for craftsmen and 2/9 for labourers; a guaranteed 40 hours at the 44 hour rate; two weeks paid holiday and pay for bank holidays; a national building workers’ ballot for one union; all building by direct labour; opposition to P.B.R. or the attuning of wages to production; and the nationalisation of the building industry and land without compensation (Mass Meeting Broadsheet, H.P., D.J.H. 11/2).

25. Brothers: Stand Firm For 3/- Per Hour, 119473, H.P., D.J.H. 11/3.

26. R.B., Appraisal of Struggle in the Past Period, 5 Jan. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 12/74.

27. In the London Transport Strike the party considered it had made a strong intervention, which received press coverage. It produced a Socialist Appeal Transport Strike Bulletin: Unity is strength, [Jan. 1947] , H.P., D.J.H.r E/ 16.

28. The party had “excellent relations” with the strike committee of the Glasgow binmen, for whom they provided typing and duplicating assistance. In return the committee reproduced a Socialist Appeal article as a strike leaflet (Organisational Report of the RCP, RCP Conference Documents, 1947, 4).

29. The Savoy Hotel staff sought recognition for their union, the GMWU. The RCP had a member, Marion Lunt, working there and its coverage of the dispute led to a libel action against Socialist Appeal. On 14 April 1948, the Master in Chambers found against the paper.

30. 75% of those eligible to join were in trade unions, 220 out of about 270. But 10% of the party’s members were housewives and it had sixty members in the forces (Membership Report, 1946).

31. Party Organiser, Sept. 1946, 9.

32. R. Tearse, Reply to R.B., 5 Jan. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 12/74.

33. In 1947, on the eve of the split, the party reported eight convenors, fifty seven branch officials or committee members, nine district committee members, three area committee members and thirty six shop stewards. There were sixty trades council delegates serving on thirty five trades councils. In each case there was a strong presence of AEU members; (Organisational Report of the RCP, loc. cit., 4).

34. This was not accurate. While the number of strikes in 1950 at 1,339, was just over half that in 1945 and the number of working days less than half, the number of strikes in coal mining was large (E. Wigham, op. cit., 102).

35. The government’s ability to break the London Transport strike without causing an outcry was the subject of a dispute between the International Secretariat and the RCP (Pablo, A Turn Towards the Labour Party Masses is Becoming ever more Urgent, Jan. 1947 postcript, H.P., D.J.H. 12/75; C. van Gelderen, Why I Now Oppose Entry, Internal Bulletin, March 1947, H.P., 1).

36. There were 10,000 stoppages in January 1945-autumn 1950, nearly all of them illegal, but not a single striker was ever prosecuted under Order 1305 although it was in force throughout (E. Wigham, op. cit., 104).

37. Vigilance Committees appeared in 1947 as a check on employers who squandered fuel. The RCP held that they reflected high class consciousness, “Soviet forms of organisation based on the factories” and called on its members to participate (Emergency Resolution on the Fuel Crisis, [1947?], H.P.).

38. See also P. Sedgwick, The Fight for Workers’ Control, International Socialism, no.3, 1960, 22; RCP Conference Documents, 1947, H.P.

39. Haston requested of Attlee that the British Prosecutor probe the alleged Nazi-Sedov link and that the RCP be allowed a watching brief and the right to question some of the accused. He also wrote to Shawcross, and directly demanded that Vyshinsky, the Soviet prosecutor who had also prosecuted in Moscow, prove Trotsky’s connection with the Nazis (J. Haston to Attlee, 23 Dec. 1945; to Shawcross and to the Russian prosecutor, 4 Jan. 1946, H.P., D.J.H. 15A/21). A copy of the Vyshinsky letter went to the Daily Worker.

40. A model resolution was drawn up for labour movement meetings (H.P., D.J.H. 15B/53), 50,000 leaflets distributed, a pamphlet written (but not published), and much space given over in Socialist Appeal (Report for Three Months, Feb.-April 1946).

41. Unlike the RCP, the Socialist Workers Party was reluctant to act and the main thrust of a half-hearted campaign in America was provided by the Workers Party with whom Al Goldman, Trotsky’s attorney, and Natalya Trotsky had links. Haston told J.P. Cannon on 1 June 1946 that an offensive campaign by the RCP had “completely silenced the British Stalinists”. For Haston’s correspondence with the SWP and other Americans see H.P., D.J.H. 15A/21.

42. The most prominent name on the list of intellectuals who lent their name was H.G. Wells, who had withheld his support at the time of the Moscow Trials.

43. The party issued the broadsheets Back to Lenin (Nov. 1945), An Open Letter to all Communist Party members (Feb. 1947), Cominform is not a workers international (Oct. 1947), and Open letter to members of the Communist Party and YCL (Nov. 1947) (H.P., D.J.H. 15E/i, 17, 19, 21).

44. In 1942 WIL ran NCLC classes in Shepherds Bush and Coventry and moved its speakers onto the programme elsewhere. Trotskyist infiltration of the NCLC was denounced by the communists (W. Wainwright, Clear Out Hitler’s Agents:! (1942), 15).

45. Sara had become Southern London Area Organiser for the NCLC and .lectured against Vansittartism in January 1944. He and Maitland contributed to The Plebs in 1944 and 1945. Some NCLC officials including J.P.M. Millar and George Phippen may have looked to Trotskyists to offset communist influence. Phippen certainly created a congenial political environment in Southall, where the Trotskyists were strong (George Phippen, in J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol.5 (1979) 179-81). After he broke with Trotskyism, Haston obtained a full time position with the NCLC.

46. In 1946 Tyneside suffered a major crisis with the resignation of Minority supporters T. Dan Smith, Jack Jones and George Benn. Tearse led a Central Commission investigation into the way the branch, under the leadership of Dave Binah, was run. His report proved yet another occasion of Majority/Minority disagreement (H.P., D.J.H. 15B/82, July 1947).

47. Interview with S. Bidwell (Jan. 1973). Southall was one of the branches which undertook fraternisation with German Prisoners of War, a key feature in the RCP’s international programme. Bill Clemitson, another party member, was arrested in 1946 for distributing literature to German prisoners at a POW camp.

48. The party Control Commission had to investigate a case in Liverpool as well (Statement of the Control Commission on the Liverpool case and related correspondence, July 1947, D.J.H. 15B/82).

49. Publishing correspondence (New York), 2, special supplement, 27 Nov. 1954.

50. Membership losses were 112 between August 1945 and September 1946 (Against the Politics of Stagnation, Internal Bulletin, 1947 Conference Number, 1).

51. 36 voting members at the 1946 conference represented 29 branches: ten in London, thirteen in the provinces, four in Scotland and two in Wales. Membership in London, the centre of the factional struggle had risen by 30% and paper sales by 70%.

52. There were twelve full-time and one part-time worker in November 1944.

53. See below.

54. Interview with J. Goffe (July 1974).

55. The core of the Minority was Healy, already estranged from the old WIL leadership which now dominated the Political Bureau of the RCP; Goffe, variously of the Centre or the Right (Trotskyist) Opposition of the RSL, and (later) Lawrence, himself leader of the Right. They had the support of Sherry Mangan, a Time Life journalist based first in London and later in Paris. Mangan, who functioned in Europe under the names “Phelan” or “Patrick O’Daniel” was a member of the SWP and later of the International Secretariat. Other followers of the entrist faction were Fred Emmett, an AEU member who taught crafts in Stockwell, Sam Goldberg, Ben Elsbury and Hilda Pratt (Interview with J. Goffe; A. Richardson, op. cit.).

56. D. Finch and B. Shaw, Our Perspectives in the ILP, 9 Aug. 1944, H.P., D.J.H. 15A/3. Finch and Shaw rejected entry into the ILP but they believed fraction work there was of greatest importance after industrial work. They charged that ILP work was being downgraded, notably by the taking out of Bill Hunter, its convenor, to supervise trade union activities. Paradoxically they also forecast the rapid disappearance of the ILP.

57. “But the ILP remains an important obstacle in the path of the Fourth International. Events will not resolve themselves as simply as the comrades imagine. Far from the ILP disappearing at the “first breath of revolution”, even the beginning of mass radicalisation will see an enormous increase and influence in the membership for this organisation.” (Political Bureau, Perspectives in the ILP, [1944?], H.P., D.J.H. 15A/3)

58. “However, even if the terms are harsh, they would in any case be accepted by the ILP leadership. The ILP leaders are preparing to repeat on a new historical scale the experience of 1920-23. The lefts should analyse carefully this experience. But from the point of view of building the left wing, they should support the re-entry, however onerous the terms. The revolutionary wing will enter the Labour Party with a different aim than the leadership.” (Political Bureau, The ILP Fraction and Affiliation to the Labour Party, [late 1944?], H.P., D.J.H. 15B 17.

59. RCP members in the ILP continued, as in 1944, to back reaffiliation. See also P. Thwaites, op. cit., 38.

60. T. Dan Smith, North-East divisional representative on the ILP National Administrative Council, was expelled in May 1945 along with two other members of the RCP fraction. Herbie Bell, another Trotskyist, resigned in sympathy with them. In London Betty Russell was also expelled. The open adherence of the North-Eastern faction was reported in Socialist Appeal for June 1945. See also P. Thwaites, op. cit., 139-40.

61. Grant argued that the ILP was in no position to make conditions about the Labour Party breaking the coalition. If it decided to reaffiliate then continued coalition was irrelevant (The ILP, at the Crossroads, WIN, April 1945, 5). J.B. Stuart (the political name of Sam Gordon, who had become administrative secretary of the IEC when it underwent its 1940 reorganisation) sought a way to reconcile “the good sides” of the two parties. An approach by the RCP to the ILP would dispel illusions:

“That is why the next task of the RCP is a main orientation to the ILP That is why fusion with the Left Wing in the ILP is the main tactic in the immediate period.” (J.B. Stuart, The RCP and the ILP Left Wing, Internal Bulletin, June 1945, 1)

62. The RCP was criticised for making reaffiliation the benchmark of its approach to the ILP (ibid.). Some kind of contact between Dewar and the IS existed until at least 1946: Dewar told the ILP’s 1946 conference that he had discussed with it the RCP view of the ILP, and the Nuremburg Trial. After RCP complaints, the IS denied that any official contact had taken place. (Political Bureau to the IS, 9 May 1946; IS to the Political Bureau, 20 May 1946, H.P.)

63. In 1946 Wicks and Dewar combined with pacifists in the ILP to defeat reaffiliation at the party’s annual conference. When a by-election was called for 25 June at Battersea North, the London divisional ILP, with little encouragement from national level, put Dewar up as candidate. Dewar polled only 1.5% of the vote. This was a traumatic blow for the London ILP (Interview with H. Wicks Nov. 1979). After this Dewar mainly devoted himself to writing. He wrote Assassins at Large (1951) and Communist Politics in Britain (1976) as well as a pamphlet at the time of the Hungarian crisis of 1957 and various articles. Wicks continued as an antagonist of the CPGB on the Battersea and London trades councils.

64. The last RCP polemic with the ILP was published in early 1946 when Hunter argued that it was at a dead end and called on all revolutionaries to rally to Trotskyism (W. Hunter, The ILP and the Revolutionary Party, WIN, Feb.-March 1946, 141-50). In April 1946 the RCP recorded that it still had severe differences with the ILP left.

65. Reg. Groves was part of the Victory for Socialism movement which helped to crystallize discontent. He was co-organiser of the conference of anti-coalition local parties and trades councils organised in Birmingham on 9/10 September 1944.

66. See Socialist Appeal for January 1945.

67. The RCP held seventy meetings up to polling day, ranging from impromptu pithead gatherings to open air rallies in Neath with audiences between 300 and 500 and finally to two indoor forums at Gwyn Hall with 750 and 1500 in attendance, the last for an eve-of-poll debate with the CPGB (J. Lawrence, Report on the Neath Campaign, 13 June 1945, H.P., D.J.H. 15A/21,3).

68. Thirty other party members took their holidays in Neath though this was in part an admission of local weakness. 7,500 special election issues of Socialist Appeal were sold and 2,000 of each fortnightly issue of the campaign. 30,000 leaflets were distributed (J. Lawrence, ibid.).

69. Williams, the author of Capitalist Combination in the Coal Industry (1924), had once had some sympathy for Trotsky, if not Trotskyism.

70. Voting was on 15 May 1945, eight days before Labour actually pulled out of the coalition.

71. Haston polled 1,781 votes against more than 6,000 for the Nationalist and 30,847 for Williams. On a turnout of 58% Haston amassed 4.6% of the poll. Work on the Neath by-election by Mr. B.J. Ripley and Mr. J. McHugh of Manchester Polytechnic is currently (Sept. 1980) in progress.

72. From no members in Neath before the election, the RCP built a branch of six in the town and one of ten nearby. Sales of Socialist Appeal were reported, rather soon, to have “stabilised” at 1,000 (J. Lawrence, Report on the Neath Campaign, 3).

73. John Lawrence in his report noted that a Save the Deposit campaign had not been a success and advised caution in future ventures. RCP canvassers also encountered many Neath people who sympathised with them but were determined to vote Labour (Interview with E. Grant, Jan. 1973).

74. “Where possible we will put our own candidates as against those of the Labour Party, as well as of other parties” (Electoral Policy, adopted by the Central Committee, July 1944, 3, H.P., D.J.H. 12/6).

75. The RCP also called, in an unreal passage, for a united front of working class parties, including Common Wealth. Its argument was the old entrist one of sharing the experience of putting Labour in Power (Labour to Power in the General Election, statement of the RCP Political Bureau, printed in Socialist Appeal for June 1945).

76. See Electoral Policy. At this point, before the coalition was broken, the party speculated on writing “End the Coalition” across the ballot paper or even urging abstention, except where there was an ILP candidate to vote for. It also considered the possibility of a snap jingo election which would lead to a short-lived Tory government.

77. There is a discussion of the common fate of Common Wealth, the ILP and the RCP in D.L. Prynn, Common Wealth – A British “Third Party” of the 1940s, J.C.H., Vol.7, No.1-2 (1972), 178-9. Prynn’s suggestion of common work between the three parties seems fanciful however. See also A. Calder, The Common Wealth Party, 1942-45, Vol.1, 186-95, 315-17 and P. Thwaites, op. cit., 185. C.A. Smith was a physical link between the ILP’s reaffiliation discussions of 1938-9 and the crisis within Common Wealth, of which he was now a leader, provoked by the approach of the 1945 General Election.

78. From 1943 there was a rise in the total individual membership of the party. 1945 membership was practically double that of the previous year (LPCR). The CPGB, which could not be bracketed with the anti-truce parties, also felt Labour’s gravitational pull, and had sought affiliation as early as 1943 even though its membership total was booming.

79. On Our Tasks and Perspectives, Internal Bulletin (30 June 1945). The Glasgow branch had found there was a response for attacks on Churchill from a soapbox but less interest in meetings organised under the auspices of the RCP (Interview with J. Goffe, July 1974). J. Walters (Some Notes on British Trotskyist History, Marxist Studies, 2, 3, 1962-3, 45) dates the dispute over entry from the 1945 election, but Healy’s contribution preceded the declaration of results.

80. “Entry” and the Revolutionary Party, Political Bureau reply to the discussion, 1945 Conference Discussion (20 July 1945). The RCP leaders argued that the emergence of a “healthy” centrist current would compel the attention of all revolutionaries, but whatever the value of entrism in the past, this moment had not arrived.

81. In the eighteen months to July 1945 the RCP’s Labour Party members had failed to make even one recruit (ibid., 31).

82. This argument was in 1945 more powerful than it had been a decade earlier in view of the fame of Socialist Appeal relative to that of pre-war Trotskyist journals. Trotsky had even in 1936 considered the retention of an independent press while urging entry into the Labour Party.

83. Just after the conference, in September 1945, the Left Fraction, a reluctant partner to the 1944 fusion was expelled for indiscipline. It had refused to surrender control of Militant Miner but its other infraction was refusal to pull out two Labour Party members for open work. An appeal by the Fraction to the IS received no reply (Left Fraction, Brief Notes on the History of the Left Fraction, 1960, 3). It continued within the Labour Party, publishing a duplicated paper Voice of Labour (A. Richardson, Some Notes for a Biblography of British Trotskyism, 1979, 20). See also 1945 RCP Conference resolution on the Left Fraction, 4 Aug. 1945; W.D., T.M., J.L.R., Open letter to the membership, [5 Aug. 1945?]; and Left Fraction, A reply to the letter of the Secretary of the RCP to members of the Left Fraction, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/30b, 31, 34a.

84. C. Martinson stood in the Mersey Ward of Bootle (see above), and H. Bell, formerly an ILP official, stood in the Buddle Ward of Wallsend on a Revolutionary Communist Ticket.

85. The internal documents of the party contained many contributions on the subject but this can be misleading. Party members had the right to have documents reproduced within twenty one days (interview with J. Haston, July 1973); and the Minority levelled criticisms a good deal more often than the Majority answered them.

86. The Minority protested against closure, and it was recognised that circumstances, notably the arrival of Labour in government, were changing. The discussion was therefore extended to the end of 1945. This would only have barred formal contributions to the Internal Bulletin and could not of itself reverse deeply held convictions; in 1946 even this restriction proved ineffective.

87. The Labour Party question has been the subject of discussion within the British Trotskyist movement for more than ten years. That is a long time even to discuss so important a tactical question as entry into the Labour Party. The subject was one of the principal questions in dispute between the RSL and the WIL prior to the Fusion Conference of 1944. That conference decided the issue. (M. Lee, On the Limitation of the Discussion on “Entry”, [Dec. 1945/Jan. 1946?], H.P., D.J.H. 15B/45, 2).

88. Leigh Davis ceased activity in 1944 (see above). Margaret Johns had become inactive while living in Glasgow in the middle of the war. After the war she was persuaded to rejoin the party and was for a time a member of its Thames Valley branch (Interview with M. Johns, Nov. 1973). Van Gelderen, another former RSL leader, opposed entry after initial hesitation.

89. Harber shared with Lee, Grant and Haston the insistence that entry demanded a centrist current, participation in which (on a short term basis), would make surrender of an established open press worthwhile. Faced by Minority interest in the I.L.P., Harber wrote pseudonymously:

“.... granting (as they know I do) the assumption that we shall eventually have to enter the Labour Party, how can we in the meantime best build up our forces for entry ...” (P. Dixon, The 1945 Congress of the RCP – A Reply to Comrades Goffe and Healy, 23 Nov. 1945, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/40, 9).

90. See below.

91. They charged it with advocating liquidation of the I.L.P. as the priority task, then preparation for entry and then total entry (C.C. Majority, Reply to the Minority Statement, 9 Feb. 1946, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/48, 2).

92. Militant a duplicated paper around which the faction was intended to operate was made into a printed publication in mid-1946, a bold step for the RCP which was beginning to experience difficulties in the production of Socialist Appeal. RCP leaders charged that the Minority had failed to contribute any articles to Militant up to February 1946 (ibid.). No copies of this Militant have been located, but see A. Penn, op. cit., 163 for an issue with an Edinburgh imprint. She also discovered a publication Workers Weekly issued from the same city in the party’s name on 9 December 1944.

93. The establishment of a definite Minority dedicated to winning the RCP for total entry was declared in Minority Statement to the Central Committee of 9/10 Feb. 1946, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/48, 1.

94. “In a general way, the road for the construction of our parties, particularly in Continental Europe, leads at present through the combination of our independent work, guaranteed by our organisational and political autonomy, with patient, systematic and sustained fraction work in reformist, centrist and Stalinist organisations” (The New Imperialist Peace [IS document of the April 1946 pre-conference of the Fourth International], WIN, Nov.-Dec. 1946, 307). The RCP attempted to amend this resolution, arguing that entry could not be rejected a priori for Europe “in the coming period” ... (WIN, Nov.-Dec. 1946, 328).

95. At the first plenum of the new International Executive Committee in June 1946, the main resolution on entry was carried with only the British opposed. They put a counter resolution which fell with five votes in support, including that of the French majority and the Spanish delegate.

96. This is exemplified by Minority warnings about communist penetration:

“If we fail to rally our forces to wage this struggle (that within the Labour Party), we are merely handing over the leadership in the next immediate period to the Stalinists, who are undoubtedly our strongest opponents” (Finch, Goffe, Healy, Lawrence, The Turn to Mass Work, RCP Internal Bulletin, 17 July 1946, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/59, 9).

97. Van Gelderen backed entry on individual grounds. He believed that contemporary industrial movements would later be reflected in the Labour Party and that an authoritative presence there had to be established in anticipation. The actual moment of entry, he suggested, could only be determined empirically and he implied a longer period within the Labour Party than the RCP leaders, with their short term concept of entry, had envisaged (C. van Gelderen, Towards Entry – A Contribution towards the pre-conference discussion, RCP Internal Bulletin, [August? 1946], H.P., 10).

98. W. Hunter, British Perspectives – The Economics of the Discussion, RCP Internal Bulletin, [August?] 1946, 1. H.P. Hunter disputed that any sort of capitalist offensive was taking place and charged that the Minority depicted “a harassed and desperate ruling class with no room for manoeuvres, no room for retreats or compromises”.

99. The RCP’s Labour Party members had grown in number from forty four to sixty six during the year between conferences, a 50% increase which compared very favourably with the overall position (Labour Party Fraction Report, [Sept.? 1946], H.P., D.J.H. 15B/63). However it emerged the following year that this fraction itself supported a majority of the RCP staying out, and that a number of them preferred to sell Socialist Appeal rather than Militant. The Thames Valley branch of the RCP, a thriving Labour Party branch sold more copies of the open paper. Monthly sales of Militant were reported in September 1946 to be 118. In late 1946 the party was speaking of “increased attention” to the Labour Party though it had the Labour League of Youth chiefly in mind (Editorial Notes, WIN, Sept.-Oct. 1946, 261).

100. J.B. Stuart, Report on RCP National Conference, 1946, Internal Bulletin, 1946. H.P. Stuart, a supporter of the Minority, judged the class composition of the two sides to be similar, thus pre-empting an accusation it would level against the leading bodies the following year.

101. ”Because mass unemployment will only begin towards the end of Labour’s term in office ... it is quite likely that not only will the Labour Government see through its term of office, but that we may see a second Labour Government” (Perspectives and Orientation of the RCP, RCP Conference Documents, 1946, H.P., 7).

102. “The inevitable crisis, however, will not be immediate. It will be delayed for a time. The orientation and strategy of the Revolutionary Communist Party is firmly based on the long-term perspective of crisis and decline but its eyes are also wide open to the immediate conjunctural upswing (Editorial Notes, WIN, Sept.-Oct. 1946, 260.)

103. IS, A Turn Towards the Labour Party Masses Is Becoming Ever More Urgent, Jan. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 12/75. In March 1947 the IEC discussed and approved this letter to the RCP by a narrow majority of seven to five (one Italian, one Spanish, one French Majority, two British).

104. The IS quoted Labour Party success in local polls and by-elections and the resolutions being sent into Transport House in opposition to Bevin’s foreign policy, but did not face the contradiction between electoral support and its belief that the government’s policy was reactionary (ibid., 5-6). The opposition within the Labour Party to government policy with its emphasis on a critique of foreign policy is discussed by D. Rubinstein, Socialism and the Labour Party: The Labour Left and Domestic Policy, 1945-1950, in D.E. Martin and D. Rubinstein (eds.), Ideology and the Labour Movement, 1979, 227-57.

105. ”Every capitalist boom in the imperialist epoch is without perspective of achieving real stability” (The Real Situation in Britain – A Reply to the IS, Internal Bulletin, March 1947, H.P.).

106. The RCP’s detailed account of the revival is in loc. cit., 19-23.

107. “The British people were far from starving”, writes David Marquand, “although a casual newspaper reader might have been forgiven for doubting the fact” (Sir Stafford Cripps, in M. Sissons and P. French (eds.), Age of Austerity, 1945-1951, 1964, 186).

108. ”Under these conditions, it is obviously bound to be much more difficult to recruit members from the Labour Party directly to the revolutionary party, than to organise them inside for Trotskyism” (IS, A Turn Towards the Labour Party Masses, 8).

109. ibid., 12.

110. The RCP Political Bureau referred often to the need for entry to be preceded by the emergence of a centrist current within social democracy, moving towards the left and in a period of high political life. They also insisted that entry could be for the short-term only. While they could quote Trotsky in this respect they were on less firm ground with their conditions for entry. The IS argued that “entry of revolutionary organisations has taken place, at different periods that vary greatly in political character and for different purposes”, and gave the example of groups seeking protection against terror and groups seeking their first recruits (ibid., 9).

111. The Real Situation in Britain, 11.

112. “It was with no pleasure that we read your letter addressed to the Central Committee of the RCP but with growing apprehension.” Following this opening sentence the RCP declared the IS orientation, polemical method and conclusions “patently false” and informed it, “we concluded a study of your letter with considerable alarm” (The Real Situation in Britain, 1).

113. “In that event, the Communist Party should never have been formed in Britain nor should the Trotskyist Party. The Trotskyists should have entered the LP and remained there until the masses had completed their experience” (ibid., 30). The example of the dockers was proferred: they were Labour supporters but had not sought to use the Labour Party during their recent strike. The RCP however had found it possible to approach the dockers openly as a representative of the Fourth International.

114. Thus the RCP argued that while paper membership of the Labour Party had risen, activity in many localities had declined as soon as the General Election was over. In traditional areas there had been scarcely any revival. The League of Youth now barely existed and Labour Party publications showed a swing to the right.

115. “The setting into motion of the entire awakened working class will not be achieved by a few hundred (or even a few thousand Trotskyists) no matter how determined, or how well we plan, or how much we might work or wish to achieve this aim – albeit propped up by the inspired directions of the IS” (ibid., 41).

116. This point is specifically applied in the text to the Labour Party faction paper Militant.

117. The very-fact that the Labour Party is in power with such a huge majority, and that the local organisations are not nearly as active as they were even before the outbreak of the war, is one of the factors that makes us hesitant to conclude that the workers will pour into the Labour Party in active masses as a result of the next wave of radicalisation (ibid., 50).

118. This entailed two conclusions: that Trotskyism could grow when there was healthy life and internal struggle in the reformist or centrist organisation it had entered; that when the movement was quiet Trotskyism stagnated, especially if struggles found an outlet outside the Labour Party (ibid., 40).

119. Van Gelderen was editor of Militant and representative of the Labour Party fraction’s steering committee on the Political Bureau. He announced that his years abroad had left him out of touch and that British workers currently looked to unions and factory organisations as “organs of struggle”. Going into the Labour Party, he suggested, “means that for a long time ahead, we transform ourselves into a propaganda group for the sake of winning over the comparatively rare workers who do attend local LP meetings – and these by no means the most advanced” (Why I Now Oppose Entry, Internal Bulletin, March 1947, 2).

120. Van Gelderen had observed that the RCP members in the Labour Party were succumbing in some cases “to the reformist and petty-bourgeois atmosphere and opportunist tendencies are creeping in their articles and activities” (ibid., 2). J. King, a Labour Party fraction leader recruited during the ALLVDC campaign of 1944, delineated the case for placing the major emphasis on independence, from Labour Party structure.

121. CC Minority, Some Comments on the PB reply to the IS letter, Internal Bulletin, April 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 11/29.

122. See A. Walker, The Task of the Party in the Present Period, Internal Bulletin, April 1947, sep. page., 1-3, H.P., D.J.H. 11/29. Walker was a follower of Shachtman. Bob Condon, a Welsh miner Trotskyist, went even further than Shachtman by arguing that technocracy and not capitalism would be the next historic stage after capitalism (The New Order, Internal Bulletin, March 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 11/17).

123. ”Today the Labour Government nationalises industries which form the basis of capitalist economy, and it is undeniable that there has so far been no fundamental opposition from its bourgeoisie” (B. Hunter, The Nationalisation of British Industry, WIN, May 1947, 1).

124. Two Years of Labour in Power, WIN, Oct. 1947, 1-11. D. Rubinstein discusses the role of the Labour Left, urging the government faster along the same road rather than along a different one in Socialism and the Labour Party, loc. cit., 236.

125. Hunter’s argument was that the Labour Government was acting as the most conscious section of the ruling class thus far, so that state interventions could not be interpreted in a progressive light. Nevertheless, he suggested, workers did interpret them that way (The Nationalisation of British Industry, loc. cit., 4-6).

126. “... we anticipated a development of events at a far more rapid tempo than has taken place. On this basis we overestimated the possibilities of growth. This error must be corrected, or it can have serious consequences for the Party by causing a sense of frustration among the cadres in face of a slower tempo of events. The Party must be prepared to face a period, not of rapid and spectacular gains but of slow growth and entrenchment in the propaganda field and in the trade unions and in the industrial arena” (Editorial Notes, WIN, Sept.-Oct. 1946, 261).

127. Patrick O’Daniel (Sherry Mangan) invited the British to moderate their polemical tone in his pompous “A Note on Discussion Methods” (Internal Bulletin, 12 July 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 11/34). Haston wrote a devastating reply, with a witty appendage, In Reply to the Discussion Method of Comrade Daniel (Internal Bulletin, [July 1947?], H.P., D.J.H. 11/36).

128. See Chapter XII.

129. On 14-15 June 1947, the Minority held its own conference and formally constituted itself as the “Entrist Faction”. An International representative attended. Haston complained of poor attendance by Minority members at aggregates and public meetings, and also of a lack of interest in Militant. “The atmosphere of a split already exists”, he complained (J. Haston to IS, 15 July 1947, For Information, H.P., D.J.H. 12/82, 6). He also charged that the Minority, despite its interest in the Labour Party would take no responsibility for the operation of the fraction within it. Van Gelderen, he charged, had “on several occasions” written the entire Militant himself (Internal Bulletin, July 1947). To a charge of being opposed to the decision to print Militant, Healy replied that he and Goffe felt the fraction’s narrow base did not justify it and that low Majority interest in Labour Party work inhibited the development of it in any case. In the pre-conference period Minority contributions started to be styled, “EC Entrist Faction”. For separate Minority interventionsin industry, see R. Tearse and T. Reilly, The Adrema Strike – The Real Issues, Sept. 1947, D.J.H. 12/90, 4.

130. Between September 1946 and July 1947, the party had a net loss of forty two members (EC Entrist Faction, Against the Politics of Stagnation, Internal Bulletin, 1947 Conference Number, 1, H.P., D.J.H. 11/32, 1).

131. ibid.

132. Pablo (Michel Raptis), It is High Time to Find a Solution, Internal Bulletin, July 1947, 9 H.P.

133. “Let the next Conference of our British comrades solve the problem in this direction and let each of the two tendencies in our British movement make its own experience” (ibid., 12).

134. Pablo’s conditions were:

1. The existence of a party based on the working class enjoying the confidence of its overwhelming majority and which allows within its ranks a legal or semi-legal revolutionary tendency.
2. The economic and political conditions of the country, which far from forseeing a capitalist stabilisation, determine an equilibrium more and more unstable of the bourgeoisie, which will accentuate the opposition of the masses to th reformist leadership of the Labour Party and will drive them to seek a more revolutionary situation. (ibid., 11.)

135. In 1946 and 1947 it could muster only seven delegates for total immediate entry against twenty eight for the Majority. It did, however, question the accuracy of representation at RCP conferences, claiming the split among active members was 149:73. This complaint, first made after the annual conference of 1947, lacked moral force.

136. “... we shall suggest to the IEC that it allows temporarily a division of the British section into an open and an entrist group. Such a division would take place within the Fourth International and there would therefore be no return to the pre-1944 division of forces in which one group was inside the F.I. and the other (the WIL) was outside” (E.C. Entrist Faction, Open Letter to the Political Bureau. The crisis in the Revolutionary Communist Party, Internal Bulletin, Special 1947 Conference Number, H.P., D.J.H. 15A/39 1-2) .

137. Healy, the Minority leader had been a founder-member of WIL, but in this presentation to the 1947 conference, his Entrist Faction looked back on wartime activities which had been ”valuable” but fostered illusions that independent activity “could, of itself, build the revolutionary party” (ibid., 4).

138. The suggestion was that two thirds of the Majority representatives on the Political Bureau and the Central Committee were “either petty-bourgeois or intellectuals with no experience of work in the mass movement” (ibid., 7). This assertion conflicted with the observations of Stuart the previous year, as shown on p.432, above. It was not uncommon in the Fourth International to level this kind of charge, but in the 1939-40 separation of the SWP, considered a model guide to conduct during factional disputes, Trotsky, a participant, had been careful to avoid it before Shachtman et al. took a definite splitting course.

139. In 1947, 79% of the RCP membership, excluding forces members, was in unions. The rest were divided equally between those ineligible to join and housewives. 35.3% were in basic industrial unions; 18.9% in industrial service, transport or general unions; 25.2% in white collar or professional unions. Blue collar member ship predominated in the provinces; white collar in London (Organisational Report of the RCP, RCP Conference Documents, 1947, H.P., I-2).

140. RCP Conference Documents, 6.

141. The RCP still expected a mass communist movement to emerge. It noted that the CPGB was giving publicity to Labour Party members leaving to join it and regarded this as a hint that the danger of a large Stalinist faction within the Labour Party was less than it seemed from Paris (The Real Situation in Britain, 34).

142. The bulk of the membership, at 332, had been held, perhaps by the lowering of expectations. But they now supported only eight professionals. The failure of WIN to appear for five months after May 1947 may be attributable to the intense factional conflict: there were abundant internal documents during this time.

143. The IS brought to conference a resolution which stated, “This Conference accepts the decision of the next IEC on the British Question.” Against Minority and International protests, the RCP leaders’ view that this should not be put to the vote was upheld. Both the International Secretariat and the Minority had accused Haston and Grant of canvassing a possible split from the International. No documentary proof of this has been located. That same month Haston claimed that he had appealed to the IS in June to throw its weight against a split and that the Minority had been asked to acquiesce in the decision of the 1947 conference (Majority Central Committee, To the International Executive Committee, 19 Aug. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/86).

144. This also conflicted with Trotsky’s advice to J.P. Cannon during the SWP debate of 1939-40, where the American had been advised while in a minority to work patiently for a majority (In Defence of Marxism, 1966, passim.

145. “The tactic of the Majority bases itself on the orientation of the independent party, but an integral part of that orientation is the operation of a faction inside the Labour Party” (To the International Executive Committee, 5). This document also made the claim that about half of the Labour Party faction supported the Majority view. If the RCP was separated, these members were likely to fall under the sway of the Minority.

146. The Minority proposed, on the eve of the 1947 annual conference, to re-open discussion about WIL’s abstention from the Peace and Unity conference of July 1938. This had been closed at the 1944 Fusion Conference. The move was clearly intended to subvert the key ex-WIL figures who led the RCP. But they countered most effectively with a protest from the RCP central committee against singling out one only of the many splits which pockmarked the history of the Fourth International. This protest, circulated at the annual conference derived its force from being issued over the names of all central committee members who had not been in WIL in 1938, a surprising fifteen out of twenty. Grant, Haston, Healy, Heaton Lee and Millie Lee had been in WIL in 1938. The signatories to the protest (with their 1938 organisation in brackets), were:

The remarkable spectrum of support for this declaration confirmed how conscientiously the RSL leaders had put ancient quarrels behind them in 1944 (RCP to the IEC: An Appeal, 19 Aug. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/87).

147. Pablo charged that the RCP leaders sought to gather round themselves all the malcontents within the international and, undeterred by the central committee declaration, quoted the Resolution of the Founding Congress of the International on the Lee Group. He also charged the RCP with preparing a split while accusing others of doing the same (Reply to Comrade Haston: certain reflections are now necessary, Aug. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B 88).

148. Initially, the IEC declared itself eight to five “in favour of the entry of the Minority of the RCP into the Labour Party”. Supporting the two British delegates in opposition were one Indian, one French Majority and one Indo-Chinese. Haston had avoided a harder reolution than this but now sought the best deal he could get. With “Jerome” and “Robert” he made a Special Commission which produced a compromise resolution. Under its terms both factions received official recognition and would separately pursue their courses under the guidance of the IS which would convene monthly meetings. The IEC upheld this resolution eleven to one with one abstention (Resolutions and motions of the Fourth Plenum of the IEC, Sept. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/90)

149. Declaration of the majority ... for the special conference, 11 Oct. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/93b.

150. Central Committee resolution to go before the Special Conference, Oct. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/93a. Militant was allowed by the Minority to die, though the 1947 annual conference had been told that it had a print run of 1,000 of which 450 were sold. More than a year later, in December 1948, it launched a new paper, Socialist Outlook.

151. In Bevanism: Labour’s High Tide (1979) M. Jenkins places the end of conditional CPGB support for the Labour government at October 1947, the very month of the RCP split. Jenkins follows Pelling in attributing the docks strikes of 1948 and 1949 to communist attempts to disrupt European recovery (op. cit., 15). D.N. Pritt, in The Labour Government, 1945-51 (1963) dated strong developments on the left from 1948.

152. M. Jenkins, op. cit., 91. Jenkins wrongly presents the 1947 and 1949 entries of the RCP into the Labour Party as one and makes no comment on the presence of Trotskyists in the Labour Party from 1945 (op. cit., 58n, 92-3).

153. Declaration of the majority ..., H.P.

154. P. Frank, The Fourth International (1979), 85. Frank unconvincingly motivates IS advice by Labour’s “close links” with the unions and the emergence of Bevanism. But the “close links” were not new and were in any case an argument for permanent entry. Bevanism moreover should only accurately be dated from the 1950s. For the contemporary left, see M. Jenkins, op. cit.; D. Rubinstein, loc. cit.

155. The subsequent history of the Minority falls outside the scope of this thesis. Some of their activity can be followed in M. Jenkins, op. cit., D. Rubinstein, loc. cit., and LPCR, 1947-9.

156. See above, p.81

157. This thesis, which was acknowledged by the Majority itself was challenged by the state capitalists within the RCP ranks, who argued that it should be an exception to the general decline of all parties outside the Labour Party. They urged the maintenance of independence and the advancement of a practical alternative to the programme of the Labour government (B. Evans and R. Carson, Must the RCP Collapse?, Internal Bulletin, Aug. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 11/38).

XIV
LAST RITES
(THE RCP 1947 – 1949)

The RCP continued in being after the October 1947 split though the apparatus of the party was gradually reduced. 1948 was a year of stagnation: party leaders concentrated on theoretical explanation of dynamic world and national political changes, but there was declining activity by the membership. The difficulty of maintaining progress and disillusionment with ideologically bankrupt international leaders led to most RCP leaders advocating entry into the Labour Party early in 1949. After a short fierce battle, a majority of the party supported them and the RCP was dissolved.

The majority retained the name and most of the apparatus of the RCP But from this point the party press began to run down [1] and it seems that there was a decline in membership and in the activity of those who remained during the fifteen months to the opening of the final debate in January 1949. [2] Internal life, so frenetic in 1947, also subsided. [3] 1948 was the first year the WIL/RCP had failed to convene its annual conference since 1941. Polemics began to be directed, not against internal critics but against the IS and the Cominform.

The strongest plank in the platform of explanation offered by the RCP for the post-war political lull was the non-appearance of slump. It was this which would expose Labour’s reformism. [4] RCP leaders had rejected any suggestion that a slump was already taking place. They did not doubt, however, that it would soon be upon them. Signs abounded in the re-emergence of Mosley, an electoral swing to the right [5] and the words of Labour leaders. [6] But continued British insistence that the lull would be ended for fundamentally economic reasons still left it divided from the IS, which continued to believe European politics was occurring within “unstable equilibrium”, that 1938 output levels in the nations of the Continent were exceeded “only in exceptional cases”. [7] The absurd “ceilings” argument was applied in detail to Britain by the IS economist Mandel, who warned the RCP:

“.... it is necessary to abandon right now any juggling with a boom that has not existed and that British capitalism will never experience again.” [8]

By 1947 key sectors of industry had been taken into public ownership in all the buffer states of Eastern Europe. In 1948, a domestic crisis over acceptance of Marshall Aid precipitated a full communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. That year also witnessed the Tito-Stalin split, the first serious and open rift between communist governments. The next year a generation of communist struggle in China was crowned with success when the Red Army, long in control of the countryside, finally entered the country’s cities. These events created an unprecedented, albeit largely unrecognised, ideological crisis within the Fourth International, whose leaders had already proved unable to comprehend the survival of Soviet Russia after the war.

To the RCP there was a need for enquiry into the worldwide enhanced role of the state in the economy. Some RCP leaders [9] had begun to consider that Trotsky’s analysis of Russia might be outmoded and that a form of “state capitalism” flourished there. Some of these speculations found expression within a document of autumn 1947 which implied that “state capitalism” was a form of society which might emerge from contemporary economy. [10] It was after this debate was opened that Tony Cliff, an Israeli exile [11], drew an emphatic conclusion from the hypothesis and applied it to Russia. [12] A year after raising the matter the RCP leaders had concluded that the theory was not coherent: if the state took over all the means of production, they reasoned, capitalism had ceased to exist. Their analysis rested mainly on the introduction of planning where industry was mainly in the hands of the state, a step which allowed crises to be transcended and the contradiction between production and the market gradually ironed out. In the capitalist countries, statification (nationalisation) could proceed only up to a certain point. The use of state ownership was a device of capitalism to mitigate the effects of its decline. It would not peacefully evolve into its opposite. [13] The more negative features of Soviet rule were given greater emphasis in a contemporary contribution from Hunter. [14] In 1949, with the RCP already doomed, the crystallized views of Cliff on Russian economy and society received weighty refutation from Grant. [15]

Before the political shocks that 1948 brought to Eastern Europe, the IS saw the buffer states “retaining their basic capitalist structure” and moving towards western influence. [16] The 1948 World Congress, meeting in the month of the Prague coup, endorsed this view, seeing in these states,

“.... an attempt to exploit the resources of the ‘buffer zone’ and to ensure its strategic control, while at the same time maintaining capitalist production relations and a bourgeois state structure in its traditional form.” [17]

Removal of capitalism from Eastern Europe was envisaged by the IS only within the context of structural assimilation into the USSR Underlying its reasoning was the assumption that national social change could occur only through a mass uprising, following the Russian model of 1917. The corollary was that only two social alternatives lay before Eastern European states: capitalism or a healthy socialist system. The IS was forced to believe this, for the alternative was that some agency other than the Fourth International could achieve social change. [18] By 1949 its views were at such variance with reality that some stalwart supporters began to crack. [19]

Impatience grew in Britain. The RCP argued that the existence of the bourgeoisie in the buffer states was more apparent than real, but kept in insubstantial being for reasons of realpolitik. [20] The new society, Hunter reasoned in an important article, emerged that much more easily because of the existence of a model degenerated workers’ state in Russia. [21]

But the IS now accomplished an astonishing volte-face. When the split between Russian and Yugoslav communists broke into the open in June 1948, the IS responded with a naive open letter to the Central Committee of the Yugoslav party which betrayed great illusions about what was taking place, and principally the belief that Tito and his colleagues were repudiating the past. [22] The IS made no criticisms of Tito and urged him further along “the road of the socialist revolution and its programme”. The RCP was unimpressed however. [23] It also supported Tito against Stalin but interpreted the split as a struggle for independence by one section of Soviet bureaucracy. The Titoites were Stalinist still, claimed the RCP, and they shared with the Russians some responsibility for the crimes of the past. But the IS had landed itself in a hopeless ideological muddle [24], and the British paid no attention to its views in the literature they put out for public consumption. [25]

1949 brought final success for the Chinese communists which compounded the bewilderment of the IS It reacted in the same myopic way as it had to the new Eastern European states, which is to say that it pretended, in effect, that a revolution had not taken place. [26] To the RCP, this brought final disillusionment. David James took the views of the IS itself to their logical conclusion that the Fourth International was irrelevant. [27] Nor was he satisfied with the RCP attempt to handle the apparent contradictions in Trotskyist theory, thrown up by Yugoslavia and China by backing a deformed workers’ state. Stalinism, he concluded, was the only real alternative to capitalism. Grant’s refutation of this rested on the variety of political forms available either to proletarian or to bourgeois rule, and the argument that like economic forms did not preclude conflicts between states. RCP support for Tito was dictated not by the form of Yugoslav society but by the right of nations to self-determination, which had been threatened by Stalin. As for China, Mao might prove “a new and more formidable Tito” but this did not mean that his revolution would not also be deformed from the start. [28] Support for this argument came also from Hunter, who noted in his analysis the close economic similarity of Russia to all the buffer states, yet echoed Grant’s warning of future Maoist opposition. [29]

The ideological incapacity of the IS as well as the general lack of progress by the Fourth International was the background to the disintegration of the RCP which took place in 1949. Grant and others had cobbled together a strong alternative analysis to that of the IS, but they-had not provided a definite programme to guide the activity of Fourth Internationalists in the present. Internationally and nationally the thrust of their argument was that no initiatives were available, that matters were in the hands of objective economic and political forces. The malaise might have been offset by RCP progress but this did not take place. In Britain Labour was, apparently, carrying out its programme. The extension of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe made it improbable that any great numbers would defect from the CPGB After a period of confusion induced by the Tito-Stalin split, the CPGB, rallied to Russia. Party membership fell, but Trotskyism did not benefit thereby.

The crisis of Trotskyist leadership may have been long gathering. [30] It broke into the open in January 1949 when Haston, Tearse, Atkinson and Vic Charles, a majority of the Political Bureau, called for entry into the Labour Party. [31] They had not revised their views on how things stood within the Labour Party, but recognised that the industrial field had been, contrary to expectations, “exceptionally quiescent”, and that communists were now more confident than before and thus more difficult to move. Haston et al. made no claim that the conditions for entry existed in the Britain of 1949. They suggested instead that the problem be approached from a new angle: that it would be impossible to build a third party except from a recognition that workers had first to complete their experiences of social democracy and communism. Without enthusiasm [32], they proposed a long period of Labour Party work. [33] Since it was an expression of a mood the proposal, if it was to be defeated, had to be instantly suppressed. But other party leaders were not sufficiently resolute or willing to take such rapid steps. Grant and two other Political Bureau members consciously avoided the issue by declining to engage in a struggle over entrism. In their view the die was already cast [34] and unity took precedence over a sterile discussion within the party. [35] They put great value on the agreement by all that there was a need to maintain a theoretical journal and a tight organisation. This was to turn out to be self-deception. The debate ceased to be confined to RCP leaders as the party received a missive from the IS and polemics from members who sought to retain an independent party. The IS letter was animated by an unforgiving spirit. [36] Haston et al. had not adopted the entrist proposals of the IS two years late; they had devised their own. Nor had they revised their economic perspectives. They were proposing to enter the Labour Party without any definite end in view. [37] The IS called for delay and regretted that no votes had been taken in the discussions held so far by the RCP. This document had the predictable effect of solidifying the British leaders. None of them shared the views of the IS, on the economy or in the controversies over Russia and Eastern Europe. The IS had so little standing with the RCP that its demand to be involved in the debate had negligible impact. A rapid reply from the Political Bureau rejected the liquidationist charge and all IS proposals for conduct of the debate. [38] It also pointed out the RCP leaders were now repudiating the very concept of entrism the International itself had criticised two years before. [39] The IS could derive no comfort at all from other contributions to the debate. [40] Most significantly there was a rank and file revolt which centred on restating original RCP views against a leadership which it believed to be demoralised. These members, centred on the London district committee, had first looked to Grant to resist the drift into the Labour Party. When disappointed, they took up cudgels themselves. They agreed with the IS only in their belief that Haston et al. were aiming at destruction of the party. In every other respect they opposed it. Entry could be efficacious only under conditions of economic recession which were absent. RCP leaders were privately in despair at the ability of the party to maintain itself and this was driving them on. [41] The Open Party Faction had only a limited impact though it made considerable effort. [42] Late in the debate its leaders did attempt to broaden the issues. They rejected the classical conditions of entry, formerly much beloved. [43] They came close to suggesting that successful Trotskyist activity within the Labour Party was impossible. [44] Lack of activity there would, they predicted, lead to an over emphasis on theory and to factionalism. [45]

When the Political Bureau next addressed the party it was in more radical mood. It repudiated its own policy of independence since 1945 [46], conceded the charge of fatalism levelled in the past by the IS [47] and predicted that the beneficiaries of a mass movement would be no independent force but Bevan and other left wing Labour leaders. The RCP, it now believed, would never be able to step in and take control of an established current: it would have to earn support. [48] Appearing monolithic before the members, and having allowed a lengthy discussion, the Political Bureau’s victory was assured. The Open Party Faction had failed to gain ground and other alternatives did not attract support. [49] There was no split before the special RCP Congress of 4-6 June, which gave most of its agenda over to the problem of entry. [50] At the Congress the biggest faction, with around 50% of the thirty delegates was that behind Grant which meant a vote to enter the Labour Party was certain. The supporters of Haston and of the Open Party Faction registered about equal strength. [51] Speeches by Levy and Snobel gained them no ground and the decision to dissolve was taken. [52] Haston was appointed to head a Committee of Dissolution.

The last issue of Socialist Appeal was published in July 1949. It ran a declaration of dissolution:

“The perspective for Socialists must therefore be to join the ranks of the politically conscious workers inside the Labour Party and try to orientate its policy along truly socialist lines.” [53]

It was openly stated that dissolution was forced on the RCP by a 1946 decision of Labour Party conference on affiliations. It claimed to take this step in order to help Labour fashion an anti-capitalist programme in the face of the coming world slump. In the end the RCP, had succumbed to the same hostile environment which had induced the collapse of the ILP and Common Wealth. Ideologically and organisationally it was tougher (though much smaller) than either, and so its fate was delayed. To its credit it tried honestly to explain post-war developments in the economy and politics at home and abroad. Its efforts shone when compared with those of its international leadership. [54] But events were so different to expectations that the party itself was shattered by the reorientation expected of it. The argument between the IS, the Majority and the Minority had been over when, not whether the slump would appear. By 1949 only the Majority had faced up to the probability of some years of expansion which its determinist Marxism suggested meant also a political lull. This greater clarity brought nearer its demise and an end to the struggle against history. [55]

Notes

1. The October 1947 issue was the only Workers International News between May 1947 and June 1948, though it appeared two monthly thereafter. 800 copies of the last (Jan.-Feb. 1949) were published. Socialist Appeal already a monthly was hit by the decision to break the long standing arrangement with the printers C.A. Brock, who, it had been discovered, were undertaking work for Mosley. No issues of Party Organiser post-dating the split have been located.

2. The Haston papers provide little evidence of activity in 1948 though most members now expected a political recession and were prepared for it. Some of the moneyed backers of the party were however starting to lose interest (Interview with E. Grant, Jan. 1973). In 1948 some professionals began to be removed from the employment roll.

3. The internal dispute over entry and economic perspectives ceased with the split. 1948 was a vital year in the development of Trotskyist ideas in Britain and important documents were written, but the Internal Bulletin in its usual form virtually ceased to appear. These documents were the work of a handful of leading party members. In February 1949 it was alleged that the Political Bureau had failed to issue a single directive for the previous twelve months (Bill Cleminson, Criticism of the entry statement of J.H., H.A., R.T., V.C., [Feb? 1949], H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101). D.D. Harber, a supporter of the leadership, ceased activity circa 1948. He continued to combine WEA work with his CIS job in Eastbourne. In later years his main creative work was in ornithology, though he kept his Marxist views and gift for languages.

4. E. Grant, Two Years of Labour in Power, loc. cit., 11.

5. E. Grant, in The Menace of Fascism (1948), repeated the wartime argument about the irrelevance of Fascism to British capitalists as long as they could achieve their ends by other means. The reappearance of Mosley and rising Tory votes at by-elections were linked by him to Labour “tinkering” with capitalism. Disaffection in a boom threatened dire things for the slump.

6. Grant argued that “the exhaustion of the sellers” market looms in sight and that in the speeches of Cripps were to be perceived, “the symptoms of decline, of impending economic slump, of overproduction” (ibid., 51).

7. The IS also discerned evidence of a rightward swing of the petty bourgeoisie in election results, but perceived an imminent clash between the two wings of the Labour Party (World Situation and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Fourth International [NY], Nov.-Dec. 1947), 275).

8. E. Mandel, From the A.B.C. to Current Reading: Boom, Revival or Crisis?, Internal Bulletin, Sept. 1947, H.P., D.J.H. 11/40, 9. Mandel focussed especially on the shortages of manpower and of coal, both of which rendered the transformation of the economic revival into a boom “impossible”, and on the refusal of “an enormous mass of capital ... to converge towards industry”. Mandel’s paper was circulated to party members with a reply by Cliff.

9. Notably Haston and Grant (Interviews, 1973).

10. Capitalist Statification. This internal document has not been located.

11. Cliff (Yigal Gluckstein) had come to England in 1946 and contributed occasional articles to Workers International News and Internal Bulletin.

12. The Nature of Stalinism in Russia, trans. C. Dallas, June 1948, H.P., D.J.H. 15A/43. A harbinger of this critique was Cliff’s article What is Happening in Stalinist Russia?, Socialist Appeal, Feb. 1947.

13. The analysis can be followed in The Tendency Towards Statification – A Necessary Correction, WIN, Nov.-Dec. 1948, 8-18. The decision to make the correction arose from a Central Committee meeting of September 4/5 1948.

14. Hunter contrasted the reality of state power in Russia, with Engels’ prediction that it would wither away, and argued that bourgeois rights there were strengthening, not weakening, as expected by Marx (Is Russia Moving to Communism?, WIN, Jan.-Feb. 1949 , 8-23) .

15. T. Cliff, Marxism and the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, [1949?], H.P., D.J.H. 15B/109; E. Grant, The Marxist Theory of the state as applied to the Stalinist states: reply to Cliff, Aug. 1949, D.J.H./1SB/109. This debate on the state extends beyond the RCP to take in a faction fight within “the Club” (the former Entrist Minority led by Healy), and the formation of a discrete state capitalist group. It is not therefore dealt with here. See D. Hallas (ed.) The Fourth International: Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialists (1971).

16. In a resolution which speaks of their “need to trade with the West and imports of American capital and industrial products” and suggests that their population is moving in favour of socialist parties. (World Situation and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Fourth International (Nov.-Dec. 1947), 275). Six months later the IS called on Trotskyists in Eastern Europe to enter Social Democratic parties (The USSR and Stalinism, Fourth International, June 1948, 110-28).

17. ibid., 118.

18. Unaccountably, T. Ali in The Coming British Revolution (1971), attributes this folly not to the IS, but to its British critics. But the RCP stood opposed to the fantastic call in the 1948 World Congress theses for the expropriation of the big bourgeoisie of Eastern Europe who had been expropriated long before (The USSR and Stalinism, loc. cit., 121).

19. The argument that structural assimilation into the USSR was not in prospect and that the East European states were sociologically similar to Russia, was rehearsed by E.R. Frank (Memorandum on Resolution on The Evolution of the Buffer Countries, 31 March 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/103). The Evolution of the Buffer Countries was an IEC resolution of March 1949, which still did not clarify the social character of these countries.

20. Hunter argued that the Czech communists kept a National Block in being when it was not needed:

“the coalition with the shadow of the bourgeoisie was intended to placate western imperialism in line with the alliances then existing, and to facilitate western economic aid.” (B. Hunter, Stalinism in Czechoslovakia, WIN, June 1948.)

21. ibid.

22. “Now you are in a position to understand, in the light of the infamous campaign of which you are the victims, the real meaning of the Moscow Trials and of the whole Stalinist struggle against Trotskyism” (Open Letter to Yugoslav CP, WIN, Aug. 1948, 16). A further letter developed this friendly theme and offered Tito the assistance of the Fourth International.

23. “We cannot lend credence, by silence on aspects of YCP policy and regime, to any impression that Tito or the leaders of the CPY (sic) are Trotskyist “ (Letter on Yugoslavia sent to the IEC by the RCP (Britain), Oct. 1948, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/100). The Letter, toned down from earlier drafts, called on the IEC to repudiate the open letters. I.H. Birchall, Workers Against the Monolith (1974) reports the later rejection by the Cliff Group of the official FI line but omits any reference to the RCP leaders’ contemporary rebuttal.

24. In June 1948, the month of the split, the World Congress had declared all the East European states to be capitalist. Now it was supporting a “capitalist” country (Yugoslavia) against a ”workers’ state” (Russia). There was, as Haston the RCP signatory pointed out, no call for the overthrow of Yugoslav capitalism in the open letters.

25. See the pamphlet, E. Grant and J. Haston, The Tito-Stalin Split (1948). The official Trotskyist reaction was no passing fancy. Two years later, in its official American journal, Gerard Bloch wrote that “the Yugoslav revolution can very well become the springboard from which the Fourth International will launch out to win over the masses” (The Test of Yugoslavia, Fourth International, July-Aug. 1950, 121). For an interesting first-hand account of the course of events before and during the Tito-Stalin quarrel see F. Claudin, The Communist Movement, 1975, 486-548. The enthusiasm of the Fourth International leaders for Tito found a mirror image in James Klugmann’s From Trotsky to Tito (1951) which constructed a farrago of links between the two movements.

26. In April 1948, before the Nationalists were routed, a Chinese Trotskyist dismissed Mao’s programme as “an embellishment of bourgeois power” and predicted he would use the national bourgeoisie as an ally against imperialism (H. Yueh, Mao Tse-tung’s “Revolution”, Fourth International (NY), Dec. 1949, 328-32) Later it was suggested that “the Stalinist programme itself is dedicated to the protection and preservation of capitalist property relations” (C.L. Liu, China: An Aborted Revolution, Fourth International (NY), Jan.-Feb. 1950, 3-7).

27 ”Objectively, it is Tito (and Gomulka and tomorrow perhaps Mao Tse-tung) who express the programme of Trotskyism, unconsciously, in a distorted form. The Fourth International has been by-passed.” (Some Remarks on the Question of Stalinism, Feb. 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/102, 10).

28. Grant predicted bonapartist rule in China. The working class had not played a leading role there and the bourgeoisie would only be allowed a fragile existence while Mao played for time (In Reply to David James, 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/102, 15).

29 W. Hunter, The IS and Eastern Europe, May 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 12/106, 3. Grant had welcomed the passage of power to the Chinese communists with the remarkable prediction that “it is quite likely that Stalin will have a new Tito on his hands. Mao will have a powerful base in China with its 450-500 million population, and its potential resources, and the undoubted mass support that his regime will possess in the early stages” (Socialist Appeal, Jan. 1949).

30. Haston had been surprised at the leniency of his treatment in Durham Jail in 1944. Three years later he had argued against extending support to a miners’ strike (Interview with J. Haston, July 1973). It is believed that he had attempted to resign several times before 1949, but been dissuaded by other party leaders who also suppressed the news (Interview with S. Bornstein and S. Levy, 30 Nov. 1973).

31. J. Haston et. al., Statement on the perspective of the RCP, Jan. 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101. The discussion was officially opened on 9 January and it was then agreed that it would last fourteen weeks. In fact written contributions continued to arrive until the special RCP conference in mid-June 1949.

32. [The Labour Party] “despite the limitations which it will impose on revolutionary agitation is the only field from which a mass Trotskyist tendency can arise in the period ahead” (ibid.).

33. “Several years” were specified, another departure from previous beliefs. The authors rejected another earlier view by talking of going in to organise the left wing. Their detailed proposal was for a period of preparation for entry, an open approach to the Labour Party for terms, and coordination with the former Minority once they were inside.

34. “The overwhelming majority of the leadership and trained cadres, and a substantial section of the rank and file” were in favour of dissolving the RCP, they claimed (T. Grant, J. Deane, G. Hanson, Letter to the Members, [Jan.? 1949] , H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101).

35. Grant et al. argued that if a principle had been at stake then there would have to be a struggle regardless of the consequences. But since Trotskyism was barred from growth for the present whatever it did, a debate would be futile.

36. “This document is the expression of liquidationist tendencies” (Open letter from the IS to all members of the RCP, 8 Feb. 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101, I).

37. “There is great danger because the policy of the comrades depends on nothing. Nothing is to be done because reformism is transforming the working class, nothing is to be done because Stalinism is achieving victories for the working class. They have not much hope to build the Trotskyist organisation, they have no hope in the development of the Fourth International. The proposal of entry looks like the act of a desperate man drowning himself in deep water” (ibid.).

38. To the IS from the Political Bureau of the RCP, 21 Feb. 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101. The authors declared their hope, on entering the Labour Party, to fuse with the old Minority.

39. Although the Political Bureau now believed there would be no great gains inside or outside the Labour Party, they did also concede that they had to attempt to influence processes at work within it. It may have been this concession to the IS which caused Grant to abstain over its statements (ibid.).

40. B. Cleminson, Criticisms of the entry statement of J.H., H.A., R.T., V.C., [Jan./Feb. 1949?], H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101. Cleminson believed that criticism of the Labour Government was growing but was not expressed through the Labour Party. He asserted that the RCP had never been more than a propaganda group and that if the ability to agitate successfully was the criterion of open work, Trotskyists should never have left the Labour Party. He branded the Haston document as a screen for inactivity and remoteness on the part of the leadership, and proposed a purge of those who suggested, “let’s drown ourselves in the most stagnant pool in British politics – The Labour Party”.

41. Open Party Faction, Some Comments on the IS Letter and the PB Reply, March 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101.

42. Sam Levy, author of Some Comments, and Alf Snobel, another faction leader, visited several party branches but failed to convince them of the need to hold the traditional line. They themselves lacked the aura of front rank leaders, and their perspective of more of the same did not inspire confidence (Interview with S. Bornstein and S. Levy, Nov. 1973).

43. Once again – the real situation in Britain; document of the Open Party Faction, May 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101, 12.

44. The Faction claimed that those RCP members still in the Labour Party wished to be withdrawn, and that the former Minority was placing increasing emphasis on the support of left parliamentarians through its paper the Socialist Outlook (ibid., 15).

45. They charged the RCP leadership with neglecting the ideological education of members. This seems harsh in view of the output of Grant and Hunter from 1947 onwards, and yet Grant is the subject of particularly scathing remarks in the text of the Faction’s May document.

46. Maintenance of an open party had been wrong, “ever since the Labour Party was elected and began to carry out its programme” (Political Bureau, Statement on Entry, March 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/101).

47. The Political Bureau acknowledged that together with the Open Party Faction it had been guilty of waiting for events to come its way in an “ivory tower”.

48. Specific points of activity would be persuading disillusioned militants not to despair of the Labour Party, and the NCLC (considered a form of Labour Party work). The danger of degenerating into left opportunism was rejected: “the mere existence of an open party and seclusion from real trends in no answer to incipient ideological capitulation” (ibid.).

49. One of these was advanced by Frank Ward, a central committee member, who favoured entry for most of the RCP with a small group outside to publish a new theoretical journal and undertake industrial work (British Perspectives and the International, [May?] 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/107). The F.I. leaders were predictably as (horrified by the views of Ward on the Fourth International as they were by those of James, and considered the party had failed to convincingly refute either (IS, To The Conference of the RCP, 2 June 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 12/108). Another RCP leader, Tommy Reilly, drew even further conclusions from the failure of the Fourth International and joined the CPGB (See Central Committee, RCP, To the IS, 25 June 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 12/108).

50. There was however a discussion on attitudes to the Fourth International which revealed that Ward alone advocated the slogan “For the Fourth” which Trotsky had rejected before the Founding Congress.

51. No minutes of this Congress have been located. These figures are based on an interview with S. Bornstein and S. Levy (Nov. 1973). The Congress met in the presence of an IS delegate and Goldberg from the old Minority.

52. In fact some Faction supporters were lost during the debate (Interview with S. Bornstein and S. Levy, Nov. 1973).

53. ”Declaration on the dissolution of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the entry of its members into the Labour Party” (Socialist Appeal [special number], July 1949).

54. The RCP. leaders rapped IS knuckles one final time on the eve of dissolution when they attributed some of the democratisation to IS failure to distinguish the Fourth International from Stalinism (Central Committee, RCP, To the IS, 25 June 1949, H.P., D.J.H. 12/108) .

55. The subsequent fate of the RCP is outside the scope of this thesis. The Open Party Faction had predicted that the IS would give control of the newly fused Trotskyist presence in the Labour Party to the Minority, now known as the Club. The idea of a fusion had been supported from the outset by Haston et al. Two different economic perspectives were at war within the Club and that of the IS and Healy prevailed following a number of expulsions. Within a short time the state capitalist group of Cliff departed. Others ceased activity. Haston formally left the Trotskyist movement on 10 June 1950, leaving behind him a remarkable memoir in which he repudiated the activity of a lifetime (H.P., D.J.H. 15B/111). At least one former RCP leader, Deane, was expelled from the Club for refusing to break relations with Haston (E.C. Statement on the conduct of J.D., 24 May 1950, H.P., D.J.H. 15B/110). Shortly, most RCP leaders had either ceased activity or, like Grant and Cliff, were seeking to build anew outside the Club. The real meaning of the original proposal of Haston et al. – physical exhaustion arising from a long struggle against adverse circumstances as well as arrival at an ideological impasse – was now apparent (Interview with S. Bornstein and S. Levy, Nov. 1979; J. Walters, Some Notes on British Trotskyist History, Marxist Studies, Vol.2, No.3, 1962-3, 45-8).

APPENDIX A

A Note on British Trotskyists and Spain
by Martin Upham

The Spanish Civil War dramatized the menace of Fascism for the Left in Britain. The Trotskyists had a distinctive critique, and their comrades were being brutally repressed in Spain. The communists had to engage in a limited polemic on their left. It might have been possible to avoid it had the Trotskyists been their only critics (except perhaps in the League of Youth where the centre of gravity of the debate was further left than elsewhere). As it was there was some disquiet in the Labour Party about the communists” role in the war, though loyalty to the Republic generally overrode it. The ILP, however, was militantly critical and its opposition to the Spanish communists deepened after the Barcelona rising of May 1937 and the suppression of its sister party, the POUM. [1] The communists branded all their left critics as Trotskyists, though they eschewed a polemic with the Trotskyists themselves. [2] Within the party there were differences over Spain [3], though the Trotskyists only gained from them in a very minor way. [4]

In Spain the verdict of the Moscow Trials was steadily applied to critics of the communist line, and that was a matter not only for Trotskyists. Yet the response of the ILP, the party most at risk, was muffled for most of 1937 by its longing for a united front at home.

All Trotskyists closely followed developments in Spain, especially after the events of May 1937 in Barcelona. To Militant the gains of the July 1936 revolution were steadily filched later in the year and in early 1937. Continual provocation by the Government led, in its view, to the Barcelona rising. Yet this insurrection would, it believed, have succeeded but for the vacillation of the POUM. and the anarchists. With its failure “the Government felt more secure and the tempo of the counter-revolution increased”. The keynote criticism of the POUM was probably the extract from a Trotsky article with which Youth Militant led in June 1937

The New Leader publicised the rolling back of the revolution from 1937. [5] The death of Bob Smillie and the murder of Andres Nin drew particular attention. But, the ILP apart, it was only the Trotskyists who thoroughly covered the revolution within the Civil War in Spain. What was more, Trotskyism denounced the ILP for its willingness to unite with a communist movement which was executing revolutionaries in Spain:

“Let Brockway and Maxton take this to heart. Their participation in the famous ‘unity’ campaign helped the Stalinist murder gang to get away with this crime” (the murder of Nin – M.U.). [6]

Trotskyism opposed the strategic thrust of the republicans and communists towards a democratic Spain. As Militant observed, Spain had been a democracy since 1931, but the advantages were not obvious. [7] A socialist programme could not await the end of the war: indeed the destruction of the revolution would prolong war and lead in the end to some sort of fascism. Militant therefore supported the POUM and Anarchist belief that the war was indivisible. It differed in its insistence that workers and peasants power, mediated through Soviets, was the indispensable tool for translating belief into reality. Yet Trotskyists drew encouragement from the regroupment of revolutionary socialists through the Socialist Party and the Friends of Durrutti: a new party might be born out of this. Of all the Trotskyist papers Fight most regularly carried the documents of the Spanish “Bolshevik-Leninists” who were fighting for such a regroupment.

Looking back over two years of the Spanish conflict, Fight [8] reflected that a People’s Front government was unable to prevent civil war breaking out and incapable of waging it either. “Almost from the very beginning, the Spanish Government did not obtain a single lasting victory.” Fight did not minimise the inferior arms supplies of the Republic, but it insisted that moral superiority could bring victory against a better equipped enemy. But the People’s Front government had, in its view, destroyed morale by reintroducing Assault Guards into key military positions and deepening the divisions between officers and men through salary differentials.

Notes

1. Within the ILP. Trotskyists and others at annual conferences urged the inconsistency of ILP-CPGB cooperation in the Unity Campaign, while the communists were suppressing the POUM. in Barcelona (The New Leader, 2 April 1937 and 22 April 1938 ).

2. J.R. Campbell, Spain’s “Left” Critics, 1937, 16p. The POUM was not a Trotskyist party any more than the ILP. itself. But there were Trotskyists in the POUM. Two of them, Mary Low and Juan Brea published Red Spanish Notebook (with an introduction by C.L.R. James) in 1937.

3. Discussion for 13 April 1937 did carry an article by Hugh Slater which argued that Daily Herald reports of fighting behind the lines might be untrue, but otherwise there was no public controversy between communists over Spain. Yet Wally Tapsell and others did bring back criticisms from the Brigades (H. McShane and J. Smith, Harry McShane, No Mean Fighter, 1975, 223; F. Copeman, Reason in Revolt, 1948, 119; H. Dewar, Assassins at Large, 1951, 70.). Emile Burns did feel it necessary to defend Stalin’s early policy of neutrality (Discussion, Nov. 1936). See also R. Black, Stalinism in Britain, 1970, 113-4.

4. Bob Armstrong and four other communists who had served in Spain joined WIL in 1939.

5. See The New Leader, passim, and also Brockway’s pamphlet, The Truth About Barcelona (1937). Fight polemicised against this pamphlet in July 1937.

6. Militant, Sept. 1937.

7. “The advent of the Azana Government in Spain was hailed as a decisive defeat for Fascism, a victory for the working class. But the agrarian problem could not be solved, for this would have meant an attack upon the banks and the church. No political rights were given to the oppressed people of Morocco, with the result that they became a ready prey to Fascist demagogy. All the old instruments of repression – the army, the police – were maintained and were used by the reaction in the rising of July. We have seen the result in a civil war which has decimated Spain for over a year.” (Militant, Oct. 1937)

“It is for a third taste of a liberal bourgeois government that the leaders of the liberals, the socialists and the Stalinists say the workers are fighting and dying. A slight knowledge of the history of Spain since the Republic shows how monstrous is the slogan ‘For Democracy’ in Spain.” (Fight, April 1937)

8. S. Frost, Two Years of Civil War in Spain, Aug. 1938.

APPENDIX F

Trotskyism and the ILP
by Martin Upham

This is Appendix F in Martin Upham’s thesis. Appendix D & E (the Programme and Industrial Programme of the RCP) can be found in the Home Office Report of 1944 on the Trotskyists groups on this website.
 

In the ILP Trotskyism’s presence in 1938 was at a low ebb, virtually reduced to Patterson and others working from the Clapham ILP bookshop. In the Guild of Youth there were some young members of WIL and they achieved a symbolic coup on 26 November 1938 when the London Guild declared for the formation of the Fourth International. [1] At the national conference of the Guild, however, the Fourth International was passed over for the London Bureau and the RSL was condemned for failing to support an anti-war front the Bureau had summoned. [2] At the Party conference of 1939 reaffiliation was the key issue and now, as at the end of the war, Trotskyism split both ways. Harry Wicks and Hugo Dewar had moved to the ILP as the most likely source, in their view, of labour movement revival. With their supporters they openly entered the ILP and formed its Battersea and Wimbledon branches. [3] At conference they allied with C.A. Smith and Fred Jowett against reaffiliation. [4] Patterson, a long standing opponent of rejoining Labour had now reversed his view. [5] From its Labour Party position, Workers International League also supported reaffiliation. [6] The desire of the National Council was upheld and negotiations opened which might have been successful had not war intervened. Patterson attempted to take dissident ILPers into the Labour Party and received support from the London Divisional Council. The attempt was crushed by ILP head office. [7]

War gave the ILP a chance to return to the great simplicities. [8] The 1930s had revealed a lack of clarity as to what the party stood for, but it was definitely against war. This gave it a greater firmness of purpose between 1939 and 1945 than it had had for some years and even the fleeting promise of not being confined to electoral representation in Scotland. It also gathered to it other dissidents stifled by the electoral truce between the two main parties. Before June 1941 the CPGB was better placed to tap this potential. After that date the ILP, the new Common Wealth Party, and even WIL derived growth from defiance of the consensus.

In January 1940 The New Leader felt confident enough to treat the Trotskyists with disdain, listing five separate organisations of theirs which opposed the war. [9] But while Patterson had left the ILP, Wicks and Dewar had come in. By 1942 two more Trotskyist groups had entered the party. The first group was the RSP, which had never really surrendered its independence at the time of the Peace and Unity agreement or later. In 1940 a split was evident within this tiny party. Maitland and the Taits were extracted by the idea of conscientious objection, but a number of their Edinburgh members had drifted towards the perspectives of the WIL, which had sent Lee and Haston up to address the branch. [10] Maitland and the Taits expelled the pro-WIL faction. [11] In December 1941 they announced their decision to enter the ILP, then “challenging the capitalist warmongers in the Central Edinburgh By-Election”. The ILP, they had concluded, was the only nationally organised socialist party in Britain [12], and they set up a new branch of it in the city.

When the ILP launched its Socialist Britain Now! campaign in late 1941 it rallied support from many with histories in the Trotskyist movement. Reg Groves greeted it with the declaration that it would bring “hope to the world”. [13] He and two comrades from SAWF days, W.T. Colyer and Will Morris, now wrote regularly for The New Leader. In February 1942 Dick Beech, an early British contact of the Opposition, applied to join the ILP as the only party which had not shelved socialism for the duration. [14] Groves threw himself into the campaign in the spring of that year. [15]

The premise of the Socialist Britain Now! campaign was that the ILP, would be the prime instrument of socialist transformation. This view was diametrically opposed to that of WIL, which believed that the ILP should join the Labour Party in order to strengthen its left. [16] Three Trotskyist factions were in evidence at the ILP annual conferences [17] of 1942. There W. Tait urged the sending of arms to Russia under worker’ control and found a seconder in W.G. Hanton, the Communist League veteran. [18] Maitland moved a resolution on industrial unionism. [19] WIL ran a baleful eye of the performance of Dewar and Wicks, who they thought had antagonised delegates with points of order and not forced the Russian issue. [20] For itself, it took great encouragement from the passage by chance, of its “Labour to Power” policy, and the strong contact established with the Newcastle and Cardiff branches. [21]

Interest in Trotsky, never absent from the ILP, increased in 1942 with polemical articles sustained subsequently by WIL. [22] Wicks and Dewar, with support from Maitland, took over the open forum Free Expression, and by 1943 had turned it into a Trotskyist vehicle. [23] Ironically it was WIL which effectively was operating the policy Wicks and Dewar had advocated for the Communist League a decade earlier: an independent Trotskyist organisation with an ILP fraction. Its more effective ILR work helped it to make recruits from Wicks and Dewar as well as directly from the ILP. [24]

One thrust of WIL propaganda against the ILP was to ridicule its leaders as poseurs with a taste for ultra-left adventures. Such, it believed, was the Socialist Britain Now! campaign which collapsed between the annual conferences of 1942 and 1943. WIL argued that if it were a revolutionary party reaffiliation to Labour would be a disaster, for ILP leaders did not make principled criticisms of Labour leaders; precisely because it was not revolutionary ILP reaffiliation would be a progressive step which would sort out not only its own members but those of the Labour Left as well. [25] By the time of the 1943 conference WIL was confident. The ILP now had within it a sizeable group of genuine Marxists “for the first time since the C.L.R. James walk-out and debacle”. [26]

At this conference WIL influence contributed to the success of Ted Fletcher in defeating an NAC proposal for an alliance with Common Wealth, though a discussion on the Fourth International was not allowed. There was still a clash of policy between the Trotskyists. A Wallsend-Tooting amendment was tabled to the NAC resolution on Political Truce and Labour Unity but its call for “Labour to Power” was voted down. After this Wicks, the Battersea delegate, opposed the resolution itself on the grounds that it implied reaffiliation [27]: Nor was this the only clash. [28] In their journals the WIL and the Wicks-Dewar factions argued out the future of the ILP from opposite corners. [29] Yet despite their programmatic differences both emphasised the importance of agitation in the factories: there was a close similarity between their approach and that of the ILP when at last it took up industrial work. [30] These similar approaches helped at least one of the ILP’s impressive wartime performances at by-elections. [31]

January 1944 saw Trotskyist influence in the North-East reach a peak at the ILP Divisional conference. There a resolution was accepted calling for discussions with “the Fourth International and other groups who recognise the urgent necessity for the working class to be led by a Workers International based upon Marxism and embracing the Bolshevik form of organisation”. Conference also amended an official motion on War and the World Struggle to include the Trotskyist demand for a united socialist states of Europe. [32] The division defeated a call for Labour Party affiliation, yet it also rejected an electoral alliance with Common Wealth. That same weekend saw the London and Southern Counties division turn down a Tooting resolution on the Common Wealth alliance and refuse permission to approach other revolutionary organisations including the Fourth International.

National ILP conference coincided in time and place with the arrests of Trotskyists for acting in furtherance of the Tyneside apprentices dispute. No party rallied more powerfully to the aid of the infant RCP than the ILP, not least at a parliamentary level. [33] This is remarkable since 1944 may justly be singled out as the year when, arguably, Trotskyist influence on the ILP exceeded even that of 1935-6. Dave Binah, an RCP member and Sunderland delegate urged on the 1944 conference the policy of Labour to Power. His call for the ILP to help break the coalition and participate in exposing reformists was countered by Maitland who claimed Brockway and the Glasgow councillor Tom.Taylor were trying to lead the ILP back by the nose into the Labour Party. It was being asked to mask new treachery. This time the RCP was on the winning side: an NAC resolution for socialist unity and the establishment of joint left groups fell by forty three to sixty one. [34] Two separate Trotskyist streams in the ILP continued to flow their distinct ways. The RCP’s fraction work culminated in expulsions the following year. [35] Dewar [36] and Maitland [37] remained within the ILP, firmly committed to the thesis that it might become the agent of revolutionary transformation. In the case of Dewar at least this was to mean commitment to a sinking ship. [38]

Notes

1. The decision had only an abstract meaning since the Guild also rejected cooperation with Youth for Socialism, at that time largely based on the League of Youth (The New Leader, 2 Dec. 1938; Youth for Socialism, Nov. 1938).

2. The conference also rejected a Stepney resolution advancing the Trotskyist view of Russia and passed one from Barking putting the ILP view (The New Leader, 24 Feb. 1939).

3. Wicks and Dewar negotiated their entry with Brockway who welcomed them because they brought support (Interview with H. Wicks).

4. For this debate see P. Thwaites, The Independent Labour Party, 1938-1950 (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1976), 83; F. Brockway, Inside the Left, 1942; The New Leader, 14 April 1939. In the winter of 1940-41, C.A. Smith shocked the ILP by coming out in favour of the war and national defence.

5. Patterson was on the losing side in his attempts to subject the parliamentary group to the party following its behaviour during the Munich crisis, in his effort to strengthen the ILP’s immediate policy on war and in his opposition, during the debate on the National Register, to any connection with ARP (The New Leader, 14 April 1939).

6. Perhaps with Patterson in mind WIL wrote

“The militant members, who have vainly been striving to transform the ILP into a revolutionary organisation, now completely disillusioned, are attempting to organise themselves with a view to entering the Labour Party apart from the ILP.” (What Next for the ILP?, WIN, June 1939, 3)

7. The NAC suspended Patterson for anti-party conduct but the London Divisional Council declined by one vote to operate the suspension. Thereupon the NAC suspended the Council, convened a special conference of London branches, and put to it the motion that the ILP could be made “an effective revolutionary instrument” and should be strengthened. Resolutions for and against Patterson were ruled out of order on the grounds that he had a right of appeal, whereupon nine branches withdrew in protest. But twenty stayed to pass the resolution and it seems that both groups of delegates opted for staying in the ILP (The New Leader, 21 July 1939).

8. See the first four footnotes. ILP MPs opposed the Military Training Act, the Emergency Powers Act, the National Services (Armed Forces) Act, the Control of Employment Act, and the Declaration of War itself (The ILP in War and Peace).

9. J. Jupp, op. cit., 237.

10. Interview with E. Grant (Jan. 1973).

11. They adhered to the WIL, but because of local conditions peculiar to Edinburgh were allowed to continue with open work (WIL, Reply of the EC to Comrade D.F., 12 Oct. 1940, Internal Bulletin,

12. [R.S.P.], Vote For A Socialist Britain, [Dec. 1941 , H.P., D.J.H. 8/1]. In June 1942 WIL attempted unsuccessfully to recruit the rump of the RSP. When it failed it concluded W. Tait and others would line up with the “right wing including Padley and Wicks against the WIL members in the ILP” (C.C., 20 June 1942, H.P., D.J.H. 14B/19).

13. The New Leader (10 Jan. 1942).

14. He did not become a prominent member though The New Leader did publish some of his fiction in 1944.

15. He spoke at a number of campaign meetings and in March 1942 seconded Brockway’s main resolution at a Socialist Britain Now! conference in the ILP Midland division (Maitland-Sara Papers, MSS 172/LPA/5).

16. See WIL’s open letter to the 1942 ILP conference (Socialist Appeal, April 1942). It had been sufficiently sensitive to ILP affairs to publish Trotsky’s The ILP and the Fourth International, in WIN for December 1941. The CPGB was equally scornful of the proposition that the ILP would rapidly become the instrument of socialist change. See the treatment of an analysis by John McGovern MP in J.R. Campbell, Socialism Through Victory (1942), 10-11.

17. Groves also maintained relations with the ILP but on an individual basis. From summer 1943 while still Labour candidate for Aylesbury he contributed a free-ranging column Time to Kill to The New Leader. The RSL executive broke its inflexibility on the Labour Party tactic on 16 March 1942 to allow that members might enter the ILP, where short term gains could be made. Nothing came of this, preventing the ILP’s internal life becoming yet more complex.

18. J.R. Campbell, Socialism Through Victory (1942), 6.

19. S. Bornstein, interview with F. Maitland (Aug. 1976), kindly lent to author.

20. Their activity was “distinguished only by its complete stupidity and political ineptitude” (EC Report, 22 April 1942, H.P., D.J.H. 14B/11/1; National Organiser’s Report, n.d., 2). The WIL National Organiser and Healy had attended the conference as observers.

21. Conference had passed by an overwhelming majority a Cardiff-Tooting composite putting the Socialist Appeal programme. This “most amazing fluke” gave WIL a legal platform for its activities (EC Report, 22 April 1942, H.P., D.J.H.14B/11/1).Marc Loris of the SWP, who was closely in touch with WIL, contributed a critique, The ILP: Words and Reality, of the Socialist Britain Now! campaign to Left (formerly Controversy) for October 1942. Walter Padley of the ILP replied in December and Loris wrote again on the party the next year (The British ILP, Fourth International, Feb. 1943, 63). See also WIN, passim.

22. Wicks promised a limited attempt at changing Free Expression into “a Marxist theoretical journal” in October 1942, and that month it proclaimed itself “a Revolutionary Socialist monthly”. (H. Wicks to Sara, 1 Oct. 1942, Warwick MSS 15/3/1/66). From November it was a regular Trotskyist journal, publishing articles by Trotsky himself, former oppositionists and Hugo and Margaret Dewar. Free Expression articles were forceful, but weakened when they had to give practical advice.

23. [NOTE MISSING]

24. They were to win the support of Bill Hunter, a Tynesider who had formerly belonged to the Peace Pledge Union, and Betty Russell of the Tooting branch of the ILP These WIL gains may have been facilitated by joint ILP-Trotskyist fractions (Interview with H. Wicks, 30 Nov. 1979). Against such gains WIL had to offset its problems with Healy, who in February 1943 told its Political Bureau that he was resigning to join the ILP The Bureau recalled seven previous resignations that had been hushed up and this was no more permanent (Statement of the PB on the Expulsion of G. Healy at the Central Committee Meeting of February 7th 1943, 15 Feb. 1943, H.P., D.J.H. 4 (15)).

25. E. Grant, The ILP in Transition, WIN, May 1943, 2.

26. A Letter from England, Fourth International (June 1943), 190. The most effective work of all was being done in the North-East. Roy Tearse, from that ILP division, was from 1942 organising WIL industrial work from London. Following the arrival of Heaton Lee and Ann Keen in Walker in 1943, a consolidated ILP fraction included T. Dan Smith, Ken Skethaway, Dave Binah and Jack and Daisy Rawlings. This led in turn to an acquaintance with Bill Davy of the YCL, who was to lead the engineering apprentices’ movement of 1943-4 (Interview with Ann Finkel (Keen), 30 July 1974). As to the size of the factions, P. Thwaites (op. cit., 36) gives twelve for the WIL on entry into the ILP and H. Wicks recalls twenty around Free Expression (Interview, 30 Nov. 1979).

27. Hugo Dewar believed that the basis of reformism had been eaten away by the war. “The disappearance of this (Labour) party from the British political scene is inevitable”, he concluded (The End of the Labour Party, Free Expression, June 1943, n.p.). For the clash between the Trotskyists see P. Thwaites, op. cit., 155.

28. In the India debate Wicks backed an NAC resolution while Betty Russell (Tooting) unsuccessfully moved a series of amendments disputing that Congress could be an instrument of workers’ and peasants’ struggles. There was, however, only one speaker, Wicks, who called for class unity as the best way to help Russia.

29. Free Expression was open to opposed views. The annonymous author of Socialists and the Labour Party, in its December 1943 issue, argued the WIL case that the Fourth International which the journal called for would not begin from mere denunciation of Labour Party crimes. The opposite view was advanced by Maitland in The Meaning of Smith, Left, March 1943, 66-70. Maitland wrote another article, The Political Struggle for Italy for Left, October 1943.

30. See Chapter XI.

31. At a by-election in Acton in December 1943, Walter Padley, the party Industrial Organiser, fought an area where the ILP and Trotskyism had factory support. He polled a respectable 28% of the votes.

32. There was some ambiguity in this since there were ILPers who backed this demand.

33.The generous response of Maxton and the ILP conference to the victimization of Jock Haston and the other arrested Trotskyists and the contribution of ILP M.P.s to the debate on Order IA(a) are discussed in Chapter XI.

34. The New Leader, 7 April 1945.

35. See Chapter XIII of Upham.

36. See Dewar’s defence of an ILP separate from the Labour Party, What Will the Labour Party Live For?, Left, Dec. 1944, 271-3.

37. Maitland wrote four articles for Left in 1945 including his brief polemic against Walter Padley, Lord Keynes and Walter Padley, Jan. 1945, 306.

38. The post-war decline of the ILP and the disastrous Battersea by-election are discussed in Chapter XIII.