Tarbuck, Ken

These papers relating to British Trotskyist movements were collected by the late Ken Tarbuck, a long-time member of these movements and a member of the Socialist Review Group National Committee.

The British Section of the International Left Opposition emerged during the period from 1929 to 1932. The movement was always hampered by disunity and between 1934 and 1938 a series of splits occurred, mainly relating to relations with the Labour Party, resulting in the existence of three distinct groups in the London area by September 1938, although a variety of other groups had appeared and disappeared and there were also various groups in other regions of the country. The Marxist League, led by Harry Wicks and Hugo Dewar, had recently joined with the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) and were operating independently of the Labour Party. The Militant group, led by D. D. Harber and Jackson, advocated continuing to work as an entrist group inside the Labour Party, and they too eventually joined the RSL, as did the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Edinburgh. The Workers' International League (WIL), led by Lee, Grant, Haston and Healy, also advocated an entrist policy, but remained autonomous of the RSL.

On the initiative of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, discussions on unification took place between the RSL and the WIL in the early 1940s and at a Fusion Conference in March 1944 the two groups merged to form the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP only remained in existence until 1949 and the 'unity' was always highly precarious, the party being split by continued disagreements on the question of the relationship of its members to the Labour Party.

When the RCP disintegrated in 1949 its members formed a variety of smaller groups, including the Socialist Review Group, which was distinguished by its analysis of the Soviet Union as 'State Capitalist', embodied in its slogan 'Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism!'