Denzil Dean Harber
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Denzil Dean Harber (1909-1966) was an early British Trotskyist leader.
Interested in the Soviet Union from an early age, Harber taught himself Russian and studied Russian Commerce at the London School of Economics. Around this time, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1931, he travelled to the Soviet Union as an interpreter, but was disillusioned by what he found. Returning home, he found publications of the Trotskyist Left Opposition and made contact with the Balham Group.
In 1932, Harber joined the Balham Group's successor, the Communist League, the first independent Trotskyist group in the country. Trotsky advised the group to enter the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which had just disaffiliated from the Labour Party. Trotsky believed that the group should work for a "Bolshevik transformation of the party".[1]
The majority of the Communist League argued against joining the ILP in favour of maintaining an open party, but allowed thirty of its members led by Harber to form a secretive "Bolshevik-Leninist Fraction" in the ILP. This difference in orientation essentially split the party, and in November 1934, sixty Trotskyist ILPers officially formed the Marxist Group, led by Harber.
While, perhaps due to this delay and infighting, the Group never achieved the influence hoped for by Trotsky, it did win new members, including C. L. R. James. Ted Grant also joined the organisation, having moved from South Africa. By the ILP Conference of 1935, it claimed a similar strength to the Revolutionary Policy Committee, which was sympathetic to the Communist Party of Great Britain.
However Harber now left the ILP to rejoin the Labour Party, as Trotsky urged, now forming the Militant Group. Harber later led this into the Revolutionary Socialist League (of which he was a secretary for a time) then worked in the Workers International League and the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Harber had long opposed Gerry Healy, and when the Revolutionary Communist Party dissolved in 1949, he did not follow many of his comrades into Healy's group, The Club. He left political activity and soon moved to Sussex, where he became a prominent ornithologist, publishing the Sussex Bird Report with Grahame des Forges.[2]