For decades, the International Marxist Tendency and its forerunners, led by Ted Grant and later Alan Woods in Britain, were implacably opposed to any break by workers from Stalinism and Labourism. It routinely denounced Leon Trotsky’s struggle to build the world party of socialist revolution as a failure and the International Committee of the Fourth International as an ultra-left “sect” for continuing this historic task.
In 2024, the IMT was forced to belatedly acknowledge that millions of workers, especially the younger generation, were turning away from reformism and Stalinism in disgust. It rebranded itself as a new Revolutionary Communist International and its national affiliates as Revolutionary Communist Parties to attract young people radicalized by the deepening social crisis, amplified by mass opposition to the Gaza genocide, and seeking an anti-capitalist alternative.
The penetrating analysis presented here by Chris Marsden, National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK) exposes this political maneuver. He explains, through an examination of the history of the Grant/Woods tendency, that the new “international” is still defined by hostility to Trotskyism, an explicit rejection of Lenin’s fight for socialist consciousness in the working class, and a continued political apologia for the Labour and trade union bureaucracy combined with a regroupment with various remnants of the old Stalinist parties.
