Activity
Just as the Committee for a Worker's International pursued a policy of working in the traditional mass organisations up until the early 1990s, IMT groups across the world pursue this method in their respective Labour Parties (where they exist), some Communist Parties such as those in France and Italy and, in some countries, mass parties such as the Pakistan Peoples Party. This work, however, is typically combined with independent work outside these parties and with a strong observance of not liquidating the organisation inside these parties. The IMT's section in the United States does not pursue this policy, instead supporting a campaign for a trade union-backed Labour Party.
The IMT has spread to parts of Latin America, where it now has groups in Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil and El Salvador. At the end of 2002 it promoted the launching of the solidarity campaign at Hands Off Venezuela, which is now active in 30 countries and has had resolutions passed within the trade union movements in Britain, Canada, Italy and other countries. IMT activists also play an important role in FRETECO (Front of Factories Under Workers' Control) movement in Brazil and Venezuela. They have been very active in Venezuela, where their section supports the popular revolution and spread the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. In 2010 Ramon Muchacho, leader of the main Venzualean opposition party Primero Justicia, claimed that Alan Woods of the IMT was the "principal ideological adviser and personal friend" of Hugo Chávez, a claim played down by Alan Woods.
Every year all the sections of tendency take part in a large event that is either a World Congress or a World School of Marxism. The function of the congress is to discuss the progress of IMT in the world, present reports and plan the future activities, whilst the World School is aimed mainly to deepen the knowledge of Marxist theory, history of workers' movement and the actual situation of the struggle for world socialism.
In the first days of March 2009 the International Marxist Tendency organised a Marxist School in Mexico, where revolutionaries from all over North, South and Central America gathered in order to discuss the work done in each country, as well as Marxist ideas and perspectives for the movement. Notably present at one of the Meetings was Esteban Volkov, Grandson of Trotsky who described Alan Woods as one of Trotsky's best followers. Also in this event, a new theoretical magazine was launched, called America Socialista, which is now published in Spanish, but will eventually come out in Portuguese, English and French.
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Famous quotes containing the word activity:
“I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man’s capital. Yet I have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this to pay me!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Genghis Khan, in his usual jodhpurs accessorized with whip, straddled a canvas chair and gloated upon the fairyland he had built. Journalists, photographers, secretaries, sycophants, script girls, and set dressers milled and stirred around him, activity ... irresistibly reminiscent of the movement of maggots upon rotting meat.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)