MANDEL'S INTERVIEW IN DER SPIEGEL'

On April 12, 1972, an article on Ernest Mandel. Mandel is the leading spokesman of the opportunists who call themselves the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Claiming to be Trotskyist, the United Secretariat (represented in Britain by the International Marxist Group) is based in fact on the programme and ideas of Michel Pablo, who abandoned Trotskyism in the Our concern in this article was with two interviews by Mandel published in the German capitalist press. The interviews arose out of the West German authorities' decision to exclude Mandel from that country, particularly their acting to prevent his taking up a professorship at the Free University of West Berlin, to which he had been elected.

Now the Workers Press article has come under attack from two doughty defenders of Mandel-lariq All and Pat Jordan, leading IMG members —writing in the Pabloite 'Intercontinental Press' Among other things, Tariq Ali and Pat Jordan accuse the Socialist Labour League of whitewashing the German capitalists' decision, all on account of our blind sectarian hate of Mandel. Because of this sectarianism, they say, we oppose the defence of Mandel's It is necessary to deal with this unprincipled accusation before turning to the very intercsting ommissions Jordan's and Ali's article.

The SLL has never allowed its criticisms of other working class and left-wing tendencies to stand in the way of defending them from capitalist attack. For example, when Communist Party leading members in the Electrical Trades Union were witch-hunted from office, we defended them at a time when the Party itself refused to do so.

When Pablo was arrested in the late 1950s in Holland we campaigned for his release.

Similarly, the SLL fought article with which Tariq Ali and Pat Jordan fail to deal in any way. They ignore completely the point we featured most prominently: that, besides his interview in the magazine 'Der Spiegel', Mandel also gave a full-length interview to the fascist paper 'National Zeitung'!

The very same issue of this paper Carried full-page advertisement for an anticommunist march on Bonn. Such is the Unified Secretariat's method of 'defending democratic rights'!

Secondly, we emphasized one significant reply by Mandel 'Der Spiegel's questions. Asked his opinion of the West German government's ban, he replied that he considered it 'a blow against the preparation for the political integration of Europe'! Why do not Jordan and Ali defend this extraordinary statement?

Either they agree with it, or they consider it indefensible.

But its meaning is inescapable. The Comman Market

CONSCIENCE People may be wondering why the unions withheld their votes from Senator McGovern at the Democratic convention last week. The reasons are sound enough. In 1966 there was a crucial vote in the Senate.

A labour Bill was before the House designed to repeal vicious sections of the notorious Taft-Hartley LaW. The southern reactionaries in the Republican Party and rightwing Democrats staged a filibuster to stop the Bill from being enacted. When Democrats put down a motion to try to end the filibuster, McGovern voted with the right-wingers.

McGovern now says he cast this vote for 'pragmatic reasons'. He wanted to save Tuesday July 18,1972 far from it-but that they have become formal rather than friendly and I blame largely the desire of student politicians for the change.' And advising them on their future lives he emphasized the need for tolerance for other people's ideas and opinions. A university was a place, he said, where they should have learned to debate and discuss 'without rancour' and to 'maintain friendships even when they differed in opinion'.

They could give such a lead if they could achieve this and pass it on, particularly in the industrial and political scene.

(Rumours that the Rector of Glasgow University, Mr Jimmy Reid is thinking of getting together with Dr Smith must be discounted.)