Dear Comrades,
We acknowledge receipt of comrade Burns' [Healy] letter announcing that your committee is meeting at the beginning of September to take a position about our last proposals concerning unification. On this occasion, we should like to give you some additional specific information in order to facilitate your taking a position favorable thereto.
We state once more our decision to accept point 1 of comrade J.C.'s proposals and to consider the other points as a basis for discussion.
We repeat that, in our opinion, once the political basis has been laid for reunification, the difficulties about organizational questions could be easily smoothed out.
We are completely in agreement with the viewpoint expressed by comrade J.C. according to which it is a question of reaching, in this field, a sort of *organizational compromise,* giving you, more than *concessions,* genuine *organizational guarantees.* Such was, indeed, the meaning of the proposals made by Comrade P. O'D. [Mangan] to Comrade Cannon.
As for political questions, we are also in agreement avoiding, for the moment, discussions on controversial points from the past, and leaving them for later, as soon as a propitious atmosphere will permit an objective and calm discussion of a genuinely educational nature, as well as concentrating essentially on what can bring us together and unite us at the present stage, in order thus to make possible the functioning of the International as a democratic centralist world organization.
From this point of view we are sorry to see comrade Sinclair's [Hunter] article which both reopened the polemics about the past and questioned in the most violent terms the fact of the convergence of our politics (most especially those of the SWP and the International). The reply made to this article by Comrade Germain in the name of the entire IS was in no way motivated by a desire to rekindle polemics nor was it particularly aimed at your British organization. That reply had as its essential purpose to demonstrate that the main thesis of comrade Sinclair's article, insisting on "wider and wider" divergences, was erroneous and obviously raised an obstacle to unification.
Our policy toward both the British organization and the other organizations of your committee is sincerely prounification. We profoundly hope that it is the same on the part of your organization toward the international and its sympathizing organization in Great Britain.
Hence, comrades, we sincerely see no obstacle to your accepting a commission which would immediately begin to draw up "a joint draft of political agreement" and to discuss the other terms of unification on the basis of both the proposals of comrade J.C. and those presented by Comrade P. O'D and the IS.
With our internationalist-communist greetings,
The IS