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International Bolshevik Tendency | |
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| Abbreviation | IBT |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Split from | international Spartacist tendency (now ICL) |
| Ideology | Communism Leninism Trotskyism Bolshevism |
| Political position | Far-left |
| Website | |
| www | |
| Part of a series on |
| Trotskyism |
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The International Bolshevik Tendency is an international Trotskyist organisation. [1]
The International Bolshevik Tendency was originally known as the External Tendency (ET) and was formed in 1982 by former members of the International Spartacist Tendency (iSt) (now known as the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)). [2]
While identifying the International Spartacists Tendency, from the 1960s until the late 1970s, as the only grouping with a consistency revolutionary programme, members of the External Tendency alleged a 'process of political degeneration' in the late 70s and early 80s. [3] A claim disputed by the International Spartacist Tendency (iSt) and subsequently, the International Communist League (ICL). [4]
While the External Tendency had engaged in polemical exchanges with leaders of the iSt [5] by 1985 the External Tendency characterised the Spartacist League's break from its revolutionary past as "qualitatively complete". [6]
In 1991, the North American-based Bolshevik Tendency fused with the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG) of New Zealand at a joint conference in Oakland, California. This unified tendency then joined forces in August with members of the former Gruppe IV. Internationale based in West Berlin. These mergers resulted in the organisation renaming itself the International Bolshevik Tendency. [7]
In October 2018 a number of members of the International Bolshevik Tendency left the organisation. Those leaving formed a separate organisations called the Bolshevik Tendency and Bolshevik Group (South Korea), identifying political alignment with the organisation before its fusion with the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG). The departing members cited disagreements regarding Russia and Imperialism, chiefly whether Russia could be considered Imperialist, with the departing members viewing Russia as non-Imperialist in character. [8] It argued that this disagreement and others regarding the character of Islamist regimes in Egypt, Turkey and Iran signified a growing divergence in political analysis between itself and the International Bolshevik Tendency. [9] The International Bolshevik Tendency stated that it does not consider these differences sufficient grounds for a separate organisation, and has called on former members to rejoin. [10]
The group began publishing its journal '1917' as the Bolshevik Tendency, in the winter of 1986. [11] The journal name taking inspiration from 'year one of the proletarian revolution'. [12]
The British section of the International Bolshevik Tendency began publishing the 'Marxist Bulletin' in 1997, while operating as a faction within the Socialist Labour Party (UK). [13] It published the last issue in May 2000. [14]
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 ".
The Fourth International (FI) was a political international established in France in 1938 by Leon Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union and the Communist International.
The League for the Fourth International (LFI) is a Trotskyist international organization that has sections in Mexico, Brazil, Italy, the United States and Germany. All of these are very small and based in at most one or two cities. Like other international Trotskyist groups, it fights for "international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party."
James Robertson (1928–2019) was the long-time and founding National Chairman of the Spartacist League (US), the original national section of the International Communist League. In his later years, Robertson was consultative member of the ICL's international executive committee.
The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was a Trotskyist group in the United States established in 1973 and disbanded in 1989.
Trotskyism in Vietnam was represented by those who, in left opposition to the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) of Ho Chi Minh, identified with the call by Leon Trotsky to re-found "vanguard parties of proletariat" on principles of "proletarian internationalism" and of "permanent revolution". Active in the 1930s in organising the Saigon waterfront, industry and transport, Trotskyists presented a significant challenge to the Moscow-aligned party in Cochinchina. Following the September 1945 Saigon uprising against the restoration of French colonial rule, Vietnamese Trotskyists were systematically hunted down and eliminated by both the French Sûreté and the Communist-front Viet Minh.
The Spartacist League/U.S. is a Trotskyist political grouping which is the United States section of the International Communist League, formerly the International Spartacist Tendency. This Spartacist League named themselves after the original Spartacus League of Weimar Republic in Germany, but has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is a public faction of the Fourth International founded in 1953. Today, two Trotskyist internationals claim to be the continuations of the ICFI; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK.
The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, is a Trotskyist international.
The Workers Party (WP) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland and Leon Trotsky's belief that the USSR under Joseph Stalin was still innately proletarian, a "degenerated workers' state." They included Max Shachtman, who became the new group's leader, Hal Draper, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Abern, Joseph Carter, Julius Jacobson, Phyllis Jacobson, Albert Glotzer, Stan Weir, B. J. Widick, James Robertson, and Irving Howe. The party's politics are often referred to as "Shachtmanite."
The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism that aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism by supporting the organised working class as a "third camp".
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) abbreviated as ICL(FI), earlier known as the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) is a Trotskyist international. Its largest constituent party is the Spartacist League (US). There are smaller sections of the ICL (FI) in Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Greece and the United Kingdom.
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they regard as more authentically Marxist than the views of Marxism–Leninism espoused by the Communist International after its Bolshevization by Joseph Stalin and during its second congress.
Michel Pablo was the pseudonym of Michalis N. Raptis, a Trotskyist leader of Greek origin.
Alan Woods is a British Trotskyist political theorist and author. He is one of the leading members of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) and was a founder of Socialist Appeal. He is political editor of the RCI's In Defence of Marxism website. Woods was a leading supporter within the Militant tendency within the Labour Party and its parent group the Committee for a Workers' International until the early 1990s. A series of disagreements on tactics and theory led to Woods and Ted Grant leaving the CWI, to found the Committee for a Marxist International in 1992. They continued with the policy of entryism into the Labour Party. Woods has expressed particularly vocal support for the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and repeatedly met with the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, leading to speculation that he was a close political adviser to the president.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
