A criticism by the RSL of the WIL pamphlet Preparing for power¶
Core Argument¶
Here the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) delivers a polemical dissection of the Workers’ International League (WIL) pamphlet Preparing for Power, charging that it confirms the WIL as a centrist body moving away from Bolshevism. The RSL’s core argument is that the WIL has adopted a fundamentally defencist position on the imperialist war, concealed beneath a veneer of revolutionary phraseology, and that this error vitiates its entire political perspective, including its approach to the Labour Party.
The RSL’s first major criticism targets the WIL’s analysis of British imperialism’s wartime defeats. The WIL attributes these to the “senility and decay” of the British ruling class and the incompetence of its “old school tie” officials. The RSL counters that this is a gross distortion, omitting the Marxist explanation rooted in the uneven development of capitalism: Britain’s accumulated imperialist booty is now disproportionate to its relative economic and military strength compared to rivals like the USA and Germany. The RSL insists that British imperialism is far from “completely senile,” pointing to its high per capita production, and warns that such an exaggeration of British weakness leads directly to false policies.
The most serious charge concerns the WIL’s perspective on working-class consciousness and the war. The RSL argues that the WIL falsely claims that the workers are already questioning the capitalist system due to military incompetence. In reality, the RSL asserts, the masses still support the imperialist war and merely demand it be fought more efficiently. This is a petty-bourgeois, not a proletarian, reaction. The RSL insists that genuine class action will arise not from demands for a more efficient war, but from war-weariness and the desire for peace. The WIL’s document, the RSL notes, omits the slogan of peace entirely, implicitly replacing the Bolshevik strategy of “turning the imperialist war into a civil war” with a call to “turn the imperialist war into a workers’ anti-fascist war.” The WIL’s main attack is thus directed not against the British bourgeoisie, but against its fascist rivals, a position the RSL equates with veiled support for the imperialist war effort.
The RSL further attacks the WIL’s treatment of possible war terminations, accusing it of pushing the revolutionary perspective into the background. The WIL’s three scenarios—a capitulation to Hitler provoking a patriotic uprising, an Allied victory leading to revolutionary explosions over broken promises, or a stalemate—are contrasted with the RSL’s own fourth possibility: revolution born of war-weariness. The RSL mocks the WIL’s suggestion that a French-style capitulation would provoke an uprising to continue the war, pointing to the absence of such a development in France and the very different course of the Russian Revolution in 1917, which the WIL now treats as an exception.
On the Labour Party tactic, the RSL accuses the WIL of inconsistency and a creeping abandonment of the entrist perspective. The WIL’s own 1938 document described the Labour Party in peacetime as a “mere skeleton” with a notably absent mass membership, yet the WIL now claims the tactic was based on entering a party “in a state of flux.” The RSL argues that the WIL, while still verbally acknowledging that workers will turn to the Labour Party at a later stage, is preparing the ground to deny this, suggesting the masses might “skip over” the Labour Party and turn directly to the WIL. This, the RSL contends, is a form of “double bookkeeping” reminiscent of Stalinist “third period” politics.
In sum, the RSL diagnoses the WIL’s errors as stemming from a defencist position adopted after the fall of France. To conceal this essential chauvinism, the WIL uses revolutionary slogans like “workers’ control of production” but imbues them with a counter-revolutionary content—increasing production for the war. To justify this opportunism, the WIL must falsely depict the present situation as one of acute class conflict on the eve of revolution, leading to its absurd underestimation of British imperialism and its abandonment of the patient, long-term work within the Labour Party.