The Workers Socialist League (WSL) was a Trotskyist political party in the United Kingdom. The group was formed by Alan Thornett and other members of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) after their expulsion from that group in 1974. Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. ... A political party is a political organization that subscribes to a certain ideology and seeks to attain political power within a government. ... Alan Thornett is a British Trotskyist leader. ... The Workers Revolutionary Party was a Trotskyist political party in the United Kingdom. ... 1974 is a common year starting on Tuesday (click on link for calendar). ...

Thornett and his friends had questioned what they saw as a sectarian turn of the WRP. They argued that this turn would isolate the WRP and that it was necessary to turn back to Trotsky's Transitional Programme. They wrote a number of documents to argue their case and as a result were expelled. A minor controversy surrounded these documents when some WRP members alleged that Thornett was not their author, but that in fact they were written by members of the Bulletin Group, who were supporters of Pierre Lambert and therefore strongly opposed by the WRP. Sectarianism is an adherence to a particular sect or party or denomination, it also usually involves a rejection of those not a member of ones sect. ... 1915 passport photo of Trotsky Leon Davidovich Trotsky (Russian: Лев Давидович Троцкий; also transliterated Trotskii, Trotski, Trotzky) (October 26 (O.S.) = November 7 (N.S.), 1879 - August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Лев Давидович Бронштейн), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist intellectual. ... The full name of the Transitional Program is The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International:The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power. ... Pierre Lambert (born June 9, 1920) (real name Pierre Boussel) is a French Trotskyist leader. ...

The WSL was founded in 1975 with a leadership grouped around Thornett, Tony Richardson and John Lister. Terry Eagleton was a well-known member. It published the weekly paper Socialist Press and a number of issues of a theoretical journal Trotskyism Today, in the pages of which the United Secretariat of the Fourth International was dismissed in an article entitled The Poisoned Well. Unlike the WRP, whose politics it inherited, it covered Irish politics, women's struggles and broke with the homophobia characteristic of Gerry Healy. The group also decided that Cuba had been a workers state since the revolution of 1959. 1975 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... Terry Eagleton (born in Salford, England, on February 22, 1943) is a British literary critic and philosopher. ... The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is the largest Trotskyist international organisation. ... The Republic of Ireland is a sovereign, independent state. ... Homophobia (from Greek homos, same and fobos, fear) literally means fear of the same, however the term homo as a reference to homosexuals was used in the creation of the word. ... Gerry Healy (December 3, 1913 - December 14, 1989) was a Trotskyist politician. ... The Cuban Revolution was the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista by the 26th of July Movement and the establishment of a new government led by Fidel Castro in the 1950s. ...

In its first few years the WSL attempted to capitalise on its existing base in industry and expand outwards from its base in Oxford. Despite having more realistic perspectives than the WRP, it was never able to group more than 150 members. Many people who left the WRP simply left revolutionary politics, and as the level of industrial struggle slackened in the late 1970s the WSL lost members and internal factional struggles began. Oxford is a city and local government district in Oxfordshire, England, with a population of 134,248 (2001 census). ...

The first factional struggles were the result of the development of a small group of supporters of the American Spartacist League. Spartacist London had been founded in 1975 by American, Canadian and Australian Spartacists with the intention of engaging other Trotskyist groups in debate. As both they and the WSL have a common past in the International Committee of the Fourth International they paid great attention to the WSL. The result was that they recruited a number of WSL members to their views and these formed the Leninist Faction in 1977. The Leninist Faction would split to join the London Spartacists in forming the Spartacist League in 1978. This debilitating factional struggle had its sequel in 1979 when another group of WSL members were similarly won to the Spartacists this time calling themselves the Trotskyist Faction. The Spartacist League (Spartakusbund in German) was a left-wing Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during and just after the politically volatile years of World War I, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (nicknamed Red Rosa) along with others such as Clara Zetkin. ... 1975 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is a Trotskyist international. ... 1977 was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1977 calendar). ... 1978 was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... 1979 is a common year starting on Monday. ...

Meanwhile 1979 saw the election of a Conservative Government and the beginnings of a major offensive against the trade unions. This also had a reaction in the Labour Party which swung to the left and began to attract the attention of Trotskyist groups including the WSL. By 1980 the WSL was essentially working within the Labour Party which caused a degree of internal differentiation within its membership as to how to relate to the Labour Lefts around Tony Benn who they saw as reformists. The presence of another Trotskyist group in the Labour Party, the International-Communist League, also posed problems and the possibility of the two groups merging was raised. The Conservative Party is the largest political party on the centre-right in the United Kingdom. ... A union (labor union in American English; trade union in British English; either labour union or trade union in Canadian English) is a group of workers who act collectively to address common issues. ... The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom (see British politics), and one of the United Kingdoms three main political parties. ... 1980 is a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... Tony Benn speaking in London, June 2004 The Right Honourable Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (born April 3, 1925), known as Tony Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, is a British politician regarded as being on the left of the Labour Party. ... The International Communist League can refer to several Trotskyist political groupings: The name of the International Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, after 1933 and until 1936 when it became known as the Movement for the Fourth International. ...

Those members of the WSL most opposed to any fusion of the group with the I-CL tended to be those involved with the groups "open" work around unemployment which was then a massive question in Britain. The WSL launched a short-lived National Unemployed Workers Movement at this time which despite its name was actually more concerned with unemployed youth than workers thrown out of the factories. The fusion of the two groups was achieved in July 1981 with the fused group maintaining the name Workers Socialist League, often called the 'new' WSL, with Socialist Organiser as its paper (although theoretically SO was a "broad" paper and not that of the WSL or I-CL before it). The WSL remained affiliated to the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, a small international tendency of groups led by the WSL. Its other affiliates were to be found in Denmark, Italy, Greece, the USA and among Turkish exiles. The only group affiliated which supported the former I-CL was to be found in Australia. Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers in California during the Great Depression. ... 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Socialist Organiser was the name of a defunct weekly socialist newspaper circulated in the British Labour Party . ...

Within the new WSL disputes broke out immediately. Although their were many issues involved in the internal debates the Falklands War was paramount. Traditionally, Trotskyists defend countries oppressed by imperialism in any military conflict, calling this military support which is differentiated from political support. The reaction from some Trotskyists in Britain was to give such support to Argentina when war broke out, ignoring historical claims to the islands or the question of who began the war. The I-CL disagreed with this view and took a dual defeatist position on the war on the grounds that Argenetina was not a semi-colony of imperialism, and also called for self determination for the Falkland Islanders. This position caused disputes within the group, mostly with members of the old WSL. The Falklands War or the Malvinas War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas), was an armed conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, also known in Spanish as the Islas Malvinas, between March and June of 1982. ... A cartoon portraying the British Empire as an octopus, reaching into foreign lands Imperialism is a policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics... Defeatism is acceptance and content with defeat without struggle. ... A semi-colony is, in Marxist theory, a country which is nominally independent, but which is dominated by a greater power for the benefit of their ruling class. ... Self-determination is a principle in international law that a people ought to be able to determine their own governmental forms and structure free from outside influence. ...

By the summer of 1982 clear but informal factional lines had developed in the WSL. One group was the former I-CL around Sean Matgamna, a second around Alan Clinton and a smaller third group was composed of part of the old WSL. Most of the parties in the TILC supported the third group, which in January 1983 constituted itself as the Internationalist Tendency (IT). The small IT group came to disagree with both the other groups on many important issues, including the Labour Party, Northern Ireland and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The IT had 38 members most from the old WSL but including I-CLers with its main support in Leicester and Nottingham. It was led by Chris Erswell, Mike Jones and Pete Flack. 1982 is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1983 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Northern Ireland is one of four constituent parts of the United Kingdom. ... ‹The template below has been proposed for deletion. ...

In March 1983 the IT declared that it was now a faction, thus becoming the Internationalist Faction (IF), and it adopted a number of documents in which their criticisms of the leadership was stepped up. But there were by now tensions in the IF as some members became sympathetic to Workers Power and left to join that group. Others sympathised with the international tendency around the Argentine Workers Party, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. The next stage in the developing split was the April 1983 TILC meeting at which the WSL delegates voted to prevent Chilean sympathisers from affiliating to the TILC. The WSL then walked out after a resolution calling on Alan Thornett to fight Sean Matgamna's "revisionism". The IF who sympathised with the TILC were then expelled from the WSL, and formed the Workers Internationalist League. Workers Power is an orthodox Trotskyist group, affiliated to the League for the Fifth International, which they were prime movers in founding. ... Revisionism is a word which has several meanings. ... The Workers Internationalist League was a Trotskyist group in Britain founded in the summer of 1983 by the Internationalist Faction of the Workers Socialist League. ...

The WSL was a little smaller after the expulsion of the IF and still split between the supporters of Sean Matgamna and Alan Thornett. Thornett's supporters stopped paying subscriptions to the group and called several special conferences. Later in 1983, Matgamna's supporters formally expelled Thornett's supporters, although by this point the group was not functioning as a whole and both groups described the event as a "defusion".

Matgamna's supporters continued with the WSL and Socialist Organiser but soon dropped the name WSL in favour of the Socialist Organiser Alliance, while Thornett's depleted followers founded a new smaller group called the Socialist Group, which was to publish a magazine called Socialist Viewpoint until they later fused with the International Group. The International Marxist Group (IMG) was a Trotskyist political party in the United Kingdom between 1964 and 1987. ... The International Marxist Group (IMG) was a Trotskyist political party in the United Kingdom between 1964 and 1987. ...