Spartacist League of Britain

The origins of the group derive from a 1964 group of activists within the American Socialist Workers Party who were expelled for refusing to support the leadership of the Cuban Revolution.[1] The American group sent some of its members to the UK in 1975, to form the London Spartacist Group.[2] In 1977 the group was joined by New Zealanders Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah, who had led the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand from 1972 to 1977, and who were "transferred to London at the behest of the Spartacist international leadership" with a view to strengthening the tendency's organisation there.[3] "The Spartacist League/Britain was founded in 1978 as a fusion between the London Spartacist Group and the Trotskyist Faction (TF), which split from Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League ...".[2] The Trotskyist Faction, with about two dozen members, left the Workers Socialist League on 19 February 1978 and merged with the London Spartacist Group at a conference held seven weeks later over the weekend of 4–5 April. The new party claimed to have about fifty members in London and the Midlands.[4]

The group published a monthly periodical called Spartacist Britain, which changed its title to Workers Hammer in 1984 and is now a quarterly.

In the summer of 2017, the ICL questioned its past, believing that it had been, in the person of "a number of American cadres" penetrated by "the chauvinist Hydra" since 1974 [5]

The Spartacist League "seeks to combat illusions in Labourite reformism in order to win the most conscious workers, minorities and youth to build a multiethnic workers party", on the model of the Bolsheviks, "devoted to rooting out the system of capitalist exploitation."[6]

• Dave Spart

• Archive of recent issues of Workers Hammer
• Catalogue of the Spartacist League archives, held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick