Greetings from Brita from Britain

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ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT 3 David Hudson represented the International Socialist Group, British affiliate of the Fourth International, at the Aug. 6 rally.

I bring you greetings from the International Socialist Group of Britain. We are a small organization, but we are building an organization that is committed to the program of the Fourth International.

I think it is very fitting that this platform includes comrades from many key areas of the world revolution today. It is the method of the Fourth International to extend unconditional support and build active solidarity with all national-liberation, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist But we are not just cheerleaders of the revolution as it develops in the different sectors of the world revolution. We also have a program, and as genuine internationalists we engage in dialogue and a discussion around this program with these forces in order to build a genuine, mass revolutionary international. That is our task.

Britain today is not the center of the international class struggle, but it is still a major imperialist power, and Trotskyists in Britain well understand the responsibility we have to the struggle of the comrades in South Africa. We also have a special responsibility to the nationalist struggle in Northern Ireland.

August 1988-89 is a year of action in Britain. It marks the 20th anniversary of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and of the sending in of the British troops. We are engaged in assembling a new withdrawal alliance based in the labor

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(The following speech was delivered at the Aug. 6 rally in commemoration of the S0th anniversary of the Fourth International. Esteban Volkov is Leon Trotsky's grandson.)

Human labor is the basis of our survival and progress. It produces almost all the goods that surround us. From very old times, it has been a cherished booty. In almost all societies known by history, there have been individuals, groups, or parasitical classes that through strength, power, or cunning have been able to get hold of other people's labor. With the advent of capitalism and the growth of population, the appropriation of human labor in the form of surplus value became more sophisticated and widely extended. In the present world, the development of A-2 Monday. August 8,1988 * * modern capitalism, with its ruthless financial imperialism, has widened the gap between the poorest, most vulnerable, larger sectors of population of the world and smaller groups of people who are accumulating inconceivable amounts of riches and power.

And we also have the development of the stratified societies of bureaucratic dictatorships, where on a lesser scale, you can still find great inequalities between the working classes and the power groups.

It is a universal law that every action provokes a reaction. The unfair and heartless exploitation of huge masses of people in the dreary and unhealthy factories of the rising capitalism of the last century gave birth to the response of Marxism. Capitalism, with its more sophisticated form of slavery—without lash or chain, but with the specter of hunger for the worker and his family—was nonetheless cruel. Marxism, the human response to this cruelty, was undertaken by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, brilliant revolutionary thinkers with an inviolable sense of justice. They deciphered the dynamics of history, creating a rational and scientific methodology: historic materialism.

They thoroughly studied the capitalist system, discovering its laws and its unavoidable contradictions. They dedicated their lives to the goal of eradicating forever the exploitation of the working class by parasitic minorities holding power and capital.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, creators of scientific socialism, or Marxist theory, provided the working class and other exploited classes with a powerful ideological weapon to struggle against all forms of exploitation, oppression, and alienation suffered in present society.

Marxism is not a crystal ball nor a magic wand. We don't have any MacGraw Hill book on "How to Perform a Successful Revolution." Marxism constitutes an essential analytical method of economic, political, and social phenomena and a basic tool for any revolutionary process. One doesn't need to be a great strategist to understand the reason for more than a century of constant attacks and distortions against the so-called obsolete ideology of Marxism and for the persecution and extermination of many of its defenders and revolutionary leaders.

The exploited masses, according to the ruling minorities, must be kept away from dangerous ideas and loyal guides. This seems to be the simplest way to try to preserve the happy world of the fortunate minorities at the top of the social pyramid.

Enemies within own ranks Those who have damaged Marxism most, however, those who have most hampered the struggle of the oppressed, have been the disguised enemies coming from its own