[Got your copy? sector and the fight against…]

Scan page 13

Got your copy?

sector and the fight against cuts and privatisation, lessons from the NHS strike, and unions and the Labour Party. Polemics on the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party. Features on the left and the Stalinist state 'unions' , and on workers' politics and national liberation. From the arsenal of Marxism: Leon Trotsky on boom, crisis, and workers' 70p (plus 16p p&p) from WSL, PO 135, London N1 ODD _ACACACRLO,anI JIAY OUT WOULD it be a reasonable proposition to suggest that Labour go into the forthcoming election on the Election Manifesto of 1935?

Only a lunatic could agree. Yet Tony Richards asserts that our practical policy flow straightforwardly from •a document produced thirty-six months later. Tony operates on a crude "big bang" theory of epistemology: all history led to the explosion of political thought that finds its manifestation in the Transitional Programme, and this programme is now sufficient to lead us into the Garden of Eden.

We are in the centenary year of a great revolutionary, whose life-work was dedicated to arguing that politics was a science. Across the whole spectrum of the organic and inorganic sciences, there have been tremendous developments in knowledge and method in the last forty ycars. What was the state of nuclear physics in 1938? What was the state of the theory of relativity? In 1938 astronomers seriously believed Mars was an oxygen-based planet! And Preston won the lA Cup that year using tactics which would nowadays see them taken to the cleaners by Stockport County. The political theory of that era bears as much relationship to the necessities of the cighties as the antique crooning of At Bowley does to the music of Duran Duran.

Religious

did done hasa fundamentally religious rather than scientitic comeption of politics For this monk of the North politics was I won ne the great prophet spoke. The decades since then have constituted another ice age. Tony must realise that the thoughts of great men a long time ago are not always a helpful guide to the task of today.

When John Mollroy suggests a mild rethinking, Tony reacts in the same way that Pope Pius the Third responded to. Martin Luther. Reliance on the Holy Books is for Talmudic scholars, Socialist Organiser must pioneer new breakthroughs, new innovations. The ice must be cracked. Otherwise Socialist Organiser will end up like Tyrannosaurus Rex. And I'm talking about a prehistoric monster, not a pop group.

Yours fraternally, NOEL HIBBERT Published by Socialist Forum for Southern Africa Solidarity.

Available (at 90p plus 20p post) c/o SO, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. d06 BOb Fine

Scan page 14

BREAD +WATER Organ n 4131 May 12 1983 Page N0T04 LANTED STAND

----- pull-quotes -----

AQUESTION OFSOLIDARHY Independent Trade Unions In South Ăfrica

Lawrence Welch