Socialist Challenge IMGS CHALLENGE TO TROTSKYISM

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Socialist Challenge editor, Tariq Ali Flippant, anti-political "holiday snaps" from the Grunwick mass picket; uncritical extracts from the new Big Flame pamphlet against Trotskyism; pages of "debate" on "Eurocommunism" in which the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism is not mentioned; and a mere two paragraphs on the struggle for the policy of a sliding scale of wages carried out at the TGWU Conference: mix these together with a welter of light minded and irrelevent material and you have a close approximation to each of the first six editions of 'Socialist Challenge' Socialist Challenge, says the IMG, is not a 'party paper' ' It aims to draw into the Editorial Board organised "forces" outside the present outfit.

Already, several hapless groupings, with neither aim nor programme, have accepted this cordial invitation.

These include 'Big Flame' , which is openly hostile to Trotskyism; the Workers League, which believes Russia and China to be capitalist states; and two new microscopic discoveries-the 'Marxist Worker Group' (from Bolton) and the •Tameside International Socialists' Socialist Challenge No. 1 tried to explain the IMG's role as ringmaster = this circus.

It talked of the need to attract people "responsive to the initiatives BIG - CAGER the far-left but who repelled its lack of unity"

The 'Our Policies' section makes a virtue out of opportunist neces sity and talks of uniting such forces into "broad based class struggle tendencies . . . non-exclusive in character, grouping together militants holding a wide range !!! of political views."

"SECTARIANISM"

The same section . talks of the need to reject "sectarianism". But Trotsky answered all these positions long ago when he pointed to the confusion of the "anti-sectarians":

'The centrist frequently covers up his dawdling by referring to the danger of 'sectarianism', ,, by which he understands an active concern for purity of principles, clarity of position, political consistency and organisational completeness."

(Centrism and the Fourth International).

The IMG today, of course, like the centrists of yesterday, try to make reasonableness and openmindedness on Marxist theory their basis for trapping the innocent and the unwary.

They attack the Workers Socialist League for its determination to carry through a consistent fight for the Trotskyist programme.

TROTSKY

Trotsky dealt with these arguments also:

"Occasionally one may hear the following reproach. .. 'why does [the Left Opposition] take such an intransigent attitude toward those organisations that stand outside of VFAMESIDE C ANTED RONT • LEAN.

Ernest Mandel the Second and Third Internationals [ie the Socialist and Communist Parties]? Why does it demand of them '100% Marxism?' Behind this extremely characteristic approach there is hidden an entire world attitude in which there is hardly to be found 51% Marxism •.. Without a day-to-day struggle for principled purity and for the intransigence of the party, one can have only petty bourgeois floundering in the waves of history."

In fact the "petty bourgeois floundering" of the IMG is deeply rooted in the history of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International, of which the IMG is the British section.

This bloc of organisations dates back to the faction led by Michel Pablo which brought the Trotskyist movement to a split by declaring it was unnecessary and futile to build independent revolutionary parties in the working class, since "objective processes' were, apparently automatically producing centrist moving currents within the mass Stalinist parties.

"FUSE"

The job of Trotskyists, according to the Pabloites, was therefore to dissolve their independent parties and "fuse" with these And, since that split in 1953, under the leadership of Ernest Mandel. they have remained the working class.

The IMG today with its search for a 'broad based' "class struggle [!] tendency" mirrors this method exactly and has resorted to wooing the Socialist Workers Party (formerly the International Socialists).

This is the largest group on the IMG's "far-left' and therefore a prime target for the drive towards 'unity"

As ever the IMG prepares the ground for this manoeuvre, not by an open fight for political clarity but by finding 'reasons' for calling the SWP 'revolutionary' The main problem here is that this definition is blatantly false. The SWP is an out-and-out centrist formation.

It rejects the Trotskyist Transitional Programme outright.

AVOIDED

Its paper, Socialist Worker, completely avoids the fight for Marxist theory, programme and leadership in the working class; considering its job done each time it has given a group of strikers a patronising pat on the back.

Hand in hand with this, the SWP rejects defence of workers' states against imperialism.

Yet for Socialist Challenge it is undiplomatic to point out such things.

(A letter in Socialist Challenge by IMG leader John Ross, was entitled 'Stop These Little [!] Attacks).

Only long articles urging 'unity' and 'non-sectarianism ', are now on the agenda.

In a sense however, there is wisdom in the IMG's silence. To criticise these aspects of the SWP, especially if related to their practical activity in the class Spanish CP leadership struggle would only serve to confirm the fact that 'lack of unity' on the 'far-left' is about deadly serious matters, and cannot be smoothed over by the gimmick of a catch-all newspaper.

Desperate to prove that the opposite is the case Socialist jut for the Challenge has gone all c title of 'Most Flippant and Superficial Left Newspaper"

The Grunwick strike point.

Despite pages and pages of coverage, the reader may search vain for serious political analysis this major struggle.

Why after several months, did the Tories, press and cops seek to turn this struggle into a head-on confrontation?

What questions ot programme "A centrist swears readily by the policy of the united front, emptying it of its revolutionary content and transforming it from a tactic into a supreme principle."

service to those sections of the working class which are seeking a victory in this struggle.

Yet Socialist Challenge in at least its first five issues, merely treats us to the same essential 'analysis' that can be found in any mass-consumption bourgeois paper.

We read:

"The strikers rely not on talks, or on 'compromises" , but in building mass action not as a means of forcing Ward to compromise, but as a way of winning the strike |!!.

They rely on the working class action: in class struggle.

As Arthur Scargill put it, 'What Grunwick is about is class confronmajor political issue it has."

The IMG is here carried away with a euphoria that blinds them to every question of political programme and leadership Socialist Challenge readers will find no serious treatment of the use of the courts or the need to spread the postal blacking which has been the central issue throughout the strike.

Trotskyism is thus reduced to trade unionism, and the IMG descends to the political level of Arthur Scargill.

But while grovelling to the SWP and trade union militancy is bad enough, grovelling to the Stalinists of the Communist Party is worse.

Socialist Challenge has given much attention to the question of "Euro-Communism"-by which it refers to the changing positions of many Western Communist Parties in relation to their own bourgeoisie and in relation to the Soviet Union.

But nowhere will the reader find an honest and open article which fights to explain the utterly counter-revolutionary nature of the CP leaderships.

FRIENDLY

In Socialist Challenge No. S, we find leading IMG member Robin Blackburn giving friendly advice to the British Stalinist Party:

"You're a small cadre organisation [!] on the fringe of a large I think thot won chould

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debated over the last decades, because they are directly relevent both to the situation of your own I and to the conditions of in an advanced capitalist country..

The "relevance" of the "Incomplete'! Fails to understand"! All this is presented as if slightly touched-up, the "critique' by this former leader of a GPU murder squad during the Civil War, could be useful to the working class.

Instead they gave prominence to the inadequate and diversionary pay demands lodged by Stalinist dominated leaderships in Fords (15%), Longbridge (£15) and the docks (20%). None of these claims, if won in full, would even hold its Stalinists which the paper hopes to draw around the IMG.

Such a severe and wholesale lurch away from the principles and method fought for by Trotsky must have a disturbing impact on those

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tation on the picket line. Which is why Grunwick has become the