Win workers to Marxism

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Membership open to Constituency Labour Parties, trade union organisations, Labour Labour Party Young Socialists summer camp 1983: July 30 to August 6. All Fee: CLPs and unions £10, wards £5, indivi Young Socialists should come: a week duals and other organisations £3. Write to- of YS workshops, Class Fighter meetLAW, 11 Wilderton Road, London N16. ings, and very much more debate than Next National Council meeting, open to delegates from CLPs and trade union bodies: Saturday July 12 noon, Carden Town Hall, Judd St. entrance.

transport. Bring sleeping bags and tents. Party affiliates, and individuals. THE COMING period, after Labour's biggest election defeat since the war, paradoxically gives us in the Socialist Organiser Alliance the best opportunity we have ever had to win converts in the trade union and labour movement to our interpretation of Marxism and Trotskyism as the surest way forward to socialism.

Ken Livingstone and Arthur Scargill are right to suggest that the main struggles over the next few years will be outside Parliament. According to the Cambridge Econometrics Group, 'unemployment is set to top 4 million if the Conservative government pursues its existing policies and to reach 4.3 million by the end of the decade' (Tribune, June 24). The same group forecasts that, by 1986, growth will slow steadily to about 1.3% a year with the tailing-off of North Sea Oil revenues.

If this forecast is correct, then the crunch will come for the welfare state and the Conservatives' 'hidden manifesto' will come into play. There will be great opport= unities for a cohesive Marxist left wing in both the unions and the So, what should be the priorities of a Marxist group like the Socialist Organiser Alliance. which seeks to integrate activity on all the fronts of the class struggle - economic. political. ideological - into a coherent strategy?

One uur main strengths.

I our comt itment to : unito action (chair, Socialist Organiser Alliance)

wherever possible, is our openness and lack of sectarianism. We have a great deal of credibility in areas of the trade unions and of constituency Labour Parties where we are strong because of our hard work and willingness to workwith others on the left while retaining our distinctive approach.

We should, first of all, take the lead and strive to create Labour Party workplace branches as a means of combining trade union and Labour Party work and reinvigorating the basis of the Labour Party. We should seek to build new SO groups and develop the ones we already have, and, within this organisational priority, determine how many people we can put forward in each area as prospective councillors and parliamentary candidates.

Within this developing organisational framework, we should fight for our policies and to call to account those MPs, councillors and union leaders who collaborate with the Tories. Labour MPs in particular should be persuaded to conduct a campaign of parliamentary obstruction.

One of the major debates at last year's TUC was over tripartism - whether the trade union movement should continue to collaborate with the Government in bodies like the NEDC. In the light of the Tory landslide. this debate is bound to recur at this year's TUC. and we should push this facet of our policy - the need to break off collaboration with the Government - particularly hard in the newt few months.

In the unions, we should fight for election, and periodic re-election, of all officials by methods of direct, participatory democracy, not the anti-democratic Tebbitfavoured postal ballots.

We need to fight to remould the labour movement to be habitable for women and to be orientated towards their needs. On that basis a mass working-class based women's movement can be built, and a socialist alliance created between the labour movement and the women's movement.

The hold of the media cannot be overestimated, and any strategy for bringing about a Labour government towards the end of the decade dominated by Marxists and left social democrats (in the true historical sense of that expression) - which remains a possibility - must take that fact into account.

As a start, we must build up the sales of SO and start a series of articles explaining the detailed components of our programme. Where We Stand. We should recognise that some parts of our programme are more easily achievable in a shorter time span than others, and formulate a strategy for implementing the programme accordingly.

• In conclusion, the old slogan, 'educate, agitate, organise' still has validity. If we can organise a cohesive Marxist left wing in the labour movement - both unions and Labour Party - by recruiting members and fighting for our ideas on the shop floor and in the Labour Party branches, we can build up a base in the rank and file that can have a major influence on a Labour government and its trade union allies in the late 1980s

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Socialist Urganiser no.138 June

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NOUR AGAINST THE PARTY WITCH-HUNT!

there is at YS conference. Contact Class Fighter, 13 Buxton Road, London N19 for details and