Dear Comrades,
We have received your letter of 10 July, 1957.
We regret that your reply was negative toward our proposals of unification, following upon the proposals contained in the letter of comrade Cannon to comrade Goonewardene and the negotiations which took place in the United States. We are particularly sorry to observe the step backward which your reply constitutes, compared to the previous stage, by putting the accent on "the important political differences which exist between our respective tendencies," making no reply to our request to learn whether you share the opinion of your British organization that politically "the gulf grows wider and wider," and by not mentioning at all the fact that comrade Cannon and the leadership of the SWP saw our political positions as drawing closer together.
The question of unification is indeed an essentially political one.
If you are not ready to recognize that our political positions have drawn close, how can you consider the subsequent functioning of the unified organization as possible, even on the basis visualized by the propositions of comrade Cannon?
Or do you believe that we should ever accept a de facto liquidation of the International by reducing the unity of its political line to practically nothing by rendering it incapable of existing politically as an International and transforming it practically into a loose association of national groups, each following its own line?
The extreme organizational concessions implied by the acceptance of the demands of comrade Cannon would be meaningless except in case of a really broad political agreement, giving guarantees that the International could function as a International and not engage in a de facto liquidation of itself.
Convinced that the possibility of such a broad agreement may exist by the recognition of the fact that the political lines followed by the SWP and the Militant, and the International, have unquestionably drawn close together, we are prepared to accept point 1 in the letter of April 29, 1957, from comrade Cannon to comrade Patrick [Mangan], in order to try to draw up a joint "Memorandum of Agreement", covering the greatest possible number of current political questions. This memorandum would be destined to become the general basic platform guiding the action of the joint leadership of the unified International which would be named by the World Congress of Unification. For this reason, it should be as extensive and detailed as possible, in order to reduce to a minimum the questions on which divergences would continue to exist and, above all, in order to indicate the direction of the future action of the International's leadership.
We look forward to a prompt and positive reply to this proposition.
With internationalist-communist greetings,
The IS