 |
Revolutionary Workers' Party (Trotskyist) | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1962 |
| Split from | Revolutionary Socialist League |
| Newspaper | Red Flag |
| Ideology | Posadism |
The Revolutionary Workers' Party (Trotskyist) was a socialist political party in Britain, based in Birmingham. [1]
It was founded in 1963 by members of the Revolutionary Socialist League who supported the Fourth International of J. Posadas when it split from the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. [2] The group began working on the European Marxist Review and publishing Red Flag. It later supported Sinn Féin, the Black Panther Party and also worked within Labour Party Young Socialists.
In the early 1970s, the party suffered a major split, with supporters of Dave Douglass leaving to form the Socialist Union (Internationalist).
The remainder of the party remained loyal to Posadas' line; it continued with a very low level of activity after his death in 1981, and continued to publish Red Flag intermittently until the year 2000. [2]
The organisation adhered to Posadism, the theories of Argentine Trotskyist, J. Posadas. He was the author of a number of works with an unconventional slant; he tried to create a synthesis of Trotskyism and Ufology. His most prominent thesis from this perspective was Flying saucers, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working-class struggle and the socialist future of mankind (1968). Posadists believed that extra-terrestrials visiting earth in flying saucers must come from a socially and scientifically advanced civilisation to master inter-planetary travel and that the working-class should welcome the alien invaders as their liberators.
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and by some other members of Left Opposition and IV International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and Bolshevik–Leninist, a follower of Marx, Engels, and of 3L: Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The Fourth International (FI) is a revolutionary socialist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, also known as Trotskyists, whose declared goal is the overthrowing of global capitalism and the establishment of world socialism via international revolution. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938, as Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Third International or Comintern as effectively puppets of Stalinism and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own competing Fourth International.
Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, better known under the pseudonym J. Posadas or sometimes Juan Posadas, was an Argentine Trotskyist whose personal vision is usually described as Posadism. Originally a collective pen name of the leadership of the Grupo Cuarta Internacional in Argentina in the 1940s, it was also used by Dante Minazzoli initially.
The Workers Socialist League (WSL) was a Trotskyist group in Britain. The group was formed by Alan Thornett and other members of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) after their expulsion from that group in 1974.
The Fourth International Posadist is a Trotskyist international. 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.
The International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada, the Workers Party of Canada, Socialist Policy Group, Socialist Workers League, Revolutionary Workers Party, The Club, the Socialist Education League and Socialist Information Centre, and the League for Socialist Action were successive Trotskyist organisations in Canada.
John Gordon Michael Lawrence was a leading far-left activist in a wide variety of groups in Britain.
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 International Marxist Group (IMG) was a Trotskyist group in Britain between 1968 and 1982. It was the British Section of the Fourth International. It had around 1,000 members and supporters in the late 1970s. In 1980, it had 682 members; by 1982, when it changed its name to the Socialist League, membership had fallen to 534.
The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, is a Trotskyist international. In 1963, following a ten-year schism, the majorities of the two public factions of the Fourth International, the International Secretariat and the International Committee, reunited, electing a United Secretariat of the Fourth International. In 2003, the United Secretariat was replaced by an Executive Bureau and an International Committee, although some other Trotskyists still refer to the organisation as the USFI or USec.
The French Turn was the name given to the entry between 1934 and 1936 of the French Trotskyists into the Section Française de l'International Ouvrière. The French Turn was repeated by Trotskyists in other countries during the 1930s.
The Workers Revolutionary Party is a Trotskyist group in Britain once led by Gerry Healy. In the mid-1980s, it split into several smaller groups, one of which retains possession of the name.
Workers' Power was a Trotskyist group which formed the British section of the League for the Fifth International. The group published the magazine Workers Power and distributed the English language journal Fifth International.
Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine and tradition within socialism which stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary in order to bring about structural changes to society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for a transition from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as 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 Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.
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 Trotskyists.
Michael Banda, born Michael Alexander Van Der Poorten, was a Sri Lankan socialist activist best known as the General Secretary of the British Workers Revolutionary Party.
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.
The Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) is an international association of Trotskyist political parties. The organisation considers itself a continuation of the Committee for a Workers' International that was founded in 1974.
