International Bolshevik Tendency

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.
Organisational history
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. 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."
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.
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