The Communist League split with the tendency opposed to joining the ILP continuing as the Marxist League which later worked within the Labour Party. He also chaired the British Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky.
In 1936, Wicks and several others signed a letter to the Manchester Guardian defending Trotsky's right to asylum and calling for an international inquiry into the Moscow Trials.[1] Wicks was also an active anti-fascist.[2]
Wicks began working with C. L. R. James of the Marxist Group, helping James write World Revolution, his 1937 history of the Communist International, and in 1938 their tendencies merged to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. However, Wicks and the remnants of the former Marxist League soon left and formed the Socialist Anti-War Federation. In 1940, this group dissolved and he joined the Independent Labour Party.
At the end of the Second World War, Wicks joined the Labour Party and became active in NALGO. In 1971, he became involved with the Trotskyist movement again, joining the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the International Socialists. He was part of the 1976 split which formed the Workers League. He would later work with the SWP in various campaigns but never rejoined it.
Not long before his death he wrote an autobiography, Keeping My Head: The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik, with the help of Logie Barrow.
