International Marxist Tendency - Theory and Tactics

Theory and Tactics

The International Marxist Tendency adheres to orthodox Trotskyism, emphasising the education of cadres of workers and youth. There is an emphasis on the following issues in their theory:

• The constitutionally "Socialist" states born after the Second World War (for example, those in the Eastern Bloc) are categorised by Grant as "deformed workers' states", or "proletarian Bonapartist" regimes. Thus he denies a qualitative difference between Stalin's USSR and such countries. In particular, Ted Grant deepened Trotsky's theory on "proletarian Bonapartism". According to this premise, variants between such regimes have a minor importance and the clashes counterposing their leaderships are just instrumental in supporting the interests of conflicting bureaucracies.

• Unlike most Trotskyist groups, the IMT believes that countries such as Burma and Syria, though their leaders were not delivering Marxist–Leninist speeches, are to be included in that same category when they had a planned economy. For these countries, the IMT supports a classic Trotskyist demand: a workers' political revolution aimed at restoring or establishing workers' democracy while preserving economic planning. This demand was raised by the workers' wing of the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956.

• The IMT developed an original concept of entrism which was described as being a different concept than the classic entryism and also an opposing vision to Michel Pablo's "deep entrism" or "entrism sui generis". Marxists should work inside, outside and around the mass organisations for workers begin to move through their own traditional mass organisations and therefore "outside the workers' movement, there's nothing".

• The IMT manifesto makes demands such as "the end to privatisation and the abandonment of market economics", "the rationalisation for privatised companies without compensation" and "the reintroduction of the state monopoly of foreign trade".