30.04.2003

Pipe and slippers: International Socialist Group

Newspaper: Resistance (a co-sponsored monthly).

Other journals: International Viewpoint, journal of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Website: www.zoo.co.uk/~z8001063/International-Socialist-Group

Prominent members: Alan Thornett (member of SA executive); Greg Tucker (a leading militant in the RMT rail union). Size: Up to 100 members, I have been informed, but that is hard to believe.

Comments: Harmless, inert group. Official section of the Fourth International in Britain - although that is much less impressive than it sounds. Via a whole series of splits, realignments and cruel historical ironies, this is what remains of the dynamic but politically unstable, student-based International Marxist Group, which was prominent in the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and led - amongst others - by Tariq Ali.

In more recent years, the ISG has constituted itself as apologist for the SWP's more crass manoeuvres in the Socialist Alliance and there were even negotiations about the ISG joining the SWP. These broke down over faction rights.

The ISG and its 'international' adhere to a formally democratic approach to party culture, with rights for open factions - obviously not acceptable to the bureaucratic SWP mandarins, so that was the end of that. For the time being, at least.

The ISG has recently become more impatient with the SWP role in becalming the Socialist Alliance project. It too wants to see a party result from the process - although a democratic centralist, revolutionary communist party is not what it has in mind.