Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
The opening chapter establishes the Workers' International League (WIL) as the most significant Trotskyist formation in wartime Europe, tracing its origins from the political apprenticeship of Ted Grant in South Africa to its consolidation as a revolutionary current within the British labour movement. Grant, born in Germiston in 1913, was introduced to Marxism at fifteen by Ralph Lee, an expelled member of the South African Communist Party. Together they organised a Left Opposition group in Johannesburg and led the 1934 laundry workers' strike before relocating to Britain in search of broader revolutionary horizons.
The WIL emerged from a factional rupture with the Militant Group, precipitated by slanders against Lee. In December 1937, eight comrades formed the WIL as the only genuine Trotskyist organisation in Britain, refusing to participate in the 1938 unity conference on principled grounds. Trotsky adopted a patient attitude towards the WIL's status as an unofficial sympathising group, marking with interest Ralph Lee's February 1938 letter reporting the establishment of a printing press and the publication of Workers' International News and a pamphlet on the Moscow Trials. Trotsky later praised the WIL for obtaining a press, urging the American SWP to follow suit.
The chapter situates the WIL's development against the backdrop of imperialist war preparations. Britain had assisted German rearmament as a bulwark against Bolshevism, with extracts from US ambassador William E. Dodd's diary revealing that Britain and France armed in violation of the Versailles Treaty while aiming to turn Germany eastwards. Churchill admired Hitler's "patriotic achievement," and the proclaimed "war against fascism" masked imperialist war aims. The Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939 allowed Hitler access to Soviet raw materials; the WIL denounced the Stalinists as representing only Kremlin interests.
The WIL's theoretical contribution lay in its adoption of Trotsky's proletarian military policy, first articulated shortly before his death. This policy called for arming the working class and dissolving the standing army into an armed people, arguing that only the workers could defeat fascism. A minority within the leadership criticised the paper's slant on the Home Guard, but the dispute was resolved based on Grant's resolution. The official British section, the RSL, rejected the policy in September 1941 as capitulation to chauvinism, demanding the war be turned into civil war. The WIL argued this sectarian anti-militarism could never win the masses, especially after the fall of France. After Hitler's attack on the USSR, the WIL unconditionally defended the Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state while maintaining the war remained imperialist. By its first national conference in August 1942, the WIL had grown from eight members to around 300, predominantly industrial workers, proving correct its break from the Trotskyist sects.