It's all smiles at the new-look Socialist Outlook offices A second printing of the Socialist Challenge pamphlet advertised in the last Socialist Outlook will be made next week. The new printing has been made necessary by orders from Militant readers in Britain and Belgium.
The pamphlet is available for €1.00 from 'Outlook International', PO Box 11089, London, N4 2UU. Bundles in multiples of five are half-price. As readers will see in this Socialist Outlook, the filipino left is turning away from its traditional reference point with Maoism.
Groups like BISIG [interviewed in Socialist Outlook 62] and the Multilateral Co-ordinating Body are organising new revolutionary organisations with a combined membership of over 10,000.
The Fourth International is eagerly answering requests from these organisations for english-language marxist literature. Socialist Outlook is sending a shipment of books to Manila on January 24.
More than 30 volumes by Leon Trotsky, Ernest Mandel, James P. Cannon, Alan Thornett, Indian Fourth Internationalist Kunal Chattopadhyay and others have been donated by the Socialist Outlook staff.
If readers have books they would like to give for the shipment please contact your Socialist Outlook seller or mail them to 'Outlook International', PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU. Charles Mullet's 'Comment' article [A Bolshevik Century?, Socialist Outlook 73-741 poses very real questions for Leninists like Socialist Outlook. We continue to defend a basic strategic line for Britain developed out of the experiences of the 1917 Russian revolutions and adapted for the west by Lenin's Communist International and those who defended its tradition.
Mullet attempts to stress the limits of what we can learn from 1917 - arguing that Bolshevik tactics were only the historically specific form of the Russian revolution. Mullet concludes that a part of the Trotskyist tradition has mistakenly superimposed the Russian experience onto the modern world - "a copy of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution in their anorak pockets, eager to 'spot the Kerensky' and give advice on defeating the local Kornilov."
Sadly it is Mullet who is mistaken. Of course the LeninistTrotskyist tradition must admit it has made mistakes - but not in defending the basic propositions sian revolution.
Many of these ideas - that only the workers and peasants successfully lead the revolution, that democratic gains can only be consolidated through social revolution, that this requires the independance of the revolutionary working class party and the smashing of the capitalist state machine, that this requires the direct economic democracy of workers' councils - are crucial tools in making politics today.
In Brazil, fighting for independant working class politics, in South Africa, working for a break with the ruling rich, in Belgium, confronting the politics of the popular front, and worldwide - it is the living continuity of Bolshevism which the Fourth International renews and represents in this period of late capitalism.
Chris Brooks, London N4. The question mark says it all. How can we even talk of 'A Bolshevik Century? [Socialist Outlook 73-74]. At best, perhaps, a
Phillipines book appeal
*A Bolshevik century?'