The Newsletter, vol. 4 no. 144

In 1958-9 there were 91 fires caused by oil heaters in Lancashire alone. And the recent spate of house fires said to be due to accidents with these heaters is causing considerable alarm.

However, the Oil Appliance Manufacturers’ Asso-’ ciation recently stated that it considered there was no need to stop the sale of drip-feed heaters.

The Fire Brigades’ Union, on the other hand, has called for immediate government steps to compel manufacturers to accept the return of drip-feed oil heaters for modification to make them draught-proof.

The FBU also demands the prohibition of further sales of such heaters unless they comply with safety requirements.

This desire to have a say in safety conditions—hbefore fires break out—is typical of fire service workers. They want the fire brigade to be a fire prevention service—not just a band of fire extinguishers.

They want a say in safety conditions of domestic appliances. They also want the right to inspect offices, factories, etc., to enforce fire safety conditions. They regard many old office blocks, for instance, as potential death traps.

Firemen feel they should be spending more time on fire prevention and less on stupid time-wasting, spit-and-polish routine in the stations. They say there is so much emphasis on ‘bull’ in the stations that some station officers regard fires as unwelcome interruptions.

Firemen demand better conditions In short, firemen want to transform the service into a modern, up-to-date force. One of the things needed to do this is to bring the pay structure up-to-date.

At present, the starting wage for a fireman is £10 7s. 6d. (less £1 per week stoppages). Annual increments. bring him up to a maximum of £12 12s. 6d., but this takes 15 years.

And this wage is for a standard week of sixty hours.

If he works more than sixty hours, a fireman gets one

shilling and sixpence for each additional hour. And, remember, a fireman must be ready to work week-ends, Christmas. Day, bank holidays—the lot. -The pay is not the only out-dated part of a fireman’s job. The fire uniform, they feel, is also something out of the Ark. Firemen think it should not be impossible to produce a good light-weight, waterproof fire-dress, in place of the present bulky, heavy and not-so-waterproof one.

Another grievance is the employers’ plan to introduce a new officer cadet force.. The men say this would mean a two-tier service with promotion and better pay confined to one section.

So—better pay, modern conditions, less ‘bull’—is this too high a price for an efficient fire-fighting (and fire-preventing) service?

The Mind Of An Assassin, by Isaac Don Levine. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 21s. AMONG the many important points made by Nikita Khrushchev to the closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 24 and 25, 1956, was his frank admission in relation to Stalin’s brutal treatment of opponents and especially those who were characterized as Trotskyists.

‘In his “testament”, said Khrushchev, ‘Lenin warned that “Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s October episode was of course not an accident.” But Lenin did not pose the question of their arrest and certainly not their shooting.

‘Or let us take the example of the Trotskyites. At present, after a sufficiently long historical period, we can speak about the fight with the Trotskyites with complete calm and can analyze this matter with sufficient objectivity.

all around Trotsky were people whose origin cannot by any means be traced to bourgeois society. Part of them belonged to the party intelligentsia and a certain part were recruited from among the workers. We can name many individuals who, in their time, joined the Trotskyites; however, these same individuals took an active part in the workers’ movement before the Revolution, during the Socialist October Revolution itself, and also in the consolidation of the victory of this greatest of revolutions. Many of them broke with Trotskyism and returned to Leninist positions. Was it necessary to annihilate such people? We are deeply convinced that, had Lenin lived, such an extreme method would not have been used against any of them.’

Probably few in Communist Party circles in Britain today would care to deny that not only many ‘Trotskyites’ but Trotsky himself fell victim to Stalin’s ‘annihilation’ methods of dealing with political adversaries. The brutal murder of Trotsky and all the meticulous planning which led up to it on that warm summer day of August 21, 1940, in Mexico, remain very much a terrible skeleton in the Stalinist cupboard.

Vv Mercader, alias Jacson, the man who drove the ice-pick into Trotsky’s brain will be released from his prison in Mexico City next August, exactly twenty years after he carried out that foul deed on behalf of his master in the Kremlin. He and other people who were actively implicated in the murder and are alive today constitute a terrible danger to all those bureaucratic elements who cling to Stalinist policy in practice, whilst they mumble pious words about mistakes having been made and comrades posthumously rehabilitated. The Harry Pollitts, Andrew Rothsteins, John Gollancz and John Ross Campbells cannot claim to be cleansed from the crimes of Stalinism.

Interest in this subject is bound to be heightened by the publication on March 25 of a book by American journalist Isaac Don Levine, ‘The Mind of An Assassin’ (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 21s.). It is necessary, however, to treat with great caution the story which is told by Levine. The author is one of a band of reactionary American publicists whose talks are frequently beamed to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by the American State Department. Mr. Levine has a definite object in trying to cash in on the rightful indignation of the Labour movement against Stalinism. He wishes to make use Reviewed by G. HEALY of the crimes of Stalin to whitewash capitalism by implying that Stalinism equals Communism.

He attempts, therefore, to depict the murderer Mercader as the Communist man of the future, a robot in every sense of the word, who plods irresistibly on his foul mission as if guided by some remote-control bureaucrat thousands of miles away. Levine is not concerned with an examination of the historical basis of Stalinism and the parasitic role of the Soviet bureaucracy. He portrays ‘plots and conspiracies’ as if they were the normal mode of conduct in the Communist movement.

Vv From this point of view he is not over-careful in his handling of certain facts. One of his assertions is that Louis Budenz, who for a time in the early 1940s was editor of the New York Daily Worker, was congratulated by the Kremlin for a report which he is supposed to have made to the GPU agent Roberts in New York. This report was to the effect that Trotsky was expelled from Norway because Soviet diplomats in that country were able to produce for the Norwegian government of the day a statement alleged to have been made by the Reverend A. J. Muste that Trotsky had plans for the ‘violent overthrow of the Soviet regime’. This is highly questionable material. At the time Trotsky was in Norway the Soviet government had a fishing trade agreement with the Norwegian government, which was regarded as very important to the economy of that country. To have Trotsky expelled from Norway was not a big job for the Soviet bureaucrats; all they had to do was to threaten the termination of this agreement. There is absolutely no evidence that Muste ever made any report such as Budenz is supposed to have reported.

Levine’s book produces important evidence concerning the background to Trotsky’s assassinatidn, but the credit for this cannot be extended to Levine himself. He has drawn heavily from the writings of others, especially David and Lilia Dallin, who have specialized in exposing a Soviet agent known as Mark Zorin, alias Mark Zborowski, alias Etienne, as he was known in European Trotskyist circles in the years before the war. Etienne was responsible for the murder of Sedov, Trotsky’s son. This man is now serving five years in an American penitentiary, and in his declaration to the FBI he admitted that he was an agent of the GPU, although he denied having carried out the crimes attributed to him. Levine says:

‘Zborowski was tried and convicted on charges of perjury in New York early in December, 1958, receiving the maximum sentence of five years. Although the United States Attorney accused Zborowski of having served the cause of Soviet Russia and international Communism from the very beginning of his adult life, the defendant could not be brought to justice here for his criminal acts committed in France in connection with Stalin’s operations against Trotsky.

‘The first break in the far-flung espionage web around Trotsky, leading to the downfall of Soble and Zborowski, was made by Alexander Orlov, who confided his suspicions ‘to the Dallins. Orlov had learned in Moscow of the reports of the mysterious Etienne, which Stalin cherished on the inside doings in the Trotsky camp.

The source of material in Levine’s book on this matter leaves no doubt that Etienne is a guilty man. Speaking about the death of Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s ‘son, Levine says :

‘Leon Sedov was taken ill with abdominal pains, and had to be rushed to a hospital for an appendectomy. Mrs. Dallin and her good friend Zborowski took elaborate precautions to prevent the NKVD from finding out where Sedov was going to be operated upon. Zborowski ordered an ambulance and accompanied Trotsky’s stricken son to a small hospital in Auteuil, the head of which was a Russian emigre physician. To protect the patient from Stalin’s killers, Zborowski had him register under the name of Martin, posing as a French engineer. The operation was successful and there was steady improvement thereafter, so that the special attending hospital nurse was removed. -‘Then, suddenly, Sedov died. Immediately before his death he was found pajama-clad and in delirium wandering around the corridors of the hospital. The surgeon who had operated upon him was so puzzled by the death that he asked Mrs. Sedov whether her husband had ever tried to commit suicide. .His mother, Natalia, subsequently added what she cailed bizarre details: that the hospital was frequented by pro-Stalinist Russians, that her son had been addressed in Russian by a physician, and that he had been given something to eat in the hours between regular meals.’

The merit of Levine’s book is that it brings together a large body of factual material which proves beyond doubt the identity of Trotsky’s assassin and the fact that he was an agent of Stalin and the GPU. We challenge the London Daily Worker to disprove this material. For instance, Caridad Mercader, the mother of the assassin, is now resident in Paris. She was a key figure in the Soviet GPU’s behind-the-scenes planning of the murder. Immediately after Trotsky died she went to the Soviet Union with her companion Eitingon, the man who was in charge of GPU activity abroad. Incidentally, this man disappeared or was shot during the purge of Beria’s group.

J. R. Campbell’s explanation of the murder of Trotsky, given at the time, was that it was carried out by malcontent Trotskyists. We challenge Mr. Campbell to now come forward and justify this explanation in the’ light of the facts which have been presented.

It will be no use Mr. Campbell claiming that Isaac Don Levine is an agent of the State Department. That is all very well, but what we are concerned with here is an objective appraisal of the facts in Levine’s book.

Vv Perhaps John Gollan would also like to comment now onthe disappearance of Rose Cohen in Moscow during the purge years of 1937-1938. Your silence will not help you for long, gentlemen of King Street. Levine’s book must be answered, not for its author’s sake, but because of the facts he presents regarding Mercader.

Levine has, of course, another purpose in mind in his intermixing of correct facts and reactionary aims. He would like to depict the international Trotskyist movement as _ overrun with Soviet agents and spies. Levine reflects the spy. mania of cold-war McCarthyism. He tries to depict Trotsky as a naive old gentlemen who, whilst he plodded on with his peculiar ideas, was nevertheless blind to the reality of the Stalinist murder-threats.

The method used by Levine is quite consistent in this respect. He is not interested in the historical significance of Trotsky’s political struggle against Stalinism. Indeed he wants to dispute this by obscuring Trotsky’s Marxist method in the fight against Stalin with the impression that spies were crawling all over the Trotskyist movement. There is no doubt that Stalin sent agents of the GPU into Trotskyist organizations. There is no doubt that Etienne, who worked with Mercader, was one of Stalin’s leading agents, but Marxists, and Trotsky was the foremost Marxist, do not consider that a panic reaction is the answer to spies, not only agents of Stalin, but also agents of Scotland Yard and the FBI. The MARCH 26,° 1960 struggle against these vermin is basically a political one. It is a question of programme and an understanding of the class struggle in the construction of the revolutionary party. It is entirely to Trotsky’s credit that he never panicked, but concentrated his attention on the political aspects of Stalinism. In other words his very greatness was that he did the opposite to what Levine believes him to have done. Even when his son lay dying in Paris, Trotsky used the occasion to establish Marxist understanding of such terrible crimes in the minds of revolutionary youth all over the world. His words on the death of Sedov will remain one of the great classics of Marxist writing for all time.

It was within the framework of his political exposure of Stalinism that Trotsky, contrary to what Levine would have us believe, constantly warned about the murderous intentions of Stalin and his agents. The Trotskyist movement all over the world issued declaration after declaration exposing the murderers of Ignace Reis and Rudolph Klement. That is the side of Trotsky and the Fourth International which Levine wants to conceal.

Levine's book should be read by the widest possible number of active workers in the Labour movement. But it must not be taken as the last word. No Marxist can be complacent about Stalinism and its counter-revolutionary role. There are a number of questions which will have to be answered concerning the role played by Etienne and his allies, if he had any, in the world Trotskyist movement—a movement which inevitably must attract intense attention from the agents of the Soviet bureaucacy. The answers will be found in the course of political struggle as well as in a constant checking of a multitude of historical facts brought to light by such people as the Dallins and Isaac Don Levine.

Three particular resolutions debated at the recent conference of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament illustrate most strikingly the contradictions developing inside the Campaign.

One resolution called for the withdrawal of Britain from NATO, saying that this should be ‘an essential part of CND policy’. Another resolution urged that the Campaign play a larger part in the Labour movement. Despite these progressive and positive decisions, a plea for greater democracy inside CND, including the election of the leadership, was rejected.

It is ironical that the present unelected leaders of the CND are the bitterest opponents of political action, and therefore the least likely people to implement the other two resolutions.

Conference garried another resolution instructing the executive committee to emphasise the economic and_ political aspects of its (CND’s) policy. This resolution called for the sending of CND speakers to trade union branches, holding of factory gate meetings and setting up of supporters’ groups in factories. This shows the growing awareness developing amongst many CND members of the need to gain wider support inside the Labour movement.

Following this, Conference then rejected a resolution from Woolwich CND calling for a vigorous campaign amongst the rank and file of the trade unions to gain support for the ‘blacking’? of work on rocket bases and H-bombs.

Certain steps forward have been taken by CND. The adoption of the anti-NATO resolution brings the movement into conflict with the real enemies of peace: the Tory Government. The recognition of the need for a more decisive turn towards the working class brings the CND into contact with the only forces able to resist successfully the nuclear war plans of the Tories and fight for the Government’s removal.

Still lacking in the CND is the recognition of the need to develop a conscious anti-Tory policy and the need to ally the CND with Labour’s left wing, which is the main political force against war. Unless CND takes up the fight against Toryism all its propaganda against the Bomb, its marches and lobbies will be unable to stop nuclear war.

THE New. Statesman points out that Gaitskell and his advisers, in disciplining Crossman, ‘have challenged the central principle of debate in the party (a freedom of which, in attacking Clause Four, they have availed themselves freely)’. The ‘leadership faction’ (or Frognal Set) have indeed tried to establish a precedent whereby the Right has rights while the Left has none. But this didn’t begin with the Crossman affair. Yet the New Statesman made no protest when supporters of The Newsletter were being thrown out of the Labour Party last year to the tune of propositions like this: ‘They oppose the declared policy of the Labour Party from within the Labour Party’ (Peter Robshaw in London News, May, 1959).

It is because Gaitskell and Co. were allowed by the ‘respectable’ Left to get away with their action against The Newsletter, the Streatham and Norwood Labour Parties and the Socialist Labour League that they were encouraged to take the further steps which have now made even the New Statesman begin to see that the real threat to the Labour Party comes from them, from the Right, and not from our much-maligned selves.

‘Forgotten’ Words of Marx Readers looking for material to combat the latest spate of Moral Rearmament propaganda will find it useful to refer back to the two articles by Bob Pennington which appeared in The Newsletter for January 9 and 16.

The pamphlet which MRA are distributing so widely at the present time was evidently written in the first place for an American public. Hence such gaffes as a verse from the Internationale given in the version they sing over there, which differs from ours—and the statement that the British Labour movement began in the East End of London... .

I noticed that William Wainwright, discussing the pamphlet in the Daily Worker, saw fit to include among its weaknesses a ‘quotation from Trotsky on “permanent revolution” without mentioning the fact that he was expelled from the Communist Party and from the Soviet Union’. This caught my eye because of a conversation I had just had with a Communist Party acquaintance who is reading Deutscher’s books and being made by them willy-nilly to reconsider some of his old ideas. Struggling hard, he put the point to me that it was a mistake on Trotsky’s part to think up ‘such an unfortunate expression as “permanent revolution”’.’ When I demurred that, whether or not the expression is an unfortunate one, it was first used by Marx, not Trotsky, he was genuinely incredulous.

The phrase was first used (so far as I know) in the ‘Address of the Central Council to the Communist League’, written by Marx and Engels in March, 1850. Discussing the tactics of the revolutionary workers in revolutions directed against feudalism and autocracy, they observe : ‘While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible . . . it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been displaced from domination, until the proletariat has conquered State power. ...’ And they conclude the document by urging the workers of Germany not to allow themselves ‘for a single moment to be led astray from the independent organizations of the party of the proletariat by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois. Their battle-cry must be: “the permanent revolution”.’

The document is altogether of a character such as to embarrass the Wainwrights and other miseducators of would-be Communists like my acquaintance. Take this, for example : ‘Weapons and munitions must not be surrendered (by the workers) on any pretext; any attempt at disarming must if necessary be frustrated by force.’ Or this: ‘Far from opposing so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are only associated with hateful recollections, such instances must ‘not only be tolerated but the leadership of them must be taken in hand.’

Never So Good—25 Years Ago ‘It is cold comfort to tell the wage-earners that they are better off than their fathers and grandfathers were. . . . The standards of the workers have advanced, but the rich, too, . have had their standards raised even more. The general luxury of today would amaze the property-owning classes of fifty years ago far more than would the workers’ standards of those who were then toiling in the factories, mines and fields. Although both classes have advanced, the gap between the two has widened. The extremes are more violent and more remarkable.

‘This general advance’ brings into still higher relief . the tragedy of poverty, disease and slums, because it emphasises the fact that science has now provided us with the means of overcoming these evils if only we will mobilize our forces to deal with them effectively.’

Stafford Cripps, ‘The Struggle for Peace’ (1936).

More To Come The review of Deutscher’s book ‘The Prophet Unarmed : Trotsky, 1921-1929’ in the second issue of New Left Review is headed ‘Trotsky: The Final Act’. This must be what is called, I believe, in New Left circles, a Freudian slip—wishful thinking coming out in a verbal mistake. The year 1929 by no means marked the end of The Trotsky Story; and Deutscher has a third volume in preparation, ‘The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940’, which will tell of his hero's activities in exile. These laid the basis of the Trotskyist movement on a world scale, including the British section which has developed into the Socialist Labour League of today.

A Socialist Manager Alasdair MaclIntyre’s mention of the role played by Herbert Morrison in getting the Labour movement to accept the ‘London Transport’ model for nationalization without workers’ control recalls the help Morrison was given in that crucial discussion in 1932-1934 by A. L. Rowse.

Rowse was in those days, as author of ‘Politics and the Younger Generation’ (1931), one of the Labour Party’s bright young men. He contributed an essay on ‘Industry in the Transition’ to an influential symposium called ‘Where Stands Socialism Today’ (1933), and in this essay argued in favour of a socialist government entrusting the top management of nationalized industries to the same people who had held the jobs under capitalism.

One of his points was that Lenin had appointed Krassin, manager for Russia of the great Siemens electrical concern, to some key economic positions. Later, as a result of the confidence shown in him, Krassin had come over to Bolshevism. ‘At first he was an outsider, a great manager, not really understanding the social aims and ideas of Communism. . . . To my mind, the story of Krassin’s coming over is a story the moral of which, for our own purposes, we should take heart.’

What the worthy historian concealed from his readers’ view in this example was that Krassin had been a Marxist from student days, had been to prison and Siberia for his views, and had been a member of the first Bolshevik central committee! He was responsible for a great deal of the Bolshevik underground work in Baku, which was later attributed to: Stalin. True, in the period of reaction after 1908 Krassin drifted out of active politics, like many other ‘old Bolsheviks’; but in 1917 he once again placed himself at Lenin’s disposal—and this Krassin was no naive, non-political ‘specialist’ such as Rowse would have had his readers visualise.

The moral of which is that even the most respectableseeming of historians ought not to be taken on trust when he writes about political issues of his own day.

USA MaARcH 26, 1960

POLICE-STATE tactics and gangs of deputized storm troopers are being employed by Southern officials to smash the still spreading protest movement of Negro students.

City and State officials have imposed a regime close to martial law upon the Negroes of Montgomery, Alabama, who now risk life and limb if they attempt to assemble, petition or peacefully demonstrate. In addition to city and State police, gangs of deputized horsemen and Ku Klux elements wearing Civil Defence insignia are _ terrorizing Negroes, newspaper reporters and photographers.

The actions of the authorities and the white-supremacist vigilantes in Alabama are so ominous that Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, asked the White House to act to avert a possible ‘massacre’ of Negroes.

On March 13, Walter Reuther, president of the AFL-CIO United Auto Workers, wired Eisenhower: ‘The reign of terror in Montgomery, Alabama, reported to you by the Rev. Martin Luther King, is shocking, immoral and un-American—appealing to you to instruct the Attorney General to take immediate action in your name to restore law and order in Montgomery.’

Pressed by questioners at his March 16 news conference, the President agreed that the Constitution guaranteed people the right to hold peaceful demonstrations, but he saw no way of protecting the Negro people in this right. He suggested it would be good if bi-racial conferences were held in every Southern community.

Held in stockade In Orangeburg, South Carolina, a demonstration by 1,000 students from South Carolina State and Clafin Colleges was met by tear gas and fire hoses. Walking in groups of one hundred, the young Negro men and women, attempted to converge on the downtown section by different routes. They continued, though drenched by hoses in the forty degree weather.

About 350 (one-third of them women) were herded by police into a stockade beside the court house. They were arraigned in groups of fifteen, while buses stood outside to take those unable to find bail to the State prison.

Other demonstrations in South Carolina occurred in Rock Hill, where 70 students were arrested. for picketing city hall; in Columbia, the State capital, where ten were arrested for asking for service at lunch counters; and in Sumter, where police made no arrests.

In Atlanta, Ga., students from the six Negro. institutions comprising Atlanta University Centre, staged simultaneous sit-downs on March 15 in about a dozen eating places. Seventy-seven were jailed under three charges including violation of a new trespass law providing sentences of a year and a half and $1,000 fine. The next day Georgia experienced its second demonstration in Savannah, where sit-downs occurred at seven lunch counters; three students were arrested.

Mississippi next?

The spread of the sit-downs to Arkansas and Georgia means that every Southern State except Mississippi has been affected. That the rulers of that most notoriously anti-Negro State expect demonstrations is attested by the legislature’s rushing through a harsh anti-trespass law. Five students from Philander Smith College in Little Rock are being held for trial following the March 10 sit-downs in that city.

In San Antonio, Texas, six dime stores and a city-wide chain of drug stores, faced with an ultimatum by Negroes that sit-downs would begin March 17, desegregated their lunch counters the day before. In Nashville, Tennessee, Negroes were served for the first time at a bus station lunch counter where students two weeks before had been arrested for sitting down.

Many of the approximately 150 students arrested in that city refused to pay fines and are serving 35-day sentences. Under armed guards they are being used to collect garbage and do similar tasks on the city’s streets. A bi-racial committee appointed by the mayor has been holding discussions of the situation in Nashville.

Negro students have already told this committee they will not accept a ‘compromise’ proposal by which any section of a lunch counter would remain segregated.

Addressing 600 students in a Montgomery church, March 8, after police had invaded the Alabama State campus to stop a meeting and arrest 36 participants, Bernard Lee, expelled as a ‘ringleader’, urged Negroes to be ready to be jailed or even killed in their ‘fight for freedom’, to form a ‘united front against guns, clubs, and tear gas’. ‘By Friday,’ he said, ‘the North will respond. They will be 100 per cent, with you, as they were during the civil war.’

(Reprinted from the Militant—an American Socialist weekly.)

RENTS ST. PANCRAS TENANTS STILL REFUSE TO

Published by The Newsletter, 186 Clapham High St., London, SW4 Registered at the GPO as a newspaper Twenty-three St. Pancras tenants who are still refusing to pay the rent increases imposed by the Tory Borough Council in January, are being taken to court on May 17 and 24. The court hearings will be a mere formality and the tenants face eviction as soon as they have taken place. Many more tenants whose notices to quit have also run out have not yet received summonses; Tory councillor Prior is evidently waiting to see what resistance is offered to the first batch of evictions before he takes on the rest.

Though the exact number of tenants still with-holding the increases is not clear, what is clear is that the battle against the Differential Rent Scheme is over. All that remains is to protect those tenants now facing eviction. The United Tenants’ Associations have made no effort during the course of the rent strike to collect the increases from with-holding tenants. Hence those under threat of eviction are in a doublyexposed position, being unable to find the arrears.

The tenants’ associations are paying lip service to the necessity for organized resistance to the evictions. But actual preparations seem to be rather half-hearted. It was intended as a first step to compile a list of tenants with telephones. who are at home all day to sound the alarm should the bailiffs arrive. But one tenant involved told me, ‘I have never yet seen such a list, and I doubt very much if it exists’.

Defence squads to picket the flats of any threatened tenants are now a matter of urgency. In our opinion it is not too late for the local Labour Parties to act by organizing a conference of delegates from the Labour Parties, Trades Council and all the local union branches. Such a conference could set up the necessary squads.

PLPRPBPPPPPPPEPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPLPA MARXISM IN The Second in a Series of Public Lectures Class Conflicts in British Industry R. Pennington SUNDAY, MARCH 27, at 7.30 p.m. 186 CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, S.W.4 PPG PPP PP PPP PPP PIP PPPIPPPIPPPIPLPD Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU), r.o. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4 .