Revolutionary Communist Party (1944-1949)
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Revolutionary Communist Party
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| Founded | 1944 |
| Dissolved | 1949 |
| Preceded by | Workers' International League, Revolutionary Socialist League |
| Succeeded by |
Socialist Review The Club (Trotskyist) |
| Ideology | Trotskyism |
| Political position | Far-left |
| International affiliation | Fourth International |
The Revolutionary Communist Party was a British Trotskyist group, formed in 1944 and active until 1949, which published the newspaper Socialist Appeal and a theoretical journal, Workers International News.
The party was founded as the official section of the Fourth International in Britain after the Revolutionary Socialist League collapsed. Moreover, the RSL had not adopted the positions of the Fourth International with regard to the Second World War and was polemicising against the Workers International League (WIL), declaring it to be following politics which it characterised as social patriotic. The positions of the WIL corresponded to those of the Fourth International and the American SWP and as a result the latter decided that the WIL should become the International's British section.
In order to draw the WIL into the International, the Americans exerted pressure on the three factions of the RSL to re-unite, after which the re-formed RSL could fuse with the larger WIL. The fused group, which adopted the politics of the majority WIL group, became the Revolutionary Communist Party. The leadership bodies of the new party incorporated leaders of the RSL such as Denzil Dean Harber and John Lawrence, with the exception of the old RSL Left Fraction who soon left.
The new party maintained an entrist faction in the Labour Party. This faction was led by Charlie van Gelderen and maintained publication of The Militant as its organ.
The main area on which the party concentrated however was the industrial front. This led to recruitment from the Communist Party but more recruits came from direct intervention in the industrial struggles of the war years such as that of the Kent miners and the Tyneside engineering apprentices. This latter dispute led to the RCP receiving the attention of the police as their headquarters in London were raided and a number of leading members were jailed. In furtherance of this industrial work a Militant Workers Federation was organised by the RCP in conjunction with the Industrial Committee of the Independent Labour Party and some anarchists.
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