Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Workers Power
Workers Power is an orthodox Trotskyist group, with sections in the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic and supporters in other countries. As part of the League for the Fifth International, which they were prime movers in founding, they enjoy links with groups throughout Europe. The group in the UK publish a newspaper, also named Workers Power and a journal called Fifth International.
They originated in the International Socialists from which they departed in 1974 to form a new group. In 1975 they joined with Workers Fight to form the International-Communist League which split into its constuent parts soon after. In 1980 Workers Power abandoned their position that the 'socialist states' were state capitalist and adopted the idea that they were deformed workers states. They have since changed this position and now hold an orthodox Trotskyist viewpoint that Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries were 'Degenerate Workers States'.
Always linked with the Irish Workers Group they have placed a great deal of emphasis on building an international organisation. They founded the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International with the IWG, Group Arbeitermacht in Germany and Pouvoir Ouvrier in France. This added supporters in Austria, Peru and Bolivia and became the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. They then added a group in New Zealand.
Having grown they split and lost most of their supporters in New Zealand, all those in Peru and Bolivia and a few in Europe who formed the LCMRCI. At their international congress in 2003 they adopted a new programme and rebranded themselves the League for the Fifth international. They left the Socialist Alliance in 2003 as in their opinion the Socialist Workers Party was bureaucratically destroying the political independence of that body through its subjection to the new Respect Unity Coalition which Workers Power held to be populist and non socialist in nature.
They campaign to build a rank and file movement in the trade unions, and for a new mass workers party in Britain. The group has probably grown in recent years due to work in the student and anti-war movements. However it remains a small organisation.
The League for the Fifth International founded an independent youth organisation, known as Revolution, which is closely linked with Workers' Power.
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