Mg and Workers Self Defence

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The real meaning of the International Marxist Group's call simply to "support black self-defence" came out at a public meeting of the Sheffield Anti-Fascist Front last Thursday.

Tariq Ali, IMG spokesman, mentioned not a word of programme to defend jobs and wages. Nor did he once attack the trade union and Labour leaders for their lack of fight.

Instead his main emphasis was on racialism within the working class itself - "on the shop floor"

This led him to claim -that Barbara Castle and other Labour ministers had simply "given in" to "pressure" from the racialist Brifish working class.

• This of course turns the question of leadership on its head. The working class is the historically progressive class whose struggles provide the material basis for the building of a conscious leadership which can fight racialism and seek to develop class consciousness.

BASIS

Yet the Labour and trade union leaders rest on the continued existence of capitalism. Their inaction against racism has a historical and a material basis.

This is why Lenin did not blame the working class for their support for their "own" ruling class in World War I - he blamed their Social Democratic leaders and split from them when the outbreak of war revealed their class betrayal.

But Ali's speech went further, to voice the reactionary demand for "anti-racist" candidates in local elections. This attempt to turn racialism into a single issue divorced from jobs and wages plays only into the hands of the racists.

Ali never even suggested that such "anti-racist" candidates should be socialists!

For the IMG, in other words, the slogan "Support Black Self-Defence" is simply another one of their ways of ducking out of the fight for principle, programme and leadership in the organised workers' movement.

FALSE Against this, Ali falsely claimed that the WSL policy - fighting to turn local black self-defence groups towards the labour movement as a whole - meant inaction.

"OK. Go ahead. Form your defence squads of mainly white trade unionists" ', said Ali. "But we can't wait for that"

The WSL has never suggested black workers wait passively until broad-based defence squads are formed.

But we insist that only if the question of defence is approacbed politically can it be succanfully carried through.