nist International - which will unite national sections under a single discipline in struggle for a common Trotskyist programme.
This task is essentially a political one which can only be carried through in the struggle for revolutionary leadership in practice. In this respect, the political positions of the USFI concerning the nature of the petty bourgeois leaderships of the Chinese and Cuban workers states and the need to build Trotskyist parties in these countries reflect grave weaknesses.
(Our tendency is in political solidarity with the Leninist Trotskyist Faction (LTF), a faction within the Fourth International to reverse the ultra-left turn initiated at the 1969 World Congress and to win the Fourth International back to the transitional method and programme.)
Since taking office, the Labour Government has carried through a wide-ranging programme of anti-working class measures to bail British capıtalism out of its deepening crisis. In doing so, it has been able to count on the support of the leaders of the Labour Party and the trade UmOnS.
The result has been drastic cutbacks in the social services; mounting unemployment; escalating attacks on democratic rights; inflation; wage controls; speed-up; and a deterioration in the quality of life. Fifteen thousand troops have been kept in Northern Ireland. The right to abor-/ tion is under further attack.
The treachery of the labour leaders has disoriented large sections of the working class and prevented them from fighting back effectively. Nevertheless, the working class has suffered no major defeat for 40 years and in the post-war period has come to expect rising living standards. As the ruling class steps up its offensive, the class struggle will tend to deepen, giving rise to big working class struggles, which will be reflected within the waue umons and tre Labour rarty The key question that the workers have vet to overcome is the crisis of leadership. The betrayals of the labour leaders underscore the urgent need to win the workers to a revolutionary socialist consciousness and practice and so forge a new, revolutionary leadership. The building of a mass Leninist combat party is a pre-condition for the successful socialist revolution. It is only when such a party has been built and the present reformist misleaders of the working class pushed aside that we will be able to determine the course and outcome of the class struggle.
The construction of such a party is a gigantic task and can only be achieved by participating in the class struggle armed with the transitional programme and method. By raising appropriate immediate, democratic and transitional demands, which speak to the concerns and inAUTOTHEDL The direct relevance of these questions is clearly shown in the practical line advanced by the leadership for Britian today, with its project for a class struggle opposition relying on the emergence of a "progressive' current in the labour bureaucracy.
6. The emergence of the Workers Socialist League out of a struggle for Trotskyism in the degenerated International Committee represents an important development for the political reconstruction of the Fourth International. Despite terests of the exploited and oppres sed, the masses can be spurred into anti-capitalist struggle, using proletarian methods of mass action. In fighting to win their demands, the masses, through their own experience, will develop a socialist consciousness and an understanding of the need to take power.
This approach is diametrically opposed to the 'strategy' of the three tendencies in the IMG which adhere to the International Majority Tendency (IMT), all of which base themselves on the concerns of the "new mass vanguard' rather than the objective interests of the masses.
Today's ruling class offensive is not confined to attacks on wages and living conditions. It also involves an attack on social and political rights. The working class cannot make a socialist revolution without winning to its banner all the oppres sed - women, youth, immigrants, blacks. If the working class is to mobilise all the forces available for the socialist revolution, it must champion the demands of all the oppressed.
Many struggles of the oppressed challenge the major pillars of capitalist rule and thus help the working class as a whole to achieve its goal of abolishing capitalism and replacing it with a socialist society. Struggles such as the Irish people's fight for self-determination and the campaigns of the women's liberation movement, students, blacks and immigrants, play an important role in educating the workers to assume their historic responsibilities.
These struggles help to overcome the divisions within the working class which are consciously promoted by the ruling class. All other tendencies in the IMG have failed to grasp the central importance of these issues to the success of the coming British revolution.
The most effective way we can give revolutionary leadership in the class struggle today, thereby increasing our influence and winning the maximum recruits to our movement, is by adopting the following orientation and tasks.
Demand We must continually demand that the Labour Party and trade union leaders chart a course in the objective interests of the working class. We should propagandise within the mass organisations of the working political weaknesses in the WSL particularly its failure to grasp adequately the history and development of the USFI struggle to develop and win support for the Trotskyist programme among decisive sections of militant workers represents a major gain for the world movement.
UNITE For this reason we say that the Conference should resolve to unite the forces of the IMG with the WSL as a vital part of our perspectives for the year ahead.
class for a fight to defend the interests of all the oppressed. Against unemployment and inflation, we fight for: the shorter work-week with no loss of pay; for the labour leadership to assume the responsibility of organising the unemployed; for the sliding scale of wages, tied to an accurate cost-of-living index.
We advocate a massive public WOLKS programme and an end to all cuts in social services. We stand for workers democracy within the Labour Party and the unions. We urge the labour movement to use its power to campaign to get the troops out of Ireland; to back up the fight for free, legal abortion; and to champion the struggles of students, blacks and immigrants. We advocate reliance on proletarian means of struggle, not parliamentary or judicial means.
We continually counterpose our class-struggle programme and actions to those of the labou bureaucracy, thereby laying the basis for the building of a class-struggle left wing within the labour movement and for the recruitment of the more militant workers to the IMG.
Fifteen thousand British troops are maintained in Ireland in violation - its daily CAVENUE TENP BARER FOURTH
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IM DH HILL