MAGAZINES SAVILLE DEBUNKS WELFARE STATE MYTHS

Latest issue of The New Reasoner (no. 3, Winter 1957-58) marks a further advance in quality by this quarterly ‘journal of socialist humanism’.

John Saville contributes a study of the Welfare State, debunking myths that are the stock-in-trade of both Tories and Right-wing Labour.

Edward Thompson deals with attempts by the current semiTory.. semi-cynical trend among historians to rewrite the hustory of the Peterloo period in a fashion less distressing zo men of property than that of the Hammonds and their school.

Peter Worsley—whose recent book ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ has been’ widely recognized as a valuable study of the mind of a colonial people—demolishes the cult of Albert Scheweitzer.

‘A true humanism’, he writes, ‘must be a revolutionary.

materialist humanism if it is not to become as compromised, corrupted and dehumanized as Schweitzer’s’.

Other contributions include further comments by readers oa Thompson’s article on Socialist Humanism, the most interesting of which is, perhaps, that by John St John, who suggests that Trotsky’s analysis should be examined before mt be accepted that the bankruptcy of Stalinism has discredited the Marxist approach. © There is also a Russian short story, ‘Levers’, by Alexander Yashin, translated and presented by Alfred Dressler, which not long ago brought down Moscow bureaucratic thunderbolts upon its author’s head (he has since recanted) for the exposure it gives of the hypocritical double-talk of ‘party cadres” in the Soviet Union: :

Meanwhile two issues of the bi-monthly Labour Review have appeared—for. November-December 1957 and January-February 1958...

This journal now presents a regular and serious challenge to Labour Monthly and Marxism Today as the leading Marxist political journal in Britain.

Specially noteworthy features of these two numbers are the editorials (on forty years of Soviet Russia and on current problems of the Labour Party), a study by William Hunter of the ‘blue union’ and the part it plays in dockland!, two 'This article has been reprinted as a threepenny pamphlet, Hands Off the ‘Blue Union’!

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the extent of supporting the abandonment of hard-won rules in certain industries.

Yet this is an episode of great significance, if only because there is every reason to suppose that, should Moscow secure some new ‘Potsdam’ agreement with a British Government— Tory, Coalition or Labour—King Street would revert to the line of. 1945-47, using-the trade union positions won during the ‘militant’ phase of 1948 onward for the purpose of imposing this line upon the workers.

THERE is nothing new under the sun, says an old AT THE CROSS-ROADS (Continued from front page)

open to the TGWU. Why not set up joint local and regional action committees together with the railwaymen? This would be a shining example for all workers in struggle and it would be greeted with enthusiasm by all trade unionists. Such action committees could put the workers’ case locally and win public support; .and they could rapidly be extended to embrace other industries if the need arose.