Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
The third volume of Ted Grant's Collected Writings encompasses the final phase of the Second World War and the transformed international balance of forces that emerged in its aftermath. Grant, who had established himself as the principal theoretician of British Trotskyism, witnessed the Workers' International League dominate the fusion with the Revolutionary Socialist League in March 1944, creating the Revolutionary Communist Party. By war's end, the RCP stood as the most developed section of the Fourth International in Europe.
Trotsky had anticipated a revolutionary wave surpassing that of 1917-19, and events initially appeared to confirm this prognosis. Workers' power emerged in Italy, France and Greece. Yet Stalinist and reformist leaders betrayed these movements, propping up capitalism in accordance with Stalin's agreement with the imperialist powers to carve Europe into spheres of influence. By August 1943, Grant had concluded that the revolutionary wave would be derailed by the absence of mass Trotskyist parties, predicting a period of "Kerenskyism or Popular Frontism" and later characterising the outcome as a "counter-revolution in democratic form".
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International rejected this analysis entirely. Clinging dogmatically to the 1938 perspective, they insisted the war had not ended, that Stalinism was weakened, and that only Bonapartist or military dictatorships could exist in Europe. Grant and the RCP countered that unstable bourgeois democratic regimes were precisely the product of the betrayed revolution. The International leadership, including Cannon, Pablo, Frank and Mandel, also predicted no economic recovery in Europe—a position Grant refuted, arguing that capitalism's own laws made a new boom inevitable. The RCP submitted amendments to this effect but were accused of eclecticism and revisionism. The International leadership subsequently altered its documents silently, without acknowledging its errors.
Cannon, bearing a grudge against the RCP, orchestrated a campaign against its leaders using Gerry Healy as a stooge within the party. Healy pushed for entry into the Labour Party, claiming a mass left wing was developing, but the RCP's Political Bureau rebutted this, citing reports from its Labour Party fraction that the ranks remained passive. The RCP leadership recognised the post-war economic recovery and the Labour government's reforms as temporarily stabilising capitalism while strengthening illusions in reformism and Stalinism—but regarded this as a transient phase. Healy's faction, backed by the International leadership, offered no such analysis, stubbornly maintaining the false position of imminent slump and war.