Socialist Workers Party | |
|---|---|
.png) | |
| Abbreviation | SWP |
| International secretary | Alex Callinicos |
| National secretary | Lewis Nielsen[1] |
| Founder | Tony Cliff |
| Founded | Socialist Review Group (1950) International Socialists (1962) Socialist Workers Party (1977) |
| Split from | Revolutionary Communist Party |
| Headquarters | London, England, United Kingdom |
| Newspaper | |
| Membership(2023) |  2,504 (financial)[2]6,000 (registered)[2] |
| Ideology | |
| International affiliation | International Socialist Tendency |
| Colours | Red |
| Governing bodies |
|
| Website | |
| socialistworker | |
TheSocialist Workers Party (SWP) is apolitical party in the United Kingdom. Founded as theSocialist Review Group (SRG) by supporters ofTony Cliff in 1950, it became theInternational Socialists in 1962 and the SWP in 1977.[3] The party considers itself to beTrotskyist. Cliff and his followers criticised theSoviet Union and its satellites, calling themstate capitalist rather thansocialist countries.
The SWP has founded severalfronts through which they have sought to coordinate and influence leftist action, such as theAnti-Nazi League in the late 1970s.[4] It also formed an alliance withGeorge Galloway andRespect, the dissolution of which in 2007 caused an internal crisis in the SWP. A more serious internal crisis emerged at the beginning of 2013 over allegations of rape and sexual assault made against a leading member of the party.[5][6] The SWP's handling of these accusations against the individual known as "Comrade Delta", later identified asMartin Smith, led to a significant decline in the party's membership.[7] The SWP has revised its procedures to reflect a zero tolerance approach to sexual harassment in 2024, and published a response to the 2013 internal crisis in May 2024.[8]
On the international level, the SWP is part of theInternational Socialist Tendency.
This section serves as a summary of the party's history. For a more detailed account, see the main article:
This period saw the group’s evolution from a small theoretical tendency into a national organisation engaged in industrial and anti-racist campaigns.
The origins of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) lie in the Socialist Review Group (SRG), founded in 1950 by supporters of Tony Cliff.[9][10] The group's theoretical basis was Cliff's analysis that the Soviet Union and its satellite states were bureaucratic state capitalist societies. Due to its small size, the SRG initially employed entryism within the Labour Party to recruit new members, particularly through the Labour League of Youth (LLY).[11]
In 1962, the SRG renamed itself the International Socialism Group (IS).[12] During this period, the group shifted away from entryism in the Labour Party around 1965 to focus heavily on trade union work and building a rank-and-file movement.[13] In 1968, the IS adopted Leninist democratic centralism as its organisational practice.[14]
This decade was marked by consolidation, rapid growth, and the launch of major anti-fascist initiatives.
By the early 1970s, the IS had grown significantly, increasing its membership from 400 to 1,000.[15] The Workers' Fight group joined as an open faction but were expelled in 1971, later becoming the Alliance for Workers' Liberty.[16] In 1975, what had been known as the Left Faction suffered the same fate and became Workers Power.[17] The Revolutionary Faction were expelled from the IS in 1973. The resulting Revolutionary Communist Group later developed an internal opposition that became the Revolutionary Communist Party led by Frank Furedi.[18]
The IS was renamed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in January 1977.[19] This decision was linked to the move to stand in elections and a perception that the organisation’s ability to initiate activity had increased.[20] According to Martin Shaw, this occurred with little internal discussion.[21] Jim Higgins later claimed the founding of the SWP was primarily an internal morale exercise rather than a real advance.[22]
A major initiative during the late 1970s was the launch of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in 1977 as a united-front organisation against the National Front.[23] The ANL was accused of being a front organisation for the SWP. The campaign worked closely with Rock Against Racism and adopted tactics of physical confrontation to deny the far right a public platform.
During the 1980s, rank-and-file organisations were wound down, along with the ANL, the women’s organisationWomen's Voice, and the ethnic minority paperFlame. Activists associated with ANL defence squads were denounced as "squadist" and expelled, later forming Anti-Fascist Action and Red Action.[24][25] The closure ofWomen's Voice in 1982, reportedly due to disagreements over feminist theory, was highly controversial.[26][27]
This era brought the party its greatest public prominence through anti-war mobilisation and electoral experiments.
Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the SWP played a central role in founding the Stop the War Coalition, opposing the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Leading SWP members held senior positions within the coalition.[28]
The party also participated in electoral alliances including the Socialist Alliance (1999–2004) and Respect – The Unity Coalition, which split in 2007.
The party experienced a major internal crisis in 2013–14 concerning allegations of sexual assault and rape against former National Secretary Martin Smith ("Comrade Delta"). The allegations had been known internally since 2010. The party’s handling of the case, including statements rejecting reliance on the criminal justice system, led to widespread criticism and the resignation of approximately 700 members by June 2014.
The SWP remains a smaller but active organisation involved in anti-racist and labour movement campaigns. It continues to publishSocialist Worker and supports campaigns including Unite Against Fascism, Love Music Hate Racism, and Stand Up To Racism.
In May 2024, the SWP issued a statement apologising for its handling of disciplinary cases involving "Comrade W and Comrade X".[29]
Undercover Metropolitan Police officers infiltrated the SWP between 1970 and 2007, with 24 officers involved, four of whom entered into sexual relationships with party members. As of December 2025, the public inquiry had not yet reported.
The leadership is formed by a central committee, and a national committee. Elections to the central committee are held at the national conference each January. As of 2023[update] the central committee members were:Alex Callinicos, Amy Leather, Camilla R,Charlie Kimber, Héctor Puente Sierra, Jessica Walsh, Joseph Choonara, Julie Sherry, Lewis Nielsen, Mark Thomas, Michael Bradley, Nadia Sayed, Sophia Beach, Tomáš Tengely Evans andWeyman Bennett.[30]
The national committee consists of 51 members elected annually at national conference. At least four party councils a year are to be arranged by the central committee. At these councils two delegates elected from each branch plus the national committee will be entitled to attend.[31]
Duncan Hallas, a founding member of the IS, predecessor of the SWP, wrote: "The founders of the group saw themselves as mainstream Trotskyists, differing on important questions from the dominant group in the International, but belonging to the same basic tendency."[32] Here "the group" refers to the Socialist Review Group, forerunner of the SWP and "the International" to theFourth International, the main Trotskyist grouping.
The SWP describes itself as a "revolutionary socialist party" and considers itself to stand in the tradition ofLeon Trotsky. It also shares many of the political positions of other Trotskyist groups, a tradition rooted inMarxism andLeninism (see for example Tony Cliff,Marxism at the Millennium.[33]) In common with other Trotskyists the SWP defends the body of ideas codified by the first four Congresses of theCommunist International and the founding Congress of theFourth International of Leon Trotsky in 1938.
Its supporters often refer to their beliefs as 'socialism from below', a term which has been attributed toHal Draper. This concept can also be traced back to the rules of theFirst International which stated: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves."[34] They see this as distinguishing themselves from other socialist groups, particularly both from reformist parties such as theLabour Party (described as a "capitalist workers' party")[35] and from various forms of what they disparagingly termStalinism—forms of socialism usually associated with the former Soviet Bloc and the old Communist Parties. These are seen as advocating socialism from above. In contrast Cliff argued: "The heart of Marxism is that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class.The Communist Manifesto states: 'All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.'"[36] For more on this, seeMarxism at the Millennium (2000).[33]
The SWP also seeks to differentiate itself from other Trotskyist tendencies. Three key theories are at the centre of its difference from other Trotskyists: State Capitalism, Deflected Permanent Revolution and The Permanent Arms Economy (see below).
Unlike most Trotskyist organisations, the SWP does not have a formal programme (like the Fourth International's founding document, theTransitional Program), but an outline of the SWP's ideas called "Where We Stand"[37] is published in each issue ofSocialist Worker.
The SWP maintains an opposition to what it terms "substitutionist strategies". This is the idea that social forces other than theproletariat, which is for Marxists the potentially social revolutionary class due to its 'radical chains', may substitute for the proletariat in the struggle for a socialist society (see above). This idea led the founder of the SWP, Tony Cliff, to reject the idea that the USSR was adegenerated workers' state, the position held by other Trotskyists and derived from Leon Trotsky's analysis in the 1930s. Cliff argued that in fact the USSR andEastern Europe used a form of capitalism which he referred to as 'bureaucraticstate capitalist', and that later so did other countries ruled by what he termed Stalinist parties, such asChina,Vietnam andCuba. Cliff's approach to this idea was published in the 1948 articleThe Nature of Stalinist Russia[38] as it was further advanced on in his 2000 publicationTrotskyism after Trotsky where he discussed the decline of the USSR.
Other IS/SWP theoreticians such asNigel Harris andChris Harman would later extend and develop a distinct body of state capitalist analysis based on Cliff's initial work. This theory was summed up in the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism". The slogan is said to have originally come fromMax Shachtman's group, theWorkers Party, in their paper 'Labor Action' and was only borrowed by the IS/SWP at a later date. This is seen as ironic because one of Cliff's concerns when first developing his idea of state capitalism was to differentiate his ideas from the idea ofbureaucratic collectivism associated with Shachtman (see for exampleThe Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique (1948)).[39] However, the formula also echoes theFourth International's 1948 manifesto,Neither Wall Street nor the Kremlin. Cliff's version of the theory of state capitalism can be differentiated from those associated with other dissident Trotskyists and Marxists, such asC. L. R. James andRaya Dunayevskaya.
As a Trotskyist tendency, the SRG/IS was faced with developing an explanation as to why and how a number of countries in the former colonial world had succeeded in overthrowing the rule of various imperial powers and forming states characterised by the SRG/IS as being bureaucratic state capitalist. In part, such an explanation was needed to understand why these colonial revolutions had not developed into uninterrupted orPermanent Revolutions, as predicted by Leon Trotsky in his theory of the same name. Taking Trotsky's theory as his starting point, Tony Cliff developed his own theory of 'deflected permanent revolution'. He argued that where a revolutionary working class did not exist, the intelligentsia could, in certain limited circumstances, take the leadership of the nation and lead a successful revolution in the direction of a state capitalist solution. The outcome of such a revolution would be deflected from the goal of a social revolution as envisaged in Trotsky's original work.
Cliff's essay "Permanent Revolution" was first published inInternational Socialism Journal, No. 12 Spring 1963,[40] in response to theCuban Revolution and largely took it and the earlierChinese Revolution as its subject. However, the general concept of a deflected permanent revolution would be much exercised as a key analytical tool by IS theoreticians in the coming years. Significant in this respect is the work of Nigel Harris in relation to India and later ofMike Gonzalez on Cuba[41] and Nicaragua. The theory has been given a central place in Cem Uzun's workMaking the Turkish Revolution (2004).
.jpg)
State capitalism and deflected permanent revolution came to be seen as central to a distinct IS politics by the mid-1960s along with the theory of thepermanent arms economy (PAE) which sought to explain thelong boom in the global economy after theSecond World War. This boom was in contrast to the period after the First World War when a period of stagnation occurred.
The three theories taken together are often seen as being the hallmarks of the IS tradition, although this is contested by some former leaders of the IS, including Nigel Harris andMichael Kidron both of whom worked on the PAE and now repudiate it, and by some other Trotskyists outside the IS Tradition. The PAE, the most contested of the three theories, is also the only one that did not originate with Tony Cliff.
The PAE originated with a member of Max Shachtman's Workers' Party/Independent Socialist League named Ed Sard in 1944. Sard, writing as Walter J. Oakes, argued inPolitics that the PAE was to be understood as allowing capitalism to achieve a level of stability by preventing the rate of profit from falling as spending on arms was unproductive and would not lead to the increase of the organic composition of capital. Later in 1951 inNew International, this time writing as T. N. Vance, Sard argued that the PAE operated through its ability to applyKeynes' multiplier effect.[42] Although briefly mentioned by Duncan Hallas in aSocialist Review of 1952 the theory was only introduced to the IS by Cliff in 1957.[43]
In his May 1957 article "Perspectives of the Permanent War Economy",[44] Cliff offered the PAE to readers in a version derived from Sard's earlier essays but without reference to Keynes and using a Marxist theoretical framework. This was the only attempt to develop the idea, which it is suggested explains the long post war boom, until the publication of Mike Kidron'sWestern Capitalism Since the War[45] in 1968. Kidron would further develop the theory in hisCapitalism and Theory. Additional work was also contributed by Nigel Harris and later by Chris Harman. However it should also be noted that Mike Kidron was to repudiate the theory as early as the mid-1970s in his essay "Two Insights Don't Make a Theory"[46] inInternational Socialism No. 100. This was followed by a rejoinder from Chris Harman ("Better a valid insight than a wrong theory").[47]
The SWP publishes a weekly newspaper calledSocialist Worker, and a quarterly theoretical journal calledInternational Socialism.[citation needed] Until 2020 it published a monthly magazine calledSocialist Review. It also publishes three editions of a pre-conference Internal Bulletin and a formerly public bulletin calledParty Notes as well as various pamphlets and books through Bookmarks, its publishing house.[citation needed]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
