Trotsky's method a 'senile vision'?

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I WOULD like to support the views of Joyce Brown and Noel Hibbert in the SO letters column recently. - Tony Richards' letter (SO 131) is typical of the quasireligious approach that has little in common with Marxism but has dogged "Marxism" for decades. Hagiographic references to Trotsy cannot replace real political analysis.

I would suggest that the experience of European socialists since 1945 has confirmed the ultra-left utopian nature of the so-called "Transitional" approach. Recourse either to the Programme of 1938 OI ''Trotsky's method" is a comfort for those who cannot break from abstract apocalyptic visions of socialist revolution but who do acknowledge the need to "relate to the workers as they are"

If we assume (as Tony Richards and Gerry Healy do) that the working class can seize power in the foreseeable future by mobilisation around "transitional" demands, we do not need to address the (admittedly difficult) questions of how we win the ideological battle with Thatcherism and how we mobilise a largely demoralised, or at least atomised, working class. • Surely as socialists committed to the self-activity of the working class our "demands" (in so far as such things are needed in any struggle should be developed flexibly and creatively, not drafted in from the senile visions of a figure from another era and another political world?

Yours fraternally.

ALBERT ROSS Stockport CLASS FIGHTER