Socialist Labour League Conference

[p022] Socialist Labour League, because the Socialist Labour League is not just a British movement. We’re not some- thing which developed simply in this country out of certain problems facing the working class in this country. We represent the continua- tion of an international tradition going back through the struggle of Trotsky for the Fourth International, through the Left Opposition in the 20s which fought against the development of Stalinism inside the Russian party first of all, through Lenin’s fight for the Third Inter- national, the fight of Bolshevism against revisionist trends inside the Russian party and in the interna- tional Social-Democratic movement, back to the basic fight of Marx and Engels to develop a working-class leadership internationally in the 19th century. Our work today in every form, our form of organisation, our methods of fighting for our ideas and developing the activity of the movement in this country, are a continuation and a development of that tradition. When we take up the fight in the British labour movement, we use these methods. We don’t start from scratch every time a new situation comes along. That’s not to say that we apply them in a fixed way, as if they are something which Marx or Lenin or Trotsky wrote down as permanent recipes. Theory has to be defended against revisionism because theory is the distilled experience of the working- class movement. The fight against revisionism is itself part of the fight to build working-class leadership in a practical, as well as in a theoretical way. The point has been emphasised many times that the basis for the degeneration of the SWP leadership lies in the fact that they didn’t pay heed to Trotsky’s exhortation in the 1939-1940 fight against Shachtman, that they should beware of American pragmatic methods, that they must develop the basic ideas of Marxist

[p023] 184 philosophy if they were really going to keep at bay the methods that represenied the methods of American imperialism in the American labour movement. They didn’t take this up; they never really developed theory. They repeated throughouc the ’40s and part of the ’50s some of the ideas put forward by Trotsky, and criticised the Pabloites when they clearly departed from those ideas. But they did not enrich these ideas, they did not develop them in any way; and it is no accident that Pabloite and SWP spokesmen today treat as something of a joke the concern of the SLL with probiems of dialeciics. For these peopie, Marxism is already laid down and nothing need be done about it. All you have to do is to apply it. 1 want to say something else on the question of method, in relation to this question of what is a workers’ state. Peopie ask: what’s the criterion for a workers’ state? They want to know how to identify a workers’ s.ate if they happened to meet one. They wani a list of characteristics— so many legs, colour of eyes, and so on—and they could then look at it and see if it fitted the description. But for us, when we refer to the countries of Eastern Europe, or to China, and particularly to the Soviet Union, as workers’ states, we are not just presenting them wich a medal. We are not just giving them a grade. We’re talking about their relation to the world revoiution, We are saying something about the way in which ihe working class must fight to over- throw capitalism, and that’s why for us the question of how they came to be what they are now is an essential part of our definition. The way that the Socialist Workers Party leaders, for example, talk about Cuba, is to separate the characteristics of the state as it is now; they work out what percentage is nationalized and so on, although they don’t go in to any great detail even on _ these questions, and in addition we have seen that they very often neglect to mention evidence which does not fit in with any argument which they want to put forward. For example, they choose to guard Castro’s poli- tical position. When such objec- tions are raised, they are dismissed as irrelevant. One Pabloite spokes- ‘revisionists’ analysis of Cuba. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer 1963 man reacted very strongly in a dis- cussion with our National Com- mittee when somebody said that Castro had never written any Marxist works. He said, ‘you don’t make a revolution with books’. As _ it happens, this is quite untrue, for the revolutionary movement can_ only develop through the building of a conscious leadership, which must be based on developing theory, on books representing the needs of the working class in its fight to overthrow capicalism. None of this enters into the They look at the characteristics of this particular country and they say, ‘well, if you call China a workers’ state, why not Cuba?’ We look at the Chinese revolution and when we say we think China is a workers’ state, we don't leave it at that. We want to say a lot more about the nature of the leadership of the Chinese revolution, the role that it plays in the world Stalinist move- ment, all kinds of other things about it. If comrades look at the way in which Trotsky analysed the Soviet Union as a workers’ state in The Revolution Betrayed, they find not a single-sentence definition, but a whole page of various characteristics of the Soviet Union in its history, in its development. Perhaps, he concludes, people will say this isn’t much good as a definition. To these people he ironically apologises but insists that this is the description of the actual process. I think that the method of empiricism, which other comrades have talked. about, leads to this way of looking at things, which separates the theory and the principles of the movement from the real struggle to develop the overthrow of capitalism and to develop the power of the working class. It puts these as two quite separate things and in fact, in doing so, completely emasculates the whole of Marxism. What this leads to is simply an adaptation to the existing leaderships of the labour movement: those leaderships which have held back the working class and which are in fact responsible for the continued existence of capitalism, of imperialism, and all that that involves for the conditions of the working class today. Unless you develop Marxism in this way, in a theoretical and practi- cal way, in continuing the fight against revisionism, you will mentally adapt yourself to these other ten- dencies in the movement, You can’t do anything else because you are left with acceptance of ‘the fact’, that is to say, the domination of those who are in control at the particular time. We do not look at the fight in this way. For us it is a fight for leader- ship: a struggle against revisionist tendencies is essential to the whole meaning of Marxism. One leading I.S. member addressed our National Committee for almost an hour on ‘entry’ into Social-Democratic parties without once mentioning the fight against the bureaucracy in those movements. Instead, the perspective was to sit inside these movements and wait for things to develop, for someihing to turn up. He had a systematic theory of how the working class was going to go through various grades from right-wing to left centrism, and at each stage the Marxist must find out what grade had been reached, and deduce what he ought to be doing and to be saying at that particular moment. In our opinion, this adaptation to the bureaucracy results from the failure to develop Marxist theory and to fight for the leadership of the working class, to see theory as being part of that fight for leadership, the key to that fight for leadership. ROBERT BLACK: I would like to say a few words on the nature of revisionism, what in fact the SWP and the Pabloites are revising. All the disputes in the international labour movement have not been so much about how capitalism can be overthrown, as who is going to do it, because the class which is going to do it determines the nature of the struggle. The dispute with the Second International was over the nature of the overthrow of imperial- ism. The Kautskyites put forward the theory that in fact it needn’t be overthrown at all because the imperialists, by rationalising the capitalist production system would in fact remove its contradictions and leave the working class the bene- ficiaries of imperialism. Well, this theory was rapidly knocked on the head by the First World War.

[p024] REVISIONISM—THE DISCUSSION But this theory, like all others, did not automatically disintegrate; although Lenin’s theory on the need for a Bolshevik party was correct historically, it was only accepted by a tiny fraction of the proletariat in the first two or three years of the war. Kautsky’s theories were accepted by the majority of the Social-Democratic members and functionaries and continue to main- tain a grip on the working class to this day. Theories do not dis- integrate on their own, mechanically, but only in struggle. This was proved by the degeneration of S‘alin- ism, for the simple reason that the ability of the leadership to develop the theories disintegrated and the movement collapsed with it. On the dispute within the Third International, once again it was on who was going to carry through the world revolution. Stalin said ‘leave it to me’. We know the results. The basic nature of the dispute in the 20s and °30s was over socialism in one country. Could state power be maintained and socialism built in Russia alone? This is what Stalin envisaged. By the early 1950s he began to envisage communism in one country, let alone socialism. This is the theory of Stalinism, that by the growth of productive forces in one State or group of states, capitalism would disintegrate automatically. Once again this theory has been proved false by history, by experience, and once again these theories haven’t collapsed by their own free will. Conimunist Party membership in this country at the moment is stable, and and it is stable over a large section of the advanced capitalist countries, simply because these theories aren’t being defeated in struggle. They still stand because no alternative theory has been put forward in struggle. It is no good proclaiming theories in the abstract and demolish- ing Stalinism as we all may be able to do from this platform. We must be able to defeat them in struggle. This leads to the position of the SWP. They too have a theory about the transition to socialism: that this is no longer the job of the proletariat as a class. It’s the job of privileged bureaucrats in that class and other classes that may show revolutionary fervour at particular times in par- ticular countries. The dispute about what is ‘a fact’ is of great relevance here, because to use Hansen’s terminology, it is a fact that at certain times in history, the peasantry have in fact attacked the state, or attacked certain aspects of the state and also capitalist pro- duction, certain aspects of capitalist production, the urban aspects of capitalist production, more vigorously than the proletariat. The Mexican revolution is an example, where workers’ battalions were recruited to put down Zapata’s peasant revolution, but this as a fact doesn’t negate the fact that economically, through an economic analysis of capitalist pro- duction, the proletariat is the only class historically able to overthrow capitalism. Now, Hansen, though he _ talks about the resurrection of the peasantry as a revolutionary class which is able to lead a revolution, nowhere goes back to the basic economic analysis of Marx and shows how this premise is contained in or developed from the works of Marx. He seems to tag it on as an after- thought and then makes it the centre of his whole orientation towards the world movement. Now if we go back to the works of Marx, nowhere can we find any justification or support for the view that the peasantry can have an independent existence as a revolutionary class. In fact, Marx shows quite clearly in his attack upon the ideas of Proudhon and other early socialist theorists, that the peasantry in essence must tend toward a bour- geois mode of production, because they are private accumulators of property and wish to accumulate more property. This is a tendency of the petty-bourgeoisie to wish to become big bourgeoisie; and how this class can independently turn suddenly towards socialism is some- thing never envisaged by Marx, Lenin nor Trotsky. They all con- sidered that the petty-bourgeoisie as a class could be won for the revolution in struggle, led by the working class, once again with the emphasis on struggle, not on abstract polemics. The revision by Hansen and Pablo of this fundamental idea that the peasantry is not in its essence a revolutionary class leads to a revision of the whole basic tenets of Marxism, -in the indigenous population. 185 because once you overthrow the basic economic foundation of Marx- ism, the fundamental confrontation of the proletariat and the bour- geoisie, you must therefore over- throw all the concepts which flow from this original proposition. If, in fact the proletariat and the bour- geoisie are not antagonistic classes in a historical sense, therefore, the state is not a weapon of oppression of the ruling class; this might explain the SWP’s call to Kennedy to intervene in the Negro struggle in the South. It also leads. to the SWP’s position on Algeria, where they are satisfied to publish un- critically Ben Bella’s statements on workers’ control. The Pabloites in Britain have recently published Ben Bella on workers’ control. It is full of fine- sounding phrases on what the workers can do in each enterprise, but it finally ends up by saying that a certain man sent along from the state, undefined, will have authority over the workers’ actions. And this is supposed to be a Marxist organi- sation, publishing this sort of material uncritically, without any attempt to analyse what is the state in Algeria, what are its historic and class origins. These origins are essentially bourgeois. It was a French state, a French-owned state, and the state machine is in no way being des‘royed. It is being supple- mented by petty-bourgeois elements This is the character of the Algerian State, and this is the state that is going to supervise ‘workers’ control’ in the Algerian factories and other enter- prises. From the rejection of the pro- letariat as a revolutionary class there follows the denial of the need for a revolutionary party, and this is the logical conclusion, the end-product of the revision of the Pabloites. Having denied silently the economic analysis of capitalism carried out by Marx, they must conclude by reject- ing the process and the instrument by which capitalism is to be over- thrown. Their acceptance of ‘facts’ is a freezing of the historical process, They look around them and think, these are the facts, the things that confront my senses at this moment, and think this is reality, therefore, we have to do something

[p025] 186 about it. Marx in The German Ideology said that the laws of capitalism can be deduced empirically, but it’s one thing to duduce the laws of capi- talism empirically from observation and analysis of phenomena. It is another thing to freeze those facts and to say that they cannot change. That is empiricism. Marx collected data empirically. But collecting empirical data is not empiricism. Empiricism is a philosophic method that accepts facts as they are, as being immutable and _ unchanging, and this, of course, is a completely non-materialist conception of history. It is mechanistic, and therefore it rules out completely the role of human consciousness in the process, because if things are what they are, then we can’t intervene and must adapt ourselves to it. The party as the highest expression of human consciousness is rejected completely. Therefore, on the basis of Pablo’s conceptions, he should wind up his press, his centre and everything, and just retire into oblivion and watch the historical process take over. TOM KEMP: I think it is evident that when Marxists discuss differences which arise politically in the move- ment, they should try to seek the social basis for these tendencies and differences. Why do they arise? After all, any political party or tendency is the expression of par- ticular class forces, and the type of ‘organisation, the type of programme which the party or tendency has is designed to enable that class, or section of a class to carry out par- ticular tasks. There are parties which represent the working class in capitalist society, which have no intention, whose leaders have no intention, of. changing the social order, of overthrowing the capitalist state, and parties of that kind can, of course, have an organisation which is based upon parliamentary methods, winning parliamentary elections, etc. Parties which have a democratic centralist organisation, parties of the Bolshevik type, don’t grow up acci- dentally. They grow up to carry out “certain tasks which history presents ‘to the working class in capitalist society. That form of organisation is retermined by the end to over- alliances with all sorts LABOUR REVIEW—Summer 1963 throw the capitalist state, to carry out a revolution. Lenin’s quarrel with the Mensheviks was a very deep- going quarrel, because this question of party membership and party organisation was inseparably linked with the perspective which the people who put forward the views about alternative organisation had, of the coming revolution in Russia. The Mensheviks could exist with the loose type of organisation they proposed, because they envisaged a more or less protracted period after the overthrow of Tzarism in which capitalism and bourgeois democracy would exist in Russia, in other words, their organisation was determined by their belief that the coming revolu- tion was to be a bourgeois-democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie. And Lenin fought for the Bolshevik Party, with its method of organisa- tion and discipline, because he fore- saw that this revolution was bound to pose the question of workers’ power to the working class. Remember, however, that he didn’t see this task as clearly in the years of the growth of the Bolshevik Party as it was to appear to him in 1917, in fact there is the question that one of the people attacked by Lenin in the years before 1914, was Trotsky, who at that period was _ putting forward in many ways a more correct prognosis for the historical course of development in Russia. That was the basis, of course, upon which Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party, where he saw in 1917 that his prognosis of the Russian revolution, which differed fundamentally from the Menshevik one, led necessarily to the adoption of the Bolshevik method of organisation. His conversion, then, was an entirely understandable one, an historically necessary one, and didn’t represent any sort of psychological kink of Trotsky’s, as the enemies of Trotskyism put forward. So, when the Socialist Workers Party not only refuses to consider this historical tradition, when it fears even an investigation of its own immediate past, it is clear that it .is seeing the task of the working-class movement, the task of its own organisation in a new light. If it abandons the concep‘ion of building the revolutionary party, if it seeks of other trends, then it must be seeing the revolution in a different way, or it must be abandoning the idea of the necessity of a proletarian revolution altogether. Maybe it hasn’t openly come out along these lines, bui that is the tendency which necessarily follows from the abandonment of the task of building a revolutionary party on a world scale. This in effect is what the Pabloites have already done. Their tactic of ‘deep entrism’ means virtually that they abandon any possibility of carrying out the overthrow of capi- talism in the coming period, or the coming decade, that if capitalism is overthrown, it will be, as they believe, through the existing leadership of the working-class movements, and it will be a long time, decades or even centuries, before any possibility of a healthy workers’ state can arise after this revolution comes into being. These are some of the revisions, then, which are bound up with the evasion of a historical discussion, an evasion of any real theoretical dis- cussion by the Pabloites and by the Socialist Workers Party. Finally, on the question of the character of the workers’ state. The comrade who spoke earlier dealt very well with this point, but when one reads the press of the Socialist Workers Party and the Pabloites now, one is expecting to hear almost week to week that some other states have been elevated to the rank of workers’ states. It certainly seemed for a period a few months ago that it could only be a question of time before the Algerian Republic reached this elevated rank, and there has been a moving towards it and moving away from this conclusion on a purely pragmatic basis, accord- ing to what Ben Bella has done or said in the previous week or two, in the pages of The Militant. But if Cuba is accepted as a workers’ state on the lines laid down in the docu- ments of the Socialist Workers Party, it will only be a matter of time before the necessary attributes of this state can be assembled for Algeria, and if Algeria, why not go off to some other parts of the world and see if some of the attributes aren’t being assembled there too? There is Sekou Touré’s Guinea, which the Pabloites a couple of years ago virtually did promote to the rank of

[p026] REVISIONISM—THE DISCUSSION a workers’ state for a very brief period. There is Egypt. There is Burma, where only recently the National Revolutionary Council laid down a programme called Burma’s Way to Socialism as the policy of the Burmese government. It has in recent months nationalized, or is proposing to nationalize, a number of capitalist enterprises, American and British owned, in Burma—oil wells, banks and other enterprises. They have already been nationalized, or are going to be nationalized. You have a government which says it’s going to work to create a socialist Burma, You have a ‘socialist’ pro- gramme adopted by this government, so here are many of the kind of things which the Socialist Workers Party sees in Cuba as constituting a workers’ state, already present in Burma. Perhaps when they learn about this, they'll begin investigating the Burmese question. In fact, if Burma had been an island 80 miles off the American coast, instead of being in SE. Asia, it probably already would have been promoted to this rank. MICHAEL WOOD: At a time when imperialism is suffering from a deep- rooted crisis and there is a resurgence of working-class struggle throughout Europe, the struggle against revision- ism in the Trotskyist movement and for revolutionary Marxism must become the slogan of the day. It is precisely at this period that the role of revisionism presents the greatest danger to the working class and its eradication from the international movement becomes all the more necessary. I think that one of the most important things that has emerged from this struggle is the exposure of the empiricist method adopted by the Pabloites and SWP revisionists, and the abandonment of dialectical materialism. This method is illustrated really by the 1961 Political Resolution of the SWP where a number of facts, or what they call main determinants, are listed very much in the style of Pablo, like, for example, the Colonial Revolution, de-Stalinisation, the growing strength of the workers’ states, and so on. In place of any serious analysis of the economic and class contradictions of these processes, or any attempt really to relate them to one another in a scientific way, facts are simply added together impressionistically, so that the SWP gets a boost from the feeling that things are going their way. Again the Algerian and Cuban revolutions are seen as simply static, unchangeable facts, rather than phases in a unified but contradictory process. Facts like these are nowhere analysed in the light of objective requirements of imperialism in this epoch, which is the only way in which things like Algeria can be understood. With this sort of approach, the SWP leadership al- together loses sight of the role of human consciousness in the class struggle, and the relationship between theory and practice. Objective situations, and the 1961 resolution was a good example of this, are reflected simply passively in their writings, and really only commen- tated upon. Nowhere are they appraised from the point of view of the concrete political tasks that the SWP should have been prepared to undertake in the coming period. It is in this way, as always, that the Marxist movement is reduced to inactivity, by the impressionistic and uncritical assumption that what have always been considered basically re- formist elements in the labour movement, can play a revolutionary role under the impact of these so- called irreversible trends. The same empiricist method has appeared to inspire the SWP in its dealings with the Pabloites. Ever since 1953 they have been content to characterise these particular revisionists by reference only to surface phenomena and impressions, Apart from the bureaucratic organi- sational measures characteristic of Pabloism, Pabloism is regarded by the SWP simply as a political pro- gramme which can contain good or bad elements, and if sufficient agree- ment apparently is reached on the programmatic points, unity is assured with them. No questions of political method, or of the social and historical roots of revisionism, are raised at all in these circles. No attempt is made in the way of dis- cussing past history, past experiences, to maintain any kind of historical and theoretical continuity in the 187 movement. I think we should remember that Edward Bernstein, the most thorough- going revisionist, applied precisely the same method to political events that Hansen is applying now. He discovered one morning a number of facts which appeared on the face of it to falsify some of Marx’s predictions about capitalism. Isolated and disconnected as they were, these facts—that the proletariat was not getting poorer and that it was not being driven to revolt, and that capitalism was not slowly approach- ing the abyss of its downfall—were all good reasons for Bernstein for jettisoning the dialectical method and confining the Social-Democratic party to campaigning for reforms within capitalism. But Bernstein failed altogether to look at these facts he collected in their concrete relationship with capitalism as a whole. He made no sort of analysis of this kind. Thus we see that the empiricism into which Hansen has descended has quite a long history. As opposed to the empiricist method of Bernstein and Hansen, the dialectical method insists that facts of this kind must be considered as moments in a whole unified process, developing in a contradictory way, that is through class and economic contradictions. They have to be analysed seriously by the revolution- ary movement. Further, a _ dialectical dynamic interaction has to be established between the Marxist vanguard and this reality, including the working- class movement. Theory has to be applied constantly as a guide to action, not for the purpose of simply commenting on reality and explaining it, but as a method of seeking all the time concrete tasks for the movement. The Marxist vanguard constantly has to test and enrich its theory for this purpose again and again, through practical, revolutionary struggle. This is some- thing of which the SWP leadership can no longer be considered capable, Im my opinion. JOHN WILTON: I would like to say a few words on the question of empiricist method which has been raised in the whole of this discussion, and which stems in fact from

[p027] 188 Hansen’s open avowal that he is an empiricist, justified by his claim that empiricism as a philosophical method leads directly to dialectics. I think here we have a case where we can see the total theoretical bankruptcy and _ capitulation to idealist philosophy of the revisionists. This is shown by their claim that empiricism leads to dialectics: in this they in fact completely divorce the question of philosophical method, and in this case empiricism, from the whole his‘orical social develop- ment, through class struggle, of human history. And I think it is important to see this, that empiricism in fact does not just drop from the skies on to the head of Thomas Hobbes, dropped by some philoso- phical pigeon, but in fact developed with the emergence of the capitalist class empirically, bit by bit as it were, from within feudal society. It is no accident that particular philo- sophical methods grow with the development of particular classes. To give an example from the history of this time, the English Civil War: nobody got up like Lenin did and said after October, ‘Now we are going to build a socialist society’. Cromwell never got up and said, ‘We are going to construct capital- ism.’ If he had done he would not have been an_ empiricist. But Cromwell was a typical empiricist. He was blown hither and _ thither, sometimes further than he intended to go in the first place. Now, if we take the method itself, Hansen claims this leads to dialectics, quite ignoring,- of course, the development of Hegel’s philosophy for a start. I think we must examine what we mean by empiricism. We have seen this method in relation to our political work, but Hansen talks about it as a general method at the beginning of one of his contributions. I think one of the best analogies I can think of for empiricism, which is looking at things as bits, separate factors, as things, not in interconnection, part of a developing process. You separate our facts and you contem- plate them, you sit back and you look at them, and say, ‘Aren’t they pretty,’ or ‘Aren’t they nasty,’ as the case may be. . The usual empiricist procedure is to look at the world and divide it up definition of a workers’ LABOUR REVIEW—Summer 1963 into separate ‘facts’, rather like cutting up a cake into separate slices. And when we have examined each slice very thoroughly to see what it is like, then we try putting the cake together again to get an idea of what the world as a whole is like. But if anybody ever tries cutting up a cake and then putting the slices back in again, he will find a hole left in the middle, and this in fact is what happens with empiricism. You get a hole left in the middle, and into that hole you can stick anything—you can stick ‘the weltanschauung’, you can stick ‘the life force’, you can stick Jesus Christ, according to taste. In fact, it leads directly to mysticism, and religion, and philo- sophical idealism under whatever badge the investigator happens to fancy at the time. We can see this with our revisionists here, when they make great stress on so-called trends, and currents. It is no accident that these people use terminology directly derived from the weather, which is a thing they cannot control. Nobody controls the weather. They are blown hither and thither by winds and currents, until they form a school of sort of ‘Meteorological Marxism’, which has no relation with materialism whatsoever. An alternative procedure for the empiricist is to take all the separate parts, or a few of them, and con- struct a working model. These models or definitions are like geo- metrical theorems. Hansen, for example, arrives at what he calls economic criteria for the model state, and proceeds to go on a world tour, fitting this model on to the various states. It a bit sticks out here, you either ignore it, or you try and push it into place, or you wait for it to go away. This is what he does for Cuba. Now the interesting thing about this is that in the documents, particularly when discussing the French comrades’ analysis of the Cuban regime as a workers’ and peasants’ government, he attempts to project back this argument and see it as a revision of the International’s definition of the states of Eastern Europe and China in 1948. It might seem at first sight, just looking at the documents, that there was something in this; that, in fact, if you were going to say that Eastern Europe is a deformed workers’ state, or Hungary, or Poland, according to certain criteria, like nationalization, monopoly of foreign trade, and so forth, you have got to apply the same criteria to Cuba. But this is a typical example of the empiricist method, because it takes criteria based on one situation and circumstance, and then auto- matically takes this working model and sticks it on to other states, quite apart from the historical develop- ment of the regimes in Eastern Europe, where you had a_ bureau- cratic establishment of deformed workers’ states, but where the bureau- cratic establishment was in fact led by parties, the Communist parties in those countries, which had a base in the working class, however de- formed their theory was, and where the whole development was part of the position of the Soviet bureaucracy under the pressure of world imperial- ism in the development of the world war. A new Labour Review pamphlet In the early years of the 1914-18 war, Lenin made an intensive study of the philosophy of Hegel, with a view to writing a book on dialectics. Recently, these ‘Philosophical Notebooks’ were published in English and are an invaluable asset to Marxists. Lenin on Dialecties (An Introduction to the Philosophical Notebooks of Lenin) By CLIFF SLAUGHTER This pamphlet shows the connection between the needs of the modern revolutionary movement and the study of dialectical materialism, in Lenin’s day and our own. Two shillings and Sixpence from New Park Publications Lftd.,

[p028] BRITISH CAPITALISM