Following Stolypin’s coup of June 1907, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) was illegalized and its Duma representatives arrested. Party fractions could continue to exist in legal and semi-legal workers organizations (e.g., trade...
The Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, held in London in May 1907, was almost evenly divided between the Bolsheviks with 89 delegate votes and the Mensheviks with 88. At the Fourth Congress a year...
The emergence of differences with the Mensheviks over the role of bourgeois liberalism in the revolution weakened, but did not eliminate, the forces of conciliationism in the Bolshevik camp. At the all-Bolshevik Third Congress...
During 1904, Russian defeats in the war with Japan provoked a surge of liberal bourgeois opposition to the tsarist autocracy. This significant change in the Russian political scene deepened the differences between Menshevism and...
The Second Congress of the RSDRP, held in Brussels and then London in July-August 1903, was to be the culmination of the Iskraist project to create a centralized party based on a comprehensive program....
Recently the British International Marxist Group (IMG) and the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party—SWP/IS), two of the largest groups of the British “far left,” have taken to revising the history of the Bolsheviks....
Lenin and the Vanguard Party was a series of articles by Joseph Seymour published in Workers Vanguard in 1977-78. The following text is based on the Spartacist League pamphlet of 1978, but incorporates some...
Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency (statement formally initiating the international Spartacist tendency) Adopted July 1974; published in Spartacist, No. 23, Spring 1977 1. The Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand...
Spartacist No. 23, Spring 1977 Reprinted below is the founding document of the Trotskyist Fraction (TF) of the German Spartacusbund. When confronted by a principled Trotskyist opposition at their sixth national conference in January 1977,...
By Joseph Seymour Workers Vanguard no 162, 17 June 1977 The following article is based on a talk by Joseph Seymour at a West Coast Spartacus Youth League educational in mid-March 1977 There is...