Dear comrades, May I take up some of the points raised by your report in the February 28 Black Dwarf of the recent debate between Tony Cliff and Gerry Healey?
For such debates to be useful, there must be a readiness at least to consider common activity on points on which there is agreement, if only to provide a common touchstone by which to clarify the differences which remain. But the comrades of the Socialist Labour League, as they have always made clear, are not prepared to cooperate with groups on the left which they consider "revisionist'. Their justification of this is provided by the allegedly anti-Marxist nature of all other left elements, and any attempt to discuss questions of strategy with them must inevitably end DY concentrating the questions to which your reporter refers. This was no doubt the reason why Cde. Cliff decided to concentrate on these questions from the beginning of the London debate. Had he done otherwise, as happened in a recent Oxford La monologue alone would have The sectarian divisions which disfigure the Marxist left today arose during a whole generation in which all revolutionaries, and especially the Trotskyists, were walled off from any contact with the workers movement by the twin bureaucracies of Social Democracy and Stalinism; they were in Victor Serge's phrase "exiles in their own class', and exile politics are notoriously fissile. The reasons are the same in both instances: theoretical differences cannot be resolved in practice - - the only. way which is ultimately decisive for Marxists and lead therefore to splits. This isolation was imposed by the hold which reformism had: a hold made possible by the changes in capitalism after the war, but which is coming now to an end. In this period, capitalism grew faster than at any other time this century, and tremendous questions had to be answered on topics like the role of arms expenditure in ensuring stability, the nature of reformis, changes in the nature of imperialism and Stalinism, and changes within the working class itself.
Whether International Socialism's answers to those questions have been correct or useful, Dwarf readers can decide for themselves; but that they exist is an undeniable fact, as any examination of back numbers of IS (soon to be republished in book form) or of the book of arether the safe claim can be made for the from Socialist Review SLL is also a question which Dwarf readers should be able to answer.
But apart from this, your report's conclusion on the irrelevance of the existing groups to "building the left that the present situation makes possible and requires" must be challenged from another angle. Both IS and the SLL devote the bulk of their efforts to building organsed force of political militants in To conclude with Robin Blackburn that "the time is not yet ripe for creating the revolutionary party of the British left" is to postpone this task to the revolutionary Kalends and in fact adopt a position of 'postponed spontaneism'. We reject this theory. The struggles in which many Dwarf readers will be engaged, in industry, in the Universities and colleges, on the estates, and in the schools, all
In the past six months the discontent which has | examination rat-race.