Swp Uk

ON OCTOBER 14, 2017, Efraim Carlebach interviewed Ian Birchall at Birchall’s home in Edmonton, north London. In 1962, Birchall joined the International Socialists, a tendency led by Tony Cliff and the organizational forerunner of the extant Socialist Workers Party (UK), founded in 1977. Though he is no longer a member of the Socialist Workers Party, Birchall has remained a leading figure of the International Socialist tendency for over half a century. [Read More]

SPEAKING FOR THE International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) at the Left Forum, Jason Wright recently observed, “It seems for a while now that it has been the desire of Platypus to have a three-way conversation be tween New Left Maoism (as one of the more palatable faces of Stalinism), orthodox Trotskyism,” and Platypus themselves, who tend to put speakers in situations significantly less comfortable than their catechistic internal meetings. At a roundtable with the IBT, Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and Platypus, it would be difficult to discern which group has done a larger disservice to the workers’ movement. [Read More]

I became a Trotskyist in 1933. The theory of state capitalism is a development of Trotsky’s position… But at the end of the Second World War, the perspectives that Trotsky had put forward were not realized. Trotsky wrote that one thing was certain: the Stalinist bureaucracy would not survive the war. It would either be overthrown by revolution or by counterrevolution… The assumption was that the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy would be a fantastic opening for the Trotskyist movement, for the Fourth International. [Read More]

JAMES HEARTFIELD’S REVIEW of Ian Birchall’s biography of Tony Cliff, founder of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and therefore of the International Socialist Tendency, is a curious affair.1 Heartfield fails his readers by declining to situate himself in the story, as a champion of the changing perspectives of the late British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), unique among British left groups in having evolved from Trotskyism first to a neither-left-nor-right iconoclasm and then to a pro-market libertarianism. [Read More]

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY (SWP) is the largest political party left of the Labour Party, and has been active on the far left since 1977 and before that as the International Socialists since the 1960s. The party was led by Tony Cliff until his death thirteen years ago, and Ian Birchall, who has written this diligently researched memoir, is still a member since joining in the 1960s. Birchall’s “warts-and-all” examination is motivated by a marked unhappiness about A World To Win, the autobiography which Cliff apparently wrote based on recollection, without access to the relevant documentation. [Read More]