The
Gerry Healy
Archive
It was Healy’s practice to send such political letters as this to clarify important questions and keep members informed. They show his method of party building and are vital material necessary for training leading Marxist cadres today. (Ed)
POLITICAL LETTER NO. 1, 4TH March 1963
Dear Comrades,
Towards Our Pre-conference Discussion
It is now almost three months to the national conference of the League. During the coming weeks we shall be giving considerable attention to the progress of our discussion and activity since our last conference.
All our active members will have something to say about their experiences. Our 1962 conference perspectives and political discussion made a considerable contribution to the understanding of the present crisis of British Imperialism.
Unlike the fake lefts and apologists for reformism, we were fully prepared for the great campaign against unemployment. Those who have pinned their hopes on the belief that Tory capitalism could this time escape by juggling with inflationary policies have been sorely disappointed. In particular, the emphasis which our 1962 conference laid on the sharpening of the class struggle within the factories and the trade unions has been born out. The constant conflict within the motor car industry, (Fords, for example), and the drive against wages and working conditions have now become part of everyday policy of industrial monopolists.
One of our most important tasks which we successfully implemented in 1962 was the preparation and holding of our area conferences. We avoided a tendency towards routine discussion by insisting on the need to prepare in advance a programme of activity for each area. This was achieved by prior discussion within the branches and between leading comrades in the areas which in turn provided an impetus for the development of local leadership on a scale that we have never been able to achieve in the past. In some cases where the conferences were not adequately prepared steps were taken to postpone them until each preparation could be carried out. This intervention by our National Committee was in itself part of the preparation which began immediately after the Conference. During July 1962 we held two National Committee meetings at which all the weaknesses in our work were reviewed and steps were taken to overcome them. Particularly in the case of the fight against the witch-hunt the results were entirely positive; not only did the youth defeat the witch-hunt of the right-wing, they succeeded in improving their work in all fields.
Our policy in the Electrical Trades Union which had hitherto been based on the need to regroup the left forces under conditions where a savage witch-hunt was carried out against the members of the Communist Party, was developed a step further. As part of the preparation for the first national election under the new right-wing leadership, we carried through a struggle inside the ranks of the CP for a break with their past opportunist policies. In the selection of a candidate we were able to present one of our own comrades for the post and in doing so we gained for the first time a definite following amongst CP ETU militants despite the hostility of their leadership.* (See footnote).
At the Rules Revision Conference of that union in October we had a large attendance of delegates at our open political meeting where considerable support was gained for the policies of the League.
The work of our leadership over 1962 has been carried out under conditions where, starting from the political decisions of our Conference, we put into practice the practical conclusions and prepared our work concretely.
The area conferences which concluded their work early in January 1963, adopted targets for increasing the membership nationally by 150 before 31 March. There is every indication that we shall achieve this target and it is possible that we might have gained a further 100 by the time our Conferences takes place early in June. In the main these recruits consist of the best type of young people; factory and industrial workers of all kinds, young students with little previous experience in politics and Communist Party students.
We have established three new branches. Amongst these is one in Oxford, something that was impossible for our movement since the end of the war. This is, in fact, a sign of the growing militancy of the new layers of students who are now entering the university and reflects in itself the crisis in working class youth.
The circulation of The Newsletter has increased by approximately 700 copies a week since the beginning of this year. We have published a new edition of the Transitional Programme and The Platform of the Left Opposition.
Our public meetings have been better attended than at any time in the history of the movement and the policy of the League is getting a much wider reception amongst trade unionists, especially those who are members of the Communist Party.
We cannot in this letter speak openly about all our campaigns for obvious reasons, except for the mass lobby against unemployment which will take place on 26 March. Every member of our organisation should be aware of the preparatory work which has gone into this lobby. In all regions our branches have been to the fore in organising local demonstrations, contact work amongst unemployed at Labour exchanges and outdoor meetings at factory gate level.
Perhaps the most outstanding feature of this work has been the fact that it has been carried out in severe weather conditions.
A distinctive feature of the 26 March lobby is that we have mobilised all our forces to intervene inside all the organisations of the Labour movement. The youth are in action and in the forefront of the political preparation of the campaign. Our unemployed trade unionists are busy outside the Labour Exchanges ensuring that there will be a genuine lobby by unemployed workers. Inside the trade union branches and trades councils we have succeeded in utilising the official organisations for the purpose of strengthening the preparatory work of the campaign, particularly in relation to the organisation of coach loads of people from the provinces, the setting up of reception centres in London and the organizing of a mass public rally immediately the lobby is over.
Our students have started a campaign on behalf of unemployed school leavers and their contingent will be active with the vanguard of the youth movement in the course of the lobby.
Steps have been taken to involve members of the Communist Party around policies where we can get united action. This is being done in a way in which it is difficult for the Stalinist-minded leadership to prevent it.
Of course the most important thing about the lobby is that it is being transformed completely from a pious form of protest into a massive campaign for nationalisation. This can have considerable effect, particularly at a time when the Labour Party, under its new leader, Harold Wilson, has been forced to re-discuss economic questions in the light of the worsening situation.
A lobby of Labour MP’s which will seriously discuss these questions and outline the need for more nationalisation can have a big effect on the forthcoming conference of the Labour Party and in preparation of its policy for the general election.
Thus, our campaign, besides being able to mobilize our entire organisation in the form of activity which unites the most militant sections of the Labour Party and the trade union movement, is able to direct all its efforts towards a decisive political intervention inside the Labour Party.
These activities in themselves expose the constant stream of lies and abuse which emanates from so-called leaders of the Pabloite Fourth International that we are sectarians. These gentlemen characterise as sectarian any public opposition whatsoever to the reformists. If, for example, in a struggle against the reformists our members should be defeated and expelled then this is all glibly described as “SLL sectarianism”. Thus do these renegade elements cover up for their own policies of opportunism and liquidation. They see the struggle inside social democracy as one which is carried on within the apparatus around resolutions and pious protests and not through combining the class struggle within the working class movement with the struggle within the Labour Party and the trade union apparatus. To make decisive changes inside these organisations today it is necessary to mobilise tens of thousands of fresh workers who have hitherto not been in politics. This can only be done through such activities as our organisation constantly carries out. It is through such activity that we have so far defeated the witch-hunters. Had we confined our work solely within the Labour Party we would have simply suffered the same fate as the fake lefts.
This is the kind of revolutionary Marxist conception of entrism which comrade Trotsky always advocated and not the adaption to the reformist bureaucracy which is the hallmark of the Pabloites and the State Capitalist group led by T. Cliffe.
Thus our theoretical and practical work in Britain is closely related to the international struggle between ourselves and the Pabloites.
Pabloism today is an adaptation either to Stalinism, Social Democracy, or bourgeois nationalism such as the FLN. Thus Pablo can take a job as a functionary in the Algerian government whilst his press in Europe plays down the illegalisation of the Algerian Communist Party and the attack on the trade union leadership carried out by Ben Bella and the FLN.
Their European centre maintains contact with two tiny groups in Britain lead by J. in Nottingham and G. and D. in London. Under the name of the Fourth International these people play the most treacherous role in the labour movement. In all cases they act as a left cover for the right wing. Such treachery is not new, of course, so far as Pabloism in Britain is concerned.
The following are brief but concrete examples of what our movement has experienced in Britain from Pabloism over the past ten years.
In 1953 we opposed Pabloite adaptation to the Stalinist bureaucracy contained in their resolution “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism”. Pablo then organised a minority of supporters in our section headed by John Lawrence. When this minority failed to get a majority on our National Committee, Pablo instructed our National Committee to allow Lawrence to have full powers of a majority even though he was only a minority. This was the same procedure as he proposed in France in 1951 and it led to the split in the French section after the minority expelled the majority. It was a typical Stalinist procedure and was rejected out of hand by our section.
Lawrence was at that time editor of the Socialist Outlook, a paper produced by members of the Labour Party. He was instructed by Pablo to organise support for his policy from the centrists on the editorial board of the paper against the Marxist representatives who were the majority of the British section. Lawrence was given authority by Pablo to ignore our majority rights on the editorial board and to act independently. This led to the split on 21 November 1953.
Pablo the constituted Lawrence into a section on 15 December 1953 and gave him the authority and power of a section. The same meeting carried the expulsion of comrades Healy and Hunter as leaders of our section.
The first action of Lawrence on the editorial board in his new role as leader of Pablo’s section in Britain was to propose in January 1954 a complete change of policy for the Socialist Outlook. He proposed that instead of supporting industrial and political struggle against the Tory government we should organise a mass petition calling on the government to resign. This was completely contrary to the policy previously adopted by the paper and entirely in line with the Pabloite adaptation to bureaucracy and to reformist methods of struggle.
Under the instructions of Pablo, Lawrence then united with Tom Braddock and Stalinists fellow-travellers who were shareholders in the Socialist Outlook in an attempt to drive our print-shop, John Stafford Thomas Ltd., into bankruptcy. This was done by increasing the expenditure of the paper in relation to its resources and by building up a heavy debt at the print-shop which could not possibly be met.
At the same time as this was done, the columns of the paper were thrown open to all sorts of Stalinists and fellow-travellers to express their views. During the war in Indo-China, Lawrence and Pablo openly attacked leaders of our section as sectarian and ultra-left because we criticised the role of the Soviet bureaucracy in utilising the war as an attempt to reach agreement with American imperialism.
Lawrence’s articles in the Socialist Outlook were translated by the Soviet news agency TASS in London and re-printed in Pravda as a contribution from a Stalinist fellow traveller in Britain.
It was at this time, April 1954, that Lawrence began to work not only with TASS news agency, but also directly with John Gollan, the present secretary of the British Communist Party. All this time he received the full support of Pablo.
His attack on the Socialist Outlook was then concentrated on playing upon the confusion of the Labour Party members who were shareholders and using the argument which is now a favourite of the SWP and Pabloite circles that we were sectarians.
He thought that by confusing these people he would be able to win a majority of the share holders to his side and take complete control of the paper. In this he was ably abetted by John Baird, now deposed left-faker MP for Wolverhampton East. The shareholders meeting was held on 12 May 1954 and Lawrence was decisively defeated.
Under the instructions of the Communist Party he obtained a job as a full-time clerk for the shop stewards committee in Briggs Motors, a subsidiary of Fords. Whilst he was still a member of the Labour Party, he was instructed immediately after his expulsion from editorship of the Socialist Outlook to approach Tribune, with Jack Mitchell, a shop stewards’ convenor at Briggs Bodies and a Stalinist fellow traveller. They proposed to Tribune that they should join its editorial board and place at its disposal their knowledge of our organisation and effective ways to fight us. This was rejected by the centrists around Tribune, not out of liking for us, but because they knew that Lawrence was already an agent of the Communist Party.
In June 1954, Lawrence participated at the Fourth Congress of Pablo’s international movement and urged the Pabloites to liquidate into the Communist Party. This was the logical conclusion of his political relations with Pablo, who now found himself unable to accept the offer.
Immediately upon his return from that conference, Lawrence proposed the dissolution of Pablo’s section in Britain and this was accepted unanimously. This stage of Pabloism in Britain ended in complete liquidation. Not a single political explanation has ever been provided by a Pabloite spokesman as to how this arose.
Shortly after Lawrence’s break from the Socialist Outlook it was proscribed by the right wing of the Labour Party who openly declared that since the “left sectarians” had taken control they could no longer tolerate it inside the Party.
Then, owing to the irresponsibility of Lawrence, a libel action which was incurred during the time of his editorship came into the courts. Lawrence refused to collaborate in the preparation of the case against libel. He refused to come into the courts to give evidence against the people who had brought the action.
All this was done, of course, under the instructions of the Communist Party, who already in April 1954 had produced a complete dossier of the names of our people and their positions in the Labour Party and sent it to Transport House. The dossier was published in World News and Views.
The libel action was successful against the Socialist Outlook and the print shop went into liquidation. During the liquidation, when the court was enquiring into the background of the liquidation, Tom Braddock, acting in agreement with Lawrence, appeared before the liquidator and gave evidence to the effect that our movement had misused the funds of the print shop for political purposes. This is the full record of Pabloism and how it worked out in relation to the Lawrence episode up to the summer of 1955.
But that is not all. On 23 November 1958, Lawrence and his collaborators, without Braddock, openly joined the Communist Party. One would have expected Pablo to have made a political denunciation of Lawrence, but he did nothing of the sort. All he did was to publically explain that “it was strange that Lawrence, a man who believed in mass work, should become a member of the sectarian Communist Party.” That, and nothing else. No political explanation as to how Lawrence degenerated, no political explanation as to the forces which Lawrence represented in our movement, no defence of our organisation in its fight against this pernicious group. All Pablo, Germain and Co. did was to remain silent.
John Lawrence continued as a full time secretary of the Ford Motor shop stewards committee. He was responsible for the propaganda work of the Communist Party within this body and for the complete failure to make any serious preparations for the struggle which is now under way.
He campaigned at all times most viciously against our organisation and it is only recently that we have been able to break down the barriers and establish some important relations with members of the shop stewards committee.
But Pablo and Co. were not silent about us – as we shall see.
Having been stripped of his support in Britain, Pablo decided early in 1957 to try to organise once more a section of his movement in this country. He advertised in Tribune for anyone wanting to join the Fourth International to write to a box number for information. It was at this time that the Grant group came on the scene. Previously, Grant had been a close collaborator of the renegade opportunist Jock Haston, and was expelled on the motion of Germain at Pablo’s Third World Congress in 1951. Now he re-applied on the understanding with Pablo that he would fight us. No political explanation was demanded of Grant’s past record of his methods of fighting us. All that was required by Pablo was that he should fight us, no matter how unprincipled the means involved.
The new secretary of Pablo’s box-number-advertised group was John F. This man had a long record of treachery to the Trotskyist movement. He joined the Revolutionary Communist Party towards the end of the war, went to India in the army and came back around 1947. For a brief period, (approximately one year), he was a member of our group, and then he left under the most dubious circumstances.
On a Sunday evening early in February 1949 John F. opened a discussion on the role of Stalinism in India. Without raising a word of difference with anyone present over the politics of our organisation, he walked out of the meeting as soon as it was over and crossed the road to post a letter to the secretary of the organisation renouncing our movement and declaring his allegiance to the Stalinists. It later turned out that while he was denouncing Stalinism in India he had this letter already written in his pocket.
Upon joining the Communist Party he went straight to King Street and gave a full report of the activities of our organisation. It was the information supplied by him at that time and later by Lawrence that enabled the Stalinists to denounce our members to the right wing of the Labour Party in 1954.
In the middle of 1952, John F. suddenly resigned from the Communist Party and made approaches to our organisation in West London. His story at that time was that he was mentally unbalanced and that he desired to work with us. He also made another statement which revealed to us all he knew about the internal workings of the Communist Party. Our organisation took a decision that he would not in any circumstances become a member again, although we allowed him to continue selling our publications when and where he thought fit.
His income appeared at all times to be from private sources and at that time he was engaged in a course in journalism at the Regent Street Polytechnic. On occasion he wrote brief articles for our press. When the proscription of the Socialist Outlook was being adopted at the Labour Party Conference in October 1954, we asked him to help us cover the conference, since we proposed carrying a very up-to-the-minute report of the proceedings. On the Saturday preceding the Conference, F. sent a telegram to our comrade who was in charge stating that he broke with Trotskyism for ever and was again proposing to denounce it. He developed this point further in a letter in which he said that all Trotskyism was nonsense and that he was going to spend the rest of his life reading Kafka.
It was this man whom Pablo chose to be the leader of his section, despite the record with which Pablo was familiar. We informed him in every detail of what this man had done.
John F. remained with Pablo until 1960. During the latter part of his membership he worked with John Baird, MP, on the paper Free Algeria. As soon as Pablo was arrested in Amsterdam F. decided to leave the Pabloites and join the state capitalists, to whom he owes allegiance at present. At the moment he is working for the National Assistance Board in action as an investigator into the incomes of unemployed and destitute people.
The case of John F. is especially instructive because it shows a tendency – which we shall see presently – for renegade Pabloites to intermingle constantly with the state capitalist group of T. Cliffe.
Like the Grant group, this group had its origins in the Revolutionary Communist Party. Cliffe arrived in England from Israel where he had been loosely associated during the war years with the intellectual movement sympathetic to Trotskyism. He immediately joined forces with Haston and Grant who were the leaders of the RCP, and declared his complete support for their opposition to entry into the Labour Party. From the autumn of 1946 to the latter part of 1948, he was an active supporter of the sectarian position of Haston and Grant. He then went to Dublin for a period and during that time broke off relations with them on the grounds that he considered Russia to be a state capitalist country. At the same time most of his supporters were still members of the RCP and he permitted them to remain there.
From the time he arrived in Britain Cliffe was always an opponent of our tendency, but when the RCP dissolved in 1949 and many of its leaders liquidated themselves into the right wing of the Labour Party, Cliffe instantly altered his position on the Labour Party and entered its ranks, where he remains today. His followers at that time were mainly young middle class people who were members of what was at that time the Labour League of Youth.
The following is the background to the liquidation of the RCP. In the autumn of 1947 our group commenced activity inside the Labour Party and from then on there were two organisations. In 1949 Haston, Grant and Co., who were the leaders of the open group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, decided to enter the Labour Party and a fusion took place in September1949 between our two groups. In February 1950 Haston abandoned Trotskyism and joined forces with the right wing. Most of his leading supporters almost immediately followed him. It was during this fusion that Cliffes’s supporters became members of our organisation.
In June 1950 the Korean war broke out, and our movement gave full support to the North Koreans against the imperialist forces of General MacArthur and the United Nations. Cliffe’s supporters, under his instructions, opened an internal discussion inside the organisation calling for us to denounce the North Koreans as being equally as imperialist as General MacArthur. We refused to do this and the matter went before our annual conference in August 1950. At this conference the Cliffe supporters got two votes in favour of their case, with Grant, who was also a delegate, abstaining
Immediately the conference was over Cliffe instructed his supporters in Birmingham and London to break publically with the decisions of the organisation and denounce the North Koreans. Without consulting our group they placed resolutions on the agenda of the Birmingham Trades Council and inside the Labour Party in North London. For this deliberate violation of the decisions of conference they were charged under the constitution and expelled. Grant immediately left with them, although he did not join them.
In the middle of the witch-hunt which arose from the proscription of the Socialist Outlook in October 1954, comrade Bill Hunter, one of our leading members, was expelled from the Labour Party. Present at the expulsion meeting was Grant who was a member of the same party. When the witch-hunters, who came direct from Transport House, presented the motion for expulsion, Grant abstained. As the meeting was drawing to a close he moved a vote of thanks to these same people who had come down to the meeting to have our comrade expelled.
The Cliffe group now began their attack against us within the Labour League of Youth under conditions which were at the time favourable for such disruption. The Youth Movement was still mainly middle class in its composition and had no real basis outside London. The witch-hunt against us on the Korean war had become more and more intensified with the desertion of a number of MP’s from being supporters of the Socialist Outlook. Among these was Mrs. Bessie Braddock. The Socialist Fellowship in which we had members was proscribed and it naturally became a favourite pastime of the Cliffe Group to witch-hunt our supporters in the Labour League of Youth, just as they do today in the Young Socialists.
At that time they were in the main successful because the principles stand which our movement took against the Korean war temporarily isolated us within the Labour Party whose leadership was in complete support of the UN and General MacArthur
Cliffe concentrated his attention on whipping up an anti-communist smear against us, and the youth movement gradually diminished. Most of the leading lights became absorbed in their careers both inside and outside the Labour Party.
The Cliffe group has always been notorious for the way in which it uses the reactionary anti-communist sentiment of the left-wing reformists in order to play upon this fundamental weakness in an attempt to isolate our forces. It has no stable membership, people come and go and do as they like. Their general characteristic is contempt for the working class which reveals itself in a completely pessimistic approach to the problem of the struggle against the right wing. By associating with the left they have adapted themselves gradually with the right wing bureaucracy. Their perspective is not to overthrow it, but to seek an arrangement with it which would permit them to be considered a loyal reformist opposition.
One of our comrades recently said that “wherever you find a witch-hunt, Tony Cliffe is not far away from the district”. The youth movement has been notorious so far as witch hunting is concerned over the past three years. At its conference last Easter, the right wing alleged that the Marxists were guilty of acts of physical violence against opponents. When this provocation was denounced and exposed a frame up was arranged. This took place at the May Day 1962 demonstration in London. One of Cliffe’s close supporters, John P., led an attack on the platform on which George Brown MP was speaking. This action was designed to involve our supporters who had strict instructions not to participate in any such action.
John P. snatched the microphone out of Brown’s hand and the meeting was closed down. One would imagine that he would have been immediately expelled from the Labour Party for this act of violence, but nothing of the sort took place. Instead, immediately after the meeting, the Daily Herald and a number of Tory newspapers attempted to involve us in what was obviously a frame up. We vigorously refuted this and Transport House were unable to bring forward any concrete evidence. Nevertheless they went forward with the proscription immediately afterwards.
All of us then waited to see what was going to happen to John P., but he seemed to go from success to success in the Labour Party. A few months after the incident, he came before a selection committee at Transport House for endorsement of his selection as parliamentary candidate for a Croydon constituency. George Brown presided over this selection committee and when he saw P. smiled and said, “We have met before”. Nothing was said about the meeting being closed down owing to P. having taken the microphone from Brown’s hand. Instead P. was adopted as the candidate.
One must understand that the selection committee at Transport House is the most bureaucratic right wing body in the Party. It is the body which recently recommended that John Bair should not be re-adopted by the right wing at Wolverhampton East. It has turned down Ernie Roberts, assistant general secretary at the AEU, and many others. The conditions under which P. was adopted should be a lesson to everyone. The May Day incident was evidently meant to be a provocation against our people to blacken them with allegations of violence against party leaders.
The Cliffe group’s present amalgam with the Pabloites has its roots in their reformist orientation. The Pabloites began in 1953 by adapting themselves to the Stalinist bureaucracy, but this was not the end of the process. Having once decided on adaptation to bureaucracy, it only became a question of who was the most powerful, the Stalinists or the Social Democrats in a particular country. In Britain, of course, it is the Labour Party. Pablo thought that Lawrence should remain in the Labour Party, but he proved the exception and went completely over to the Communist Party. On the other hand, the present group, constituted by Pablo in 1957, is much more amenable to his approach to the Labour Party and as a result operates the policy of adaptation to the right wing bureaucracy which in turn brings them into alignment with the Cliffe group, although on paper they do not necessarily agree with one another on their estimation of the Soviet state.
This is the basis for their collaboration around Young Guard. This basis was clearly revealed last year when in region after region supporters of this tendency gained positions on the National Committee of the Young Socialists through a combination of right wingers, Pabloites and state capitalists against our supporters. It is this trend which predominates today and it is a condemnation of Pabloism in its hatred and constant attempts to smash our organisation.
Pablo sent his agent, Ellis H., into our organisation in 1955 and this man reported regularly all the developments within the leading committees. Subsequently Ellis H., as a member of our organisation, became a London County Councillor. In the course of a rent struggle he refused to see a deputation of tenants who went to lobby the council on the increase in rents. He failed to vote against the proposed rent increases on the county Council. Almost simultaneously with this development, the Socialist Labour League was launched and he refused to give an undertaking to accept the discipline of the organisation. EH was expelled by a unanimous decision.
In 1956 when a large number of members of the Communist Party joined our organisation, Pablo almost immediately took up temporary residence in this country. He first of all concentrated his attention on trying to bribe them with promises of trips to his conference in Paris and with facilities for work through funds supplied by the Algerian FLN. When this failed, he bided his time until a small number such as Fryer and Cadogan decided to desert from the revolutionary movement. Pablo immediately arranged a meeting with them and gave them every encouragement in their efforts to slander the SLL. He published all their documents for circulation within the international movement. He helped them launch a public attack against us within the Labour Party at a time when the Socialist Labour League was proscribed. His supporters in Liverpool voted for the proscription of the League.
This but a brief catalogue of the events of the past ten years in relation to Pabloism. Is it any wonder that we consider all this pious talk of unification hypocrisy and nonsense?
The essence of Pabloism is a constant undercover attack on the revolutionary party. It is not just a question of debate on matters of abstract principle. The history of the past ten years shows that the role of Pabloism is far from confined to debate. At each critical stage of the construction of the revolutionary party in Britain, the Pabloites have lined up with the class enemy or his agents. This tendency must be outlawed in the working class movement. Ten years of Pabloism leave us in no doubt in theory and practice as to what this tendency represents. If it has no support in our organisation it is because our leadership has in the first instance been steeled in the bitter conflicts against it and our membership has been recruited as a result of our participation in the class struggle.
Our movement is today fighting inside the Labour Party and the trade unions to establish a Marxist leadership. We endeavour to educate our members in Marxist theory and practice simultaneously. During our pre-conference discussion it is our duty not only to go over all the experiences of our work over the past year, but to check these against our policies and decisions and the way these have been carried out.
The steady growth in the membership of the Socialist Labour League is only the beginning of a process which in the coming struggle between the Tories and the labour movement will lead to the establishment of a mass communist movement in Britain.
We all have the opportunities for such a step forward. The general crisis of world imperialism, the Stalinist and social-democratic bureaucracies, the great split between the Chinese and Khrushchev and the effects which this split will have in the Communist Party in Britain, and the stepping up of the class struggle which is having an immediate reflection inside the youth movement, the Labour Party and the trade unions. [Text as original – Ed]. The constant theoretical struggle against Pabloite revisionism on the international field provides us with a great opportunity to relate the significance of the international developments with the work which we have immediately on hand in Britain.
Yours fraternally,
G. Healy,
National Secretary.
*Our candidate in the ETU election received almost 6000 votes, 11% of the votes cast.