Trouble-making Trotskyists to Attempt to Extend Dock Strike

Wellred

Core Argument

Here, the Daily Mail’s reporting on the 1945 Liverpool dock strike is reproduced and subjected to a polemical counterblast from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The core narrative thrust of the Mail’s original piece is to present the RCP as an external, conspiratorial “vagrant body” of Trotskyist agitators who are artificially extending an otherwise industrial dispute for political ends. The Mail claims these “trouble-making Trotskyists” are attempting to spread the strike from Liverpool, where 18,000 men are idle, to other ports, using pamphlets that denounce union leaders as “selling out” and that urge dockers to cut out their officials. The newspaper cites a Transport and General Workers Union official who asserts the organisation contains no dockers, and notes that Liverpool CID is investigating.

The RCP’s response, printed as a counter-text, does not deny the party’s involvement but radically reframes its meaning. It provides a specific factual rebuttal to the Daily Mirror’s claim that Charles Martinson “claimed to be speaking on behalf of the Liverpool dockers.” The RCP insists that Martinson was sitting in a cafe with no intention of speaking, that 2,000 dockers demanded he address them, and that his statement—that his party stood solidly behind the demand for 25 shillings a day and a 40-hour week—was met with cheers. The RCP’s key claim is that it is not creating the strike but publicising and coordinating a national rank-and-file link-up that is already the product of the class struggle. The polemic is directed at three targets simultaneously: the capitalist press (Daily Mail, Mirror, Express), which is accused of slandering the working class for its own political interests; the Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (the “Stalinists”), who are denounced as betraying their class by not actively aiding the strike; and the union officials (named as Donovan and Barratt), who are labelled strike-breakers. The RCP’s theoretical argument is that politics and economics cannot be separated: every strike is a product of the class struggle, and those who cry “keep politics out” are themselves advancing a political interest in seeing the dockers defeated. The chapter thus functions as a Marxist defence of revolutionary intervention in trade-union struggles, counterposing the RCP’s “genuine working-class programme” to the reformist and Stalinist betrayals it identifies.