Lessons from history of British Trotskyism

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Reading, Chamberlain, Hoare, Front: I to r, Snowden, Baldwin Der A number of important historical questions were discussed at the first full conference of the Group for the Study of Leon Trotsky and the Revolutionary Movement held on 20 September last at the Polytechnic of Central London.

Nor were the items discussed at the conference merely of academic interest, centring as they did on fundamental questons of the formation of a revolutionary proletarian party, the struggle against the Stalinist policies of the popular front and the intervention of revolutionaries in the main processes of bourgeoiș democracy.

The first paper, read by Geoffrey Littlejohns, dealt with the disaffiliation of the Independent Labour farty from the Labour Party in 1932, and the activities of the Revolutionary Policy Committee within the ILP, particularly before it became an instrument of the Stalinists in the disintegration of the ILP from 1934.

Opportunism

Comrade Littlejohns, and speakers in the subsequent discussion emphasised that the 1932 break took place for a number of reasons, including the opportunism of the Brockway-Maxton leadership and the independent power base of the ILP in Glasgow, possibly in alliance with local Catholics.

However, it also reflected the crystalisation of a coherent apposition to the betrayals of the 1929-31 MacDonald government and the possibility of a real alternative movement to the complicity in these betrayals of those Labour leaders like Henderson, Morrison and Dalton, who had only drawn back at the last moment from the actual alliance of MacDonald and the others with the Tories.

It was for this reason that Trotsky welcomed the 1932 disaffiliation but said that it was necessary to turn back immediately to the mass of Labour Party members, whose. mood was reflected in the left resolutions of the annual conferences of 1932 and 1933, calling for the nationalisation of the banks and much else, well to the left of any programmatic policies of the conferences until much more recent times.

However, the ILP leaders as is well known, did not take the direction advised by Trotsky. There were at least three important reasons for this.

Centrism

The first of these was the inveterate centrism of the ILP leaders, Maxton and Brockway. They spoke of workers' councils', but were quite unwilling to break from a parliamentary orientation.

Brockway in particular spent a great deal of time trying to reconcile the Second and Third Internationals rather than making a break from the betrayals of both.

. The second reason was that the ILP rank and file generally largely as a result of this, had little conception of what had been intended to come from their break with the Labour Party. Were they to be simply a more left wing version of the other Labour Party, mainly interested in electoral contests or were they to become a revolutionary party building workers councils and preparing insurrection and the seizure of power?

The fact that nobody even posed such a question, let alone answered it, led to a feelNational Cabinet 1931. Back: Macdonald, Samuel, Sanky. ing of purposelessness and demoralisation which reduced the membership from 16,000 at the time of disaffiliation in 1932 to as little as 4,000 by the beginning of 1934.

The confusion also meant that the ILP did not even carry out agitation of the sort continued by the ultra-left Stalinists in the period amongst the unemployed. to r, Cunliffe-Lister, Thomas, Transport House did not go as far as this, but put considerable pressure on the local Labour Party to adopt another more conciliatory candidate.

The local Party rejected all these pressures, and fought tenaciously to get Groves a vote of 7,661, by far the highest Labour had ever got in the constituency, making him the ER only candidate to gain votes from the previous election.

Reg Groves himself pointed out that his campaign weakened the Liberal Party in the area for good, and was a step in weakenthe Peace Alliance' by which the Stalinists were at the time trying to revive the popular front policy which had collapsed with the end of the CP/ILP/Socialist League "Unity Campaign' in 1937.

Although the policies of the popular front did not collapse altogether, union conferences and other bodies began to pass resolutions against the popular front line, now that the by-election had shown there could be a successful working class alternative to the treachery of ar Stalinist policies.

It is a pity that Comrade Groves did not expand on this, rather than eulogising the class consciousness of rural workers and the pleasures of being away from his previous period of disputes in the Trotskyist movement.

The third paper, given by John McHugh, dealt with the participation of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which brought together virtually all groups of British Trotskyists, in the by-election at Neath in May 1945. The candidate was Jock Haston, at the time General Secretary of the RCP.

The RCP chose to stand in a very strong Labour seat during the wartime electoral truce when the main parties did not stand against one another. It saw the intervention as a general propaganda campaign to argue against imperialist war and for Labour to power on a socialist Once again the strongest opponents of such policies were the local Stalinists who by now were calling for a 'national government' of Tory and Labour leaders. However the effect of the RCP propaganda compelled them to agree to a public debate with Haston on the eve of poll.

Here the Stalinists accused the Trotskyists of being Fifth Columnists' and Haston replied with calls for defence of the independent rights of the working class and for socialist internationalism.

The vote of 1781 was not enormous but the impact of what was then a tiny organisation was as great as could be expected.