The future of the

I should like to take up some of the issues raised by Tony Topham and other writers in The Week in regard to the tactics and prospects of the Left. 1) I would argue that with certain minor quelifications the Left in Britain has been in headlong retreat since 1961. In policy terms not merely have we failed to carry the Labour movement on such central issues as neutralism and public ownership, but we have been forced back to fight on issues which at one time seemed barely arguable=- eg immigration, union rights. The "reconstruction" of the Labour Party as a modern "classless" electoral machine governed by an opport eunistic olig@rchy and directed toward neo-capitalist "modernising" objectives has actually gone further and feSterzsander Wilson than under Gaitskell. At the strategic level we have seen the virtual extinction of parliamentary opposition to Labour policy and leadership, a quiescent rank-and-file Left and the collapse of CND, the one great independent mass movement of protest since the thirties, Whole areas of debate that we opened(the Cold War, the role of the U.N., the mass media) are now closed, whole channels of opposition that we utilised(mass demonstrations, civil disobedience)are now disused. It is true that recently the Labour Left has begun to regroup its shattered forces and that, as Tony Tophan says, some significant new propaganda and organisational initiatives have been taken, But valuable though these developments are, they are still highly local -ised, narrowly confined to hard-core Labour activists and in fact represent only the merest beginnings of a counter-attack by the Left. It is surely time for the Left to have learnt that a roll-call of publications and organisations does not constitute a movement, 2) Tony Topham and Ken Tarbuck assert that the'main struggle is at home", I take this to be the quasi-marxist formula that domestic or "class" issu-* sre somehow "prior" to international issues. That the struggle against the told Jar against imperialism and racism, somehow takes its "real"form in internal industrial confrontations, that the causes of international peace and freedom are best advanced by tackling the "underlying" causes on the home front. I reject this both as a theory and a tactic. In my view (a) the most serious political issues that face us are precisely international issues war, race and poverty(as the Radical Alliance put it); (b) these international evils are the outcome of a complex of factors= military, political, economic, ideological=- which is not reduceable to any simple formula; (c) although clearly "conditioned" by domestic factors, international issues are not mere "reflections" of domestic class needs or divisions but are the outcome of factors lying in the semi-autonomous sphere of"international relations"; (d) socialists in combating international problems must offer international solutions, must organise campaigns specifically directed towards these issues, must argue and propagandise in international terms, must meet the opposing side on each and every level of their defence, Ths attempt to reduce the struggle over foreign policy to a struggle over domestic concerns in fact means surremering the foreign policyfield to the eneny, abdicating our responsibilities in that sphere.( Incidentaaly it seems to me astonishing that one — to make these points after nearly a decade of work by the New Left