50 Years Since the Founding of the CWI (Now ISA)

I remember attending the founding conference of the Committee for a Workers International in April 1974.

I was an active member of Militant and the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) and was Chair of the Yorkshire Region of the LPYS. We had just had the National Conference of the LPYS at Easter where we had fraternal delegates from other social democratic youth organisations affiliated to the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY). Of course, most of the German, Belgian and Swedish delegates were out-and-out reformists, some of them were even already MPs! But there were always good young comrades who were open to Marxist ideas and the best of them would be invited for further discussions.

I was asked to go to London for the meeting as an activist, maybe also because I spoke German, having studied it at university. Of course, the Germans generally spoke very good English!

I knew what we were trying to achieve with the meeting, but I certainly didn’t realise how important it would turn out to be in the history of Trotskyism. It was made very clear to us that these were early beginnings and that the name had been chosen deliberately to express that. We weren’t declaring arrogantly that we were a Fourth — or even a Fifth! — International but were working towards the creation of a working-class international. And the name stuck.

There was an impressive spread of comrades, of course a preponderance of English comrades but also several Irish comrades who later played a leading role, I remember especially Peter Hadden, John Throne and Finn Geaney being there. I recall that there were comrades from Spain, Sweden and Belgium too.

I also remember a very impressive older comrade Dudley Edwards who had been involved in the Pressed Steel Fisher factory in Oxford. He had spent much of his life in the Communist Party but had come to Trotskyism, and the Militant, late in life, it was good to see the experience he would bring to bear. Another comrade with a similar history was Jim Brookshaw, a print-worker, who later went on to run the Militant printshop.

That weekend I was introduced to Hans-Gerd Offinger, who was already a leading member in our incipient German section. I arranged with him that my wife (also a comrade) and I would spend the summer hitch-hiking round Germany visiting his contacts to try to persuade them to join the CWI. So that’s what we did. I remember visiting Dortmund, Frankfurt, Darmstadt and of course Hans-Gerd’s home village of Alt-Hengstett where he had some good potential members.

Militant was always profoundly internationalist, and we took that into our work in the LPYS. Shortly after the CWI’s founding conference we launched the Spanish Young Socialists Defence Campaign to raise finances for the Juventudes Socialistas de Espana which were of course an underground organisation under the military dictatorship of Franco. We raised several thousand pounds through an appeal in the labour and trade union movement. After Franco died in 1975 all the rich and powerful social democratic parties, especially the German SPD, flooded Spain with money to boost the right-wing in the reformist PSOE but the CWI nevertheless built a large and authoritative section in Spain.