Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. His relations with Lenin have been a source of intense historical debate. However, on balance, scholarly opinion among a range of prominent historians and political scientists such as E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Suny, Richard B. Day and W. Bruce Lincoln was that Lenin’s desired “heir” would have been a collective responsibility in which Trotsky was placed in "an important role and within which Stalin would be dramatically demoted ".
Socialist Appeal was the British section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), founded in 1992 alongside the IMT by supporters of Ted Grant and Alan Woods after they were expelled from the Militant tendency of the Labour Party. In 2024 the Great Britain-based elements of the IMT were relaunched as the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Duncan Hallas, was a prominent member of the Trotskyist movement and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain.
The Fourth International Posadist is a Trotskyist international organisation. It was founded in 1962 by J. Posadas, who had been the leader of the Latin America Bureau of the Fourth International in the 1950s, and of the Fourth International's section in Argentina. Between their split from the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1962 and Posadas' death in 1981, Posadists developed a strain of communism that included several fringe ideas, which brought them into conflict with more mainstream left-wing groups.
A political international is a transnational organization of political parties having similar ideology or political orientation. The international works together on points of agreement to co-ordinate activity.
Revolutionary Left is a Trotskyist political party in Spain formerly affiliated with the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI). Revolutionary left publishes El Militante in Spanish, Militant in Catalan and Euskal Herria Sozialista. They contain a socialist perspective on news and current issues. It campaigns for a party of the working class to express the political needs of those not benefiting from the capitalist system. They believe a strong and organized movement of workers and young people can overthrow capitalism and establish a new society. This can be achieved by taking banks and big businesses into public ownership and administering them through democratic control and management.
The Socialist Workers League was a group of Israeli Trotskyists, founded in 2002 and dissolved in 2004. The SWL was built as a result of a split initiated by Trotskyists who were part of the Israeli Committee for One Democratic Republic of Palestine. The prominent member of the SWL was Yossi Schwartz, former member of the leadership of the Canadian section of the International Communist League, known as the international Spartacist tendency, the Trotskyist League (Canada). The Trotskyists, led by Schwartz, believed that only a program that struggles for a socialist Palestinian republic can unite the Palestinian Arab workers and peasants of the region.
Centrist Marxism represents a position between revolution and reformism. Within the Marxist movement, centrism thus entails a specific meaning between the left-wing revolutionary socialism and the right-wing reformist socialist. For instance, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) were both seen as centrist because they oscillated between advocating reaching a socialist economy through reforms and advocating a socialist revolution. The parties that belonged to the Two-and-a-half and Three-and-a-half Internationals, who could not choose between the reformism of the Second International and the revolutionary politics of the Third International, were also exemplary of centrism in this sense. They included the Spanish Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and Poale Zion.
The Workers' International League (WIL) was a Trotskyist group that existed in Britain from 1937 to 1944.
Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine, and tradition within socialism that stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary to bring about structural changes in society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for transitioning from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as a seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class and its interests.
The Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) is a Trotskyist political international. It was founded as the Committee for a Marxist International by British-based South African political theorist Ted Grant and his supporters after they broke with the Committee for a Workers' International in 1992, and was subsequently renamed the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) in 2004 before adopting its current name in June 2024. The organization's website, Marxist.com or In Defence of Marxism, is edited by Alan Woods. The site is multilingual, and publishes international current affairs articles written from a Marxist perspective, as well as many historical and theoretical articles.
The phrase Fifth International refers to the efforts made by groups of socialists and communists to create a new workers' international.
The Revolutionary Communist Party was a British Trotskyist group, formed in 1944 and active until 1949, which published the newspaper Socialist Appeal and a theoretical journal, Workers International News. The party was the ancestor of the three main currents of British Trotskyism: Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party, Ted Grant's Militant and Tony Cliff's Socialist Workers Party.
The Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) was an international association of Trotskyist political parties and organisations. Today, two groups claim to be the continuation of the CWI, the refounded Committee for a Workers' International and International Socialist Alternative.
Edward Grant was a South African Trotskyist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He was a founding member of the group Militant and later Socialist Appeal.
Far-left politics in the United Kingdom have existed since at least the 1840s, with the formation of various organisations following ideologies such as Marxism, revolutionary socialism, communism, anarchism and syndicalism.
