won education, health and welfare services, the working class in 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 employers and the government has simply fuelled and encous aged to offense against and Wales should be left to await 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 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK 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 clean environment, peace and dechange. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working 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, of youth -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 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 workers and the oppressed fight your short article (Socialist Outlook 76) on the extraordinary upsurge around live animal 'exports. It was good to mark the issue. I disagree with your "angle" however on several points.
To say that "the issue is immaterial" is completely wrong. These demonstrations are only one end of a long line of protests going back to Napoleonic times (and beyond!!) and giving us laws against cruelty to animals in the 1820's, and laws against cock fighting and baiting in the 1830's and 1840's.
Human sensibility towards animals has increased over a whole historical period - just as arbitrary cruelties have been suppressed in human relations: judicial torture, wife beating, child beating etc. in the metropolitan bourgeois democracies. I don't know that "the core of these protests is people with well paid jobs" etc.? My campaign group is in Hove, next door Shoreham protests. One Group member is also prominent in the Shoreham protests: he is a working class Labour Councillor and engineering Arthur Scargill.
The impression I get is that a very large proportion of the protesters are women and schoolchildren (a local schoolmaster says its a real hot issue in his school - otherwise politically apathetic); and that fractions of youth that have radicalised around environmental issues... roads, animal welfare, travelling etc..
Joseph Newman, Portslade, E. Sussex MOTORWAY TRAGEDY -lorry crashes on M62 - 133 sheep killed, 2 people slightly injured, 2nd February. So where's the tragedy?
Is it that 133 potential Sunday lunches ended up splattered on the hard shoulder?
Or is it that Socialist Outlook has jumped on the bandwagon by attempting to subject this petty-bourgeois fad to serious analysis?
Aidan Day (Socialist Outlook 76) equates the powerlessness felt by the English middle classes in Tory Britain with the "experience" of veal calves. This would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. state, trade union rights, privatisation of services, unemployment, homelessness, etc..
That people should be devoting time and energy to such a triviality and that a Marxist newspaper is devoting valuable column space to such a division - that is the real tragedy. DAFYDD RHYS' article on the Jewish question (Comment, Socialist Outlook 77) raised several issues.
"He (Trotsky) saw that the expected assimilation had not occurred and that the Jews had developed further the Jewish language and created a vibrant Yiddish press. He decided therefore that the Jews could be called a nation and that they therefore had the right, if they chose to exercise it, of a homeland of their own."
But even in Trotsky's day this argument was problematic, since it could have led to the conclusion, not that there was a Jewish nation, but that there was an Ashkenazi Jewish nation in Russia.
Where did this leave e.g. Ladino-speaking Sefardi Jewish communities in the Balkans? Support for Yiddish was justified then because in general the right of people to use their native language is a democratic right, but some of the demands of the Bund would have been inappropriate
Heddwen Jones, London E17 Jewish question