Discussion¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter records a factional debate within the British Trotskyist movement during the Second World War, centred on the correct military policy for a revolutionary party. The core argument revolves around whether revolutionaries should adopt a posture of unconditional revolutionary defeatism—working for the military defeat of one’s own imperialist bourgeoisie—or a more nuanced position that engages with the workers’ actual hostility to fascism and seeks to channel it into a struggle for power.
Grant, moving the resolution for the Workers’ International League (WIL), argues that the party must abandon mere opposition to the war and instead present a fighting alternative. The working class, he claims, faces crushing by German, British, or American imperialism alike, but the immediate dread of fascism has driven workers to support Churchill. The task is to show that only a workers’ government, with elected officers and armed workers, can genuinely fight fascism. He points to evidence of class tension within the British military—English officers fraternising with captured Italian officers, British soldiers shooting their own officers at Dunkirk—and notes that arms are being hidden even in the Home Guard. Grant invokes Trotsky’s transitional programme to assert that every working-class problem is a question of power. He denounces the treachery of the Second and Third Internationals for the war, but concedes that simply saying this will not convince the workers.
The Left Fraction, represented by Mercer, counter-attacks sharply. They insist that any revolutionary struggle or strike necessarily facilitates the defeat of one’s own imperialism. To ask the working class to fight a revolutionary struggle while forgetting the war is, in Mercer’s words, ludicrous. The real choice is between chauvinism and a revolutionary attitude to the war. He accuses the WIL of evading this question and compares their position unfavourably to that of Kautsky, a damning insult in Marxist terms. The Left Fraction’s seconder states bluntly that the sole enemy of the British working class is British imperialism, and that fraternisation must be directed against British imperialism, not German. Any working class action, they insist, facilitates the military defeat of one’s own country.
The Militant group, speaking through Davis and Harber, occupies a middle ground. Davis argues that the slogan ‘the enemy is at home’ failed to sink in against the tide of working-class illusion, especially when invasion seemed imminent. He contends that the correct approach was not to arm workers to fight Germans but to intensify class struggle and explain the imperialist character of the war. He claims that every strike is a political strike, even if conducted under a pro-war banner, and that a revolutionary mood begins precisely at this point of contradiction. Harber defends this as identical to Lenin’s position in the last war, with the only new feature being the fear of fascism compared to the fear of Tsarism.
Goodman, also of the Militant group, delivers a devastating polemic: he claims there is no difference between Grant’s slogan and the position of Harry Pollitt, the Stalinist leader of the British Communist Party who had supported the war effort after Hitler invaded the USSR. This is an accusation of class collaboration.
The discussion concludes with Bose, an Indian member of the Militant Workers’ Federation, calling for an immediate programme for power. The WIL resolution is carried. The chapter notes that the Left Fraction and Militant group stand for the complete defeat of British imperialism, while Cannon in America and the WIL want to go partly with the workers in the fight against fascism. The debate thus exposes a fundamental fracture: whether revolutionary strategy should prioritise the defeat of one’s own bourgeoisie at all costs, or whether it must tactically engage with the workers’ anti-fascist sentiment to build a credible revolutionary alternative.