1. Pre-war period¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 1: Pre-war Period
Founded in late 1937 as war clouds gathered over Europe, the Workers’ International League (WIL) established itself as the principal voice of British Trotskyism, producing Youth For Socialism, Workers’ International News, and numerous pamphlets. The WIL characterised the approaching conflict as an imperialist war, opposing both the petty-bourgeois pacifism of the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party’s cynical shift from “peace on Hitler’s terms” to a “democracy against fascism” line.
The WIL’s 1938 pamphlet The Lesson of Spain argued that the Spanish Civil War demonstrated the bankruptcy of the popular front strategy. The Republican government had left the army in reactionary hands, suppressed workers’ militias and factory committees, and failed to prepare against Franco. The underlying problems of Spanish capitalism—land hunger and industrial stagnation—could only be resolved through workers’ revolution, not coalition with capitalist parties. The Communist and Socialist parties had dismantled workers’ conquests and crushed the POUM. The pamphlet warned that the same strategy was being prepared for Britain, where the Labour bureaucracy would embrace popular frontism once workers began moving leftwards, and called for a genuine united front of the working class.
A WIL Political Bureau document from June 1938 analysed the material basis of British labour opportunism, rooted in super-profits from colonial monopoly. This foundation was being destroyed by German, Italian and Japanese rivalry, colonial revolts, and the approaching slump. The Labour Party sought to manage capitalism, not overthrow it, and the experience of two Labour governments had not automatically radicalised workers. A revolutionary vanguard must work within the mass organisations, not as an external sect, to drive home the lessons of reformist betrayal.
The WIL sharply polemicised against the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), which pursued an abstentionist tactic towards reformist organisations. The RSL’s external criticism of the AEU leadership’s arms policy was ignored, while it failed to organise effective internal opposition, glorifying this abstention as “the independence of the revolutionary proletarian party.” The WIL committed its entire forces to work within the Labour Party, arguing that revolutionary socialists inside the party gained political weight disproportionate to their numbers, could contact awakening workers, and use national machinery as a sounding board for revolutionary policy.
The claim that arms were for “defence of liberty and democracy” was a sham covering defence of capitalist trade interests. Britain and France’s hypocrisy was exposed by their haste to recognise Franco and abandon the Spanish Republic. Labour and Communist leaders betrayed the working class by supporting rearmament for “national defence” without criticising its capitalist purpose. The Emergency Powers Act would sweep away workers’ liberties; in France, dictatorship had already advanced further. War would bring immense profits for monopoly capitalists on both sides, while the working class suffered. The struggle must be against the real cause of war—capitalism—and the main enemy was British capitalism at home. The fight for socialism was the fight for peace.