since the 1930s Wimbledon, Merton and Morden Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth (LLY). This was where she was introduced to the trotskyist movement, through Arthur Wimbush and Vic Carpenter. It was a small group and not formally linked to Reg Groves and his small group in nearby Balham. 'We used to go out at weekends and set up a speaking platform borrowed from Reg Groves,' she exout and, with the Labour Party speakers' notes, hold forth in the
Her branch of the LLY, of which she became vice chair, was very active and, she remembers, 'overwhelmingly working class in composition. We had secretaries, clerks, metal workers, dustmen. We had anything from a dozen to twenty attending each meeting. Nationally the LLY was led by a proLeague of Nations disarmament current, which was carried overwhelmingly at conferences at that time - so it was to the left of the Labour leadership.'
'One of the things our branch did was to help organise tours for Spanish children during the Spanish civil war. We organised a concert given by Basque children.'
In 1938, the year of the founding of the Fourth International, Eileen moved to the United States. 'We were not talking seriously about the Fourth International when | left Britain - everything seemed up in the air.' But, once in the United States, Eileen went to see US trotskyist leader James P. Cannon: 'Cannon told me about the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, coming out of the founding of the Fourth Internation-
Eileen was to remain in the United States for forty-seven years, moving back to Britain in 1985. But for a period during the war she more or less dropped out of political activity. 'I got married, had children and i did not go out of my way at this time to get involved politically. But then in the late forties I began to get involved in the
anti-nuclear movement in Chicago which developed after the war.
I asked Eileen how she came to rejoin the trotskyist movement in the US after a number of years ab-
'When my daughter was seventeen she went to the University of Pennsylvania and met up with the Young Socialist Alliance [the youth organisation of the Socialist Workers Partyl. She brought home the Militant [the SWP's paper] for me to read. I recognised it, of course, and got in
Soon Eileen was right in the thick of things again - helping the SWP to find an office for their pro-choice work with the Women's National Abortion Action Committee, 'then I helped set up meetings at the University of Pennsylvania for that. Then there was the anti-Vietnam war movement. I got more and more involved.' Finally, in 1972, after many years of working with the SWP as a close sympathiser, she became a memberjoining not only her daughter but also her son, who were by now members of the party.
Eileen witnessed the degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party and the adoption by its leadership around Jack Barnes of increasing ly revisionist positions and an undemocratic internal regime. Along with many others, including most of the long-standing cadres of the party, she was bureaucratically expelled in 1984. 'They instituted new practices for the SWP. They did everything they could to avoid debating with those who opposed them in the party, and then finally they expelled us.
Despite witnessing the destruction of the party she had done so much to build, Eileen has not given up hope in the battle for socialism and the building of a real trotskyist movement. She is still in contact with those in the US who are trying to rebuild a revolutionary movement under very difficult conditions. And she continues her political activity to this day. Her life is an inspiration and an example to younger generations of revolutionaries. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
The 'transitional programme':
Fifty years ago Leon Trotsky, together with a number of groups of revolutionaries from different parts of the world, founded the Fourth International. The new world party of socialist revolution was committed to defending the programme of bolshevism and marxism against the class collaboration of both the Third (Communist) International, dominated by Stalin, and the Second International of the reformist social democratic parties.
In the Soviet Union the infamous Moscow trials were taking place. Trotsky, the main defendant along with other leaders of the October revolution, was preposterously accused of crimes against the working class. The ruling bureaucracy represented by Stalin was determined to liquidate physically the last vestiges of bolshevism within the Communist Party and the workers' movement.
But despite the horrors of the Stalin purges and the blatant political betrayals, the objective SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
SUS P P a