[3] Four of Livingstone's key advisers were Socialist Action members; all made the "top 25" in the Evening Standard's 2007 list of the most influential people in London.
The remainder of the group drew pessimistic conclusions from the fall of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Socialist Action participated in the 1989 and 1990 Fourth International Youth Summer Camps but suffered another split after the 1991 World Congress.
In 1997, along with Labour Party activist Ken Livingstone, SA backed Morning Star chief executive Mary Rosser and committee member Kumar Murshid in a battle for control over the newspaper.
[7][8][9] In 2001, SA stopped publishing its journal, also named Socialist Action, but continued to organise as a faction, for instance as the Student Broad Left.
[citation needed] In 2003, it played a major role in backing Kate Hudson's leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND),[10] and a long-term CND officer alleged that, along with the Communist Party of Britain, it was becoming dominant in the organisation, in order to exert influence over the Stop The War Coalition.
[4] Running as an independent candidate for Mayor in 2000, Livingstone's decision to appoint members of Socialist Action to his administration during his first term drew criticism in the media.
[14] In a January 2008 article that was subsequently spun as revealing a "secret Marxist cell" at the GLA, Atma Singh, a former member of SA who had been Policy Advisor on Asian Affairs to Ken Livingstone from 2001 to 2007, detailed some of the history and activities of Socialist Action, accusing members of planning a "bourgeois democratic revolution", trying to accumulate power and manipulating the Mayor.
[3] A subsequent episode of the Channel 4 documentary series Dispatches, "The Court of Ken", presented by journalist Martin Bright, featured Singh and others making these same allegations.
It was not a secret group.”[16] In 2007 Livingstone changed the GLA rules so that his eight key advisers, four associated with SA (including John Ross and the late Redmond O'Neill), who as temporary appointments would not normally have been entitled to severance pay, received an average of £200,000 each.
The group applies the Marxist concept of the organic composition of capital to argue that the US economy is in a long-term decline and in turn the non-capitalist character of China is helping it to emerge from the crisis.