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From International Socialism (1st series), No.35, Winter 1968/69, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
New brooms always threaten to sweep clean, and the new editorial board is no exception. Rather than make grandiose promises, we’ll just ask readers to note the new Polemic section, which will, we hope, provide opportunity for more political debate in IS. Relevant socialist theory too often languishes in scrofulous duplicated form, and we hope to help bring some of this material to the light of printed day.
No promises, but we hope to go bi-monthly shortly. This will strain our meagre resources somewhat, so if you have an odd pound or five looking for a cause, remember IS. If your odd bobs or pounds can be regular, our business manager will be delighted to assist you.
Readers of French are recommended to take a look at the new paper, Lutte Ouvrière, available weekly from Initiative Socialiste, 54 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Paris 6. We wish the comrades associated with its production – one of whom has contributed to our Survey – well with their aim of seeing that ‘May 1968 fructifies and regenerates the working-class movement.’
Still on France, Tony Cliff and Ian Birchall have written an analysis on the May events, under the title France: the struggle goes on, which IS has published at 2s 6d. Just out from our stable too is Education, Capitalism and the Student Revolt, by various hands (4s 6d). And a second edition of Kuron and Modzelewski’s Open Letter to the Party has made this important analysis of Polish society easily available again at 4s. We’re happy to note that the Polish bureaucracy is sufficiently worried by our comrades for Gomulka to go out of his way to attack them in the central committee report to the party congress (Times, 12 November). Details of these and other publications elsewhere in this issue.
Two of our comrades, Raymond Challinor and Brian Rifley, have just published The Miners’ Union – A Trade Union in the Age of the Chartists (Lawrence and Wishart, 42s). And since our last issue, Paul Foot’s The Politics of Harold Wilson (Penguin, 6s) has appeared, to mingled snarls and cheers from the reviewers.
In case readers might have missed them, New Left Review 51 printed a small collection of otherwise unavailable articles by Gramsci on the factory councils. Our rueful congratulations to NLR for beating us to it; we intend to continue the good work of making this all too little known Italian Marxist available to English socialists.
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Last updated on 4.1.2008