resistance of workers to falling living tandards, moves towards wage control and the strong state, inflaton and social service cuts. In the coming period the traditional tactics al economic struggle will not be able to defend even the economic: gains of the workers movement, let alone its vital political interest in combatting every form ol oppre mian and exploitation.
The content of our demands should be such as to eliminate the many reactionary aspects of the concessions made in the past to the working class, These real concestons to the workers movement have always been made in such a way as to encourage the passivity of the masses and to strengthen the bourgeois state and the bourg cols family. Our demands must have a quite different logic: encouraging the adoption of class wide demands, encouriging the workers independent proletarian polities defending the interests of all the oppressed.
We should combat the prevalent political passivity of trade union militants within the Labour Party. especially at the local level. We should agitate within the Labour Party for action to be taken at both the local and national level for a working class solution to the ctisis along the lines of the Action Programme. Within both the trade unions and Labour Party we should be the most vigorious champions of workers" democracy, of the accountability of all representatives and officials, and of unity in the fighting ranks of the working class. To underline this latter point the IMG should after due preparation apply for formal affiliation to the Labour Party.
We should also seck to promote Given the weakness of revolutof the forces of the far left around the Action Programme. The prospect of a new upsurge in South Fast Asia and the Iberian peninsula should greatly assist the task of developing a united revolutionary front. We should propose immediate discussions with all groups who recognise the necessity for the Fourth Intemational.
A crucial tactical objective of our work around the Action Prog taltune must be lo assemble the forces for a challenge to Labour's political hegemony over the workers organisations and over the masses. As a rule such a challenge should be made on the basis of support from a significant layer of the local labour movement. The crucial arena in which such a challenge should be mounted is that of local clections and campaigns should seek to present in a lively and relevant fashion all the points of the Action Programme. The local arena will express many vital aspects of the crisis of social expenditure and the problems of public sector workers; it provides a natural focus for the agitations of tonants, squatters, the women's movement and solidarity with all local workers' struggles and resistance to repression.
Candidates should be accountable to all their sponsors in the local labour movement. We should aim to run senous campaigns which bring up all the issucs of the mass strugele and disrupt the weary routines of local politicking. We should avoid the empty propagandism which so Cat our aim is to establish the modest beginnings of a real altersmovement and committed to a preparation for such campaigns would force revolutionaries to gain lems of tie masses and to develop concrete solutions which stimulate workers" sell-organisation.
we have outlined should equip the often plagues the electoral intervenbions of the far left, making it clear ative to Labour within the workers programme to meet the crisis. The an intimate knowledge of the probTaken together the tactics which IMG to prepare for a real political advance within the workers' movement. Labour's monopoly hold is not poing to be broken in a day, but that it no reason for postponing the preparations to that end that can now be made. We do not believe that a mass revolutionary party can arise prior to the first experience of dual power. But ruptures within the bourgeois political order will precede a rupture. of the state apparatus itself. Challenging reformism all along the line in the trade unions, in campaigns work, in the constitenence of the Labour Government uency parties and in clections - is the best way of promoting indepen dent working class politics and ensuring the emergence and victory of soviets.
Wo end with a quotation from Trotsky on the necessity of discor ering real paths towards workers I stand on the ground of the reality of bourpeois society, in orde to find in it the forces and the levers with which to overthros it. As against the factory councils, the trade unions, parliament, you counter-pose the soviet systern. In this connection the Germans have a very excellent verse: "Schoen ist ein Zylinderhut wenn man iha besitzen fur' (Indeed a silk hat is very fine, provided only that I've got mine). You have not only no soviets, you have not eren a bride to them, not even a road to the bride, nor a footpach to the road. Die Atrion has transfor med the soviets into a fetish, into a supersocial spectre, into z religiou myth. Mythology serves people as a cover for their own weakness. or at best as a consolation. (The Struggle Aguinst Pascirm in Germiалу ор 86-7).
EXPLANATORY NOTE: The pro posals of Tendency A are based on the theses on the economic and political conjuncture contained in The Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe ado pted at the 10th World Congress of the Fourth International (see International, Vol 2, No. TJ, and on the resolution on the world recession adopted unanimously by the Intonational Executive Committee of the Ff in January 1975 (see intercontinental Press, 17 February 1975).
the coming incomes policy, and in
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Challenging Labour's monopoly hold
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