Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
영국 사회주의노동자당
A Trotskyist party in the United Kingdom, founded in 1950 as the Socialist Review Group by supporters of Tony Cliff. It became the International Socialists in 1962 and took the name Socialist Workers Party in 1977. It rests on Cliff's analysis of the Soviet Union and its satellites as state capitalist rather than socialist, and belongs to the International Socialist Tendency.
In depth
The Socialist Review Group split from The Club and was formed in 1950 with only eight members. Because of its small size it practised entryism in the Labour Party, recruiting through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Labour's youth organisations. Renamed the International Socialism Group in December 1962, it gave up entryism around 1965 and turned to work in the trade unions. In 1968 it adopted Leninist democratic centralism, and through the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the student protests it grew from 400 to 1,000 members.
In the early 1970s it turned to industry, creating factory branches and rank-and-file papers, and its membership reached 4,000 by 1977. In January 1977 it was renamed the Socialist Workers Party, and that year it launched the Anti-Nazi League against the National Front. From 1978 Cliff became convinced that a downturn in struggle had begun, and by 1982 the party had turned to a propagandist approach based on geographical branches.
After 2001 the party took part in the Stop the War Coalition and in Respect, an electoral alliance with George Galloway, whose collapse in 2007 caused an internal crisis. In 2013 a crisis over the party's handling of allegations of sexual assault against the leading member Martin Smith followed, and about 700 members had resigned by 2014. The party is led by a central committee elected each January at its national conference and by a national committee.