Socialist Appeal
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Socialist Appeal is the publication of a minor British Trotskyist organisation founded by Ted Grant after he left the Militant Tendency. Internally that group calls itself the Workers International League, after a Trotskyist group that had dissolved in 1944. Externally, they are almost always known as the Socialist Appeal group.
Grant had been the founder and a major leader of the Militant Tendency, the bulk of which is now the Socialist Party (in England and Wales) and the Scottish Socialist Party, but broke with them in the course of their 1992 expulsion from the Labour Party. The split was due to Grant's continued support for the tactic of entrism into the Labour Party, a policy abandoned by the others at the time of their expulsion. The Socialist Appeal group claims that unlike the Socialist Party, they focus on educating their members.
As Labour under Tony Blair has embraced the Third Way and moved away from its socialist roots most Trotskyist tendencies in Britain that employed the tactic of entryism have left Labour and either run candidates under their own banner, such as the Socialist Party, or joined electoral coalitions such as the Scottish Socialist Party or the Socialist Alliance. Supporters of Socialist Appeal have rejected this turn and are quite possibly the only Trotskyist group in Britain to maintain the entrist tactic into the twenty-first century.
Although they remain small, the tendency around Socialist Appeal has regrouped to some degree, and its international co-thinkers (grouped in the Committee for a Marxist International) have grown in number. As well as publishing their magazine Socialist Appeal, the group has also published a number of books by Ted Grant and Alan Woods. The group has recently devoted much of their time to developing the multilingual website In Defence of Marxism.
External links
- Socialist Appeal official website (http://www.socialist.net)
- In Defence of Marxism (http://www.marxist.com)
Socialist Appeal was also the name of the newspaper of the British Trotskyist Workers International League (in the World War II era), and (immediately following that) of the also Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, the latter being no relation to the as of 2004 contemporary party of the same name.