Workers' Power (UK): Difference between revisions

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.

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.

The League for the Fifth International has founded a youth organisation, known as Revolution, which is politically independent though closely linked to Workers Power. However, non-LFI members in Revo, including most of the German, Czech, Swiss and, Australian groups, opposed to what they described as the bureaucratic control of the L5I, formed a tendency called Independent Revolution or iRevo after the Second International Delegates Conference held in Prague in July, where the Australian section was desectionalised from Revolution in a controversial vote in which the L5I members held the majority.

On July 1, 2006, the group issued a statement regarding the expulsion of almost half of its members, including several founders. This formed part of an international factional struggle over perspectives and tactics. The expelled group, calling itself Permanent Revolution, issued its own statement.[1]

In October 2006, the German & Czech iRevo comrades were expelled from Revolution.

• Workers Power website
• The L5I website
• Revolution UK website
• http://www.permanentrevolution.net
• http://www.irevo.int.tc