If you live in a university town, and have no other knowledge of Socialist Appeal, then their ubiquitous stickers saying “Are you a communist? Then get organised” might give a wrong impression of the organisation- or at least one its founder Ted Grant would not immediately recognise.
Socialist Appeal came from the Ted Grant led minority faction within the Militant (then Militant Labour) group in the early 1990s.
A combination of success and growth from doing open, ‘mass’ work around the poll tax struggle, and a renewed witch-hunt within the Labour Party caused Militant (first in Scotland) to break with its long term strategy of entrism- eventually rebranding as the Socialist Party.
The Grant / Woods / Sewell faction rejected this perspective. Their official Opposition was banned and key members expelled early in 1992, as explained in this 38 page bulletin: The Case Against Bureaucratic Centralism.
They then established a new magazine, Socialist Appeal, as the ‘Marxist voice of the labour movement’
We have most of the first 170 or so issues running from 1992 to mid-2009. Usually a monthly, sometimes a fortnightly. At times poorly produced- some of our issues have missing pages, duplicated pages and no staples (bloody hard to scan when they have no staples!)
At some point thereafter, the magazine gave way to a tabloid newspaper of the same name (I only have a smattering of these, not yet scanned) and the group itself began to recruit heavily amongst students and youth with a much more open profile.
We are told that the SWP rape scandal of ten years ago proved a godsend for Socialist Appeal. As the SWP’s student groups all dissolved it was able to clean up and become a dominant force on some campuses.
So, whilst Socialist Appeal remained mostly in the Labour Party in the difficult pre-Corbyn years, its focus was, and remains, more open work outside of the CLPs.
Besides the Socialist Appeal magazines, we also have a dozen pamphlets and specials and six issues of Socialist Appeal- magazine of their US co-thinkers
We have the first issue of Marxist International Review which, I believe, later became In Defence of Marxism.
Splits and Fusions 