The Battle for Trotskyism

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Second edition of the opposition documents presented inside the WRP by the present leadership of the Workers Socialist League Price £2.50 plus 20p postage and package from Workers Socialist League, 31 Dartmouth Park Hill • London NWS 1HR With a new introduction increasingly vital to win: so vital that huge resources and rigorous training programmes are devoted to it, and individual athletes resort to drugs as a means to defeat their competitors.

Equal pressures are brought to bear on athletes from the capitalist countries, where the lust for profit, combined with national chauvinism, drives on the "Olympic spirit"

Stabilised

But of course for all the Stalinist longing for a stabilised "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism, the class struggle continues internationally. Political questions have therefore constantly intruded into the make-believe "non-political" world of sport.

Again and again the Games have been exploited by the host government to boost its national prestige.

The clearest example of this This suffered a blow when black American Jesse Owens won four gold medals: but the overall impact of the Games was a success for Hitler, and even today Nazi groups show Leni Riefenstahl's films.

More recently, the Olympics have seen repeated intrusions of the real world into the "ideal"

The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico were preceded by student demonstrations in Mexico City in protest at the huge expense of the Games in the midst of grinding poverty. Hundreds of students were gunned down in the streets.

Not one country boycotted the Mexico Olympics. The savage Mexican capitalist regime was clearly acceptable to all.

The Mexico Games took place in the midst of a mass movement among US blacks and the growing anti-Vietnam war movement.

When Tommie Smith, US 400 metre hurdle gold medal winner, rose to the winner's rostrum and the American anthem started to play, he and to Chile where they were invited to play in the Santiago stadium which had been used by the Pinochet regime as a concentration camp.

lope articularly in ta leveloped trade unions, aimed at stopping the visit.

But two questions arise in such a boycott campaign:

*It must not give the illusion that a boycott can defeat the regime: it is clearly only a propaganda tactic;

*It must not be a boycott that can be exploited by reactionaries for their own ends.

Workers states

It is therefore very unlikely that the boycott tactic can be used in relation to the deformed and degenerated workers states.

• Indeed a tentative campaign for the boycott of the Moscow Olympics at the end of last year centred on the treatment of dissidents by the Kremlin We were opposed to • this Such a development will never occur under imperialist oppression bolstered up by the Stalinist policy of "peaceful coexistence": , only the world socialist revolution and the overthrow of capitalism can create conditions for the advance of man's cultural and physical wellbeing.

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loseph blames immigrants for capitalist slump Sir Keith Joseph, supposedly one of the "brains" of the Thatcher cabinet, last week came out with the astonishing theory that immigrants are to blame for the decline in British By settling and providing a potential labour force in what Joseph called the "dynamic areas"-the Midlands and the South East-Joseph believes that they prevented employers there from attempting to move their new investment into other regions.

This bizarre new version of the old racialist line that "the immigrants are taking our jobs" was immediately refuted by the Commission for Racial Equality, which pointed out that immigrant workers tended to settle in already-declining inner city areas.

It is a well-known fact that textile and clothing. industries in the North would long ago have collapsed if they had not been able to draw in low-wage immigrant labour and thus keep rates of pay down.

Whole sections of industry dependent upon manual labour have relied upon the super exploitation of immigrant workers-who total no more than 6% of the total labour force.

And Sir Keith's supposed "dynamic" areas-the South East and West Midlands-have undergone bigger percentage increases in unemployment-in which, of course immigrant workers and youth are foremost victims.

It would be wrong however to dismiss Joseph's ludicrous argument as no more than a brainstorm from a Minister widely regarded somewhat unstable.

Behind his statement is, on the one hand the frantic campaign by Tory and other bourgeois ideologists to cover over the most obvious expressions of the anarchy of the capitalist system.

Unemployment in the regions is rising as a result of the wholesale rationalisation of a l bankrupt and crisis-ridden British capitalism, which now in place of the promise of increasing wealth and social progress offers workers only the destruction of existing productive forces, social services and basic rights.

But on the other hand, as the Tories spearhead the drive by British employers to carry through these attacks in order to raise profits, they need to seek any means at their disposal to divide and weaken the working class.

Joseph's move to blame immigrant workers for the longterm chronic crisis of British industry, together with the Tory moves to introduce reactionary new racialist legislation, are a conscious attempt to whip up racial divisions in the workers' movement.

the conditions for such racist propaganda are made less favourable, as workers-black and white alike-find themselves side by side in the common battle against the employers and the Tory government.

The fight against racialism is thus connected at each point with the fight for a new, revolutionary leadership in the working class, capable of mobilising its full strength in the struggle to bring down the Thatcher-Joseph gang and establish a workers' government. Joseph

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a question of having "taken part" in the Games it becomes

Common fight' But as mass struggles develop