The Socialist Equality Party (Australia) will hold an online lecture this Tuesday, June 30, on the 1985–86 split between the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).
The split ranks among the most crucial strategic experiences of the Trotskyist movement and the international working class. The victory of the ICFI over the WRP brought to an end a civil war within the Fourth International, between genuine Trotskyists and Pabloite national-opportunists, that had raged for more than 30 years.
The lecture will review the origins of the turn by the WRP to British nationalism and its reversion to the Pabloite positions that it had once powerfully fought against. It will detail the struggle taken up by the Workers League against the WRP in the early 1980s, including over the British organisation’s support for bourgeois-nationalist governments in the Middle East and its increasing adaptation to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.
The fight waged against the WRP created the conditions for the development of the ICFI as the world party of socialist revolution envisaged by Leon Trotsky when he founded the Fourth International. It laid the basis for a renaissance of Marxism, expressed in the ICFI’s analysis of globalisation, its fight against historical falsification, establishment of Socialist Equality Parties and launching of the World Socialist Web Site. It prepared the Trotskyist movement for the current situation, characterised by a breakdown of global capitalism and a resurgence of the working class.
The lecture will be delivered by Oscar Grenfell, a member of the SEP (Australia) national committee.
The event, which is part of a series of six weekly lectures, is on the Zoom platform at 7 p.m. (Australian Eastern Standard Time), June 30. To participate, download the app or join on a web browser, and click on this link before the lecture begins:
To view the previous lectures in the series click here.