Ted Grant

Early life

Grant's father had settled in South Africa after fleeing Tsarist Russia in the 19th century. His original family name is reported as "Blank" also in his autobiography, but The Guardian in an obituary suggested that his full birth name was kept unknown.

His parents divorced when he was young and he was brought up by his French-born mother who took in lodgers to supplement her income. He was introduced to Trotskyism by one of these lodgers, Ralph Lee (born Raphael Levy), who discussed politics with Isaac and supplied him with copies of The Militant, the Trotskyist newspaper of the Communist League of America. In 1934, he helped Lee found the Bolshevik-Leninist League of South Africa, a small Trotskyist group which soon merged with other tendencies to form the Workers Party of South Africa. Later in the year, Grant, Lee and Max Basch decided to move to London where they believed there were better prospects for the movement.

On the journey he changed his name to Edward Grant – but he was always to be known as Ted – and stopped over in France to meet Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov. Once in Britain, he joined the Marxist Group, which at the time was working in the Independent Labour Party and took part in the Battle of Cable Street against fascists. But when Trotsky suggested the group should turn to working in the Labour Party, and their leadership disagreed, Grant was one of a small group who split to form the Bolshevik-Leninist Group, which soon became known as the Militant Group. The group grew, but in 1937, a dispute about the leadership's treatment of Ralph Lee led to the split of several members including Grant.

Political activities

The former Revolutionary Socialist League members formed the Workers' International League, and Grant was to become its main theoretician after the return of Lee to South Africa and in partnership with Jock Haston. The group grew, and in 1941, he became editor of its paper. He continued his role in the fused Revolutionary Communist Party. In 1945, Ted Grant, together with Jock Haston and others, argued that there would be a new but limited period of economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s in the west. This contrasted with the perspectives of the American Socialist Workers Party led by James Cannon in 1945.

After the breakup of the RCP, Grant reluctantly joined Gerry Healy's faction, but was soon expelled. He formed a new, small tendency in the Labour Party which, during 1952 and 1953, called itself the International Socialist Group after its quarterly magazine, The International Socialist. Later named the Revolutionary Socialist League, it was recognised as the official British section of the Fourth International between 1957 and 1965. In 1964 it founded the newspaper Militant.

The group at first grew only very slowly, but by 1983 it had become a significant force in British politics, known as Militant, or the Militant tendency. Throughout this period, Grant and his colleagues formally denied to officials of the Labour Party that Militant was organised in a way which was contrary to the constitution of the Labour Party, insisting it was merely a group of supporters of the Militant newspaper. In the atmosphere of Labour's shift to the left in the 1970s, in which constituency Labour Party General Management Committees (GMCs) were largely against expulsions, there were only a few isolated attempts to take action against Militant, whilst its support in the party, judged by the number of delegates to national conference which supported its motions, seemed to grow.

Labour Party responses

The left had lost their majority on the Labour Party's National Executive Committee in 1982, and the five members of the editorial board of the Militant newspaper, Grant, Clare Doyle, Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh and Keith Dickinson, were expelled from the party on 22 February 1983, while Michael Foot was still leader.

The decision was subsequently endorsed by the full conference of the party, where the union block vote (often used at the discretion of the union general secretaries) swung behind the expulsions, while 80% of the delegates from the Constituency Labour Parties were against expelling Militant activists, as were a considerable number of trade union delegates. This measure did not however stop the growth of Militant.

In 1986 the Labour Party comprehensively overhauled its rule book, at the same as expelling leading Militant members in Merseyside, with a view to making it possible to systematically remove members of entryist groups such as Militant. At first only a handful of leading Militant members were expelled; their (by 1987) three Labour-elected members of parliament were remained under the Labour whip in the House of Commons.

The expulsions from the Labour Party later resumed, by Militant's own tabulation amounting to 219 by August 1991, created a dynamic within the organisation that led many to question the use of entryist tactics.

Expulsion from Militant

At the end of the 1980s, Militant was active in the anti-Poll Tax movement against the Thatcher government's Community Charge (popularly known as the poll tax). Meanwhile, there was a growing faction which believed that continuing support for the Labour Party was impeding the growth of the tendency. Grant worried that his organisation was shifting away from interpreting Trotsky's theories and indulging in "activism"; he had argued that Militant's MPs should pay the poll tax to protect the group. A debate arose within Militant wherein Peter Taaffe and his supporters argued in favour of abandoning the entryist tactic, and instead began standing candidates against the Labour Party in the Liverpool Walton by-election, 1991 and then in the 1992 general election in Liverpool and Scotland.

Ted Grant opposed these developments, and after the ensuing lengthy internal debate and special national conference which confirmed the decision to leave the Labour Party, Grant was expelled from Militant along with Alan Woods in 1992 after a document allegedly written by their faction emerged in the mainstream media which stated that they intended to split Militant and the Committee for a Workers' International.

Following the expulsion they started a new group in the Labour Party, known by the name of its publication, Socialist Appeal. The split also left Grant and his supporters outside the Committee for a Workers' International, but he and Woods were able to found the Committee for a Marxist International (now called the International Marxist Tendency) with international supporters. He spent much of his time following the split on his writing until he suffered a stroke in 2003 at the age of 90, while he was giving a speech. Ted Grant died on 20 July 2006, at the age of 93.

Trotsky's grandson Vsievolod Platonovich Volkov said in 1997 that Grant's "deep knowledge of Marxist theory, and particularly the thoughts and works of Leon Trotsky, leap from the written page. Such a knowledge is the fruit of a long life tenaciously dedicated to the meticulous study of Marxism both in theory and in everyday practice."

Main ideas

Ted Grant described himself as a Marxist, a Leninist and a Trotskyist. In his ideas, one can recognise a strong emphasis on the following issues:

Works