The ILP After Disaffiliation¶
Core Argument¶
The ILP After Disaffiliation
In a series of polemical interventions from 1933, Leon Trotsky subjected the Independent Labour Party to a searching critique, challenging its equivocal position between reformism and revolution. His letter of 25 August 1933 took direct aim at James Maxton’s foreword, which had refused to adjudicate disputes within the Russian Bolsheviks on the grounds that only Russian socialists were competent to judge. Trotsky condemned this as a denial of socialism’s international character, arguing that Maxton’s stance implicitly endorsed Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country” by treating a question of world-historical importance as a merely national affair. The struggle between international socialism and national socialism, Trotsky insisted, concerned every worker, and ILP members bore a duty to form independent opinions.
Analysing the ILP’s collaboration with the Communist Party of Great Britain in “Whither the ILP?” (September 1933), Trotsky exposed a fundamental contradiction: the Comintern denounced the ILP as “counter-revolutionary” while simultaneously pursuing a united front from above. The ILP’s theses, he noted, avoided criticising the Communist Party’s “social-fascism” theory, leaving unresolved contradictions that rendered the alliance a house of cards. Trotsky warned that the ILP could not remain in an intermediary position; it must study the first four Comintern congresses and the Left Opposition’s struggle against Stalinism, particularly the German catastrophe. In “The ILP and the New International” (4 September 1933), he rejected the ILP’s proposal to test the Comintern at a world congress, insisting that responsibility for Hitler’s victory constituted decisive proof of the Comintern’s failure.
Trotsky’s analysis extended to the trade unions, which, built during capitalism’s rise, had seen their reformist basis undermined by capitalism’s decline. The bureaucracy, choosing to serve capital, used union authority against workers’ resistance. The revolutionary party’s key task became freeing workers from this reactionary influence, yet the Comintern had failed here, toadying to the TUC General Council during the 1926 General Strike and mortally wounding the Minority Movement. Its subsequent ultra-radicalism isolated the Communist Party from the working class. Workers recognised the unions’ changed role but saw no alternative, as official communism had compromised the revolutionary path. Trotsky argued against bypassing unions for new organisations, insisting the task was to win the masses where they were. The Comintern’s creation of obedient ‘Communist’ trade unions had doomed it to impotence, as in Germany.
Trotsky further charged that the ILP lacked internal democracy, expelling critics, and that its struggle against the Comintern bureaucracy had been ongoing for ten years, with Germany as the decisive case. If Germany could not convince the bureaucracy of its errors, nothing would. He advocated forming the Fourth International, uniting revolutionaries who recognised both the Second and Third Internationals as bankrupt—the former through reactionary reformism, the latter through bureaucratic centrism. His advice to the ILP was to remain independent until it moved from reformism to revolution and from empiricism to theory, requiring a firm grasp of revolutionary theory, correct evaluation of forces, and a definite plan for Britain—flexible in detail but rigid in principle.