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IF the Socialist Organiser, Militant and Socialist Action tendencies were to unite, a powerful Trotskyist tendency could be formed capable of establishing a Trotskyist daily paper fairly soon and rapidly transforming the situation in Britain.

Socialist Action (letter of D. Biggs in SO, April 7) seems to understand this, or at least be pointing in that direction (it is not clear whether it is prepared to include Militant).

There seems little doubt that, whatever they may still be saying publicly, under the impact of events, including the expulsion of AS AN S.O. reader for some two years 1 have often meant to write particularly about the paper's trade union coverage. While SO on the Labour Party thoughtfully attempts to find new solutions to old problems, industrial articles have often neglected serious analysis in favour of sloganising.

Often (not always) they seem informed by the idea that SO knows all the answers and if it shouts loudly and often enough workers will eventually get the message.

Recently regimental sergeant major Alan Thornett has been letting the world know that the problem is leadership'. What this means is left unclear, but it appears to involve acting like superman (or superwoman) when all too often left wing activists are Clark Kents and Lois Lanes, i.e. ordinary human beings faced with al the constraints trade unionism involves.

1am particularly disappointed that John Mcllroy's recent careful articles giving a realistic analysis of the level of the membership's consciousness and providing us with ammunition to answer their problems should be met by a response from Tony Richards which, far from debating the issucs, simply asserts a dogmatism which could make SO irrelevant lo people like myself.

H Tony really believes that Arthur Scargill's behaviour over the recent ballot was the very highpoint of leadership betrayal' he is not living on the same planet as lam.

Il Tony really believes that support for import controls simply infects stewards and not members, he is dreaming. When he suggests that we should campaign today for the sliding scale of wages, he is simply avoiding the real issues of 1983.

Because Tony believes that matters were settled once and for some of their leaders trom the Labour Party and the determined defence of them by SO, Militant supporters are also thinking again about the way forward.

However John Lister is right when he points out that divisions that exist "for the most part reflect genuine political disagreements which must be resolved rather than ignored."

The big danger is that a unified organisation would be centrist and not revolutionary, that while it would correctly show "the greatest flexibility towards the mass organisations" it would not combine with that the necessary 'intransigence of the all by Leon Trotsky in 1938 he can even deduce, from his statement that the 'Open the Books' demand has never been implemented in recent times, the innate excellence and utility of this slogan.

SO has moved some distance from the half-world of other left groupings. The politics of Tony Richards will drag it back into the abyss.

JOYCE BROWN, (ASTMS no.2 Divisional Council delegate, in personal capacity) Manchester 19 UNFORTUNATELY Mike Foley (letters, SO 128) is right - it is unlikely that the communal sectarian divisions in the Northern Ireland working class will just disappear one morning soon when the Protestant workers recognise that most of their economic privileges are gone or going.

The mass Protestant demand for restoration of Stormont is in part a programme to change this by restoring a provincial government that will 'take care of the Protestants at the expense of the Catholics.

On the basis of facts from the TV programme, and memories of the big mainly Protestant unemployment demonstrations of the early '60s, all I suggested was that we should at least dare to hope that some common Catholic/Protestant working class struggle might develop, even if only at a very low level, against what are now common conditions of economic and social oppression.

Mike seems to think that it is 'Militant' politics even to suggest that this might be possible. What's party toward reformism and centrism" (Trotsky, Writings 1935-36, p.321)

And this danger does not only come from the other tendencies. In my view; since the unification of Socialist Press with the old Socialist Organiser the "hardness" of SP has not been sufficiently strongly represented in the combined paper, the present SO.

What I would like to see SO do, is propose to the other two tendencies that for a period, of say six months, supporters of all three tendencies should together make an intensive study of Trotsky's writings, including, to take a few examples, Where is Britain Going?, what he wrote on Germany in the 1920s and '30s, Spain in the '30s and his Writings 1929-40.

ALAN Thornett (SO 127) and Martin Barclay (SO 128) interpret my brief letter (SO 125) as "defending" Arthur Scargill, or giving him "the benefit of the doubt".

My argument is not so much about whether we should criticise Arthur Scargill on the Lewis Merthyr struggle, as how. If it is a question of whether or not to rely on Scargill, then we should not give him the benefit of the doubt. wrong with Militant on this question is that it pretends that the inter-communal division is a rift and not a chasm, or doesn't exist, and that workers' unity will certainly be created out of economic and social struggles. It looks to mundane economic questions 'on the ground' and to the socialist revolution on the horizon, and has no way of linking the two. It resolutely stands apart from the Catholic struggle and has an abstentionist attitude to all the living political questions, like partition and so on.

I recorded the facts about the Protestants' situation now. I noted that in the past common conditions of oppression in which the Protestants could not grab a special advantage - as now - had produced a joint Catholic/Protestant fightback. I expressed a 'hope'. This is not Militant's politics.

The opposite of Militant's way of understanding the situation in Northern Ireland is the view that any possibility of common Protestant/Catholic action, even in unity?

I believe for instance that after Trotsky's writings collected in The Spanish Revolution 193139 (Pathfinder, 1973) had been read, there would be general agreement that a wishy-washy centrist party like POUM, which many considered to be Trotskyist, cannot carry through a revolution.

It is a question of putting clearly to the other tendencies the willingness SO to do all it can. narticulariv through a perioc of joint study, to reach a principled agreement on the basis of the strengths but not the weaknesses of all three tendencies, of a deeper understanding by all of what has to be done. The time is ripe for such a unification.

DAVID HARRIS, West Sussex But if criticism of Scargill - or anyone else - is to be convincing for those who are not already convinced, then we must grant the benefit of the doubt. We must take on the strongest case that can be made for those we criticise, not the weakest.

Maybe Martin Barclay is right about big coal stocks not being an important factor. But for sure the situation was one where a big, vicconditions like these, is ruled out: that therefore it is wrong even to express a hope about it, and a waste of time or politically wrong and diversionary to advocate it, that the only way out of the impasse is the 'national struggle' and everything else is a distraction from that.

This is the position of the Provisionals, IKSP and in fact of the USFI supporters in Ireland: that the 'national struggle' in the Six Counties is the central question of political life North and South. The socialistnationalists see this as a question of taking it in stages, and the "Trotskyists' as "permanent revolution'. For now there is ‚no difference in practice.

but any serious Marxist poncy must integrate both the struggle on economic and social questions, and the struggle for the democratic reorganisation of the Irish state system. It must integrate the struggle on both sides of the Border. Militant, on one side, and the Republicans and "Trotskyists' on the other, both embody a torious struggle organise.

In his statement on the Wednesday of the strike, Arthur Scargill put forward the perspective of spreading the strike through an Executive call coming in the wake of the area strike decisions and the Derbyshire walkouts. Alan Thornett calls this statement 'excellent, ', and l agree.

On the Thursday, Alan writes, ta crippling one-sidedness: each re. pellent to the other, and both equi-distant from even minimally adequate revolutionary politics for Ireland as a whole.

Mike Foley himself thinks that working class unity will only be possible within a united socialist Ireland. Will this united socialist Ireland be created by magic? Or when the trumpet sounds and Brian Boru and his Dolcassian hordes, or the Red Branch Knights come riding out of Tir Na Nog? Or by a few hundred Republican gunmen?

It can only be created by the working class - a (mainly) united working class. Mike Foley is in a vicious circle: for him the socialist revolution will miraculously come out of the national struggle, wheréas for Militant it will come out of the economic and social issues.

He parallels, or creates a mirror image to, Militant. He does not rise above their ideas, integrating their proper concerns into a coherent whole.

JOHN O'MAHONY, London.

TIL.

Scargill made concessions to the right wing". Obviously. He came out of the executive meeting with a decision - the ballot, and the withdrawal of the area strike calls - quite different from what he had called for.

The question I raised in SO 125 was, were the concessions unavoidable! Ur did the right wing majority on the Executive, or a large chunk of it, with its force of inertia strengthened by the difficult objective situation, mount sufficient resistance that Scargill's perspective proclaimed on Wednesday was no longer viable? I don't know. But that is at least possible. And the situation, it seems to me, was not one where spontaneous militancy was riding high enough for Scargill simply to go over the Executive's head.

Now it is also true; as Alan points out, that the way Scargill announced the ballot decision was "not the language of someone forced into the position after a fight and making a formal statement... " It happens too often in the labour movement that militants, having been forced into an unsatistactory compromise on this or that committee, then 'make the best of it' and thus fail to do what can be done to educate and organise a rank and file movement which can create better alternatives for the future. They confine themselves too much to what will get a majority now, and fail to blaze a trail for the future.

I think there is a good case for criticising Scargill on that score. But that is different from saying that he could have got through his policy of the Wednesday, and failed only through lack of will to fight the right wing. MARTIN THOMASD MARTIN THOMAS, Islington

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