Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis.
The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal classwar Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, using the full powers of the state.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the einployers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union New realism is the latest form taken by the politics of reformism, seeking no more than improved conditions within the framework of capitalist rule.
Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are against fighting for reforms, but because we know that the needs of the working class - for full employment, decent living standards, a class - the overwhelming majority of society - to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, ofyouth -and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world.
Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries worldwide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. Too often this degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from the actual struggle taking shape within the labour movement, playing into the hands of the right wing.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and Wales should be left to await the outcome of a socialist revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now around their own demands, which are a part of the struggle for socialism.
But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism. The fight for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which YOUR REPORT on the Defend Clause IV Campaign Steering Committee meeting could not be more wrong when it talks of the situation 'in the telecoms union NCU".
This does not reflect the report given at the meeting and talks of a union that no longer exists! UCW into the Communications Workers' Union NCU Broad Left were hoping that the union would cast its vote in three parts - the clerical and engineering sections of the NCU always used to vote separately.
Their hopes were that this would mean that the NCU engineering section delegates (where the Broad Left is strong) would cast its vote for Clause IV, and were not terribly concerned that this would mean the clerical vote would go with Blair, as, very possibly, would the UCW's.
However, the new unions' executive is in the process of scotching this misguided complacency. Wanting to cast all of the union's votes for Blair's change, the joint General Secretaries, Alan Johnson and Tony Young, are pushing that the exfor the whole union.
Moreover, they are now pushing for a ballot of all WU. members on how the union should cast its vote. Clearly their calculation is that this will produce the desired outcome, unlike a one-day union conference, the democratic alternative.
However, it is not impossible that their scheming could backfire on them, but this needs a massive campaign by CWU activists and local and national Defend Clause IV campaigns to convince members to vote to keep Clause IV.
CWU member, Upney over-ridden by the drive for profit.
Adam Hartman, Manchester Labourism I WISH to take issue with Julian Menear's letter "Soft on Labourism?" (Socialist Out100k 77).
The case for most of his letter seems rather flimsy, to say the least. He accuses Ellen Moore of saying that defence of Labour's traditional social democratic, collectivist framework is a 'struggle about Marxism or Liberalism as