Obituary
Charlie van Gelderen
The death of John Archer on December 23, at the age of 91, removed from the political scene the oldest, still active Trotskyist in Britain.
I first met John in 1936. He and his wife, Mary, were living in Leeds at the time and he had come to London for a meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Group (RSG), the Trotskyist grouplet who were working inside the Labour Party as the Militant Group. He was, along with Harber, Margaret Johns and myself, among the earliest supporters of the 'entrist tactic' which Trotsky advocated. We were joined shortly after by Starkey Jackson and Leigh-Davies.
As always, John was an enthusiastic and optimistic revolutionary. I remember him entertaining us with a song at a social in Margaret Johns' flat, with a refrain which went:
"When the revolution comes,
When the revolution comes,
It's coming fast, our turn at last,
The social revolution."
The revolution did not come as fast as John, and most of us at the time, anticipated, but John certainly spent the rest of his long life, striving to bring it about.
John's political life is almost a blue-print of why the Trotskyist movement never became a viable force in Britain, or, indeed, anywhere else.
After the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was wound up in the 1950s, he went with the rump of the RCP into the Healy group, then known as the Club, later the Socialist Labour League (SLL), then the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). Unfortunately, I cannot state that he always took the right road.
I hoped, after the expulsion of Alan Thornett and his supporters from the WRP in 1974, that John would return to the Fourth International (United Secretariat).
But instead he chose to align himself to almost every little group that opposed the unification of the Trotskyist forces within the FI - the Lambert/Demassot Organising Committee 'for the Reconstruction of the FI'; the Moreno 'Centre for Reconstructing the FI - and I don't know what other groups, all hell-bent on 'reconstructing the FI', rather than working inside it and trying to correct any errors they conceived.
It is these splits and fissions, usually about obscure, almost theological differences, which have kept the Trotskyist movement so small and politically insignificant, despite the correctness of most of its political positions.
John also had an almost abiding faith in the 'entrist tactic.' This tactic, as we conceived it in the 1930s, was based on two propositions: that the decline of capitalism would lead to a left turn in the ranks of the Labour Party; and that Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the Comintern would be overthrown by a social revolution of the working class.
There was a left swing in the Labour Party, but it went to Nye Bevan and not to the Militant Group. The latest turn to the left went to Tony Benn. John Archer never steeled himself to face these facts.
I salute his memory as a permanent revolutionary in every sense of that word, and one who I was proud to call comrade.
An Ally against Healy
Alan Thornett
I first met John Archer in 1974, when we were conducting a faction fight inside Gerry Healy's WRP, which eventually got us expelled in the December of that year.
We had been getting help from the Bulletin Group, and had drafted a document, but needed to get it typed. John's name was given to me, and I took the manuscript to his house in London, where he typed it up on stencils for us.
Sitting here with a word processor and sending in the text by email reminds me again how much the world has changed since then. Not that a word processor would have made conducting a faction fight against Healy any more pleasant an experience, which is why we needed all the help we could get.
At the end of the 1980s/early 90s I was in the same organisation as John again, after the regroupment between the ISG and the SLG. Unfortunately he left us after a short time to form a small group in solidarity with the Lambertists, which, I think, is where his main political loyalties had been for a long period of time.
The last time I saw him was when he spoke at the event we organised a couple of years ago around the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International.
As you know he spoke along with Charlie van Gelderen, Bill Hunter and Harry Ratner on the history of the movement, and it was all fascinating stuff.
Obviously John and I have not always seen eye to eye. But the contribution he has made to the movement over a very long period of time has clearly been of great value.
The workers' movement will be the poorer without him, although, of course, it can draw strength from the legacy he has left behind.