International Bolshevik Tendency

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The International Bolshevik Tendency is an international Trotskyist organisation. It was formed by former members of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) in the USA and Canada, but many of its current members are not former Spartacists. The IBT publishes a journal, entitled 1917.

Politically it claims to continue the Spartacist tradition which it is argued degenerated in the late 1970s. They claim that it is no coincidence that most of the founding cadre of the IBT were pushed out of the iSt in those years. They also claim that the iSt abandoned much of its trade union work at the same time. The iSt in turn claims that IBT members were not "pushed out" but rather quit. The iSt/ICL-FI and the IBT have both produced a number of polemical documents against one another.

After a period known as the External Tendency of the iSt the USA- and Canada-based founders of the IBT renamed themselves the Bolshevik Tendency. They briefly won the allegiance of a small group on the US west coast called the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency only to lose them again.

The IBT group in Germany was also drawn from members of the iSt who had formed the Gruppe IV. Internationale (GIVI) before joining the newly formed IBT as the Gruppe Spartakus. The IBT section in New Zealand, the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG), was founded by former Spartacist leader Bill Logan, expelled by the Spartacist League in 1979 for "gross moral turpitude", although none of the claims made by the Spartacist League have ever been proven. After a period of work with the German GIVI they fused with them and the PRG of New Zealand and became the International Bolshevik Tendency.

They have since gained a tiny group of supporters in Britain, in part from transfer of members from other IBT sections, who spent some time in Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party publishing a journal entitled Marxist Bulletin, before resuming an independent existence.

In 1998 the IBT held its Second International Conference where they marked the loss of the majority of their New York City branch and the recruitment of others from what they describe, following the traditions of the Spartacists, as Ostensible Revolutionary Organizations (OROs) including the Revolutionary Workers League and the Canadian International Socialists. Their Third International Conference took place in October 2001 and recorded the recruitment of the Young Revolutionary Marxists in Ukraine. This group later turned out to be part of a fraud to obtain funds.

It is a tiny organization, with members in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Germany.