SINN FEIN president Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat at the general election, a fact greeted by Socialist Organiser (SO 520) with the headline: 'Good news from West Belfast'.
For Socialis! Oroaniser this amounted to a 'rejection of sectarianism' by West Belfast wor kers.
At the level of facts this is Adams lost his seat despite we tact what tus vore, absolutely and in percentage termis, toes up. some nundred of loyalist voters switched to the SDLP to vote Adams out.
SO supporters say the SDLP is the 'party of the Socialist International". It may be thus affiliated, but it is not, like the Labour Party, a party based on the workers movement. It is a bourgeois nationalist party, full stop. stems not from principled considerations, but from their irraHonal prejudice against the national struggle in Ireland.
dereat is simpiy a victory for imperialism, albeita marginal victory. Let Socialist Organiser chief Sean Matgamna's joy be unbounded.
This particular piece of nonense led some SO contacts te stop buying the paper. But worse was to come.
In SO 521 Matgamna lets off steam with a huge attack on Ken Livingstone, denouncing him as a pantomime candiinese pot the candidate of the Sun and culminating with 'scumbag; and calling on Tony Benn to stand against Of course Marxists have many disagreements with Ken Livingstone. Maybe Tony Benn would have been a better left candidate. But so what? Marxists don't support left Labour candidates against the right beically on everything, but beitically on everything, but cause we support the fight of left against right to advance the struggle.
The main factor in the situation is that someone on the lett has been prepared to get up and fight back against the new realists. The whole left should therefore stand behind Livingstone's campaign, while quite rightly making its criticisms of his policies But the bizarre antics by SO are not the end of the matter SO supporters in the National Union of Students intend to take the NUS to court over its ao on or witter concrete.
Court intervention The motivation for calling on the bourgeois courts to take action, overriding the inde pendence of the NUS, simple factional one: NUS conferences are the highlights of routine. When paper sales and contacts are up for grabs, who cares about political principle?
The present political gyrations of SO are just the latest of a series of eccentricities of this ex-Trotskyist grouping Others nouncing the whole of the far left as bigoted against Israeli Jews' for backing the Palestinian struggle, and giving almost uncritical upporto bors reitu socialist Organiser is moving to the right politically at a rate of knots. Increasingly based on students, its leadership seeks to distinguish itself from all other left forces by the adoption of Before writing his letter criticising SO's position on the all-white referendum in South Africa (SO April 17), Michael Wippell should have asked himself who has benefitted from the result-the liberation movement or De Klerk and the white establishment?
What is quite clear is that De bizarre sectarian badges of Of course, there is nothing wrong with open polemic in a Marxist paper; it educates and ing to a socialist tendency which denounces someone on the left as 'scumbag? Espe cally when that denunciation comes from its best-known leader?
These kind of antics are the stock-in-trade of the international Spartacist tendency and other loonies. They reek of fac tional degeneration. Socialist Organiser is going into auto-dethat a future constitution would ensure that there would be no risk of a 'black dictator'. He also promised that the existing racist ricameral parliament might be kept as the upper house of a new parliament instead of the regionally elected senate previously proposed A real boost for De Klerk was the almost instantaneous abandonment of sancuons by inter
We welcome letters on any subject but please keep them brief. Letters over 350 words will be cut. Send your letters to: Socialist Outlook PO Box 1109, London, N4 2UU
Referendum - a boost for De Klerk