Activity
The organisation regarded itself as having learned important lessons from the women's movement, gay liberation struggles and environmental movements and is oriented towards broad campaigns and recomposition of the left. It supported developments like Workers Aid for Bosnia, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, the International Socialist Movement, the World Social Forum, the Respect coalition, Hands Off Venezuela, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Campaign against Climate Change.
Alongside its own journal the ISG sponsored Socialist Resistance, a magazine produced jointly with the smaller Socialist Solidarity Network and some individuals. By 2009, the group's membership had fallen somewhere around 70, the number signed up to its members-only email discussion group.
Reflecting the support of the Fourth International for the European Anticapitalist Left, the ISG joined Respect coalition in England and Wales. Alan Thornett sits on Respect's National Council, and is an organiser of the Respect Renewal movement. The ISG also strongly supports the Scottish Socialist Party, and opposed the split from that party which created the Solidarity movement in Scotland. The Group called for a first preference vote for the Green Party candidate, the ecosocialist Siân Berry, in the 2008 London mayoral election.
Read more about this topic: International Socialist Group
Famous quotes containing the word activity:
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man’s capital. Yet I have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this to pay me!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Envy has blackened every page of his history.... The future, in its justice, will number him among those men whom passions and an excess of activity have condemned to unhappiness, through the gift of genius.”
—Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)