fredbergen

ok, I sent it.

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.

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.

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.

...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).

Cde: Lenin and Trotsky advocated critical support to the British Labour party when it was exploding in membership as the (deformed) political expression of a potentially revolutionary upsurge in the workers movement. Later, Trotsky supported temporary entry into the parties of the 2nd international to intersect and draw out of them a layer of radicalized youth and workers. Both of these were contingent on particular historic circumstances, not on the more general definition of certain parties as "traditional" working class parties.

Trotsky continued advocating criticial electoral support for social democracy all his life, even when parties like Labour in the UK had shifted far to the right, had overseen austerity rogrammes and imperialist war (Labour had been part of the War Cabinet before it even governed on its own, i.e. before Lenin called to vote for them) and were no longer experiencing a boom in membership.

Most socialists offer "critical support" to any nominally "socialist" candidate, or to the most leftist candidate if there are a number of options. . . . So the IG, and the Spartacist League/ICL when it was a revolutionary organization, would not offer "critical support" to most "socialist" or Labor candidates, but would critically and "conditionally" support workers' candidates only if a vote for them would represent a significant move towards class political independence.

But doesn't this contradict Lenin and Trotsky's position? Or in the case that you thionk social democracy in Western Europe has broken its organic linsk with the class, when would you say this happened? Also I notice you don't place emphasis ont he call for a workers party in the US...what's the reasoning behind this?

Hello comrade, I read the article. It was interesting, but I think not giving support ot Obama or Nader goes without saying (on the SWP I am less knowledgeable, on the SEP I agree because of their scab position).

However I was interested if you have anything on the bourgeois-workers parties and the tactic of critical electoral support. You say: (see above as message was too long)...

Cde, before I couldn't post visitor messgaes to you for some reason.

I read the introductory article ony our page. What is your groups position on tactical electoral support for social democratic parties?