FOR MILITANT WORKERS
1959The NewsletterWilliam Hunter Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
AFTER this clear and comprehensive survey of the policies of the Socialist Labour League* it will be-more difficult than ever for some of the ‘new Left’ to be taken seriously when they sneer about the British Marxists’ ‘mindless militancy’, or about ideas ‘distilled in a cellar’.
Militants in the trade unions and Labour Party will grasp eagerly at this book, which meets a need that many of them have been expressing for some time.
‘The Battle for Socialism’ is packed with facts, precisely annotated. There is a great deal of material in it for the socialist propagandist.
But it is more than a propaganda handbook. Much more. It surveys the disintegration of capitalist society. It focuses attention on the turn to violence and reaction throughout the capitalist world. It analyses the employers’ offensive in Britain.
STRUGGLE
It uncovers the causes of Labour bureaucracy—both Stalinist and Right-wing reformist—and shows how these bureaucracies stand athwart the road to socialism. It underlines the urgent need to smash their grip on the working-class movement.
Above all, it elaborates a programme for building a leadership which will consciously mobilize the workers for struggle and consciously prepare them to take power.
Marxists are separated from all other trends on three counts, writes Peter Fryer.
First, they are guided by a scientific theory which explains the laws of development of human society.
Secondly, they seek the combination of socialist consciousness and mass struggle. They do not confine their activities to propaganda and education.
Thirdly, they organize in such a way that decisions reached through democratic discussion can be carried out in a disciplined way.
All other trends in the working-class movement have failed, Fryer says, because they did not rely on the workers and because they did not set the achievement of working-class power as their goal.
SUCCESSFUL
It is from this point of view that he discusses the attitude of the Stalinists and the Right-wing reformists towards such problems as the H-bomb and the employers’ offensive.
He is confident that the working class can successfully solve these problems under the leadership of the Marxist movement,