Many years ago when I was getting into the swing of scanning ever greater quantities of papers and journals I quipped that I was willing to scan everything and anything but drew the line at The News Line, daily paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

However, where small numbers of News Lines were found within other collections, of course I scanned them. In particular the issues from the immediate split in the WRP in 1985 were of great interest as we see rival papers with the same name and masthead being published simultaneously by the two main pro and anti-Healy factions.

When a few years ago I bought a substantial collection of the earlier WRP daily, Workers Press, from a chap who found them dumped in a Liverpool skip, they came with maybe 90-odd issues of News Line and I also scanned those.

However, it was not until May 2024 that I came across a more substantial collection of News Lines.

Many thanks to John M for sending me these- 200 copies from the early to mid 1980s. I took my time but have finally scanned them!

This collection is doubly interesting as it contains a substantial number of papers from the 1984-5 miners’ strike.

Say what you will about the politics of the WRP, the daily coverage of the strike at ground level was exemplary, even if the editorialising was sometimes out of touch with reality.

So, by the time of the 1985 split, News Line ran to very nearly 3000 issues.

We have a total of 365 of these. They are ordered by year (some years have few or none) and are mostly in the 1984 and 1985 period, terminating at the split:

The NEWS LINE Archive

Additionally we have some 50 copies of the Healy-Torrance Newsline from the 1985-1987 period, and 25 of the News Line published by the anti-Healy faction which later re-named it Workers Press.

Continuity News Line – the property of the Sheila Torrance led WRP- survives to this day and will celebrate (!) 50 years of continuous publication this year.

It must surely be up to issue 15,000 by now.

Don’t even think about sending me any of those to scan.

Our friend Scott McLemee, former archival technician at the Library of Congress, adds the following notes:

Bibliographical note on an edition of Trotsky’s writings

July 2025

The Revolutionary Socialist League’s pamphlet In Defence of the Soviet Union: A Compilation 1927-1937 by Leon Trotsky is almost identical in content to one of the same title issued by the American Trotskyist organization. Most of the differences are of purely bibliographical interest. But one is of some political significance and may be indicative of when it was republished.

The RSL item lists its publisher as the Pioneer Publishing Association in Glasgow, while the US edition is from Pioneer Publishers in New York City. The RSL text is mimeographed; the U.S. edition is printed rather than duplicated and uses the American spelling “Defense” in its title. Neither edition gives a publication date, although the finding aid [ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6h4nb1gn/entire_text/ ] for the archival records of Pathfinder Press (successor of Pioneer) indicates that the printed version appeared in 1937.

The most substantial difference is that the US edition contains an introduction by Max Shachtman, dated March 23, 1937. One of the “three generals without an army” expelled from the Communist Party of America in 1928 for their adherence to Trotskyism, Shachtman was the translator of at least some of the writings collected in the pamphlet, as well as for two of the “Four important books by Leon Trotsky” advertised on its back cover The Third International After Lenin and The Stalin School of Falsification.

Its introduction [ https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1937/03/ussr.htm ] presents the compendium as a necessary response to the Moscow Trials, then recent, during which Trotsky and his followers were depicted as driven by pathological hatred of the Soviet Union to collaborate with German and Japanese fascists for its destruction. The prosecution’s lies and delirium were exposed in another Pioneer title, Shachtman’s short book Behind the Moscow Trial, published in 1936. It focused on the case against Gregory Zinoviev, Leon Kamanev, and 14 other Bolsheviks, The pamphlet of 1937, by contrast, documented the ideological fabrication at issue by assembling Trotsky’s scattered writings arguing that Stalinism posed an enormous and increasing threat to the Soviet Union’s survival.

Three years later, Shachtman and about half of the American section’s membership would depart from it, in large part in opposition to Trotsky’s line that defense of the USSR remained a revolutionary obligation even in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Like most other Fourth Internationalist organizations, the RSL adhered to Trotsky’s policy. Whatever one’s assessment of thT dispute, it is not difficult to appreciate why, after the split of 1940, the introduction might have seemed anomalous and politically unrepresentative for all parties involved.

In any case, the de-Shachtmanized RSL edition appears to have been the one time the compilation was republished. Examination of other RSL material in the Splits & Fusions collection turns up no mention of it. Indeed, the final page of the July and September 1939 issues of the organization’s journal Workers Fight lists three RSL pamphlets then available, with In Defence… not among them.

Lower on the same page appears a notice of the British section’s recent receipt of a shipment of literature from the American Trotskyists — including copies of In Defense…. Given wartime conditions, typing up the whole thing for mimeographed duplication may have been easier than restocking the printed edition.

The date of the RSL edition is unknown, as yet, but the circumstances of its absence from Workers Fight in 1939 and the omission (exclusion?) of Shachtman’s text suggest it was not published until 1940 at the earliest. A firmer estimate may be possible if more wartime issues of Workers Fight become available.

What makes it particularly interesting is the fact that it does not appear in other collections and its existence was previously unknown.

Barry Buitekant writes:

“I found this previously unrecorded Trotskyist pamphlet amongst a recent donation to Housmans. 

What is striking to me is that as far as I can see it isn’t included in the monumental ‘Leon Trotsky – A Bibliography’ compiled by Louis Sinclair. This strikes me as a bit odd as Sinclair was a member of the RSL’s Glasgow branch. Its not exactly known when Sinclair joined the RSL but according to Wolfgang Lubitz in his ‘Trotsky Bibliography” it was “around 1938″. So even if Sinclair joined the RSL after the pamphlet was published I can’t understand how someone so obsessed in locating writings by Trotsky missed including this item”.

This ‘new’ pamphlet now joins other items in our RSL collections.

REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST LEAGUE Archive

Wikipedia tells us that in 1998, Mick Hicks was ousted as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain in a 17–13 vote moved by John Haylett (who was also editor of the Morning Star) at a meeting of the party’s executive committee. Hicks’ supporters on the Management Committee of the Morning Star responded by suspending and then sacking Haylett, which led to a prolonged strike at the Morning Star, ending in victory for Haylett and his reinstatement. Some of Hicks’ supporters were expelled and others resigned in protest. They formed a discussion group called Marxist Forum.

Prominent members of the group included Hicks, Marxist economist Ron Bellamy, former Morning Star chief executive Mary Rosser and former CPB North West District Secretary Peter Ritman.

The Marxist Forum published a journal of the same name and we present them here for your perusal.

Marxist Forum was an A5, cheaply produced magazine of 28 to 36 pages and tells us that the print run was around 300 copies.

The first few issues discuss at length the recent split in the CPB and take on the arguments of Robert Griffiths et al. In addition to the magazine, MF advertises a couple of papers or documents elaborating on this theme, which we do not have.

Our MF collection runs to 14 issues between 1999 and 2006 with issue 14 being split into Part 1 and Part 2, both published together.

This might well have been the last issue published but it is unclear when Marxist Forum folded as a group.

Also in the archive is a short (single sided A5) interim statement on the September 11th attacks.

MARXIST FORUM Archive

The entry for the “Socialist Vanguard Group” in the Encyclopedia Of British And Irish Political Organizations tells us it was the British section of the Militant Socialist International- followers of the German philosopher Leonhard Nelson- established around 1933 and which joined the Labour Party in the 1940s. It then moved to the right establishing the journal Socialist Commentary by the end of the war.

However, as this article on LibCom shows, the Militant Socialist International, or ISK, in Germany was a more colourful creature.

The Internationale Sozialistische Kampfbund (ISK) was an “ethical socialist”, but explicitly non-Marxist, split from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1925 (members having previously been expelled from the Communist Party), and it was active in the resistance to the Nazis from 1933 through to the end of the war.

It used the names Militant Socialist International in English and Internacio de Socialista Kunbatalo in Esperanto.

It was a tight cadre organisation built on ethical principles- vegetarianism, anti-clericalism, anti-militarism and abstention from drinking and smoking.

In Germany it operated a network of vegetarian cafes which distributed anti-Nazi propaganda.

This detailed Wikipedia entry explains the origins, publications and evolution of the Socialist Vanguard Group in Britain.

We have two copies of the English language journal Socialist Vanguard.

V2 no4 September 1936 and V3 No2 July 1937

Both are interesting reads and they both cover events in Spain and have essays on socialism and ethics.

Tucked in one of them we found a leaflet from the MSI attacking George Lansbury for trying to talk peace with Hitler.

It promotes a public meeting in London, 7th May 1937 “Peace and Socialist Principles at stake. The LANSBURY-HITLER talk.”

I very much hope to be able to add to our SOCIALIST VANGUARD Archive in the future.

In Can the Unions Defeat the Tories? Labour Action tells us that it is a newly formed group of active members of the Labour Party.

Apart from an address – 86, Rosebank Road, W11 (which again has a vague ring of familiarity) there are very few additional details.

There is no mention of a paper or newsletter available from the group so it might just be that this was the first and only thing they ever put out.

The pamphlet dates to 1973 and the Heath government. It puts forward a TU and Labour Party centred strategy for taking on the Tories and is relatively sober and sensible in its demands. The group behind it could well be either Trotskyists or from the Labour left tradition.

The only groups mentioned in the pamphlet are the CP and the SLL, both of which it considers should be permitted to affiliate to the Labour Party, and International Socialism which it criticizes for ultra-left dismissal of the potential of the LP.

So, whilst the group could well derive from the Grantites (or maybe a fragment of the IMG or Matgamnaites) the above points of reference, and no others, make it seem less likely.

Anyone out there ever heard of these before?

Ever hopeful, here is a repository for our LABOUR ACTION Archive

But what in Earth was the Socialist Propaganda League?

Formed in 1911, the SPL was a split from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It was concerned that the MPs and other elected officials the SPGB was poised to win in droves, would succumb to the temptations of office and start to support progressive reforms and legislation.

The SPL actually lasted a full 40 years until its death in 1951…

Interestingly, given the SPL’s pedigree as a fundamentalist / impossiblist organisation this bulletin from the 1930s appears to buy into the ide that Stalinist Russia was somehow more progressive than Western capitalism and while still capitalist (through its interaction with the world market) they support the idea that the Russian workers enjoyed better material conditions and more rights than workers elsewhere in the world.

You can read more about the SPL in this issue of the SPGB’s Socialist Standard in an article which looks at various historical splits from that group.

One day there will be more items in our SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA LEAGUE Archive

Before posting I did a quick Google on Socialist Correspondence to find that the only significant online source on the group was our own post from 2018 “Socialist Correspondence- the British “Right Opposition”?

Interestingly, back then we included with our files of the SC newsletter a letter to subscribers about a new pamphlet– and now we have found it.

This allows us to date the pamphlet to the later summer of 1939 and the eve of the coming world war…

All our Socialist Correspondence materials can be found here:

SOCIALIST CORRESPONDENCE Archive

J. also contributes a guest post on the history of the SL(DC) immediately below, bringing together everything we know about this group, its origins and development.

But first a few things I notice from the papers….

Labor News was an approximately monthly tabloid newspaper of 8 or 12 pages. Its content combined news, agitation and campaigning pieces with international coverage, longer theoretical articles and polemics against some of its rivals on the left which included the Spartacist League, the Workers League from which the SL(DC) was expelled and others.

Interestingly, our issues are all stamped as ‘File’ copies and the mailing address indicates that these were part of the office collection of the Spartacist League itself.

A large part of the content of Labor News, sometimes as much as 40% of an issue, was reprinted directly from Socialist Press, the paper of the WSL in Britain, which indicates how closely the SCL(DC) was aligned with the WSL. This included the main Socialist Press theoretical supplements Trotskyism Today.

Indeed, it is evident that the SL(DC) saw itself as part of the same international split from Healy’s ICFI as the expulsion of the proto-WSL from the WRP and the Communist Internationalist League, expelled from the Workers Internationalist League in Greece (see Labor News vol 2 no7 for a series of articles reprinted from Socialist Press). So, the WSL has a small international following from the start, some years before the formal establishment of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee (TILC)

Our holdings of Labor News, other publications of the SL(DC) and its later iterations as the Proletarian Tasks Tendency and Workers Socialist League (US) are here:

SOCIALIST LEAGUE (DEMOCRATIC CENTRALIST) Archive

J. writes on the history of the SL(DC):

The Socialist League (Democratic Centralist) emerged out of the Workers League, the American supporters of the International Committee led by Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party.

In a well known if contentious bit of Trotskyist history, Tim Wohlforth, the leader of the Workers League, was instructed by Healy to carry out a struggle against centrism within the WL. He began this campaign at the 5th National Conference of the Workers League held at the end of August and start of September 1973. For the next year, this ‘struggle against centrism,’ carried out by Tim Wohlforth and his then-companion Nancy Fields, caused a lot of tumult within the WL. It would last a full year and by Wohlforth’s own account, resulted in over a hundred members of the WL being driven out from August 1973 to August 1974, roughly half the membership. This included half the members of the Central Committee and the Political Committee and the whole founding leadership of the Young Socialists. The campaign came to an end at a summer camp held at the end of August 1974 when Gerry Healy came and denounced Wohlforth for seeking to “liquidate” the WL. He also raised accusations that Fields, who was raised by an uncle who had worked for the CIA, had not been given a proper “security clearance,” and the two were removed from their posts in the WL, both resigning from the party in September.

Among those who were driven out from the Workers League during this period was Irving Hall (Hughes), a member of the Central Committee. He raised an objection when the Workers League called the police on some youth they had brought to a national youth conference organized by the WL/YS in 1974, the youth in question having assaulted a member of the Workers League. When Hall criticized calling on the capitalist state against these youth, he was expelled in May 1974. His companion Judy Hughes and Steve Zeltzer were expelled a week later. Tom Cagle was reported as either being expelled as well or else resigning in July. Another member, Ernest Yacapin, was also mentioned in connection with them.

With Wohlforth’s removal as National Secretary in August 1974, Irving Hughes, Judy Hughes, Steve Zeltzer, Tom Cagle, and Ernest Yacapin wrote to the International Committee to appeal their expulsions and be reinstated in the WL. They met with representatives of the IC in September who upheld the expulsion of Irving Hughes as correct but granted the expulsions of Judy Hughes and Zeltzer was illegal, also stating that Cagle resigned and not mentioning Yacapin at all. They introduced conditions for the Hall-Zeltzer group to agree to in order for the IC to recommend the Workers League readmit them. When they were not immediately accepted, the offer was withdrawn. Hall-Zeltzer submitted a “Platform of Opposition” dated 10 December 1974, right around the same time as the split in the Workers Revolutionary Party that gave rise to the Workers Socialist League led by Alan Thornett.

After resigning from the WL, Wohlforth sent Hall a letter apologizing for his past behavior and claiming he was directly instructed to seek his expulsion by Healy himself. Notably, this prompted the IC to spend the better part of an entire issue of their journal Fourth International solely on the “December 10 faction” as they called it (Vol. 9, No. 3, Autumn 1975, “New slander from an old liar”).

After Wohlforth produced a statement in January 1975 on his ouster, he reached out to Alan Thornett and the Workers Socialist League in Britain. Thornett directed Wohlforth towards the Hughes-Zeltzer group. Sometime in early 1975 a split emerged between Irving and Judy Hughes on one side and Steve Zeltzer and Tom Cagle on the other. It may have been geographic (the Hughes were in Los Angeles and Zeltzer-Cagle in the Bay Area) or it might have been political (Hughes was said to be more pro-Lambert and Zeltzer more pro-Thornett) or something else. The Zeltzer-Cagle wing of the “December 10 faction” formed the Socialist League (Democratic Centralist) in the immediate aftermath of this split, the first issue of Labor News being dated 15 May 1975. They were seen as basically the American cothinkers of the WSL. I don’t know what happened to the Hughes after this point.

When the WSL organized an international current in December 1979, the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, the SL (DC) functioned as its U.S. group—I don’t know if they were officially a section or if they were a fraternal group or something else. Another American organization, the Revolutionary Workers Group led by Peter Sollenberger (Johnson) and Leland Sanderson, also expressed an interest in the TILC. This resulted in the RWG and SL (DC) uniting in July 1981 as the Revolutionary Workers League, the American section of the TILC. The fusion doesn’t seem to have been a happy one, with the core of the former SL (DC), including Steve Zeltzer and three other members, forming the Proletarian Tasks Tendency and splitting from the RWL in the fall of 1982. The PTT renamed itself the Workers Socialist League in 1984 and lasted into the early 1990s, but that’s where my knowledge of them ends.

This is Correspondence Pamphlet No3, an account of the Aldermaston marches and the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament written by Kathleen Gough and originally printed in Correspondence V5 no12 1961- the newspaper of CLR James group based mainly in the USA.

We have been very slowly putting together a small collection of materials from the Correspondence Publishing Co. and its predecessor the Johnson-Forrest Tendency.

The newspaper (originally a duplicated bulletin) is very hard to find and what we have is either fragmentary and incomplete, or poor condition.

It is surprising, given the interest in CLR James, and Raya Dunayevskaya, that no substantial runs of Correspondence appear to have been archived anywhere. If you do have any leads or ideas, let us know.

Here we have Correspondence first series (duplicated)

Correspondence second series (newspaper)

Related pamphlets

All of this can be found in our

JOHNSON FORREST TENDENCY Archive