WORKERS OF ALL LANDS, UNITE!

THE Socialist Labour League and The Newsletter send May Day greetings to workers everywhere, to all who are struggling against imperialism.

Internationalism is the central theme of May Day, and internationalism is the keystone of our newly-formed League and of our paper, which is two years old next week.

Our League and our paper are under fire from all who, in one way or another, desire the continuance of the present order of things.

Not least of all, we are under fire for our internationalism, for our loyalty to the grand old slogan: ‘Workers of all lands, unite!’

We reaffirm that the working people of Britain and America, of Russia, China and Africa, have common interests and aspirations. Together they will shake their enemies—the capitalists and bureaucrats—off their backs.

* WE are proud that in the work and activity of the Marxist movement the employing class of Britain, the capitalist Press, the Right-wing Labour leaders, the leaders of the Communist Party and the so-called ‘new thinkers’ have all recognized a formidable challenge.

According to Tom Driberg, speaking at a London meeting last Monday, the Socialist Labour League is an ‘insignificant clique’.

If this is so, how is it that hardly a week now goes by without some scare story in one or other of the millionaireowned newspapers about the ‘troublemaking’ Trotskyists?

Trotskyism is the new spectre that is haunting the old guard of British politics—Tories. Fabians, Stalinists and all. Morgan Phillips exorcizes it week after week with his pen. But all to no avail.

The social forces that have led our world to the brink of thermo-nuclear annihilation; that have unleashed poisons which strike at the infant in the womb and at future generations, that thrive on mass unemployment, that torment the coloured peoples with crimes like the Poplarville lynching; that pervert the workers’ movement into bureaucratism—all these forces see in the Marxist movement a growing danger.

But a growing number of militant’ workers see in the Marxist movement a new hope of effective and honest leadership in their struggles for bread, security, peace and socialism.

We do not shrink from the label that the book-burners and witchhunters fasten on us.

Because we are Marxists we are also Trotskyists. Trotskyism and Marxism are one and the same. We are followers of Lenin and Trotsky, the giants of revolutionary thought and practice, who rescued Marxism from distortion and who showed the working class how to fight and destroy capitalist society and how to take power into their own hands.

* ND who on this May Day 1959, viewing soberly the state the world has been brought to by its present rulers and their hangers-on in the Labour movement, can fail to see the need for such 2 fight?

The battle for socialism is the battle for life. What hells have our rulers in store for us if we fail to destroy the H-bomb and overthrow the capitalist class which produces it and which depends on it for the maintenance of its rule?

Listen to Wing Commander Marshall, who last week-end was in charge of a mock nuclear war in which, 40ft below ground, the direction of sup-. posed radio-active fall-out over Britain was plotted.

His observers man 1,500 posts scattered throughout the country, 500 of which are already ‘completely equipped for nuclear warfare’; four men could stay in each of the latter for nine hours without ventilation, ‘or indefinitely with filtered air’.

When the warning goes, says Wing Commander Marshall, ‘grab five kettles of water and get below is the most sensible advice to give people’.

While the mock wars go on, the real fall-out continues, and the rate has doubled in a year. But let us be comforted: the Prime Minister is keeping ‘a close watch’ on its effects and speaks reassuringly about the strontium-90 in our bones.

Trust Macmillan and buy four spare kettles. To this pass have the worsnippers of the ‘deterrent’ brought us.

* M FANWHILE capitalist society is creaking through another period of economic stagnation.

But there is hopeful news for those who sign on at the Labour. Exchanges. Who is this just back from west Germany, eager to pour out to the Daily Telegraph his discoveries about German efficiency, German expansion, German productivity, and the way the happy German worker loves his boss?

Why, none other than Sir William Lawther, who used to be president of the British miners, and who now commends to us the three-years wages standstill agreed to by the west German miners’ leaders.

But Lawther lets the cat out of the bag when he tells of the millions of refugees, who have been ‘unwilling to indulge in unrest’ and ‘have exerted a powerful steadying influence’ on the German workers.

If the British workers could be made to accept such semi-colonial conditions, how happy the employing class would be!

* ORTUNATELY the British working class is in no mood to be fooled by those who want to curb its militancy. There are too many ‘rebels’, like the Port Talbot steelworkers, who will not accept mis-leadership.

The rank-and-file steelworkers are fighting for more say in their union’s affairs and policy. That such a fight is absolutely necessary is one of the two main lessons of every recent dispute.

The other is that only under Marxist leadership can the workers ever hope to achieve lasting successes from their struggles against sackings, wage-cuts and victimization.

Already the capitalist class is very well aware of this. That is why its witch-hunt and Press campaign against us are so vicious, so scurrilous and so sustained.