Ted Grant (1913 - 2006) | The Communist

Today, July 20th, is the fourth anniversary of the death of Ted Grant,
Marxist, Revolutionary, defender of the banner of Trotskyism. In the
next few days we will be publishing the first volume of the collected
writings of Ted Grant cover the period from 1938 to 1942.

We reproduce below deatails of the memorial appeal launched in 2006:

We are appealing to
all our readers and supporters to help raise the necessary resources for the
publication of the collected works of Ted Grant, the only Marxist theoretician
who genuinely developed and built on the ideas of Leon Trotsky after the Second
World War.

The death of Ted Grant
marked the end of an era, but not the end of the struggle for the ideas he
always defended. He has left behind a great legacy and a wealth of material in
the form of articles, speeches and notes spread over the last 70 years. These
constitute an "unbroken thread" in the defence of Marxism and deal with a host
of theoretical, political and organisational questions thrown up by the
workers’ movement in Britain and internationally.

Theory is not a
secondary question. It is of fundamental importance and constitutes an
accumulation of generalised historical experience over generations. Theory is
the distilled essence of experience which serves to guide us in the ebbs and
flows of the class struggle. Ted’s ability to develop Marxist theory was
extremely valuable in this epoch of sharp and sudden changes. His unique
contribution needs to be preserved and made available to the new generation.

Ted Grant in the early 1990s

This does not mean to
say that Ted was infallible. He made mistakes, as did all the great Marxist
teachers. But they were fewer than most and the main thing was that he learned
from them. It is the method that is important, the dialectical method that
permeates all his writings.

Under the influence of
Ralph Lee, an expelled member of the Communist Party, Ted joined the Trotskyist
movement in the late 1920s after reading the American "Militant", which
contained Trotsky’s articles on Stalinism, beginning with the "Critique of the
Draft Programme of the Communist International".

Both Ralph (22 years
old) and Ted (only 16) were engaged in pioneering work helping to set up a small
Trotskyist group in Johannesburg.
Through this means they attempted to establish contact with the black South
African workers. They had a certain success under the circumstances but
suffered from the general harsh climate of the South African regime. We are not
aware if they produced a paper, but they did establish links with the Cape Town
Trotskyists and the International, with Lee’s articles about South Africa
appearing in "The New International".

The earliest piece (in
our possession) written by Ted Grant is from April 1935 – a letter to Leon
Sedov, the secretary of the International Communist League. At this time, Ted
was a member of the Marxist Group inside the ILP but had come into conflict
with the opportunist stance of the group’s leadership. Through this letter, it
was Ted and a few other comrades who alerted Leon Sedov, and through him
Trotsky, about the more favourable opportunities for Marxism inside the Labour
League of Youth. Within a matter of months, Trotsky had drawn similar
conclusions and called for a new orientation towards the Labour Party. "The
British section will recruit its first cadres from the thirty thousand young
workers in the Labour League of Youth", wrote Trotsky.

From the Second World
War onwards, Ted Grant became the main theoretician of the Trotskyist movement
and wrote important works on the evolution and character of Stalinism in Eastern
Europe and China.
He defended the real methods and traditions of Trotskyism and applied them to
the new situation that emerged after the war. As a result, these theoretical
works served to reorientate the movement in Britain, a task the leaders of the
International after Trotsky’s death were incapable of performing. Ted went on
to explain the post-war upswing and the importance of the mass organisations in
the evolution of the working class, which laid the theoretical basis for the
launching of the "Militant Tendency", the most successful Trotskyist movement
in British history.

While a number of
Ted’s writings have been published, many remain unpublished or out of print,
and therefore inaccessible to many. A volume of his selected works entitled
"The Unbroken Thread" was issued in 1989, three years before his bureaucratic
expulsion from "Militant" and the loss of his archives, but this book has been
out of print for some years. A valuable website – tedgrant.org – serves to
publish much of the old documents, but it is not complete and is no substitute
for the printed copy. Over the last month we have added several valuable
documents written by Ted during the Second World War on the Ted Grant Internet
Archive (see www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant or http://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/ for a mirror on the Marxists Internet Archive),
which we intend to reprint in a book.

We – those who knew
and worked with him – have a responsibility to preserve Ted Grant’s priceless
legacy: his ideas.

We therefore call upon
all comrades and friends to give generously to this appeal. This project will
be a fitting memorial to Ted’s life and work for the cause of the working
class.