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*e:4010612 rrance-is auapieu io iriese e That document received two votes.

We would certainly not agree with all the formulations in this document, but its general thrust is essentially correct.

How, then, should Trotskyists regard and approach the SWP?

The IS/SWP left the Fl in 1950 and has systematically revised the basic tenets of Trotskyism.

It has abandoned and now opposes the struggle for leadership, the transitional programme and the Fourth International.

Without a programme it is subject to pressures from the bureaucracy and trails behind the present level of consciousness within the working class.

It can only react to the struggles of the working classinevitably tailending it. Socialist Challenge Ali editor Tari This does not, however, mean that the mass of the SWP membership and even the leadership are not 'revolutionaries' in the sense that they fight in their own way for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

It does mean that the SWP is a barrier on the road to the overthrow of capitalism.

it systematically miseducates and diverts those who find their way into its ranks.

We say that all talk of the possibility of the whole of the SWP coming to revolutionary Marxism is a diversion (at best) because it is irrelevant at this stage.

That is why at present any approach for unity is to breed illusions in the SWP.

An organisation like the SWP could only be won-and we doubt the possibility anywayWSL fights racist attacks throug squads.

It is no accident that the shift in the IMG from Red Weekly to Socialist Challengepremised on the need for 'revolutionary unity' has resulted in a retreat from the struggle for the transitional programme, however, inadequate that struggle was in the first place.

The IMG's issuing of 'Our Common Ground' in October 1977 marked an important step away from the transitional This document contains not one transitional demand: and it specifically excludes the defence of the deforme: and degenerated workers' states from imperialist attacks.

Not a programme In January of this year the IMG and the ISA Socialist Alliance) issued a 'New Year resolution on Revolutonary Unity' (Socialist Challenge 4.1.79).

On a number of occasions the resolution stressed that it was not a programme and one had to be worked out but the signatories did consider that it provided 'the basis for developing joint work in order to test out in practice the viability of building a unified organisation.

The method here is one in which the organisations concerned try to come to agreement on joint work by progressively whittling down the theoretical and programmatic differences until a distorted "synthesis"' of two very different positions emerges.

The whole of the resolution avoids programme from start to finish and thus the practice on which the 'unity' is to be forged will be and indeed is already subject to the pressures of the struggles in which the comrades will be involved.

The IMG are travelling down the road to centrism-this is an inevitable result of its present orientation.

We approach the Pabloism The Poisoned. differently from the SWP because the IMG still retains a formal commitment to Trotskyism and the building of the Fourth International.

We do not agree with their argument that the USFI is "the" Fourth Internationalwhich we believe to have been destroyed as a single organising centre by the politics of Pabloism.

We see our task as the reconstruction of the Fourth International on the basis of the method of the transitional This reconstruction is at present fought for by the WSL through the fight in the world Trotskyist movement for a re-evaluation of the experience of the post-war history of Trotskyism with the aim of re directing those who are fighting for the building of the Fourth International towards a correct course in that fight.

For us, therefore, significant unity of the 'revolutionary left' can only be achieved on a Trotskyist programme, with agreement on the theoretical underpinnings of that To members of the SWP we say: study our positionscompare the practice of our two organisations.

We will fight for practical unity in the working class in struggle around our programme -or aspects of it.

We do not start from seeking to jettison that programme which we see as the only basis for a successful seizure of power by the working class.

That is the distinctive feature of the politics of the WSL which equips our members to do battle with the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies. It is on this basis, and this basis alone that we seek political unity.

CONCLUDED