International socialist trend

ICT begins its story with a British group formed around Socialist Review magazine. The group appeared after Tony Cliff and his supporters were expelled from The Club and, accordingly, from the Fourth International in 1950.

During the 1950s, Socialist Review had good relations with the American International Socialist League (MSL), led by Max Shachtman , before it broke up in 1958. The group maintained relations with comrades who left this organization, as well as individually with members of the Fourth International. However, until the 1960s they did not have a significant increase in the number of supporters.

The theory of permanent military economics was developed by T.N. Vance in a series of publications during 1951 in the journal of the American MSL New International, although it is based on Keynesian theory and was developed in a Marxist manner by Tony Cliff in the early 1950s. The idea was further developed by theorists such as Mike Kidron, Nigel Harris and Chris Harman .

In the 1960s, the group took on the name International Socialists (MS). During this period, the group goes to the international level, establishes relations with comrades in other countries, who begin to create organizations in their own countries. One of the first was the Socialist Labor Movement in Ireland in 1971, followed by the formation of groups in Australia, Canada and Germany. Relations were established with the organization Independent Socialists (later - International Socialists) in the United States. These ties led to the split of American "International Socialists" in 1978, and the formation of the International Socialist Organization, closely linked to the British PSA.

In the late 1960s, International Socialists also participated in meetings organized by the French Workers' Wrestling , which were also attended by American International Socialists. At that time, the MC and the Republic of Belarus represented a semi-syndicalist tendency in the world Trotskyist movement. The meetings were attended by a variety of political groups, such as, for example, the operators from the Autonomia Operaia.

Despite these successes, this was not a formal association. Meanwhile, international meetings of the leaders of the "International Socialists" developed, and usually took place as part of the Marxist PSA summer school in London.

In the 1980s, new groups appeared in France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Greece. A group of Turkish cliffists at that time recruited supporters in Germany and Britain.

The 1990s were a period of further growth in ICT - organizations were founded in Austria, Cyprus, Spain, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Korea. Organizations were also created in the former Stalinist states - Poland and the Czech Republic. In Russia, there were two groups that maintained relations with the International Socialist Trend: the revolutionary proletarian cells (or the Workers' struggle group) in St. Petersburg ^[1] and the Socialist Solidarity group in Moscow ^[2] . However, both of these organizations ceased to exist by the second half of the 1990s.

However, the 1990s were marked by a number of problems for Trend. There are several breakaways from the organization that were not related to each other. But it seemed that they had one basis under them. According to members of some groups, the reason for the breakaways was in the internal regime within their organizations, which were increasingly bureaucratized, as well as the lack of democracy and accountability of leadership at the international level. The groups affected by the splits were in Belgium, Germany, South Africa, Ireland, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and France. In Belgium, most of the group became part of the local section of the Workers International Committee .

The next few years were marked by the contradictory development of Trends. New groups were formed in Austria, Pakistan, Botswana, Lebanon, Uruguay, Finland, Sweden and Ghana. At the same time, the leadership of the International Socialist Organization, a section in the United States, began a discussion with the leadership of the British PSA on the importance of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalist movement, which resulted in a thousands-strong demonstration in Seattle in November 1999. However, in the end, the MCO was excluded from the Trend, and a small part, faithful to the IST, left the organization and founded the small group “Left Turn”. The various currents within the anti-globalist / alterglobast movement and its political perspectives were subsequently analyzed in the book “The Anti-capitalist Manifesto” by the leading ICT theorist Alex Kallinikos (2003).

In Greece, a split also occurred in the Socialist Workers 'Party, as a result of which a minority emerged from it, forming the organization Internationalist Workers' Left (ΔΕΑ). Today, the Greek PSA operates within the framework of the extra-parliamentary left-wing radical front, “United Anticapitalist Left” (ANTARSIA), and ΔΕΑ joined the Coalition of Radical Left . In a number of European countries, the ICT sections also became part of wider left associations such as the Danish Red-Green Coalition (the International Socialists group) and the Dutch Socialist Party .

At the present stage, a number of sections of the Trends in the countries of the "Third World" show significant protest activity. In Thailand, the activist of the local Left Turn, Professor Tchi Ungpakorn, played an important role in the Red Shirts movement. The “ Revolutionary Socialists ”, the Egyptian section of the ICT, became one of the most active left groups that took part in the revolutionary events in Egypt in 2011 , and the 23-year-old representative of the movement, the blogger Zhizhi Ibrahim , was one of the recognizable faces of Tahrir Square . At the same time, in Zimbabwe, the Mugabe regime arrested 52 activists associated with the ICT-affiliated International Socialist Organization, who gathered for a discussion about the Arab Spring . Their trial threatens to end with the death penalty.

• European left
• European anti-capitalist left
• Reunited Fourth International

1. ↑ Korgunyuk Yu. G. , Zaslavsky S.E. Russian multi-party system. Chapter 5. The Communist Movement (1996)
2. ↑ A.N. Tarasov . Leftists in Russia: Moderate to Extremist

• Official website
• Some IST Documents
• "International Socialists." Biographies and Works