Unity in action, dialogue where there are differences

Immediately we can and should consolidate and maximise the new openings for unity and dialogue. The AWL, the SWP, the SP, the Independent Labour Network, the Socialist Labour Party, Outlook and other groups in each city or borough should set up local liaison committees.

The committees' first task would be to coordinate action on the many issues where the activist left has broad agreement - support for strikes; battles against cuts; promotion of campaigns like the United Campaign for Trade Union Rights; action against racism. The efforts of activists from different left currents should be coordinated in workplaces and unions where they operate side-by-side. In Rouen, France, four different revolutionary groups, Voix des Travailleurs, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, the Gauche Revolutionnaire, and the Association pour le Rassemblement des Travailleurs, work together to produce regular fortnightly bulletins in five different workplaces. We should discuss similar work in Britain. The liaison committees would also organise joint campaigning where the left had joint slates for elections. The different groups would retain their right to act separately whenever they wished. They would organise their own members' meetings and - until, let's hope, at a later stage we got agreement on a joint weekly paper of the activist left - their own paper sales.

The committees should also organise joint public discussion forums, let's say monthly. These would attract more people than the sum total of the different left-group public meetings now, from the very fact of unity and also because the element of debate would make them more educative and interesting than monotone meetings can ever be. They would thus help the left to broaden our appeal and at the same time make progress in resolving and clarifying our differences with each other. Some will object that such forums would become sectarian quibble-fests, disrupted by furious quarrels over obscure disputes which baffle the new people attending. Obviously some speeches would be sectarian or quibbling. If everyone always had balanced judgment and talked good sense, we would never need any debates. But this is a problem which can be dealt with by clear rules and good chairing. And the only way to find out whether criticisms are sectarian or principled, quibbling or rigorous, is by debate linked to common action. Remember, Lenin in his time was often called a pedantic sectarian.

The debate and the joint action will be worthwhile even if they go no further. We want them to go further. We want a united working-class socialist party, principled but flexible and democratic, linked in collaboration with other working-class socialist parties across the world. Nothing less is adequate as an instrument for the tasks we face. We urge socialists to join in the fight for unity, and in the fight to build the AWL as the active agent for unity.