International Bolshevik Tendency

The International Bolshevik Tendency was founded in February 1985 by Bill Logan (1939–2024) and Adaire Hannah after their late-1979 expulsion from the Spartacist League / International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) by James Robertson and the ICL leadership. The Logan expulsion followed the ICL's internal 'Logan investigation' (1979) — a months-long inquiry into Logan's coercive sexual conduct as Australia / New Zealand Section organiser, in which the ICL's Control Commission found that Logan had used his cadre position to pressure female comrades into sexual relationships and had retaliated against women who refused. The ICL's expulsion of Logan was, at the time, one of the most-substantial internal Trotskyist-organisation disciplinary actions of the post-1970s era and is documented in detail in the ICL's published Workers Vanguard coverage and in Bob Pitt's later What Next? journal analysis.

The IBT framed itself as preserving 'authentic' Trotskyism that the post-1979 Spartacist tradition had abandoned. Doctrinally the IBT continues most of the classical Spartacist positions: unconditional defence of the Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state until 1991, unconditional defence of Cuba and North Korea, opposition to popular-front politics, and a generally orthodox-Trotskyist line on national-liberation movements. The organisation operates chapters in the UK, USA, Germany, New Zealand, and Canada, with total global membership in the low hundreds.

Documented coercive-control patterns at IBT (per Bob Pitt's Whatever Happened to the Spartacists? coverage extended to IBT; per multiple ex-IBT published accounts; per Dennis Tourish + Tim Wohlforth's On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left 2000 comparative framework) include: strict ideological line under Logan's leadership through 2024; severance of dissenting members; sustained weekly commitment to meetings, paper-selling, and 'work' tasks; substantial financial commitment via dues and special collections; and the structural irony that an organisation founded around the post-Logan-investigation reform has continued to exhibit similar cadre-party-discipline patterns to its parent Spartacist tradition.

Bill Logan died in 2024; the IBT continues under successor leadership at reduced scale. The organisation publishes 1917 journal and various country-specific publications. Like the parent Spartacist tradition, the IBT exists at the intersection of small-Trotskyist-sect organisational rigidity and cult-pattern-recovery literature; the academic and journalistic treatments uniformly place IBT in the small-political-cult genre rather than ordinary political-party participation.