Introduction

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New Technology and Globalisation – can a capitalist slump be avoided?

A reply to ex-Merseyside Socialist Party members by the Socialist Party executive committee


Introduction

This pamphlet is an answer to criticisms of the Socialist Party’s position on a number of key issues facing the workers’ movement in Britain and internationally.

As well as globalisation, new technology and perspectives for the world capitalist economy, we also touch on the trade unions, the character and methods of building a revolutionary party and a number of other important issues.

There is a spoken, sometimes an unspoken, criticism of Marxist ideas and perspectives amongst a broad layer of sceptical intellectuals and workers in Britain and worldwide.

Theoretical bewilderment and confusion is widespread. This is an inevitable product of the situation facing the workers’ movement following the collapse of Stalinism between 1989 and 1991, and with it the planned economy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Merseyside ex-members of the Socialist Party express this deep scepticism in a particularly sharp form.

By their own admission, their document amounts to a ‘critique’ of the Socialist Party, but with no alternative suggested: ‘There is little in this document which defines precisely where comrades on Merseyside stand on many of the issues which we are critical about in relation to the Socialist Party.’ [The political evolution of the Militant/Socialist Party in the 1990s; Merseyside’s view, p1 para2]

What would be said about a worker who discards his tools, without first acquiring new ones, and then proceeds to carry on working with his bare hands? He would be seen as a very inadequate worker.

This, we are afraid, is how the ex-members of the Socialist Party on Merseyside will now be viewed, by those looking for an answer to the serious problems confronting the workers’ movement worldwide.

However in answering them we hope to illuminate, for the membership and supporters of our party, and hopefully a wider layer of workers generally, the real ideas of the Socialist Party.

June 1999

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