Committee for a Marxist International

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The Committee for a Marxist International (also known as the International Marxist Tendency) is a Trotskyist tendency based on the ideas of Ted Grant and Alan Woods.

Grant was the long time leader of the Militant Tendency in the British Labour Party until it split in early 1992 over whether to try to continue working in the Labour Party. The majority formed Militant Labour outside the Labour Party, which subsequentially became the Socialist Party of England and Wales. Grant maintained that Marxists should remain within mainstream Labour. As a result of the surfacing of a document which, it is alleged, showed that Grant and his supporters were planning to split Militant, he and his supporters were expelled from the tendency and formed Socialist Appeal in Britain (which some former members say has the internal name of the Workers' International League. )

In 1974, Militant and its co-thinkers from Sweden, Ireland and elsewhere around the world formed the Committee for a Workers International. The faction fight within Militant that led to the expulsion of Grant and Woods also played itself out within the CWI with supporters of the Grant minority leaving to form the CMI.

Just as the Grant and Woods led Socialist Appeal tendency pursues a policy of entrism in the British Labour Party, CMI groups outside Britain pursue entrism in equivalents of the Labour Party (where they exist), some Communist Parties such as those in Israel, France and Italy and, in some countries, progressive bourgeois parties such as the Pakistan Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto.

The CMI has elected three MPs in Pakistan (running for the Pakistan Peoples Party) and has developed throughout Latin America, where it now has groups in Venezuela, Peru, Argentina and Mexico. At the end of 2002 it promoted the launching of the solidarity campaign at Hands Off Venezuela which is now active in 30 countries and has had resolutions passed within the trade union movements in Britain, Canada and other countries. One of its most successful section is in Spain, where CMI youth organized the national student organisation Sindicato de Estudiantes.

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