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Socialist Appeal | |
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Founded | April 1992 |
Split from | Militant tendency |
Succeeded by | Revolutionary Communist Party (2024) |
Newspaper | Socialist Appeal |
Student wing | Marxist Student Federation |
Ideology | |
International affiliation | |
Website | |
communist |
Part of a series on |
Socialism in the United Kingdom |
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Socialist Appeal was the British section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), founded in 1992 alongside the IMT by supporters of Ted Grant and Alan Woods after they were expelled from the Militant tendency of the Labour Party. [1] In 2024 the Great Britain-based elements of the IMT were relaunched as the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The organisation described itself as a "Marxist organisation which stands for the socialist transformation of society." Its stated aim was to build a revolutionary leadership capable of leading the working class in a struggle against capitalism. [2] It described its politics as descending from Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. [3]
Socialist Appeal published a fortnightly newspaper under the same name until January 2024, and operated the Wellred Books publisher and bookstore.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Socialist Appeal's predecessor, the Militant tendency, had been a significant force within the British Labour Party. [4] At the height of its influence in the mid-to-late 1980s, Militant had three Labour MPs, control of Liverpool City Council and later initiated the campaign that they claim forced the abandonment of the Poll tax. [5] [6] Grant had been one of the founders [7] and the theoretical leader of the Militant group, but he was expelled with other supporters after the 1991 debate on the Open Turn. [8]
The split was caused by what Grant and Woods claimed was the bureaucratic centralist degeneration of Militant's internal regime, as well as Grant's continued support for the tactic of entryism within the Labour Party. [9] [10] In 1991, Militant decided by a large majority to abandon entryism in the Labour Party. Ted Grant, once the group's most important member, was expelled and his breakaway minority, now known as Socialist Appeal, continued with the entryist strategy.[ citation needed ] The majority changed its name to Militant Labour and then in 1997 to the Socialist Party.
Socialist Appeal began publishing their own journal in 1992. In 2000, the group was estimated to have around 250 supporters. [11]
In 2013, Socialist Appeal launched a student wing, the Marxist Student Federation (MSF), to provide a "national platform for Marxist ideas in the student movement," [12] focused on political discussions at university Marxist societies, as well as campaigning within the labour movement. [13]
Following the Scottish independence referendum in which Scots voted to retain the union with the rest of the United Kingdom, the International Marxist Tendency launched a separate Scottish periodical called Revolution, which analysed events in Scotland, and put forward a Marxist position in relation to the Scottish independence movement. Revolution's masthead carries the slogan "For a Scottish workers' republic and world socialist revolution!". [14]
In July 2021, the Labour Party's National Executive Committee banned Socialist Appeal and ruled that its members could be automatically expelled from the Labour Party. [15] [16]
On 14 November 2023, Socialist Appeal announced that the IMT within Great Britain would be refounded as the Revolutionary Communist Party. [17] The founding congress of the party took place in May 2024. [18]
Socialist Appeal refers to the fortnightly newspaper of the same name. In September 2009, the publication Socialist Appeal changed from a magazine journal format to a full colour tabloid. [19] As part of the establishment of the Revolutionary Community Party, the paper was merged with the Scottish IMT newspaper, Revolution, to form The Communist in January 2024. [20]
The group also produced and/or published books, pamphlets, magazines and other Marxist educational material through the Wellred Books site operated by themselves. [21]
Socialist Appeal was also the name of two British Trotskyist newspapers associated with Ted Grant in the 1940s: one was the newspaper of the Workers International League and immediately following that of the Revolutionary Communist Party. [22]
Socialist Appeal was part of the International Marxist Tendency. In Latin America, it supported President of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution and the IMT instigated the formation of the Hands Off Venezuela campaign group to support Chávez. [23] [24]
The IMT runs the multilingual website In Defence of Marxism.
Peter Taaffe is a British Marxist Trotskyist political activist and journalist. He was the general secretary of the Socialist Party of England and Wales from its founding until 2020 and was a member of the International Executive Committee of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI).
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The Militant tendency, or Militant, was a Trotskyist group in the British Labour Party, organised around the Militant newspaper, which launched in 1964. According to Michael Crick, its politics were based on the thoughts of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and "virtually nobody else".
The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is a Trotskyist political international founded by British-based South African political theorist Ted Grant and his supporters after they broke with the Committee for a Workers' International in 1992. The organization's website, Marxist.com or In Defence of Marxism, is edited by Alan Woods. The site is multilingual, and publishes international current affairs articles written from a Marxist perspective, as well as many historical and theoretical articles. The IMT has announced it will relaunch itself as the Revolutionary Communist International at its World School of Communism on 10 June 2024.
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Edward Grant was a South African Trotskyist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He was a founding member of the group Militant and later Socialist Appeal.
Alan Woods is a British Trotskyist political theorist and author. He is one of the leading members of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) as well as of its British affiliate group Socialist Appeal. He is political editor of the IMT's In Defence of Marxism website. Woods was a leading supporter within the Militant tendency within the Labour Party and its parent group the Committee for a Workers' International until the early 1990s. A series of disagreements on tactics and theory led to Woods and Ted Grant leaving the CWI, to found the Committee for a Marxist International in 1992. They continued with the policy of entryism into the Labour Party. Woods has expressed particularly vocal support for the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and repeatedly met with the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, leading to speculation that he was a close political adviser to the president.
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