The past period has opened up tremendous possibilities for the building of a revolutionary party. The radicalisation among wide layers of the population in the middle 'sixties has been given a central thrust, more recently, by the growing politicisation of the labour movement reflected in a serious crisis within the Labour Party and challenge to its pro-capitalist leaders.
Moreover, the ability of the Stalinists to take advantage of this situation has been seriously reduced by the deepening tensions within their own ranks provoked by the contradictions facing them as a world movement. Attempts to 'disassociate themselves from the worst crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy - while retaining their links with the Soviet Union - has created a deep 'cleavage' in the Communist Party which undermines and weakens its credibility before wide layers.
The 'opportunities' for Trotskyism have never appeared so favourable. The key 'reason' why such opportunities have not been taken advantage of is due to the fragmentation and confusion of those forces which lay claim to a Trotskyist heritage. The causes of this fragmentation are, of course, complex. They stem basically from the discontinuity of the Trotskyist movement created by the degeneration of the SLL (now the WRP) in Such a degeneration created a vacuum filled by the emergence and growth of new groups, divorced from the traditions of the Trotskyist movement and unable to grasp its method of approach, that were incapable of understanding and relating to the complex and uneven development of the class struggle over the past few decades or so.
Britain on the basis of a clear methodology that has provoked inner convulsions in their ranks, leading to split-offs, expulsions and growing disillusion. This has been revealed not only in the narrow leconomism' of such groups as the WSL or SWP which have been unable to grasp iment in Scotland or Wales.
It has also been revealed in the inability of such groups - and others such as the IMG or ICL -to integrate these new developments into an overall strategy of struggle within the Labour movement against its reformist leaders. Groups such as the IMG, for example, have swung in the space of a few years from ultra- left abstention on the Labour Party to almost 'uncritical' support for left-reformists such as Benn (in the 1976 leadership battle).
Solving this fragmentation - which objectively holds back the creation of a mass revolutionary party by alienating broad layers on the left seeking an alternative to Stalinism & reformism - is an urgent task. While sectarian attitudes born out of organisational fetishism are to be avoided, it cannot be solved by 'proclamations' in favour of unity such as that recently launched by the IMG around its paper 'Socialist Challenge'.
James P. Cannor:, founder of the American Trotskyist movement.
Such an attitude - which ignores or downplays the programmatic basis on which such unity must be forged - merely repeats the mistakes of the past and harbours the splits of the future. It represents a short-cut tactic to the difficult problems of party-building.
The only way such fragmentation will be overcome in the period opening up is by adopting a perspective that combines:
a) engaging in a serious political debate with all forces on the left to clarify points of agreement b) creating as much unity as possible among the left on those issues where agreement is possible - such as Ireland, abortion or racist Immigration laws - which can provide wide layers with a real perspective of struggle.
It is in the process of working together around concrete issues and carrying on a serious debate SOCIALIST ACTION
around major programmatic questions that the basis will be laid for possible regroupments in the future. Such a regroupment will emerge out of a unity forged at both the level of theory and practThe key task before the LSA remains, in this sense, the elaboration of a clear programme of action which will allow us - in the period ahead -both to a) begin to enter into serious debate with the other tendencies on the left; and b) begin, we develop, to create the maximum unity in action around given aspects other sectors of the marxist left.
In elaborating such a programme, several underlying points have to be born in mind in relation to the method of such a programme - the transitional 1) We begin from the objective contradictions of the capitalist system and the direction in these are moving. On that basis, we derive our demands and we formulate them in terms as possible, understandable to the masses at their given level of consciousness.
2) We do not begin by demanding that the masses understand what the 'system' is or that they reject any aspect of it. Instead we chart a course, raise demands & propose actions aimed at shift -ing the burden of the inequities and breakdowns of capitalism from the shoulders of working people onto the employers & their government where they belong.
3) We. champion the progressive demands and support the struggles of all sectors ressed regardless of the origin or level of these 4) We recognise the deep divisions within the British working class created by Imperialism & class society, and we press for revolutionary unity based on support for the demands of the most oppressed. We press the working class to give clear and concrete answers to the problems faced by its allies. We unconditionally reject all ideas that the oppressed should 'wait! for the labour movement to support them before 'entering' into their own struggles.
5) We raise demands that challenge the 'rights' of capitalist private property and the prerogative claimed by the government to control the lives of working people and the wealth they create. We do not stop with the necessary struggle to defend and extend democratic rights. We carry the fight for democracy into the organisation of the economy and the process for making decisions over the standard of living of the working class.
5) Our method is one of class - struggle leading to deeper and clearer class conscious -ness. We promote the use of proletarian methods of struggle where the workers and their allies can make their weight count advantageously in direct mass actions in the streets & in the work places. In this perspective, united-front, single issue campaigns are central.
7) We recognise that, while willing to struggle around demands seen as vital to them, the working class (and its allies) have deep illusions still in the ability of the Labour Party to champion its rights. Breaking down these illusions cannot be achieved by ignoring the Labour Party but only by placing such demands on the Labour leaders -from inside and outside the party - in order to allow ever-wider layers to go through a concrete experience of the limitations of that party and begin, in the process, to forge a revolutionary party. A) Ireland The central task of socialists in Britain, over the past decade or so, has been to come to the aid of the Irish freedom struggle. Such aid is not only important in giving the oppressed minority, economically weak and numerically small, new courage and a new perspective, It is also important in relationto the British class struggle since unless the labour movement can be won to defending the democratic rights of its allies, it will be increasingly unable in the period ahead to defend its own democratic rights.
The most effective way of aiding the Irish freedom struggle is by mobilising ever-wider layers of the British people in mass action to force the British government to retreat and limit its room British troops in actior. in N. Ireland for manoeuvre. Building such mass action should be around the right of the Irish people to determine their own future. This principle - fought for independently of the stage of the struggle in N. Ireland - is concretely crystalised in the demand 'Troops Out Now'. Other slogans such as 'Free all Irish Political Prisoners' fall within the general framework of this principle.
Such a position should be fought for against the positions advocated by both the Communist Party and the Labour 'lefts' of a 'phased withdrawal of troops' from No Ireland. Such an argument makes a major concession to the 'right' of British Imperialism to be in Ireland & cuts across the principle of selt-determination. The only 'right' that socialists should concede to Imperialism is the 'right to get out now.
Despite the weakness and failings of the present Troops Out Moverent, socialists should support such a movement, attempting in the process to cut across its internal faction fights and give it an outward - going mass action perspective. They must fight for the right of all forces - whatever their positions on other issues or even on the nature of the struggle in N. Ireland - to exist in such a movement provided they agree on the principle of self-determination.
At the same time as helping to build such a movement, the LSA has the duty - through the pages of Socialist Action - to continually analyse the developments in the struggle in N. Ireland from a marxist standpoint.
B) Scotland The growth of Scottish nationalism among ever-
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It has been the inability of these groups to rel- ate to the complex nature of the radicalisation in
the significance of the women's liberation move- ment, Black Power or growing nationalist sent-