About this archive
An alpha. The archive is being built, and this is what is in it so far.
- Black Dwarf 1968–70 — 583 articles in 33 issues.
- The Red Mole 1970–73 — 949 articles in 76 issues.
- Red Weekly 1973–77 — 5,537 articles in 210 issues.
- Socialist Challenge 1977–83 — 282 issues, the whole issue on one page; text for 282 so far.
- Socialist Action (IMG / Socialist League) 1983–88 — 179 issues, the whole issue on one page; text for 179 so far.
- Socialist Action (League for Socialist Action) 1976–81 — 19 issues, the whole issue on one page; text for 19 so far.
What is here
The newspapers of the International Marxist Group (IMG), the British section of the Fourth International, and of the paper that came before them: Black Dwarf (1968–70), edited by Tariq Ali, whose editorial board split in 1970 to produce The Red Mole (1970–73); Red Weekly (1973–77) with its Battle of Ideas supplements; Socialist Challenge (1977–83); and Socialist Action, the tabloid of the IMG and then the Socialist League, from no. 1 (18 March 1983) to the end of the newspaper in July 1988.
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.
Two papers called Socialist Action
This archive holds two. Socialist Action, 1983–88 is the IMG’s own paper. Socialist Action, 1976–81 is the paper of a different group, the League for Socialist Action: supporters of the US Socialist Workers Party’s tendency in the Fourth International, who split from the IMG in 1976 and rejoined it in 1982. Neither is the US paper Socialist Action.
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 the page says so.
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.
- Black Dwarf and The Red Mole were cut into articles by machine: a newspaper prints no contents list, so the cuts are made at the headlines, found by their type size. Titles are the machine reading of the headline, and some are fragments; an article can carry text from its neighbour, or be split in two. The page numbers of the scan are marked in the text.
- Red Weekly, Socialist Challenge and both Socialist Actions are given 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. They are a way to find things in the scans, not an edition. Their text is being added as the machine reading proceeds; an issue not yet read is listed with its scan and “text to come”.
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.