[p. 54]
I have just seen the article by Comrade Murry Weiss "Guilty of Daring to Battle for Marxism," in your issue of January 4, 1960.
It is, naturally, Comrade Weiss' right to interpret in his own way recent developments in the policy and organization of the Socialist Labour League. What is regrettable indeed is to proceed to declarations of a scarcely responsible kind.
To suppose that Socialist Fight is in effect a Trotskyist paper linked with the fourth International, according to the version now peddled by Comrade Weiss, is objectively to denounce this paper to the bureaucratic leadership of the Labour Party, and to provoke the expulsion of the comrades who support this paper.
It is feasible to propose to carry out a long-term entrist work in a party such as the Labour Party and at the same time to agitate openly for another, revolutionary organization, the implacable enemy of reformism, such as the Fourth International is?
In the present relationship of forces between the revolutionary Marxists integrated in the LP and the bureaucratic leadership, such an attitude would be an adventure of guaranteed self-destruction of the entrist work.
[p. 55]
That is the path chosen by the SLL since its formation, for reasons which escape ordinary understanding. Comrade Weiss now gives his approval to this policy of suicide, and after the example repeatedly provided by the SLL press seeks to impose the same state on revolutionary Marxist forces which would try, with good reason, to maintain by all means a genuine entrist work.
I refuse, of course, to accept the version given by Comrade Weiss of Socialist Fight and its so-called links with the Fourth International.
Socialist Fight is not an organ of the Fourth International, and in particular has no links with me personally. My personal position is that of a militant elected to a particular position in a Marxist organization, democratically and collectively led: the Fourth International. In connection with the precise accusation launched by Comrade Weiss against Socialist Fight, I have taken the trouble to check the facts.
It is easy to obtain this paper, circulating freely in the British labor movement circles.
In its issue dated August 1959, there is an article signed by Councillor Brian Deane replying to accusations launched by the SLL, which Comrade Weiss, without exercising critical judgement, now takes as his stand.
I quote in appendix this article in extenso:
From this quotation it is clear that the charge made by the SLL against the Left Labour paper which is Socialist Fight does not hold water, and that the facts, as often the case, were grossly twisted.
The "crime" of the LP members in Liverpool who support Socialist Fight was to refuse to follow the comrades of the SLL in their "operation suicide" within the LP, in declaring themselves members of an organization outside the LP.
The SLL has now latterly chosen a peculiar way to proclaim the "truth": regardless of the particular circumstances of those whom it now considers to be its "enemies," often erstwhile militants in its own ranks, against whom it lets fall calculated "indiscretions" objectively equivalent to denunciations. This was the case, for example, with Socialist Fight and also with Comrade Peter Fryer whose illegal presence in a semifascist country is denounced.
It is necessary resolutely to call a halt to this really factional backsliding, now damaging terribly the great name of Trotskyism in Great Britain.
It is to be hoped that after careful reflection on the facts, Comrade Weiss will likewise arrive at this opinion.
With my Communist Internationalist greetings,