Party News (1981)

Party News from the January 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the first week of December two London members went on a propaganda tour of over a thousand miles. Steve Coleman addressed about twenty people in the King George Hotel at Doncaster on “Unemployment - the socialist solution”. He described the terrible effects of unemployment on the working class and went on to show how the problem is an integral part of the system of profits and wages. It is likely that a discussion group will soon be formed in Doncaster. The following day the reformist campaigners who wish to mop up capitalism’s problems without establishing socialism were dealt with in a lunch-time meeting in Edinburgh University entitled “The left wing officers looking for infantry”. A meeting at Strathclyde University was poorly attended: evidently the students there are too busy studying the world (to give them the benefit of the doubt) to change it. Finally on December 5 Steve Coleman and Clifford Slapper spoke at Swansea AEUW Room on “Is a Third World War Inevitable?” Twenty-five people turned up and most agreed with our proposition that although world capitalism has produced, is producing and will produce war, neither capitalism nor war are inevitable. A world war can be averted only by the working class organising politically to remove the system of commercial and military conflict and replacing it with a classless world society.