Communist League (New Zealand)
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The Communist League of New Zealand is a New Zealand communist party.
The party was founded in 1969 by students from Victoria University of Wellington, and was originally named the Socialist Action League. The new party rejected the more established groups such as the Communist Party as too authoritarian, conservative, and unimaginative, but at the same time, rejected many of the newer communist groups in New Zealand as disorganised and unfocused. It was aligned with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), an international grouping of Trotskyist parties. The party achieved a certain amount of public recognition for its role in protests against the Vietnam War.
In the 1980s, the Socialist Workers Party in the United States broke away from the Trotskyism, and left the USFI. A number of other parties in the USFI chose also chose to leave, including the Socialist Action League in New Zealand. Those members of the Socialist Action League who did not agree with the departure from Trotskyism and the USFI were expelled or resigned. Later, the Socialist Action League renamed itself the Communist League, following the pattern of the other parties that had left the USFI. Today, the party is still associated with the Socialist Workers Party's so-called Pathfinder tendency. In the 2002 elections, it stood two candidates, but gained only a handful of votes.
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