A Counter-plan is needed

It strikes me that the main problem facing the left in Britain today this was unfortunately borne out by the meeting which established the cae for Socialist Education - is its complete inability to relate A to B Paradoxically, one of socialism's main claims is its ability to neadon dialectically and consider society as a totality. But what we are faced with is a continuation of a long series of demands which are good in themselves but are unrelated to each other, We speak out against the war in Vietnam but don't draw the lesson from it, or don't bother to relate imperialism to internal social questions. We speak out against redundancy but leave it at that, and don't bother to formulate plans for social change etce, In effect the right and its position is mmhmore creditable. They ; have come forward with a total plan, with a total series of social and economic relations, and as bad as it is, it has a unity and coherence which allow them to turn around and claim that the left is anti-modern and that socialism is outdated, The plan as such enforces the existing regime by shrouding it in a myth of omipotence and of econometric science and its sacred motto "increase production and you will increase wages", What is needed from us is more than education but a series of broad guidee lines that: 3) allow us to come together on a common programme; and 2) allow us to challenge the Government. I think it is necessary for us to draw up a counter-plan which has as its philosophical basis a socialist rather than a liberal neo-colonialist basis, A counter=plan that would serve as basis for discussion so that in our educative activities, because of differences over individual issues and their implementation we don't sacrifice the fragile unity we achieved at the founding meeting of the C.S.E. by either sending 15 speakers to a meeting or saying nothing about a particular issue. Such a method has three essential merits: by fixing objectives it gives the socialist ideal a precise ness that it seems. to have lost a long time ago; it gives the entire left the opportunity to express its aspirations; it permits us to show that the left far from teing bankrupt of ideas has the only viable policy which is democratic. At the same time the formulation of such a counter-plan would go a long way to erasing the false division between "intellectuals" and workers» Structural reform is at the basis of all,the changes we want to see. I think in producing any kind of plan wav iittke it clear from the very beginning thet woare after a system of industrial democracy where global planning,and all processes of decisions,will be decided by the people themselvese If the work were organised in a way whereby we present the theoretical assumptions first and then go on to define a counter-plan, I think/will show that we are interested in technological decisions. Unfortunately this was the fault with the plan draw up by the P.S.U. in France and also of the little though extremely useful book Le Conteplan, by Julian Ensemble (really a rather large group of people) and published by Du Seuil, Therefore it is necessary to secure the maximum trade union co-operation possible. A work purely by academics will inevitably miss out on a huge number of points. Where they are useful though is in quantification and other procedures when we deal with the technical problems, “here they are not useful or of not more use than anyone else is in the comeptualisation of what should be done. N.B. We understand that the CSE is/Support this idea to the full.