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From The New International, Vol. XXIV No. 2–3, Spring–Summer 1958, p. 71.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
With great sadness we announce this final issue of The New International. The reasons for this are amply stated in the accompanying address of the Independent Socialist League on its unification with the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation. Before closing the columns of the NI we wish to take note of its long and valiant history. Except for the interruption in the years 1937–1938, the NI has appeared continuously since 1934, its own evolution corresponding to the changing years and the evolution of world events. Few Marxian socialist periodicals in our time have lasted as long.
Quite obviously, no adequate resume of the NI is possible in this brief farewell note. It suffices to point out that the NI, through its successive editors and boards, maintained a consistently high level of theoretical and political discussion. The NI won a justly deserved reputation in this and other countries as an “expert” on Stalinism. Within its columns the earliest public discussion took place on the “Russian question” and the nature of the Russian state. Together with the Workers Party it helped to develop the “theory of bureaucratic collectivism” which remains the most lucid and instructive analysis of the Stalinist state and the system of Stalinism – views which are borrowed, with or without credit, in more recent times.
Throughout the war years, the NI remained devoted to the ideas of socialist internationalism. Its anti-war position was not only a reminder to socialists everywhere of the meaning of the socialist ideals, but it enabled the NI in the midst of the war to champion the great ideas of “self-determination” and “national independence” in its many discussions devoted to the “national question.”
In the post-war years down to the present, the NI espoused the cause of democratic socialism, not as a temporary tactic in the class struggle, but as central to the great cause of socialism, against capitalism and Stalinism. The fight for democratic socialism to it was the struggle for the new society of freedom, the independence of all nations big and small as the indispensable prelude to the world brotherhood of all nations and peoples. That meant a never-ending struggle against all forms of imperialism, capitalist and Stalinist, and all forms of totalitarianism.
IN OUR DECISION TO DISSOLVE the NI, we are acting in the service of a larger and more important idea: the construction of the democratic socialist movement in the United States, the success of which will be of enormous meaning to socialists everywhere. Most important of all, the new growth of socialist influence and organization can insure the successful struggle against capitalism and Stalinism.
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Last updated on 13 January 2020