CHARLIE VAN GELDEREN is celebrating 50 years in the revolutionary socialist movement. Colin Talbot talked to him about his life and experiences.
Charlie van Gelderen was born in South Africa in 1913. At the age of 17 he joined the South Africa Fabian Society. 'I was always interested in politics', he says, 'as I grew up in a political family. My father had emigrated from Holland just before the Boer War and was a supporter of South African nationalism and strongly anti-British imperialism. The Fabian Society wasn't very good on socialism but it helped to purge me of racism.'
But in 1932, at the age of 19, Charlie was already becoming interested in more radical alternatives than Fabianism. Involvement in the International Socialist Club, made up largely of expelled members of the South African Communist Party, led to contact with a small group of South African Trotskyists. With them he participated in the Marxist Education League, which concentrated on basic Marxist education. 'We studied Marxist economics, the Communist Manifesto, and the Russian Revolution before moving on to the critique of official Communism.'
Charlie's first contact with Trotskyism as such was reading a copy of the American paper Militant, purchased outside a meeting of the International Socialist Club. It carried Trotsky's article 'Germany — Key to the International Situation'. 'It made a great impression on me,' he recalls.
The South African Trotskyists subsequently formed the Lenin Club in 1934, published the newspaper Workers Voice of which Charlie was editor. They also published the first Trotskyist manifesto on May Day 1934, which Charlie played a central role in drafting.
With the agreement of his colleagues, Charlie decided to come to Europe to expand his knowledge of the international movement. In 1935 he arrived in London. 'There were two Trotskyist Groups, one led by Reg Groves in the Labour Party. The other, the Marxist Group, led by C L R James, was inside the Independent Labour Party, which had split from Labour three years before.' Charlie, on advice from the Trotskyist international socialist leadership, joined the Marxist Group and also joined the Labour League of Youth, which was rapidly growing with over 25,000 members.
Inside the League of Youth two political tendencies dominated: the Stalinist sympathisers of Advance and the Trotskyists of Youth Militant. While the Labour youth battled Oswald Moseley's home grown fascists, it also raised support for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. The Stalinists propagated the class collaborationist 'People's Front' to combat fascism, while the Trotskyists fought for the working class united front. On the editorial board of Youth Militant Charlie played an important role in this fight. Within the adult party, the Trotskyists entered the Socialist League, the left-wing led by Stafford Cripps and Nye Bevan. When the Socialist League was suppressed by Transport House in 1937 the Militant Labour League was formed to replace it. Inside the MLL the Trotskyists organised the Revolutionary Socialist League, which was affiliated to the International Communist League, the world Trotskyist grouping.
In 1938 Charlie attended the founding conference of the Fourth International as an observer for the South African Trotskyists and of the Youth International as a delegate of the Youth Militant group. He was elected to the Youth International's executive.
The outbreak of war in 1939 put the Trotskyists under immense pressure. 'The Labour Party shut up shop and virtually stopped meeting', Charlie recalls. 'We carried out propaganda against the war and carried on meeting amongst ourselves. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) adopted a pacifist stance and tried to avoid the draft but we decided to go into the army if we were called up.' Charlie joined the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) which provided him with a job at £3 per week, and a possible exemption from the draft. Together with George (now Lord) Brown he helped organise the ARP into the unions. But in 1941 he was called up into the Army medical corps and dispatched by troop ship to Iraq.
On board ship a group of Stalinists started up a Marxist discussion group, 'but they ended up asking me to do most of the talks', Charlie says. 'There was very little hostility to socialists and I never hid my views. After the Soviet Union joined the war socialist propaganda was hardly frowned on at all.' He says that among the rank and file British troops anti-fascism was at least as strong a motivation as patriotism.
As the Allied armies and the Resistance pushed up through Italy, Charlie was moved to Naples, where he stayed for 2½ years. He began establishing contact with the Italian Trotskyists. After making friends with an Italian Socialist Party member Charlie recalls addressing a meeting of the Socialist Youth. 'I didn't speak Italian but my friend spoke German and so did I. So I spoke to the meeting in German and he translated.' This meeting led indirectly to Charlie meeting the Italian Trotskyist Fosca, and he participated in the long painful process of re-assembling the Trotskyist forces. Supporters in the American and British Armies sold scarce goods they had 'borrowed' from the Army on the black-market and used the proceeds to help launch the paper Il Militante.
'It was very exciting in Naples. The walls were covered with slogans saying "workers to power". In the markets communist books suddenly appeared. They were all dated 1924 and had obviously been hidden since Mussolini's rise to power.'
In March 1943 Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communists, returned to Naples from his exile in the Soviet Union. Charlie remembers the first big meeting Togliatti spoke at. 'There were placards everywhere saying "workers to power", pictures of Lenin, Stalin and Togliatti. There were tremendous illusions in the Soviet Union and Stalin. The Red Army was marching across Europe. Togliatti said: "No comrades, now is not the time for workers to power, Now we need Generals and Field Marshalls in power", and he appealed to the workers to hand in their guns and join the army.'
After the war, the Communists justified their failure to take power in Italy (and France) by saying that the American Army would have intervened to crush the revolution. But Charlie says that the American troops in Italy 'were completely fed up with Europe. If the Communist led Resistance had seized power the Americans would have voted with their feet and gone home. The US troops used to have a favourite saying, "I've only got one war aim — Stateside." They just wanted to go home.'
Charlie attended the founding conference of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in London while on leave in 1945. On being demobbed in 1946 he returned to London, joined the RCP and for a while became reinvolved in the Labour Party. The RCP was the shortlived unification of all the Trotskyists in Britain, which soon split on whether to be inside or outside the Labour Party. Charlie left the Labour Party and stayed outside with the RCP majority, but in 1948 they decided to dissolve the RCP and re-enter the Labour Party.
Inside the Labour Party the Trotskyists gained some influence among the Bevanite left-wing, which emerged towards the end of the Labour government and under the Tories. Charlie spent four years as a Labour councillor in Hammersmith. But as the main forces of British Trotskyism were gradually taken over by and degenerated under the leadership of Gerry Healy, Charlie withdrew somewhat. While on an adult education course in Edinburgh he met Ken Coates and joined the small group around the Week magazine. They were eventually to emerge out of the fragments of British Trotskyism as the International Marxist Group, the British section of the reunited Fourth International, of which Charlie is still a member today.
Charlie is working on his memoirs, 'but things are still very chaotic' he says. At the age of 68 and after fifty years Charlie is still an active revolutionary. His example is an inspiration to today's generation of revolutionaries. We can learn much from the veterans of our movement like Charlie, who are our living memory, a link with our heritage.