Unity Against Trotsky Sm

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MORNING WORKERS CHALLENGE!

"Unity is an excelient thing. But demarcation on the question of the Marxist programme must precede unity (fusion of the mass newspapers) in order for that unity to be honest and long lasting"

Trotsky "Before we can unite, and in order that we can unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation. Otherwise our unity will be purely fictitious, it will conceal the prevailing confusion and hinder its radical elimination"

Lenin Flying in the face of this advice from the great revolutionaries of our epoch Socialist Challenge was launched a year ago by the opportunist International Marxist Group in the hope of finding a programme sufficiently minimal to permit the fusion of the IMG with a wide range of centrist and anti-Trotskyist groups.

Foremost among these antiTrotskyists courted by the IMG is the biggest grouping on the left-the Socialist Workers Expelled The SWP's founders were expelled from the Trotskyist movement for refusing to defend the Snviet Union against imperialism in the cold-war period-arguing that it had. been transformed into a "state capitalist" regime.

They still hold this reactionary position-which denies the gains of the October 1917 And in keeping with this superficial method of analysis the SWP today consistently pulls back from struggies against the trade union burnaucracy, relying on the syndicalist hope of 'outflanking' them by "rank and file" action.

Despite the fact that these positions not only run directly counter to the Trotskyist programme but have also been crushingly refuted by every event in working class history (which demonstrates that 'the workers united can be defeated Bolton and Leigh).

But apparently the IMG leaders remain undeterred. They are convinced that rather than carry through the hard fight to build a movement by recruiting workers and others to the Trotskyist programme, a shortcut can be found through dropping the programme and swallowing up ready-made centrist layers-no matter what their political positions.

A major Commons debate on the néwspaper industry last week took place to the sound of GoveThis, together with the continuing inability of the IMG impressionists to analyse the development of the class struggle has produced Socialist Challenge's utter political confusion, spiced with occasional adventurism and sensationalism.

From its first appearance its record on key issues has been abysmal.

Socialist Challenge failed for months to call for blacking of ...SO LET'S CALL IT Tra Grunwick, peddled illusions in the Scarman report and carried uncritical interviews with 'left" demagogue Jack Dromey; it has consistently refused to confront or call for a break in the Lib-Lab Coalition; in revealing speeches and documents by Leyland bosses Socialist Challenge made no attempt to use this material to direct workers towards a programme for action on jobs-and wages;

olutionary swimmer." geois formations of the time."

and throughout the firemens' strike Socialist Challenge aped the SWP in focussing on calls for "solidarity" and picketing, when the sharpest political fight centred on the struggle against TUC-policed wage controls.

In between these wrong and dangerous positions an array of non-Trotskyists and antiTrotskyists have been given page after page to display their hos. tility to programmatic clarity and the concept of a Leninist vanguard party.

Sucked in Socialist Challenge cannot be reformed" to produce Trotskyist paper. Its policy on each issue is tied to that of the anti-Trotskyists that have been sucked into Socialist Unity and to the current line of the Socialist Workers Party.

• With the SWP moving to the right in its grovelling to Liberals and bourgeois supporters of the Anti-Nazi League, Socialist Challenge must be drawn in the same direction.

Meanwhile letters from three loading IMG members in recent issues of Socialist Challenge indicate a public split in the organisation on the question of Stalinism.

Orthodox

Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali are both moving towards further accomodation to the British Communist Party, while John Ross is trying to sound like a voice of orthodoxy.

But there can be no prospect of a return to orthodox Trotskyism without the scrapping of the Socialist Challenge adventure, an accoun ting of the historical origins of these revisionist positions, and a thorough break from them in practice in the fight to reconstruct the Fourth International:

The united front of Tory and Labour leaders to boost print union leaders against their members was inevitably backed by the TrotskyWritings 1935-6, p27. Crisis of the French Section pp 122-3.

We note, without the slightest regret, the untimely passing (several decades too late) of two major figures of postwar imperialism.

Selwyn Lloyd was the British Foreign Secretary who in 1956 in league with "socialist" government in France and with the Israeli Zionist regime, organised the British invasion of Egypt in a vain attempt to seize the Suez canal which had been nationalised (with compensațion) by Nasser's Lloyd later went on to be, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, an architect of the Tory attack on working class living standards in the 1960s.

His invention of the six month "pay pause" in 1961 was later made use of by Harold Wilson's Labour Government in 1966.

And last week, of course, no one was more unctuous

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