topics of Cass struggle revolutionary struggles in progress. But the FI is still too weak to mobilise its forces effectively for a greater number of objectives.
congress drew a clear distinction such campaigns and those of a propaganda characnecessity be These will. consist essentially of articles in our press, backed up in countries issue with Duolid meetings and participation in campaign bodies.
Among the most important subjects in this *defence of the Kampuchean people against the starvation attempts of imperialism and its allies in South-East Asia;
*defence of the Indochinese revolution in of the sectors. of the colonial to particularly (Zimbabwe, *defence of national minorities or especially oppressed nationalities (Irish, Basques, Kurds);
*defence of tortured political prisoners in Argentina, Brazile, Chile, Uruguay;
immigrant workers in the imperialist countries against the discrimination described above. more forward.
The objective bureaucrati movement, the stepping possibility leaderships virulent pursuit of South revolutionary advance.
whose concrete outlines socialist revolution.
The Fourth International has developed considerably from a numerical point of view over the last decade, even if this growth has slowed somewhat over the last two or three years in the imperialist countries for the reasons We now have to use this increased force as a springboard for a new leap conditions the crisis engulfing capitalism and the traditional leaderships ot progress of the world revolution - will aid this leap forward. The proletarianisation, the of influencing maJor workers' struggles throughout the world from the inside, a change in the style of work of our national and organisations, the vigorous policy of non-sectarian regroupment will all help to create the subjective conditions for this new Success here will mean a new stage in reaching our goal, one which is still distant but Male how becoming visible: the creation of the world party of the Socialist Challenge 13 December 1979 page 13
LETTERS published on this page will normally be cut to at least 400 words; 10 ensure that the maximum number of readers can express their views.
Anonymous letters will not be published unless there is a very special. reason, but real names will be withheld from publication on request.
Split to Fuse WHILE agreeing with comrades Hearse and Packer's analysis of the split in the USFI, their conclusions do not necessariv follow from it. 'The point about the split is that it is a sectarian split, carried out by those who put their own factional interests before those of the International as a whole: The Fi was therefore justified in expelling them.
What is inconsistent is to then appeal to the sectarians for unity, or to accept the hypocritical statement of their supporters in the IMO that the fight goes on' — the fight for a split? The correct reply to this by the IMG would be to instruct them to cease their splitting activities, or else be expelled.
This result would then have the welcome effect of removing the chief obstacle — the sectarian current in the IMG — to the formation of a unified revolutionary organisation in Britain with the Socialist Workers Party, and clear the way to beginning the task of building a mass revolutionary party as the British Section of the Fourth International. Splits and fusions are a necessary part of this process. J. STRĄUTHER (Liverpool] Credit and debit ALL credit to your paper for covering the rise and fall of Hull News. Noel Hibbert's post-mortem (29 November) was certainly controversial.
He argues that too much reliance was placed on professional journalism. I judge this to be untrue, but the point is that money problems caused the paper to die. Specifically, the lack of launch capital and political resistance by advertisers.
He also argued that the strength of the paper must lie in its base of paid sales, nor in advertising. But paid sales were not the problem, advertising was. While political resistance by advertisers is inevitable, nobody has yet come up with a formula for a mass circulation local paper not dependent on adverts.
Your contributor wrote of factory subscriptions. He knows perfectly well that the Newsagents' Federation had demanded exclusive sales rights outside the city centre. He talks of a smear campaign. In fact the local press ignored Hull News (naturally enough) while the radio was subdued but sympathetic.
After working alongside Noel tor four years, I find it typical that he should casually double the amount of money he is supposed to have raised in ine labour movement.
BRYNLEY HEAVEN, Ads Manager, Hull News.
And another AS a Hull News activist, I would like to reply to Noel Hibbert's article (29 November). Apart from waffle and factual 'mistakes', Noel produced a semi-accurate account of events, but he didn't mention a major factor in the newspaper's failure - -the isolation of Hull Trades Council from the ocal workers' movement.
First, the waffle. What does seeking advertising from 'businesses least tuned into competitive markets' mean? Unfortunately, the SWP bookshop can't manage £1,000 a week More seriously, Noel raises the myth of the professional journalism mistique. We all attempted to involve but a weekly newspaper needs a # me it bare Aren'i Socialist Worker andl Socialist Chailenge run in this way?
Anoiner faise argument is that the venture surfered from a media red «art. Ihetact is that the local Istaser totally ignored us. and Ace i locals Charte Humberside, I'm sure we would have been informed of any attacks from A basic problem in running a trades council newspaper is the trade council's isolation from the working class in Hull. Despite being more left wing and active than most, Hull Trades Council is essentially a paper tiger. On May Day marches, for example, only two hundred people can be mustered, half of them from left groups.
A manifestation of this isolation was the lack of starting capital raised from the labour movement for the newspaper. Apart from the donation of £500 from the dockers — the trades counch bresident and another executive member are dockers — other donations were pitiful. The AUEW district committee, for instance, gave us the princely sum of £2.
While £25,000 was necessary to launch the paper, we only raised a tenth of that sum. When the printers saw our first editorial they demanded weekly payment of their bills, and since the advertisers paid on a monthly basis, we immediately had a cash-flow problem.
The mass of workers in Hull do not identify with the trades council or its newspaper, and this relationship was worsened by the downturn in class struggle under the Labour government, the legacy of which is still with us.
A possible solution is to publish a large number of copies of a free newspaper to be distributed to most people, perhaps at their place of work. I understand that this is what Sheffield Trades Council is attempting to do with Forward.
Such a paper could adopt a left-wing perspective and take in advertising, because a sufficient number of individual capitalists would advertise if enough people would see their adverts. This could raise sufficient funds to produce a newspaper which a largish number of people would want to buy.
GEOFF COLLIER (Hull)
Child-care OH DEAR, does Tommy Cusack (Letters, 22 Nov) not realise that the "task' of childbearing can only be done by women? Or has this fact escaped his notice? Is it really the ideology of woman as mother that prevents men helping with the shitwork or is it really because housework is a bourgeois fetish? JESSICA H. NORRISH (East London] Marx and men I AM sure nearly all letters to Socialist Challenge have to be cut for reasons of space, but the cuts that were made to my letter (22 November) set me up like a coconut in a shy for replies like Louise Smith's last week.
The central points of my letter. were, first, that Sue Landau's view that the cause of women's liberation could be advanced by women journalists scabbing on the NUJ's fight to have its members reinstated in their jobs had to be opposed. And secondly, her claim that men have historical material interests as a sex separate from those they have as a class and that this was a Marxist idea had to be denied.
Unfortumately, all these references were the ones that were cut. Perhaps this is what led Louise Smith to believe that I was concocting a theory in order to dismiss the politics of the women's movement.
In fact, I was neither trying to speak on behalf of women, nor trying to define who is and who isn't a feminist, but merely restating what I believe Marxism - from Engelsto Evelyn Reed — has said is fundamental to a materialist understanding of women's oppression.
Of course, the activity of the women's movement has caused the development of this theory and the would say that the basic conception that women are oppressed as a sex is a function of class society has very well stood the test of time.
a Chinese wall in theory between the interests of women and those of the working class as a whole. This led her to advocate actions which undermine the fight to win male workers to an understanding that it is in their own interest to support the campaigns of the women's movement and of women generally.
had on stressing the class content of the fight for women's liberation.
arguments further than that, but I hope that Sue, Louise, and other readers will accept there is a genuine and important debate, and that 150 years of Marxism cannot be dismissed as 'crass and sexist garbage' just because most of it was written by men.
TOMMY CUSACK [London NW1] Whose sell-out? LAM moved by anger to reply to the article 'Why has the Patriotic Front agreed' (22 November). At the very moment when the Front needs support, SC prints an article accusing it of betraying the liberation struggle In reality the concessions the Patriotic Front are forced to make reflect not so much their weakness as the strength of British imperialism. one political consequence: abandoning the Zimbabwean liberation struggle to the clutches of Front for capitulating to imperialism is disgusting when the national ZEC demonstration on 11 November could only muster 3,000 people, a large Front supporters.
by its absence. It made no serious attempt to mobilise support for and build a large anti-imperialist demonstration.
and all supposed socialists in Britain — the building of a genuine anti-imperialist movement in Britain, which will tie the hands of British imperialism and prevent it pressurising movements like the Patriotic Front. Until that movement is built, for SC to condemn the Front is tantamount to siding with Victory to the Patriotic Front! Hands off Zimbabwe!
LEROY SMITH [Bury] Blunt speaking YOUR editorial on the Blunt affair (22 November) was a mixture of reaction and rubbish:
the cover-up done on behalf of a ruling class homosexual, you think fit to devote a paragraph to the alleged sexual relationship between Princess I IN THIS DREAM THE BRITISH ARMY SUICIDE EN MASSE development of some rival ones. But I and parasites'.
I thought Sue's original letter built I concentrated in the few words I It's impossible here to develop the and gays.
sexuality? Economics on the economic crisis.
SC's inversion of reality can only have For SC to condemn the Patriotic The British lett was conspicuous That is the real task that faces SC capital tends to fall capitalist lines.
• (1) In an editorial concerned with , 15 BADRAY ABOUT THAT?
Margaret and John Bindon. The only way this can be understood is that the ruling class is 'corrupt' because of its 'loose' sexual morality. Since when has this been the position of SC?
(2) (The Blunt affair) showed how scared our ruters are of those of us who stand outside the palaces of Westminster and Buckingham. The degenerates and parasites who occupy those buildings are truly frightened of the wrath of the common people'. We can leave aside for the moment the questions of just how 'frightened' they are, and of whether Labour MPs, for instance, are 'degenerates The passage quoted is a bit ambiguous. because we do not know whether the type of degenerate in question is the homosexual Blunt or he high-lving Princess Margaret People who do this from the left neglect the fact that the decay of a mode of production results in increased open sexual immorality not only in the ruling class but in the oppressed classes too. Any attacks of this kind on the ruling class therefore inevitably rebound onto the working class, and particularly onto women (3) The editorial ends: "And it they are that unsure of themselves, the only question that remains 1s why have we tolerated this scum for so . This ridiculous piece of rhetoric is thrown in because the editorial can come to no useful conclusion, being based on such weak politics. When will you write a sensible editorial on the subject of DAVID ETHERINGTON [York] IVERY much agree with Ken Tarbuck's remarks (Letters, 29 November) about your centre-spread First, let me say that I think it is very good that you are now having more basic propaganda material in the paper. However, it is probably due to neglect of this in the past that two of the three articles in the centre-soread were based souare von bourgeois rather than Marxist economics. The most essential point that such propaganda needs to explain (rather than continually assert) is why this is a capitalist crisis and why the workers are not to blame.
The reason is that the crisis is ultimately caused by the long term increase in the amount of capital materials relative to that invested in labour power. Since surplus value and profit are only made from labour power, this means that the amount of profit made on a given amount of It is this above all that is responsible for the long term fall in the rate of profit (not the amount of profit, as you say) since the early fifties, and thus for the present crisis I'his crisis theretore on v arises because production is organised along Your articles, however, presented a different story. To explain the depression of the 1930s, you quote J K Galbraith. The problem was 'the bad distribution of income', so that working class incomes were too low to buy capitalists' consumer goods.
This does not explain either that or this crisis, however, because if working class demand is insufficient' you have to explain why demand from capitalists for means of production and luxuries does not counter-balance this. This theory leads you to the conclusion that raising working class incomes would lead to 'an increase in WAS ONLY A DREAM!
STRANGE economic activity', which is the opposite of the case.
The second argument you present is that the 1929 crash was produced by stock market speculation by promoters, gratters, swindlers, imposters and frauds' who diverted money 'which could have been invested in new plant and machinery (into) the stock market'.
However, a half page devoted to moralistic attacks on speculators cannot explain why it is that they speculate rather than invest productively. The reason was and is that the rate of profit is too low, for the reason already explained.
One of the articles starts: We all know that capitalism causes the misery and deprivation that people suffer in their daily lives.' It is precisely because we do not all know this that Marxists have to prove it! This is a difficult thing to do, but it is certain that it will never be done by relying on bourgeois economics, which sets out to prove exactly the opposite JAMIE GOUGH [London WC1] Memorial THE Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for 1979 has been awarded to Dr GA Cohen, Reader in Philosophy at University College, London, for his book Kari Marx's Theory of History. A Defence, published by Oxford University Press.
The prize, to the value of 2100, is awarded annually and is intended to recognise and encourage outstanding research and writing in the tradition of Isaac Deutscher The prize for 1980 will be awarded in the autumn of 1980 and a jury drawn from among the sponsors will consider work published or in Any such work should be submitted by I May 1980 to The Isaac RALPH MILIBAND, on behalf of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize THEMASSACRE OFTHEINNOCENTS How profit now endangers health From unextracted lead, Since petrol-firms with countless wealth Think more of greed instead.
Does no one care that we must breathe Such lead-polluted air, Orthat the petrol-firms bequeath Such harm without a care?
The death rate on the road is known y in rigures or despair.
But profit, greed and wealth disown High rates of lead in air.
Though we with pent-up anger groan Atlead with every breath The baby and the child are prone Much more to harm and death.
King Herod had the children stain And nousands wen were ocad How heartless are the firms that gain By pain of cursed lead.
© N. Racine-Jaques, 1979 The lead content of petrol is higher Britamn than in most other countries. Lead i an accumulative poison. the biblica story; also alludes to a Parliamentary slang Government Bills not sufficiently advanced lo de passea durine the session Cassell's New English Dictionary. J
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Deutscher Memorial Prize, c/o Lloyds Bank, 68 Warwick Sq.,