The real discussions at conference¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter delivers a polemical dissection of a purportedly conscientious but fundamentally dishonest “report” on the fusion conference that created the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in Britain. Its core argument is that the report’s author, Stuart, systematically suppressed the actual political content of the conference debates, substituting instead a trivialising account of backstairs gossip and factional hearsay. The chapter insists that a proper report would have grounded itself in the documents, resolutions, and minutes that recorded the real differences separating the British Trotskyist groups for years.
The key claims are substantiated by a detailed reconstruction of the conference’s political architecture. Three factions submitted resolutions: the Militant Group, the “Left” faction, and the Workers’ International League (WIL), whose position was supported by the Trotskyist Opposition (TO). Delegates numbered 69, with the WIL holding 52 and the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) 17, the latter subdivided into Militant Group (7), TO (6), and Left (4). The chapter identifies four decisive policy questions. On military policy, the WIL-TO resolution—later published in the Fourth International—was opposed by both the Left and Militant Group as chauvinist and opportunist; the vote was 57 in favour, 11 opposed, with one abstention. On Labour Party tactic, the entrist position (immediate entry and subordination of independent work) mustered only 11 votes against 58 for an independent orientation rooted in factory and trade union work while maintaining factions inside the Labour and Independent Labour Parties. On the slogan of workers’ control, the WIL-TO argued for its propaganda potency during wartime, counterposing proletarian control to the capitalist Joint Production Committees; the Left held it could only arise from a third Labour government, the Militant Group only during revolutionary upsurge. On industrial tactics, the WIL resolution supporting the Militant Workers’ Federation (MWF) as a crystallising force for militant factory leadership was backed by all factions except the Left, who dismissed the MWF as a paper organisation and advocated entry into Stalinist-controlled unofficial movements, with expulsion seen as the precondition for real work.
The chapter draws on the theoretical context of the Fourth International’s wartime debates over revolutionary defeatism, entryism, and the relationship between transitional demands and imperialist war. Its polemic is directed squarely at Stuart and, by extension, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leadership, for whom the report was written. The charge is that Stuart’s method—substituting organisational evaluations for political analysis—served not education but factional distortion, denying SWP members any genuine understanding of the fusion’s political stakes. The chapter closes by noting that several Left resolutions (on sabotage in relation to the USSR, the national question, China, and the Italian revolution) were omitted from the agenda for lack of time, underscoring how much political substance Stuart’s “report” elided.