Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line

Socialist Future

Following the major schism in the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1985, both sides of the split continued to unravel and give rise to new groups for a number of years.

The “continuity” WRP, which still exists as the Torrance led Newslinegroup, at first took the side of Gerry Healy but in 1987 broke with him, and his supporters — notably the Redgraves. This group then formed the Marxist Party which styled itself the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (one of at least three competing ICFIs in existence at the time!).

A year after Healy’s death in 1989, the Marxist Party expelled a group of members centered on Healy’s personal assistant Corinna Lotz, and Paul Feldman, who then went on to form the Communist League.

The issues around the split are far from clear. A Communist League pamphlet The Split in the Marxist Party and The Struggle for Marxism covers some of the events in detail and includes contemporary correspondence but does not shed much light on the political differences at stake.

From March 1992 the CL published a magazine Socialist Future / Socialist Future Review of which we have 36 copies in our Archive.

The Communist League later renamed itself the Socialist Future Group and the Movement for a Socialist Future before becoming part of a broader formation A World To Win which is still active and which continues to sell Lotz and Feldman’s uncritical biography of Gerry Healy.