Committee for a Workers' International
International association of Trotskyist parties
The Committee for a Workers' International (CWI; Spanish: Comité por una Internacional de los Trabajadores, CIT; French: Comité pour une internationale ouvrière, CIO) was an international association of Trotskyist political parties and organisations. Today, two groups claim to be the continuation of the CWI, the refounded Committee for a Workers' International and International Socialist Alternative.
History
Founding
The origins of the CWI can be traced to a group of British Trotskyists which were expelled from the USFI in 1965, after disagreements regarding the Colonial Revolution, Guerillaism, Studentism and the post war boom. But it is not till 1974 that they set about building an international.
The founding conference of the CWI was held in London on 20 to 21 April 1974 and attended by supporters of what was then called Militant (or the Militant tendency), from 12 countries including Britain, Ireland and Sweden. In the early years of the international, sections generally pursued a policy of entryism into social democratic or labour parties. As such, the CWI was originally secretive because to organise openly risked the expulsion of its sections from the parties in which they were working.
End of entryism
The CWI largely ended its strategy of entryism in the early 1990s. The international developed an analysis that many social democratic parties had fundamentally changed in nature and become outright capitalist parties, their main example being the UK Labour Party. This was strongly resisted by Ted Grant, one of Militant's founders.
The public source identifies “Committee for a Workers' International” as international association of Trotskyist parties. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Committee, Workers' and International.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q158073. VIAF identifies the subject as 145202879. The Library of Congress control number is nb2007015659. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Committee for a Workers' International” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.