wider layers of the Scottish people places similar, if not so urgent, responsibility on the shoulders of socialists in England. Despite the different form the nationalist upsurge has taken in Scotland, it represents an embryonic struggle for the democratic right of self-determination.
Supporting such a right has to be pioneered against wide layers of the marxist left (up to and including the Labour "lefts') who claim that such a development, undermining the unity of the British working class, is reactionary in character. Such an argument is false to the core.
The lunity! the left refer to is an imaginary one since large layers of Scottish workers feel that they suffer a distinct national 'discrimination'. The only way to achieve such a 'unity' is not by being antagonistic to their national aspirations - which can only succeed in pushing them behind the banners of the SNP and creating a growing disunity - but by showing them in practice that socialists in England support their democratic rights and are prepared to fight for them.
The attitude of the 'left' towards the rise of in this respect, to their attitude towards the Irish freedom struggle - is born out of adaptation to the chauvinist traditions within the English labour movement. Far from criticising Scottish workers for adapting to nationalist pressures, they should be fighting these pressures within the English labour movement by pioneering the right of the Scottish people to self-determination.
The concretisation of this right must be geared, at any given stage, to the feelings within the Scottish people. While taking up this issue in a general way, the LSA should also continually analyse, within the pages of Socialist Action, developments in Scotland from a marxist point of view.
due to the deiault in marxist leadership. These, stretch from 'economist' errors (seeing only the struggles of women in the workforce as important) to 'counter-institution' positions or, more recently, 'separatist' currents.
Socialists have to counterpose to these orientations that of building mass action campaigns on concrete aspects of women's oppression that can draw ever-wider layers of women into struggle. At the present stage, this means actively supporting and promoting the National Abortion Campaign (which the LSA helped to 'found') as a mass single-issue campaign to fight against continued attempts by the right-wing to erode those rights won under the 1957 Act. The thrust of such a campaign should be to defend the rights won under the 1967 Act as a basis for extending them to a woman's right to choose.
At the same time as intervening as the best supporters of NAC, we should (as socialists) fight to win women activists to a marxist analysis of the roots of women's oppression.