marcus The Labor Tribune site is very welcome.If it goes on as well as it began with the launch meeting then it could play a positive role in developing much needed cooperation on the left. I begin from that point because I am taken aback that you seem to go out of your way to to put offside a significant part of the left forces who identify to one degree or anothger with the Trotskyist tradition. It is not a mere quibble to say that your use of the term Trotskyite grates on us who understand it was commonly used in connection with other terms such as wrecker, spltter, imperialist agent etc. Where the Stalinist bureaucratic caste held state power such phrases were found in literal death sentences against actual Trotskyists or those deemed to be sso for the purpose of execution. In capitalist countries the Stalinist bureaucracies in the workers' movement used such phrases to stigmatise honest working class opponents as part of the attempt to exclude them from the movement. You profess indifference to "ite" or "ist" endings and claim to use the term Stalinite-well I think you are either naive or are having a lend of us. By the way,I have never heard of the term Stalinite before and a brief survey of others who have been around the left a long time shows similar ignorance. I suspect its your own neologism. A man who tatoos a swastika on his bicep will be seen to identify one way or another with fascism no matter how much he proclaims his veneration of an ancient Hindu symbol. To analogise more directly imagine if, when I spoke at your launch meeting, I had referred to panel member Jack mundey as a Stalinist-as once I might have. That would have been wrong and counter-productive because anyone who heard that would have rightly seen it as a silly use of a term of abuse that they had to swallow before they could consider any political point I was trying to make-and so why should they? Really is it worth the pleasure of reminding people of where you come from to