Ted Grant¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter is a commemorative obituary for Ted Grant (1913–2006), written by Alan Woods, which functions simultaneously as a political biography and a defence of the strategic line associated with Grant’s wing of the Trotskyist movement. The core narrative thrust is twofold: to establish Grant as the foremost guardian of orthodox Trotskyism in the post-war period, and to vindicate his strategic insistence on entry work within mass labour parties against those who later broke from the Labour Party.
The chapter traces Grant’s trajectory from his birth in Germiston, South Africa, through his early conversion to Trotskyism after reading Capital at fourteen, to his move to London in 1934. It highlights his role in founding the Workers International League (WIL) before the war, which later fused into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The assassination of Trotsky in 1940 is presented as a watershed: the Fourth International’s leadership faltered, but the RCP—thanks to Grant’s theoretical capacities—supposedly alone adjusted correctly to the post-1945 world. Grant’s writings on Stalinism, economics, and colonial revolution are described as “classics of modern Marxism,” though no specific texts are analysed in depth.
The chapter’s central polemic is internal to the Trotskyist tradition. Woods argues that Grant’s method—systematic, patient work within the trade unions and the Labour Party, particularly the Young Socialists—produced the Militant Tendency, which by its height had 8,000 members, three MPs, and a national profile. The break from the Labour Party by a section of the Militant leadership is condemned as a “criminal act of folly,” a “shortcut over a cliff.” Grant’s expulsion from the Labour Party in 1983 is recounted with defiance: his conference speech—“We’ll be back!”—is held up as the correct orientation. The chapter thus argues against sectarian exit strategies and for the Leninist tactic of the united front and entryism as the only viable road to mass influence.
Theoretical context is provided by reference to the “dark years” of the 1950s capitalist upswing, when genuine Marxism was reduced to “isolated pockets” in Liverpool, London, and South Wales. Grant’s optimism is attributed not to temperament but to Marxist theory. The chapter also draws on the history of the Fourth International after Trotsky’s death, presenting Grant as the figure who preserved its heritage from “shipwreck.”
The personal portrait is detailed and affectionate: Grant’s encyclopaedic knowledge, his rigorous editing, his public speaking style (facts and arguments, no personal attacks), his dietary and exercise regimes, and his indifference to appearance except when visiting his fashion-conscious sister Rae in Paris. The chapter ends with a vignette from Grant’s final years: asked what he would say to Hugo Chávez, he replied, “I would tell him to take power.” The closing paragraphs explicitly frame Grant’s legacy as a banner to be carried forward by the International Marxist Tendency, with the injunction to build “an imperishable monument of proletarian organisation.”