real power, they merely imitate the discredited techniques of the old left reformists over the years who never succeeded in seriously challenging the right-wing and breaking their strangle-hold over the leadership.
It is only by basing onself in the unions that socialists can offset any tendency to adapt to lettreformist pressures. Rooted in the unions, the struggle to build a mass-action left-wing becomes not a question of manoeuvres in ward meetings but mobilising, in action, the rank-and-file over issues of concern to the labour movement and its allies.
It is in the course of such mobilisations that the leaders of the Labour Party - from the Healeys to Tony Benn - can be tested out. It is by placing demands on them stemming from the grassroots - demands relating to unemployment, opposition to racist laws or the removal of the troops from Ireland - that more and more workers will have the chance to test out all those who lay claim to lead them and begin the construction of a real class-struggle leadership.
UNITY IN ACTION Such a process does not mean, of course, downplaying unity in action. On the contrary, it is by fighting for the maximum unity in action - by demanding that the Labour leaders turn their plattorm rhetoric into action on the streets and in the factories -that not only will the Tory offensive be stopped but the testing out of all the different currents advanced.
This means avoiding the shrill denunciations of the Labour leaders by ultra-left outfits such as the SWP whose hostile attitude to the Labour Party merely cuts them off from the mainstream of the labour movement. While such groups will rapidly be bypassed as the class struggle develops, their sectarian line can - temporarily - hold back the fight for an alternative leadership in the labour movement and renders them a brake on the radicalisation process.
It also means, however, avoiding the adaptation to reformism that can grow within the Labour Party among socialist currents. Under the pressures building up, there can be a very real danger of tendencies uncritically following behind the left reformist leaders, as happened for a time with the IMG which became a cheer-leader for Tony Benn.
Both sectarian abstention and opportunist adaptation will, in the period ahead, become a brake STOP ME Contingent on April 1981 CARL demonstration. on the process of building a clear class-struggle left-wing which should be constructed around policies and not personalities.
UNITY There can be little doubt that the radicalisation currently underway in the labour movement offers socialists major opportunities for advancing socialist solutions. More and more workers will be looking for answers to the current crisis which go beyond those offered by the reformists and Stalinists.
While offering major opportunities, however, the marxist left faces the coming period in a state of disarray. The fragmentation ef the marxist left over the past few decades - due mainly to its isolation from the labour move"ment - means that it is unable to offer workers, seeking a solution to the left of the Stalinists and reformists, a viable alternative.
There will, in this sense, be growing pressures on those marxist currents moving politically closer - under the objective situation - to unite to form a coherent and strong organisational force integrated in the unions and Labour Party. The splits and fissures that occurred in a movement isolated from rank-and-file workers will no longer be tolerated by trade unionists who appreciate only too well the need for unity against the class enemy.
Those tendencies which put their tactical "shibboleths" ahead of unity around a clear programmatic basis will be increasingly bypassed in action. Such a process of unity will be quite different from that called by the IMG, a few years back, in its Socialist Unity campaign. That campaign sought to unite petty-bourgeois groupings, outside the labour movement, on a blurred programmatic basis. The present situation will, on the contrary, facilitate the coming together of forces within the unions and Labour Party on a common programmatic platform.
The coming together of Marxist currents who share a common programme - and whose tactical disagreements are narrowing -will be a vital step in building a serious marxist tendency in the labour movement. It is only by the construction of such a tendency, built around a programme of action, that it will be possible to advance the construction of a mass action left-wing which can remove the present Tory government and fight for socialist policies in the labour movement. The two are inseperable.
SHOPS of workers.
This leadership consciously led the Cuban workers and farmers to make a socialist revolution more than 20 years ago. It is consciously leading the Nicaraguan and Grenadian workers and farmers along the same path today. And it is standing at the head of the El Salvadoran What is Marxism It is important to understand the significance for Marxists of the extension of the world revolution in the Caribbean and Central America, masses in a bloody struggle to overand of the revolutionary calibre of the working class leaderships there. It is helpful to begin by reviewing exactly what Marxism is, through Russell Johnson, National Ser
October 1981 the words of the founders of scien-