Socialist Workers Party (UK)
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a extreme left wing organisation in the UK. They publish a weekly newspaper called Socialist Worker which party members sell on the streets and at demonstrations, etc.The SWP grew out of the organisation International Socialists, itself part of the Trotskyist movement, which includes several other British parties, such as the Socialist Party of England and Wales, the Alliance for Workers Liberty and Workers Power (an old political joke in the UK refers to the various factions around its left-wing fringes as the 57 varieties of socialism, a reference to a famous advertising slogan employed by baked bean manufacturers Heinz).
The SWP's theoreticians developed three major theories, which moved them away from the official Trotskyist movement:
- A state capitalist analysis of Russia and the Eastern bloc, developed by Tony Cliff. Other left groups had however been referring to the USSR as state-capitalist from the early 1920's and in 1918 Lenin had set the development of state capitalism as the short term goal of the Bolshevik Party. This led the group (then known as the International Socialists) to adopt the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism" and to oppose both sides in the Cold War.
- The theory of the permanent arms economy, developed by Mike Kidron, which argued that high arms spending fuelled the long post-war boom in the 50s and 60s. This helped the group avoid perpetual forecasts that the collapse of capitalism was just around the corner, when living standards in the UK were clearly rising.
- The theory of permanent revolution deflected, developed by Tony Cliff, which built on Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, and attempted to explain why workers had not taken power in various Third World revolutions.
In Scotland the SWP is part of the Scottish Socialist Party with which it merged in 2001.
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