About this archive
An alpha. This is IMGpapers 1980–83; what it holds:
- Socialist Challenge 1980–83 — 5,564 articles in 154 issues. Socialist Challenge 1980–83 is here; 1977–79 is at IMGpapers 1976–79.
- Socialist Action (League for Socialist Action) 1980–81 — 11 issues, the whole issue on one page; text for 11 so far. Socialist Action (League for Socialist Action) 1980–81 is here; 1976–79 is at IMGpapers 1976–79.
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; and Socialist Challenge (1977–83), which became Socialist Action in March 1983, when the IMG renamed itself the Socialist League. The League for Socialist Action’s paper (1976–81) is a different group’s: 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.
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 (this site): Socialist Challenge 1980 to March 1983, and the League for Socialist Action’s paper 1980–81
- Socialist Action 1983–88: 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.
- The newspapers 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.
- The League for Socialist Action’s paper is given issue by issue, the whole issue on one page.
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.