Discussion urgent!

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SE Asian wars have split 'united' INB: not circulate the document to IMG members. This was followed by the following let-out clause].

"The Usec, of course, will have to make its own decisions. You must appreciate the number. of nationally based groups which want to circulate material in our discussion.

"In any event there is very lițtle likelihood that the Usec would assume the burden of the very large technical and financial costs involved in any decision to circulate your document."

(emphasis added)

But the evasion of the November letter went further, with the announcment that a member of the USFI Bureau would meet WSL representatives not to speak for the USFI, but:

''to facilitate a Usec decision in this matter"

When this meeting eventually did take place in January, it was made clear that the USFI Bureau spokesman would then refer the discussion back to the Bureau, and that the final agreed USFI proposals would be forwarded to us in writing, along with copies of the USFI Resolutions on Europe and Latin America which we had not received.

Needless to say, the events in iran and various election campaigns intervened: and, despite several attempts to obtain it this letter has still not been sent.

In other words we were correct in saying that no definitive reply to the points raised in our October 25 letter had been received at the time of going to press.

But, this said, we are pleased to see Comrade Grogan has moved to clarify the IMG's position on the circulation of The Poisoned says that:

«[We are) prepared to circulate the text to the members of the IMG, and the Bureau will inform the sections of its existence and encourage them to circulate it."

We have already taken steps to facilitate this circulation through the production of French, Spanish and Danish language translations. We welcome this positive step by the IMG and the USFI towards fulfilling their initial agreement with us.

As soon as we receive copies of all USFI Resolutions for the coming World Congress, work will begin on a document in reply to them.

This will. indeed show the relationship between the historical record of the USFI as discussed in The Poisoned Well and its theoretical and practical positions in today's class struggle-as revealed in these Resolutions (all of which have in fact appeared after The Poisoned Well was completed).

Such a reply will in no way contradict but rather build on the basic groundwork laid in The Poisoned Well.

We have made it plain from our very first statement on the question of the reconstruction of the Trotskyist International (Fourth International: Problems and Tasks) that we do wish seriously to discuss with the USFI and with the other inteïnational groupings calling themselves Trotskyist.

The purpose of such discussions in our view is to establish whether sufficient basis of agreement can be created on the principles and method of the Trotskyist programme for the reconstruction of the International as the democratic centralist World Party of Socialist The emergence in recent weeks and months of further splits and tendencies within the world Trotskyist movementthe 'International Tendency' and the 'Bolshevik Tendency' within the USFI; the split within the USFI which has led to the publication of two opposing positions on • the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea; the formation of the 'Fourth Internationalist Tendency' from groups expelled from the OCRFI; and the continued crisis within and waves of expulsions from the Healyite IC-all these developments in our view testify to the urgency of a thoroughgoing discussion of the programme and principles on which the Trotskyist International must be reconstructed.

Far from simply dredging up abstractions or arbitrary points of dead "history" The Poisoned Well attempts to examine the actual experience of the postwar Trotskyist movement in its attempts to implement the programme laid down in 1938.

And just as the USFI has been reluctant to discuss these experiences, we note that the most signal omission from the USFI's Resolutions is any serious attempt to examine the practical experiences of its sections even since its last World Congress in 1974.

The World Perspectives Resolution, for instance, contains no examination at all of the immense revolutionary struggles in Portugal between 1974-76 and the lessons it must Trotsky have for revolutionary tactics and strategy in other capitalist countries!

By pressing for the circulation of The Poisoned Well and in replying to the USFI's World Congress Resolutions, therefore, the WSL is attempting to turn the entire world Trotskyist movement towards a study of the actual problems of programme and perspective that must be confronted if leadership is to be given to the working class in today's struggles.

As Trotsky points out, dialectical materialism "starts from experience. and always returns to it"

We hope that the welcome decision by the IMG and the USFI to circulate The Poisoned Well will therefore help USFI members to understand that the experience. of their movement did not begin last year or even at the last USFI World Congress -but carries with it all of the post war problems of the Fourth International.

We repeat our public invitation to the members and the leadership of the IMG, the USFI or other groupings regarding themselves as Trotskyists to reply or enlarge upon The Poisoned Well in the pages of our theoretical magazine Trotskyism Today.

And we will continue to seek every avenue for the furtherance of this much overdue discussion on programme and principle.

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JALI , Wednesd Johnny Byrne