Funds needed for Chilean struggle No to witch-hunts in the Labour Party

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¡LOTARIO Best, a man of ighty years of age and 61 ears of work in the trade inion movement, is almost i living history of the Chilan trade union movenent's struggles.

Throughout his life of truggle against injustice ie has been a religious person. But this fact did not itop him, under pressure if the demands of the Kruggle, from having a revolutionary practice. He vas one of the founderes bf CUT, the national union joining , together the different syndicates in Chile.

The CUT was smashed by the dictatorship, but Clotorio Best, as one of the recognised leaders of the corking class, reunited their forces and founded CODES (the Defence Committee for Trade Union Rights). At the same time it was also necessary to create a sister organisacion, CODEH (The Defence Committee for Human Rights).

IN SOCIALIST Organiser no.63 you write thai 'with the end of Women's Voice.

there is now only one national women s newspaper with a socialist perspective' • This, as many readers and supporters of both Socialist Worker and Women's Voice know, is absolute rubbish!

The truth is that the SWP has disbanded the organisation that had grown alongside the Women's Voice paper. The magazine itself is to continue as the women's publication of the SWP. In this way all members of the party wil! reprioritise our women's work.

The criticisms that Soc-.

ialist Organiser make of the SWP, though, are more deeply rooted in your lack Clotorio Blest is the Pre ident of these two organi ations, which are togeth now called CODESH.

Invaluable CODESH has played an invaluable role, not least in circulating to militants in exile and those fighting for solidarity work with the Chilean workers' movement regular information on developments in the struggle in Chile.

The 'Bolshevik Workers' League of Chile' (LOB), which is affiliated to the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, started the CODESH solidarity campaign in exile. They did this despite the reactionary boycott of CODESH at its birth by the traditional and bourgeois workers' parties such as the Communist and Socialist parties and the MIR.

In late November the LOB wAS informed from Chile that all publications of understanding that it is the prolctariat that creates socialism and not any outside force, whether it be the Stalinists in Eastern Europe, the labour fakers here in Britain, or any other non-revolutionary social force such as feminism or black nationalism.

The : major differences between the various 'trotskyist' groups are merely in your selections from the list of various substitutes for the revolutionary role of the proletariat and its class party. In this way socialists such as yourselves find a way to 'enter' an utterly irreformable bourgeois workers' party such as the British Labour Party.

When it comes down to fighting for independent feminist policies in the of leaflets, pamphlets, and bulletins which are distributed throughout Chile have stopped because the printing press and photo-copying machines upon which they have been produced have finally broken down and are now useless.

Comrades, on behalf of all those struggling to reorganise the Chilean workers' movement, we ask you to make contributions to help to buy another printing machine to replace the unrepairable previous one. At this very moment. such a printing machine is a vital revolutionary arm in the fight against the dictatorship.

Solidarity with international workers' struggles is not charity but a revolutionary duty. For the construction of socialism and proletarian internationalism!

LOB comrades in Britain. *Cheques to CODESH Appea send to 11 Nook St, Leicester working class, it would seem that for Socialist Organiser it is only a matter of choice between Juan Lestor and Jo Richardson within the Labour Party. Therefore I can only take your independent feminist position to mean 'independent of the revolutionary party' In this way it is Socialist Organiser which abstains in the struggle against reformism which it is our task to wage within the labour movement as a whole.

Socialists must realise that it is an urgent task for revolutionaries to build an alternative to the Labour Party now and not in the future. Only in this way will we ensure the victory of both feminism and revolutionary communism.

M.C.PEARN, Cardiff SWP THE BUREAUCRATS and the parliamentarians are marking the ground on which to erect the witchhunters' gibbets.

Their real target is the fighting reformist Left in the Labour Party and in the unions which, with help from some of the Marxists, has won the changes that have been pushed through recent Labour Party conferences. Their strategy is to intimidate the Labour Left by chopping out the Marxists - so they focus on Militant, on George Galloway, and on... Tariq Ali.

In this situation, John Lister's piece in Graffiti (last Socialist Organiser) -more like gratuitous and self-indulgent abuse than his usual standard - is about the last thing we need in Socialist Organiser.

Entire

Surely we are for the affiliation of the CP to the Labour Party? We are for the affiliation of the CP, the SWP, the WSL, and the IM6. We deny the trade union officials and the Left and Right parliamentarians exclusive ownership and control of the Labour Party, the mass political party of the British labour movement.

Positi.

George Galloway is right to advocate CP affiliation, and it is an extremely serious matter that he is under investigation. Clearly it is one strand of the repression which is now being prepared for the Left.

Deny He is entitled to the support and solidarity of the entire Left, and especially • of SO, which has championed the unity of the Left and, in the RFMC, been instrumental in achieving unity for a while.

As well as the history of the CP, in the light of which John Lister's comments are mild, there is the present British CP. It is far from homogeneous.

As well as old-line Stalinists and 'Eurocommunists' who yearn to make careers in the Labour Party, there are probably quite a few would-be revolutionaries and socialists who can become revolutionaries.

We should welcome such people into the Labour Party, to work with them and, of course, to discuss and argue with them.

To denounce them as an undifferentiated mass of right wing fingermen and 'rats' is not likely to be true or just. Certainly it is not useful. When some of them do act as fingermen, our job is to help others of them to learn from that experience. Tariq Ali our reason.

Comments like John Lister's are not appropriate to the immediate task of defending Tariq Ali's right to join the Labour Party without disavowing his politics. Neither do they speak to people for whom Tariq All is being made, by the press and Michael Foot, to represent revolutionary politics.

They are likely to switch off a lot of people, not from Tariq Ali's Marxism but from SO's. Marxist politics is a process of selfselection, re-selection, grouping and regrouping of the militants in response to the living issues of the class struggle and the struggle in the labour movement.

The experience and concerns of the past are very important, but serious people focus on the struggle now, and measure others according to what role they are playing. If Tariq Ali wants to join the Labour Party, that is good, and it. should help others. to slough off sectarianism.

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Socialist Organiser 28, Middle Lane London N8 Why waste time and space with such nonsense as questioning Tariq Ali's Marxism in general? Let's discuss his current politics at the right time and in the appropriate circumstances. Let's give him time, and offer him space, to spell them out in his new situation: then we will be entitled to express an opinion as to whether he is a 'Marxist' or not.

The Right and soft Left are now trying to isolate the Marxists in the Labour Party. We should not do it for them. We must build the broadest unity to resist the Right/soft Left offensive.

That doesn't rule out principled criticism of our allies and potential allies. It should, I think, rule out such 'Graffiti' JOHN O'MAHONY, Islington.

JOHN LISTER replies:

Without wanting to prolong debate on this topic, 1 would point out that (a) my article was never intended to, and does not, brand every member of the CP as