Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Join Our Fight Against Tories!

Socialist Press no. 172, 24 October 1979 · scan pp. 10–11 · about 510 words

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Returned to office after five years of Labour betrayals, the Tory government has immediately begun wielding a sharpened axe on jobs, conditions and social services. Trade Union rights face imminent legal attack. Prices are already beginning to rocket upwards.

Plum sectors of state industry will be handed to the Tories' profiteering big business backers; and the pay rises to police and armed forces mark only the prelude to increased state violence against pickets and anti-fascists, and an intensified army crackThe Callaghan Healey leadership has made it clear that it witl opppose any perspective other than settling down and meekAnd, though they have once more dusted off their near-forgotten "socialist" speeches, Labour's "left-wing" MPs have continued to duck away from any fight to remove Callaghan.

TUC leaders, too, have set out to establish a basis for collaboration with Thatcher and the Tory cabinet, parallelling tHeir anti-working class alfiance with Wilson and then Callaghan.

But the working class has experienced and overcome such betrayals before-to topple Heath's union bashing government in 1974, and smash through Callaghan's reactionary Phase 4 of wage controls in a series of monumental pay battles last winter.

These experiences are not dead. They point to the way that jobs, social services and hard-won union rights can be defended But a principled, revolutionary leadership is needed if the Labour traitors, the TUC collaborators and their hangers-on in the Communist Party are to be exposed and pushed aside, and the mass struggles mobilised that can defeat and remove the Such a leadership must fight day in and day out for a programme of transitional demands which, starting from today's conditions and today's consciousness within the working class, lead workers to grasp the necessity for socialist revolution.

And in taking up democratic demands-such as an • end to racial and sexual discrimination, it must show the crucial role that must be played by the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class capable of leading the struggle for the And it must fight on an international basis-mobilising solidarity for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggleswhether in Ireland, in Southern Africa or elsewhere throughout the world, and drawing strength. and palitical lessons from revolutionary upheavals such as that which ousted the hated PRESS struggle against This means fighting for the reconstruction of the Trotsky.

This method of approach, rejecting any descent to simple trade union militancy, or concessions to any wing of the labour bureaucracy, is the method fought for by the Workers Socialist The next period will see major class struggles in Britain. A principled, Marxist leadership is essential. Our movement though and redundancies strong in programme remains small in numbers. ELSALIST of Socialist Press. I enclose Name. .

Address Send to Socialist Press, Hill, London NW5 IHR.

.75 £6.00 .11.00 £6.50 £8.00 31, Dartmouth Park down in the accupied North of Ireland.

ly accepting five years of Tory devastation. against renewed Tory attacks.

Tory government. emancipation of mankind.

Shah in Iran.

ist Fourth Internationai..

League.

. JOIN US and take forward the struggle for

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SOCIALIST PRESS, HEinESia I+ OcIober 1979

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 172, 24 October 1979