Workers' International League (US)
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Workers' International League is the name of a group in the United States formed to sympathise with the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). The group is better known by the name of their magazine, Socialist Appeal. The website of the Socialist Appeal describes itself as in political solidarity with the In Defense of Marxism There are also unsubstantiated claims by non-members and some former members of the IMT that Workers International League is also the internal name of the IMT's section in the United Kingdom which was formed by Ted Grant and Alan Woods after their expulsion from the former Militant Tendency in 1993. However, since the group practices entrism in the Labour Party it denies being anything more than a magazine (Socialist Appeal).
The Workers' International League was officially formed in July, 2001 during the meetings of its national committee in St. Louis, Missouri and Houston, Texas. Before that time what would become the Workers' International League operated mainly as Youth for International Socialism (YFIS), which is now the youth wing of the WIL, although there is not much distinction between the two organizations as the WIL's cadres are primarily youth and young adults. Instead, the YFIS acted as a recruitment pool for membership in the small "American section" of the IMT, then called the Committee for a Marxist International. More active members of YFIS who paid dues would be placed on an "internal list" of cadres. Eventually these members would form the Workers' International League as the parent organization to Youth for International Socialism.
The organization remains small, but has since grown to about 35-50 members.
Both the British and American sections of the IMT are Trotskyist groups. The US section aims to establish a mass party of labor based on the unions to power with class-independent and socialist policies within the United States while the British section aims to build a Marxist tendency within the Labour Party.
[edit] External links
- Socialist Appeal Website
- In Defense of Marxism. Website of the International Marxist Tendency.
