Workers' Power (UK)
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| Workers Power | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Leader | none |
| Founded | 1974 |
| Headquarters | London |
| Political Ideology | Trotskyism |
| Political Position | Far left |
| International Affiliation | League for the Fifth International |
| European Affiliation | none |
| European Parliament Group | none |
| Colours | none |
| Website | workerspower.com |
| See also | Politics of the UK |
Workers Power is a Trotskyist group, affiliated to the League for the Fifth International, which it was a prime mover in founding. The group in the UK publish a newspaper, also named Workers Power and print the L5I's quarterly English language journal, Fifth International. They have branches London, and Leeds - which also has the largest section of their youth group, Revolution (political group), as well as groups of members in Leicester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Huddersfield and Manchester.
The group originated in the International Socialists (IS) as the Left Faction. Whilst within IS it differed from the majority. The Faction argued that IS needed a fully developed programme. It also criticised the stance IS adopted on the IRA's terrorist actions. In 1974 it was excluded from IS and formed the Workers Power Group. In 1975 it briefly joined with Workers Fight to form the International-Communist League which split into its constituent parts soon after.
In 1980 Workers Power abandoned the position that the "Stalinist states" were state capitalist. In that year it co-published The Degenerated Revolution which adopted a unique term, that those countries were "degenerate workers states", representing a nuance to the Fourth International's 1948 analysis that the USSR was a degenerated workers state while the other countries were deformed workers' states.
Always linked with the Irish Workers Group, it has placed a great deal of emphasis on building an international organisation. It founded the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International with the IWG, the Gruppe Arbeitermacht in Germany and Pouvoir Ouvrier in France. The MRCI added supporters in Austria, Peru and Bolivia and became the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. It then added a group in New Zealand. After this growth the LRCI split with most of their supporters in New Zealand, all those in Peru and Bolivia and a few in Europe who formed the LCMRCI. At its international congress in 2003 it adopted a new programme and became the League for the Fifth International.
Workers Power took part in the Socialist Alliance but withdrew in 2003: in its opinion the Socialist Workers Party was bureaucratically destroying the political independence of the Alliance through its subjection to the then-new Respect coalition, which Workers Power held to be populist and not socialist in nature.
It campaigns to build a rank and file movement in the trade unions, and for a new mass workers' party in Britain. The group has grown in recent years through work in the student and anti-war movements. Workers Power members in the RMT trade union successfully pushed through a resolution calling for a conference to discuss the formation of a new workers party, which led to the RMT sponsored conference in London in January on the crisis of working class representation, which was attended by over 350 people. Workers Power has subsequently joined the Socialist Party-initiated Campaign for a New Workers' Party, even though they were critical of some of its formulations in the original statement (arguing the need for the party to be revolutionary from the start).
The League for the Fifth International has founded a youth organisation, known as Revolution, which is politically independent though closely linked to Workers Power. It has played an active role in the anti-capitalist movement over the last six years and has been a steady source of recruits to the "League for the Fifth International".
[edit] Expulsions
On July 1, 2006, the group issued a statement regarding the expulsion of almost around third of its members. This followed the release of a series of leaked emails that revealed the then international faction of the League were planning to split from the organisation on the eve of its Seventh Congress.
This was a culmination of a year and a half period of internal struggle within the group over perspectives and tasks. The parameters of the debate were around whether global capitalism had entered a period crises described as a "pre-revolutionary period" by the L5I akin to Trotsky's description on the 1938 Transitional Programme or whether the restoration of capitalism in the former workers states in the 1990s and the defeats of the workers movement, particularly in the US and UK in the 1970s/80s had enabled it to escape from the stagnant phase of capitalist development clearly manifest then; the extent of the breaks in social democracy and whether it was still permissible to use united front tactics towards them and the significance (or not) of the anti-capitalist movement; and whether social forums could be transformed into a revolutionary international.
The expelled group, calling itself Permanent Revolution, issued its own statement.[1]
Alongside this split in the League there had also been a period of dispute in the youth group Revolution over the role of L5I members in the organisation. Some non-L5I members (led by a former-L5I member), calling themselves 'independents', formed a tendency called iRevo in the Summer of 2006 releasing a statement explaining they still supported the manifesto but rejected the involvement of the L5I [2]. iRevo included over half of the German and Czech Revolution sections as well as the Swiss section. There was a period of debate and discussion following the formation of this tendency [3] but in October 2006 iRevo split from Revolution after refusing to recognise the international leadership structures and Conference decisions which they claimed were controlled by the L5I.
