IF, as you state in 'Our Common Cause' (13 March), revolutionary unity is the equivalent of unity between the Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group, what has happened to the thousands of revolutionary socialists who are in neither group yet who participated in such campaigns as the Anti Nazi League? What indeed has happened to the thousands (?) who have passed through both organisations in the past decade or have they all become reformists?
In a thinly veiled attack on the authors of Beyond the Fragments, you state that 'those who believe that a united revolutionary organisation can be built outside the existing groups through socialist centres and so on are living in a dream world'. Really?
It is a gross caricature to suggest that such centres can only be built apart from existing groups.
Whatever the polemic about 'rank and file groups' versus 'united fronts', the IMG did participate in, for example the Rank and File group in the National Union of Teachers until the SWP's sectarianism necessitated the formation of the STA.
That's the main point — the SWP's manipulatory attitude towards non-party groups and movements, not whether they are united fronts, socialist alliances or centres, rank and file groups or, as the ANL was, neither.
It is the 'numbers game' that lies behind so much of the SWP's sectarianism.
Yet your juggling of membership figures — 3,000 (SWP) + 1,500 (new recruits) = 6,000 — falls into precisely that trap. It is the needs of the situation — a reactionary government intent on slashing the social and industrial wage, in addition to political attacks on women's rights, sexual and racial minorities, civil liberties and so on which demand a mass response.
It is in this context that socialist alliances and centres and other forms of organisation can play their part as well as the IMG. But no, the IMG sees redemption lying in fusion with the SWP.
Could I suggest that instead of dismissing the ideas contained in Beyond the Fragments as 'lending weight to Benn's view', as Valerie Coultas maintains in her report on the Debate of the Decade, you ask why it is that the behaviour of the far-left groups in Britain have given comfort to the reformists and put off large numbers of people from joining any group.
I write incidentally as an ex-member of the International Socialists and as a founder member of the Socialist Students Alliance.
TONY GREENSTEIN, Brighton