AS SOCIALIST Action explained in an editorial Labour Party conference its role is going to change over the next months. From the end of the onwards Action was, for a considerable time, the only paper out the views of the forces that had emerged and radicalised in that its Socialist Action is still the only place where you can find a record of Arthur Scargill's speeches during the miners strike, the record of Women Against Pit Closures as it developed, the major statements of the Black Section, major interviews by Benn and others summing up the strike, a blow by blow record of the Committee's (WAC) fight for the right of women to control their own organisations inside the party. This is in addition to Socialist Action's role in getting material of Sinn Fein, the FSLN in Nicaragua, the ANC and other international organisations.
Other newspapers would not print this material because they want these currents flourish. Breaking the wall of silence, by even simply printing what people had to say, was vital. At the same time Socialist Action fought to these forces and trade Socialist Action had to combine its GWIL distinctive voice with being a platform for these currents. a necessary and right thing to do. Larger Fortunately much larger forces than us are now beginning to take up that job now. Labour Left Liaison has the largest and potentially most authoritative, wing organisation within the Labour Campaign Group reaching significantly dience than Socialist Action with the views of the Campaign MPs, renoe.
NUM, the Labour Party Black Secin treland, and the WAC, the Labour Committee paign for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
All this means that Socialist Action is beginning to have a different role to play. Not, of course, that it is going to turn its back on those it has been working with in the last period - they will still be appearing in its before the that developing Socialist which got •developing attermath.
an alliance for socialism'.
major Marxism for Tony shopping Action Developing weight and at definite points in out the struggle both that, gramme must be developed.
did not exist or recognised by bring the state, the unions.
be taken. They This was country.
gramme for Britain must be grasped.
the universal left which Marxism tain? wider auGroup of the finance capital, not a single .. Camin ils own country tiona amalgam features. The pages. But Socialist Action now has a more strategic and programmatic role to play. It has to, so to speak, look ahead of where we are today and look at the line of march of the new forces the movement. A central theme around which it intends to do this is through programme for hnthe line of development of the working class and oppressed together around that programme - around the slogan which appears on our masthead of bullding It is necessary to be clear about what is meant by this. Developing a Artale obes nOt means sitting down and writing out a list of demands and proposals which have to be fought for -a shopping list is not a programme.
programme situating and understanding the real which specific demands and proposals have both in the long term the class the specific way they are posed in Britain. To understand what that means it is worth looking at how that Many serious, pIuThe starting point of a programme must be the basic features of society Marxism. Marx's theory of the economy and society, Lenin's analysis of imperialism and Trotsky's allal yois fascism and the degeneration of the USSR, and many other contributions are the key starting points that must Ine universal elements of Marxism that apply in any But in order to develop a pro• something else That is the com pletely unique and specific character of every country and every situation. What, then, is the relation between forces analyses situation in a specific country, BriTrotsky explained this relation in his Third International after Lenin:
'In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, ie of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of can establish its programme by proceeding soley or mainly from condi- to tions and tendencies of developments Anteridi programme is in no case the sum total of national programmes or of their common DIU gramme must proceed directly from ana vsis 01 the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts.
"In Tne bresen esoci io a muci greater extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary difference belween .. internationalism and all variene ornaona socalsill.
Or, as Trotsky put it as regards the in his introduction to Permanent Revolution: "Marxism takes its point of departure from world economy, not as a sum of national parts but as a mighty and independent reality which has been created by the international division of labour and the world market, and which in our epoch imperiously dominates the national markets.' It is for this reason, for example, tional peculiarities original combination of the features of the world process. originality can be significance for strategy over a span of many years...
"It is absolutely wrong to base the activity of the Communist parties on sonne an type capitalism. tend that this is what the interna tionalism of the Communist parties rests upon". In reality, it rests on the insolvency of the which has long ago outlived itself and which has turned into a brake upon the development of the productive forces. National capitalism cannot be understood, reconstructed, world economy.
"The economic peculiarities of difrepresent an must be This of decisive SICULIO a abstracal features national national It is utterly false to connational state, larger States alone except as a part of a unified India, the Brazil. But the the higher proportion of the last peculiarity is nothing of conditions, but on their inmunist Party.
state.
revolutionary , or Poland, then they The overall features of the each country ab- and must be realisation Socialism'.
done by socialists in each country is unique, it is totally interdependent with what is being done in every other country. Britain, as with every other country, represents a unique combination of the international elements of class struggle.
To see this take merely some of the unique features of the British state. It is an example of an imperialist state Not twenty or thirty in the world. But is is, in a very real sense ine most parasılıcaly impellalst Illa jor state in the entire world - with foreign assets which are still five times in relation to its internal economy than those of the United That uniquely imperialist character of the British state helps determines its entire nature.
Within that state, however, exists movement. possesses a single mass working class party based on a single unified trade union movement - something extremely rare in the world. Britain has one of the highest participations of women in the work force in the world. It has a new black community created since World War II. It has a level of unemployment exceeding that even of its imperialist rivals. It has the lowest manufacturing in economy of any major country Europe. It is sandwiched between the US and the EEC — with its imperialist interests central in a country such as South Africa. Britain has an interna colony in the six counties of the North of Ireland. It still has national questions in Scotland and Wales. It is undergoing its greatest reorganisation of bourgeois politics in ovel years with the emergence of the SDP. It has a profound crisis of its ComAll these features are just some of the unique features of the British bul tney are specific unique features composed of a combination of elements of an international situation. The task of developing a programme for Britain is to start with that world situation, and the international programme of Marxism analyse the specific situation of Bri tain in terms of it. That is what, over the coming months, Socialist Action will be devoting space to.
It will provide a strategic pro. grammatic background to the work we are doing every y day in the labour movement. It will help provide a of the slogan on our masthead of Building an Alliance fot