Revolutionary Communist Party (1944-1949)
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The Revolutionary Communist Party was a British Trotskyist political party, formed in 1944 and active until 1949, and publishing the Socialist Appeal fortnightly newspaper, a theoretical journal Workers International News and an entrist paper for its Labour Party fraction The Militant.
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Collapse of the RSL and founding of the RCP
The party was founded as the official section of the Fourth International in Britain after the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) collapsed. Moreover the RSL had not adopted the positions of the Fourth International with regard to the Second World War and was pursuing a course which was characterised as pacifist or semi-pacifist. In turn it polemicised against the Workers International League (WIL), declaring it to be following politics which it characterised as social patriotic. The positions of the WIL corresponded to those of the Fourth International and the American SWP, and as a result the latter decided that the WIL should become the International's British section.
In order to draw the WIL into the International, the problem of the paper existence of the RSL had to be solved. The Americans exerted pressure on the three factions of the RSL to re-unite, after which the re-formed RSL could fuse with the much larger WIL. The fused group, which adopted the politicies of the majority WIL group, became the Revolutionary Communist Party. The leadership bodies of the new party incorporated such leaders of the RSL as D. D. Harber and John Lawrence and operated reasonably harmoniously, with the exception of the old RSL Left Fraction which soon left.
Recruiting methods
The new party maintained an entrist fraction in the Labour Party, led by Charlie van Gelderen, which maintained publication of The Militant as its organ. However this work was unrewarding for the party and any new recruits were directed to other more profitable areas of intervention.
The main area on which the party concentrated was the industrial front where after 1941 they had a clear field as the Communist Party turned to a super-patriotic position. This led to recruitment from the Communist Party but more recruits came from direct intervention in the industrial struggles of the war years such as that of the Kent miners and the Tyneside engineering apprentices. This latter dispute led to the RCP receiving the attention of the police as their headquarters in London were raided and a number of leading members were jailed. In furtherance of this industrial work a Militant Workers Federation was organised by the RCP in conjunction with the Industrial Committee of the fading Independent Labour Party and some anarchists.
During the war the RCP opposed the electoral truce which guaranteed that where parliamentary seats fell vacant they would automatically be filled by another member of the incumbent party. This meant that the leftward movement among electors since the 1935 General Election and it had been left to the Independent Labour Party and the emphemeral Commonwealth Party to do so, with considerable success. When an opportunity for the RCP to stand occurred, the party stood their leader, Jock Haston, in the Neath by-election of 1945, primarily as a protest against the Conservative. Given that this election was held on the very outdated electoral register the vote polled was considered a success and a number of new members were recruited, in part from the ILP.
As noted above the Left Fraction of the former RSL remained organised within the RCP, but refused to recognise the authority of the leadership, and were expelled in 1945 to pursue entrist work in the Labour Party, and publish the occasional Voice of Labour newspaper. It broke up in 1950, when most of its members joined the Socialist Fellowship group which was associated with the paper Socialist Outlook. Other former Left Fraction members revived the group in the early 1960s.
End of the RCP
In 1947, Gerry Healy and John Lawrence formed a minority faction to argue for the entire RCP to enter the Labour Party. Although the Fourth International also urged this, the majority of the party disagreed, and the party devoted a great deal of time to internal arguments. In 1948, the minority, which had been sanctioned by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International to enter the Labour Party independently started publishing Socialist Outlook, a journal which supported Tito and Mao.
The remaining RCP then found existence outside the Labour Party increasingly difficult with the end of wartime militancy. The new regimes in Eastern Europe caused debate within the RCP, as they did within the Intertnational as a whole. The leadership of the RCP around Haston was more cautious with regard to declaring these new regimes to be degenerated workers states than the International's leadership around Ernest Mandel and Pablo.
Taken together these factors caused demoralisation within the RCP and it became clear that it had to seek a new orientation. A debate developed as to whether the group should enter the Labour Party. A faction was declared by some supporters of the leadership, which firmly opposed entry. This grouping of RCPers called itself the Open Party Faction and was increasingly disillusioned with the leadership around Jock Haston and Ted Grant whom they thought to be caving in to Healy's entry group, ultimately leading to a decision to dissolve the RCP in 1950 and join the Labour Party.
The International then ordered that the members of the RCP join Healy's entry group, known as The Club, but that despite being in a majority they were not able to exercise democratic control of the fused group. Jock Haston immediately dropped out of politics as did much of the reamining leadership. Ted Grant made a decision to join the fused group in order to preserve the remaining cadre, but it was purged by Healy who strongly discouraged dissent.
Some of Tony Cliff's supporters in Birmimgham were expelled - Cliff himself could not be expelled being resident in Dublin and therefore beyond Healy's reach - and then when Grant attempted to defend the rights of Cliff's supporters he too was expelled. Cliff would regrouped his supporters around the magazine Socialist Review and Grant similarly formed a group called the Revolutionary Socialist League. Most former members of the RCP had left the Trotskyist movement by the end of 1951.
External links
- Crawford, Ted. HO45/25486: a report on the RCP and the Trotskyist movement (http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/otherdox/HO45.htm). Revolutionary History. May 2003. HO 45 /25486 seems to be the main source of Special Branch records of RCP and Club activities (up to c. 1954). It is about 1000 pages or so, divided into 24 internal folders.