The aim of our project is to conduct interviews with surviving members of the International Socialists (IS) and its predecessor the Socialist Review Group (SRG) to record their experiences in, and reflections on, their time in these organisations during an important period in the history of the left in Britain between 1950 when the SRG was founded and 1977 when the IS became the Socialist Workers' Party.
We have now completed close to 50 interviews. We have heard about everything from the early years of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the crisis in the Communist Party post-1956, to the Vietnamese solidarity campaign, the working class upsurge in the early seventies, the birth of the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements and anti-fascist and anti-racist activity. We also want to capture the much smaller scale experiences of activists in workplaces, housing estates or schools and colleges.
It is vital we preserve these accounts, memories and reflections of those involved in the radical left in Britain for future historians and activists. That is why we are asking you to donate what you can to our crowd-funder for the IS History Project archive.
We hope to complete 150 interviews by the summer of 2024 for the archive which will be kept by the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University.
We would use any money raised to help us pay for:
- Licenses for technologies such as Zoom (audio/video meetings) and Otter.ai (transcription)
- Secure storage of recordings
- Travel expenses to meet interviewees in person where necessary.
- Paying someone at a Living Wage rate to help with administration and writing summaries of all the interviews
Get in touch with us at [email protected]