UP AGAINST 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 ana Labour leaders nave 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 captaism.
We reject reformism, not because we are against reforms, but because we know that full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace ano democracy, can never be achieved under capitalism.
Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes survived only by repressing the working class.
We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian parodies of state marxism, nor on the tame, toothless version of 'marxism' beloved by armchair academics, but the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. differences.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change.
We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class to topple the Name :. Address IPost code. Phone [Send to Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 corrupt and reactionary rule 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 simple. and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and worldwide.
Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth Inter- again pretty quickly. national, which organises in over 40 countries.
Unlike some other groups on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. This ones do not exist. degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from struggles in the labour movement, playing into right wing hands. tice.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland, Ireland and Wales should be left to await revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now for their 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 mobi- whom do not. lise 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 for their rights.
To strengthen this fight we press for united front campaigns on key issues such as racism and fascism - in which various left currents can work together for common objectives while remaining free to debate If you agree with what you see in Socialist Outlook, and want to join with us in the struggle for socialism, readers' groups meet in towns across the country.
Contact us now, get organised, and get active!
sold it. "Why are there so many left papers?" is one of the questions socialists get asked most often. Of course it would be a "good thing" if there were one paper that all revolutionaries organised around (and, by impli- Young joinse cation, one organisation), navy but the world is not that Important differences of analysis, programme, strategy and - flowing from them - tactics, mean that simply throwing different views into the same melting pot would lead to friction and a flying apart While it would be sectarian to elevate minor differences into an obstacle to such co-operation, it would be equally unprincipled (and counter productive) to pretend serious Unification won't be outlines of policy and elect an brought about by wishful editorial board which will be thinking but by argument and accountable to it. a testing out of ideas in prac- Such an organisation does not currently exist, but needs But that is not the end of the to be built around the Socialist story. While Socialist Outlook Campaign Group Supporters supporters do not currently Network or the Socialist Polisee any other left tendency cies for a Labour Government with wich we could seriously organisation set up at the June produce a joint paper without 17 post-Clause IV confercompromising important as- ence. Such an organisation is pects of our politics, we do see necessary in itself, and the the need for a paper of the left question of a publication must of the labour movement, sup- be at the heart of building it. ported by activists from the There is however, curunions and Labour Party, rently an alternative option on some of whom support par- the market. ucular tendencies, most of AGM, Labour Briefing voted.
to relaunch itself in the The necessity of this in the autumn, together with the face of the bosses' and Tory publishers of the one-off New onslaught, the refusal of al- Left. most all union leaders to fight ---### Yeltsin has no answers! Genuine steps to unification on the left need much more than wishful thinking This project is neither a joint publication of left tendencies (and Socialist Outlook has serious differences with both those involved so far), nor that of the broad labour movement left; but a mish-mash of the two.
Accountability
While they want it to "reflect" the Socialist Campaign Group Supporters Network, they have no intention of handing the publication over to its accountable structures, but instead are inviting it to At its recent put one representative the EB. This would mean that while some EB members are accountane to the broader draw, get a free subscription to Don 1 let thel make us bay movement most are simply there as representing their own narrow tendency.
Apart from the unworkably large EB elected at the Labour Briefing AGM, there are no regular structures to which the publication is accountable. Indeed there could not be such a structure under these proposals because it would mean creating an additional organisation separate from the SCGSN.
It is for these reasons that Socialist Outlook supporters decided at a meeting on July 3 that they will not be taking onto up the offer to participate in the revamped Briefing but will continue to argue for a publication of the left of the anour movement -----