Militant Tendency
The Militant Tendency (MT) was a Trotskyist group in Great Britain that was entristically involved in the Labor Party . It was founded in 1964 by members of the Revolutionary Socialist League and, after being renamed several times, dissolved into the Socialist Party (England and Wales) in 1997 .
Foundation and Entrismus
The Militant Tendency can trace its organizational origins back to the Workers' International League, founded in 1937, and the successor party Revolutionary Communist Party (Revolutionary Communist Party). The founding core of MT was the editorial staff of the magazine "Socialist Fight" around Ted Grant , Ellis Hillman and Peter Taaffe . The MT was named after its newspaper "Militant", which initially appeared monthly, later biweekly and finally as a weekly newspaper. The Militant Tendency managed from 1969 to 1972 to exercise control over the youth organization of the Labor Party. In the 1980s, the influence of the MT, which had more than 500 activists, continued to grow within Labor.
In 1985 Labor leader Neil Kinnock sharply criticized the "infiltration" of his party by MT activists at a party conference. This led to massive expulsions of MT supporters in the Liverpool branch of Labor. The zenith of the influence of the Militant Tendency had passed; there was fierce wars over the direction of the group over the question of whether entryism in Labor was still the appropriate revolutionary strategy for mobilizing the working class . In 1992 Ted Grant and Alan Woods were excluded because they wanted to continue working in social democracy , which was rejected by 93% of the delegates at the then World Congress of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) . In 1993 Ted Grant and Alan Woods then founded the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) , which was joined by several larger sections of the CWI. In Great Britain, the IMT section there, under the name Socialist Appeal, continues the original political and organizational line of the Militant Tendency to this day and is still oriented towards the Labor Party. The CWI, on the other hand, founded the Socialist Party (England and Wales) in 1997 and has been running against the Labor Party ever since. However, both organizations see themselves as heirs to the Militant Tendency.