FACING MASS unemployment, rampant employers with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won public 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 build a new type of working class leadership, based on class struggle and revolutionary socialism.
The capitalist class, driven by its own crisis, and politically united by its need to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has had determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions, and to fragment and weaken the resistance, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively total surrender, while ditching any pretence of being a socialist alternative. Every retreat encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights.
New realism is the latest form of reformism, seeking only improved conditions within capitalism.
We reject reformism, not because we are against reforms, but because we know that full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy, can never be achieved under capitalism.
Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these deSOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 81. April 8 1995, Page 14. of capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, to unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland themselves and fight now for their demands, which are a part of the struggle tor But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism. The fight for policies which can mobiSocialist Outlook welcomes readers' letters. London N4.2UU. IN S.O. 79 Neil Murray claims that "Socialism has to be clarified".