The Socialist League (or Forward Group) was a Canadian Trotskyist group formed in 1974 by Ross Dowson and approximately twenty other former members of the League for Socialist Action after their faction was defeated at the 1973 LSA national convention. Dowson had previously been the leader of the LSA. The group published a newspaper, Forward and soon became better known as the "Forward Readers Group" or the "Forward Group".
Dowson and his followers differed with the rest of the Trotskyist movement in Canada through their adoption of a Canadian economic nationalist perspective, influenced by the views of the Waffle, a Marxist tendency within the New Democratic Party (NDP) within which the LSA was active.
They argued that Canada was an economic colony of the United States and thus an oppressed nation where other Marxists viewed Canada as a fully capitalist nation, if only a "junior partner" participating in the oppression of the developing world.
The Socialist League viewed its competitors on the left as extremists and ultra-leftists and was especially critical of their views on the New Democratic Party. The Socialist League was an entrist formation and supported full participation by socialists in the NDP where the LSA and particularly the Revolutionary Marxist Group were increasingly critical of the NDP and came to support running their own candidates against NDP nominees in some ridings during provincial and federal elections. Instead, the Socialist League formed the Left Caucus within the NDP and worked to build a leftist tendency within the party. The Caucus' strategy was to ally with "centrists" within the NDP such as, in the mid-1980s, Judy Rebick with whom it participated in the Committee for an Activist Party. For a time Forward had influence in a few NDP riding associations such as in the suburban Toronto riding of Oriole where it helped Rebick win the NDP nomination for the 1987 Ontario election and nearby York Mills where Socialist League member Gord Doctorow was the NDP candidate in the 1985 Ontario election.
The Socialist League remained aloof in 1977 when the RWL and LSA and its Quebec counterparts fused to form the Revolutionary Workers League. The group grew initially through the 1970s and was able to recruit a number of student youth, particularly at York University but it declined through the 1980s and became largely inactive after Dowson suffered a stroke in 1989. Forward ceased publication in the mid-1980s, although the Left Caucus Bulletin continued to appear until the mid-1990s.
The Communist League in Canada was founded as the "Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire" (RWL) in 1977 as the result of a merger of the League for Socialist Action (LSA), the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG) and the Groupe Marxiste Revolutionaire.
The League for Socialist Action was a Trotskyist organization in Canada. It was known by several names throughout its history, including the International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada, the Workers Party of Canada, the Socialist Policy Group, the Socialist Workers League, the Revolutionary Workers Party, The Club, the Socialist Education League and the Socialist Information Centre.
Ross Jewitt Dowson was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure.
The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was a Trotskyist group in the United States established circa 1972 and disbanded 1989.
The New Democratic Party Socialist Caucus is an unofficial left-wing faction within Canada's New Democratic Party.
Judy Rebick is a Canadian writer, journalist, political activist, and feminist.
The Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG) was a Trotskyist political organization in Canada in the 1970s. Though not a registered political party it did field small numbers of candidates in several elections.
For information about the British Marxist newspaper named Socialist Challenge see International Marxist Group.
Ernie Tate was a long-standing supporter and leading member of Trotskyist groups in Canada and the United Kingdom and a founder in the 1960s of the International Marxist Group and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain.
Joe Flexer was a trade unionist and communist activist in Canada. Born in Brooklyn, Flexer was politicized in the mid-1940s through contacts with the American Communist Party in New York City. He left the United States, a Zionist, in 1950 at the age of 17 with the Habonim Zionist youth movement and immigrated to Israel where he lived in Kibbutz Urim.
Murray Dowson was a Canadian Trotskyist politician.
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 Spartacist League is a Trotskyist political grouping. They are 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 the current League has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.
The Left Caucus was an Ontario-based left-wing pressure group within the New Democratic Party of Canada and the Ontario New Democratic Party from the late 1970s to early 1990s.
Socialist Action is a revolutionary socialist political organization in Canada. Its members write for and distribute the North American monthly newspaper, Socialist Action, published in San Francisco. It has a youth affiliate called Youth for Socialist Action (YSA),.
Entryism is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. If the organization being "entered" is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge and subversion to hide the fact that they are an organization in their own right.
The International Communist League , earlier known as the International Spartacist tendency 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.
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.
John Riddell is a Canadian Marxist essayist, historian, editor, translator and activist. He is best known as editor of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, an eight-volume series of books of Communist International documents, many of which have been translated into English for the first time.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
