International Marxist Group
Its founders, Pat Jordan and Ken Coates, had broken with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in Nottingham in 1956.
While IMG members largely remained in the Labour Party, including Charlie van Gelderen, International marked a break from 'deep entrism'.
Its campaigning was focussed on broader initiatives such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Russell Tribunal, in which Ernie Tate was prominent and in which the RSL and Socialist Labour League did not work, the Institute for Workers' Control and the Revolutionary Socialist Students Front, in which Peter Gowan and Murray Smith were active.
The Group gained some public prominence when Tariq Ali, who had joined in April 1968, was widely publicised in the media as a leader of protests against the Vietnam War.
This turn out from the party led to a small number of members, including Al Richardson, being marginalised: they went on to form the Revolutionary Communist League, better known as the Chartists.
International's May 1969 famous headline "Permanent Revolution Reaches UK" reflected its support for armed self-defence against the British state's forces in Northern Ireland in the Red Weekly and in its propaganda activity.
In 1970, the group used the general election as an opportunity to make revolutionary propaganda rather than canvassing for the return of a Labour government.
In March 1970, The Black Dwarf's editorial board split over questions of Leninism, the felt lack of internal programmatic debate, especially around the support for anti-colonial revolutionary movements by the breakaway faction.
[5] A second newspaper was established, Red Mole, which Tariq Ali edited alongside an editorial board with an IMG majority.
Red Mole was a "revolutionary internationalist" paper that carried a broad range of left-wing opinion in its pages, including a famous interview with John Lennon.
[6] Chenhanho Chimutengwende, a Zimbabwe exile who later served as a minister under Robert Mugabe, was one of the non-IMG members on the editorial board.
[7] IMG members also took part in New Left Review: Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, and Quintin Hoare were on its editorial board for much of the 1970s and subsequently.
For example, there was confusion after Robin Blackburn had written an April 1970 article entitled "Let it bleed" for Red Mole, in which he argued that Marxists should disrupt the campaigns of the Labour and Conservative parties in the 1970 General Election.
The IMG radicalised as it grew: Pat Jordan's leadership gave way to that of John Ross, who anticipated that the rising tide of class struggle could lead to a pre-revolutionary crisis in Britain.
[8] After the events of Bloody Sunday John Lennon and Yoko Ono attended a protest in London while displaying a Red Mole newspaper with the headline "For the IRA, Against British Imperialism".
International's editors and editorial board included many of the organisation's leaders, including Tariq Ali, Patrick Camiller, Ann Clafferty, Gus Fagan, Peter Gowan, Quintin Hoare, Michelle Lee, Bob Pennington, John Ross, Tony Whelan and Judith White.
A notable minority tendency included Pat Jordan, Tariq Ali, Phil Hearse and many of the IMG's supporters on the New Left Review editorial board.
[11] However, by the time of the 1976 USFI World Congress, internal disputes over Latin America were becoming more difficult to reconcile as divisions became entrenched between supporters of the International Majority Tendency, led by Ernest Mandel, and the Leninist Trotskyist Faction, which was led by the American Socialist Workers Party.
