Ted Grant: 1913–2006¶
Core Argument¶
Here is a chapter digest for the specified text.
This chapter is a political obituary and personal memoir of Ted Grant, written by his close collaborator Alan Woods. Its core narrative thrust is twofold: to establish Grant as the foremost guardian of orthodox Trotskyist theory in the post-war period, and to defend the strategic line—entry into mass labour parties—that defined his political legacy against those who later abandoned it. Woods presents Grant’s life as a single-minded struggle to preserve the theoretical heritage of the October Revolution through a period of capitalist upswing and left-wing degeneration.
The digest traces Grant’s formation from his youth in South Africa, where the treatment of black workers first politicised him, through his move to London in 1934 and his role in founding the Workers International League and later the Revolutionary Communist Party. The key claim is that after Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, the international leadership of the Fourth International faltered, and only the British RCP—thanks to Grant’s theoretical capabilities—was able to correctly readjust to the post-1945 world. Woods argues that Grant’s writings on Stalinism, economics, and the colonial revolution remain classics, and that his insistence on Marxist theory as the bedrock of political work allowed a tiny handful of supporters to survive the bleak 1950s.
The chapter’s central polemic is directed against the faction of the Militant leadership that, in the 1980s, broke from the Labour Party. Woods frames this as a catastrophic sectarian deviation, quoting Grant’s retort that it was a “short cut over a cliff.” This split is presented as the direct result of allowing success to go to one’s head, contravening Grant’s fundamental axiom: “outside the labour movement there is nothing!” The text argues that the subsequent expulsion of Grant and his supporters from the Militant was a criminal act of folly, and that the correct response to the post-Soviet pessimism was to defend fundamental ideas, producing works like Reason in Revolt and Russia—from Revolution to Counterrevolution.
The digest also draws on personal anecdotes to illustrate Grant’s character: his encyclopaedic knowledge, his rigorous work ethic in editing manuscripts, his peculiar diet and exercise regime, and his ability to sell more papers on demonstrations than anyone else. The chapter concludes by framing Grant as the last of a generation of revolutionary giants, and insists that the proper memorial to him is not lamentation but the continued building of the International Marxist Tendency, whose recent successes—particularly in Venezuela—are presented as the ultimate vindication of his ideas and methods.