NOTE TO READERS

The International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO) was established in 1992 at an international conference in Florence, Italy. The conference brought together Trotskyists from a number of countries. The essential idea uniting the people attending the conference was to reconstruct the Fourth International as an authoritative World Party struggling to overthrow capitalism. Our approach to achieving this was:

a) to participate with our small forces in the daily struggles of the working class;

b) to intervene patiently and constructively into the crisis of the existing international organisations identifying themselves as Trotskyist to organisationally reconstruct and politically regenerate the Fourth International;

c) to encourage the, generally marginalised, forces identifying with Trotskyism to intervene themselves in the larger organisations of the broad workers vanguard and, in particular, the left splits from the mass workers parties which were then developing in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism.

The British supporters of the ITO have brought out this publication to express their point of view and also as an educational vehicle for people who may be new to socialist politics. We do not wish to simply speak to other Trotskyists (important though that is), but to try and win new people to Trotskyist ideas from the broader workers vanguard. The first article by Archie O'Reilly was written with this latter aim in mind. The translated extract from a long article by Osvaldo Coggiola, an Argentinian Trotskyist who is secretary of the academics' union at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was taken from the Argentine Trotkskyist journal En Defensa del Marxismo. We will publish the second half in our next issue. The articles on Peru, Bolivia, Korea and the SLP were sent to us by supporters of the recently formed Trotskyist group, The Liason Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International. This grouping broke last year with the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (whose British section is Workers Power) on a number of questions including the Yugoslav question. We will be producing this publication three times a year to begin with. We can be contacted at: ITO Britain/In Defence of Marxism, Dept 88, 1 Newton St, Manchester M11HW. Email: itobritain@ hands-on.ltd.uk