Origins
Thornett and his comrades had questioned what they saw as a sectarian turn of the WRP. They argued that this turn would isolate the WRP and that it was necessary to turn back to Trotsky's Transitional Programme. They wrote a number of documents to argue their case and as a result were expelled. A minor controversy surrounded these documents when some WRP members alleged that Thornett was not their author, but that in fact they were written by members of the Bulletin Group, who were supporters of Pierre Lambert and therefore strongly opposed by the WRP.
The WSL was founded in 1975 with a leadership grouped around Thornett, Tony Richardson and John Lister. Terry Eagleton was a well-known member. Unlike the WRP, whose politics it inherited, it covered Irish politics, women's struggles and broke with the homophobia characteristic of Gerry Healy. The group also concluded that Cuba had been a deformed workers state since the revolution of 1959. It published the weekly paper Socialist Press and a number of issues of a theoretical journal Trotskyism Today.
In its first few years the WSL attempted to capitalise on its existing base in industry and expand outwards from its base in Oxford. Despite having more realistic perspectives than the WRP, it was never able to group more than 150 members. Many people who left the WRP simply left revolutionary politics, and as the level of industrial struggle slackened in the late 1970s the WSL lost members and internal factional struggles began.
The first factional struggles were the result of the development of a small group of supporters of the American Spartacist League. Spartacist London had been founded in 1975 by American, Canadian and Australian Spartacists with the intention of engaging other Trotskyist groups in debate. As both they and the WSL have a common past in the International Committee of the Fourth International they paid great attention to the WSL. The result was that they recruited a number of WSL members to their views and these formed the Leninist Faction in 1977. The Leninist Faction would split to join the London Spartacists in forming the Spartacist League in 1978. This factional struggle had its sequel in 1979 when another group of WSL members were similarly won to the Spartacists this time calling themselves the Trotskyist Faction.
In 1978 the United Secretariat of the Fourth International invited the WSL to submit material to the USec's 1979 Eleventh World Congress. It did so in July 1978 with The Poisoned Well, a critical analysis of the development of USec which was republished in Trotskyism Today.
Meanwhile 1979 saw the election of a Conservative Government and the beginnings of a major offensive against the trade unions. This also had a reaction in the Labour Party which swung to the left and began to attract the attention of Trotskyist groups including the WSL.
Read more about this topic: Workers' Socialist League
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