Pathfinder tendency

The Pathfinder tendency is the unofficial name of a group of historically Trotskyist organizations that cooperate politically and organizationally with the Socialist Workers Party of the United States and support its solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and the Communist Party of Cuba.

The Communist Leagues, even those in non-English-speaking countries, sell the SWP publication The Militant.

In the 1980s, the Socialist Workers Party and its international supporters within the Fourth International (FI) broke from many of Trotskyism's traditional positions, including the theory of Permanent Revolution, and embraced positions that marked a political convergence with the Cuban Communist Party and the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.

By the late 1980s, this process was completed and national sections of the FI had either been taken over with supporters of the international's mainstream being expelled—this happened with the Revolutionary Workers League in Canada, the Socialist Action League in New Zealand and the SWP in the US—or supporters of the US SWP had split from FI sections and founded their own organisations, as occurred in Australia, Sweden and Britain.

Since the creation of the Pathfinder tendency, new Communist Leagues have formed to organise previously existing groups of supporters in Iceland and France.