Table Of ContentThe War
and the
International
To the Revolutionary Internationalists
who served the cause of the
working class during the
Second Imperialist War
The War
and the
International
A History of the
Trotskyist Movement
in Britain 1937 - 1949
Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson
SOCIALIST PLA TFORM
Published by Socialist Platform
First edition October 1986
Copyright © 1986 Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson
Phototypeset by Impeccable 01 609 9974
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
A. Wheaton and Co. Ltd., Exeter
Cover design by David King
ISBN 09508423 3 8 (paper)
Trade Distribution: Housemans, 5 Caledonian Road,
London N19DX.
Socialist Platform Ltd., BCM Box 7646, London WC1N 3XX.
Contents
Forward by Fred Jackson vii
Preface xi
Chapter One
New Beginnings and The Test of War
TheW.I.L. 1937 - 1941 1
Chapter Two
Unity and Disintegration
TheR.S.L. 1938 - 1943 20
Chapter Three
Preparing For Power: TheW.I.L. 1941 - 1944 52
Chapter Four
Rebuilding the British Section, 1943 - 1944 97
Chapter Five
Jail and Missed Opportunity:
The Revolutionary Communist Party, 1944 - 1945 114
Chapter Six
A New World and Old Conflicts, 1944 - 1947 160
Chapter Seven
Back to Stalinism,
The End of the R.C.P. 1947 - 1949 209
Chapter Eight
Trotskyism’s Legacy 238
Appendix One 244
Appendix Two
The Wartime Agitation of a Trotskyist Soldier 246
Index 248
Illustrations
1. The Publications of the W.I.L. and R.C.P.
2. a) The W.I.L. Centre, 61 Northdown Street, Kings Cross.
b) The R.C.P. Centre, 256 Harrow Road.
3. The Neath By-elections, 1945.
4. R.C.P. Mayday Demonstration, 1946.
(between pages 128 and 129)
Foreward
It is with mixed feelings and reluctance that I have accepted the author’s
invitation to write an introduction to this second volume of their history of
the early Trotskyist movement in Britain. I am a most unsuitable person to
be writing this introduction. I do so only because of a pressure exerted on
me by Sam and Al, who think that being one of the dwindling ‘old-timers’ is
qualification enough, and out of admiration for the dedication and self-
sacrifice that kept them ‘grubbing in the archives’ for thirteen years,
researching the two volumes of this history and its necessary predecessor,
Two Steps Back.
I had a working class background; my father, a skilled artisan in the
pottery trade, had moved from Stoke-on-Trent on completion of his
apprenticeship, to a job in Scotland. He had been a member of the I. L.P.
since his teens, and of the Clarion Scouts, the group of cyclists who used to
tour the country making Socialist speeches, largely in the open air. I grew up
on a diet of Socialist discussion, the New Leader, the Glasgow Forward, and
a constant stream of Socialist speakers being put up in our house for one
night. By the time I was ten years old I had read Blatchfords’ Merrie
England, Britain for the British and Kropotkins’s Fields, Factories and
Workshops. In 1929 my father was invited to stand as I. L.P. candidate for
the Ayrshire County Council elections. His employer, the then
Conservative Chairman of the Council, told him bluntly that he was not
prepared to sit at the same table as one of his employees, and ordered him to
withdraw - or else. My father refused, lost his job, and the Pottery Workers’
Union was too weak to do anything about it. This was at the start of the first
world slump, and for two years I learned what it was like to live on ‘the dole’
- 17 shillings for the man, 9 shillings for his wife, and two shillings for each of
four children. At the end of two years my father secured a poorly paid job on
the other side of Scotland, and two years later a better-paid job, still in his
trade, back in his native England, leaving me behind in Scotland to
complete the last three years of an apprenticeship I had secured on leaving
vii
viii THE WAR AND THE INTERNA TIONA L
school. At a wage of 8 shillings a week, it was impossible to live in lodgings,
and my parents had to subsidise me to the extent of £1 per week - a
considerable sacrifice in those days.
My father remained a member of the I. L.P. after dis-affiliation from the
Labour Party, and it was inevitable that I graduated in the same direction. I
joined the I.L.P. at the age of 16, shortly after dis-affiliation, and remained
there a a little over seven years. In 1932, in that part of Scotland, at least,
there was little emphasis on theory in the I.L.P. There was practical activity;
attendance at branch meetings; attendance, largely uncoordinated, at
Trade Union meetings, participation in demonstrations of the unemployed;
and, above all, propaganda meetings, mostly in the open air. In those days
there was no money for printed publicity; meetings were advertised by
chalking the streets and pavements at strategic spots - and many a barked
knuckle I acquired! Here I began the learn to speak in public, first as
chairman trying to gather an audience for the advertised speaker, and later
as a speaker in my own right.
But as a consequence of these activities I met the local Communist Party
- both members! They talked to me about Marx and Engels, about Lenin
and the Bolshevik Party, and I began to read some of the Marxist Classics
published by Lawrence and Wishart. I was never tainted with Stalinist ideas
(even the ‘soft’ New Leader had innoculated me against that), but I began to
realise the importance of the Revolutionary Party. The I.L.P. had been
calling itself a revolutionary party since disaffiliation, but as the years
passed I couldn’t equate these perfectly sincere, honest, and in many cases
self-sacrificing comrades with Lenin’s Bolsheviks. ‘Socialists’ who railed
against the iniquities of capitalism on ‘moral’ grounds - but couldn’t explain
the Labour Theory of Value; ‘revolutionaries’ who were unacquainted with
Lenin’s State and Revolution s pacifists in Mussolini’s war against Abyssinia -
all of these made me increasingly uneasy. With these somewhat subjective
feelings, but no particularly clear objective criticism of Party policy, I ended
my apprenticeship and obtained a job in London, in November 1937. (I had
first moved to Glasgow, ostensibly to study for qualifications which was the
logical continuation of my apprenticeship, but politics - the Spanish Civil
War had broken out - proved incompatible with serious study, and I gave it
up).
In the London I.L.P. , for the first time in the six years of my political life,
I began to meet some semblance of real political discussion and the
importance of theory. I began to hear about Trotskyism. I saw a few pieces
of Trotskyist literature, and I found my way to Speakers’ Corner at Hyde
Park. Here I met the newly-formed Workers’ International League, and I
knew, at once, that his was what I had been looking for. These people were
largely proletarian, they were dedicatedly active, and attendance at a few of
their ‘study circles’ convinced me that they had a serious attitude to theory.
Here, for the first time, Marxism began to come alive for me, It is almost
true to say that, far from them recruiting me, I recruited myself to them.
FOREWARD ix
I have often wished that I had come to London a couple of years earlier,
and had experienced for myself the events leading up to the foundation of
the W.I.L. But I did meet some members of the Militant Labour League,
listened to their arguments (against the leadership of the W.I.L.) and was
not impressed. I joined the W.I.L. and began the ten most satisfying years
of my life. The successes of the W.I.L., its transition - as recounted in this
book - into the Revolutionary Communist Party, British Section of the
Fourth International, the successes of the R.C.P. in excrutiatingly difficult
conditions of wartime, and the Stalinist slanders, reinforced my conviction
that the decision to set up the W.I.L. had been correct. I was in a real
revolutionary movement at last; I was a member of a Bolshevik
organisation; and the international socialist revolution was ‘just around the
corner’. For nearly ten years, every minute that could be spared from the
unfortunate necessity to earn a living was devoted to the movement. Even in
prison; the result of the ‘Sheffield Incident’ described in Chapter 1, I
managed to make Socialist propaganda, and later, having been conscripted
into the Fleet Air Arm, I was at one time selling three dozen copies of
Socialist Appeal.
The mistakes and weaknesses of the R.C.P. , described by the authors
from Chapter 5 onwards, may be obvious now - in retrospect. They were not
obvious to me. I do not think they were obvious to any of us at the time. It
was not until late 1947 that the changed conditions of the post-war world,
and the decline of the party so ably explained in the book, began to make
inroads into the euphoria which had pervaded my life in the previous
period. I began to draw conclusions from the existence of the atomic bomb.
I began to feel that, while I had no quarrel with the policy and programme,
there just wasn’t time to rejuvenate this disintegrating group into the mass
revolutionary party which was needed, before the onset of World War 3,
which would bring civilisation to an end. And so, in 1948, I left the
movement.
I remember that when I announced to Jock and Millie Haston (Lee) that
I was leaving politics, Millie warned me (with Jock nodding his head in grave
agreement): “You’ll be sorry, Fred - you’ll degenerate. There is no life
outside the Fourth International .” It is ironic that within a year they
themselves were “outside the Fourth International”.
A new generation will build a revolutionary leadership. Of one thing I
am sure; the new generation will have to base itself on the ideas of Marx and
Engels, their development of Lenin and Trotsky, and the first four
congresses of the Communist International, and build a world party on the
foundation of the democratic centralism which characterised the R.C.P. in
its best years.
In conclusion, I can only support those commentators on the authors’
previous books who have emphasised the importance for Socialists of a
study of the early history of the Trotskyist movement - its successes and its
failures. Outside the Fourth International there is no life. Here I am not
