Workers' International League (1985)

The Workers' International League (WIL) was a British Trotskyist organisation that split in early 1987 from the Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP) which had been led by Sheila Torrance.

The League soon started to publish "Workers' News" as its monthly publication. Initially, the group around leading WRP adherents Richard Price and Ian Harrison defended the Healyite tradition, albeit in a critical way. However, during and after a nine month faction struggle against a minority section in the organisation who supported the idea of joining David North's ICFI, the group began to abandon the Healyite tradition and came to the conclusion that the Fourth International had degenerated by the late 1940s, needing to be rebuilt afresh.

Due to a physical altercation between a leading member of the WIL, then in Torrance's WRP, with a leading member of the Workers Press faction of the WRP during the 1986 printers' dispute in Wapping, East London, there was great hostility between the two groups, which did not help in its fledgling steps into the wider labour movement. Even so, two years after its formation, the WIL had recruited Bob Pitt, who was originally a supporter of the Workers Press faction of the WRP.

The League also began to have discussions with other small groups, particularly Workers Power and the Revolutionary International League, and though these discussions did not amount to a merger of these groups, they did help the organisation to mature politically. At around the same time, the WIL began making firm links with small groups around the international circuit, in an attempt to start the reforging of the Fourth International.

In 1997 the League evolved into a group around the magazine "Workers Action", which was produced quarterly until 2004 and bi-annually since then.

External links

* [http://www.workersaction.org.uk/ Workers' Action website]