The SWL affiliated to the reunified Fourth International, under the influence of the American section, the Socialist Workers Party.

A minority of SWL/Socialist Youth Alliance members split in August 1972 and went on to form the Communist League as a national organisation.

[citation needed] The Communist League in Australia was co-founded by Queensland doctor John McCarthy (1948–2008), who later played a major role in integrating the CL and the SWP.

While maintaining Leon Trotsky's critique of the USSR, the party replaced Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution with the view that socialist revolution in Third World countries (countries in which, according to Marxist theory, the development of capitalism has been distorted by colonialism and imperialism) will take place in two connected stages.

[citation needed] The Democratic Socialist Electoral League espoused a left-wing position on most issues, including privatisation, the environment, immigration and civil rights.

[4] A smaller group of loyalists to the American SWP split from the DSP and use the name Communist League to the present day.

Nonetheless, the DSP has retained a core membership drawn from each upsurge of political struggle, some of whom are founding members of the party back in 1972.

[citation needed] This caused a split, after the opposition was expelled subsequently forming a new organisation the same year, the Revolutionary Socialist Party.