The politics of Socialist Organiser

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I would like to take up some of the points you made in reply to Cde KW's letter in SP221.

I consider that you are seriously wrong to state that "for Socialist Organiser the perspective is to map out a minimum basis of principled agreement for the formation of a left wing current within the • Firstly, Socialist Organiser's statement Where we Stand' which appears in each issue of the SO paper is very far from being a 'minimum basis' • It states very clearly that "Our perspective must be working class action to raze the capitalist system down to its foundations ...

Tactics While we may differ from the comrades of SO on points of tactics or emphasis, this gives us no right to distort their positions.

Secondly, the SO statement nowhere insists or even suggests that the Labour Party is the exclusive centre of struggle.

On the contrary, they make clear their orientation to the trade unions and to newly developing movements of women, gays, blacks etc and the Irish republicans.

They have also recently pubWHERE WE STAND - Socialist Organiser "Organise the left to beat back the Tories' attacks!

No to attacks on union rights; defend the picket line; no state interference in. our unions!

No to any wage curbs.

Labour must support all struggles for better living standards and conditions!

Wage rises should at the very least keep up with price increases. The same should go for state benefits, grants and pensions.

Start improving the social services rather than cutting them. Stop cutting jobs in the public sector.

End unemployment. Cut hours, not jobs-share the work lished a very interesting broadsheet The fight for trade union democracy' which alone suffices to refute your distortions.

However, I think Cde KW is entirely correct to stress that the central question for Trotskyists now is the precise way to approach the huge left wing movement in the Labour Party, and here the experience of the SO comrades is valuable.

Their effective intervention into the Labour left is an example to those of us who want to see a genuinely mass socialist revolutionary movement.

They have been able to bring their views in front of very large sections of the Labour Party membership.

Other Trotskyists have been less successful in this direction and inrraacinoly find themselves We welcome on : any topic pret ferably le words. in a marginal position relative to the Labour left wing.

The development of this left wing at the same point in time as the beginnings of mass industrial action against the Tories presents a real possibility of major political advance in this country-the possibility of an overthrow of a Tory government and its replacement by a workers' government formed nut of the I ahnur left The possibilities for such a development are greater now than at any time in the history of the British labour movement.

It is to these possibilities that all serious socialists must turn their attention urgently, and in the process abandon the practice of attacking others for positions they do not even hold.

Fraternally Ernie Stubbins East London ÉDITOR'S REPLY My comments in reply to KW's initial letter were designed to draw out the marked distinction between the task we set ourselves in Socialist Press-the elaboration of a full Trotskyist programme and the construction of a revolutionary Marxist Party-and the very different task set by Socialist Organiser.

"to help build a class struggle left wing in the trade unions and Labour Party based on a revolutionary socialist platform". (SO Sept 27).

Comrade Stubbins does not need me to remind him that a "class struggle left wing" is not a revolutionary party; nor is it a substitute for a party. And a glance at this revolutionary socialist platform (reproduced below, for the information of our readers shows that it is, as I stated, no more than "a minimum basis of principled agreement" for a broad-based left wing movement.

As such it achieves what it sets out to do: but it is by no means an adequate programme for a revolutionary party.

Transitional demands It contains hardly any of the demands of the Trotskyist Transitional Programme. In particular it omits the call for a sliding scale of wages to keep pace with inflation; it nowhere calls for workers committees to fight to open the books of firms refusing wage demands or seeking to impose redundanciesthus omitting the fight for workers' control of production and for a workers' plan for the development of the economy.

The Socialist Organiser platform also fails to call for occupation of factories and public sector facilities threatened with closure; makes no demand for public service spending to be protected against inflation; calls simply for "support for black self-defence" rather than for workers' defence squads to defeat racist and fascist attacks; and maps out no perspective for uniting the struggles that emerge against the Tory government through the building of councils of action.

Thus the programmatic demands which lead towards the building of organs of dual power are left out altogether from the SO platform.

Indeed the platform even fails to call for action to bring down the Tory governmentwithout which its call for "all firms threatening closure" to be The issues at Labour Conferenes Puger Control For to org "nationalised under workers' control" appears somewhat forlorn-and little more advanced than the Labour Party's own vague commitments to nationalisation.

It is therefore not inaccurate to describe the militant, generally anti-capitalist, demands of the Socialist Organiser platform as a "minimum basis for principled agreement" for a left wing current-as distinct from an'elaboration or popularisation of the Trotskyist programme.

Impact

This is equaliy true whether the demands themselves are raised in the Labour Party or in the unions.

It was not my intention to suggest that Socialist Organiser -for better or worse-directs itself exclusively towards the Labour Party - though its impact has been far more evident there than it has been in the unions.

My stress on the fact that the Labour Party-for all the changes that have taken placeis only one arena rather than the exclusive arena of the fight for socialist programme was in fact in reply to the assertion by comrade KW in his letter that:

"The central arena of the fight for a revolutionary programme must now become the I pointed out that this is not the position of Socialist Press. The building of a new leadership capable in reality of leading a struggle to "raze the capitalist system down to its foundation" requires in our view the construction not simply of a broad "class struggle left wing" in the trade unions and Labour Party, but the building in the workers' movement of a revolutionary party, based on the full programme of Trotskyism, developed in the conditions of today's class struggle.

While broader groupings can therefore play a role in-the struggle, the key issue for us must remain the qualitative one of building and training a Marxist vanguard that is equipped to fight the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

Socialist Press is therefore seen by the WSL as an important means of working towards that objective. It is some of the positions that Socialist Organiser does not hold that are in our view central to the development a revolutionary party in Britain and internationally.

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stop the cuts