About this archive

Workers Power began as the Left Faction of the International Socialists (IS), the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party, an opposition inside IS from the early 1970s. Expelled in 1975, the faction published its platform and a magazine, fused briefly with Workers Fight as the International-Communist League, and re-formed as the Workers Power group in 1976. Its monthly paper ran from October 1978. In the 1980s it broke with the theory of state capitalism it had inherited from IS, published the journal Permanent Revolution, and with sister groups elsewhere in Europe founded the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International (1984), from 1989 the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, whose journals were Trotskyist International and Trotskyist Bulletin.

This archive holds 328 items, 6,012 pages, up to the end of 1995. The scans are from the Splits & Fusions collection of the British far left, gathered by Rob Marsden, which is also the source of the Workers Power pages on the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL); everything ETOL holds for these years is here, and items that are also on ETOL link to it.

What is missing

Workers Power no. 88 (November 1986) and Permanent Revolution no. 1. The International-Communist League’s own paper, International Communist (1976–78), is not included. If you have any of these, Red Mole would like to hear from you.

The text

Each page was read by machine (Tesseract OCR) from the scan, and the text is published uncorrected so that it can be searched. It is a finding aid: columns run together and words are misread, especially in the typewritten documents of the 1970s. The scan is the authority. Where a file name gave no date, the date shown was worked out from the text and is marked “c.”. Some scans too large to put online as they are have been re-encoded at a lower resolution.