MG's significant silence

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It was erhaps the silences that said most about the Marxist Group at their rally last week.

Not that the speakers were not loud and proficient.

Not that they failed to impress the almost exclusively middle class audience at the Camden Centre.

But the speakers, supposedly addressing the topic of the 40th anniversary of the formation of the Fourth International were unable to attempt any examination of the practical record or the problems and splits in the International since 1938.

And there was no mention of any fight being carried out today py the IMG or any section of the 'United Secretariat of the Fourth International (of which it is a section) for the demands and principles of the Transitional Instead USFI leader Ernest Mandel offered the prospect of an international campaign for a 35-hour week (which would win instant endorsement from the British TUC) and US Socialist Workers Party speaker Nan Bailey offered simply an endless string of partial and democratic demands, without a single mention of a socialist policy.

Odd man out on the platform was an Iranian speaker, who offered a cogent analysis of the development of mass struggle in Iran, a clear call for the building of a Trotskyist party, and a ringing denunciation of international Stalinism.

Yet this speaker, who clearly represents some of the most determined layers within the Iranian mass movement, failed to see the contradiction between his analysis and that presented by Mandel-who dwelt at length on the fact that the Italian, French and Spanish Stalinist parties have rehabilitated" Trotsky and Bukharin, and who boasted of the attendance of a Stalinist union delegation at the recent conference of the Spanish USFI section.

Mandel conspiciously avoided any attempt to examine the role of these Stalinist parties in relation to the class struggle in their own countries: nor did he attempt any assessment of the role of international Stalinism as a whole.

Such evasion is not an isolated mistake; it typifies the approach of the USFI. The result is that while revolutionary elements are drawn towards the USFI hoping to find political leadership, they are offered simply impressions and organised opportunism.

A high point of this is the British IMG.

The platform sensibly omitted any reference to the IMG's work in the British class struggle, though veteran Trotskyist Harry Wicks showed how far he has moved in recent years by trying to compare the IMG's opportunist Socialist Challenge to the early 1930s issues of the US Trotskyist paper The Militant. ' While the rally attempted to show the USFl as the continuity of Trotskyism, its silences and its statements combined to point once again to the need to reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of a practical and theoretical reaffirmation of its method and

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