Appendices¶
Core Argument¶
The appendices present a fragmented yet revealing portrait of the international Trotskyist movement’s struggles during the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on organisational decay, political isolation, and the ferocity of Stalinist polemics. A report to the International Secretariat of the International Communist League, likely from April 1935, details the deteriorating position of the Bolshevik-Leninist fraction (the “Marxist Group”) within the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The ILP’s membership and influence had declined steadily since 1934, with branches reduced to small groups of four to twelve active members and the party kept afloat only by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois loans. Support for the Fourth International at the 1935 annual conference was negligible, with only six to ten votes out of 153 delegates. Not one existing ILP member in London had been won over since the entry of the old Communist League minority; all new support came from converts won before joining. Inside the Marxist Group, centrist tendencies had spread, manifested in three ways: fetishising loyalty to the ILP leadership and constitution; lacking concrete perspectives, with the official policy still holding that the ILP could be converted to a revolutionary line despite growing doubts; and organisational degeneration, where the inner Bolshevik-Leninist fraction had been liquidated into the wider Marxist Group, leaving no reliable machinery for International Secretariat communications, while a secret clique had formed on a personal basis. The report concludes that these unhealthy developments flow from a small Bolshevik-Leninist group isolated in a centrist party with no working-class contacts.
The virulence of Stalinist attacks is captured in a 1942 leaflet, Clear out the bosses’ agents!!, which instructs factory workers to treat Trotskyists as Nazis, exposing and removing them from all working-class organisations. It distinguishes genuine Trotskyists—defined as bitter enemies of Stalin—from confused workers who need re-education. The leaflet claims the Communist Party’s anti-Trotskyist campaign aims to undermine rank-and-file trade unionism and signal employers to victimise activists. It accuses the Communist Party of supporting profiteers, blacklegging on miners’ strikes, and previously helping Hitler by opposing the war and seeking peace with Germany. The Socialist Appeal is presented as the genuine Leninist alternative, opposing both Churchill and Hitler and demanding workers’ control of war industries.
The Thesis of Indian Fourth Internationalists (1941) characterises the Indian National Congress as a bourgeois party comparable to the Kuomintang, not a multi-class united front. It argues the bourgeoisie, through Gandhi, repeatedly led mass struggles only to betray them. The thesis identifies the main revolutionary forces as the peasantry, driven by agrarian crisis, but argues they cannot lead independently due to their scattered and backward condition. The landlord-peasant antagonism remains primary, but a new antagonism has emerged with the growth of an agricultural proletariat. Leadership must come from the industrial proletariat, numbering five million, which occupies a vital economic position and faces extreme exploitation. The Communist Party of India is dismissed as practising “national united front” deception, oscillating between sectarianism and collaboration with the bourgeoisie. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, based on the theory of permanent revolution, must be built. The Indian revolution is combined: its bourgeois-democratic tasks can only be accomplished through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will then proceed to socialist tasks. The revolution’s fate will be determined on the international arena. Historical context is provided by accounts of the Santal rebellion (1855–1856) and the Deccan Riots of 1875, both native uprisings against British colonial authority and the corrupt upper caste zamindari system, targeting conditions of debt peonage to moneylenders.