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"Socialist Press" is the fortnightly paper of the Workers Socialist League. The League was formed on Sunday 22nd December, after nearly all the founding members had been expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party by its leadership headed by The reason for the expulsions was that Alan Thornett, who was at the time a Central Committee member of the WRP, after a lengthy period of critical analysis of the practice of the WRP itself, set out to bring about a discussion within that party on what were the wrong positions being taken by the Healy leaderThe issues were first raised on the Central Committee, and that Committee agreed to circulate a document written by comrade Thornett, containing a statement of his differences, and to arrange a 'full and free' discussion within the party prior to the 1st Annual Conference. That free discussion never took place. Tiny quantities of the document were circulated to 'reliable' members, and no meetings were held for comrade Inornett to put his position other than in his own immediate To understand the response this document produced in the WRP, forming the basis of a major split on the question of programme, it is necessary to recognise the period we are now entering. As many articles in this first issue show it is as in Trotsky's Transitional Programme a period of struggle for the The defence of jobs through the fight for the sliding scale of hours without loss of pay; the defence of living standards through the fight for the sliding scale of wages related to rising prices; the challenging of the employer and the preparation of the struggle for power by the fight to open the books and establish the power of factory committees and occupations - all of these struggles are now called for by the developing situation. Yet the WRP, right up to the opening of the discussion by comrade Thornett on the CC, had never seriously fought for Instead it had restricted itself to the sterile maximum demand: 'nationalise the economy without compensation under workers control.' Comrade Thornett fought this position and for the demands from Trotsky's Transitional Programme to be included in the WRP's struggle for leadership, in order to form a bridge over which workers could move from their present struggles of whether to resume their ceasefire.

Whoever sups with the devil nee a long spoon, and any revolutionary or any Irishman who tries to peacefully negotiate Irish independence with a British capitalist government is either blind to history or a prisoner of the most limited aims he has set himself.

Those who want to continue th fight however must at some time begin to ask themselves how its ultimate success can be secured.

MARX

We agree with the view expressed by Karl Marx a hundred years ago that Ireland must have 'Selfgovernment and independence from England'.

We also agree with him that the achievement of such aims should be seen as a 'precondition for the emancipation of the English wor king class.

We warn those English: workers who are deceived by the hysteria.

of the capitalist mass media, as Marx warned them in 1870, that standing army, which, if needs be, can be used against the Eng lish workers after having done its military training in Ireland.' This warning applies not just to the army, but also to the battery of repressive legislation that is being introduced by Labour's great liberal' Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins.

Finally, we insist that it is only in the building of the Fourth International that the historic struggle for Irish freedom can triumph.

Here in England the campaign for the withdrawal of British troops, the disbanding of the standing army, and for independence.

and self-determination for Ireland must be taken into the workers movement, as part of the struggle for the building of revolutionary Gerry Healy.

snip and in its daily paper 'Workers Press' area.

entire working class. any of these demands. the leadership. and principles of Trotskyism. fight to end capitalism.

considerable political strength.

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KARL MARX FROM THE VERY BEGINNING Pace 4 frenew of: Kurl Marx and Frea erici Ingel Collected Works, Volume One Kart: 1033-÷3, published by Lawrence and Wishort at £ 3./ Alan Clinton 'Kant ana Pictre soar to heavens Seeking jor some distant land, I but seek to grasp profound and That which - in the streets I find.

These words, written before he was yet nineteen years old, show that, though Karl Marx was not to make himselt a poet, he was the best friend poetry ever had. Struggling to find his feet in the ferment of German idealist philosophy in the 1630%, Marx began the rich and harsh journey along the road where, together with Fruderick Engels, he constructed the bedrock of scientiric socialism.

I study of inen Collected Works will make it possible to trace all the steps on this road. from its first stir nes within the realm of philosophi ral denise co is colmation in the striggle to bund revolutionary ivadership in the workie class.

The systematic prescmention in English: for the first time of all the kee Markond Engels must be •he occasion for celebration by evolutionary socialsts. There can hono doubt that the materials proded will play an ersential part in do cevdopment of that scientific theory essential tor the emancipa•on of the working class.

This preliminary volume, which is eT produced and inexpensive by -day's standards, contains writing:

hich, however remote they seem a st. play a part in to-day's struggle i the working class.

Defers expanding on this point. mething more needs to be said of • cy it is that only now in 1975, with Marx dead for more than 90 veers and Engels for 80, we have refore us the first of fifty volumes .: this tremendous undertaking.

COMPLETE EDITION

It will be some years yet before we wii nave a complete edition in our language of all the works of Marx Engels, and they have been a long time in coming.

These delays are the result not of a sertes of unfortunate accidents, but Oi me sellaja vi the heritage of Marxism on the part of those leaders of reformism and Stalinism who have falsoly claimed to carry it forward.

In Britain before 1900 very few of te writings of Marx and Engels were available to workers. There were some editions of the Communist Manifesto in which together they set out theit main ideas about the develogarnese ens sociely, and put forsard die will which has long since echocd down the gonerations "Work.

ers of the World Unite!' !Or0 only the first volume of ratta? vas avallable in English. It was here that Marx sel out his analy• 1: 0 i bauer of commodity prodection and the laws of motion of rapitalist soulery.

A summary of some aspects of these economic theories was available in two pamphlets entitled Wage Labour and Capital and Wages, Price and Projit.

di the turn of the century the only tresent el the philosophy of dialectical materialism available to British workers was contained in those chapters of Engels reprinted under the title Socialism Utopian • centfit Engels book on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 could be obtaincd. and this must have been useful for those seeking to understand the mature of capitalist industrialisation.

Also available at that time, though in very expensive editions, were some of Marx's collected journalism and hir attack on the petty bourgeois anarchism of Proudhon in The Porer of Philosoph!:

OPPORTUNISM It is not surprising that, with so tew of the works of scientific socialism available to them, British wor!as found their difficulties compounled when they were confronted rich the opportunism of their trade ..nleaders, and the doctrinaire ty of the self-appointed Marx•s oi Sovial Democratic Federation. Angels considered this organisation, in Britain claiming allegiance : *'s theories, to have 'ossified :agma and. by re•emen that is not orthodox Marxism (and that a Marxism which contains much that is erroneous), that is. by pursuing the exact opposite of the policy recommended in the Manifesto, it renders itself incapable of ever becoming anything but a sect.

The need for a break from such sectarian conceptions has by no means disappeared from the British working class movement to this day. However, this break requires, amongst other things, a firm grasp of the basic principles and method of Marxism in a way which has only become possible in the years since these problems first arose.

It has only been in fits and starts that the works of Marx and Engels have become available, and then they have not always appeared in a complete form, with the notes and background information necessary for their study.

After Marx and Engels died , the papers containing all their writings, most of which were unpublished, tel into the hands of the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, who each embarked on the road to revisionism and class betrayal.

Edward Bernstein was given the task of editing the later sections of 'Capital' for publication, but in 1898 decided that capitalism was no longer a system of crisis and contradiction.

The defence of orthodoxy against these attacks on its basic principies was ündertaken by Karl Kautsky, who for all his erudition and correct statements, saw Marxism as a dogma rather than as a method for developing the class struggle at every turn. It was for this reason that he took part, together with nearly all the other German Social Democratic leaders in the betraval of the struggi that the working class needed to carry out in 1914 against imperialist war.

It is hardly surprising that, in the hands of people such as these, few o the warks of Marx and Engels wete prepared for publication, and in some cases they were even censored or suppressed.

After the achievement of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, it seemed that at last all the resources might be found for a proper edition of all the works of Marx and Engels.

In 1923, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow announced that they were preparing an edition of the complete works under the editorship of David Ryazanov, a founder of the Russian workers mov ment and one of the great Marxist scholars of his day.

However, it was not long before it became clear that such a restoration of Marxism would put in question many of the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. Thus the project collapsed in 1930, when Ryazanov was arrested and disappeared into a prison camp.

MANUSCRIPTS DISPERSED After 1933, when fascism came to power in Germany, the manuscripts of Marx and Engels were dispersed, most to Amsterdam, and some for a time to Oxford.

It was only very slowly after the War that the East Germans began to bring out a German edition of the Collected Works, and it is on the basis of this that the fuller and more accessible English version has been produced.

What is clear from this very first bolume is that Marx did not embark on the road to scientific socialism by looking at the appearances he saw around him, but by moving out to what were then the furthest frontiers of bourgeois thought. However, this volume also shows that he immediately came up agains oppression, poveriy, and political struggle. As soon as Marx began to confront the very first theoretical problems of his life, he moved towards precisely those issues which were crucial in the development of his theory.

Thus there was no 'epistomological break' in Marx's thought, no moment when he suddenly rejecter or overturned what had gone befor • The starting point of Marx's writings and researches may appear strange, particularly to those who are used to the crudities of the world of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, where reality is assumed to consist essentially of 'one damn thing after another' Thus Marx says that a legisiator does not invent (laws), he only formulates them, expressing in conscior positive laws the inner laws of spiritual relations' . (p. 308)

This method of approach despite its idealist form, assumes a connection between all aspects of being and appearance which is essential for anybody who sees the need to under stand the world, and to change it. Such a view of the world is superior not only to empiricism, but also to that of the priests of Kantian idealism, whom Marx attacks in his earliest notebooks as having to 'tell their beads over their own powerlessness in the face of things. (p.429 It also leads on very quickly to a hostility to the more vulnerable forms of idealism, especially religion. Thus as early as 1842, Marx had already developed the opinion that Thursday 6th *religion in itself is without content it owes itself not to heaven but to the earth' . (p. 395)

It is of some interest to note that this same passage is quoted by James Klugmann, the Stalinist sage, in his review of this volume in the Morning Star of 9th January. However, Klugmann also quotes the section which follows asserting that religious theory will collapse of itself This view is not consistent with Marx's more mature opinion that "the criticism ot religion is the nignest of all criticism' However, Marx's carly idealism does fit in somewhat with the s called dialogue conducted betv cen Klugmann and various representatives of organised religion.

Other reviews, such as the one by Ken Coates in 'Tribune' have drawr attention to the liberal political opinions expressed by Marx in his aster piones of loutnalism.

Thas Mart opposes censorship. supports divorce, and generally ex" presses opinions which the Stalinist editors can happily characterise as • democratic. . To talk about Marx's views in these terms is. however, to obscure one of its essential aspects.

•LIBERAL He was never a Moeral in the guardian' or "New Statesman' sense. As can be seen from his ..arly opinions about the nature of law, he never saw the various political problems that confronted him simply as isolated injustices, but as aspects of a situation that had to be dealt with in terms of the world as a whole.

This approach immediately places Marx in a stronger position than the many liberal protesters who continue to this day to inhabit the political horizon.

In his early journalism, Marx wrote about many of the immediate political questions of his day, such as the reforms of local administration in the German statelets, which had just begun to move towards unification.

CONFLICT WITH IDFALISM It was in taking up another issue that he wrote about the debates in the Prussian assembly on a proposed law to prevent the peasants from taking wood from the forests for their use, as had been their custom.

In considering these debates, Marx soon came into conflict with those aspects of the Hegelian world-view that provided his starting point. It was clear that what was being declared illegal was that which is harmful to the interests of the forest owner' He thus saw already that his 'philosopher's stone' could only be found in the demand for the poor, politically and socially propertiless' to maintain their 'customary right' to take the wood Thus when he moved from his general notion of law to considering real laws, Marx immediately found that he could not agree with any Hegelian concept of wond-spirit that manifested itself by 'making the rights of human beings give way to that of young trees' (pp. 249, 230, 226).

Thus it was that right from the very start, Marx found the categories if not the methods of Hegelian idealism coming into conflict with the problems he had to consider. He wrote movingly about where his activities were forcing him.

'Anyone who often has to hear directly the ruthless voice of want ämong the surrounding population easily loses the aesthetic tact by which his thoughts can be expressed in the most elegant and modest images. He may perhaps even consider it his political duty for a time to speak in public in the popular language of distress, which in his native land he had no chance of forgetting.' (p.332)

In asserting his qualified support for the materialism of Feuerbach, Marx wrote of the need for nature to come together with politics 'In the only alliance by which present day philosophy can become truth.

In 1837 his moderatoly liberal father was already warning Marx against becoming 'embittered' and four years later his fiancee Jenny von Westphalen feared he was getting 'involved in politics' - 'indeer the most risky thing of all. (pp.

684, 707)

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1 February, 1975 Page S h Februar 1975

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such campaigns are a 'pretext' to make it possible to develop a 'big