I'M ALL in favour of Socialist Action being a paper which encourages debate on what kind of socialist policies the labour movement needs and how to fight for them.
However, to print one and a half pages of incomprehensible waffle by Stuart Holland (SA 15 April) was a disgrace.
This article proposed a 'European' road out of the present world economic crisis.
But nowhere did it state the simple fact that we are in the middle of a capitalist crisis and that the only way out is the socialist transformation of society.
By socialist I mean working people taking the economy out of the hands of the capitalist class and instituting a planned economy geared to human need.
What Holland means by his gibberish of 'transforming the crisis' (into what? by whom?) I don't know.
Incredibly, while it made references to the labour movement — in Holland's meaning a self-appointed clique of European social democratic political and trade union bureaucrats — the article didn't even mention the working class, yet alone stress that it is the only force that can bring about socialism.
Instead we were asked to believe that the French turn-coat Mitterrand will present a 'manifesto of demands for the transformation of the economic crisis' to some summit in May on behalf of the assorted scoundrels who are Prime Ministers of Finland, Sweden, Austria, Greece and Spain (not forgetting poor old Michael Foot).
You wouldn't know from Holland's article that all these people have ditched any radical policies in the manifestos they were elected on and are busily attacking the living standards of their own workers.
No doubt the editor's defence will be that there will be a reply putting the 'correct' Marxist position — no doubt equally long and incomprehensible. That misses the point.
By printing Holland's rubbish we have helped mis-educate any reader who could understand it. But, more fundamentally, socialist policies and programmes delelop out of the actual experiences, past and present, of working people — and not out of the heads of intellectuals.
Let's debate and discuss with people who are actually engaged in struggle and let the likes of Holland get his rubbish published somewhere else.
MICK GOSLING, London.