Our history

Comrade Bill Landles died this Saturday evening after a short illness, at the age of 95. Many of our older comrades will have fond memories of Bill. It somehow seemed that he’d always be there, with his sense of humour and his commitment to the ideas of Marxism. Bill was the last living link with the wartime pioneering work of the Workers' International League from where we trace the origins of Socialist Appeal and the International Marxist Tendency. 

It was with tremendous sadness that we discovered comrade Pam Woods had died following a courageous battle with leukaemia and MDS. In keeping with her immediate family’s wishes for privacy at such a difficult time, we did not publish an obituary.

It was with a deep sense of sadness and personal loss that Ana and myself learned of the death of our dear old friend and comrade, Bob Lee, last Friday. We had been very close for many years, and we learned to love and respect him as a great comrade, a tireless fighter and above all as a warm, loving and generous human being.

The recent convulsive faction fight and split in the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI), driven by Peter Taaffe, the General Secretary of SPEW, the Socialist Party of England and Wales, is now plastered all over social media for the world to see. Despite the stream of allegations coming from the Taaffe faction, and the rebuttals from the other side, the dispute in reality centres around prestige politics, a highly pernicious tendency that is invariably fatal in a revolutionary organisation.

The crisis unfolding within the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) is reaching a critical phase, and a deep split is now imminent. The Spanish group of the CWI, Izquierda Revolucionaria, which only joined the CWI in 2017, has already split away and what remains of the Mexican and Venezuelan groups have followed suit. The Portuguese group has also left. To help readers understand what is happening, we take this opportunity to publish two opposition documents from 1991 and 1992, when a heated dispute took place within the Militant Tendency

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It is a well-known fact that accident can play a considerable role in both history and the lives of individuals. In the course of my life I have observed many accidents and extraordinary coincidences. But I have never experienced such a unique and unforeseeable concatenation of circumstances as that which I am about to relate here.

Ten years ago today comrade Phil Mitchinson died tragically at the age of 38. He was a leading cadre of the Socialist Appeal in Britain and also of the International Marxist Tendency. He played a key role in building up the forces of the Socialist Appeal. We republish here an article by Rob Sewell written one year after his death,  Phil Mitchinson: “We will finish what he began”. We are also highlighting one of his major articles, Marxism and direct action, which is the best way of honouring the comrade and showing his calibre as a leading Marxist cadre.

News of the death of comrade Jean Lievens came as a most shocking and unwelcome surprise to all of us who knew him. Jean was always so full of life that to speak of his death seems to be unthinkable. But at the tragically early age of 59 he has been suddenly taken from us after a short fight against a serious illness.

Alan Woods recalls the role of Ted Grant, discussions he had with him and also provides excerpts from some of Ted’s speeches in the 1990s, that reveal a sharp mind still following world events and applying the Marxist method to explain them.

We have just received the sad news of the death of Terry Fields, a Militant supporter and Labour MP for Liverpool Broadgreen (1983 -92). He died over the weekend after a long struggle with cancer. Terry is remembered by all the comrades who knew him as a true class fighter and a man who stuck to his socialist principles throughout.

We are publishing a 1945 article by Ted Grant’s which was a contribution to the discussion on the national question in Europe then taking place within the Fourth International. The IKD was the German section of the Fourth International, but some of its members had unfortunately drawn some very reactionary conclusions. Instead of the perspective of the socialist revolution they had been thrown back to the idea of the “national democratic” revolution. Ted explained the disastrous consequences this idea would have on the movement and went on to state the classical Marxist position on this question.

In 1946 the perspectives of the then leadership of the Fourth International were that through “the combined economic, political and diplomatic pressure and the military threats of American and British imperialism” the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union could collapse. The complete opposite was the truth. Ted Grant, together with the leadership of the RCP, attempted to correct this mistaken prognosis. Here we provide the historical 1946 documentation.

In 1946 the leaders of the Fourth International were predicting imminent revolutonary upheavals, when in reality capitalism was entering the biggest boom in its history. The leadership of the British Trotskyists, in particular Ted Grant, tried to convince the International that their perspective was false. History has proven Ted to be right. No one can doubt it, and we are proud to continue the tradition that he laid down of serious, meticulous analysis of the real processes taking place in society.

A comrade who was actively involved in building the Militant in the 1970s and 1980s recounts his experience, how he became disillusioned by the changes in the internal regime, how the tendency he had joined was transformed into something else. He now sees in In Defence of Marxism the genuine traditions of the Militant at its best.