With all this and more going on around us Socialist Outlook is making plans to go fortnightly in order to respond faster
We believe that there is an audience for the ideas of revolutionary marxism within the growing anti-war movement, in the anti-poll tax movement, among socialist feminists, in the Labour Party, in the trade unions - indeed amongst all those fighting capitalism and trying to build an alternative to the new realist mis-leaders of the labour movement. With a fortnightly paper we hope to arm our readership with ideas and analysis that will be useful in the class struggle.
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PR: an act of faith?
Pete Willsman was right in suggesting that Davy Jones' article on PR required a response (Socialist Outlook No. 29). Unfortunately, his was not the one to be expected from readers of a "revolutionary marxist" joumal.
Jones' contention, "that PR would help the mobilisation of a real popular majority to win elections and introduce socialism", may well be an act of faith as Willsman argues, but not in the sense that he meant. For both are arguing from within a context of parliamentary reformism - quite legitemately in Willsman's case. However, Jones a supposed Trotskyist, cannot seriously claim such a description at the same time as suggesting a parliamentary road to socialism.
I am not necessarily suggesting that marxists should not give critical support to PR -we should give no blank cheques to the institutions of bourgeois democracy. However, the questions to be raised over PR include such problems as whether it would give workers and the oppressed greater control over their lives or whether it would help to break the hold of reformism. One can debate PR in this cort of context without any illusions that a change in the forms of capitalist democracy would allow a socialist transformation of society.
Perhaps one can look to Socialist Outlook's perspective of building the Socialist Movement with (amongst others) reformist and with more clarity on the vital issues of the day.
to go!
LETTERS elements outside the Labour Party for an explanation of Jones' attitude to PR?
Geoff Coleman
Hull
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Socialist Outlook!
¿ US bungles attack on Kuwait creating a massive oil slick
* 2 million strike against the war in Spain
* Kinnock and Willis back imperialism to the hilt i Tories slip Poll Tax announcement through
SOCIALIST
OUTLOOK
Where were the Trots?
Phil Hearse's obituary of Louis Althusser (Socialist Outlook No.29) is a well balanced piece, and for Trotskyists I think that is a bit of a problem. However useful some aspects of Althusser's project may, or may not, have been, its core was an attempt to rejuvenate Stalinism in a more acceptable, because more academic and more abstract, mode.
Of course, as Hearse notes, Althusser did not actually engage with Trotskyism. Unlike Hearse however, I don't think Althusser's inability to see the 1986 version of Trotsky's philosophical writings was central to this. Rather surely it was the responsibility of the not inconsiderable number of Trotskyists organised in France during the peak of Althusser's influence?
Keith Flett
Tottenham
Unshackle the Unions
Fighting the Tory Anti-Union Laws
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