FACING MASS unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-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 soclalism, 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 class-war 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', of fectively 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 govern ment has LIST OUTLOOK simply fuelled and encouraged the of fensive 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 clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achieved under capitalism.
Nor, as we arqued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achleved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes survived only by repressing their own working class.
We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarlan parodies of state marxism, nor on the tame, toothless version of 'marxism' beloved by armchalr academ--| Name .. ยก Address Post code Phone Send to Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU. Ics, but the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobitise 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 bullding 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 lesblans and gay men, of students, of youth -and of those fighting Imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world.
Socialist Outlook Is above all an internatonalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskylst Fourth International, which organises wide.
THERE IS no doubt that the Scottish Labour Party conference in Inverness led to a realignment in world politics. Gone are the left, right and liberal. A new vocabulary was forced on stunned delegates through the inexorable co-thinkers in 40 logic of deregulation and the countries world- global communication revolution.
Unlike some There is an unsubstantiother groupings on ated rumour that some delethe British left, we gates had read the recent do not belleve a International Labour Organimass revolutionary sation report which highparty can be built lights a third of the world's simply by proclaim- 820 million workers as unIng ourselves to be der- or un-employed. one. Too often this In this vicious world of rudegenerates into mour and counter-rumour, sectarian posturing some Machiavellian tactician and abstention with a warped sense of the from the actual ridiculous has alleged that the struggle taking Labour Party shape within the la- have come up with 'the' sobour movement, playing into the hands of the right Nor do we beleve that the demands of women, Letters over 300 words may be edited. lution to the Missing Link of Our Times - the market mechanism, which hereto will be called Socialism. It will be infantile and discourteous in the extreme to disagree.
The name Inverness will reverberate around the world as the place where the new fault-line definitions for the next century first poked through. In the interests of clarity, each MP must be issued with a choice of tattoos to be imprinted on their foreheads as they enter the town's borders. One is of Sisyphus rolling a boulder up the hill. The second is a greasy pole.
Thus straight away we differentiate between those prepared to proclaim their powerlessness in a parliament which has little or no influence as capital ups and does in the twinkle of a unelected stock broker's eye (they get the boulder), to be lined up against the "greasy pole to nowhere brigade' suffering "modernisers' from the self-delusion that they can regulate the market.
Socialist Outlook & a The "Polers' by their nature will be duty bound to exterminate the handful of troublesome 'Boulders' who will not accept the rules of the game, but by default this will expose a great historical truth; all the energy, flare, commitment and blood which has led to change in the past has begun as extra-parliamentary struggle and usually, those with an eye for the past will have noticed, criminal.
Let's face it. If we are going to save the planet and begin the Great Democratic Debate over the liberation of Capital between 'Polers' and 'Boulders' we need something spectacular upon which to distract attention from the OJ Simpson trial.
Paul Laverty, Givan [Paul Laverty worked in central America as a human rights lawyer and wrote the script for Ken Loach's next film.]
Socialist Outlook welcomes readers' letters. Write to Feedback, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU.