Rp Myth Exposed

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had increased exploitation, enormous fortunes were made out of the blood of defeat. As the war industries swelled, devouring all resources, peacetime production was dying away and shortages were becoming chronic.

However, the Russian masses were passing over from criticism of the war to action in the summer of 1915:

"Their indignation finds expression first of all in food disturbances, sometimes rising to the height of local riots. These food disorders, spreading over the whole country, broke the war hypnosis and laid the road to strikes. The rise in the cost of living automatically lowered wages. Economic strikes were the inevitable mass reflection -stormy in proportion as they had been delayed. The strikes were accompanied by meetings, adoption of political resolutions, scrimunages with the police, not intrequently by shots and casualties"

Common profits, war defeats and internal dangers drew together the parties of the ruling class. In 1915 the patriotic majority of the Duma formed. the "Progressive Bloc" for "a satisfaction of the needs created by the war" comprising the Kadets, the Progressives, and national groups like the Poles, Jews, etc. Minister of the Interior, Prince Sherbatov, called it "a union called forth by the danger of social revolution"

Taking up again the struggle for power, they proposed to the Csar a joint Cabinet of the Duma and the Court. They hoped to take over the regulation and planning of industry which the state bureaucracy had refused, although the latter was impotent against the opposition of the powerful Military-Industrial Committees.

The Csar refused and dissolved the Duma on 3rd September, 1915. The workers of Petrograd and Moscow responded with strikes of protest. These first signs of strike struggle since the war began were weaker and less clear politically than the first months of 1914, but heralded great battles.

The Minister of Justice said: "If there are at present no armed demonstrations of the workers, it is only because they have as yet no organisation" • The Minister of the Interior added "We must not amnesty the members of the Duma struggle in many countries. Trotsky describes it as follows:

*The delegates, filling four stagecoaches, set off for the mountains they joked about the fact that half a century after the founding of the Pirst International, it was still possible to seat all the internationalists in four coaches. But they were not sceptical. The thread of history often breaks - then a new knot must be tied. And this is what we were doing in Zimmerwald.

'Lenin was on the extreme left at the conference. In many questions he was in a minority of one, even within the Zimmerwald left wing, to which i did not formally belong, although I was close to it on all-important questions. In Zimmerwald, Lenin was tightening up the spring of the future international action. In a Swiss mountain village, he was laying the corner-stone of the Iuternational." (Trotsky - My Life, Pathfinder While the bourgeoisie continued to suppress the Bolsheviks, they attempted to win over the Mensheviks. Frightened by the strike movement, the industrialists trea to impose patriotic discipline on the workers by including their elected representatives on the Military-Industrial Committees.

While the Bolsheviks campaigned to boycott the committees, one Menshevik was saying to the industrialists there "You ought to demand that the existing bureaucratic power retire from the scene, yielding its place to you as the inheritors of the present social structure" • This new political friendship brought forth its rotten fruit after the February revolution.

In May 1916 the Duma was called together again, no one knew why. The bourgeoisie was mortally afraid of a revolution, of any change, but were powerless without it. By the autumn it was obvious that the war was hopeless, and the indignation of the masses threatened to explode.

SEPARATE PEACE

On behalf of the "Progressive Bloc" Protopopov felt out the possibilities of a separate peace, but the demands of the Allies, who wanted to make Russia the chief field of exploitation after the war, were ton orpat far him One 'of the most recent myths created by the Workers Revolutionary Party leadership is that wartime Trotskyists entered Joint Production Committees. They put this forward as part of their argument as to why Trotskyists today should enter class collaborationist "participation" committees.

For instance Workers Press of January 9th tells us:

collaborating Ryder committees in British Leyland] on this issue is no different from Trotskyists in the second world war who participated ın Joint Production Committees where they were nominated by their members, in order to expose them"

It is no surprise that WRP General Secretary G. Healy should wish to find cover for their latest opportunist policies. But that he should do so by inventing tales about the history of Trotskyism is another matter.

The war-time Trotskyists were so far removed from the class collaboration represented by oday's Ryder plan that they were siandered as "traitors" and "Nazis" by the arch-collaborators - the Communist Party. And it was the CP who were the prime movers behind the Joint Production Committees.

The CP campaigned vigorously for these in New Propellor, the organ of the CP-dominated Engineering and Allied Trades Shop Stewards National Council. (The paper was, along with the Daily Worker and the Sunday Dispatch, the most vehement in denouncing Trotskyists as 'nazis'.)

The object of these committees was of course speed-up, rate-cutting and discipline. In the shipyards, for instance, the committees were first set up to deal with the 'problem' of absenteeism (for which during the war workers could be imprisoned).

The hated Essential Works Order - an anti-labour law - demanded that absenteeism be dealt with by these PC This function was, of antrod hittmalo aa-a-d relieved of it.

Indeed, as Court, the official historian of the Coal Industry tells uS:

"The miners were not prepared to relax their hostility"

This hostility was shared by the Trotskyist movement. They recognised the truth of the statement by IC! Chairman Lord McGowen in 1941, who expressed open cynicism:

"Though there was a risk of their (JPCs) getting into the hands of extremists, his experience was that they moderated the extremist by giving him a place in the sun and at the same time weakened his influence amongst other workers, because they were taken into the confidence management" (emphasis added).

The rapid plunge of the WRP's Tom White to the right wing bears out completely Lord McGowans assessment. The wartime Trotskyists for just these reasons opposed the JPCs.

The British Trotskyist movement at this time was split into two sections, the Revolutionary Socialist League and the Workers International League. The lattet, around Haston, Ted Grant, Tearse and Healy, published a paper Socialist Appeal, (The two organisations merged in 1944 to form the Revolutionary Communist Party). It was the WIL, of which Healy was Industrial Organise its campaign against the which was the most JPCs.

This correctly upheld the need for the class struggle to continue during war time. In the early days the main slogan of the WIl and RSL was "THE MAIN ENEMY IS HOME!" and . Trotskyists became the only labour movement tendency to support strikes against speed up and the slashing of living standards.

Healy in October 1942 wrote attacking the CP for its role in speed-up and rate-cutting:

"Today British industry is in a chaotic condition. The workers know full well that the owners are the responsible people. This is a natural result of the fact that they are not gearing up industry with the successtully the war of capitalist competition ... These are their war aims and that is why the drive against the workers to lower conditions and keep down wages is a more urgent concern to them than any national interest. These are the real saboteurs of production and they now have a very good ally in the CP with its parrot cry to the workers to sacrifice everything to production and the Second (Socialist Appeal, October 1942).

So, as any study of their press shows, the position of the WIL. was absolutely clear on these questions. They stood for total opposition to the. Joint Production Committees, attacked the CP for its support for them, and showed how support for them was in the interests of capitalist profits and led to wage cutting, the worsening …of conditions and more repressive legislation.

Indeed, nowhere in the pages of Socialist Appeal during the war years is tnere one single mention of entering these committees in order to 'expose' them - such a move was the opposite of the WIL's whole Healy knows this full well. In the issues of Socialist Appeal in which our quotations appear, there are also articles by Healy himself as Industrial Organiser. In January 1943a picture of Healy accompanies a WIL programme for industrial militants within which the only mention of production is to criticise the CP for rate-cutting activities. And a resolution, passed at the WII annual conference in 1943 refers to:

"the" failure of the Joint Production Committees to solve the problems of production except at the expense of the workers"

and goes on to call for the necessity of ending the industrial truce, We can say therefore that, unless Healy is to convince us that the WIL (in the same sneaky and underhand manner as today's WRP) published onepolicy in its paper while carrying out a completely different opportunist role practice, that the story cooked up to justify their entry into "worker