Socialist Justice Party

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Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna




Leader	Per-Åke Westerlund

Founded	1973

Political ideology	Trotskyism
International affiliation	Committee for a Workers International
Colour(s)	Red

Website	www.socialisterna.org

See also the politics of Sweden series

The Socialist Justice Party (Swedish: Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna, RS) is a Trotskyist political party in Sweden. RS is the Swedish section of the Committee for a Workers' International. The forerunner organization of RS was called Arbetarförbundet Offensiv (Workers' League - Offensive). The group developed out of the Offensiv group that had practiced entryism in the Swedish Social Democratic Party during the 1970s and 1980s.

1 History
2 Elections
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

The group who were later to start Offensiv were students at Umeå University and members of Swedish Social Democratic Youth League (SSU, Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Ungdomsförbund: the youth organisation of the Swedish Social Democratic Party). At the 1972 SSU conference, two members of this group; Anders Hjelm and Arne Johansson; met representatives of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Britain, where supporters of the left wing Militant had won control of that organisation, and began discussing with them. As Arne Johansson puts it "One conclusion of the discussions with the British Trotskyists was that we should start publishing a paper as a rallying point for a Marxist left within the labour movement, something we then did ahead of the election in 1973".^[1]

In the early 1980s SSU initiated expulsions against young socialists associated with Arbetarförbundet Offensiv and their newspaper, named Offensiv. Activists of Offensiv defined these expulsions as witchhunts arranged by the right-wing leadership of SSU. On the other hand, the leadership of SSU saw the Offensiv-tendency as an ambition to carry out a communist take-over of SSU.

In the early 1990s, Arbetarförbundet Offensiv started to relinquish their former tactics of entryism into other movements. The organisation also gradually distanced themselves from the Swedish Social Democratic Party and even further from SSU, who's members often saw them as infiltrators. The newspaper, Offensiv, ran harsh criticism on the Social Democratic Party's policies, claiming that this party no longer represented the interests of the working class. Instead they started to promote the building of a new labour party to take this role.

In 1997, Arbetarförbundet Offensiv changed name to Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna (Socialist Justice Party or Justice Party - the Socialists) and began publishing Offensiv weekly instead of monthly.^[2]

[edit] Elections

RS first won seats on the municipal council of Umeå in 1991, winning 3 seats. In 2002 the party had three seats in the municipal council in Umeå and also won two seats in Luleå.^[3] After the 2006 elections, RS is represented in the municipal councils of Umeå (3 seats), Luleå (3 seats) and Haninge (2 seats).^[4]