active groups in the usa

[Q-collective]

Comrade, we left with a fraction of the organization.  The idea that we would "rebuild the Militant movement," which the Taaffe leadership took away on his ill-advised Scottish Turn and later SP adventures and which took decades to build, in such a short time is asking a bit much.

You have a point. I'm just saying that out of the 8000 members and thousands of sympathisers Militant had, Socialist Appeal wasn't able either to rebuild the organisation. This was because the situation to work in Labour had changed.

The point that Oi was making is that since the split, your membership has decreased 8+ fold, while ours did not suffer from NEARLY the same rate and have in fact seen growth.  Those facts don't work in favor of your argument.

Your last sentence is at least technically correct, but when talking about such a huge decline in membership over such a short amount of time, this sounds more like an excuse than genuine analysis.

I'm still learning, reading, discussing into these matters, so I cannot give a definitive view here. I agree that it would be expected that an organisation with our methods should be able to retain more members. The example of the Bolsheviks come to mind, they too suffered many failures before 1917 but were best of all leftwing parties in Russia able to retain its membership.

But this is all so specific for the UK. In Belgium for example, the split was pretty even (30 for IMT, 30 for CWI), the CWI there too made an "open turn" and was able to grow tenfold until now. The IMT still has about 30 members. What I'm saying is that independant work isn't "ultra-left" by definition.

[Dimitri]

Yet Socialist Appeal wasn't able to rebuild the Militant movement at all in consequent years, pointing out that the majority were correct that Labour had ceased to be a mass workers party and were in decay. Besides, membership doesn't grow in a steady line. The betrayal of Labour and the collapse of Stalinism were serious historical events that affected all of the left, including us. Now, what you're doing is ignoring these factors, saying that the plummet in our support was all because of us leaving Labour. If these factors hadn't existed and we would have remained working in Labour than I agree that we would have grown much further and would have had tens of thousands of supporters for the ideas of genuine Marxism.

How can you rebuild the movement with approximately 100 people left in Socialist appeal in 1991? The fact is that we have increased in membership since then.
Also the fall of the USSR can't have the effect to Trotskyist parties , as it has to Stalinist parties. The fall of the USSR was predicted by Trotsky in 1936, we didn't build our organization in the basis of the "glory of the USSR". To give you a specific example, in Greece the CP lost half of its votes due to the collapse of the USSR. And we are talking about a part that has supported Stalin, Krutchev, Breznief, Andropov, Gorbatchev  etc. How can this party lose half of its support , while a Trotskyist party goes to 1/10 th of the support it had ?(the 1/10th is generous too!).
Hence there is another factor that comes into play. The premature split from Labour. When we perform entrism we don't care about the positions of the bureaucracy. To tell you the truth sometimes(when the base is more to the left) , a right wing leadership is good for us as they get exposed and we are able to win over more people.

Why do you talk about the betrayal of Labour? Labour was reformist anyways thus it commited "treason to the working class" to begin with. Why so suddenly this concern about its right wing turn?

the moral out of all of this and taking into account the lessons the mistakes of Rosa Luxemburg gave us, we have to understand that the split was a mistake first of all, and make sure not to be impatient in the future .
For example in Pakistan we have 2-3 thousands in the PPP , while the name Lal Khan is a household name. If we did the same  mistake like in Britain we would end up losing most of our membership , although the PPP is more reactionary than Labour. Therefore we stay in the PPP while focusing on open work in order to make a MASS split in the following years.
It is not a "what if" conversation. It is a conversation about facts and correct tactics, tactics so important that can affect the course of history in the following years.

Well I hope my answer was coherent because my english is kind of bad.

But this is all so specific for the UK. In Belgium for example, the split was pretty even (30 for IMT, 30 for CWI), the CWI there too made an "open turn" and was able to grow tenfold until now. The IMT still has about 30 members. What I'm saying is that independant work isn't "ultra-left" by definition.

First of all I think we have more than 30 members in Belgium. This was a peculiar situation due to different subjective factors, like the accident that killed some leading comrades in Belgium, thus setting back the work in a big degree. Also the benefits of working in a mass party do not come in a matter of 10-15 years but in a matter of long patient work under the correct conditions.
The Militant was built after patient work of 40 years , not in a matter of 2-3 years(and under difficult conditions). The split was 30-30 but as the IMT was setback for subjective and objective factors , the CWI grew and then advanced layers of the student movement naturally selected the bigger organization. I think that the British situation is more relevant than the Belgium situation , as it was in Britain where we had a huge section, not in Belgium.

I think that even if there is a vacuum in a certain country, to alienate yourself from the traditional mass organizations , when it is obvious even to a blind man that it is from there that the workers enter the arena of politics, is a huge mistake.
Because as we see in almost every country in the world , when the masses enter the political arena they do that through their mass organizations and we should be there to educate them in the ideas of genuine marxism and if possible form a mass revolutionary party through this patient and longterm work.