The Newsletter, vol. 9 no. 471

TROTSKYISM IN BRITAIN is approximately 37 years old. It was born out of the historic struggle between Trotsky, his supporters of the Left Opposition inside the CPSU, and Stalin.

There are today no survivors from this great conflict. Most of those involved were brutally put to death by Stalin, a small handful, including Stalin himself, died from natural causes.

The struggle between Trotskyism and the Soviet bureaucracy is much more sharp today than it was even in those early days.

Stalin's disciples who still dominate Kremlin politics are becoming more and more subserimperial the these on vorte prepared than Stalin was to join hands with the imperialists in crushing revolution in all parts of the world.

The major issue in world politics now is the behind-the-scenes preparations for an unprincipled deal between the Soviet bureaucracy and US imperialism over Vietnam.

Kosygın and Brezhnev are prepared to betray the Vietnam revolution as part of the price for peaceful co-existence with Ünited States imperialism and its satellites.

More and more these political left-overs from the Stalin regime are being exposed as traitors to the international working class.

The difference between the situation пого and when 'the great genius Stalin' was doing the dirty work for imperialism in the 1930s is that the working class in the metropolitan capitalist countries are no longer a defeated force as they were the years after the First World The future lies with the SLL INTRODUCING the documeni special delegate conference of weekend, Gerry Healy, nation • WE DECIDED to hold this conference in order to discuss the new political situation which has developed so rapidly, not only in Britain, but internationally, over the past three months.

Since the beginning of November unemployment has increased by well over half a million. The cost of living has gone steadily upwards. By the New Year it Will have increased something like an additional 25s. to keep a family of four over and above what it was previously costing them to live.

The Prices and Incomes Act is, of course, in full operation. Trade unions are legally tied to the capitalist state under conditions where it is now no longer the question of negotiations and collective bargaining that decides the relationship between the employers and the working class but an Order given out by the Cabinet.

At least this much must be said about the right wing of the Labour Party and the trade unions; they are not hypocrites in their class position.

With eyes open What the Labour government has done it has done with its eyes wide open. It has a real class purpose in mind. It hates the working class, it is frightened of the working class, it is tied hand and foot to the employers and to the party of the employers the Tory Party.

Trade union leaders from time to time make vague criticism of the policy of the government. Generally speaking they are on the side of the government.

The experience of two years functioning of the TUC shows that all of the right-wing leaders are if anything only making their criticism of the Labour government in order to justity, when the time comes, lining up solidly with that government.

Their criticism is an attempt to divert the attention of the working class in order to prevent real struggle against the government.

When they talk left' they do so in a calculating way so as to leave the working class without leadership and in order to turn them from any kind of preparation.

Fear one thing If there is one thing that the Labour Party, the trade union leaders and the employers fear in this country it is a movement to arise which will prepare the working class in a series of decisive class battles against the government and the employers.

It would be a great mistake not to understand this very serious weakness of the employers at this time.

They are living by virtue of an agreement with a Labour government.. They could not function today without this agreement. Even though it seems to provide them with all the things they want there is still within that agreement a fatal flaw. It will work just so long as it is challenged by nobody.

Continued page 4, column War. They are no longer their knees.

Fresh from 25 years of full employment and a consistent struggle to improve their living standards they face the degenerate imperialists and their corrupt bureaucracies with confidence.

Because of this revolutionary buoyancy of the working class the Trotskyist movement is today entirely different from what it was when it was founded.

Ninety-five per cent of the delegates present at the special conference of the SLL held on November 26 and 27 were either not born or were babies when Stalin assassinated Trotsky in August 1940. Of the remaining tve per cent, three per cent had just joined the movement whilst two, per cent were pre-war Trotskyists.

British Trotskyists more than any other organisation in the working class movement reflect the revolutionary confidence of the working class.

We fought for a majority Labour government in order lepose the role of the right-ring rightleaders such as Wilson. Now they stand exposed for all to see as just the same type of leader as Ramsay MacDonald.

The main task before the Socialist Labour League is not only to expose the right-wing Labour leaders but the fake-left MPs and the Soviet bureaucracy which they slavishly support. The programme adopted by the special national conference of the SLL is a guide to action for thousands of militant trade unionists in the months ahead.

Trotskyism is emerging more and more as the only Marxist-Leninist leadership in the struggle against world imperialism. ›n British Perspectives the e Socialist Labour Leag last secretary of the SLL, id: Next step for YS - Morecambe and international conferences THE MORECAMBE CONFERENCE of the Young Socialists was the next important stage in preparing for an international youth conference and international youth movement, said YS national secretary Sheila Torrance at last weekend's special conference of the SLL.

In the struggle for such a movement, the forces that would defeat the social-democratic and Stalinist bureauracies and lead the workin lass to victory against im perialism, would be developed, she said.

The YS and SLL based their analysis on the class struggle, not on the idea that the crisis of capitalism could be staved off for a period.

The present crisis, now leading to mass redundancies and over half a million unemployed, had YS secretary: Sheila Torrance developed since 1962-1963, and was reflected in the working class in a deep hatred for the Wilson government.

Even when selling programmes for our bazaar in a dock area, workers would only buy them on the basis that the Young Socialists are in opposition to Wilson's policies,' she said.

Unprincipled

At the same time the employers would fight back through other agencies against the development of working-class leadership-the B/OSL ALE SPECIAL CONFERENCE CALL MAKE THE LEFTS FIGHT AT TH E SPECIAL in Lone lon last week against Wilson and carried unanimously Conference calls upon the rank and file of the labour and trade union movement to demand that all left MPs break publicly from Wilson and immediately begin a campaign inside and outside Parliament for socialist policies.

These policies must include the nationalization of all the major industries, without compensation and under workers' control; repeal of the Pripes and Incomes Act; an end to wage freezing and unemployment. Withdraw all British troops from verseas; full freedom and independence for all colonial YS had already experienced the unprincipled unification of the Stalinists, state capitalists and other revisionists against them, especially during the last year's struggles against the wage freeze.

"The only way to develop leadership is to fight for a qualitative change in the theoretical understanding of the crisis, , she said. "The youth also have to understand the strength of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and therefor our responsibilities.' This meant carrying out the winter programmes of the YS and building the movement.

Recruit and build

'A big effort has to be made to recruit youth around the Labour exchanges, apprentices, schools and industries. We must fight for every Young Socialist branch and build more, she said.

The struggle to build the YS was the only way to train youth to fight bureaucracy inside the trade unions. This fight was the way the youth had to prepare for their Morecambe conference. FILE DELEGATE CONFERENCE of the Socialist Labour League held end a call was made to make the left-wing MPs in parliament fight the Labour government's policies. The following demands were by conference in the main document discussed by delegates on the British Perspectives:

YOUNG SOCIALISTS GRAND XMAS BAZAAR Saturday December 10 at THE CORN EXCHANGE LEEDS 1 Christmas gifts : Prizes Galore: Special attractions for all the family Be sure to see the wonderful range of stalls PUBLIC MEETINGS see page four peoples. Arm the Africans against Smith's Rhodesian regime. Break immediately with US imperialism over Vietnam. For the victory of the National Liberation Front.

We call upon the left before the Parliamentary Wilson's Cabinet to resign.

Such a demand should national demonstration and London early in the New Year. MPs to place a resolution Labour Party calling for be supported by lobby to be held. in A section of the delegates at last weekend's special conference listening to G. Healy speak on British Perspectives

THE IRONY OF the Middle East situation is that none of the actions of the forces involved leads to its intended results.

When Israeli forces attacked the villages of Es Samu on November 13, Prime Minister Eshkol hoped it would force Washington to support the effort to stop Arab border guerrillas. Instead the Americans backed the United Nations resolution condemning Israel.

More important, the effect of the raid has been to unleash a movement inside Jordan which now threatens the regime of King Hussein. And with this stooge of imperialism will fall the stability of the region, which has allowed Israel to survive for 20 years.

The anti-Hussein movement has been encouraged by Nasser, through both Cairo and Damascus radios. The Palestine Liberation Organisation, which enjoys Nasser's backing, has called for Hussein's overthrow and is banned in Jordan.

The feeling in Jordan, especially its Western areas, is not just a matter of the Es Samu raid. Many of the people demonstrating in Jerusalem and Nablus once lived in what is now Israel.

When, in 1947, the United Nations, supported by both the Americans and the Russians, set up the state of Israel, these Palestinians were forced to take refuge in Jordan and other Arab countries. Many still live in squalid refugee camps.

The Israelis, claiming to provide a solution to the Jewish problem, in fact are no more than imperialist pawns. The misery of hundreds of thousands of Jews was used as a weapon against the rising tide of revolution in the Middle East.

On his side, Nasser plays with the anti-Israel feelings of the Arab masses; but he too unleashes forces he cannot control.

Hussein's British-trained Arab Legion is not deployed against Israel, but against the Jordan workers and peasants.

All able-bodied men in Jordan have been called upto keep them under control. Damascus Radio reports that Saudi Arabian troops have entered Jordan to give an additional prop to Hussein.

The development of revolution in the Middle East can go beyond the bounds laid down by Arab politicians. A Marxist movement must fight to unite the Arab masses with the Israeli workers in a struggle against imperialism and all its agencies.

THE DEEPENING no longer merely a question of simple wage cutting, as to a

ARRANGEMENTS between Midland firms and trade unions, which impose minimum wages and no-strike restrictions on workers, are emerging in Coventry and Birmingham, a shop steward delegate to the SIL special conference claimed last Sunday.

The car delivery employers in Birmingham had learned from this, he thought.

In Coventry there was a 'labour only' firm which came to an arrangement with an engineering union that all the workers should be in the union. A cheque was sent each month to the union headquarters to cover the subscriptions.

The firm supplies labour at a minimum union rate-to any factory.

He also knew of aircraft factories where the management was using surplus labour to flood certain departments and force d wage rates, and in a tractor tory hit by a slump in si where the men have clai strong organisation for years, management is demanding organisation of the shops.

Break-up

'All wages and conditions are now breaking up' said the delegate. "Trade unionists must now fight around the programme of making the left MPs fight.' Mair Davies, SLL Central Committee member, confirmed the management - union collusion claimed by the shop steward.

In Coventry, she said, all car delivery drivers had belonged to one union branch and had run their affairs without any interference from union officials. The officials were, in the meantime, setting up another branch with the help of a car delivery firm's manager.

The union had virtually become a company union, she said, with the manager of the firm sitting in on union branch meetings.

"This is the sort of outfit that could have been used to break the car delivery drivers' strike.' Once again the fake lefts and Stalinists had been exposed; they had organised nothing to avoid this sell-out because they were in the same camp as the Labour government, and were exposed as such on the factory floor.

New leadership Workers were searching for a new leadership.

'We must go in and say that the bread and butter issues are political issues; the politics of making the left fight. Workers are concerned about this government they put in and fear the Tories as an alternative. Our programme shows a way forward, without letting the Tories back, and which the youth can get a big response for in the trade unions.' support Blanco and demand his release. ( On the contrary, it cal only strengthen the opposition to a regime which perverts elementary justice so blatantly.

Hugo Blanco and 28 others were held in prison without charges for over three years awaiting trial. This act, together with the sentence itself, and the committing of Blanco to a military were political aimed by the government of Peru at the suppression of all political opposition in that country.

The fact that the authorities are now considering the death sentence is proof in itself that all these repressive measures have failed to stop the forces which Hugo Blanco represents.

A mighty campaign of protest can deter the authorities trom their plan to execute Hugo Blanco. ( Such a campaign can encourage socialist forces and their democratic allies in Peru and together with them force an amnesty for Hugo Blanco.

Free Hugo Blanco and his comrades immediately!

Carried unanimously by SLL 58-27, 1966 conference, November

(Resolution of the special conference of the London, November 2627,1966.)

THIS SPECIAL conference of the Socialist Labour League demands that Hugo Blanco, leader of the revolutionary peasant movement in Peru, be immediately freed.

It calls upon all organisations and individuals in the labour and trade union movement, and all those who fight to defend elementary democratic rights, to protest in every way possible to the Peruvian government and its embassies and consulates in every country.

Hugo Blanco was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment on September 8, 1966.

His 'trial' was conducted military tribunal, in which military police acted as judge and prosecutor at the same time. When Hugo Blanco appealed against the sentence, his case was considered by the Supreme Council of Mili. tary Justice.

This Supreme Council considering answering the appeal by imposing the death penalty on Hugo Blanco.

* the arial created a sintin where the prosecuting counsel did not ask for the death penalty, even though it was recommended by a consulung judge. We are convinced that international solidarity. together with the support for Blanco within Peru, can again intervene successfully.

Blanco did not even get the right to trial before a civil court. His appeal is entirely justified; we believe it is for this reason that the death penalty is now demanded.

But this threat will not intimidate the workers and peasants who

EXTRACT FROM the minutes of the Electrical Trades Union executive council meeting held in the Hotel Metropole, Brighton, on October 1, 1966:

(144) LEGAL ACTION—A. COURTNEY AND P. RAFTER RECOVERY OF COST.

The general secretary reported that a letter had been received from the union solicitors advising that they had been attempting to enforce a judgement for costs against A. Courtney but have been informed by the court that he had moved his address.

They seek the directions of the union as to whether an enquiry agent should be employed in an endeavour to trace whereabouts.

Bros. W. P. Blair and D. Sheasby moved:

"That the solicitors be instructed to take the necessary stens to trace the whereabouts of Mr. A. Courtney!

Agreed.

'Lessons of the 1966 Seamen's Strike' must be read and studied by every trade unionist. It is a day-by-day account of how the struggle was fought and the role of the forces at work on both sides of what was a most militant class action-Britain's first political strike since 1926. The pamphlet outlines the treacherous role of the Labour and trade union leaders and the Communist Party who provided them with a 'left' cover. It is 'a must' reading for every trade unionist faced with a struggle against Wilson's policies. Price 2s 9d including postage A special discount for bulk copies of six or over. once to : Literature Department, Socialist Labour League, 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4

THE NEW SLETTER Three

crIsIs now facing British capitalism and the Labour government of Harold Wilson is bound inseparably to a rapidly maturing international crisis of imperialism. The crisis in Britain will not be understood or resolved in the interests of the working class unless it is seen from this international point of view.

We are now entering a stage where the post-war boom, which has seen a moderate expansion for imperialism, is drawing to a close and a new stage is opening up which will be dominated by an intensification of the struggles facing the working class, struggles which will decide the future of humanity.

2 THE CRISIS AFFLICTING Britain and the rest of the capitalist world has its origin in the citadel of impenerica, the United States of America. United States emerged in the post-war world as the major capitalist power, in whose hands responsibility for the future of the whole system in its struggle for survival rested.

America was forced, in this period, to provide massive funds for the restoration of European capitalism which had been shattered by the war.

'Aid' and military expenditure had to be poured into Europe and the rest of the world in order to provide the basis for any social stability.

On the shoulders of American capital also rested the major responsibility for financing the series of wars against the working class and peasantry in the colonial and ex-colonial areas, notably in Korea and currently in Vietnam and South-East Asia.

In addition, capital on a large scale poured out of the States, again principally to Europe, seeking profitable investments.

In this way major sectors of European industry and finance fell into the hands of American capital, often the most advanced sectors of European capital such as motors, electronics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc.

3 THESE EXPENDITURES have proved an impossible strain for the giant of world cause of the present international capitalism. This is the crisis facing capitalism.

In particular they have produced a growing balance of payments deficit for the United States.

Not only have the large expenditures on warfare abroad and 'aid' payments produced this deficit: the needs of war have pushed up the import bill and reduced exports so that there has been 'a continual tendency for the trade surplus (i.e., the surplus produced on physical exports less physical imports) to shrink.

The war in Vietnam is now undoubtedly a major source of growing strain for the US economy.

At the same time Johnson cannot simply decide to call off this war.

Not only would this produce an immediate crisis in the large sector of the economy which is directly or indirectly dependent upon arms production.

More than this: a defeat in South-East Asia would strengthen the fighting capacity of the world working class both inside and outside America and destroy the real purpose of the war: to make inroads into Communist China to regain the markets which were lost to imperialism in the post-war period.

ANNOUNCING A MO:

PAMPHLET4 THIS BALANCE Of payments crisis for the US is directly linked to the crisis in the world monetary system, which, despite the attentions of financiers and statesmen throughout the world, is no nearer to solution.

In the post-1945 world only two units were acceptable for the settlement of debts between capıtalist countries: gold and the dollar.

The pound sterling was given limited status as an internacional currency largely contined to the British Commonwealth The dollar owed its privileged position as an international теserve' currency to the overwhelming position of dominance of US capital and to the guarantee which the American government gave to exchange dollars for gold at the rate of 35 dollars to an ounce of fine gold.

The growing external imbalance of the US economy has now thrown these arrangements into crisis. particular the balance of payments deficits have produced a massive drain of gold away from the States.

In the post-war world the gold reserves of America have fallen by more than half and are now plunging downwards towards what Johnson and his advisers consider to be the absolute safe minimum level of 10 billion dollars.

The growing deficits have meant that many countries have acquired large dollar holdings in their reserves which are now reaching dangerously large proportions in relation to the shrinking volume of gold in Fort As a result there is widespread speculation about the stability of the present dollar price of gold and continual fear that a devaluation of the dollar will occur.

Many countries, fearing such a devaluation and also hostile to dollar which pasi on o effect, privileged allowed the US large slices of European capital, have, recent years, undertaken a rapid conversion of their existing dollar holdings into gold. Notable amongst these has of course been France.

France has argued that any reform the world monetary system can only proceed on the basis of the abolition of the privileged positions of the dollar and the pound.

These: the rowing tensions -becapitalist powers and their inability to achieve any agreement about the monetary system or the re-organisation of capitalism are but an indication of the growing contradictions of the imperialist system and further evidence that the productive forces cannot be systematically developed within the confines imposed by the capitalist national state.

5 THE AMERICAN 'solution' to this crisis is to attempt to correct her external imbalance and in this way be once more in a strong enough position to put other capitalist powers, notably France, in their place.

But such a 'correction' must have profound implications for the rest of imperialism and not least for British capitalism.

To correct her deficit the US is being forced to cut down on her imports, to intensify her drive for exports, to cut down on her aid programme and reduce wherever possible military expenditure abroad.

All these measures will slow down the rate of expansion in the world economy, if not produce an immediate turn down., They will at the same time involve necessarily an intensification of the struggle for world markets: this can already be seen in the case of motors where NOVEMBER 26-27th 1966 the problems facing such giants as General Motors in the United States is producing a drive by the US firms for increased markets inside Europe which is certain to drive many of the smaller firms to the wall.

In the second place the cut back in 'aid' from the United States must produce an intensification of the crisis in all the colonial areas, who will be even less able to make any purchases from the metropolitan countries.

This is especially serious for British capitalism which is still heavily dependent upon the 'underdeveloped' countries for a large slice of its export markets.

Even on the level of monetary movements, the same contradictions are apparent.

Interest rates in the United States are now at their highest level for 40 years, despite all the efforts of Johnson to effect some stability. This rise in rates of interest now begins seriously

ECONOMIC

PERSPECTIVES to threaten future capital investment plans of the monopolists.

What is involved here is a conflict between the banks and industry. * The implications of rising US rates of interest are also serious for the rest of the capitalist system: they produce a tendency for rates to rise in all the leading international money markets which intensifies the danger of a slump and recession.

6 THE RESPONSE of the Labour government to this crisis over the past two years has been determined at every stage by a consideration of the needs of American capitalism.

It is in this sense that we can say that Wilson has had no independent economic policy and that he has in no sense been in control of the crisis. This is clearly established in the case of devaluation of the pound.

The 'defence of the pound' which has been so strenuously undertaken by Callaghan since October 1964 has been directly in response to the needs of Johnson and the American capitalists even more than it has to the City of London and the British bamkers.

The question of the future of the pound, its value in relation to the dollar, and its role the international monetary system rests much more with Wall Street than it does with Threadneedle Street. .

After the war, the pound, although greatly weakened now much less important than the dollar, had to be accorded a limited status in the world monetary system.

It was-and still is-responsible for the finance of a considerable slice of world trade and payments and could not be dispensed with by the US. This is even more true today.

Were the pound to be devalued it would produce an immediate and deep crisis in the entire monetary system of the world. There is little doubt that the dollar would be unable to survive intact and devaluation would almost certainly be forced on the Americans.

In such a situation a disastrous 'devaluation cycle' on the pattern of the 1930s would almost certainly occur and produce a major slump in the world economy. This is why Johnson has been so keen to see the value of the pound preserved and why aid was poured into London on such a massive scale after October 1964.

This does not rule out the possibility of devaluation by the Wilson government.

But such a devaluation would be entirely different from that carried out by Cripps in 1949. It would produce, in present circumstances, a head-on collision with the United States, indicating a major crisis in the entire capitalist world and throwing into the melting pot the future of the Western military and political alliance. 7 THE DEFENCE OF STERLING' which Wilson has undertaken over the past two years has of course only further impeded any possible recovery in the fortunes of British industry and capital.

To preserve the present parity of the pound has involved the most severe credit squeeze since 1955.

To correct the balance of payments deficit all growth and modernisation in the economy has been halted and the National Plan thrown overboard.

This has involved not only a steep rise in unemployment but a savage cut back in capital investment on which any possibility of modernisation rests. This is the familiar 'stop-go' policy quite different circumstances Introduced at conference by GEOFF PILLING from that of Selwyn Lloyd and Thorneycroft.

This policy of Wilson has intensified the problem facing every exporter: with production cut back as a result of the squeeze, unit costs inevitably tend to rise and export markets become even more difficult to maintain. This is precisely the problem which now faces the car industry.

In addition the severe contraction of bank credit has starved industrialists of the funds necessary to finance the export trade or to buy capital equipment for modernisation.

These consequences of the increase in unemployment and cuts in home demand are an accurate indication of the depth of the crisis of British capitalism.

A measure of unemployment was seen by sections of the employers to be absolutely necessary in order to weaken the working class, which had built up its expectations and its organisation during the boom.

They are in fact unable to clear from their path the obstacles to getting higher production at lower cost. The same contradictions are present in the protest of some sections of the employers (motors, etc.) against the overall restrictions on credit.

These are necessary as part of the plan to cut down the working class, but within the capitalist Iramework they prevent investment and expansion deemed to be necessary for the next phase of reflation'.

8 THE WHOLE of the Labour supported following Cousins, and to the full by Stalinists, place policies before the working class which cover up the sharpness of the crisis.

Their policies represent their capitulation to capitalism: the proposals to cut defence spending, devalue the pound, and restrict capital exports are essentially attempts to rationalise' capitalism.

They are put forward in order to prevent the working class from taking the revolutionary path demanded by the crisis.

In this way the intensification of the crisis of imperialism provides the conditions for exposure of the bankruptcy of the Stalinists : well as of the social democrats.

The 'productivity' and 'highwage economy' policies put forward by Cousins and the Stalinists are their response to the danger of the working class following the lead of the Socialist Labour League, in the case of the Stalinists quite consciously.

These reformists are actually suggesting that imperialism be peacefully wound up.

The large income which comes from the transactions of the City of London and the privileged position of the pound sterling are to be quietly given up.

When the troops are brought back from Last of suez, all the interest and profit accruing trom the investments they protect (which certainly amount to a great deal more than the military expenditure!) are to be left to the colonial masses!

The supplies of raw materials such as oil, guaranteed to British capitalism by the stationing of these troops, are to be left to chance.

Wilson, who has crawled on his belly to the British capitalists and to the international banks, is presumably going to challenge Wall Street.

This petty-bourgeois fantasy represents the bankruptcy and the danger to the working class of the Stalinists and the left social democrats. It opens up at the same time the urgency of a successful political challenge to these tendencies in order to respond in a Marxist way to the radicalisation of the workers by the present economic crisis. Book Review Algeria: A Revolution that Failed THIS IS AN IMPORTANT book for Marxists. It is useful as a record of the Algerian people's struggle for independence from French colonial domination, dealing in some detail with the events leading up to the armed uprising of November 1954.

It also makes an honest, though empirical, attempt to analyse the various political factions that struggled for the leadership of the nationalist movement at this period. Un this level the book is as good as most history's of the revolution.

But far more important, this book should be read for the light that it throws upon the class and theoretical character of the leadership of the Algerian nationalist movement, tirst as it approached and carried through its agreement with the French government, and then as it began to establish itself as the ruling force within Algeria.

It is this aspect of the book that makes it essential reading for members and supporters of the Committee for the Fourth International. It is this body that has for over 10 years defended and developed the Trotskyist conception of the national-democratic revolution against all attempts to revise it by the ex-Trotskyist group around Pablo.

Pablo (in this book referred to as Michaelis Raptis) figures here as one of the political advisers to the Ben Bella regime, together with his co-thinkers Mohammed Harbi and Soliman Lutfullah.

The evolution of this group from a revision of Trotskyism to propagandists and apologists for petty-bourgeois nationalism of the most vulgar type vindicates compietely the deep political and organisational split that was carried through by the Committee of the Fourth Interna9 IN FACT the balance of payments crisis not what either Wilson or the 'left' pretend it is.

The external crisis arises in no way because exports are insufficient in value to pay for the required volume of imports. That is, the crisis cannot solved simply by measures designed to cut down on imports and boost exports.

This crisis arises because the British capitalists are caught between two insoluble objective difficulties.

They need, as capitalists, to overcome the structural weakness built into British industry and economy by its history. And yet the task of 'modernisation' is undertaken by Wilson and the employers precisely at a time when the international conditions have reached a point where they act against any such "national' regeneration.

On the other hand, there is the organised working class, standing against the industrial and political measures which the capitalists must take in order to cheapen their costs of production.

On the whole British industries are geared to the production of the cruder types of commodities where demand on a world scale is no longer expanding so rapidly and where the growing crisis in the "underdeveloped' markets will add to the problem.

The modern 'technologicallybased' industries, so close to Mr. Wilson's heart, play a relatively minor role in British capitalism compared to her major rivals.

Thus over the last few years, although imponts and. exports have risen at roughly the same pace, there has been a disproportionate rise in the importation of advanced types of machinery, of chemicals, steel, machine tools, products associated with the electronics industry and with automation. Many of these goods cannot be produced at home and supplies have to be sought from abroad..

This is the real balance of payments crisis: British capital cannot earn a sufficient surplus in the increasingly competitive market of the world which is sufficient to pay for these imports.

Yet without these imports there can no modernisation of British industry on which increased exports ultimately depend.

The intensity and quality of the crisis in Britain is indicated by the fact that it now strikes at the heart of the most advanced industries in the country: motors and steel, the former of course being the biggest single export and dollar earner.

Ne are no longer talking of a recession hitting the "backward or 'depressed' industries such as coal, railways, cotton or shipbuilding.

In this sense the crisis is quite different from that as recently as 1962-1963 when unemployment on a large scale was last felt.

It is the quality of the present orisis, reflected in the balance of payments position, which must be pressed home. It is this quality which determines the development of the class struggle.

That is, for capitalists, it is Pablo's role in Algeria exposed tional, which correctly designated Pablo's theories as a petty-bourgeois adaptation to the labour bureaucracy and nationalism.

Humbaraci deals objectively with the petty-bourgeois nature of Algerian 'socialism'. It was this socialist colouration to the regime of Ben Bella, and hence the Algerian bourgeoisie, that for a period of several years met and served the requirements of French capitalism in Africa.

To_ understand why Algerian and French capitalism needed a 'Trotskyist' veneer as a screen for its own domination of the Algerian masses, it is only necessary to examine the role of Algerian and French Stalinism.

From as early as 1934, the year of the first popular-front tactic of the Stalinists, the French Communist Party has opposed independence for Algeria from French rule. This took the extreme form of supporting armed repressions against the Arab celebrations following the defeat of Germany in 1945.

In 1954, the French and Algerian communist parties. opposed the armed rising of the people and • advised instead a policy of 'cultural assimilation' with France.

The Soviet government, anxious not to alienate de Gaulle, was among the last non-imperialist powers to recognise the provisional Algerian government, doing so only after the French had large extent it was in the 1930s.

Now what is at issue is the relationship of the employers and the state to the organisations of the working class.

The growing tendency for the unions to become integrated into the capitalist state, for all questions of wages to become the concern of the state, is very much central part of the present crisis.

For the capitalists the need is increasingly to break up the organised resistance of the working class; to atomise it. Only in this way will it be possible to make even the attempt at the basic structural re-organisation of British capital which is so urgently required.

10 THE BRITISH capitalist class is still deeply divided on the question of entry into the European Common Market as a means of tackling the crisis of British capital. Tied as they are to the older 'backward' markets of the world, many firms see in Europe the chance to modernise and re-equip their ailing industries.

On the other hand France is extremely unlikely to allow Britain into Europe with the pound and the sterling area enjoying its present privileged position.

In this sense the question is once more not one which concerns only the British bourgeoisie. A devaluation of the pound and a winding up of the sterling area would be a blow not only to the City of London but would throw the world monetary system into serious dislocation and as we have pointed out above would almost certainly lead to a devaluation of the dollar.

In this regard the question of entry into Europe is quite different than it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then the main drive for Britain's entry came from the US who, apart from wanting some counter-weight to German and French capital, also wished to make better use of the capital which they had invested in British industry, which was only possible on the basis of an enlarged European market.

Those in the labour movement who advocate entry into Europe as a simple 'solution' to the present crisis take none of these factors into account.

Wilson may well take Britain into Europe: but this would involve sharp conflicts not only with Johnson, but with the British working class in the form of a drive in the export industries for modernisation and recapitalisation.

11 IN OTHER WORDS, the development of the present international crisis fur capitalism increasingly determines more directly the political relationships between the classes.

The Socialist Labour League does not simply have an alternative policy to the Stalinists and the other reformist tendencies.

The crisis, for us, resolves itself, not in advancing a 'solution' for it in the manner of the Stalinists.

For us a study and examination of the development of the economy is part of the preparation for the building of a new leadership in the working-class movement, a leadership which will be able to take full advantage of this maturing crisis in leading the working class forward to the smashing of capitalism and the taking of power.

decided to come to terms with the FLN.

Thus Stalinism already stood exposed before the mass of the Algerian population as a counterrevolutionary force opposed to the genuine emancipation of the under-developed countries of the world from the domination of imperialism.

Some other, as yet uncompromised, form of 'socialism' was required by the nationalist leadership and their French paymasters to divert the workers and peasants of Algeria from their only road to real freedom-a break with the politics of nationalism and a joint struggle with all the exploited of North Africa for a socialist Magreb.

Ben Bella, already under the influence of the Pabloites. was pushed forward by French imperialism, as the author shows, to play just this role of left cover for the re-establishment of capitalist rule in Algeria.

Humbaraci is able to prove that even during the war an unofficial truce was observed to the south in the area around the oil fields and installations. It was this same oil, Humbaraci asserts, that found its way to the FLN troops via a French-based oil company!

It was French troops that opened the barrages along the Tunisian frontier to ensure that Ben Bella trained under Boumedienne took possession of the key centres of Algeria before any independent popular movement could establish itself.

Humbaraci also points out that this ready-made capitalist state machine would never have reached Algiers had it not been for the French army servicing it with petrol when its tankers ran dry in the desert. The dependence of Algerian nationalism on French could hardly have been better illustrated.

'As they reached Oran, the population shouted "Long live Ben Bella". When this column ran short of fuel, tankers of the French army by some mysterious

coincidence, were on the spot in time to re-fuel them. This gesture of the French was taken as further evidence that Paris was backing the Ben Bella combination.' The whole book is packed with similar examples of co-ordination of tactics between the nationalists and the French government.

What is significant is that the French sought out the so-called left wing of the nationalists at this crucial stage in the changeover of power.

The well-armed and elite trained troops of Boumedienne, plus the socialist demagogy of Ben Bella and his entourage, provided the continuity and camouflage that imperialism desperately requires at such moments of crisis.

It is at these moments that the slow and apparently incidental evolution of revisionism takes on a concrete class role, acting as a bridge from imperialism, via the petty bourgeoisie, into the working class and peasantry struggling for their emancipation from the rule of capital.

The record of Ben Bella in power is one of a constant retreat before the basic tasks posed by the democratic revolution-the expropriation of the foreign-owned 01l companies, the nationalization of the domestic industries and financial centres and the solving of the land question.

NO CHALLENGE Ben Bella, tied as he was through the army, to the landed classes and, through the oil companies, to French capital, never even began to make this challenge.

Humbaraci lays bare the real nature of Ben Bella's 'nationalizations', , which had as little socialist and working-class content as those carried out by the Labour government after the last war.

None of the enterprises taken under state ownership were of importance to the national economy. Their role was political and used as a screen for the continued grip of domestic and foreign capitalism upon the main centres of the economy.

The author says of this tactic:

what may be properly described as the industrial sector, 450 enterprises employing some 10,000 workers all told (l.e., an average of only 22 per plant) had been by mid-1964 put under self management, only to find themselves facing the competition of a better-equipped_private sector. Even among the 450, only some 5 per cent could be considered truly industrial.' (Page 122.)

This passage suitably characterises Ben Bella's-and Pablo's socialism. Far from making inroads into the power of capital, it merely takes over those centres, such as barbers' shops, cafes, cinemas and the like, which are the least profitable and most incidental to its development.

YEARS IT IS ALMOST exactly six years since our National Committee sent to the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party a letter (January 1961) which voiced our grave disquiet at the expression of revisionist theories and policies by the SWP, which at that time was formally in support of the same International Committee as we were, though barred by the United States Voorhis Act from any international political affiliation.

Our letter of January 1961 marked a new stage since December 1953. At that time James P. Cannon, on behalf of the SWP, denounced Michel Pablo and his supporters in the International Secretariat of the Fourth International for capitulating to the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Pablo and his followers had accepted the idea that the Stalinist parties would be forced by mass pressure to lead a struggle for the overthrow of capitalist state power.

Cannon liquidation of the Trotskyist movement.

TROTSKYISM AND THE STALINIST BUREAUCRACY Trotskyism and the Fourth International were born in a struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy, a struggle to defend the heritage of Marx, Engels and Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

It is appropriate at this time to ask, six years after, where the MON Fourth Internatio ter Number Price 4s.

NTENTS Editorial An Evaluation of lohn Maynard Keynes by G. Pilling NIGERIA TODAY by I. Kiomenesekenegha Rosa Luxemburg by C. Slaughter MONOPOLY CAPITAL Be sure of your copy of this journal of International Marxism by writing to:

186a, Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

Be Sure of your each week Take out a subscription 9s for 12 issues Name Address Send this form to to 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4. SWP stands and to what extent we were correct in urgently. requesting a discussion, fearful as we were that the SWP leadership was capitulating to the same revisionism which they had condemned in 1953.

Has the SWP continued a struggle for Trotskyism against bureaucracy, or has it capitulated Pabloism, to this bureaucracy?

We consider that Stalinism remains what Trotsky called it—the principal counter-revolutionary force in the international class struggle. As imperialism's crisis las deepened, so we have witnessed the inseparablv linker deepening crisis of Stalinism, because in its opposition to working class, Stalinism leans on the imperialists, whose pressure pon the first workers' state it really represents.

1956 marked a major turning-point, with the Kremlin's bloody suppression of the workers' councils in Hungary.

But in the years which immediately followed, the SWP leaders, instead of building on this confirmation of Trotsky's programme of political revolution, discovered the theory that a series of basic reforms by the Soviet bureaucracy would 'equal' a political revolution.

This 'theory' led them closer to the Pabloites who had proved incapable of supporting the revolt of the East German workers in 1953 or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Our letter was an attempt to halt the process, to establish a revisioliame to Pahto, ainmain and their supporters. But in fact the gap between us has widened ever since that day.

THE SWP AND PABLOISM We found it extremely difficult to get a discussion with the SWP leadership, and we never did get a discussion involving the rank and file of the SWP. This rank and file was deprived of our many documents while the SWP reunification, Its unprincipled with Pabloites in 1963.

We say 'unprincipled' because it was done on the basis of ignoring past differences and splits, and with different reasons given to the members on both sides for the drawing together o fthe SWP and the Pabloites.

In the period since 1961 the policies and outlook of our two organisations have diverged until today they are in direct opposition.

We set our course towards the defeat of revisionism and the building of the independent revolutionary party in every country, as the necessary weapon of the working class against imperialism in its crisis, and against its bureaucratic agents.

The SWP has reacted to this crisis in an entirely different way: via the acceptance of Pabloite revisionism it has reacted to this deepening crisis by turning completely away from the working class, towards middle-class 'radical' circles, with the politics of pacifism and radical protest which in fact serve imperialism.

This has necessitated a series of bitter slanders and attacks against the Marxists of the SLL and the International Committee.

BETRAYAL IN CEYLON Between 1901 and now, oi course, Pablo himselt has been expelled from the 'Unified Secretariat'. His departure was preceded by the historic events in Ceylon.

The Lanka Sama Samaja Party of Ceylon was always acclaimed by the Pabloites as the 'largest Trotskyist party in the world'. Almost overnight, the situation was transtormed.

In the summer of 1964, leaders of this Party joined support for the imperialist in Vietnam.

We raise the slogans 'Victory for the National Liberation home "The enemy is here at Front', and blows we strike against Wilson are blows on their behalf. There is no 'peace' in Vietnam without the defeat of imperialism.

What is the position of the SWP?

It is worth examining this particular question in detail, beAN ANTI-TROTSKYIST ALLIANCE paign ciples.' (Bulletin, September 12, 1966)

From the Moscow Trials through the Hungarian Revolution, and now into the preparations for "ideological co-existence' with capitalism, Aptheker has been and remains the model of a Stalinist "intellectual' hack, finding 'Marxist' justification for every crime and betrayal of the bureaucracy.

We support unreservedly the characterisation of our co-thinkers in the USA who denounce the SWP for its latest betrayal of the working class.

A radical 'regroupment' around the US Stalinists is one of the hopes of the Democratic Party in rolling back the swing towards the Republicans.

It is this to which the SWP is really orientated: the firmer tying of the US working class to the two-party system and the capitalist establishment, despite the propaganda protestations to the contrary.

The Liege demonstration, the real fight against the bureaucracy on the Hungarian Revolution, the Vietnam war and the support for Stalinist politics, -these are the turning-points which have accelerated the degeneration of the SWP.

capitalist coalition government of Mrs. Bandaranaike, and won the support of a large majority of the LSSP for their action.

A minority immediately split and formed the LSSP (Revolutionary Section), and atter some hesitation the Unined Secretariat proceeded to expel the LSSP majority. What a reunification!

Were not certain lessons to be drawn, about the role of revisionism, about the unprincipled character of the 'reunification'?

Not only did the SWP leadership refrain from any comment for a whole period, but they took disciplinary measures against those SWP members who demanded discussion.

Before the coalition inside the Pabloite Secretariat, they had rejected discussion of the rightward course of the LSSP traitors, on the grounds that it would be 'divisive'!

In fact the government's crisis in Ceylon was only part of a whole change in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. After it came a series of moves to the right, as the middle-class "left' nationalist alliances broke up.

Ben Bella, Nkrumah and Sukarno toppled, and military coups succeeded each other a series of countries. Imperialism could not sustain the old equilibrium.

The Pabloite revisionists had staked everything on the 'natural' development of left nationalists into Marxists, using Castro as their model. In Ceylon, in Algeria, they paid bitterly for their mistakes. They prepared active defeats for the working class.

THE SWP AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE USA But the basic revision of the SWP took place on the question of the USA and the American working class. Worship of the left, petty-bourgeois nationalists in the colonial countries, particularly Cuba, was in fact a cover for an abandonment of the American labour movement.

Instead there was a turn to the so-called 'radical milieu of middle-class 'protest' politics which abound in America but sprout especially with the approach of imperialist crises.

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 revealed these politics for what they were. So far had the SWP fallen into the dominant pragmatism of the US bourgeois world outlook that Cannon, adducing Nehru and Bertrand Russell support, praised Khrushchev's withdrawal of the missiles, on the grounds that there was no alternative 'in the given circumstances'!

Not a trace of proletarian internationalism and the independent class politics of the working class in the approach to all problems.

So prostrate were the SWP leaders before Castro that they welcomed as 'the fight against bureaucracy' Castro's insistence on the unchallengable right of the state machine to appoint all personnel in government office!

Today, George Novack excuses Castro's vicious attack on China (linked with his attack on Trotskyism) with the explanation:

'However, Peking's sectarian attitude in dealing with the neutrals in the Sino-Soviet conflict, coupled with Cuba's inescapable economic and military dependence upon the Soviet Union, have nullified this sympathy [towards China].' (International Socialist Review, Fall 1966.)

Such are the depths to which Marxism, "Trotskyism', would be reduced by Novack and the SWP leaders.

Inside the USA, the revolt of the Negro workers, requiring as it does a revolutionary programme of political independence of the US working class, has been derailed by bourgeois-nationalist types of policies, to which the SWP has continuously lent itself, with its uncritical suppont of the Black Muslims.

Worse, the SWP actually called upon the Democratic Administration to enforce de-segreation by sending Federal troops to the Southern states. The Negroes were to be freed by the monopoly-capitalist state!

The telegram of condolences sent President Kennedy's widow by Farrell Dobbs on behalf of the SWP was not a bad joke. It summed up the politics of the SWP, expressing as it did the guarantee to the bourgeoisie that they did not regard violence as the solution to America's problems.

Lenin and Trotsky fought to free the Russian labour movement mimitife individuill torrorism could destroy Tsarism. The SWP leadership tried to twist these ideas to shield itself against the jingoistic backlash of imperialist America.

In all issues of American politics the SWP has turned towards petty-bourgeois 'democratic' and 'radical' opinion. • While US imperialism finances a massive ideological campaign against Marxism on every front, the SWP in fact helps them by presenting as Marxism, as Trotskyism, a turnung away from the working class to liberal reformism and pacifism.

What we pointed out in the discussion on abandonment of dialectical materialism now has its full political expression.

TROTSKYISM AND PACIFISM With this type of politics it is inevitable that the revisionists of the SWP and the 'Unified Secretariat' find themselves on the other side in the struggle of the workers' movements to shed the Stalinist and social-democratic bureaucracy.

This has now become more openly than ever before the main question betore the workers, in the capitalist coluntries and in the deformed and degenerated workers' states.

The fact is that these 'radical' and pacifist circles, so necessary as safety-valves under imperialism, can find a stable centre only in the Stalinist bureaucracy and politics of peaceful coexistence'.

In Britain, in solidarity with the forces of the International Committee in other countries, the Socialist Labour League has fought and fights now for a programme of total opposition to the government of Wilson in its cause it is the immediate background to the latest unprincipled move of the SWP leadership against the SLL.

Consistently with its liquidation into the middle-class 'radical milieu' the SWP has merged itself in the 'peace' movement without any independent proletarian Marxist programme.

Indeed, SWP members are mobilised to vote down Trotskyists in Seattle, for example, who raised the question of international working-class solidarity against the imperialist war.

Even this elementary duty of Marxists to oppose their own imperialist government on class lines is impossible for the SWP. They have become part of the "radical milieu' towards which they turned. -No longer a proletarian tendency, they are the left wing of this radical middle class.

The transferring of this policy to Britain is only the latest of a series of our experiences of intervention by these revisionists, from which we are obliged to draw definite conclusions.

THE YOUNG SOCIALISTS Between 1960 and 1965, the Young Socialists, led by members of the Socialist Labour League, inflicted a major defeat on the bureaucracy of the Labour Party.

Their youth movement was won from them in political battle at two successive conferences.

When this process was completed, the forces trained in that fight set up their own independent revolutionary youth organisation.

It was this orgamisation, together with the magnificent French contingent from a movement inspired by the victories of the YS, which dominated the Liège demonstration of October 15, 1966, and frightened to death every revisionist in Western Europe.

The SWP's 'Militant' went five weeks before it could make a comment on the most significant international action of our movement since its foundation.

But all through the struggle in the Labour Party, the co-thinkers of the SWP in Britain, the Pabloites, condemned our fight as 'ultra-left' and 'adventurist'.

Their theory of 'deep entry' made them subordinate everything to staying in the social democracy. They characterised Wilson's government in October 1964 as a 'left-centrist' government, and so were utterly unable to mobilise any opposition to its capitalist policies.

When the SLL and YS took the initiative in the fight against the anti-trade union legislation of Wilson's government, we not only received no help from the Pabloites: they teamed up with the Stalinists and 'state capitalists' in the organisation of diversionary action.

They tried to confine the seamen's strike, a political strike, to questions of economic demands and industrial solidarity. Never once did they condemn the betrayals of the Stalinists, who helped the Labour government to defeat the strike.

All their wrath was for the SLL.

And now we find supporters of the Unified Secretariat in Britain ning up with precisely the same indo petty-bourgeois towards which the SWP is turned in the USA.

Bertrand Russell and Ralph Schoenmann organise their 'VietSolidarity Campaign' and 'War Crimes Commission' with the day-to-day assistance every level of the British Pabloites.

This same Schoenmann tried to suppress the spokesmen of the SLL when they warned, at a meeting of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, against the betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Pabloites have even defended the position of Schoenmann that fascists like Colin Jordan should be protected against discrimination in the interests of free speech.

This is the 'regroupment' which the SWP has been talking about since 1956! It is a middle-class alliance against revolutionMarxism, especially when Marxism attacks the bureaucracy.

Together with its middle-class allies, the SWP leans on this bureaucracy.

Instead of defending the Chinese Revolution against the threats of US imperialism, the SWP and the revisionists demn the "sectarianism' Chinese, while the Soviet leaders call for the overthrow of Mao Tse Tung naturally on the programme of a more conciliatory policy towards imperialism.

As the crisis of US imperialism worsens at home and abroad, it becomes increasingly difficult for the ruling class to maintain the fraud of the two-party system. New gimmicks have to be improvised in order keep the working class from breaking away and founding a Labour Party of its own.

As in the '30s during the New Deal, the American ruling class has found willing and unsolicited help from the Stalinists in deluding the radicalised sections of the working class, in particular the Negroes.

While significant sections of the US working class such as the airline mechanics are demanding a complete break with the two capitalist parties, the Stalinists are doing their utmost to maintain the decep. tion that the Democratic Party is the servant of the working class. While opposing the more reactionary sections of the Democratic Party, they urge the workers to vote for the 'progressive' or 'reform ' Democrats.

The SWP, despite its Trotskyist pretensions and talk of 'independent politics ' ', is just as much a part of this cynical fraud as the Stalinists.

APTHEKER AND THE SWP The proof is to be found in its explicit support of Herbert Aptheker, the CP candidate, in the last Congressional Elections in the 12th Congressional District of New York. Its support for Aptheker is in no way different from the supB may To the 20 01 0 Bandaranaike's SLFP government in 1964. It is capitalist politics and we agree completely with the Bulletin for the International Committee of the Fourth International which states:— 'For Herbert Aptheker and the Communist Party the Kelly district. (the : 12th Congressional District) was a perfect choice.

Being a conservative Democrat the CP could run against Kelly while at the same time continuing to plug reform Democrats elsewhere. The Aptheker campaign not only does not represent a break from bourgeois politics, but it rather functions as a cover for the CP's continued support to the "liberal" capitalists.

In fact Aptheker's campaign specifically avoids any mention of socialist or class politics.

While mentioning that Aptheker happens to be a member of the Communist Party, one is urged to vote for him on the following sabiar my lifthas sender and to the struggle against fascism, against racism, and against McCarthyism; as a candidate, these aims remain central." We take him at his word—central to him is a liberal bloc against "reaction". , not the independent struggle for the working class.

Any socialist who gives an ounce ot support to the Aptheker camA BETRAYAL OF TROTSKYISM We tell the SWP:

The days when you could address us as 'comrades' are long since gone.

Your political actions have placed you outside the camp of Trotskyism and of the working class.

You have placed the phrases of Trotskyism at the service of the middle-class pacifists and compromisers with imperialism.

There can be not the slightest question of your telling us what wẹ must do to re-establish our reputation with you.

On the contrary: the more vicious becomes your opposition to us now, the more you are forced into one unified opposition with the middle-class 'radicals' against us, the surer we are that our political course is absolutely necessary and correct.

The 'Unified Secretariat' into which you retreated, once we raised sharply with you the revisionist direction of your politics in January 1961, is decomposing in Europe as all over the world.

This was exposed at Liège, in contrast with the growth political strength of the International Committee.

In the course of this decomposition, the SWP and its collaborators run into the arms of the centrists and the bureaucracy.

Adapted to this milieu, they accept and indeed excel in the methods of scandalmongering and gossip against the revolutionaries, methods which typify these middle-class groups.

THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AND THE USA We understand how important it is for the SWP and its friends to attack the Socialist Labour League and the International Committee.

For years they have sneered at the supposed "British insularity' of the SLL, but their attacks against it have become necessary internationally for the SWP revisionists precisely because it is from Britain, from the SLL, together with its comrades in the IC, that the rebuilding of the Fourth International is being undertaken successfully. This теbuilding is the death-blow for the revisionists.

One final word. At the front of our preoccupations is the central role of the working class of the USA. The building of a Trotskyist leadership in that country should have been the task of the SWP. They have abandoned it.

American imperialism has built up an enormous ideological barrage to corrupt the American labour movement, and the SWP, by failing to develop Marxism in struggle against this, has succumbed to it.

The work of the International Committee in the ACFI in the comrades USA, will provide the basis for a Trotskyist party in the USA. But such a party will only be built in opposition to the middle-class sect, viciously anti-Trotskyist in its service to the bureaucracy, which the SWP has now become.

Internationally, too, the revisionism of the SWP has become an obstacle which must be removed from the path of the working class and the Fourth International.

The SLL is part of the Fourth International.

That is the basis of our existence.

Henceforth we have no relations with the SWP: it is a fight between the working class and the servants of the class enemy.

Adopted by a unanimous vote at the special national delegate conference of the Socialist Labour League.

November 26 and 27, 1966. The issues raised in the Nov. 2lst letter by Farrell Dobbs, Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, about what happened at Caxton Hall on the night of November I/th, we cannot discuss at this stage for legal reasons.

December 3, 1

LONGBRIDGE (BIRMINGHAM) car delivery drivers will be returning to work to clear the 10,000 cars which have accumulated in the factory compounds during their nine-week official strike against redundancy.

By Monday, eight of the 12 member firms of the Longbridge Group of Delivery Agents had signed agreements with the Transport and General Workers' Union. The drivers claim that these agreements are completely on their terms. All conditions, such as mobility of labour between one type of job and another, have been dropped.

The firms who have signed the that in each will negotiate directly with the union and will recruit labour through the union.

In September the LGDA declared that 333 out of their 650 drivers •would be made redunThe men struck and had been demanding work-sharing in place of redundancy.

The strike ended last week when the British Motor Corporation broke what is understood to have been a 'gentlemen's agreement' with the LGDA by allowing two delivery firms outside the LGDA to move some of Lue cas. the shop stewards' movement in the car factories stand exposed for their inaction on the delivery drivers' fight.

The Longbridge drivers have engaged a rough and gallant fight, enduring financial hardship, pressure from outside and long trying hours on the picket lines.

This same determination will be necessary in the future struggles in the car industry: it must be channelled into the revolutionary action it is seeking, to overthrow the capitalist system and expose the false leaders of the working class. AN ARTICLE by J. Gibbons in the October issue of World Marxist Review' brings out clearly the full implications of Stalinist politics in this

In the hut specially built for picket duty by the drivers of the Car and Commercial Deliveries firm, about ten pickets sat on Monday by the coke stove which has kept them warm through many spells of watching the storage compound. They were hourly expecting the news that their own employers had signed an agreement with their union. ( They felt that the reported statement of LGDA chairman Mr. R. J. Carrington that the union was 'accepting the offer we made a week ago', was just a face ThAt offer, put fontemptuo the urned down by the drivers luded the taking back of 75 of redundant men for month while redundancy was discondition complete mobility of iobs.

The real plans of the employers then are quite plain. But is there apparent step-down just as plain?

They have in fact got away with a certain amount of redundancy-many of those thrown out have found other iobs and will not be taken back.

Both the LGDA and BMC are obviously anxious for monetary reasons to get the cars moving again to clear the storage compounds.

But what happens when the cars are cleared, and the drop in car production again allows only a trickle out of the factories? The delivery firm bosses will again be faced with surplus labour and are bound to want to cut-back again.

Was the action of BMC in using. recently-unionised firms outside the LGDA to make the LGDA member firms act, or was it to break the strike?

And what was the attitude of the union to these two firms being allowed to move vehicles?

Certainly the Longbridge drivers' struggle is not at an end. But they must be sure of all the facts in their next battle.

The question of redundancy and unemployment is not a matter of work-sharing. It is a political issue, involving an all-out fight against the anti-working-class policies of the Wilson government.

No decisive long-term victory— which the Stalinists claim this is -can be achieved on the basis of a purely union struggle, restricted to one section of workers.

Here again those Stalinists in

OVER 1,000 workers staged a one-day token strike on Monday at the Birmingham factory of the BXL Plastics Materials Group Ltd.

This action was decided at a mass meeting on Sunday, in protest against redundancy • for 150 employees at the factory, to take place on December 17.

Workers, Who are members of the Transport and General Workers' Union, have also placed a ban on overtime.

The BXL factory, which is in the heavily-industrialised Tyseley district, is American-owned. was announced that the redundancies were caused by 'the general industrial situation'.

A group of workers outside the factory expressed the opinion that the underlying idea was to get 'four men to do the work that used to be done by five'. Registered at the G.P.O. as a newspaper Published by The Newsletter. He Capin His Sire. London Wit 36a ClE S.W.4

A SERIES of departmental strikes were being held at the CAV-Lucas factory site in Fazakerly, Liverpool, this week against the sacking of the convenor, E. Johnston.

The workers are also opposing a decision of the Amalgamated Engineering Union executive telling Johnston to accept one of the two offers made by the firm. His workmates are demanding his full and unconditional reinstatement.

Johnston, a member of the AEU executive and local district committee, was sacked on September 22.

Procedure

A strike against this was called off when a majority of workers accepted an AEU district official's proposition that the case go through procedure.

At a central conference in York last month the employers proposed that Johnston be sacked and take three months' wages or that he take a job in a small Lucas service plant for a year before being accepted back into the main plant.

'Peace'

The shop stewards' committee at CAV-Lucas have issued a statement saying that the management had declared they wanted peace on the site, but 'we know the type of peace they mean to have.

'.. their way of getting it is the most aggressive act yet committed against the union here.' Johnston had a record of fighting for improved wages and conditions. We are not going to have him exiled for fighting for trade unionism, they say.

Over 700 workers have signed a statement, which has been sent to the district committee of the union opposing the sacking and the action of the executive, which was meeting again on Thursday. The demagogy of Ben Bella (left) and well-armed and trained troops of Boumedienne (right) were sought

Real power never rested in the hands of Ben Bella and his entourage. Imperialism has withstood heavier blows than the nationalization of barbers' shops and cafes. State power lay in the hands of the army chiefs under the leadership of Col. Boumedienne, who never concealed his disdain for the 'socialist' excesses of Ben Bella and his ex-Trotskyist advisers..

When the time came to swing the regime over hard to the right the army was able to dispose of Ben Bella with contemptuous ease, the very smoothness of his removal indicating the real centres of power in the ex-colonial world.

But this course was not only mapped out in the Gaullist ministeries and the officers' barracks of the Algerian army.

REQUIRED BREACH Imperialism required a theoretical breach within the Marxist movement in order that the huge class energies unleashed by the Algerian revolution should remain without the leadership able to liberate them from the grip of capitalism.

Stalinism, as we have pointed out, was unequal to this task.

The breach took place within the Trotskyist Fourth International.

The theoretical basis of this defeat inflicted by imperialism upon the Algerian workers and peasants can be clearly seen in draft resolutions for the sixth world congress of the 'Fourth International', staged by the Pabloites several years after their break from revolutionary Marxism. • In this resolution the orientation towards the left wing of the nationalist movement achieves a finished form.

*Revolutionary - Marxist elements who operate in these dependent countries do not always have the possibility of opposing from the outside and in a completely independent way the existing national movements with bourgeois leaderships or ideology, for in this case they would run the risk of cutting themselves off from the broad masses and remaining in practice ineffective. While taking on everywhere the task of open revolutionary-Marxist publications which clarify the problems and trace out a clear perspective, they may find themselves obliged to carry on the essential part of their activity inside the existing national movements of a mass and revolutionary character, and to advocate within them a wing of a proletarian and socialist orientation.' (Fourth International', summer 1960, page 59.)

Thus the Pabloites denied the central task of the epoch, which was, and remains the construction of independent workers' parties as national sections of the Fourth International.

This is the content of Pabloite revisionism, its liquidation of the party into the lett-wing of petty bourgeois nationalism and the international labour bureaucracy.

Thus in Algeria the task was not posed as one of the building of an independent Marxist party based upon the struggles of the working class and poor peasantry, but, in the words of the Pabloites themselves, was seen as 'the need for the transformation of the FLN into a political party with a specific programme.' (Page 62.)

The conclusion drawn by the Pabloites from the leftist nature of the FLN leadership (analysed in a purely empirical way on the basis of FLN propaganda) was that 'the special case of the FLN —the leadership of a plebian revolution in which there are not yet, properly speaking, pseudocapitalist leading classes developed to any serious extent— raises a problem for the proletariat and its revolutionary organisations: they cannot be satisfied to criticise such an organisation from the outside... (Page 62.)

BETRAYAL Behind the big talk about action and not criticism, about the need to engage in struggle and not stand on the sidelines, Pablo prepared the political betrayal of the Algerian revolution by this revision of the whole basis of the programme of the Fourth International-namely its central emphasis on the crisis of leadership.

Pablo's subsequent evolution -which even horrified those of his own supporters who were unable to recognise their handiwork —was driven on by the logic of the class struggle itself.

The struggles of the question of Marxist theory and the nature of the dialectic, the class nature go on to total victory.

Pablo, however dedicated he may have been to the goal of socialism, expressed the petit-bourgeois contempt and disdain for theory. This then became the medium through which imperialism was able to partially break up the leadership within the Fourth International and take this much further through their utilisation of renegades from the Trotskyist movement, as in the case of Ceylon and Algeria, to form 'left' governments that served only to head off the struggle of the masses for real class power.

To read Humbaraci's book is really to read the record of this betrayal by Pabloism. It was not a revolution that failed-that is a passive (and therefore Pabloite) way of presenting the question.

It was a revolution that was betrayed-betrayed by revisionism-and the opportunists used the name of Trotskyism in order to conceal their material capitulation to the pressures of bureaucracy and nationalism.

The break from Pablo and his methods raised Marxism to a new level, as have all previous struggles with revisionism within the Marxist movement over the last 60 years.

For us, the Algerian experience, the fall of Ben Bella and grinding poverty of the Algerian masses cannot be separated from the struggle to defend and develop the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism, for in this struggle, the central task of humanity is now posed-the building of a class-conscious Marxist leadership able to overthrow capitalist society and the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracies and build a world socialist system.

The struggle of British and Algerian workers meet on this

period.

Deliberately concealing the international evolution and nature of the present crisis within British capitalism, Gibbons ploughs the classical Stalinist furrow of arms bill reduction (why is it always by half?) and restrictions on the export of capital.

Instead of the recognition of these features of British capitalism as being central to its role as an imperialist power within a world capitalist economy and a system of military and political alliances, Gibbons suggests that the money saved 'could be used for technological development at home'.

This line will of course be familiar to all those who have fought in the working class over the last two years against the betrayals of the Labour government for a socialist policy to resolve the crisis. This reformist, nationalist and Utopian programme of the Stalinists serves not as a workable plan for the employers and the Labour government, but as a poltical diversion from the development of a genuine class opposition to reformism in Britain.

Now, however, a new stage has been reached. Stalinism now finds it necessary to make an adjustment not only to the politics of right-wing reformism, but its latest, most reactionary expression-the drive to liquidate the independence of the working class on , behalf of a mythical "national interest.

It is here that Stalinism plays its most pernicious, and, for the social democrats and their paymasters, most valuable role.

'Force Wilson' Gibbons argues that it should be the aim of the working class to force Wilson to carry out his intended programme-that of the modernisation of British capitalism.

"The professed aim of the Labour government, an aim with which no British worker will quarrel, is to get the country out of debt and to reach a position in which Britain is able to pay her way in the world. And the British worker would gladly coby imperialism at that period in its crisis. operate in the endeavour if he knew that prices and profits were also frozen and an end put to squandermania of the NATO and East of Suez policies. (Emphasis added.)

So we know where we stand. Yes, the wage freeze is_O.K. by the British Communist Party, as long as the 'British worker' sees that his British employer is also asked to make his contribution to the national effort.

Class nature ignored Far from this Stalinist bringing out the class nature of the crisis and the necessity of developing a struggle against the employers and the government being responsible for this crisis, the attempt is made to bring together the working and capitalist class, via the legislation of the Wilson government on wages, prices and profits, for a national effort to save British capitalism so that it can once more 'pay its way in the world'.

Just when thousands of workers are flung into struggles demanding the highest level of political leadership and organisation, the Communist Party intervenes with this nationalist, anti-Marxist propaganda in order to prevent a real radicalisation of the working class and its linking up with the Trotskyist movement.

This new stage in the degeneration of Stalinism has serious implications for the Marxist movement and the working class generally.

The Newsletter has often warned over the last year of the logical direction towards which Labour's policies are heading. the absorbtion of the trade unions by the state and the creation of a corporate state on the lines of fascist Italy.

These first steps by Wilson in the direction of state control of the unions are as yet only a pale reflection of the real drives of Wilson :orrespondent capitalism on a world scale towards total smashing of working-class independence and the institution of fascist forms of rule over the working class.

The Stalinist parties, notably in Britain, where this process is particularly rapid, respond to this pressure from monopoly capitalism through the medium of the Labour bureaucracy and the trade union parliamentary 'left'.

Thus it is only now that the Stalinists come forward with such ultra-nationalist and demagogic policies as those advanced by Gibbons:

'The Communist Party, together with other (sic) lefts, is advancing an alternative programme to the Labour government's one-sided austerity.' (Emphasis added.)

'Corrective' The Communist Party sees its role as a corrective to the one-sided policies of the Labour government. The party must adjust this lack of balance by calling upon the employers to make their sacrifice too, in order that the crisis be averted.

Far from being an alternative upon which the working class can fight, such as has been developed by the campaigns of the Young Socialists and the Socialist Labour League, the Stalinists offer nothing but dangerous demagogy for the working class at a time when its situation cries out for real communist leadership.

This swing over to the extreme right by British Stalinism brings out more clearly than before the close ties that bind it both to British capitalism and to their political tutors in the Kremlin.

That the Stalinists now play with the language and ideas of the corporate state should serve as a clear warning to those who continue to believe that some room for manoeuvre still exists for British capitalism.

of the Cuban state and the relationship between petty-bourgeois nationalism and the revolution in the ex-colonial world, appeared on the surface to be remote from the 'real struggle' of the international working class.

And yet a whole chain of international events, from Hungary and Cuba to Algeria and Ceylon and now Liège, have brought out in a material way the class content of the fight for Marxist theory against its revision by those who attempt to adapt it to the needs of capitalism.

NOT ABSTRACT It is on this plane, the struggle for theory, that Marxism appears to be at its most abstract. And yet it is through this development that the working class will be able to defend its conquests and

common ground-the fight for leadership-though their material historical conditions may differ widely.

Their unity is expressed in the struggle for class consciousness and the building of the Fourth International.

This book is valuable material for the complete unmasking of Pabloism and its eventual liquidation within the ranks of the workers' movement.

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