The Workers Socialist League

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The Workers Socialist League is a Trotskyist organisation fighting to build a revolutionary leadership • in the working class in opposition to the betrayals of both "left" and right wing Labour and trade union leaders and the Communist In the daily struggle to take the demands and principles of Trotsky's Transitional Programme into the trade unions; the WL has been at the forefront of the fight for the sliding scale of wages, and work sharing on full pay — demands which at the 1975 T&GWU Conference were the only alternative to Jones' £6 pay plan, and the wholesale acceptance of redundancies by the bureaucracy. In today's fight against the TUC's 4½% pay cutting deal with Healey this demand for a sliding scale of wages (rising according to the rising cost of living as assessed by trade union committees) is the essential basis of consistent opposition.

In the Heaith Service WSL comrades have led the struggle for a sliding scale of NHS spending, for the start of workers' control of the service (beginning with opening the books of the Health Authorities), along with the fight to end all private practice. Perhaps more important we have led the growing call for strike action to defend the NHS against the cuts and to implement these policies, fighting those like the ASTMS and NUPE leadership who substitute the words for the action.

In London this policy has already won a big response with the one-day action against the closure of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital - when 2,000 hospital workers in the area struck and 400 marched to In local disputes also, WL comrades have tested and developed the demands of the Transitional Programme, putting forward in every case the only real opposition to the Stalinists and the right-wing. Our struggle for the "open the books" demand in the motor industry and against all forms of "workers' participation" have won mass responses.

At the same time we have put forward a policy to fight unemployment, calling for unity of employed and unemployed through He sEe it on moroner and here codged tire tor transitional demands, going beyond mere trade union militancy to pose In doing this our comrades have been forced also to lead struggles for trade union democracy against the bureaucratic manipulation of the But our struggle for the continuity of the principles of Trotskyism is in no way a task confined to Britain. It requires an attention and involvement in the international struggles of the working class and moves to so while many interventions in Britain have developed the League's grasp of Trotsky's Transitional Programme, there has been a consistent drive to deepen and enrich the movement's understanding of the history and the present crisis of the Trotskyist Fourth International, as an essential part of any serious initiative towards its reconstruction.

We urge all readers who agree on the need for revolutionary leadership and the demands we put forward to find out more about the WL and lobby MPs against the cuts.

The WSL is tne only the political issues to workers.

Stalinists and right-wing.

rebuild the Trotskyist Fourth International.

join our fight in the labour movement. that fights consistently for exploitation.

The siow progress of Chinese Marxism can be gathered from the fact that the Communist Manifesto was not even translated into Chinese until 1920, and from the largely student orientation of the May Fourth 1919 movement, expressed by Mao in a poem of the penod:

During those crowded months and yea All of us students together and all of t Our bearing was proud, our bodies stri Our ideals true to a scholar spirit Just and upright, fearless and frank, We pointed the finger at our land, We praised and condemned through or And those in high positions we counte This somewhat aimless attitude of youthful revolt came into contact with a form of Marxism that owed more to the mechanical conceptions of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer than to the dialectical materialism developed against Hegel through Marx and Lenin.

It was a Marxism that saw rigid "stages' of social development, ana not the dialectical relationship ol class development and revolutionary struggle.

VOLUNTARISM

The 'voluntarism' that many capitalist commentators have seen in Mao was less an attempt to look at the objective and material basis for class consciousness, than to inspire by moral exhortation and appeals. to an almost religious doctrine of self-denial.

It was a tragedy for the Chinese Communists that they only began to look seriously at questions of revolutionary theory and practice at a time when the Stalinised leadership of Lenin's Comintern was beginning to look away from the principles of revolutionary struggle and trying to win friends and influence people in such places as the British trade union bureaucracy and the Chinese national bourgeoisie.

Yet in China the national bourgeoisie under the leadership of the Kuo Min Tang had only the most effete and temporary role in history. It flickered into existence with its revolution in 1911, but it

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