GCATT and the Archaeology of British Trotskyism

Abstract

This article describes the holdings of Glasgow Caledonian University Archive of the Trotskyist Tradition (GCATT), the core of which are the organisational records of one of the main post-World War II trends of British Trotskyism. This trend emerged from the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1948 as the Club later became first the Social Labour League and finally the Workers Revolutionary Party which fragmented in 1985. This article for practical archival reasons concentrates on the earliest material held in GCATT. This material relates to the prehistory of the organisation, essentially ranging from the 1930s to 1950. Items discussed relate to the activities of early Trotskyist organisations such as the Balham Group, the Communist League, the Marxist Group, the Marxist League and the Militant Group, and their relationships to each other and to other non-Trotskyist British leftwing parties of the 1930s. The majority of GCATT documents discussed here seem to originate from two organisational sources: the records of Hugo Dewar in his official capacity as secretary of the Communist League and material deriving from the files of Tom Mercer, leading member of the Left Fraction. The Communist League was the immediate successor to the Balham Group after its expulsion from the Communist Party. The Left Fraction had its roots in the Militant Group of the late 1930s, emerged within the Revolutionary Socialist League in the early 1940s and virtually ceased to exist in 1950. Much of the Left Fraction material originates within the organisation's Glasgow branch giving a unique insight into the, now nearly forgotten, activities of this distinctive West of Scotland strand of Trotskyism.