Time to Organise

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After their 'coup' at the TUC, the right wing have now prepared a hit list of leftists to remove from the Labour Party National Executive Committee.

The Left needs to organise. We need to fight back. We need to make re-selection work. We need to build a mass Labour Party.

You have said more than once, and rightly, that the labour movement is now in effect refounding the Labour Representation Committee the seed out of which the Labour Party grew. The mass labour movement is trying to renew itself and rethinking its social and political philosophy.

The decisions of the Labour Party for democratisation for submitting Labour's parliamentarians to regular re-selection, and for giving the labour movement outside Parliament the major voice in choosing the prime minister when Labour has a parliamentary majority -and the large number of people who have joined the Benn's challenge to Healey ha Labour Party in the last two years, are the measure of where we have got so far.

Our great weakness is the lack of a mass Labour Party. The most urgent task facing the labour movement now is to organise, concentrate and focus millions of workers in the struggle to kick the Tories out. The trade unions need the backing of a political mass labour moyement.

Factory branches of the Labour Party would give the political mass labour movement real muscle where it can he made to count most. oosted the Left Mass Labour Parties rooted in the communities would organise the tenants' struggle against Tory-imposed rent and rate increases.

Millions of working people - and perhaps especially working-class women now need to organise themselves to fight the Tory cuts which are sweeping through OUT society, ravaging, destroying, and killing like the angel of death.

The riots by black and white youth desperate lashing out by the most deprived point to the great urgency of organising the working class, young as well as old, for a coherent and organised fightback against the Tories.

We urgently need a mass Labour Party. But who is going to build it?

Only the Left can build it. Only the Left can generate the energy and enthusiasm and the conviction that the Labour Party must become a fighting, democratic force for socialism.

Only the Left can draw millions of workers into the Party, into the struggle to transform the Party, and into the discussion to hammer out policies for the socialist reconstruction of British society.

If that mass Labour Party breaks with the past intolerance organised, entrenched, and bureaucratically policed intolerance of the Labour Right and sections of the Left, and allows full freedom for organised Tendencies in discussion as the preparation for unity in action. then it can create a countrywide network of mass forums for