About this archive
An alpha. This is Socialist Action 1983–88; what it holds:
- Socialist Action 1983–88 — 179 issues, the whole issue on one page; text for 179 so far.
What is here
The paper of the Socialist League. In 1983 the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International, renamed itself the Socialist League, and its weekly Socialist Challenge became Socialist Action. After 1983 the organisation did not call itself the IMG. Not the US paper Socialist Action, and not the League for Socialist Action’s paper of the same name (1976–81).
Socialist Action ran from no. 1, 18 March 1983, to the last issue of the newspaper in July 1988. It is given here issue by issue: the whole issue on one page, page by page, the headlines of each page first and then its columns in order, so one article runs on into the next. It is a way to find things in the scans, not an edition; it may later be cut into articles, as the earlier papers have been.
Four sites, by period
The IMG’s newspapers are split across four sites by the date of each issue:
- IMGpapers 1968–75: Black Dwarf, The Red Mole, Red Weekly to the end of 1975
- IMGpapers 1976–79: Red Weekly 1976–77 with its Battle of Ideas supplements, Socialist Challenge 1977–79, and the League for Socialist Action’s paper 1976–79
- IMGpapers 1980–83: Socialist Challenge 1980 to March 1983, and the League for Socialist Action’s paper 1980–81
- Socialist Action 1983–88 (this site): Socialist Action, the Socialist League’s paper, 1983–88
The reason is practical. Cut into articles, the papers run to some twenty thousand pages,
and with the search index each page costs about two files; the web host allows 20,000 files to
a site. Each site has its own search, filtered by paper and by year; archives.redmole.org searches the archive sites
together. Addresses are the same on every site (/redweekly/no101/,
/socialistchallenge/no61/), and the old addresses at imgpapers.redmole.org lead to
the right one.
The magazines, bulletins and booklets are at img.redmole.org: The Bulletin, The Week, World Politics, International, Socialist Woman, Africa in Struggle and the IMG’s documents.
Where the scans come from
Every scan is held by the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line at the Marxists Internet Archive (ETOL), and many of them were made by Red Mole Rising (Rob Marsden). Every article and issue here links its scan there, opened at the page where one is known. Issue labels and dates are MIA’s, put into one form; where MIA’s label lacks a date the file name supplies it, and where the label is proved wrong by the paper’s own running heads it is corrected.
How the text was made, and how far to trust it
- Every page was read by machine with Apple’s Vision OCR, column by column, keeping where each line sits on the page. None of it has been corrected.
- Not yet cut into articles. Each issue is one page; a search result is the whole issue.
Good enough to search and to read, but quote from the scan, not from here. If you find a mistake, please report it.
Copyright
Copyright in each piece rests with its author. Held as part of the Red Mole archive.