[The International Socialists are in the process of…]

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The International Socialists are in the process of expelling 50 of their members, including members in Cardiff, Nottingham and London, one by one. Their offence is "facAlternative'.

IS policy, reaffirmed at their last conference, permits factions to form only in the period immediately preceeding the annual conference, so that no group is able to develop sufficiently to challenge the leadership's politics. Political debate within IS takes place therefore on an annual, rather than a consistent basis, so that it precedes each period of practical activity rather than being a part of it In this the IS leadership seek to preserve the necessary separation between words and deeds to cover opportunist positions.

SPLITS

The present IS expulsions take their place therefore not only in the list of similar moves by the IS leadership to suppress any fundamental opposition to its politics, but must also be seen in the context of the many other splits, purges and divisions which are beginning to tear apart all the major groupings to the left of the Communist Party.

In the crisis of these groups and the sharpening objective conditions, serious cadres from them have responded to the WSL's fight to return to the method and programme of the Trotskyist Pourth International and have joined with both the initial group of revolutionaries expelled from the WRP last year, and further recruits from the WRP itself, to conduct the struggle for revolutionary leadership in the workers movement.

These groups all achieved their most significant growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the first stages in the development of the crisis threw a variety of social groups, including sections of workers, into clear and violent conflict with capitalism. But the theoretical development of the founders and leaders of the political groups took place during the period of the long boom.

One of the effects of this unprecedented era of capitalist expansion was that it severely restricted the possibility of building mass revolutionary parties in the metropolitan countries. The tiny forces of Trotskyism in Britain, largely deprived of the possibility of actual leadership, were reduced to various forms of propagandistic activity. Under these material conditions various tendencies to throw overboard the method and principles of Marxism in the light of supposed "new" conditions were Paul Foot, protected by purges strengthened.

The development of the crisis has created the conditions for Trotskyists to build mass revolutionary parties in all the advanced capitalist countries and the necessity that they should do so. Yet members of the IS, IMG and WRP are finding that their growth, far from increasing, is actually stagnating and in some cases even declining. At the same time the one-sided and revisionist conceptions of Marxism they bring from the boom are inadequate to understand or correct.

The IS Left Alternative's indictment of IS concerned principally its inability to develop a prog ramme capable of mobilising the working class in a struggle for power. Yet their own suggested programme, despite some considerable strengths, suffers from weakness of method inherited from IS. That is, an inability to understand the significance of revointionary tradition or to analyse the present in historical terms. Thus they write: "In a transitional period such as this the class can either go forward or accept swingeing defeats. The task öf developing and arguing fór transitional politics becomes ever more urgent. There are no ready. made answers. Those who reach for their 1938 Trotsky will find a crucial example of clarity in transit'RESS, Wednesday 7th,

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tional activity", the refusal to dissolve their faction, the Left