The ISL is the British section of the IWL (FI) which has as its central task the building of a mass Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution, with sections in every country.
The ISL fights for the Fourth International in the working class in Britain as part of the international fight to build the IWL and the Fourth International.
The fight for the independence of revolutionary Marxism and for the ISL is a central strategy to assist workers in their struggles and who are inside movements to face the big tasks of the working class.
The IWL and its sections fight to rebuild a Bolshevik regimen in its parties. It means the good working of the organisations (team building etc), party discipline, going into the working class, the priority of Marxist theory and revolutionary morality
As part of our task the ISL aims to build in Britain, a revolutionary party which would organise the working class for the establishment of a workers’ government ending capitalist ownership of land and the means of the production of wealth, and substituting common ownership and democratic control of those means of production.
The ISL is a democratic centralist organisation based on the First Four Congresses of the Communist International and the Transitional Programme adopted at the Founding Congress of the Fourth International.
The ISL operates within the statutes of the IWL (FI).
In joining the IWL we based ourselves theoretically and practically on internationalism. We formed the ISL in 1988 and it formed out of the struggle inside the WRP that developed after the explosion of the WRP in 1985 and when Healy was expelled. In the struggle inside the WRP prior to 1988 we considered that Trotsky’s fight for internationalism and the Fourth International was the central question in overcoming the crisis of leadership within the working class.
During that struggle we studied the contributions that Trotsky made in the 1930s in relation to small groups that came around the Fourth International and the struggle to break into the working class against the barriers of Stalinism which sought to liquidate the Fourth International and its leadership.
We said in a document for a World Congress that of the IWL , “The IWL was formed to be an organisation to assist in the reconstruction of a Fourth International. It did not consider itself the new Fourth International – that will not be rebuilt by proclamation, but out of great movements of the working class. For our part, we believe that Moreno he made a contribution on the specific relationship of democracy and centralism which encompassed the reality of building a revolutionary international organisation today. It was a fundamental feature of the IWL which attracted the British and Australian comrades to the IWL in 1988.”
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