''Socialist Organiser'' was a weekly socialist newspaper circulated in the
Labour Party. The newspaper was founded in 1979 by the
Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, later renamed the
Socialist Organiser Alliance.
The newspaper was originally a vehicle for united work between the
International-Communist League (I-CL), the
Workers' Socialist League (who merged with the ICL to become a new WSL),
Workers Power and independent leftists, such as
Ken Livingstone
Kenneth Robert Livingstone (born 17 June 1945) is an English former politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until the council was Local Government Act 1985, abolished in 1986, and as Mayor of Londo ...
. Some independent Labour leftists split from the paper when it opposed the tactic of raising rates to offset cuts to local government services.
In the mid-1980s, the paper was sued by the
Workers Revolutionary Party over claims they repeated that the WRP was partially funded by money from the Libyan and Iraqi governments, but the WRP abandoned the action.
The newspaper gradually became more identified with the new WSL. This process was completed when the ICL/WSL fusion broke, as ''Socialist Organiser'' re-evaluated many of its international policies and developed its own distinctive "
third camp
The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism that aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism by supporting the organised working class as a "third camp".
The term arose early during W ...
" position.
As ''Socialist Organiser'' lost ground as a broad vehicle of left unity in the Labour Party,
Sean Matgamna's supporters from the former ICL began to work entirely through the Socialist Organiser Alliance.
[{{Cite web , title=Workers Liberty (1985–present) , url=https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/wl/index.htm , access-date=2023-10-16 , website=]Marxist Internet Archive
Marxists Internet Archive, also known as MIA or Marxists.org, is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Eng ...
Socialist Organiser was denied the right to register with the Labour Party in 1990, but this had little practical effect and it continued to be published until the mid-1990s, when the
Alliance for Workers' Liberty and
International Socialist Group supported the launch of a new newspaper, ''
Action for Solidarity''.
References
Newspapers established in 1979
Defunct newspapers published in the United Kingdom
Socialist newspapers published in the United Kingdom
Labour Party (UK) publications
1979 establishments in the United Kingdom