International Bolshevik Tendency

The International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) is a revolutionary socialist organization. Permanent Revolution Group and the West German Gruppe IV. Internationale to form the International Bolshevik Tendency. The IBT started out within the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) - the international organization which the US Spartacist League was associated with (the international Spartacist Tendency now calls itself the International Communist League). Some cadre within the iSt declared an external tendency in 1982. The external tendency left the Spartacist League in 1985 and formed the Bolshevik Tendency. They began publishing a magazine called 1917 in 1986. In the early 1990's the Bolshevik Tendency fused with New Zealand's The International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) is an international Trotskyist political organisation. The group was established by former members of the international Spartacist tendency in the USA and Canada, although many of its current members are not former Spartacists. Since 1986 the organisation has published a journal entitled 1917.

Forerunners
The International Bolshevik Tendency traces its roots to the so-called International Committee of the Fourth International which emerged from a major split of the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s. This so-called "International Committee" split from the Fourth International headed by Michel Pablo over bitter disagreements about the nature of the Soviet Union. The primary section of this International Committee was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States.

In the view of the International Bolshevik Tendency, the SWP itself "experienced a political collapse...as a revolutionary organization" in the 1960s, a purported "degeneration" which was answered with the formation of a new organization called the Sparticist League.

A key figure in the future IBT was New Zealander Bill Logan. Early in the 1970s Logan got into touch with the Spartacist League of the United States indicating general agreement with their political program, subsequently forming a small Spartacist group there. Logan later moved to Australia, where he founded an organisation for all of Australiasia called the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand.

Late in the 1970s, Logan was requested by the international Spartacist tendency to move to the United Kingdom to help with the work there, which he did. He was subsequently expelled from the organisation in August 1979, however, for purported "Crimes Against Communist Morality and Elementary Human Decency" — charges later labeled a manifestation of "political banditry" by the International Bolshevik Tendency.

In July 1974, the North American and Australasian joined together to form a new international grouping called the international Spartacist tendency (iSt).

The first international gathering of this new international Spartacist tendency did not take place until the summer of 1979, when a convention was held in the United Kingdom. Attending were delegates from the Spartacist League of the United States, the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand, the Spartacist League of Britain, the Ligue Trotskyste de France, and the Trotskyist League of Canada.

Split of the Spartacist movement and establishment
The Trotskyist movement further subdivided in the early 1980s, with dissidents from the United States, Canada, and Germany breaking away to form what they called the "External Tendency of the iSt." Scholar of the Trotskyist movement Robert J. Alexander declared at the time that "although both sides engaged in a good deal of invective against each other, the 'principled' basis of this split remained somewhat obscure." Alexander attributed the split in part to the dissidents view of the policy of the iSt as excessively friendly to the USSR. The dissidents also later declared that adherents of the mainline Spartacist organisation had abandoned their orientation towards organising work in the trade union movement.

After a brief stint as the "External Tendency," the former Spartacist offshoot rechristened themselves the "Bolshevik Tendency," later the "International Bolshevik Tendency."

The IBT group in Germany was also drawn from members of the iSt who had formed the Gruppe IV. Internationale (GIVI) before joining the newly formed IBT as the Gruppe Spartakus.

In 1998 the IBT held its Second International Conference where they marked the recruitment of leftists from what they describe, following the traditions of the early Spartacists, as Ostensible Revolutionary Organizations (OROs) including the Revolutionary Workers League and the Canadian International Socialists.

The IBT's Third International Conference took place in October 2001.

Organisation today
The International Bolshevik Tendency continues into the 21st Century as a small organisation with members in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Germany and sympathizers in the Republic of Ireland.