ok, I sent it.
Please do email it. I am sending you my email address via "private message." Thanks, Fred
Comrade, I read it some time ago, I can't remember, but I will do in these few days when I have a free moment. I think that Socialist Fight from the UK actually give a pretty good argument against the attitude of what they call the ICL tradition ("the Family" they say) towards social democracy, in an open letter to the IBT from 2009 (but where they mention the LFI too). I have it in pdf, but can email it you.
Have you read Trotsky's advice to the American SWP on a U.S. Labor Party and Labor parties in general? "Must we join that 'Labor Party' or remain outside? This is no more a question of principle, but of circumstances and possibilities. [my emphasis] The question itself has arisen from the experience of the British Communists and the 'Labor Party,' and that experience has served far more the 'Labor Party' than the Communists." Nowhere is there any hint of a general "principle" of the need to vote for or otherwise support class traitors -- quite the opposite.
Cde, ever since Labour became a mass party Lenin and Trotsky advocated critically voting for it, I would rather say that it is only in exceptional circumastances when the opposite would be true (i.e.e a revolutionary situation). My point with the PRM example was simply that it is not just an issue of subjectivity or the ilusions in specific candidates, but the class character of a party.
Just because revolutionary Marxists do not support or join bourgeois parties (like Cárdenas's PRM), it does not therefore follow that we must support and join workers parties like Labour, whatever their politics, whatever the circumstances! Did Lenin or Trotsky insist at all times that German workers support their traditional party, the SPD? No, in fact one of the causes of the failure of the German revolution was that the revolutionaries broke too slowly and incompletely from the Social Democrats. What you are proposing is to take a rather exceptional case, where Trotsky was trying to work out a tactic for his very disorganized supporters in Britain to split Labour and form a Communist party, and transform it into a supposed law for all countries and all times, of "tactical electoral support" to class traitors. This is labourism disguised as Trotskyism.
This was a tactical, conjunctural assessment. It wasn't decided on the formal control of the LP apparatus by some bourgeois labor fakers But Trotsky and Lenin did place great improtance on the roganic links to the class of the Labour PArty. It was not jsut an issue of workers subjectivity - this is why Trotsky never called for entryism or criticial electoral support for Cardenas' regime which workers had as many illusions in as in the LP. Also while the LP leadership and the TU bureaucrats are undoubtedly bourgeois, I don't think it's just an issue of "formal" control, rather that objectively the LP was and is dependent on the TU's for its existence (unless it should qualitatively break that link which it hasn't to date).
But during Trotsky's tragically shortened life, voting for the British Labour party was the "stupid" (Trotsky's term!) way that the workers expressed their crudely defined class opposition to Chamberlain's bourgeois Tories. But this is still the case cde.
But during Trotsky's tragically shortened life, voting for the British Labour party was the "stupid" (Trotsky's term!) way that the workers expressed their crudely defined class opposition to Chamberlain's bourgeois Tories. That's why Trotsky told the very weakly organized British 4th Internationalists to enter the Labour party like the French had done in the SFIO and the Americans had done in the SP, to be in a position to intersect this trend and to begin to break the masses away from the Labour Party and labourite reformism. This was a tactical, conjunctural assessment. It wasn't decided on the formal control of the LP apparatus by some bourgeois labor fakers -- that road leads toward what you call the IMT's "entryism sui generis," which is really just the most consistent expression of the labourite opportunism that infects nearly the entire British left (see the article "Her Majesty's Socialists in Bed With the Police" in The Internationalist no. 29).
...This is because of the party's organic links to the class, i.e. their resting upon the trade unions for their existence. (I apolgoize, it won't let me psot more than 1000 characters in one message).
