The Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International (WIRFI) is an Trotskyist international organisation. It is based in the United Kingdom and consists of a remnant of the Workers Revolutionary Party.
The organisation was founded in 1990 to regroup the international supporters of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) WRP(WP), following the split of some of their supporters to join the International Workers League (Fourth International). Led by Cliff Slaughter and Dot Gibson, it initially had support in the Workers Revolutionary Party (Namibia) and a South African section which renamed itself WIRFI and took 5,481 votes in the South African general election, 1994, as well as Michel Varga's Group of Opposition and Continuity of the Fourth International.
The majority of the South African section left the international in 1996 and renamed itself the Workers International Vanguard League.
Following the WRP(WP)'s dissolution and reconstitution as the Movement for Socialism (Britain), Gibson and Bob Archer led the remainder of the international in splitting from Slaughter.
The organisation retains its British section and may still claim the support of the WRP of Namibia and remnants of the South African group. Otherwise it seems moribund and last published its newspaper, Workers International News, in 2002.
In Britain, the group's supporters were active in the Socialist Alliance and then the Democracy Platform of that grouping. By 2004 they had also become involved with the Liverpool based Campaign for a Mass Workers Party and its offshoot, the United Socialist Party.
Famous quotes containing the words workers, rebuild and/or fourth:
“I suspect that American workers have come to lack a work ethic. They do not live by the sweat of their brow.”
—Kiichi Miyazawa (b. 1919)
“We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high he reached the sky,
And didn’t get back till the Fourth of July.”
—Unknown. I Asked My Mother (l. 1–4)