Socialist Workers’ Party, UK

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS' Party in the United Kingdom emerged in 1977 from the International Socialists, whose weekly paper had been called Socialist Worker since 1968. Ideologically and intellectually, the Socialist Workers' Party is a Trotskyist party, deeming the Soviet Union to have become a “degenerated workers' state” in which socialism had been supplanted by a form of state capitalism, managed by a new privileged bureaucratic elite that effectively exploited the Soviet [Page 407]working class. The Socialist Workers' Party was thus emphatic that the Soviet Union was not a genuinely socialist society (even though the private ownership of the means of production had formally been abolished following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution). Hence the party's de facto slogan: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism,” which was ...