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Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Marx, Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg.
The Fourth International (FI) was established in France in 1938 by Leon Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union and the Communist International.
The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was a Spanish communist party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain and the Workers and Peasants' Bloc against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom the former broke.
The Revolutionary Communist League was a small Trotskyist group in Britain. It was founded in 1970 by two small groups, one who split from International Marxist Group, after failing to persuade the group to turn away from work in the student movement and towards the trade unions and entryism in the Labour Party, and one which had split from Militant.
The International Revolutionary Marxist Centre was an international association of left-socialist parties. The member-parties rejected both mainstream social democracy and the Third International.
The Communist League was one of the first Trotskyist groups in Britain, formed in 1932 by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain in South London, including Harry Wicks, who had been expelled after forming a loose grouping inside the CPGB known as the Balham Group. This became the British Section of the International Left Opposition and adopted the name Communist League in June 1933. They published a monthly newspaper, Red Flag, and a quarterly journal, The Communist.
Harry Wicks was a British socialist activist.
The Spartacist League 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.
Centrism has a specific meaning within the Marxist movement, referring to a position between revolution and reformism. For instance, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and British Independent Labour Party (ILP) were both seen as centrist because they oscillated between advocating reaching a socialist economy through reforms and advocating revolution. The parties that belonged to the so-called Two-and-a-half and Three-and-a-half Internationals, who could not choose between the reformism of the social democrat Second International and the revolutionary politics of the Communist 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 International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; 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 Militant Group was an early British Trotskyist group, formed in 1935 by Denzil Dean Harber, former leader of the entrist Marxist Group in the ILP, as a separate entrist group inside the Labour Party.
Denzil Dean Harber was an early British Trotskyist leader and later in his life a prominent British ornithologist.
The first Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was formed in early 1938 by the merger of the Marxist League led by Harry Wicks and the Marxist Group led by C. L. R. James.
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 tendency and Tony Cliff's Socialist Workers Party.
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.
Orthodox Trotskyism is a branch of Trotskyism which aims to adhere more closely to the philosophy, methods and positions of Leon Trotsky and the early Fourth International, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx than other avowed Trotskyists.
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.
References
- ↑ Alexander, Robert Jackson.International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement. Duke University Press, 1991, p438
- ↑ Barberis, Peter; McHugh, John; Tyldesley, Mike. Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations: Parties, Groups and Movements of the 20th Century. A&C Black, 2000, p153
- ↑ "LEON TROTSKY: Leon Trotsky on Britain, Excerpts from his writings".
- Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, Against the Stream.