SWP existential crisis

[Q]

Following criticisms of the SWP’s culture and practice in the first two Internal Bulletins, the leadership has mobilised to rubbish opponents. Peter Manson reports (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/942/internal-bulletins-crazy-contortions-of-swp-central-committee)



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/wwimages/ww942/sm=Contortions_On_Ground2.jpg
Making ‘Leninism’ look ridiculous

The third and final Socialist Workers Party Pre-conference Bulletin has seen a concerted counterattack led by the central committee against comrades calling for greater democracy, openness and honesty within the organisation.

As readers may recall, strong points were made in the first two IBs (Internal Bulletins, as they are commonly known) by “Ian”, “Paris”, “Ruth” and “Justin” - for reasons of security only first names are given (although when that given name is something like “Lovedeep”, “Søren”, “Aamna” or “Despina”, it makes you wonder just how ‘secure’ it all is - especially when the comrade’s SWP branch is specified).

The critics demanded, in particular, much more genuine debate - to be facilitated by more frequent discussion bulletins and the right of CC members and full-timers to state their own individual views rather than be bound by the central line on every question, including tactical nuances. There was also the call to do away with the undemocratic, ‘take it or leave it’ slate system for electing the CC, and for the leadership to honestly face up to its mistakes and failures, and admit to the organisation’s weaknesses - not least the real state and size of the membership.

The similarity of the responses - from both the CC itself and from various individuals and groups of comrades - leads one to suspect a degree of coordination. The main criticism of especially Paris and Ruth is that their proposals would deprive the SWP of any effectiveness by calling into question democratic centralism itself. This is combined with the claim (implied by the CC, openly stated by others) that the critics just want to sit around talking instead of getting on with the action.

In its contribution entitled ‘Democracy, intervention and the revolutionary party: a reply to Paris and Ruth’, the CC begins by stating: “The starting point for any evaluation of the party’s internal mode of operation - how it organises, debates, elects its leadership and so on - is an assessment of the current balance of class forces and how the party has responded to the major tests it has faced in the recent period. Unfortunately, neither Ruth nor Paris make any serious attempt to develop such an assessment.”

This allows the leadership to go into a long diversion about the great successes of Unite the Resistance and Unite Against Fascism, the SWP’s two main fronts at the moment. Don’t the critics realise that their outstanding achievements are all down to the current forms of organisation? According to the CC, “… the general direction of many of the arguments and proposals they make are ones that would act to weaken the party’s ability to act effectively in the class struggle at a crucial juncture. Indeed, at stake is how we conceive the nature of a revolutionary party itself.” The effect of those proposals, “if accepted, would be to shift the SWP towards being a much more decentralised and less interventionist party”.

“Jess (South East London)”, “Paul (East London)” and “Doug (Birmingham)” head their riposte: ‘In defence of Leninism’: “There is a very strong smell in these arguments,” they write, “that locates a problem as being inbuilt to, inherent in, any form of leadership.” The rather mild suggestions from Paris, Ruth and so on for introducing some basic democracy into the SWP would apparently represent “a break from any serious notion of a democratic-centralist, interventionist party in the Leninist tradition”.

For his part, “Jeff (Cardiff)” says they result from a “creeping infection of autonomism in their attack on democratic centralism and the slate system of voting in particular”, while “Gareth (Hackney)” says that all this “shades into the suspicion of revolutionary leadership as remote and manipulative that is characteristic of movementism”. He too alleges that the critics are making “an argument against democratic centralism itself”.

“Sean (North London)” also weighs in. I wonder if he is the same person as “Sean V (Islington)”, who is standing once more for the 50-strong national committee and goes by the name of Vernell? He pretends to believe that “the model put forward is closer to the social democratic type practised within the trade unions than those in a revolutionary party based on democratic centralism. The proposals, if implemented, would institutionalise passivity within the organisation.” But “we must not see their proposals in abstract from the method in which they are rooted”: ie, one that would take the SWP “away from the democratic centralist tradition”.

Finally “Shaun (Thames Valley)” alleges: “Implicit in both contributions is a different view of the party. Do we want to intervene in struggles as an organisation or simply participate in them as a loose grouping of individuals?”

I cannot believe that these comrades seriously believe that such proposals, which in reality ought to be uncontroversial in a genuinely democratic-centralist organisation, are inspired by impulses that are anarchistic, social democratic - or both.

Slate system

The main change in formal democracy that the leadership’s critics propose involves a switch to individual voting. for CC elections. In the words of a motion from Bury and Prestwich branch, “For the January 2013 conference, slates or individuals may be nominated, after which the election will take place on the basis of votes for individual candidates rather than slates, which means that conference must decide the number of people it wishes to elect to the CC before electing them.”

At the moment, if a comrade wishes to stand for the CC he or she may do so only as part of a full slate. One complication is that there is no fixed size for that slate - that is, there is no rule stipulating how many people should sit on the central committee. Another is that it is unclear whether those nominated for a particular slate can refuse to appear on a rival one. For example, if you are opposed to the re-election of a single current CC member and want to nominate a slate with someone else on it instead, are the rest of the outgoing CC obliged to stand on your slate as well as their own? If so, then any number of nominated individuals could simply add their name to the current list of CC members, and conference delegates would in effect be voting for or against those individuals. If not, you will have no option but to try to chuck out the entire leadership.

So what is wrong with the Bury and Prestwich motion? Let the CC explain: “A leadership elected on an individual basis is one that is more likely to pursue different perspectives rather than collectively agree a coherent and focused strategy which its takes responsibility for, can be tested in practice.” Even without the garbled grammar it would be difficult to follow this. What is actually wrong with having “different perspectives” feed into the collective? Doesn’t that actually help in arriving at a “coherent and focused strategy”?

Jess, Paul and Doug go for a different line: “The key problem is that delegates at our conference are and should be voting for a leading body and not simply individuals. We do not want to vote for this or that individual to be a CC member: we want to decide on what we think is the right leading body for the party as a whole.” This is so stupid, it almost beggars belief. Is that “leading body” not made up of “individuals”? Yes, but, as things stand, they can only be selected by the self-perpetuating CC.

Other CC apologists come up with equally absurd statements. For example, Jeff says: “The great advantage of the slate system is that the party gets exactly the slate that the majority vote for and not the haphazard result of individual voting.” For “Gareth (Hackney)” the effect of the latter would be to “move us away from a democratic-centralist idea of the party towards a more movementist notion of leadership, one representing a coalition of overlapping interests”. Overlapping interests? He adds: “The slate system, along with political clarity, has stood us in good stead, in a way that cannot be said of other revolutionary organisations … which have been tolerant of permanent factionalism and eclecticism in their politics.” No-one could ever accuse the SWP of eclecticism, could they?

Then there is “Donny (Edinburgh)” - I wonder what his surname is. This one is a gem: “The revolutionary party tries to lead the working class in its fight to defeat capitalism. That alone brings real democracy. Our internal practices exist to help achieve these ends. So the democratic question of how to choose a CC comes down to how to secure the best central leadership.” In other words, internal democracy matters not a jot - as though there is no relationship between how we conduct ourselves within the “revolutionary party” and what we advocate for society as a whole.

Donny states: “With slates the argument is therefore about faults in political strategy, not individuals. If members think a political problem exists, a different slate can and should be proposed to correct these faults ... with individual elections the creation of a CC would be more haphazard, and less likely to produce a coherent political line”. He concludes by asking: “What type of CC will best equip the party to spearhead the fight for the general strike: an assembly of individuals or a collective body?”

Sean Vernell again: “If we go down the road of electing our CC members on an individual basis, then not only does it become a ‘popularity contest’, but also it will break any possibility of the leadership being able to act in a collective way, because it will reinforce individual members of the CC to be more responsive to their individual power bases in the party rather than to the collective will of the CC and that of conference decisions.”

How can intelligent people come up with such nonsense? Ironically many of these comrades pay lip service to the notion that there is no one single correct way to elect a leadership, but surely that contradicts their dogmatic defence of the slate system.

Comrade Vernell also has something to say about another of the proposals from Ruth and Paris: “If the party supports their calls to give full-time workers the same democratic rights as the unpaid members of the party, it will bring about a significant shift of democracy away from the unpaid members to unelected full-time workers within the organisation. The problem of granting full-time workers the same democratic rights as non-paid members of the party is it could lead to unelected full-time workers overriding the democratically made decisions of the members through conference and party councils.”

What on earth is he talking about? The idea, as I understand it, is that all members should have equal rights. No-one should be seen as a mere conduit for the leadership without being able to make their own input. As another motion from Bury and Prestwich puts it, “… full-timers have a particular responsibility to win the party as a whole to carrying through decisions effectively. If some argue against decisions that have been reached, or obstruct their implementation, this undermines our democracy, our unity in action and the effectiveness of the party.”

However, the motions proposes: “Individual CC members and full-timers can participate freely in the key areas of the party’s democracy - NC meetings, internal bulletins, and speaking at party conference, without being bound by the CC ‘line’.”

As he did last year, Neil Davidson - “Neil (Edinburgh)” - adds further clarity, including on the democratic balance between leaders, full-timers and lay members: “… members of the CC must be free to express their views during the pre-conference period, in the same way as other comrades - including other full-timers. At the moment, we have no way of knowing what individual CC members actually think on any issue.”

The CC is, after all, “the main active element and provider of initiatives. If there are disagreements, or even just differences of emphasis on the CC, we need to know what these are, since this obviously has a bearing on what decisions conference itself may make.”

In the words of one of the motions from Bury and Prestwich, “Discipline is for unity in action in the carrying out of decisions, not to stifle debate. It is better that the strongest possible speakers from each point of view are heard to ensure maximum clarity. Discipline is necessary in a revolutionary party to ensure united action against the enemies of the working class, not against our own members.”

Culture

Comrade Davidson points to other failings. Referring to the slate system, he states: “The procedure we have used virtually since the founding of the SWP in 1976 has exhausted any usefulness it may once have had.” However, the problem is the unaccountable culture, of which the slate system is an essential part.

For example, John Rees may have been blamed for the Respect debacle and criticised for his leadership style. But what happened after he was deposed? “At the time, some of us argued that the party’s difficulties … were not simply the result of the politics and personalities of the Rees-German-Bambery-Nineham faction, but instead had deeper structural roots, which allowed this group to dominate the CC and hence the party, and which, unless consciously dealt with, would survive its departure.”

However, demonstrating the total failure of the SWP majority to understand basic democracy are statements like this one from Shaun: “What would clearly be a recipe for disarming the party is the suggestion from Paris that ‘different political tendencies should be represented on the CC’. The CC needs to provide coherent collective leadership. Of course there will be debate and disagreement, but enshrining an organised opposition within it would render it inoperable.”

Or “Pete (Birmingham)”: “Does [Paris] really think that we would be a more coherent, united and effective organisation in this situation? The divisions in the CC would be a permanent feature and the whole party would experience the debilitating effect of this.” So the leadership must be monolithic. Does that apply then to all organisations and institutions? How about workers’ soviets? Would they be “inoperable” if they contained opposition groups?

“Simon (Huddersfield)” gives an example of how the current culture allows the leadership to push through changes. In September a party council - the delegate body that meets once or twice a year between conferences - agreed a document regarding the submission of motions to conference. “From now on,” says Simon, “a faction of members that remains a minority opinion in the branches will be denied the right to submit a motion to conference to be debated.”

Factions, of course, are only permitted in the three-month period before conference, which takes place at the beginning of January every year (in 2013 it will be held in London over the weekend of January 4-6). Simon says that the change “makes a mockery of the current rules on members being able to organise as a faction in the run-up to conference, in order to try to win conference to their position”.

Whatever you think about this, Simon certainly has a point when he writes: “… proposals on how conference is structured … or on how motions are submitted … should have been debated and voted on at conference, not a party council … attended by fewer delegates than attend conference, and at such short notice that only the delegates attending party council were sent the CC proposals to read before they were adopted.” So the right of factions to submit motions to conference was abolished without any discussion in the organisation as a whole.

Yet, as Simon points out, “Under the commissions system, a group of comrades can propose an ‘alternative commission’ to be voted on … can any group of like-minded delegates submit an alternative? Do we now have one rule for motions and another for commissions?” Commissions are “documents drawn up at the end of conference sessions which summarise the main strands of discussion and action to be taken”, writes national secretary Charlie Kimber in introducing conference procedure. He does indeed state that “if there is more than one point of view in the discussion, then there can be alternative commissions which are then voted on”.

So anything can be proposed by anyone from the conference floor without prior notice? Apparently. But in reality, of course, it will only be the leadership that will be in a position to do this.

Debate

The last thing the CC wants is real debate. So, for example, it writes in response to Ruth and Paris: “The call for more Internal Bulletins must at least be tempered by a concern to avoid creating an organisation more preoccupied with internal arguments than intervention, and where those comrades with the time to write for and read the extra IBs set the agenda for debate, rather than delegate meetings at party council and conference. Such collective discussion is ultimately a higher form of democracy than a series of individual contributions which may only haphazardly reflect the wider overall experiences of comrades.”

So it is actually better when delegates agree a proposal without having discussed it in advance, is it? Just like they did at the September party council. But aren’t those comrades “with the time to write for and read the extra IBs” also likely to be the ones with “the time” to go to conference in any case?

In case you have any doubt about the leadership’s contemptuous attitude to debate, here are the CC’s recommendations in relation to Socialist Worker Student Societies: “We want to roll out SWSS caucuses that are broader than just the SWP members: These should have a five-minute-long political introduction and then set out the political tasks. We will have to patiently explain why we do paper sales, use petitions, and involve ourselves in particular political activities.”

Yes, that’s right: five minutes for a “political introduction” and then straight on to the real “political tasks” like organising paper sales.

But it is not just students who should stop all this political discussion. “Penny (Edinburgh)” - a co-thinker of “Donny” - has a piece entitled ‘How small changes can make a difference to a branch’. She proudly announces that Edinburgh branch meetings have been reduced to one hour, 25 minutes. They must finish at 9pm: “Comrades who are parents, who have to get up for work early doors … who are disabled and who find sitting still for two hours draining/painful/impossible, can all find long meetings difficult. Shortening them is orientating on the working class.”

And Penny advises comrades in other towns and cities to follow suit: “The only items for the branch meeting agenda after the political lead-off and discussion are basically what we did last week (and how it went), plus what we are doing in the week to come and why. This doesn’t preclude in-depth political discussion and debate on items like UTR, etc.” Yes, the “in-depth” debate will be about why everyone should make sure they go to the next Unite the Resistance ‘conference’, I suppose.

But not to worry, there is always the branch committee, which Penny says had to be set up to deal with outstanding business and whose meetings “last on average 35 minutes”.

Everyone knows that too much thinking and debating is bad for you. That’s what the CC is there for, after all. Here is comrade Vernell again: “The calls for more theory articulated in some of the pre-conference bulletins reflect a gradualist approach to leadership and class struggle: first you get everyone in a room to debate and discuss our theory of working class struggle and trade unions. When everyone is clear and has the ‘correct’ understanding, then we go out in the field of struggle to implement this ‘correct’ understanding.”

Whatever happened to the dialectical relationship between theory and practice?

Not everyone is bludgeoned into submission though. “Tim (Bristol)” declares: “Internal Bulletins before party councils will revitalise that body, which has, at the moment, little value other than a forum where the CC can mobilise the party faithful.” But who said the CC wants it ‘revitalised’, Tim?

And “Ian (Manchester)” makes a reappearance to follow up his submission to IB No1. Having mentioned in passing those “backward ideas such as counterposing theory and activity”, he goes into abstract mode, being careful not to direct his criticisms to anyone in particular:

“A leadership that is over-reliant on a party ‘machine’ would tend to be highly protective of it. Anything or anyone they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as a threat to their control over it would elicit an exaggerated, almost paranoid, reaction. Instead of comradely and political debate there would be a closing of ranks and a desire to deal with any issues within the machine - ‘not in front of the children’.”

But thankfully, there is no such regime in today’s SWP. Or is there? Ian goes on: “This was the unhealthy party culture comrades experienced in the era of Rees, German and Bambery and which we have begun to correct. But let us not kid ourselves that the SWP is the ‘finished article’ of a revolutionary party - we have a lot of work to do!”

Honesty

In its reply to Ruth and Paris, the CC extols the virtues of an “honest analysis of our successes and failures” - and then in the very next paragraph declares: “The recent UTR national conference on November 17 was a significant success, with 1,000 in attendance.”

Even more “honest” is comrade “Sean” - he should know: he was one of the main speakers at the event: “The Unite the Resistance … conference … was a great success. The turnout surpassed most comrades’ expectations. Over 1,000 people attended - the majority, by some margin, were not members of the SWP.”

So a hall that officially “seats up to 1,000” and was only three-quarters full somehow had “over 1,000” people in it. What is more, most of them were not SWP members. In that case, the leadership’s all-out attempts to mobilise its own comrades were truly a dismal failure, weren’t they? Only 300-400 could be bothered to go along.

How apposite is the comment by “Anna and Sue (North London)” and “Regine (Central London)” in their piece on the women’s question: “As Lenin said, ‘Never lie to the class’ - this also means our own members.”

As an aside, it is in the context of mobilisations for the likes of UTR that comrade Davidson points to one of the SWP’s fundamental weaknesses: its inability to develop a coherent strategy resulting from its refusal to adopt any programme. He writes: “We have always refused to follow orthodox Trotskyist organisations in drawing up programmatic demands, transitional or otherwise. For much of our history this has been a defensible position, allowing the maximum tactical flexibility … But unconstrained manoeuvrability, like all forms of ‘stick-bending’, has come at a cost. To this day we tend to operate with a set of relatively short-term tactics.” And if they fail “this has no consequences or implications for our analysis, despite the significance we have previously ascribed to them. We simply move on to building for the next all-important demonstration or event. What is our strategy?”

The question of honesty also comes up in other contributions, such as ‘Building the resistance, building the unions’ by “Brian and Pete (Leeds and West Yorkshire)”. They contend: “… the SWP seriously failed to realise (or was insufficiently honest about) the extent and the speed of demoralisation [throughout the working class]. A tendency of misplaced triumphalism made it difficult for many members to be open about the difficulties they were having in re-invigorating any sense of resistance.”

(These two, by the way, also state: “… we have often tended … to repeat that this government is almost uniquely weak”. However, “it is quite probable that the present government could remain in office in some shape or form until May 2015”.)

Nowhere is the leadership’s dishonesty more apparent than on the question of membership figures. These must go up every year and anyone who has signed a membership application form within the last two years, irrespective of whether they have ever been seen or heard from since, must be counted as a member.

In IB No2 Paris called for this demoralising practice of servicing ‘members’ who have never been to a meeting or paid a penny in subs to be ended. But the CC indulges in more crazy contortions in twisting his words: “Paris … calls for more involvement by members in the party. However, it seems this will only apply to some members, since he proposes that the way to resolve what he rather insultingly calls the ‘low political level’ of too many members is to conduct a purge of the membership lists.”

I wonder why it is ‘insulting’ to say that the membership has a “low political level” - it is not as though they have much opportunity to develop their ideas through vigorous debate, is it? The CC also reprimands Paris for wanting to “exclude comrades with major family commitments or trade union responsibilities”. It alleges he also “ignores how sudden shifts can take place in comrades’ level of activity and involvement”. In fact “to reduce the party only to the ‘most active’ … would be to cut it off from much of its links to the wider working class and risk turning it into a sect existing in a vacuum.”

But they are arguing against things Paris did not say. On the one hand, there are inactive members who nevertheless will turn up to the odd event, help out in specific campaigns and make financial contributions, and, on the other, at least half of the SWP’s “registered members” do none of those things.

“Simon and Christine” from the membership office inform comrades that this “registered membership” stands at 7,597 - the SWP “recruited 890 people since this time last year”. But they assure the likes of Paris that “We have taken off 420 people from the lists this year.” That gives you some idea of the “membership” turnover. Presumably a similar number of ‘members’ are struck off every year. In other words, about half those ‘recruited’ do nothing more than pass through the SWP revolving door.

“Anne and Martin (North-West London)” state: “Based on the statistics of three London districts, we estimate there are just a few hundred comrades in the whole country involved in the ‘effective intervention’”. The CC’s answer is to launch yet another “subs drive”, whereby the minority of activists are expected to spend hours and hours telephoning, emailing or personally calling on those elusive “registered members” - to very little avail.

As “Tim (Bristol)” points out, “Continued massaging of membership figures and branch numbers must end, and the overreliance on the central office needs to stop”.

[Q]

SWP Pre-conference Bulletins 2012

In the run up to the annual conference of the Socialist Workers Party, three Pre-conference bulletins have been distributed to SWP members. Comrades may have read the commentary in the current issue of the Weekly Worker, where Peter Manson notes that the final bulletin "has seen a concerted counterattack led by the central committee against comrades calling for greater democracy, openness and honesty within the organisation"

Debates on the left should be fought out openly, for the mutual benefit of all. As a service to those comrades and the whole workers' movement, we publish all three bulletins here.


PreConf_Bulletin_i_Oct_2012.pdf (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/swpinternalbulletins/PreConf_Bulletin_i_Oct_2012.pdf)
PreConf_Bulletin_ii_Nov_2012.pdf (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/swpinternalbulletins/PreConf_Bulletin_ii_Nov_2012.pdf)
PreConf_Bulletin_iii_Dec_2012.pdf (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/swpinternalbulletins/PreConf_Bulletin_iii_Dec_2012.pdf)

[Sasha]

Whoohaa, the swp afraid of autonomist entryism? :lol:
The irony and the delusions..

[ed miliband]

i don't know whether i find the swp or the weekly worker funnier:


I cannot believe that these comrades seriously believe that such proposals, which in reality ought to be uncontroversial in a genuinely democratic-centralist organisation, are inspired by impulses that are anarchistic, social democratic - or both.

both "anarchistic" and "social democratic"? nuts.

[black magick hustla]

idk why some people find interesting a rag that amounts to gossip about irrelevant sects. it has about the same value as a magazine about anime clubs and the drama inside them

[Flying Purple People Eater]

idk why some people find interesting a rag that amounts to gossip about irrelevant sects. it has about the same value as a magazine about anime clubs and the drama inside them
The irony of posting this on a leftist internet forum.

[black magick hustla]

The irony of posting this on a leftist internet forum.

:shrugs:, i am more interested about discussing class struggle and communism in general in this forum than specific groups, especially when they are tiny groups.

the point i am trying to make is that there is a specific type of sect that owes its existence to feeding off the drama of other irrelevant sects and it''s somewhat a vicious cycle cuz' it makes those folks spiral into even more irrelevancy.

[Devrim]

idk why some people find interesting a rag that amounts to gossip about irrelevant sects. it has about the same value as a magazine about anime clubs and the drama inside them

I didn't find it interesting, certainly not nearly interesting enough to bother to read it. In fact I only looked at this thread because you had posted, I am sitting at home bored on my day off, and your posts often bring a smile to my face. I know what it is though. It is the CPGB's annual denouncement of the SWP being undemocratic in its pre-conference season.

Though I imagine it is a pretty boring read, there is a consistency, and internal logic about the CPGB. They are a very small group, a few dozen at most, trying to pull people towards them from a comparatively larger group, which possibly has up to about 2,000 real members. This is the reason that they come across like a gossip-rag. It is what Trotsky called the 'primitive accumulation of cadres'. It does have its own logic (n.b. saying I understand it doesn't mean I agree with it in any way).

Devrim

[BOZG]

I didn't find it interesting, certainly not nearly interesting enough to bother to read it. In fact I only looked at this thread because you had posted, I am sitting at home bored on my day off, and your posts often bring a smile to my face. I know what it is though. It is the CPGB's annual denouncement of the SWP being undemocratic in its pre-conference season.

Though I imagine it is a pretty boring read, there is a consistency, and internal logic about the CPGB. They are a very small group, a few dozen at most, trying to pull people towards them from a comparatively larger group, which possibly has up to about 2,000 real members. This is the reason that they come across like a gossip-rag. It is what Trotsky called the 'primitive accumulation of cadres'. It does have its own logic (n.b. saying I understand it doesn't mean I agree with it in any way).

Devrim

Indeed. The perspective of the CPGB is that there will be some form of later revolutionary regroupment and the bulk of those forces will come from the SWP, hence their obsession.

[ed miliband]

idk why some people find interesting a rag that amounts to gossip about irrelevant sects. it has about the same value as a magazine about anime clubs and the drama inside them

they find it interesting on here because dnz likes it.

when i worked in a left-wing bookstore there would be regulars who'd come in and but it week after week, despite having otherwise solid politics. it basically functions as a gossip rag, yeah.

[Die Neue Zeit]

both "anarchistic" and "social democratic"? nuts.

It's possible, actually and unfortunately: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/naomi-klein-as-anarcho-liberal/

[Android]

They are a very small group, a few dozen at most, trying to pull people towards them from a comparatively larger group, which possibly has up to about 2,000 real members.
On this, 'a few dozen' is even generous in my opinion. My impression of the group is that it is in decline, a lot of the younger members they recruited during the mid-2000s (anti-war movement generation types) have dropped out, are merely passive supporters, have left or been driven out.

Although they have some people who write for their paper who are not member, and never likely to become. Mostly older people who have been through left groups and focus on less ideological stuff (e.g. individuals involved with the journal Revolutionary History) or are academics.

In terms of why they pursue this approach, I think they are genuine in their commitment to left unity as they conceive it. And so I don't think it is consciously about 'vanguard of the vanguard', 'primitive accumulation of cadre' a la Spart style. Obviously as a group I assume they will be happy to pick people up along the way, as is the way with such groups, otherwise there survival is put into question, eventually.

[Ravachol]

It's possible, actually and unfortunately: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/naomi-klein-as-anarcho-liberal/

If you think Naomi Klein is an anarchist you've got serious issues. Who even believes that?

[black magick hustla]

If you think Naomi Klein is an anarchist you've got serious issues. Who even believes that?

dude, and then i got half of the ba on my back for "trolling him". dnz says infuriating shit all the time and is the equivalent of a mild mannered troll. between left communists being bakuninists, anarchists being kleins and hooligans, and the iww being made of slum proletarians, wow

[Die Neue Zeit]

If you think Naomi Klein is an anarchist you've got serious issues. Who even believes that?

That's not the point behind the polemic (polemic, not "mild mannered troll"). It's some weird, chic combination of left-liberal or soc-dem policy planks and real or perceived anarchist tactics.

Oh, and I see someone here is really putting words in my mouth, confusing lil' ole' me with a late 19th-century American Marxist.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

That's not the point behind the polemic (polemic, not "mild mannered troll"). It's some weird, chic combination of left-liberal or soc-dem policy planks and real or perceived anarchist tactics.

Oh, and I see someone here is really putting words in my mouth, confusing lil' ole' me with a late 19th-century American Marxist.

I don't understand why, apart from wanting to slander someoone's name, you'd want to pigeon hole somebody who has a variety of tactics/ideas to their name. It's typical of the CPGB to do this and, as Devrim said, I can understand why they do it, but it's not hugely helpful.

I get the impression that the CPGB want to pigeon hole everyone else into neat, dis-united holes and themselves into the hole of 'left unity'. Unfortunately for them, reality is a lot more complicated than calling someone a social democratic anarchist. The success of the CPGB is probably better testament to this than any words I could use.:lol:

[Devrim]

left communists being bakuninists,

I thought we were the supposed to be the Hegelian left or some other such nonsense. Maybe I misread it. I only skim through his posts, very quickly.


the iww being made of slum proletarians

I missed this one all together.

[Devrim]

On this, 'a few dozen' is even generous in my opinion. My impression of the group is that it is in decline, a lot of the younger members they recruited during the mid-2000s (anti-war movement generation types) have dropped out, are merely passive supporters, have left or been driven out.

You'd be better informed than me about this. I was actually thinking of using a couple of dozen, but I imagined they were a few more than that. Having said that it is pretty amazing that they manage to keep a weekly paper together.


In terms of why they pursue this approach, I think they are genuine in their commitment to left unity as they conceive it. And so I don't think it is consciously about 'vanguard of the vanguard', 'primitive accumulation of cadre' a la Spart style. Obviously as a group I assume they will be happy to pick people up along the way, as is the way with such groups, otherwise there survival is put into question, eventually.

Yes, I think they are genuine about it, and certainly different from the Sparts. BOZG put it like this earlier:


Indeed. The perspective of the CPGB is that there will be some form of later revolutionary regroupment and the bulk of those forces will come from the SWP, hence their obsession.

I think this is about right. Like you say they are genuinely committed to left unity. ON the way they need to pick up people, this is still the primitive accumulation of cadre just without all the Spart shouting.

That though relates to how they see the party as being formed. For the Sparts it is about convincing people (often very loudly) that the OSG's are not really revolutionary, and that everybody should join them. They want people to break with these groups, individually. While the CPGB obviously want people to join them, their strategy seems to be more based around pulling organisations or factions of organisations towards them, not individuals.

They have certainly come along way from 'Yeni Yol'.

Devrim

[BOZG]

They have certainly come along way from 'Yeni Yol'.

Devrim

Yeni Yol? Just finding a lot of Turkish links.

[Devrim]

Yeni Yol? Just finding a lot of Turkish links.

Yes, you would. It is the name of the faction of the Turkish Communist Party where the CPGB's roots come from. Literally it means new road/way/path.

Devrim

[l'Enfermé]

If you think Naomi Klein is an anarchist you've got serious issues. Who even believes that?
If you payed any attention you would have noticed that nobody in this thread thinks that Naomi Klein is an anarchist.

[The Idler]

What was the perspective of Yeni Yol and how did it differ from the current CPGB?

[Devrim]

What was the perspective of Yeni Yol and how did it differ from the current CPGB?

In their early years what we now call the CPGB was a faction in the real CPGB called 'the Leninist'. They have just put all the old copies of their newspaper on line so it is possible to look at the developments yourself.

Basically though they originated as a faction of the TKP, and have done about turns on many issues. Originally they were Stalinists.

Devrim

[Ravachol]

That's not the point behind the polemic (polemic, not "mild mannered troll"). It's some weird, chic combination of left-liberal or soc-dem policy planks and real or perceived anarchist tactics.


Yeah so if that's not the point of the polemic, why post it in response to ed calling out the fact that there's no such thing as being an anarchist and a social-democrat? Sure, there's folks out there who are liberals who are called anarchists by some media pundits or college kids. Thing is, they aren't and I would suppose everyone on this board at least is familiar enough with radical political theory to note that.


If you payed any attention you would have noticed that nobody in this thread thinks that Naomi Klein is an anarchist.



both "anarchistic" and "social democratic"? nuts.

It's possible, actually and unfortunately: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/naomi-klein-as-anarcho-liberal/

[Android]

You'd be better informed than me about this. I was actually thinking of using a couple of dozen, but I imagined they were a few more than that. Having said that it is pretty amazing that they manage to keep a weekly paper together.

They are about 15-20 active members, predominantly based in London. They have individuals members in some places like South Wales and Sheffield. But they don't really have a functioning group outside of London, after they lost their group in Manchester recently. And nearly all their activity is consumed with producing the paper, as you'd expect for such a small group, in essence they are group based around a paper.

As far as how they manage to produce a weekly paper. It is noticeable that the same people write for it every week, sometimes under different names. And as I indicated they have a number of people on their periphery who they can draw on in order to write for them. Plus, they have a niche position in the left as go-to-place for what is happening in left groups, when there is something occurring.


I think this is about right. Like you say they are genuinely committed to left unity. On the way they need to pick up people, this is still the primitive accumulation of cadre just without all the Spart shouting.

I agree. The two approaches - genuine commitment and 'vanguard of the vanguard' style work - are often linked, was the point I was making. Since there is some of the latter in their work, albeit different to the Sparts, due to a different set of perspectives.


That though relates to how they see the party as being formed. For the Sparts it is about convincing people (often very loudly) that the OSG's are not really revolutionary, and that everybody should join them. They want people to break with these groups, individually. While the CPGB obviously want people to join them, their strategy seems to be more based around pulling organisations or factions of organisations towards them, not individuals.

Yeah that sums them up quite well. A related point that people who are sympathetic in some degree often make is that their approach is aimed entirely at the leadership of left groups, not their rank-and-file since they have a odd thing where they purposely state that left unity will have to be built from above, through agreement across groups.


I thought we were the supposed to be the Hegelian left or some other such nonsense. Maybe I misread it. I only skim through his posts, very quickly.

I very rarely skim his stuff it takes being tedious and boring to the extreme. We are both in his eyes. The 'hegelian' bit relates to distinctions between different trends in classical social democracy in terms of theory made by CPGB writer Mike Macnair (academic at Oxford Uni, ex-Trot, IMG). And the latter, he traces a meandering line from Bakunin to syndicalists like Sorel to Luxemburg to left-communists, arguing the link is a spontaneist/economistic politics, and ties it into the former by arguing Hegelian Marxism provides the theoretical substantiation of it. Something like that anyway. I think it is crap, but there you go.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Back in the 19th century the socialist movement was built by forging links with working class struggles through actual worker. Both in the USA, the UK and probably elsewhere 21st century sectarianism seems to be focused on "primitive accumulation of cadres" (Trotsky always knew how to turn a phrase), theoretical duels, and the maintenance of ones fiefdom. How can we ever revive our movement if we eschew links with the working class in favor of these narrow pursuits?:confused:

[l'Enfermé]

Comrade:

What was said is that her tactics are anarchistic(a fetish for "small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives", an "an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action", and so on), not that she is an Anarchist.

[Q]

What was the perspective of Yeni Yol and how did it differ from the current CPGB?

Jack Conrad explains the roots in this video (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/videos/30-years-since-the-launch-of-the-leninist-faction), if you're interested.

[Radical Dandy]

Comrade:

What was said is that her tactics are anarchistic(a fetish for "small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives", an "an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action", and so on), not that she is an Anarchist.

Except that there is nothing 'anarchistic' about that.

[GoddessCleoLover]

While this small group attempts to create a tempest in a teapot what are they doing to build links with the working class?

[Ravachol]

Comrade:

What was said is that her tactics are anarchistic(a fetish for "small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives", an "an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action", and so on), not that she is an Anarchist.

How are those tactics 'anarchist' at all? And how can one adhere to anarchist tactics, without being an anarchist (or vise-versa)? Its a bullshit attempt to try and conflate anarchism with liberals.

[Android]

While this small group attempts to create a tempest in a teapot what are they doing to build links with the working class?
Nothing, and thy are quite assertive about that. As they see it as wholly premature. It can wait until left unity is arrived, but then you'd be forgiven for thinking that, their guiding motto is 'lefty unity - the rest is nice, but it can wait'.

As they ridicule approaches that emphasise orienting to the class, they say that you should orient to the top to the class, i.e. the left, not the mass at the bottom. I have heard CPGB members argue that point nearly verbatim in that fashion.

[ind_com]

Back in the 19th century the socialist movement was built by forging links with working class struggles through actual worker. Both in the USA, the UK and probably elsewhere 21st century sectarianism seems to be focused on "primitive accumulation of cadres" (Trotsky always knew how to turn a phrase), theoretical duels, and the maintenance of ones fiefdom. How can we ever revive our movement if we eschew links with the working class in favor of these narrow pursuits?:confused:

What these groups are engaging in is just ego-struggle, not class-struggle or line-struggle.

[blake 3:17]

Whoohaa, the swp afraid of autonomist entryism? :lol:
The irony and the delusions..

Claire Solomon was suspended and expelled a couple of years ago for some kind of autonomist heresy. This was at a time when she was being recognized as a really important radical leader. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot.


I think the slate system is a real wrecker for internal democracy, especially if it's "all in". It factionalizes any debate over a single principle or policy, which is just not helpful and leads to unnecessary splits.

[ed miliband]

Claire Solomon was suspended and expelled a couple of years ago for some kind of autonomist heresy. This was at a time when she was being recognized as a really important radical leader. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot.


I think the slate system is a real wrecker for internal democracy, especially if it's "all in". It factionalizes any debate over a single principle or policy, which is just not helpful and leads to unnecessary splits.

what are you talking about? clare solomon was never "recognized as a really important radical leader", for god's sake.

her greatest moment was being caught on camera shouting "i'm in charge, this is my protest" at a bunch of students who dared to act under their own initiative. solomon represents everything that is atrocious about student activism and the left in general: an awful careerist with illusions of being some great revolutionary.

[Sasha]

Claire Solomon was suspended and expelled a couple of years ago for some kind of autonomist heresy. This was at a time when she was being recognized as a really important radical leader. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot.

my post was mostly a reference to their own policy of entryi'sm which is fundamental of the SWPs modus operandi, something that was a constant problem when we with AFA tried to work together with IS (the dutch SWP) members in topic based campaigns, while the majority of the members where all cool the leadership was almost always only in it to win new members and further their own career and couldnt give a rats arse about actually doing something seriously against fascism and racism.
Good thing about this was that we in the autonomist movement actually gained allot of good activists who deserted the IS exactly because of this. The most notable a good friend of mine who left the IS in the middle of the batle of genua who couldnt believe they still tried to flog their newspapers in clouds of teargas while they where getting shot at with live ammo. he didnt even take the IS bus back home even though he had an return ticket.... :D

[Die Neue Zeit]

Yeah so if that's not the point of the polemic, why post it in response to ed calling out the fact that there's no such thing as being an anarchist and a social-democrat? Sure, there's folks out there who are liberals who are called anarchists by some media pundits or college kids. Thing is, they aren't and I would suppose everyone on this board at least is familiar enough with radical political theory to note that.

It's about tactics and strategy, not the political positions being supported by those. Comrade l'Enferme elaborated above.


Yeah that sums them up quite well. A related point that people who are sympathetic in some degree often make is that their approach is aimed entirely at the leadership of left groups, not their rank-and-file since they have a odd thing where they purposely state that left unity will have to be built from above, through agreement across groups.

The position is that only the existing left can rebuilt the worker movement. By "existing left," they also include those sympathizers who would be way more politically active in the presence of left unity.

I guess synergy, the sum being greater than its parts, is a practical concept you don't understand.


The 'hegelian' bit relates to distinctions between different trends in classical social democracy in terms of theory made by CPGB writer Mike Macnair (academic at Oxford Uni, ex-Trot, IMG). And the latter, he traces a meandering line from Bakunin to syndicalists like Sorel to Luxemburg to left-communists, arguing the link is a spontaneist/economistic politics, and ties it into the former by arguing Hegelian Marxism provides the theoretical substantiation of it. Something like that anyway. I think it is crap, but there you go.

Neither you nor your colleagues have articulated anything to refute this "meandering," nay well-researched, link.


Nothing, and thy are quite assertive about that. As they see it as wholly premature. It can wait until left unity is arrived, but then you'd be forgiven for thinking that, their guiding motto is 'lefty unity - the rest is nice, but it can wait'.

Go back above to my "existing left" and synergy remarks.

[Ravachol]

It's about tactics and strategy, not the political positions being supported by those. Comrade l'Enferme elaborated above.


Reading up exactly 6 posts will show you I pointed out he didn't. There's nothing among what Naomi Klein said/says that amounts to 'anarchist tactics' (as if there even is such a thing in itself).

[black magick hustla]

Neither you nor your colleagues have articulated anything to refute this "meandering," nay well-researched, link.


yep. fractions that originated in the communist internationale and have their origins in centralized, marxist organizations, have an organic link to bakunin's faction in 1873 madrid. also you should add that obama proved the poverty of abrahamlincolnism

[l'Enfermé]

Reading up exactly 6 posts will show you I pointed out he didn't. There's nothing among what Naomi Klein said/says that amounts to 'anarchist tactics' (as if there even is such a thing in itself).
Anarchists don't have tactics? Sure they do. Different types of Anarchist have different tactics, and Klein borrows her tactics from the type of anarchist that has an inexploicable fetish for "small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives" and thinks that lifestyle-choice=political action.

Why do you insist on refusing to understand this? :(

[l'Enfermé]

How are those tactics 'anarchist' at all? And how can one adhere to anarchist tactics, without being an anarchist (or vise-versa)? Its a bullshit attempt to try and conflate anarchism with liberals.
You can adhere to Anarchist tactics without being an Anarchist. You can adhere to Marxist tactics without being a Marxist also, just look at all the Marxist-derived "Alternative Culture" stuff Hamas and Hezbollah have got going on. What about all the non-Anarchist Black Blockers? Are they, then, in reality, not non-Anarchist but actually Anarchists because they adopt Anarchist tactics?

Just stop.

[ed miliband]

You can adhere to Anarchist tactics without being an Anarchist. You can adhere to Marxist tactics without being a Marxist also, just look at all the Marxist-derived "Alternative Culture" stuff Hamas and Hezbollah have got going on. What about all the non-Anarchist Black Blockers? Are they, then, in reality, not non-Anarchist but actually Anarchists because they adopt Anarchist tactics?

Just stop.

'black bloc' isn't an anarchist tactic tho, it emerged from the german 'autonomen' movement. there is absolutely nothing whatsoever intrinsically anarchist about it.

[Ravachol]

Anarchists don't have tactics? Sure they do. Different types of Anarchist have different tactics, and Klein borrows her tactics from the type of anarchist that has an inexploicable fetish for "small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives" and thinks that lifestyle-choice=political action.

Why do you insist on refusing to understand this? :(

Because it's utter bullshit. Tactics aren't inherently 'anarchist'. Is syndicalism inherently anarchist? Didn't think so, yet there's an entire strategical current within anarchism which focuses on it.

Its only possible to see "Small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives" as inherently 'anarchist' when you have a fetish for "Mass, national, permanent, centralized initiatives" and counter-pose everything to that fetish.


You can adhere to Anarchist tactics without being an Anarchist. You can adhere to Marxist tactics without being a Marxist also, just look at all the Marxist-derived "Alternative Culture" stuff Hamas and Hezbollah have got going on.


Dude claiming 'alternative culture' is a "Marxist" thing is stupid and you know it, the whole principle of politically oriented alternative cultures has shown up throughout history long before the working class was even on the scene. Besides, how is the tactic still 'Marxist' but apparently no longer functioning in a "Marxist" fashion when applied by "Non-Marxists"?



What about all the non-Anarchist Black Blockers? Are they, then, in reality, not non-Anarchist but actually Anarchists because they adopt Anarchist tactics?
Just stop.

lolwat. What I tried to point out was the silliness of something like 'anarchist tactics'. The black bloc isn't an anarchist tactic. Neither in practice, nor today nor historically (it originated largely with the German autonomen who were initially very close to the anti-revisionist K-groups).

Stop trying to conflate tactics with ideology in order to tar either with the brush of your choice.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Nothing, and thy are quite assertive about that. As they see it as wholly premature. It can wait until left unity is arrived, but then you'd be forgiven for thinking that, their guiding motto is 'lefty unity - the rest is nice, but it can wait'.

As they ridicule approaches that emphasise orienting to the class, they say that you should orient to the top to the class, i.e. the left, not the mass at the bottom. I have heard CPGB members argue that point nearly verbatim in that fashion.

In other words they believe in the "primitive accumulation of cadres"? Seems to be a rather parasitic approach to the class struggle.:rolleyes:

[l'Enfermé]

'black bloc' isn't an anarchist tactic tho, it emerged from the german 'autonomen' movement. there is absolutely nothing whatsoever intrinsically anarchist about it.
Good point. I like this even better for my argument, actually. Are the Anarchists that use the autonomen BB tactic not really Anarchists, but in reality, autonomen?


Because it's utter bullshit. Tactics aren't inherently 'anarchist'. Is syndicalism inherently anarchist? Didn't think so, yet there's an entire strategical current within anarchism which focuses on it.
Syndicalism is inherently Anarchist. The ideology originates in Proudhon's disciples and the IWMA's Anarchist Jura Federation. You know, the Proudhon who was the first to formulate Anarchist doctrine(or, the first to formulate Anarchist doctrine according to the official narrative, I believe Proudhon devoted only a few pages of Qu'est-ce que la propriété? to Anarchism, I haven't read in a long time, Stirner's exposition of Anarchist theory in The Ego and Its Own is far more complete, hence Stirner has a better claim to being the father of Anarchist theory)



Its only possible to see "Small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives" as inherently 'anarchist' when you have a fetish for "Mass, national, permanent, centralized initiatives" and counter-pose everything to that fetish.

The author of that Jacobin Mag article has no "fetish" for "mass, national, permanent, centralized initiative". They are not even a Marxist as far as I can tell. If you didn't bother reading it why are you even wasting our time?



Dude claiming 'alternative culture' is a "Marxist" thing is stupid and you know it, the whole principle of politically oriented alternative cultures has shown up throughout history long before the working class was even on the scene. Besides, how is the tactic still 'Marxist' but apparently no longer functioning in a "Marxist" fashion when applied by "Non-Marxists"?
Alternative culture based around the political-party-institution is a Marxist invention.



lolwat. What I tried to point out was the silliness of something like 'anarchist tactics'. The black bloc isn't an anarchist tactic. Neither in practice, nor today nor historically (it originated largely with the German autonomen who were initially very close to the anti-revisionist K-groups).
See above.


Stop trying to conflate tactics with ideology in order to tar either with the brush of your choice.
I don't even know what this means.

[blake 3:17]

Re: Solomon -- seems kind of effed up to kick out a member who's just had a half page interview in the Guardian.

Re: Klein -- she's gotten waaaaaaaaay better. The Sock Doctrine is a really great book, she's been very of various causes, very good on indigenous rights in Ontario, great at the G20 when the folks of her caste were trying desperately to distance themselves from the Black Bloc (but really any form of direct action or illegal tactic), good on BDS.

I am so tired of the Marxist sect model making itself ineffective and driving people away from Left politics in general.

[Ravachol]

Good point. I like this even better for my argument, actually. Are the Anarchists that use the autonomen BB tactic not really Anarchists, but in reality, autonomen?


No, because your weird insistence that it is pure tactics that define one's political understanding is bollocks. I know anarchists and I know autonomen and their political perspectives diverge quite a lot, yet I've seen both participate in the same BB.




Syndicalism is inherently Anarchist.


Thanks for proving you don't know what you're talking about...



The ideology originates in Proudhon's disciples and the IWMA's Anarchist Jura Federation. You know, the Proudhon who was the first to formulate Anarchist doctrine(or, the first to formulate Anarchist doctrine according to the official narrative, I believe Proudhon devoted only a few pages of Qu'est-ce que la propriété? to Anarchism, I haven't read in a long time, Stirner's exposition of Anarchist theory in The Ego and Its Own is far more complete, hence Stirner has a better claim to being the father of Anarchist theory)


What are you talking about? Unlike some fantasy land of bearded demi-gods, there isn't some primordial 'father of anarchist theory' from which all fruit springs. No anarchist today (and for quite a long time, actually) takes Proudhon seriously. You lumping together Stirner with Proudhon and seeing no contradiction there (nor between Stirner and, say oh well, anarcho-syndicalism) goes to show...

Besides, Proudhon does not have much to do with the actual origins of Syndicalism, which do not lie in dusty theoretical tomes (as per your idealist vision of the world) but within the historical reality of the class struggle of the period.



The author of that Jacobin Mag article has no "fetish" for "mass, national, permanent, centralized initiative". They are not even a Marxist as far as I can tell. If you didn't bother reading it why are you even wasting our time?


Because you're spouting nonsense. I mean, sure, go on claiming Klein's positions/advocated tactics are 'inherently anarchist' or whatever but don't come crying when you make a fool out of yourself.



Alternative culture based around the political-party-institution is a Marxist invention.


Good for you boy! :rolleyes:

[Die Neue Zeit]

The author of that Jacobin Mag article has no "fetish" for "mass, national, permanent, centralized initiative". They are not even a Marxist as far as I can tell. If you didn't bother reading it why are you even wasting our time?

Actually, Bhaskar is a Marxist, but the magazine has a radical left line in general.

[ed miliband]

Re: Solomon -- seems kind of effed up to kick out a member who's just had a half page interview in the Guardian.


sorry, with all due respect i don't think you know what you are talking about.

that interview with the guardian was carried out over a year after she was kicked out the swp. don't see why they'd have a problem with any of their lot getting in the guardian, especially since big man callinicos occasionally writes pieces for it.

she got kicked out for some factional issues or something, and that's exactly what you can expect joining an organisation like the swp.

[Q]

And the saddening saga continues (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/943/swp-expelled-before-conference-begins). Two of the oppositionists mentioned in the OP are already expelled, a few weeks before the conference is due to take place, for 'outrageous' motions such as that "political differences should be openly acknowledged, with the debates open to the party" and criticising the “top-down style of leadership from the central committee and a lack of participation by the membership in party democracy”...


Commenting on the contributions from a minority of Socialist Workers Party comrades in the second of this year’s Pre-conference Bulletins, I wrote: “It is most encouraging that these … comrades … are clear-sighted and courageous enough to make such far-reaching proposals - proposals aimed at transforming the SWP into a genuinely democratic-centralist force, capable of playing a leading role in the struggle for the mass party we so desperately need”. I concluded: “It remains to be seen for how long they would be tolerated if their ideas began to make headway” (‘An anatomical investigation’, November 8).

Unfortunately, however, even before those ideas have had a chance to make such headway, the central committee has responded in the only way it knows: by summarily expelling two of the comrades who had written such powerful criticisms, together with two others who are alleged to be involved in “secret factionalism” alongside them.

The four expelled members are Paris Thompson (Leeds), Tim Nelson (Bristol), Charlotte Bence (London) and Adam Marks (London) - the first two had contributions published in the Internal Bulletins, as the documents are known. Ironically, temporary factions are permitted during the three-month pre-conference period and we are in such a period right now (the 2013 SWP conference will be held in London over the weekend of January 4-6). But the SWP constitution stipulates that the central committee must be notified of their formation in a document signed by “at least 30 members of the party”.

According to the constitution, “A faction will be given reasonable facilities to argue its point of view and distribute its documents. These must be circulated through the national office, to ensure that all members have the chance to consider them. Debate continues until the party at a special or annual conference reaches a decision on the disputed question. Permanent or secret factions are not allowed.”

I understand that the charge relates to communications exchanged among the four via social networking sites. I say ‘charge’, but in the SWP there is no such thing as ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Members can be instantly expelled without the accused being given an opportunity to state their case, literally at the whim of the CC or even the national secretary. I hear that the four are attempting to mount a campaign within the organisation in the hope that their case will be taken up at conference, and that they intend to appeal to the disputes committee - the body elected by conference, which for some reason always seems to uphold CC decisions.

It is clear that this rule serves only to prevent members from exchanging views, so as to prevent any effective opposition to the leadership from emerging. All horizontal communication must take place through official structures - branch meetings, district aggregates and national delegate gatherings, including ‘party councils’ as well as conferences. In addition, discussion documents from individuals and groups of members are restricted to the three IBs published in October, November and December each year.

But how are such groups of members supposed to organise their submissions in the first place? How are they supposed to know which other comrades agree with them, apart from those in their own branch, for example? In other words, the process leading to the formation of an officially recognised national faction before conference must itself involve the risk of being charged with ‘secret factionalism’ - if the CC decides to interpret your efforts in that way, of course.

It is notable that the only recognised temporary faction in the recent history of the SWP was the misnamed Left Platform, organised by deposed national secretary John Rees in 2009, with the support of 64 members across the country. Of course, comrade Rees was able to make use of the numerous contacts he had officially collated and knew exactly who would support him. In his case the minimum of 30 signatures could be rapidly obtained. But how are less prominent members to do that? The very act of canvassing for support will leave them open to accusations of factionalising - that surely is the conclusion to be drawn from these latest expulsions.

What is the CC worried about? A handful of comrades exchange views in the run-up to conference and some get their branches to propose critical motions. What is the problem? It is not as though oppositionists have ever been able to come near to winning a vote - the Left Platform was trounced at the January 2010 conference. The CC’s control is so overbearing that it dominates regional meetings to select delegates and the overwhelming majority attending conference unquestioningly accept the leadership’s recommendations.

Of course, a genuinely democratic-centralist organisation would positively encourage members to express their views, relishing the opportunity to strengthen the group’s fighting capacity through deepening its collective understanding. Neither can the ideas proposed be described as retrogressive in any way. In fact for the most part they appear to be useful and constructive proposals for change.

For example, comrade Thompson, writing as “Paris (Leeds and West Yorkshire)” in IB No2 (only the first name of contributors is given for ‘security reasons’), pointed to the CC’s dishonesty in constantly inflating “registered membership” figures by including everyone who has filled in an application to join over the last two years. He commented: “It is well known that the majority of people on the lists are not members (many never were), and that it is easier to squeeze blood from a stone than getting people taken off. These lists are then used as a basis for an assessment of our organisation’s size, which is clearly going to be completely distorted.”

The motion proposed by comrade Thompson contained proposals which must have had CC members trembling with rage, representing as they did a revolution in SWP culture: “Political differences should be openly acknowledged, with the debates open to the party. Different political tendencies should be represented on the CC, not suppressed behind a veil of ‘unity’. This would be an important step to fostering a culture of open and honest debate within the party.”

In comrade Thompson’s view, “the democratic aspect of a revolutionary party is not an added extra, but an absolutely integral element … The complete freedom of exchange of ideas and criticism in the first instance, and the absolute unity in action once a decision has been reached, remains the clearest and best way of organising a revolutionary working class organisation.”

The comrade concluded by stressing the connection between democracy and effectiveness: “Taken overall, far from the organisation being one of controversy and debate, most comrades are politically under-confident to raise criticism, unused to the rigour of constructive debate and argument, and the overall political level remains very low.”

Writing in IB No3 was a certain Tim (Bristol), who I assume is Tim Nelson. His piece, headed ‘Ending substitutionism’, like comrade Thompson’s submission criticised the “top-down style of leadership from the central committee and a lack of participation by the membership in party democracy”. During the anti-war upsurge of the last decade the SWP had adapted to “movementism”, where “we dissolved into the movement and neglected the building of a revolutionary party” and “our apparatus, as a result, had to substitute itself for the membership”.

He continued: “The apparatus, becoming used to the necessity of substituting itself for the membership, can become a potentially conservative bloc. A virtue is made out of a necessity, and the self-organised activity of the membership can become viewed with suspicion. This can lead to a top-down, anti-democratic view of party structure, which can become extremely damaging, particularly when the movement begins to come out of a downturn.”

Adam Marks had previously made similar criticisms in relation to Respect. The leadership had used the metaphor of “concentric circles” to describe the relationship between the “revolutionary party” and the Respect “united front of a special type” - with the SWP at the centre, of course. Comrade Marks had witheringly pointed to the vacuity of the metaphor: “We ‘build’ the circle and then what? Does one circle expand in relation to the others? Does Respect grow into a mass party and we sink our roots into it, or does the SWP build itself and Respect fall away like scaffolding?” (IB No2, November 2007).

While comrade Marks, like Charlotte Bence, did not contribute to this year’s IBs, you can see how his disquiet with the SWP leadership’s bureaucratic-centralist method and practice might have overlapped with those of the others. But so what? Any constructive critique can only benefit from interchange with others of like mind - and with those who disagree. It is perfectly natural, and desirable, for comrades to engage in such interchange, whether or not what results is labelled a faction.

That is why it is vital for healthy forces in the SWP to forthrightly demand the immediate reinstatement of the four expelled comrades - and the withdrawal of sanctions against those like “Justin (Cambridge)”, who tells his story in IB No2 (see ‘An anatomical investigation’, November 8). This is not the first time such cynical action has been taken in the run-up to conference. But it should be a matter of principle that disciplinary measures should be avoided if at all possible in the pre-conference period. What makes it even worse is the fact that the CC has not even bothered to inform the membership as a whole - through its weekly Party Notes, for example - that it has taken such drastic, unwarranted and anti-democratic steps.

Instead of taking the usual form of a series of tame rallies, the SWP conference ought to see a full and honest political debate. The bureaucratic-centralist ban on the right of members to form permanent or semi-permanent factions must be ended by delegates. In truth it is an important means by which the only permitted permanent faction - which goes by the name of ‘central committee’ - ensures its own total control.

[black magick hustla]

Syndicalism is inherently Anarchist. The ideology originates in Proudhon's disciples and the IWMA's Anarchist Jura Federation. You know, the Proudhon who was the first to formulate Anarchist doctrine(or, the first to formulate Anarchist doctrine according to the official narrative, I believe Proudhon devoted only a few pages of Qu'est-ce que la propriété? to Anarchism, I haven't read in a long time, Stirner's exposition of Anarchist theory in The Ego and Its Own is far more complete, hence Stirner has a better claim to being the father of Anarchist theory)

And this is the misery of the so called "orthodox marxism". The movements of the class have to be the brainchild of some great genius. Rather than tracing syndicalism to the intense and organic union struggles that emerged in the 19th century, they must be the brainchild of some proudhon.

[l'Enfermé]

No, because your weird insistence that it is pure tactics that define one's political understanding is bollocks. I know anarchists and I know autonomen and their political perspectives diverge quite a lot, yet I've seen both participate in the same BB.
What insistence? I never said that it's "pure tactics" that define one's "political understanding". If you're not even gonna bother reading this thread maybe you shouldn't participate in it.



Thanks for proving you don't know what you're talking about...

Syndicalism originated in the Anarchist Fédération jurassienne.



What are you talking about? Unlike some fantasy land of bearded demi-gods,
Fantasy land of bearded demi-gods? I'm not even going to try to understand what you mean.


there isn't some primordial 'father of anarchist theory' from which all fruit springs.
No, Anarchism just fell out of the sky.


No anarchist today (and for quite a long time, actually) takes Proudhon seriously.
No on takes Proudhon seriously because he's an idiot, but did I say anyone takes him seriously?


You lumping together Stirner with Proudhon and seeing no contradiction there
If you bothered reading what I wrote you would notice that I didn't lump Stirner and Proudhon together.


(nor between Stirner and, say oh well, anarcho-syndicalism)
I didn't lump Stirner and Anarcho-Syndicalism either.


goes to show...
Show what?


Besides, Proudhon does not have much to do with the actual origins of Syndicalism,
Did I say Proudhon or "Proudhon's disciples"?


which do not lie in dusty theoretical tomes (as per your idealist vision of the world) but within the historical reality of the class struggle of the period.
So important writings of socialists exist outside the "historical reality" of the class struggle?

Did the Communist Manifesto exist outside the "historical reality" of the class struggle? Was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen merely a "dusty theoretical tome"?



Because you're spouting nonsense. I mean, sure, go on claiming Klein's positions/advocated tactics are 'inherently anarchist' or whatever but don't come crying when you make a fool out of yourself.
1 - You're admitting that you didn't read the article, yes?
2 -"Position"? I said absolutely nothing about her "positions" being inherently Anarchist. Just stop.
3 - Who's crying? This crap began when Ed Miliband wrote "Both 'anarchistic' and 'Social-Democrat'? nuts!" or something along those lines, and DNZ replied with that Jacobin article which talks about how Klein is basically a Social-Democrat and self-described Keynesian who is very weirdly influenced by Anarchist tactics, then you pranced in and accused DNZ of having "serious issues" because he thinks that Klein is an Anarchist, even though nothing in DNZ's post indicated that he thinks Klein is an Anarchist.

The conclusion, then, is that you're the one who "made a fool of yourself", when you replied to DNZ's link without actually clicking or reading it, and before that, thought that Ed Miliband wrote "anarchist" instead of what he really wrote("anarchistic"). Instead of apologizing for your mistake and moving on, you kept up this bullshit and because of that we're inevitably in our current predicament.

So, yeah, a piece of advice: stop acting like an idiot and drop it.


Good for you boy! :rolleyes:
Boy? Good for me? Am I a dog? If you think your flame-baiting can possibly provoke me, you should think again.

Jesus, it's hard to believe exactly how full of shit you are.

[l'Enfermé]

And this is the misery of the so called "orthodox marxism". The movements of the class have to be the brainchild of some great genius. Rather than tracing syndicalism to the intense and organic union struggles that emerged in the 19th century, they must be the brainchild of some proudhon.
You will notice, upon even the most superficial examination of what I wrote, that I never said that Syndicalism was the child of "some Proudhon", nor that it must be. I never said anything about great geniuses, either, in fact, I think Proudhon was a great idiot instead(and a terrible reactionary whose socialism is worse than the current capitalism we have) and I think as lowly of the Jura Federation also. Great geniuses, then, have nothing to do with it. But, of course, you are free to carry on with your bullshit.

[Devrim]

Boy? Good for me? Am I a dog? If you think your flame-baiting can possibly provoke me, you should think again.

Jesus, it's hard to believe exactly how full of shit you are.

Well if this is how you behave when you haven't been provoked, it is a good job he didn't manage it.

Devrim

[l'Enfermé]

^I don't understand what that means either.

[l'Enfermé]

edit: double post sorry

[human strike]

In leftist and activist milieus I only ever hear Swappies talk about "autonomism" and always without ever really defining what they mean by this. Autonomism is a thing, but the SWP simply use the word as a vague pejorative term to throw at things they don't like. Actually, I think at some point they stopped using "ultra-leftist" and directly substituted it with "autonomist" - perhaps there was a memo or something in Internal Bulletins?

[ed miliband]

In leftist and activist milieus I only ever hear Swappies talk about "autonomism" and always without ever really defining what they mean by this. Autonomism is a thing, but the SWP simply use the word as a vague pejorative term to throw at things they don't like. Actually, I think at some point they stopped using "ultra-leftist" and directly substituted it with "autonomist" - perhaps there was a memo or something in Internal Bulletins?

i think it goes back to the anti-globalisation movement, release of hardt and negri's 'empire', 'change the world without taking power',* etc. the s-dubs tried to capture the energy of that time by forming a front called 'globalise resistance'.

all before my time tho.

*when they refer to 'autonomism' without it being a slur it's with reference to hardt, negri and holloway only.

[Ravachol]

i think it goes back to the anti-globalisation movement, release of hardt and negri's 'empire', 'change the world without taking power',* etc. the s-dubs tried to capture the energy of that time by forming a front called 'globalise resistance'.

all before my time tho.

*when they refer to 'autonomism' without it being a slur it's with reference to hardt, negri and holloway only.

Yeah I love how these kind of sects are always way behind the times. Besides, what passed for 'autonomism' in those days, ie. the tute bianche, ya basta!, etc. and all the Negriists had awful politics which was essentially some kind of weird decentralised eurocommunism.

[human strike]

i think it goes back to the anti-globalisation movement, release of hardt and negri's 'empire', 'change the world without taking power',* etc. the s-dubs tried to capture the energy of that time by forming a front called 'globalise resistance'.

all before my time tho.

*when they refer to 'autonomism' without it being a slur it's with reference to hardt, negri and holloway only.

I think you're right.

[BOZG]

Statement of the Democratic Opposition (Pastebin) (http://pastebin.com/gaejGccM)

[Serge's Fist]

The statement is very good and points at a common issue in many left groups. The idea by a clique of leading members that this or that member is indispensable and therefore the loss of members, like those expelled from the SWP recently, is worth it defending one person and shielding them from being held accountable. Which is what the leading clique is doing with Martin Smith atm. No other member would receive such lenient treatment.

[The Idler]

comment on socialist unity

A good Christmas present for CC
http://www.socialistunity.com/democratic-faction-formed-in-swp/#comment-629297

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

[Q]

The CPGB put up a few more documents that form an overview page (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/socialist-workers-party-faction-declared), consisting of the following:

1. Statement of SWP Democratic Opposition
2. Response from the SWP Central Committee
3. Message from the CPGB
4. New document from DO faction
5. Pre-conference bulletins

Putting up all five is way too long, so I'll just refer to the page. But I will put up document 3, as it is short and explained why the CPGB is doing this:


This message from the CPGB was sent to the Democractic Opposition on Saturday, December 29:

Comrades

The Communist Party of Great Britain welcomes the formation of the Democratic Opposition faction and wishes you well in the struggle you now face. The bureaucratic centralism that dominates at all levels of our movement has to be fought: in our view, this is an essential part of shaping our class into a future ruling class. We urge you to stay in the Socialist Workers Party and carry out a disciplined, unremitting struggle for genuine democratic centralism and principled communist unity. We will do our utmost to ensure that your case is heard amongst the most advanced elements of the workers' movement - both in this country and internationally.

With communist greetings

Mark Fischer, on behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain

[Q]

And in the run up to the conference, a second faction is formed: The Democratic Centralism faction (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/another-faction-forms-in-the-swp).



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/online_only/seenoevil-440px.jpg
How the Central Committee might prefer things

In the conviction that debates between Marxists should be held in the open and not hidden away, we publish below the statement released by the second temporary faction to be formed in the run up to the SWP's annual conference, with the supporting signatures of forty comrades at present.

Like the statement of the 'Democratic Opposition' faction, this was circulated to SWP members by CC member Charlie Kimber, with his usual fair and balanced introduction:

-------

Here is a statement from the Democratic Centralism faction. It makes allegations, particularly about the treatment of individuals, which I would strongly contest and regard as wholly inaccurate. Conference will hear the debate on such matters. I should also reiterate that the CC's statement to the National Committee was not a "partial report" from the Disputes Committee. That report is delivered by the Disputes Committee to conference and to conference alone.

Charlie Kimber , SWP national secretary

Statement: Democratic Centralism Faction

We are constituting a formal faction and will dissolve at the end of conference. We feel events in the party make this necessary. If you want to support, join or discuss our statement please contact us at [email protected] We will be arranging meetings at conference open to those who support our statement.

Background

The revolutionary left faces a difficult time in the UK . While we have anticipated and analysed the development of the crisis, the resistance at home is well short of the level we need. Since the rise of the student movement, mass TUC demonstration on March 26th and the June 30th and November 30th strikes, working class resistance has not recovered from serious setbacks, despite the large demonstration on October 20th. We were right to put our efforts into coordinating a response in the unions and ensuring we were the last to leave the battlefield. We were too small for our challenges to the right or left bureaucracy to make a decisive difference as they retreated from the pensions fight despite the successes of initiatives like UTR.

These difficulties inevitably impact on the party, exposing our strengths and weaknesses. It has also shown the difference between the recent experience of political radicalisation among younger activists and the experience of comrades with a length of experience in the trade union struggle. If we are to develop as a party we need to cohere these into a medium term strategy for resistance and a long term strategy for building and renewing a revolutionary cadre.

We can be proud that the SWP is today by a long distance the best starting point for building a mass revolutionary party in the UK . But the SWP is not the "finished article" - we have a long way to go in terms of size, roots and development.
We have followed recent developments in the party with growing concern. Arguments have been allowed to develop in a fashion that has polarised the party along almost generational lines. That the CC has allowed the situation to develop in this way amounts to a crisis of leadership.

Internal Democracy

Many comrades, particularly younger ones, are not entirely happy with our current internal democracy. Some of this will undoubtedly arise from questioning elements of democratic centralism, distrust of leadership, or the search for some organisational short-cut to faster growth of the party and of resistance. But some of it will also arise from real shortcomings between our current way of working and the problems comrades face in their activity.
The tone and content of the responses to articles by Ruth and Paris in IB2 were unhelpful. The main significance of their articles was in reflecting and seeking to grapple with the wider unease about our internal democracy, rather than their specific content. For the CC or comrades to imply that our current practice is the only model of democratic centralism is wrong, politically crude and falsely polarising. If the authors of the responses intended to educate members on democratic centralism then a far more engaged and political approach was required. Instead the main message being given by these responses to all the comrades with concerns is that they aren't being listened to or engaged with.

It is our view that some of the concerns comrades have are legitimate and should be engaged with to consolidate our understanding of democratic centralism today. However changes can only be decided upon within the context of a wider assessment of the state of the party and the tasks ahead of us.

Expulsions before conference

We oppose the expulsion of four comrades on the allegation of organising a “secret faction” - a Facebook conversation.
It is clear many comrades on all sides, including members of our elected leadership, have been discussing concerns and how best to take the party forward to conference beyond.

It is perfectly normal and acceptable for comrades to talk about party business outside of "official" party meetings. Comrades have always learned a lot from discussions in pubs and cafes, after meetings and paper sales, on the phone or round people’s houses.
The party cannot operate properly if we allow an atmosphere to develop where even a significant minority of comrades feel they cannot talk freely to each other without fear of expulsion.

Whether or not the expulsions could be technically justified, handling the issue in this way shows a lack of political confidence on the part of the CC in dealing with the issues at conference.

The expulsions raised tensions around already difficult issues, increasing the likelihood of people being avoidably lost to the party, particularly given that two of the four expelled had advocated changes to party democracy in the Internal Bulletins.

Disputes Committee

The Disputes Committee hearing surrounding a leading member of the party is now known to comrades. Conference must consider the Disputes Committee report and any challenge to it independently from any other factional argument.

However, the fallout from the CC's handling of the situation raises questions surrounding leadership in the party. The CC decision to only release a partial report to the NC allowed a period for damaging rumour and speculation to spread around the organisation. The treatment (including removing her from a post in the party centre) of a full time worker who reported issues, raises serious questions too.

It is important that the party deals with these wider issues but does not allow them to cloud comrades’ right for Disputes Committee cases to be heard independently of any wider arguments or factional considerations.

What We Hope To Achieve

We are organising as a faction to undercut the danger that conference becomes falsely polarised along lines determined by the CC's expulsion of four comrades and the "Democratic Opposition" faction created in reaction to this.

The party faces a number of serious political and organisational issues which need to be dealt with constructively and politically at conference. It will do the party little good if the result of conference is that the CC and a loyal cadre "smashes" the "Democratic Opposition" and large numbers of our young cadre leave the party or become passive or cynical.

We want to politically defend democratic centralism while being open to discussion about weaknesses in how the party currently operates and how we might do better at overcome them. We oppose any unreasoning and apolitical defence of the status quo, especially through bureaucratic means.

We stand as a loyal opposition aiming to defend and extend the party's understanding and application of revolutionary leadership.

Rob O
Croydon
Robin B
LSE
Ian A
Manchester
Stephen E
Brixton
Alys Z
Lewisham
Rick L
Manchester
Andy C
Manchester
Paul B
Tottenham
Matt C
Lewisham
Daniel G
Manchester
Lovedeep S
Slough
Ian B
East London
Sarah C
West London
Soren G
Goldsmiths
Lois C
Brixton
Jamie W
Goldsmiths
Ru M
Tooting
Rebbeca S
East London
Pete G
Hackney
Patrick W
Tower Hamlets
Ross S
Central London
Dan S
Essex Uni
Tom R
Bristol
Stacey W
Brighton
Sarah Y
Brighton
Steve H
Tower hamlets
Stephen M
Brighton
Bill P
Walthamstow
Brian P
Leeds
Gareth E
Portsmouth
Simon M
Huddersfield
Paddy U
Brighton
Pete S
Leeds
Willie B
Edinburgh
Bunny La R
Kent
Sundara J
Birmingham
Neil D
Edinburgh
Amy G
Cambridge
Dom W
Liverpool
Alex S
Ealing

[blake 3:17]

What is the SWP's problem? Callinicos? Is it taking in enough dues to create a deadhead bureaucracy? Just the Trotskyist cult model on a larger scale? That the Americans aren't a counter-weight? The amount of money they are wasting on SW?

The constant oscillation between opportunism and sectarianism (can't believe I'm writing that) just really wears people down and leads to a constant turnover of membership and makes people cynical about the radical Left.

Good on the CPGB for publishing this stuff and thanks Q for posting.

[Q]

In response to criticism and the forming of factions by SWP members, the central committee has produced an urgent pre-conference statement (https://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/swp-cc-counter-attack).

I'll let it up to the comrades to take their conclusions from this.



https://cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/online_only/SWPCentralCommittee.jpg
SWP Central Committee: Feeble riposte

FOR AN INTERVENTIONIST PARTY: STATEMENT BY THE SWP CENTRAL COMMITTEE

The annual conference of the Socialist Workers Party gathers this weekend in the shadow of a challenging situation. The global economic and financial crisis drags on despite the last minute deal between Obama and the Republicans to stop American capitalism falling over the fiscal cliff. The Arab revolutions continue, but confront tough opposition, whether in the form of Mursi’s power-grab in Egypt or of Assad’s bloody war in Syria . Politics continues to polarise in Europe , as we see with the rise of both Syriza and Golden Dawn in the Greek polls.

Here in Britain , the trade union leaders have sabotaged the pension strikes and failed to respond the new attacks mounted by the coalition – for example, scrapping collective bargaining for teachers and union dues check-off in the civil service. The assault on the poor is reaching near-crescendo levels. And the NUS demonstration last November underlined that there will be no easy rerun of the student revolt that exploded in November-December 2010.

Two groups of comrades have decided in the last couple of weeks to form factions. This is their right during the preconference period. But one might think that these decisions would have prompted by the objective situation and that the comrades concerned are trying to offer distinctive political approaches to how we should address it. Not a bit of it. As their names (the Democratic Opposition and the Democratic Centralist Faction) indicate, both these factions are turned inwards, concentrating their fire on the Central Committee for its alleged handling of two episodes and proposing changes to the party’s democratic structures.

They have nothing of any substance to say about the situation and how the party should respond to it. They do no discuss our major interventions of the last year, which – despite the difficulties we have encountered – have included some major successes, most notably the rout of the EDL by Unite against Fascism in Walthamstow and the Unite the Resistance conference in November.

Of course, it is entirely within every comrade’s rights to criticise the CC and seek to improve our democracy. But it is also the right – and indeed the duty – of the CC itself to respond to these challenges, particularly since they have been issued after the preconference aggregates have met and the last bulletin was produced. In our view, both the faction platforms are without merit. Not only are they completely wrong in what they say about the two episodes, but the logic of the changes they support would severely undermine the ability of the SWP to operate as an interventionist revolutionary party.

Expulsions

The formation of these factions has two pretexts. The first of these was the CC’s decision on 11 December to expel four comrades for their role in organising a secret faction. Any expulsion of a party member is extremely regrettable: it is a measure taken by the CC or the Disputes Committee only very rarely and as a last resort. So why did we take this step in this case?

Democracy is the lifeblood of a revolutionary organisation. In order to assess the validity of our analysis and the effectiveness of our interventions in the class struggle, we need the fullest possible discussion in the lead-up to and during conferences. It is to facilitate this that the party constitution makes provision for the formation of factions during the preconference period. But it also states very clearly: ‘Permanent or secret factions are not allowed.’

For over forty years we have refused to follow other currents on the far left (for example the Fourth International) in allowing permanent factions. These inhibit the free-flowing debate through which comrades can develop the party’s perspectives and shift their positions towards a better understanding of the tasks ahead. Moreover, as the partial breakup of the New Anticapitalist Party in France has shown, a regime of permanent factions can lead to a situation in which members put their faction first rather than the organisation as a whole. This is why the constitution requires factions to dissolve after conference.

Secret factions have all the defects of permanent factions, added to which are those of lack of any accountability to the party at large. We are confident that the four comrades we expelled are guilty of organising a secret faction. Contrary to the claims of the two open factions, these comrades were not expelled for discussing party affairs on Facebook. Members of the SWP are of course free to discuss face-to-face or online and, particularly during the preconference period, to get together to seek the outcomes that they want to achieve (though they should be careful not to involve non-members). There are many cases of this happening, usually quite informally, during the party’s history.

But this is not what the four comrades were doing. The discussions they led on Facebook show evidence that they were organising on a long-term basis – not simply planning to a meeting before this conference, but referring back to another meeting at last year’s conference, and discussing how to intervene in aggregates and what motions to move. If this was all above-board, as their defenders claim, why not openly form a faction? The rights of legitimate, open factions are recognised and defended by everyone, including the CC: witness the rights given the Left Platform in the 2009-10 preconference period.

It is clear, however, that the comrades concerned planned to organise secretly and permanently: one of the four expelled, opposing the formation of an open faction, writes: ‘There is nothing stopping a faction post-conference if it all goes Pete Tong.’ So the aim was a permanent faction, in violation of the constitution. Even more shocking is the advice to avoid open debate. Another writes: ‘My personal opinion is that it is better to get as many of us to conference as possible, and I think that if that means keeping your mouth shut for a bit then so be it.’ In other words, far from the expulsions being intended, as the Democratic Opposition Faction alleges, to ‘prevent debate’, the organisers of the secret faction were seeking to avoid an open statement of their views before the party.

What the CC was confronted with was not a ‘technical’ breach of the rules, as the Democratic Centralist Faction asserts, but a cynical defiance of the very spirit of democratic debate inside the party. We had no choice but to take the strongest measures against the four comrades, all former full-timers, who were playing the main organising role. The complaint that this shouldn’t have happened in the preconference period ignores the fact that by their actions these comrades were corrupting the democratic process leading up to conference. They have, of course, the right to appeal against our decision to the Disputes Committee, but, given the attacks that have been made against this decision, we will be asking the party conference to endorse it.

Disputes Committee

The second pretext for the formation of the two open factions (and indeed of the secret faction) was the case that the Disputes Committee had to deal with in October, arising from a very serious complaint that was made against a leading member of the party. It is greatly to be regretted that both factions have chosen to make this very difficult case a matter of internal party controversy. It is particularly shameful that the Democratic Opposition Faction criticises the comrade against whom the complaint was made because he did not ‘voluntarily step down’ (ie presumably resign from his party positions) immediately, in effect conceding his guilt without a hearing – a violation of the elementary principles of justice.

The struggle for women’s liberation is central to the SWP’s politics. We have a proud tradition of fighting all the different aspects of women’s oppression and of building a strong women cadre and women leaders. In recent years, confronted with a culture imbued with sexism and welcoming a new generation of women rebelling against this, we have sought to renew this tradition. In line with this, we had no hesitation in breaking with George Galloway over his disgraceful remarks over the Julian Assange rape allegations.

In line with this approach, we are proud of having over several decades developed a political culture that has zero tolerance for behaviour that harms women or treats them with disrespect. It is part of the role of the Disputes Committee (DC) to maintain this culture. The DC is a group of experienced comrades elected by and responsible to conference. They operate independently of the CC (as the constitution puts it) ‘to maintain party unity and principle and to investigate complaints relating to disciplinary matters by its members or units’. In dealing with cases of this nature, where disagreements over facts have to be scrutinised in order to reach a decision, there is no alternative to trusting the comrades we have elected to apply our politics correctly when trying to arrive at the truth.

While both factions have attacked the CC’s ‘handling’ of this case, its role has been confined to referring the complaint to the DC and facilitating its subsequent investigation. This investigation was thorough, rigorous, and painstaking. It was conducted in complete independence of the CC. The DC did not uphold the complaint and decided not to take any disciplinary action. The restrictions on the information concerning the case were dictated, not (as some have alleged) by an attempted cover up by the CC, but by the DC’s recognition of the right to confidentiality of both parties in the case. The CC nevertheless made a statement to the last National Committee about the case (summarised subsequently at different aggregates) in order to ensure that comrades were informed in advance of the DC reporting to the party.

The report of the DC will be submitted to conference, and must be endorsed or rejected by it. Some comrades wish to challenge the report, as is their right. But, in the view of the outgoing CC, conference should endorse the DC report. To take any other decision would have no basis in how the DC actually addressed this case. It would also show a quite unwarranted lack of confidence in the capacity of the party and its structures to maintain and develop our tradition on women’s oppression.

Democratic Centralism

These two controversies have provided the launching pad for calls by both factions to make various changes in our democratic procedures, in support of several motions that have been submitted to conference. Of course it is essential to keep our democracy under continuous review. Indeed in the 2009 conference, in response to the Respect crisis, established a Democracy Commission that reported to a special conference, which endorsed various changes to the party’s procedures. To a significant extent, the current proposals are attempts to revisit some of the issues that were debated intensively then.

Democracy, as we have already said, is essential to an effective revolutionary organisation. But democracy is not an end in itself: it is shaped historically and serves different purposes. In this case, the function of democracy is to make the party a more effective tool of revolutionary struggle. So the point of discussion is to assess and improve our analysis and our methods of working. Hence, in our tradition, the main concentration of debate during the annual preconference period, when discussion can help to clarify the tasks in the year ahead and inform the decisions taken at conference instead.

We call our version of democracy democratic centralism, following the Bolsheviks and the early Communist International. For us democracy and centralism are not in conflict: the discussions we hold would be meaningless if they did not lead to decisions taken by majority vote and if these decisions were not implemented in a united way by all members, whatever position they took in the debates leading up to conference.

Some comrades, including the Democratic Centralist Faction, point out that the general principles of democratic centralism are consistent with different organisational models for revolutionary parties. Of course this is true: how the Bolsheviks organised themselves as a mass workers’ party in the lead-up to the October 1917 insurrection inevitably was very different from how an organisation of some seven thousand revolutionaries dealing with, alas, a non-revolutionary situation in Britain are liable to operate.

Nevertheless, our model of democratic centralism is the distillation of over forty years of experience in building the largest far-left organisation in Britain and one of the largest in the world. Central to it is the principle of a strong central leadership directly elected by and accountable to conference that fights politically to clarify the tasks facing the party and to shape its interventions in the struggle.

This principle has informed our theory and practice throughout our history as a Leninist organisation. It was affirmed very strongly by Chris Harman in 1978, drawing on the experiences of the Russian and German revolutions:


But what then happens when the ‘democracy’ of the party fails to reflect the experiences of the most advanced sections of the class? When the party members have become routinised and cut off from new upsurges of spontaneous struggles, or when they come from milieus which have no real contact with the factories? In such cases, as Cliff argues in the first volume of his Lenin or as Trotsky argues in his Lessons of October the party leadership cannot simply sit back and reflect the ‘democratic will’ of a party that is lagging behind the class. It has to campaign vigorously for the sudden turns in the line of the party if necessary reaching to forces outside the party to pressurise the party members to shift their position. (‘For Democratic Centralism’, http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1978/07/democent.htm)

Leadership in this approach is not merely the arithmetical expression of the balance of opinion within the party. On the contrary, the leadership actively intervenes in the class struggle outside and the organisation within in order to shift the situation in a direction more favourable to the revolutionary forces. This is a form of leadership that is not afraid to conduct sharp arguments within the party if these will clarify our understanding of the situation and of the tasks we must address. It is clear from the Democratic Centralist Faction’s comments on the preconference debate that it is uncomfortable with our tradition of polemical leadership.

The basis on which we have chosen to select this kind of leadership has been through the outgoing Central Committee recommending a slate that is then endorsed or amended by conference. An improved version of this system was reaffirmed, after much discussion, by the Democracy Commission conference in 2009. The most important reason for using the slate system is that is elects the leadership as a coherent political collective, embodying a particular perspective and directly accountable to conference. One way in which we have enhanced this system in recent years is by insisting that the CC leads the party in dialogue with the lay elected National Committee that can hold it to account between conferences.

We believe that the various proposals for alternative ways of choosing the CC would fatally undermine the coherence and accountability that are the basis of the present system. As we shall argue in more detail at conference itself, they should be rejected. Particularly when combined with the proposal to make what the preconference bulletins a continuous feature of party life throughout the year, they would institute a regime of permanent discussion that would turn the party inwards and make it harder to hold the real leadership to account.

Harman wrote in the article already cited:


Few things are more stultifying for debate in a revolutionary organisation that a ‘government-opposition’ arrangement by which one section of the organisation feels that it is compelled as a matter of principle to oppose the elected leadership on every issue: this makes it extremely difficult for either the leadership or the opposition to learn from the concrete development of the class struggle.

Yet this is the logic of the proposals supported by the two factions. The effect would be progressively to undermine the method of interventionist organisation that has allowed the party over many years to shape much larger movements and struggles. There is a real danger that we can lose what has made us, for all our weaknesses and errors, such an effective revolutionary organisation. That is why we will vigorously oppose the factions’ arguments and proposals at conference.

Conclusion

The party faces many challenges. These stem mainly from the stalling of both the strikes and the student revolt. There is a natural temptation for comrades to turn inwards in such circumstances. But this temptation should be resisted. It is because we have faced outwards that we have been able to achieve successes in this situation, notably around UtR and UAF.

We can also be proud of having won many new comrades in recent years, often from a new generation that has become radicalised by austerity and the Arab revolutions. In this context, we reject the Democratic Centralist Faction’s attempt to play the generation game by portraying a division between ‘younger activists and … comrades with a length of experience in the trade union struggle’. The truth is that everyone in the party, young and old, student and trade unionist, is frustrated by the stymying of resistance. We have very strong traditions, not simply on the central questions of class struggle but also on the different forms of oppression that serve to weaken and divide the working class, that we need to develop together to help us address the challenges facing us.

The outgoing Central Committee is happy to stand before the party on the basis of its record over the past year. With sufficient trust in each other and in the party’s theoretical traditions democratic structures, we can overcome the difficulties that have turned us inwards in the past couple of months. But that requires us to hold onto the principle of an interventionist party that is so central to what we have achieved.

Central Committee

[Sasha]

I stopped reading about here;
Any expulsion of a party member is extremely regrettable: it is a measure taken by the CC or the Disputes Committee only very rarely and as a last resort.
Now excuse me while i go and clean my tea of my monitor... :lol:

[Q]

I stopped reading about here;
Now excuse me while i go and clean my tea of my monitor... :lol:

Yeah, that made me lolz too. The SWP must in that case be a party that is a focus lens of these very rare events :lol:

Here are some other gold mines:


They have, of course, the right to appeal against our decision to the Disputes Committee, but, given the attacks that have been made against this decision, we will be asking the party conference to endorse it.

...

It is particularly shameful that the Democratic Opposition Faction criticises the comrade against whom the complaint was made because he did not ‘voluntarily step down’ [...] immediately, in effect conceding his guilt without a hearing – a violation of the elementary principles of justice.
Seriously, what hypocrite wrote this?


Of course this is true: how the Bolsheviks organised themselves as a mass workers’ party in the lead-up to the October 1917 insurrection inevitably was very different from how an organisation of some seven thousand revolutionaries dealing with, alas, a non-revolutionary situation in Britain are liable to operate.

7 thousand? I wonder what organisation thrice the size of the SWP the CC is talking about :)

And I'm not even commenting on all the bullshit around why slates are a brilliant idea or why we need a strong leadership.

[Jimmie Higgins]

And I'm not even commenting on all the bullshit around why slates are a brilliant idea or why we need a strong leadership.Why not? It seems that these kinds of discussions would be much more valuable than the shallow sectarian glee displayed by most people in this thread.

I generally agree with the SWP's politics, but their organization seems to have much to be desired. Rather than celebrating this, I hope they will get their shit together and come to some realizations and changes through this process.

I's speculate that it stems from their decline as an organization and inability/unwillingness to face up to it. The membership is frustrated and the leadership is in denial.

[Q]

Why not? It seems that these kinds of discussions would be much more valuable than the shallow sectarian glee displayed by most people in this thread.
Slates have their known downsides (at least, I presume them to be known, otherwise I'll refer to this useful document on the topic (http://www.karlmarx.net/topics/democratic-centralism-1/theoriginofthe%E2%80%98slatesystem%E2%80%99)).

As for the strong leadership thing: In this context it is really just code language for allowing only one permanent (and via the slate system self-perpetuating!) faction to operate: The Central Committee. A leadership that will only allow its own views in the party.

Such leadership is counterproductive and, as you put it, leads to a leadership in denial, as it only sees what it wants to see. This is natural, when you realise that it has no ways of getting correctional feedback from the party (as that would mean "factions", which are banned for 3/4 of the year and reason for expulsion).


I generally agree with the SWP's politics, but their organization seems to have much to be desired. Rather than celebrating this, I hope they will get their shit together and come to some realizations and changes through this process.

I's speculate that it stems from their decline as an organization and inability/unwillingness to face up to it. The membership is frustrated and the leadership is in denial.

Yes, it would be a huge loss on the left if the SWP would just collapse. I agree that the time for it to get its act right is now. For this to happen though, we seem to need to get beyond the choking iron grip that the CC has on the organisation that just expels you when you blink wrongly at them.

[The Idler]

Why not? It seems that these kinds of discussions would be much more valuable than the shallow sectarian glee displayed by most people in this thread.

I generally agree with the SWP's politics, but their organization seems to have much to be desired. Rather than celebrating this, I hope they will get their shit together and come to some realizations and changes through this process.

I's speculate that it stems from their decline as an organization and inability/unwillingness to face up to it. The membership is frustrated and the leadership is in denial.
Nah, SWP has gone WRP, look at what happened there if you want to see the SWP's future.
Cult comes a cropper: an article by Duncan Hallas : David Osler (http://www.davidosler.com/2013/01/cult-comes-a-cropper-an-article-by-duncan-hallas/)

I didn't know until this article that the WRP are currently claiming a membership of 6000.

[Hit The North]

Nah, SWP has gone WRP, look at what happened there if you want to see the SWP's future.
Cult comes a cropper: an article by Duncan Hallas : David Osler (http://www.davidosler.com/2013/01/cult-comes-a-cropper-an-article-by-duncan-hallas/)

I didn't know until this article that the WRP are currently claiming a membership of 6000.

The WRP isn't currently claiming such a thing. The article was written in 1985 and Duncan Hallas, a lovely man, persuasive speaker and a dedicated revolutionary socialist, died in 2002.

As for the WRP experience being the future of the SWP, who knows? It might very well be reduced to tiny but stable numbers and endure a century of political irrelevance - like the SPGB :lol:.

[blake 3:17]

Callinicos will stand up better than Healy.

This image is crazy big. It's Healy's diagram of dialectics.
http://www.marxistoutlook.com/guide3.jpg

There were lots of great people in the SLL/WRP -- Ken Loach and a bunch of other interesting film and theatre people. Trevor Griffith's The Party is a play about Healy trashing May 68 and mocking Ernest Mandel. A local activist I admire a great deal was in the WRP.

Tim Wohlforth's book, The Prophet's Children, has some amazing stuff on Healy. They were in the same "international" in the late 60s and early 70s, and Healy was just such a pig. Cliff Slaughter acted like a butler for him... ikes...

Anyways-- I do hope the SWP will start acting reasonably or hopefully the dissidents can work together. I find the squabbling deeply irritating, but if there isn't a democratic process or "permanent factions", then it can't work. We need to be able to agree to disagree and not have to spout stupid lines we disagree with. The reason I even care what happens with it is that the SWP does do mass work and sometimes plays very good roles in that, other times not so.

The local group here does not turn out to certain mass actions here which are exactly the ones socialists should be participating in. During the G20 demos here, there was a "community" march led by immigrants rights and anti-poverty activists that brought together an amazing array of radicals and every left group was present but the IS. It was a real WTF moment. Same thing at Gaza solidarity stuff, aside from one of the longtime leaders they're trying to expel.

[BOZG]

Transcript from the session discussing the Dispute Committee's report has appeared on Socialist Unity here (http://www.socialistunity.com/swp-conference-transcript-disputes-committee-report/). I haven't started reading yet but I did notice that the vote was quite even with 231 in favour of accepting the report, 209 against and 18 absentions which shows very serious divisions.

[Q]

Comment of the conference in the form of a podcast (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts/january-6-2013-swp-conference-special-report).

[ed miliband]

The WRP isn't currently claiming such a thing. The article was written in 1985 and Duncan Hallas, a lovely man, persuasive speaker and a dedicated revolutionary socialist, died in 2002.

As for the WRP experience being the future of the SWP, who knows? It might very well be reduced to tiny but stable numbers and endure a century of political irrelevance - like the SPGB :lol:.

i saw some wrp-ers selling 'news line' outside my local shopping centre the other week. a truly great moment of trotspotting for me.

[blake 3:17]

Transcript from the session discussing the Dispute Committee's report has appeared on Socialist Unity here (http://www.socialistunity.com/swp-conference-transcript-disputes-committee-report/). I haven't started reading yet but I did notice that the vote was quite even with 231 in favour of accepting the report, 209 against and 18 absentions which shows very serious divisions.


I just read it. It's hard to know what to think from that transcript. The Left, in general, is bad at dealing with conflicts around allegations of sexual violence. Probably now worse than other political currents, but our aims are different.

@Q &tc --- I started thinking more and more about the leadership's statement to the Democratic Opposition and realized it was more bogus than I'd thought at first. The leadership is trying to undermine attempts at reforming the organization by accusing the opposition of agreeing with the leadership? WTF? The fearmongering that the leadership is doing is gross.

[Sam_b]

I wish me and others could be proven wrong in our analysis of the SWP. I wish they got their shit together and became a fighting interventionalist organisation that mirrored the usual statements of the CC, but alas. I've been in contact with comrades in the SWP who vow to fight on from the inside, and there are rumours a split is going to happen soon. Hell, Charlie Kimber has pretty much admitted that after this conference most of their student members will be gone, and their TU section will be completely battered.

The SWP has got to a point where it cannot be saved. I think it's appropriate to trigger warn the transcript document above as it can be exceptionally distressing. The fact that the DC actually questioned a woman about her sexual history is out of line. Whats just as disgusting is how half the speakers used their time in a DC session attaining to sexual assault and rape of a comrade to have a go at Bambery and Counterfire as if they're somehow responsible for this. For shame. I hear others have come forward now. Edit - that the comrade in question asked to be able to address conference and was denied is sickening.

I am exceptionally worried that this is going to have extreme repercussions on the British left, and could take the movement back another twenty years. It also opens the discussions about how and if we can work with the SWP anymore, especially around issues of women's liberation, when a good 300 delegates have again rallied round the CC and the defence of MS.

Just in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick, I just want to reiterate that I have absolutely no pleasure in reading this or saying this at all. Years of me and my comrades work going up in a pile of smoke, and people who I considered friends rallying around sexual assault whitewashes. The SWP is fucked.

[black magick hustla]

wow never seen such a complicated dungeons and dragons campaign

[Die Neue Zeit]

I am exceptionally worried that this is going to have extreme repercussions on the British left, and could take the movement back another twenty years.

Not unless this opens up space for a British SYRIZA or Die Linke. The SWP never had much of revolutionary strategy to begin with, and membership for short-term membership rolls' sake (instead of committed political support) has proven to be a dead end.

[Grenzer]

Not unless this opens up space for a British SYRIZA or Die Linke.

Just what Britain needs: another social-democratic party based on the same old failed Keynesian welfare state policies. If there is anything that is more than a dead end than the SWP's strategy, it is your thinly disguised reformism.

[Ravachol]

Just what Britain needs: another social-democratic party based on the same old failed Keynesian welfare state policies. If there is anything that is more than a dead end than the SWP's strategy, it is your thinly disguised reformism.

Honestly, just let him and his ilk be/ignore them. I don't think they warrant a response or engaging with or feeding their trolling or whatever. Let them post their bullshit disconnected from reality here on revleft or on the wider interwebs and see how much effect it has.

[Thirsty Crow]

Honestly, just let him and his ilk be/ignore them. I don't think they warrant a response or engaging with or feeding their trolling or whatever. Let them post their bullshit disconnected from reality here on revleft or on the wider interwebs and see how much effect it has.
They are connected to reality of course, to the reality of just how useful a left wing government, coming out of the famous party-movement, can be for capital. It's just that they prefer lullabies of revolutionary perspectives arising from the said movement.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Just what Britain needs: another social-democratic party based on the same old failed Keynesian welfare state policies. If there is anything that is more than a dead end than the SWP's strategy, it is your thinly disguised reformism.

Not every left-oriented state policy is liberal or social-democratic, and I'm not one for embellishing the political irrelevance of one's own tendency, or for embellishing mere labour disputes.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/944/swp-why-i-am-resigning



Tom Walker, (now former) Socialist Worker journalist, argues that the time has come to leave the SWP

The Socialist Workers Party is in deep crisis - as it has been for several months now. The reason is simple: an allegation of rape against Martin Smith, the then central committee member now referred to on some parts of the internet as comrade Delta, and the way it was handled by the party.

This case, as several speakers at conference noted, was in reality the sole reason for the four expulsions in the run-up to conference, the sole reason for the formation of two factions, and the sole reason for the split in the CC which resulted in an alternative slate being put to the conference, removing two CC members who had attempted to challenge the way the case was handled.

After much reflection, I have decided the immediate aftermath also means that I have no option other than to resign not just from the paper, but from the party, and encourage others to do likewise.

Before I go any further, I want to say that I will not be discussing any details of the case itself whatsoever, either here or privately. Indeed, I do not know them. I know little more than what was reported to SWP conference, which later unfortunately appeared on the internet. I will not be quoting from that document.

However, I believe that what I know is more than enough to come to some unavoidable conclusions, and the fact that the transcript has been so widely circulated - to the point where every member is facing friends outside the party, in their workplaces and campaigns, asking them about it - makes it impossible to remain silent any longer about what those are.

I will, as the conference session did, refer to some of the awful processes used to hear the case, but - and this is absolutely vital - only the processes. The CC will likely issue a response saying that this violates confidentiality and is a disgrace, but surely the real problem is that the case ever happened in the first place and that it has been allowed by the leadership to develop into a crisis in this way. I believe that what delegates on all sides said within the conference was scrupulous about respecting the confidentiality of the case itself and not for a moment prying into the details of the woman’s testimony, otherwise I would never write something like this.

I will argue four main things:

The disputes committee should never have been allowed to investigate and rule on a rape accusation, under any circumstances, period. The case should have been investigated by authorities competent to do so. The disputes committee’s extra-legal nature means its finding that this comrade is innocent is meaningless. One person, even on this committee stacked in his favour, believes sexual harassment at least is likely.

Leftwing parties are institutions that exist within our current society, and they need to put an analysis of gender and power relations at the absolute heart of their structures to avoid replicating that society’s problems. Moreover, a lack of democracy inside left organisations is not just a big political issue, but plays a role in enabling abusive behaviour. Having a good record and theory on women’s liberation turns out to be little defence against this.

The CC’s determination to ‘draw a line’ under the discussion, to the extent of banning all further mention of it on pain of expulsion, I believe makes it nigh-on impossible to ‘stay and fight’ within the organisation for any sensible interpretation of these events or concrete reforms to the structures to make sure it does not happen again. To stay in the party now means to keep your head down and try to live with yourself.

For this reason, and because of the incredibly damaging publicity around the case, the party has become no longer fit for its stated purpose. It will surely be unable to attract or hold new recruits. I do not believe anyone sensible will ever join it again. We must think again about our methods of organisation on the left. I propose a few outlines of my thinking, but I am very open to others’ views.

I will now explore these points in more detail.

Kangaroo court

The disputes committee hearing - and by extension the entire mess that followed - should simply never have happened. To be honest, it is nothing short of incredible that it was allowed to go ahead. What right does the party have to organise its very own ‘kangaroo court’ investigation and judgment over such serious allegations against a leading member? None whatsoever.

Of course, I am dead set against the capitalist police and courts, and the way they treat people. That doesn’t mean we can go off and set up our own. The SWP itself called for Julian Assange to face rape charges in Sweden, in a Socialist Worker article I am proud to have written.

I do not see why what is good enough for Assange is not good enough for the party’s leaders.

It is stated that the accuser did not want to go to the police, as is her absolute right if that was truly her decision. However, knowing the culture of the SWP, I doubt that was a decision she made entirely free from pressure.

Do not underestimate the pressure the SWP can bring to bear on members by telling them to do or not do things for the ultimate cause of the socialist society the party’s members are all fighting for. Against the prospect of the liberation of the whole of humanity, they will attempt to make even the most serious issue seem less important than the party’s survival. I do not think the CC are cynical cultists, by the way - I think they believe this themselves.

Either way, respecting that wish not to involve the police does not excuse what the party did next. The disputes committee’s project of amateur justice was doomed from the start, with the questions asked unintentionally reflecting the worst practices of the police and courts. The people involved have spoken about the immense distress and traumatisation caused.

I would add that I worry about conference delegates as well after that session. As more than one comrade said, they had never seen so many people in tears as there were in that room.

For many it will have come as a real bolt from the blue. Despite working at the party centre myself, I was under the impression that, yes, we were in for a challenge to the disputes committee, but that we were facing a row primarily about expulsions and democracy. Though some other party workers were getting involved in a faction, I felt it best to maintain a sort of journalistic distance.

In the session itself, my reaction was one of simple, visceral disgust. I was shaking. I still am. I did not know what to do. I walked out of the building in a daze. It is over the last few days of reflecting, and seeing the strong responses to the case from people inside and outside the organisation, that I have come to my conclusions.

Meaningless verdict

From the fact that the disputes committee is not a court flows the fact that, while it found the comrade not guilty of rape and that sexual harassment was “not proven”, those verdicts are utterly meaningless. Sitting in the hall, that was too easy to forget.

The disputes committee says we have not heard the evidence or details. That is true, and nor should we. Yet they admit that the only evidence they themselves heard was two straightforwardly conflicting accounts of what happened - one from the accuser and one from the accused. We do not know why they believed the accused.

As those who raised criticisms pointed out, the disputes committee included five current or former CC members, and all have known comrade Smith for many years. Though I believe they took the case deeply seriously, this was not a jury of his peers, but a jury of his mates. If we were talking about any other organisation we would all consider it obvious that allowing it to investigate itself is unlikely to produce damning conclusions. It seems unlikely that a Wikileaks disputes committee, if it existed, would find Assange guilty.

We should also remember that even this committee had a minority of one, who has faced some very real abuse for his position that it is likely there was sexual harassment. It is not my place to argue one way or the other about either allegation, but one thing that cannot be argued with is that both allegations have not yet been investigated by anyone competent to do so.

I also wonder what on earth the disputes committee thought it was going to do if it found comrade Smith guilty. Expel him and send him on his way?

As others have noted, this DIY investigation will have corrupted the evidence, as well as traumatised the accuser too far for her to want to pursue the case by other means. I am absolutely convinced this traumatisation is very real, as I cannot believe that the issue would have played out the way it has otherwise. The internet may have read the transcript of what the woman comrade’s friends and allies said, but only those who were in the room will have heard the sheer anger with which the words were spoken. If we believe that she was traumatised, then logic dictates that it is very unlikely that the allegations are of no substance.

I really hope both the accusers are not further affected by my writing this, which is fundamentally about attempting to draw lessons from the disastrous process they were subjected to, to make sure it never happens again. From the moment this case became the subject of a faction fight and the leadership refused to row back, I believe the CC must shoulder the responsibility for a series of disastrous decisions that spawned all that has followed and will follow.

Power, sexism and the left

I want to move away for a moment from the process of this case and talk about some of the wider issues it raises. The allegations inside the SWP fit a bigger pattern which should lead us to question the left’s long-term theory and practice in this area.

We might consider a spectrum of misogynist behaviour by leaders of leftwing organisations, with George Galloway’s comments about rape at one end and the horrors of Gerry Healy at the other. You can argue about who else should be included on it - unfortunately it isn’t too hard to think of candidates.

Of course, as nothing is proven either way, we do not know if or where comrade Smith fits on that spectrum. Nevertheless, there is clearly a question mark over the sexual politics of many men in powerful positions on the left. I believe the root of this is that, whether through reputation, lack of internal democracy or both, these are often positions that are effectively unchallengeable. Not for nothing have recent sex abuse allegations in the wider world focused on the idea of a ‘culture of impunity’.

Socialist Worker has pointed to the way that institutions close up to protect powerful people within them. What is not acknowledged is that the SWP is itself an institution in this sense, with its instinct for self-protection to survive. As previously mentioned, its belief in its own world-historic importance gives a motive for an attempted cover-up, making abusers feel protected. Also, leaders are put into positions of power within an organisation with open recruitment but quite a closed culture, and this has a dramatic effect on any relationships that take place. Older male party leader with younger female party member is a triply unequal power relationship, and should be considered so.

That still does not account for how on earth an organisation that has such a good analysis of the way the police and courts effectively put the woman on trial in rape cases managed to replicate the state’s reactionary lines of questioning. How did it fail so badly to put its own politics into practice?

It may shed some light to learn that ‘feminism’ is used effectively as a swear word by the leadership’s supporters. This seems to be a legacy of a sharp political argument conducted decades ago against radical feminism and its separatist methods of organisation, but unfortunately it is being used today against young, militant anti-sexists coming into the party. In fact it is deployed against anyone who seems ‘too concerned’ about issues of gender. A group of women comrades who raised questions over whether the SWP has a sexism problem last year were quietly condemned by the leadership as “feminists”, and the CC has devoted much energy since to fighting this perceived scourge.

Marxist and feminist theory would surely agree, however, that in a sexist society, sexism is a constant danger in any organisation, no matter what its politics. The only way to deal with this is to not only fight hard against sexism at all times, but to accept that if any woman or group of women are not happy with their treatment, then the organisation has a problem, needs to look hard at it (and that is not “navel-gazing”) and needs to change, not claim that the issue does not exist or that the complainants are motivated by political differences.

This leads to an additional issue, which is that the issues of democracy and sexism are not separate, but inextricably linked - the lack of the first creates space for the second to grow, and makes it all the more difficult to root it out when it does. That is surely why people like Paris Thompson, a campaigner for more democracy in the SWP who had just published his own critique in the internal bulletin, were at the forefront of the fight against an attempted cover-up of the case.

Delegates to conference were handed a partial transcript of the Facebook conversation used as evidence to expel Paris and the other three comrades. The CC says it shows evidence of cross-branch coordination and is therefore “secret faction” activity. Yet what the document shows is not at all a group organising in pursuit of political differences - Paris explicitly says he is fighting over those separately - but people trying to make sure that the way the rape case was handled would be discussed properly at conference, not swept under the carpet.

From coordinating motions to party aggregates about the case, to making sure they were elected as delegates, what the four did was not in pursuit of their own agenda, but the agenda of ensuring these serious concerns were heard. Their reward for this, barring a Damascene conversion on appeal by that same disputes committee, is that they have been cast out of the SWP for life.

When you can’t draw a line

What has happened since the SWP conference at the weekend? Despite everything, the CC position is ‘draw a line under it and move on’. The opposition were also told to sign up to this or face expulsion. That applied as of the minute conference ended - and the leadership intends to enforce it.

The CC is shutting down all debate, on the pretext that it is about the rule that factions must dissolve after conference. Party workers are being spoken to individually, and if they refuse to give a guarantee that they will never so much as mention the case again, they are being told they must leave their party jobs. Some have already gone, others may be going as I write.

Meanwhile branches are being told that the criticisms of the disputes committee raised in conference will not be reported to them and cannot be discussed by any member, even in outline. At the behest of the CC, the Socialist Worker report of the conference does not even mention the disputes committee session. For one, this means that the reason behind the alternative CC slate is not explained at all.

Meanwhile, comrade Smith turned up in Hackney on the evening of Tuesday January 8, representing the party at a Unite Against Fascism meeting as if nothing had happened. Next week he is off to Athens, again as part of the party’s work. He may have been booted off the CC, but he lingers on, rubbing it in our faces. Frankly it is sick.

If the leadership is allowed to get away with this, it means the problem just sits there and festers. It means it could all happen again. It means the party cannot further examine just how this went so utterly wrong, or do anything about it, as the official position is that the vote means none of the criticisms made were accepted. A similar accusation tomorrow would be dealt with in the exact same way.

Ticking time bomb

I believe that not dealing with the issue ultimately makes the party’s destruction inevitable. I am not its destroyer - it has already destroyed itself. Maybe it will be days, months or years, but it is now a permanent time bomb. I cannot imagine how it will hold on to any recruit who knows how to use Google. Sooner or later the whole thing will be used against the party in the unions. In the absence at the very least of the most grovelling public apology and a massive process of internal reform, I am afraid I think the SWP is broken for good.

I know there will be many who will want to stay in the party and keep fighting until the bitter end. If they can do that without simply ‘keeping their heads down’ then I absolutely respect it. I hope they, and in particular those who were involved in the opposition to the disputes committee vote, will understand why I felt I had to go now and argue that others should do the same.

You might ask what right I have to jump now. You might say that this is not about us; it is about the people affected. All true. But how can we be expected to just turn off our horror at the whole thing? We are not robots. That is why I cannot stay another second.

Another problem with staying is the likelihood that individuals who opposed the CC at conference will be picked off gradually, one by one. That is not only unpleasant and isolating, but risks diverting a large amount of activist energy into an ongoing internal struggle against victimisations. I hope people will get in touch and discuss it when they feel ready to (or when they find themselves expelled). I will also 100% keep the confidence of any current member who contacts me to discuss this.

To those who will say I should have raised these issues openly before resigning, the CC has made it abundantly clear that to do so means instant self-expulsion. It would also be unfair on others at Socialist Worker to launch some tirade in an editorial meeting and make them choose between walking or ritually condemning me. I hope that they especially - people who have been my friends and workmates over several years - will look at their consciences and decide their own way forward.

To all comrades, I say: it is a wrench, it really is, but the first step is to admit to yourself that it is time to go. I do not know how it will turn out, but at least that way we have a chance to try to create something better. The alternative - for thousands of committed socialists to sit on their hands and keep quiet, wondering if the person next to them is thinking what they are thinking - is too awful to contemplate.

I strongly believe that if everyone who reads this is able to take courage to follow their heart and their principles, then, instead of members slowly drifting off into the wilderness or being gradually drummed out of the party, the SWP can be left on the shelf of history alongside the Workers Revolutionary Party, and something a thousand times healthier built in its place.

There is hope yet. The CC talks with dread about young and student cadre who are “influenced by the movement” bringing such ideas into the party, but on the evidence of conference the ideas coming in are militant anti-sexism and a desire for democracy. The substantial opposition votes show that many members’ politics remain excellent, even while they also frustratingly show that the leadership simply cannot be defeated through the party’s democratic structures, even on this most grave of issues. If it could be, despite everything I would have stayed.

For my part, I am certainly not planning some new ‘Workers Socialist Party’. Surely we can do better than that? I intend to discuss, think and write further about how we can take a step back from the specifics of the SWP and learn some wider lessons about sexism, democracy and organisation. I believe that for the good of the whole left, and the class struggle whose course we hope to influence, we ought to be able to find a way to create something that can be a hospitable and enduring home for militant workers, radical students and activists.

I want a left where a case like this simply cannot happen, where no-one will ever have to suppress their unease or disgust thinking it is for the greater socialist good, and where no-one will have to resign because whole areas of discussion have been banned. In that future left, I hope, we will be able to organise together again, democratically, as comrades in the struggle against our real enemies.

[Q]

The central committee was delivered a body blow at this weekend’s conference - but for dissidents the fight must go on, argues Paul Demarty (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/944/the-left-comrades-in-the-swp-rebel)



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/wwimages/ww944/Socialist_Workers_Party_7_by_M_M_X%20small.jpg
Comrades, rebel!

A lot can happen in a few short weeks. The last issue of this paper reported the expulsions of four Socialist Workers Party members, on charges straight out of the imagination of Franz Kafka.1 Between then and the January 4-6 conference, it is fair to say that the SWP has had a busy holiday season. Two substantial factions declared themselves, and the central committee found itself split at the 11th hour.

Unsurprisingly, when the votes were counted, the CC won the day on all the key matters to come before conference. Yet by SWP standards it is hardly a victory. Given how comprehensively stitched up its model of ‘democratic centralism’ is, substantial minorities voting in open defiance of the CC line in itself represents a serious blow to the leadership. The closest vote at conference was won by a margin of just 22 - with 18 abstentions.

So what has become abundantly clear over the last period is just how fragile an organisation the SWP is. Allegations of sexual misdemeanours (and worse) against a leading member ended up setting off an explosive chain reaction that left the SWP in disarray come its conference. All of this is down to the sort of organisation the SWP is: its bureaucratic structures and political disorientation have made an explosion of this kind inevitable.

Comrade Delta

To begin at the beginning, there is the question of the man referred to, in a transcript of the relevant conference debate, as ‘comrade Delta’. This insistence on anonymity that has long been blown is almost touching. For those who have not been following SWP intrigue over the past few years, his name may or may not begin with ‘Martin’ and end with ‘Smith’.

In the run-up to the 2011 conference, we (and numerous other left outlets) received an anonymous email, accusing Smith of sexual harassment. At the time, we did not report on the detail of the allegations: they were “the kind of thing one hears in any fraught divorce case”2 and circulated in a manner which suggested (in the context of moves against Smith on the CC) that they were being put about with other motives in mind than disgust at violence against women.

Whatever the case, the whispers of bad behaviour on Smith’s part have refused to die down, and in September of last year, a rape allegation was made against him. The matter was put to the SWP’s disputes committee, which decided that the allegation was not proven, and that Smith should face no sanction (he nonetheless decided to step down from the CC - with no external inducement at all, I’m sure).

The situation has since become even more fractious, with yet further harassment allegations from another comrade (who claims to have been edged out of a full-timer post at party centre because her presence was ‘disruptive’). All these issues are in dispute - readers should consult a transcript of the conference debate on the matter.3

It is not the place of a third-hand commentary piece such as this one to pronounce on comrade Smith’s innocence or guilt. In fact, it is hardly the place of the mighty disputes committee of the SWP to investigate rape allegations, which seems to be the height of pretentiousness. As a movement, we are not in a position to replace the criminal justice system on this point. The latter’s record in investigating rape cases is infamously dreadful, of course - but, with the best will in the world, what modern methods of investigation are available to the DC? What forensic scientists do the good comrades have on call?

What is clear - from the aftershock, at least - is that, even within its remit, the DC’s handling of the case was deemed insufficient by large swathes of the SWP. It is this issue which led the four expelled comrades to their fate - the crime being ... deciding not to form a faction, which in the SWP’s life-world, amounts to ‘secret factionalism’ (you couldn’t make it up). And it is this issue which proved the most divisive at conference - the DC report was accepted by a margin of 231 to 209 votes.

So why should this mummer’s show of legal arbitration have been so unconvincing - and, assuming his innocence (he has not, after all, been proven guilty), why should these allegations against Smith prove so instinctively believable among the SWP rank and file? The second question is easier to answer. Whether or not such behaviour is reproduced in the comrade’s personal life, it is undeniable that he is a bully and a thug. It was Smith, for example, who hounded comrade Simon Wells out of the SWP - and later wrestled him to the ground at the SWP’s Marxism festival to confiscate his ticket.4 It was Smith whose phone calls were dreaded by SWP organisers, and resembled the hectoring of the worst kind of shop-floor manager.

This character, alas, made him ideal material for the role of SWP national organiser - the SWP operating a version of ‘chain of command’ which would be recognisable to any police constable or private. A genuine revolutionary working class organisation would promote capable, thinking leaders who had earned the respect and trust of the rank and file. The SWP, with some honourable exceptions, promotes hacks.

As for the disputes committee, the problem is the same. The CC’s claim that the DC is wholly independent of the leadership is transparently bunk. Two CC members sat on the eight-strong DC that discussed the case, along with a further three former CC members. The revolt against its handling of the Martin ‘Delta’ Smith case is only partly a matter of ‘party morality’, or women’s liberation; it is a conscious or unconscious rebellion against the SWP apparat. The closeness of this vote at conference is a testament to how deeply rooted this malaise is.

Democratic opposition

The most positive feature of this whole farrago, then, is that this link became conscious for a good many of the dissidents. Its most significant organisational expression was the Democratic Opposition - the faction that the four expellees thought it inadvisable to form, and then brought into being by virtue of their expulsions, in a textbook example of Hegel’s ‘ruse of reason’. (The dispute threw up yet another faction, the Democratic Centralists, who took a classically centrist, conciliatory line between the DO, characterised as misguided youth, and the CC, whose expulsion-happy antics were strongly criticised.)

The DO made the link between the (alleged) mishandling of Smith’s case, the arbitrary expulsions and the general political culture of the SWP. Its documents make the case well: “We believe the expulsion of these members cannot be seen in isolation from the wider issue of party democracy; it is not an anomaly, but a symptom of a real and growing problem,” they state bluntly.5

Their recommendations were, by SWP standards, fairly radical, urging support for motions calling for an end to the slate system, an end to ‘collective cabinet responsibility’ on the part of the CC and full-timers (ie, the ban on such members making their minority views known among the wider membership), and more internal bulletins linked to SWP party council meetings.6 Individual comrades had also called for - horror of horrors - the open airing of disagreements.

CC split

The CC’s response to these heresies - under the pompous title, ‘For an interventionist party’7 - is as predictable as it is disingenuous. (It also betrays all the signs - innumerable typos and so on - of having been written in a hurry.) The usual old saws are out in force. The SWP’s refusal to allow permanent factions (the DO and DC must now officially disband following the three-month period leading up to the conference) has, apparently, allowed it to survive where other organisational products of the non-Stalinist new left have remained crippled by interminable disagreements - an obvious stupidity in the light of the painful slow-motion split with supporters of former leader John Rees.

The latter debacle also gives the lie to another basic view defended by the CC - that the leadership must be a politically homogenous team to be able to lead effectively. Hence, ditching the slate system (let alone the suppression of differences on the CC) would be a disastrous folly. The problem is that, the CC being composed (more or less) of humans, disagreements are quite inevitable - and quite incapable of being dealt with effectively if they are suppressed.

As if to prove the point, there was one final twist in the pre-conference period: the CC found itself split (quelle surprise!). An alternative slate was proposed for election by Hannah Dee, Ray Marral, Joseph Choonara and Mark Bergfeld. The comrades appear to have taken this step - another surprise - in response to the handling of the Smith case; that is comrade Dee’s account in the aforementioned DC debate, and comrade Marral seems to have incurred the ire of the leadership clique by attempting to indirectly raise the problem at a meeting of the SWP national council. He and comrade Dee were dropped from the CC-recommended slate; the minority proposed the status quo.

It is worth stressing the general character of these four comrades. None, to put it mildly, are known for their forthright criticisms of the SWP’s direction. By their own account, they are in total political agreement with the CC majority. Choonara and Bergfeld, meanwhile, are not exactly nobodies: the latter has led the SWP’s all-important student work in the recent period, and Choonara is one of the few intellectual heavyweights on the CC. Yet even a completely ideologically homogenous committee has split under the pressure of events.

The stupidity of this bureaucratism is summed up in the CC document with a peach of a quote from Chris Harman: “But what then happens when the ‘democracy’ of the party fails to reflect the experiences of the most advanced sections of the class? When the party members have become routinised and cut off from new upsurges of spontaneous struggles, or when they come from milieus which have no real contact with the factories? In such cases ... the party leadership cannot simply sit back and reflect the ‘democratic will’ of a party that is lagging behind the class. It has to campaign vigorously for the sudden turns in the line of the party, if necessary reaching to forces outside the party to pressurise the party members to shift their position.”

So there you have it - monolithic centralism is necessary on the off-chance that Charlie Kimber is better attuned to the state of class-consciousness than the mass of SWP activists. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

Trapped by tradition

The underlying assumption of the CC documents - and the argument in the name of which the votes at conference were won - is a quantitative, zero-sum relationship between discussion and action; the more time one spends on the former, the less there is for the latter.

In truth - and the DO grasped this, to its credit - the relationship is qualitative. Action guided by honest and searching discussion of theory, and serious critical appraisal of previous actions, is much more effective than action for action’s sake.

And an honest appraisal of the ‘interventions’ of the SWP in the recent period reveals a frankly dire picture. The CC cites the “rout” of the English Defence League in Walthamstow and a “thousand-strong” (in reality, there were 750 at best) Unite the Resistance conference in November as “successful interventions”, which really says it all. The EDL march was not smashed, Cable Street style, by anti-fascist mobilisation. It was banned by the council. The UTR conference did not ‘unite the resistance’ at all - it simply ‘united’ the SWP and its trade union periphery in a conference room for an afternoon, during which nothing significant was discussed or decided - and, indeed, perpetuated the division of the ‘resistance’ into several competing front organisations, with rival far-left sponsors.

The SWP is utterly directionless. It recruits a thousand or so pseudo-members a year, and transforms a small fraction of those into activists, who are employed strictly to recruit the next contingent. It is not a ‘party’ - indeed, it can barely even be called an organisation. It is a self-perpetuating machine, which sustains itself by keeping its lower cadre quiet and occupied with building the next demonstration or meeting, be it a pseudo-conference of trade union militants or another fruitless turn of the ‘anti-fascist’ gerbil wheel. It lacks even the beginnings of a strategic direction in this period.

The idea that the SWP’s inner-party regime is “interventionist”, and allows any decisive impact on the class struggle, is a straightforward inversion of reality. The SWP’s regime allows it to isolate its members from reality, so that the illusion of a mass impact can be sustained with any plausibility. So when the CC complains that the DO does not talk about the world situation, or the class struggle, but only picks fluff out of the SWP’s navel, it misses the point (to put it kindly). No serious discussion of the world at large is possible under the present internal regime of the SWP - only the recycling of convenient fictions.

It will, of course, be necessary for SWP dissidents to ‘do politics’ at some point. They will have to subject the hallowed ‘IS tradition’ to some searching criticism, to sort out what was positive and what was downright wrong in it (this, remember, is the specific priestly liturgy that the SWP apparat exists to defend). But the organisational is political - and the fight for SWP democracy is a worthwhile one on its own merits.

Going forward

The results of conference may, on the face of it, be a defeat for the opposition. The disputes committee report was carried (albeit narrowly), the majority CC slate was passed (despite a respectable minority vote), and the expulsions were ratified (interestingly, by the largest margin of the three - but still with around a quarter voting against). Our sources speak of a paranoid atmosphere obtaining in the group now, with the leadership leaning on known dissidents and making life generally unpleasant.

Whether or not it really is a defeat depends overwhelmingly on what happens next. We urge - as we always do - comrades to stay in the organisation, to weather the current storm and regroup. There is no way to fight for their aims within the letter of the SWP constitution, moreover (which actually makes the ‘official’ CPGB’s look democratic!); so the comrades should be prepared to break bureaucratic rules. Doing so, in the age of anonymous blogs and so forth, has never been easier.

The SWP has just faced its most serious internal crisis since it succeeded the International Socialists over three decades ago. It is now at the crossroads. Either the opposition comrades fight to overthrow the apparat, and save the organisation; or, quite simply, it dies. It may die spectacularly, like the disintegration of Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party. It may die slowly, like the US Socialist Workers Party, which expelled wave after wave of dissidents until it wound up as a shrivelled, petrified sect.

Whatever happens, the status quo is not an option. To save the SWP for revolutionary socialism means transforming it, organisationally and politically. It was never going to be done over a January weekend - we call on the comrades who recognise the need for change to keep fighting.

[email protected]

Notes

1. ‘Expelled before conference begins’, December 20 2012.

2. ‘Another one bites the dust’, January 6 2011.

3. http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/report-of-swps-disputes-committee-and-conference-debate

4. ‘Stop thuggery in workers’ movement’ Weekly Worker July 12 2007.

5. www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/socialist-workers-party-faction-declared.

6. www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/swpinternalbulletins/PreConf_Bulletin_iii_Dec_2012.pdf – p62.

7. http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/swp-cc-counter-attack.

[The Feral Underclass]

The issue here is that democratic centralism doesn't provide accountability and the development of debate and ideas, this is precisely why "rebels" emerge and why rapists can get away with raping people. Why is there a culture within the SWP for this kind of stuff to happen? Why is there a culture for silencing debate? Organisations with truly democratic and developmental practices don't end up in these situations.

[Q]

The issue here is that democratic centralism doesn't provide accountability and the development of debate and ideas, this is precisely why "rebels" emerge and why rapists can get away with raping people. Why is there a culture within the SWP for this kind of stuff to happen? Why is there a culture for silencing debate? Organisations with truly democratic and developmental practices don't end up in these situations.

Offtopic, but: Welcome back!

[The Feral Underclass]

Thanks :)

[Lucretia]

The issue here is that democratic centralism doesn't provide accountability and the development of debate and ideas, this is precisely why "rebels" emerge and why rapists can get away with raping people. Why is there a culture within the SWP for this kind of stuff to happen? Why is there a culture for silencing debate? Organisations with truly democratic and developmental practices don't end up in these situations.

I think you mean "democratic centralism" as implemented by the SWP, in violation of Lenin's and Trotsky's principles.

BTW, putting DNZ on ignore helps remove a lot of clutter from revleft threads, people. Try it sometime.

[Grenzer]

Honestly, just let him and his ilk be/ignore them. I don't think they warrant a response or engaging with or feeding their trolling or whatever. Let them post their bullshit disconnected from reality here on revleft or on the wider interwebs and see how much effect it has.

You're right, but a lot of DNZ's ideas at their basic level reflect general leftist tropes, albeit in a grossly exaggerated form, that are worth debunking. Still, I don't think I have seen anyone(Broody aside, of course) clamoring that we should emulate what are openly capitalist(in the literal sense that they endorse the capitalist system of production) lately. It's funny, just a few months ago he was saying that there were certain aspects of Syriza to support but that they were overall in bad political shape, but now he's come out directly as a supporter of these parties.

They thrive on victimization, but there is something amusing that does relate to subject of this thread and the issue at hand:


Effective left agitation can't leave these off the table:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/labour-monarchy-strawmani-t172753/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/one-born-every-t144497/index.html

For the first link, Continental worker movements' agitation could not do without something Ferdinand Lassalle pioneered. Forgive me if my German is bad, but here's the controversial term I'm suggesting: Arbeiterfuhrerprinzip. That cuts through von Schweitzer's euphemism "democratic centralization."

The first German word distinguishes this from what the Nazis eventually employed, but basically:

1) District agitation for national politics and above is led by a singular individual "whose word is law" on said agitation. He or she is accountable to #2 and below.
2) Local agitation for national politics and above is led by a singular individual who commands all subordinated honchos for #1 above and "whose word is law" on said agitation. He or she is accountable to #3 and below.
3) Regional agitation for national politics and above is led by a singular individual who commands all subordinated honchos for #1 and #2 above and "whose word is law" on said agitation. He or she is accountable to #4 and below.
4) National agitation for national politics and above is led by a singular individual who commands all subordinated honchos for #1 to #3 above and "whose word is law" on said agitation. If there's transnational organization, there's further hierarchical accountability. If there isn't, this "Director of Agitation and Publics Relations" has a leash held by the party-movement's executive or central committee.

I discussion with comrade Q the example of right-populist Geert Wilders and his one-man Dutch "party." Anyhow, this whole structure dispenses with the oligarchic nature of cheap sloganeering and ineffective left agitation. Comrade Macnair wrote a so-so assertion that "the conceptual trap [of labour monarchy] arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of workers’ unity. This is not an organic, spontaneous unity like the unity of a family, a tribe or a peasant village." I'd like to correct him by comparing the organic unity of the immediate family with the organic unity of relatives. Peasant patrimonialism requires the image of the *Father Figure* for its leadership, but effective workers agitation requires the image of the *Charismatic Uncle* (Oskar Lafontaine) or slick *Older Cousin* (Alexis Tsipras) at all geographic levels of the Arbeiterfuhrerprinzip.

The second link addresses comrade Macnair's equally so-so "scandalize the establishment" remarks, but how does the "scandalizing" occur? Hence, leftist equivalents of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, sensationalist political tabloids, and all things conspiracy theories.

Once again back to the personality cults and aping of "right populists"(or Neo-Nazis in the case of Golden Dawn, whose organizational principles of personality cults has been praised by our most esteemed theorist here in the past). More and more I am starting to think that what we actually may have here before us is a rare specimen of the elusive social-fascist milieu. I guess we can now add Geert Wilders and Rush Limbaugh to DNZ's pantheon of political heroes alongside Nikolaos Michaloliakos and Ferdinand Lassalle.

One of the many problems of the SWP, like virtually all leftist organizations today, is that there is no genuine freedom of discussion. It exists on paper in the SWP; members are allowed to form temporary factions ahead of some annual national conference they have, but in the mere process of trying to officially form a faction, they are accused of factional activities without being an official faction and expelled. This is a problem, but I think some of the people here are making a lot of assumptions on our agency that don't have much grounding in reality.

Even if this issue could be overcome, and that the left could really operate on revolutionary principles(now we're really in the realm of fantasy here), I don't think inability to have open discussion is some road block that is magically preventing the left from being relevant again.

I also don't think personality cults and conspiracy theories are going to do shit about that either. It only exacerbates the problem and makes one look like a fool. This is just reactionary nonsense of the highest order. Let us leave our "Arbeiterführer" to his musings. How is the "Arbeiterführerprinzip" different from the fascist Führerprinzip, one might ask our all knowing theorist? Simple, it has an added prefix.

Cheap left sloganeering and ineffective agitation are worthless. What we really need, so it seems, are personality cults and conspiracy theories. :laugh:

[The Feral Underclass]

I think you mean "democratic centralism" as implemented by the SWP, in violation of Lenin's and Trotsky's principles.

No, I mean democratic centralism. The implementation of it is not unique to the SWP.

[Art Vandelay]

No, I mean democratic centralism. The implementation of it is not unique to the SWP.

So in your view it is impossible to foster a culture of debate in a democratic centralist organization? If so, what is it specifically about the set up which leads to too much centralization and not enough democracy?

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

So in your view it is impossible to foster a culture of debate in a democratic centralist organization? If so, what is it specifically about the set up which leads to too much centralization and not enough democracy?

Thanks, Rosa! (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm)

[Die Neue Zeit]

You're right, but a lot of DNZ's ideas at their basic level reflect general leftist tropes, albeit in a grossly exaggerated form, that are worth debunking. Still, I don't think I have seen anyone(Broody aside, of course) clamoring that we should emulate what are openly capitalist(in the literal sense that they endorse the capitalist system of production) lately. It's funny, just a few months ago he was saying that there were certain aspects of Syriza to support but that they were overall in bad political shape, but now he's come out directly as a supporter of these parties.

Yes, and I'm polemicizing here because of the anti-partyism in substance being presented by you and your new associates.

[Art Vandelay]

Thanks, Rosa! (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm)

I'll have to give it a read.

[blake 3:17]

The question I really want to ask: Is there any possibility that the opposition currents will form a new political formation which would include some of the other split groups and FI and CWI comrades? In recent years in the Toronto and pan-Canadian left there've been some breakthroughs in just getting people who agree on 95% of the issues to do something together. Any chances?


So in your view it is impossible to foster a culture of debate in a democratic centralist organization? If so, what is it specifically about the set up which leads to too much centralization and not enough democracy?


I was in an IST split group for many years -- the organizational principle behind the group was democratic federalist which allowed for tendencies and local groups to hold different perspectives. I ended up leaving the group because I thought it pandered to the ultraleft in the wake of 9/11 and a particular opening in social democracy here which was vehemently opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We put a very strong effort on coalition building within the genuine Left, doing united front work, and building opposition currents within unions. I think some of the strategy was essentially ultraleft -- we could've worked with the CP, certain sections of the trade union leadership and some of their friends a bit more tactfully -- but some of it was really great and many people from it continue to do great work in their particular milieus.

[Lucretia]

Thanks, Rosa! (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm)

Pointing us to a link of Rosa Luxemburg's work is hardly compelling. You might as well respond to somebody asking "Why is capitalism fucked up?" by linking to Capital Vol. 1, or the entire marxists.org archive for that matter.

From what I have heard of the SWP, problems of democracy within the group tend to result from a huge disparity between the knowledge of cadre and the knowledge and experience of the broad swaths of non-cadre members recruited at a low level, often from college campuses, and with very little knowledge of Marxian theory requisite to debate the finer points of social strategy, which of course makes "democracy" within the group untenable for obvious reasons that really don't even need to be elaborated. Again, this points to a problem of implementation, not one of first principles.

[The Feral Underclass]

So in your view it is impossible to foster a culture of debate in a democratic centralist organization? If so, what is it specifically about the set up which leads to too much centralization and not enough democracy?

Hierarchy and the centralisation of political control.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Has democratic centralism ever been implemented successfully, for any sort of extended period of time beyond a couple of years? I'm struggling to think..

[goalkeeper]

Has democratic centralism ever been implemented successfully, for any sort of extended period of time beyond a couple of years? I'm struggling to think..

Not sure, but I can imagine a lot of people saying the Bolshevik party, but from what I remember of Alexander Rabinowitch's works on the Bolshevik party in 1917, they hardly seemed to adhere particularly strictly to Democratic Centralism as it is viewed and practised today.

[l'Enfermé]

Has democratic centralism ever been implemented successfully, for any sort of extended period of time beyond a couple of years? I'm struggling to think..
RSDLP between 1898 and at least 1919?

[Q]

The Serbian IST section (presumably a smaller group) announced that it has broken away (http://grumpyoldtrot.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/swps-serbian-section-splits-from-ist/) from the IST over the debacle in the SWP.


This is our statement explaining our decision to disaffiliate from the IST

We write to resign from the Socialist Workers Party and the International Socialist Tendency. We disagree with the leadership; it is taking us in the wrong direction.
From its foundation in early 2008, Marks21 orientated towards the politics of the IST. So it is with deep regret that we have decided to resign.

Some of our current members have been members of the SWP since the 1990s and are proud of the work they did with the party to oppose imperialist intervention in the Balkans and pose the Balkan Socialist Federation as the alternative to the nationalist wars of the local ruling classes. The anti-war work around the Kosovo War was a precursor of the Stop the War Coalition, the party’s most important united front initiative of the 2000s.

Regrettably, the recent turn in the SWP’s politics away from the united front approach makes it impossible for us to continue in the IST. While the Tendency is not run on the basis of democratic centralism, and we respect the work of many of its sections, it is clear the mistakes of the SWP carry enormous symbolic weight. The SWP is the leading political force in the Tendency.

The successes of the the Left Party in Germany, Left Front in France, the Left Bloc in Portugal, the United Left Alliance in Ireland, and, most spectacularly, Syriza in Greece, where the prospect of a united left government terrified the capitalist ruling classes of the European Union, are clear evidence of the opportunities a united front approach offers revolutionaries today.

Instead, the SWP defended the New Anti-Capitalist Party’s refusal to join the Left Front in France and Antarsya’s refusal to join Syriza. This is a recipe for sectarian isolation; it is not revolutionary good sense. Working with these parties carries real dangers, but not doing so carries still greater dangers. The rise of the far right Golden Dawn in Greece should be a warning to us all. The IST has a proud record of fighting fascism and racism but it should also be fighting for a united left alternative to the system that breeds fascism.

Similarly, the SWP’s effective withdrawal from the Stop the War Coalition has damaged its anti-imperialist credibility in Britain and in the Middle East. In the case of Syria, there has been a clear tendency to downplay the role of imperialist intrigue, the key question in imperialist Britain given the Libyan fiasco.

It is clear that the SWP has over-reacted to the failure of Respect, the left electoral coalition that grew out of the anti-war movement. Since then, the SWP has retreated to a sectarian comfort zone based on orthodox party-building, abstract propaganda and an economistic emphasis on industrial struggle.

This sectarian approach has resulted in a stifling party culture and regime. Contrary to the traditions of the IST, new ideas and methods are often rejected to uphold existing tradition. Emphasising the limitations of the internet as a tool for revolutionaries at a time of ‘Facebook Revolutions’ and international ‘Occupy’ movements is a case in point.

The scandal involving allegations of rape and sexual harassment against a member of the party’s Central Committee has shocked and angered us. It has exposed the dangers of the current turn. The fact that a full-time party worker was not allowed to continue in her post for raising similar complaints of sexual harassment against the said CC member speaks volumes, as do the expulsions of comrades who raised their voices against the leadership’s handling of the matter. This is conduct that reflects bourgeois management techniques, not the revolutionary socialist struggle for women’s liberation.

We resign, but we will continue to apply classical Marxism to the realities of our times and build a new left in Serbia, in the spirit of the IS. We will work with others on the left, whether or not they are members of the IST, whenever and wherever we believe this will advance the interests of the working class and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

RSDLP between 1898 and at least 1919?

Didn't they split, though? And weren't half of the leaders in exile anyway? And wasn't the party underground and illegal?

I'm not sure, if I was aiming to build a political party, the early 20th Century RSDLP could really be held up as a model.

[Sam_b]

Worth reading Richard Seymour on this as well:

http://www.leninology.com/2013/01/crisis-in-swp.html

[Sasha]

The Serbian IST section (presumably a smaller group) announced that it has broken away (http://grumpyoldtrot.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/swps-serbian-section-splits-from-ist/) from the IST over the debacle in the SWP.


that is a pretty fucked up emphasis the reasoning though
"we want to join reformist government coalitions but our big sister doesn't let us even if we call it UnitedFront'ism and other discussions on how many angels can fit on a Trotsky goaty hair etc etc etc etc etc.........
.
.
.
.
.
oh, and i guess we should say something too about that rapist sheltering and coverup and victim blaming by the CC as well, so yeah, that"

seems like they wanted out before this and they just seized on the moment rather than actual principled concern.

[Q]

that is a pretty fucked up emphasis the reasoning though
"we want to join reformist government coalitions but our big sister doesn't let us even if we call it UnitedFront'ism and other discussions on how many angels can fit on a Trotsky goaty hair etc etc etc etc etc.........
.
.
.
.
.
oh, and i guess we should say something too about that rapist sheltering and coverup and victim blaming by the CC as well, so yeah, that"

seems like they wanted out before this and they just seized on the moment rather than actual principled concern.
Regarding that they must have been planning this for some time: That seems very likely, yes.

What struck me in the announcement is how there was no mention of the Egypt debacle (urging for a vote for Morsi and all that). That, to me, was a rather big episode the past year.

[Q]

Worth reading Richard Seymour on this as well:

http://www.leninology.com/2013/01/crisis-in-swp.html

Indeed worth reading!

A newer piece from the same blog is also interesting: A reply to the Central Committee (http://www.leninology.com/2013/01/a-reply-to-central-committee.html).

[Sam_b]

Regarding that they must have been planning this for some time: That seems very likely, yes.

A lot of groups and a lot of people have been. Many of us before the ISG was formed were determined to fight in the organisation, but after Martin Smith was given a standing ovation at the 2011 conference (this was after he was defended from an accusation of sexual harassment, a separate case from the rape) we couldn't be part of that organisation much longer.

People will have additional reasonings for leaving the party, and have been tipped over the edge by what has happened in the past weeks, and these can (as the case here perhaps) be pushed to the front in an attempt to outline how the split is a political one (this in itself is a problem as it means cadre haven't been able to make important and eloquent political arguments about feminism).

The message is clear to people - if you are an activist in the SWP you need to get out now. This will tarnish you much like what happened in the WRP. You cannot stay and fight anymore - as a project the SWP is over.

[Q]

The message is clear to people - if you are an activist in the SWP you need to get out now. This will tarnish you much like what happened in the WRP. You cannot stay and fight anymore - as a project the SWP is over.

I would hope for a more positive outcome. A WRP-like collapse of the SWP would be a complete disaster, just like the WRP collapse was at the time. If the political space can be found to continue the fight, and in the process develop a political alternative to the current state of things, I can only urge comrades to pursue it.

The Serbian group was probably small, but it might set off a chain reaction, depending on how things pan out. A full collapse of the IST would of course be even worse.

[Sam_b]

I strongly disagree with the CPGB's line on this (which from above I take as yours as well, please correct me if there are any discrepencies). This has now blown up into mainstream media as well, see Indy article and also the Daily Mail. Half of the organisation of the SWP has pretty much voted and supported a decision which is rape apologism and sexism. It has shown that the SWP is not a safe organisation for women. It has shown the SWP as a cult with Smith as a cult leader. Comrades do not stay in sexist organisations, fundamentally sexist organisations which are rooted in a CC cult of personality. It highlights they will do anything possible to save their skin, including defending rape (because in all honesty that's what this amounts to).

The SWP at this point remaining would be a disaster for the left. It gives the organised left no credibility by association alone. People remaining in the party IMO are going to be tarnished by it for generations - some activists who were know WRP members still have trouble with employment and such other things. The party has already destroyed and alienated a huge layer of predominantly young activists, some of who are unlikely to get back into any form of politics - and who can blame them.

This all shows the CC will do anything to save itself and is know widely understood to be going through a purge. Much of the organised left in the UK cannot get much worse anyway and on the whole has pretty much failed in a response to austerity, so I fail to see how the SWP's demise is some sort of huge tragedy. I refuse to defend rapists or stand by rape apologists, if I were in the SWP I would have been out first thing Monday morning. I would not be part of or want to save an organisation where someone like MS has not only faced ZERO disciplinary measures, but is still on the party's payroll.

[Sasha]

As the saying in Dutch goes; "the pluche sticks"

[Q]

I strongly disagree with the CPGB's line on this (which from above I take as yours as well, please correct me if there are any discrepencies). This has now blown up into mainstream media as well, see Indy article and also the Daily Mail. Half of the organisation of the SWP has pretty much voted and supported a decision which is rape apologism and sexism. It has shown that the SWP is not a safe organisation for women. It has shown the SWP as a cult with Smith as a cult leader. Comrades do not stay in sexist organisations, fundamentally sexist organisations which are rooted in a CC cult of personality. It highlights they will do anything possible to save their skin, including defending rape (because in all honesty that's what this amounts to).

The SWP at this point remaining would be a disaster for the left. It gives the organised left no credibility by association alone. People remaining in the party IMO are going to be tarnished by it for generations - some activists who were know WRP members still have trouble with employment and such other things. The party has already destroyed and alienated a huge layer of predominantly young activists, some of who are unlikely to get back into any form of politics - and who can blame them.

This all shows the CC will do anything to save itself and is know widely understood to be going through a purge. Much of the organised left in the UK cannot get much worse anyway and on the whole has pretty much failed in a response to austerity, so I fail to see how the SWP's demise is some sort of huge tragedy. I refuse to defend rapists or stand by rape apologists, if I were in the SWP I would have been out first thing Monday morning. I would not be part of or want to save an organisation where someone like MS has not only faced ZERO disciplinary measures, but is still on the party's payroll.

Let me start by agreeing with you regarding the CC: Burn the fucking place down for all I care.

The CC however is not the entire SWP. The problem then is that without a positive alternative coming out of this, the SWP membership risks to be completely dissolved: Thousands of members being disgruntled, disillusioned about the left, cynical about the communist project. This is what happened with the WRP membership and, on another level, when the old CPGB dissolved in 1991: It had an impact on wider society and not in a positive sense.

I am however gloomy in my hope that something positive comes out of all of this: Building an opposition, a political alternative, takes time and that is exactly what seems to be lacking with these pace of events. The best thing in these circumstances is an SWP-like group minus Martin Smith, which is hardly progress at all and prone to the same grave errors.

[Sam_b]

The CC however is not the entire SWP.

Indeed it is not. Yet half of the conference delegates voted to accept the DC document.


The problem then is that without a positive alternative coming out of this, the SWP membership risks to be completely dissolved: Thousands of members being disgruntled, disillusioned about the left, cynical about the communist project. This is what happened with the WRP membership and, on another level, when the old CPGB dissolved in 1991: It had an impact on wider society and not in a positive sense.

This is why I am arguing for members to leave. The SWP has lurched from crisis to crisis in the past but the damage done here is irreversible, particularly amongst the British left. The CC will grimly hang on as much as possible, but is now creating a political climate in the party of hostility, infighting and harassment. Very few people on the left are going to have a formal or otherwise political relationship with the SWP from now on.

Let's be clear here - since a lot of this has come out there has been three incidents involving Martin Smith. I would contest that this has been aided and abetted by the SWP's political culture. Why on earth would you argue that members, let alone women, should stay in an organisation like that? This is as much to do with basic safer spaces as it is the disintegration of an organisation. Comrades don't stand with sexists.

[Lucretia]

A lot of groups and a lot of people have been. Many of us before the ISG was formed were determined to fight in the organisation, but after Martin Smith was given a standing ovation at the 2011 conference (this was after he was defended from an accusation of sexual harassment, a separate case from the rape) we couldn't be part of that organisation much longer.

People will have additional reasonings for leaving the party, and have been tipped over the edge by what has happened in the past weeks, and these can (as the case here perhaps) be pushed to the front in an attempt to outline how the split is a political one (this in itself is a problem as it means cadre haven't been able to make important and eloquent political arguments about feminism).

The message is clear to people - if you are an activist in the SWP you need to get out now. This will tarnish you much like what happened in the WRP. You cannot stay and fight anymore - as a project the SWP is over.

Curious to know what you think the root cause of this situation was, since it seems to be a pretty thorough-going and profound failure on the part of organizational practices. (I think it's a cop-out to say it's "just sexism," though sexism is part of the problem - another part is a whole set of practices that would allow this kind of treatment of female comrades by top party members, who then continue to enjoy majority support in an organization that on paper professes to support women's liberation). As far as I can see, this problem could very well have been manifested in a variety of ways -- but the root problem is an accountable bureaucracy that places protecting its fellow bureaucrats above the well-being of members, and even above political principle. How do splinter groups intend on not replicating these same issues? What specific changes do they intend to make?

[blake 3:17]

Thanks Sam b and Q for the links and comments --

I tend to agree with Sam on this question. If the organization is this effed up, stoopid, and bureaucratic, then let it go. Just because it has the largest "membership" -- that meaning varies from group to group -- of the British Far Left, doesn't mean need to try to keep it alive. Sexual violence with our movements is unacceptable and attempts to apologize for or minimize them is as bad. Individuals make terrible mistakes and do very very bad things which are hurtful to others in ways they may or may not foresee.

When organizations, individuals, or groups of individuals try to pretend it didn't happen that ends up hurting people in terrible ways.

It also undermines the basic ethics of social justice which must underline our movements.

I was talking to a family member last night about a number of controversial incidents involving public figures on the municipal level. The one I was most angry and disappointed at was the one who lied and lied stupidly about fairly minor indiscretions. It was the dishonesty that hurt people -- mostly himself -- the issue was victimless non-crimes -- so wtf

Socialist organizations cannot abolish sexism, racism, LGBTQphobias, able-ism within their own organizations. This is impossible. BUT you can address them and create ways to address them which are relatively fair. This is extremely hard work.

On the radical and revolutionary Left, as well as the rest of my life, I've dealt heads on with one case of sexual assault in depth. It was terrible and traumatic, but there were people involved with enough generosity -- victim and assailant both, as well as friends, supporters, and experienced mediators -- that there was a possibility of acknowledging the truth of what happened and all involved felt they could move on.

Sounds like SWP CC could use a good period of internal reflection, before Fighting Fascism or whatever else it does

[Manic Impressive]

A memorial to the SWP
http://libcom.org/forums/general/swp-name-shame-their-stupid-actions-past-present-23052010

Tom Walker (the guy I quoted earlier)
http://libcom.org/library/swps-tom-walker-why-i-am-resigning

My personal feeling about the death of the Left in Britain :crying:
xvX_5ym_ajI

[Sam_b]

Curious to know what you think the root cause of this situation was, since it seems to be a pretty thorough-going and profound failure on the part of organizational practices. (I think it's a cop-out to say it's "just sexism," though sexism is part of the problem - another part is a whole set of practices that would allow this kind of treatment of female comrades by top party members, who then continue to enjoy majority support in an organization that on paper professes to support women's liberation)

Of course it is not 'just sexism', but at the same time we have to tell ourselves some home truths. One of the biggest home truths might be one some of you find controversial, but I'll go ahead and say it - more often than not, the left is not a particularly safe space for women. The sad fact is that I can think of several sexual assaults and worse that have occurred in the activist and left movement in the UK , and coupled with at times rampant mysogeny and the idea of 'strong male voices' we get a clusterfuck of a situation, which gets worse when nobody admits it goes on ("oh never in my organisation"). I think in the ISG we're trying (we're not perfect) to get a good safe spaces policy, to have good gender balances, but it's something that all the left needs to wake up and take more seriously. That's why I found MB's contribution to the DC transcript to be the fucking worst, implying that because there were women on the DC that had been around for a while they of course could make a rape judgement call. It was out of order.

People on the CC don't enjoy majority support as much as those who publicly criticise will be expelled or simply leave. A statement to that affect is a recent CC member going around districts and pretty much saying for people to keep quiet about this thing or just leave. When a party expels people for 'organising in factions outwith conference' (without going through procedures, and based on FB messages or a few years back going to a meeting with other activists a la Clare Solomon) you know something isn't right.

The bureaucracy are not accountable in the slightest, I agree. I'm a bit too tired to go into all this stuff now so I hope you'll excuse me (it's the ISG conference this weekend and I'm knackered) but as has been commented by above users the slate system is a great example of 'collective responsibility' of the CC which is not enforced. People are not elected as individuals, and not treated as such. As much as I don't want to bring it up, some other reasons for the degeneration of the SWP we brought up in our resignation letter last year, which may be of use. (http://www.socialistunity.com/swp-resignations-in-scotland/)

[Sam_b]

As much as a lot of the disquiet in the SWP has existed for a while now, much of this is because a high-ranking member of the SWP has been defended after raping someone. I think the posting of a 'Celebrate' song in this respect is bang out of line and extremely tasteless. I would ask it be removed out of sheer decency.

[Lucretia]

Of course it is not 'just sexism', but at the same time we have to tell ourselves some home truths. One of the biggest home truths might be one some of you find controversial, but I'll go ahead and say it - more often than not, the left is not a particularly safe space for women. The sad fact is that I can think of several sexual assaults and worse that have occurred in the activist and left movement in the UK , and coupled with at times rampant mysogeny and the idea of 'strong male voices' we get a clusterfuck of a situation, which gets worse when nobody admits it goes on ("oh never in my organisation"). I think in the ISG we're trying (we're not perfect) to get a good safe spaces policy, to have good gender balances, but it's something that all the left needs to wake up and take more seriously. That's why I found MB's contribution to the DC transcript to be the fucking worst, implying that because there were women on the DC that had been around for a while they of course could make a rape judgement call. It was out of order.

People on the CC don't enjoy majority support as much as those who publicly criticise will be expelled or simply leave. A statement to that affect is a recent CC member going around districts and pretty much saying for people to keep quiet about this thing or just leave. When a party expels people for 'organising in factions outwith conference' (without going through procedures, and based on FB messages or a few years back going to a meeting with other activists a la Clare Solomon) you know something isn't right.

The bureaucracy are not accountable in the slightest, I agree. I'm a bit too tired to go into all this stuff now so I hope you'll excuse me (it's the ISG conference this weekend and I'm knackered) but as has been commented by above users the slate system is a great example of 'collective responsibility' of the CC which is not enforced. People are not elected as individuals, and not treated as such. As much as I don't want to bring it up, some other reasons for the degeneration of the SWP we brought up in our resignation letter last year, which may be of use. (http://www.socialistunity.com/swp-resignations-in-scotland/)

So you think these organizational problems can adequately be addressed through scrapping the slate system?

[Sam_b]

So you think these organizational problems can adequately be addressed through scrapping the slate system?

Of course it is not merely as simple as scrapping the slate system, though this is one step of many which would need to be made. As I pointed out, I'm not really wanting to go into deeper detail tonight.

[Art Vandelay]

Has Hit the North commented on this at all? I've always respected his politics and believe he is a member of the SWP.

[blake 3:17]

So you think these organizational problems can adequately be addressed through scrapping the slate system?

I think the slate system only works in particular circumstances. That makes an election essentially a referendum. And a referendum only works when the issue being voted on is totally clear.

From what Sam b has posted, I'm generally sympathetic and supportive. Within far Left groups I've met a few people who were in to raid, but mostly are just motivated by basic opposition to the horrible world of capitalism, war, and oppression, with the hope to build a better one.

The fact that the SWP CC were so hostile to basic democratic reforms -- or even broaching the subject, like proposing building an internal commission on the issue, which I were in a similar leadership body I would propose and maybe make that a primary or even "factional" issue.

When I joined the USFI current here almost twenty years ago, it was pretty conditional on a particular leader, who had shown sexist behaviour repeatedly, being expelled from the organization. I voted the same person out of another organization, not on Big P Political grounds, I actually agreed with him more than any other person in the room, but because he was acting like a sexist pig. It was disgusting -- making rude remarks and laughing while women were speaking. I felt in a bind, because he and I were arguing exactly the same line the group should take -- a united front approach and taking actual steps towards building a united front -- but he was undermining that very effort.

[Crux]

Of course it is not 'just sexism', but at the same time we have to tell ourselves some home truths. One of the biggest home truths might be one some of you find controversial, but I'll go ahead and say it - more often than not, the left is not a particularly safe space for women. The sad fact is that I can think of several sexual assaults and worse that have occurred in the activist and left movement in the UK , and coupled with at times rampant mysogeny and the idea of 'strong male voices' we get a clusterfuck of a situation, which gets worse when nobody admits it goes on ("oh never in my organisation"). I think in the ISG we're trying (we're not perfect) to get a good safe spaces policy, to have good gender balances, but it's something that all the left needs to wake up and take more seriously. That's why I found MB's contribution to the DC transcript to be the fucking worst, implying that because there were women on the DC that had been around for a while they of course could make a rape judgement call. It was out of order.

People on the CC don't enjoy majority support as much as those who publicly criticise will be expelled or simply leave. A statement to that affect is a recent CC member going around districts and pretty much saying for people to keep quiet about this thing or just leave. When a party expels people for 'organising in factions outwith conference' (without going through procedures, and based on FB messages or a few years back going to a meeting with other activists a la Clare Solomon) you know something isn't right.

The bureaucracy are not accountable in the slightest, I agree. I'm a bit too tired to go into all this stuff now so I hope you'll excuse me (it's the ISG conference this weekend and I'm knackered) but as has been commented by above users the slate system is a great example of 'collective responsibility' of the CC which is not enforced. People are not elected as individuals, and not treated as such. As much as I don't want to bring it up, some other reasons for the degeneration of the SWP we brought up in our resignation letter last year, which may be of use. (http://www.socialistunity.com/swp-resignations-in-scotland/)
I couldn't agree more. And not to toot my own horn (indeed it's a sad fact that this wasn't there all along) but in my own organization we've taken some very valuable steps forward with engaging more actively against sexist attitudes and creating a safe space inside our org. There is for example A Women's Committee both for helping form external material about feminism etc, but also crucially as a way to help strengthen our feminism internally and combat sexist attitudes, help female members get the confidence to speak up. Just having leading female cadre isn't enough in and of itself. And yeah this means we have had problems with sexist attitudes from some members in the party, I don't feel like I am breaching any party discipline by saying that because it's highly likely to be the case within any sufficiently large group of people and also the second problem of, rather than explicit sexism, just reproduce the sexist structures that are abound in society just out of neglect.

[RisingSun]

a high-ranking member of the SWP has been defended after raping someone. This is defamation. Martin Smith has never been found guilty of raping anybody.

[Geiseric]

Heads up to comrades, the Revolutionary Labor Party is having a similar, nearly identical rape scandal, so any activists, particularly students, are under advisement from CA Student Union activists, and wider socialist activists, to deal accordingly with RLP and its affiliates members.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Labor_Party_%28United_States%29

[Sam_b]

This is defamation

I would expect nothing less from someone with a George Galloway avatar to say this. It's a sad break from the left that we've stopped believing in an absolute fundamental, and I'll come out and say it - that I believe the woman. Always.

If anyone's in doubt, here is the line that RisingSun takes, from a thread that was trashed. He is a sexist.



Loud-and-proud sluts make me nostalgic for separatist feminists. They had the courage of their convictions and were a credit to the socialist movement. Too many modern feminists want to use the label as a shield from any and all criticism and are eager throw out the label "woman hater" when somebody is understandably disgusted by their immature desire to consume a plentiful amount of dicks.

[Vanguard1917]

I would expect nothing less from someone with a George Galloway avatar to say this. It's a sad break from the left that we've stopped believing in an absolute fundamental, and I'll come out and say it - that I believe the woman. Always.

That's a silly thing to say, though.

[l'Enfermé]

I would expect nothing less from someone with a George Galloway avatar to say this. It's a sad break from the left that we've stopped believing in an absolute fundamental, and I'll come out and say it - that I believe the woman. Always.

If anyone's in doubt, here is the line that RisingSun takes, from a thread that was trashed. He is a sexist.
"Slut-shaming"? Maybe this guy is actually Galloway.

But what do you mean that you always believe the woman and only the woman? That's a pretty sexist attitude.

[Devrim]

I would expect nothing less from someone with a George Galloway avatar to say this. It's a sad break from the left that we've stopped believing in an absolute fundamental, and I'll come out and say it - that I believe the woman. Always.


That's a silly thing to say, though.


But what do you mean that you always believe the woman and only the woman? That's a pretty sexist attitude.

I wouldn't go quite as far as Sam does here, but come on. It is not a silly thing to say or a sexist attitude. The vast overwhelming majority of women who make rape allegations make them because they have been raped. Of course there are exceptions, but I would imagine that they are statistically a very small number. I wouldn't say that I would always believe that what the woman is saying is true, but I would always believe that it is nearly certainly true.

Devrim

[Geiseric]

I wouldn't go quite as far as Sam does here, but come on. It is not a silly thing to say or a sexist attitude. The vast overwhelming majority of women who make rape allegations make them because they have been raped. Of course there are exceptions, but I would imagine that they are statistically a very small number. I wouldn't say that I would always believe that what the woman is saying is true, but I would always believe that it is nearly certainly true.

Devrim

The idea that women lie about rape is a complete myth. Like I said in this other thread, this forum is as chauvinist as my Irish Catholic grandpa.

[Hit The North]

Has Hit the North commented on this at all? I've always respected his politics and believe he is a member of the SWP.

I'm now one of thousands of ex-members and have been for a couple of years or more. Like many among those thousands, I am looking glumly on as the SWP self-destructs.

Problems of democracy and accountability in every centralised political organisation is a perennial problem and the SWP is no different. Of course, the rape allegations have been handled badly and have only served to reinforce the feeling that the party is run on the lines of self-perpetuating elite. Of course, this has always largely been the case in the SWP, particularly its CC. A key difference today, is that the leadership offered by Cliff, Foot, Hallas, Harman and (even) German is no longer available and the current lot do not appear to be up to the task.

I don't have anything insightful to say about the current drama. But I think the SWP faces deeper problems that are exacerbating the internal difficulties. These problems are somewhat outside of the SWP's control and relate to the continuing low levels of class struggle in the UK.

Whether a party like the SWP can overcome the current impasse is open to severe doubt. I think a period of reinvention in required for revolutionary socialists. The old organisational form of a centralised vanguard party that arose out of the 1960s and 1970s are proving to be more or less moribund. But I am at a loss to suggest what should replace it. The rival models are less than convincing :(.

A note of optimism, I suppose, is that if the SWP does collapse, it will be the end of an era on the British left, and it is at the beginning of new eras that new creative ideas have the space to flourish.

[Devrim]

I would hope for a more positive outcome. A WRP-like collapse of the SWP would be a complete disaster, just like the WRP collapse was at the time. If the political space can be found to continue the fight, and in the process develop a political alternative to the current state of things, I can only urge comrades to pursue it.

I can't see how anybody can see the collapse of the WRP as a complete disaster.

Devrim

[Lucretia]

The idea that women lie about rape is a complete myth. Like I said in this other thread, this forum is as chauvinist as my Irish Catholic grandpa.

You honestly think that all rape allegations ever made by women against men have been true throughout human history? Yeah, there's a myth being introduced into this thread, all right. And I think I've just located it...

[Geiseric]

You honestly think that all rape allegations ever made by women against men have been true throughout human history? Yeah, there's a myth being introduced into this thread, all right. And I think I've just located it...

My point is that lying about rape is an anomaly.

[Lucretia]

My point is that lying about rape is an anomaly.

It's rare, but it does happen. Calling it a myth is clearly an overstatement, and seems intended to chip away at a legal presumption of innocence -- which is important for every accusation of criminal conduct.

[Q]

Commentary on the crisis (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts/podcast-swp-crisis-deepens) (podcast).

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

http://24.media.tumblr.com/c5904ef556bb2b31c0af21c832b359f0/tumblr_mg8eq7mwjB1rejcgao1_500.jpg

Infographics - possibly the only reasons to tolerate the existence of liberal NGOs, at least in the short term. Regardless, I hope this illustrates a point about why trusting people who say they've been assaulted is necessary, given context of ubiquitous assault (1 in 4 women, according to the estimate I've heard most frequently, and I suspect that it's higher if we imagine the thresh-hold as lower than the ridiculous/sexist legal conventions on the subject).

[Hit The North]

Regardless, I hope this illustrates a point about why trusting people who say they've been assaulted is necessary

Trusting them to the extent that the accusation is taken seriously enough to investigate it, but not trust as in believing the accusation before any scrutiny takes place. Otherwise there can be no due process.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Trusting them to the extent that the accusation is taken seriously enough to investigate it, but not trust as in believing the accusation before any scrutiny takes place. Otherwise there can be no due process.

Sorry, in the context of patriarchy, what constitutes "due process"? Sexual violence is normalized, and I have yet to hear any seriously proposed "process" by those who insist one is "due" that grapples with this in a serious way.

[The Idler]

Since Rees, German and Bambery were in the leadership of the SWP long-term until relatively recently, they and their organisations which claim the IS tradition might be expected to make some insightful comment. What's their alternative to the SWP organisational model or culture? Or is it just a question of a different leadership ie. theirs? In which case, why run a separate organisation? Like the WRP, this goes deeper than the Disputes Committee, but the IS tradition and its semi-critical supporters are looking for a scapegoat to dodge deeper questions.

[Hit The North]

Sorry, in the context of patriarchy, what constitutes "due process"?

To be presumed innocent before convincing evidence proves otherwise is a requirement for all accused people in a patriarchal society no matter what their gender. Of course, we could adopt a position where all men are assumed guilty of violent patriarchy by virtue of being male, but that is prejudice not any kind of justice.


Sexual violence is normalized, and I have yet to hear any seriously proposed "process" by those who insist one is "due" that grapples with this in a serious way.

Sexual violence is quite widespread, I agree, but that does not mean that even bourgeois culture 'normalises' it. Sexual violence is viewed as a crime in most liberal, bourgeois states. Sexual violence might be statistically 'normal' or something (I don't actually believe this, though), but this does not mean there is any process of 'normalisation' going on.

[IrishWorker]

It was only a matter of time before the SWP was going to implode no one I have been talking to is surprised or even gives a shit, who really cares?

For years the SWP have been a negative and toxic element of "the left". The SWP continuously purse petty self serving agendas they hijack and destroy every progressive campaign and view raising the working class consciousness as a narrow minded recruiting tool to their "brand" off nonsense.

Good bye, good luck and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[Hit The North]

It was only a matter of time before the SWP was going to implode no one I have been talking to is surprised or even gives a shit, who really cares?

For years the SWP have been a negative and toxic element of "the left". The SWP continuously purse petty self serving agendas they hijack and destroy every progressive campaign and view raising the working class consciousness as a narrow minded recruiting tool to their "brand" off nonsense.

Good bye, good luck and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

That's not very nice :mellow:

[IrishWorker]

That's not very nice :mellow:

I'm not a nice person.

[Hit The North]

I'm not a nice person.

I bet you are :)

[blake 3:17]

Sorry, in the context of patriarchy, what constitutes "due process"? Sexual violence is normalized, and I have yet to hear any seriously proposed "process" by those who insist one is "due" that grapples with this in a serious way.

Years ago I very publicly named an activist on the Left as a rapist. I was criticized by many others in our common circles for not respecting a "due process" which didn't exist -- police were contacted some time after the assault and were just horrible to the victim of the attack -- and for not forming a vigilante squad and kneecapping the dirtball.

If we are serious about building an alternative world based on real justice, real democracy, real equality, we need to be able to figure out how to deal with people in our ranks who do terrible things.

I would like to see the radical Left develop community allies who might be able to oversee a complaints process properly. I have found Quakers to be terrific at this stuff. There are other people who work in restorative justice who are great at this.

Our top priority should be on preventing antisocial behaviours. But they happen.

In terms of a socialist or communist ethics, the basis must be honesty. We're all screwed up and could potentially do terrible things. Acknowledging that is necessary for a justice society.

[Vanguard1917]

Sexual violence is quite widespread, I agree, but that does not mean that even bourgeois culture 'normalises' it. Sexual violence is viewed as a crime in most liberal, bourgeois states. Sexual violence might be statistically 'normal' or something (I don't actually believe this, though), but this does not mean there is any process of 'normalisation' going on.

What actually 'normalises' sexual violence (by portraying it as an ordinary, every-day conduct of the male sex) is a retrograde, petit-bourgeois feminism which has no time for class struggle and working-class solidarity - i.e. working men and women uniting in a common cause. After all, who would want to 'unite' with a bunch of rapists?

[Sam_b]

who really cares?

People who realise that this implosion has potential to completely destroy any credibility for an organised left, that's who. The reality is the SWP is now losing members, most noticeably students and young people radicalised by the anti-fees and austerity movement, who in all likelihood may never join a political organisation again. Like it or not people will be lost to the movement over this.

I also care about this as a person who wants women to be safe in the left as well, who will not tolerate the macho culture and misogyny as part of our movement, and want it stamped out. Saying it's not your organisation is not enough. It affects us all.

As someone who is seemingly part of the organised left I would assume you'd want to bring the arguments for its existence and try to win people back and over to the position in light of something which has very serious consequences. Did you even think before posting this?

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

People who realise that this implosion has potential to completely destroy any credibility for an organised left, that's who. The reality is the SWP is now losing members, most noticeably students and young people radicalised by the anti-fees and austerity movement, who in all likelihood may never join a political organisation again. Like it or not people will be lost to the movement over this.

I think its a bit silly to suggest that the SWP was the foundation on which so many of these young leftists based their whole affinity with left wing politics.

In fact, this break away from the dusty old cults that dominate the left might be the spark that the left itself needs.

Let the SWP disappear, there is literally nothing worth salvaging. Its serious activists will adapt and there is potential for new, bright and independent activists to think, organize and struggle.

[blake 3:17]

This is piece from a Canadian leader of the International Socialists (which are affiliated with the British SWP) criticizing the SWP CC. For the record, the author is someone I have done united front work with, always pleasantly, but have also disagreed with. I usually to excerpt pieces, but I'm going to quote in full.


UNDAY, JANUARY 13, 2013
Reflections on the Crisis in the SWP
JANUARY 13, 2013 – 1. Richard Seymour is author of the widely read blog, “Lenin’s Tomb,” and a prominent member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the largest group left of the Labour Party in Britain. In an article written in the days following the January 4-6 annual conference of the SWP, Seymour made public a controversy inside the party, a controversy so serious he says: “the future of the party is at stake”. Speaking of the party’s Central Committee he said: “they are on the wrong side of that fight”. Speaking to fellow members of the party, he wrote: “You, as members, have to fight for your political existence. Don't simply drift away, don't simply bury your face in your palms … You must fight now” (Seymour, 2013a).

2. China Miéville is a prolific author (Miéville, 2006, 2010, 2012) and another prominent member of the SWP. Like Seymour, he has publicly expressed concern about recent developments inside the party. There is, he says: “a terrible problem of democracy, accountability and internal culture that such a situation can occur, as is the fact that those arguing against the official line in a fashion deemed unacceptable to those in charge could be expelled for 'secret factionalism’” (Cited in Penny, 2013).

3. The SWP has a student group on various campuses called SWSS (Socialist Workers’ Student Society). The SWSS group based at Leeds University released a public statement after the SWP conference, where it “condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the recent handling of very serious accusations against a leading member of the SWP Central Committee”. The Leeds SWSS group argues that: “an atmosphere of intimidation has been allowed to develop in which young members are viewed with suspicion and treated as such” and that there exists “a culture where members feel unable to raise disagreements” a culture which is the “opposite of the kind which should exist within a healthy revolutionary organization” (Leeds University SWSS, 2013).

4. In the days after these same events at the SWP conference, a full-time journalist working for Socialist Worker, the party’s weekly paper, announced his resignation from both his job and from the SWP. He described his reaction to the conference discussion that triggered his resignation as: “one of simple, visceral disgust. I was shaking. I still am. I did not know what to do. I walked out of the building in a daze” (Walker, 2013).

5. The SWP is the largest and most prominent organization in the International Socialist Tendency (IST). In the wake of the SWP conference, there was a public announcement by the IST organization in Serbia that it no longer wished to be part of the tendency. They pointed to what they saw as “a stifling party culture and regime” inside the SWP, and stated that four pre-conference expulsions represented “conduct that reflects bourgeois management techniques” (SWP’s Serbian Section Splits From IST, 2013).

I begin with these five points to indicate only one thing – there is a very serious crisis inside the SWP. What is the background to this crisis? The references that accompany this article, provide copious detail. Below is a short summary.

1. Two years ago at the SWP conference, there was a report to conference, concerning a personal relationship between a Central Committee member (a man) and a woman member of the party. It seemed, at the time, that what was involved was “an affair that was badly ended, with the accused merely hassling the person long beyond the point of propriety” (Seymour, 2013b). The situation, serious in itself, had apparently been resolved.

2. It was not. In 2012, the issue returned, this time with the Central Committee member charged with sexual assault. A committee of the SWP (Disputes Committee) adjudicated the matter, concluding that the charges were not proven.

3. Among the criticisms made of the process by which this decision was reached, was the very serious one, that at least some of the committee members were personally acquainted with the man accused.

4. While all this was ongoing, a second woman came forward with a complaint of sexual harassment, directed against the same member of the Central Committee.

5. In the run up to the SWP conference in January 2013, four SWP members, apparently all themselves former full-time employees of the party, were discussing, on a Facebook group, how to respond to this situation. For this, they were expelled from the party, as this, apparently, amounted to “secret factionalism”.

6. This then resulted in the formation of two formal factions, which garnered considerable support at the SWP conference. The positions of the factions – calling for a reversal of the expulsions and a review of the Dispute Committee’s decision – were voted down by the majority of the conference delegates. One of the votes, however, was by a quite narrow margin.

7. At the end of the conference, these factions were instructed to disband, as organizing “across branches” on these matters is only allowed in the SWP in the three months before conference. To continue to meet and discuss these matters is a breach of discipline, making members subject to expulsion.

8. However, the issue has not gone away. The Central Committee member involved, while now not a member of that body, is still apparently engaged in high profile party work. The controversy has now become the object of speculation and discussion in the mainstream press (Penny, 2013; Taylor, 2013).

What is at stake? There are two issues, one to do with women’s oppression, the other to do with left organizing. In terms of women’s oppression:

1. The charge of sexual assault is extremely serious. It is completely inappropriate to adjudicate such a matter by a committee some of whose members know the accused well. This puts the woman bringing the charges in a very painful, impossible position. It is an approach that will be repulsive to many in the movements.

2. The current radicalization – in Occupy, during the student strike in Quebec in 2012, in Idle No More, in the Arab Spring, in the extraordinary upsurge in India against rape – is leading to a welcome revival of feminism. A new generation of young people is rejecting the anti-feminism that was perpetrated by the right-wing during the years of the backlash, and reconnecting with and extending the traditions of women’s liberation from the 1960s and 1970s.

3. However, in the current crisis in the SWP, according to Tom Walker, “‘feminism’ is used effectively as a swear word by the leadership’s supporters” (Walker, 2013). Seymour says that “old polemics against 'feminism' from the 1980s, always somewhat dogmatic, are dusted off and used as a stick to beat dissenters with” (Seymour, 2013a). These old polemics were based on a stark counterposition of Marxism and feminism. Tony Cliff in 1984, for instance, wrote: “Two different movements have sought to achieve women’s liberation over the past hundred or more years, Marxism and feminism … There can be no compromise between these two views, even though some ‘socialist feminists’ have in recent years tried to bridge the gap between them” (Birchall, 2011, p. 467; Cliff, 1984, p. 7). This quite sectarian orientation in theory is being helpfully challenged from within the Marxist tradition (Bakan, 2012; Ferguson, 1999, 2008; Smith, 2012).

In terms of left organizing:

1. The expulsion of four members for discussions in a Facebook group is absurd on its face. This is particularly so in the era of the Arab Spring. Facebook has become a tool of resistance, used to help the social movements bring down authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. For Facebook conversations, in this same era, to be seen as a threat by leading left-wingers, is risible. In addition, the very thought of trying to monitor Facebook, as well as being impossible, implies a culture of surveillance which is antithetical to effective left politics.

2. The Facebook expulsions were justified with reference to the Bolshevik tradition and democratic centralism. This is based on a complete misunderstanding of both. One example will suffice. As the Bolshevik Party was preparing an insurrection towards the end of 1917, two leading party members, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, openly expressed their opposition to the insurrection in a non-party paper. Vladimir Lenin was furious, called them strike-breakers, and argued for their expulsion from the party (Lenin, 1917). He failed. The editors of the paper, in which his call for the expulsions was printed, responded by saying that: “the sharp tone of comrade Lenin’s article does not change the fact that, fundamentally, we remain of one mind” (Bone, 1974, p. 120). Zinoviev and Kamenev went on to play prominent roles in the Russian movement, as leading members of the Bolshevik and its successor, the Communist Party. This is worth underlining. The strike-breakers Zinoviev and Kamenev were not expelled in the context of the Russian revolutionary upsurge of 1917. The Russian Revolutionary tradition cannot be used as a pretext, therefore, to expel four individuals for comments on Facebook in the rather less revolutionary conditions of Britain, 2012.

3. This austere (and incorrect) interpretation of the Bolshevik tradition is compounded by the rigid prohibition on cross-branch discussion about party matters after the conference. This rigidity, combined with a sectarian habit of counterposing Marxism to feminism, can create an unhealthy internal dynamic leading to more and more punitive actions by the leadership.

These reflections are written by someone who is not a member of the SWP, and who does not live in Britain. However, the current crisis of the SWP has implications beyond the ranks of the SWP and outside the borders of Britain. As an important part of the English-speaking left, the SWP over the years has influenced many individuals and groups. Without correction, the actions by the current leadership, along with the errors regarding women’s oppression and left organizing, risk damaging the project of building a new left for the 21st century.

© 2013 Paul Kellogg

References

Bakan, A. (2012) ‘Marxism, Feminism, and Epistemological Dissonance’, Socialist Studies / Études socialistes, 8(2), 60–84.

Birchall, I. (2011) Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time. London: Bookmarks.

Bone, A. (trans.) (1974) The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: minutes of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) August 1917-February 1918. London: Pluto Press.

Cliff, T. (1984) Class struggle and women’s liberation, 1640 to today. London: Bookmarks.

Ferguson, S. (1999) ‘Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition’, Critical Sociology, 25(1), 1–15.

Ferguson, S. (2008) ‘Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor’, Race, Gender & Class, 15(1/2), 42–57.

Leeds University SWSS (2013, January 12) Leeds University SWSS Statement [online]. Swiss Leeds Uni. [Accessed12 January 2013 ]

Lenin, V. (1917, October 18) ‘Letter To Bolshevik Party Members’ [online], Pravda.

Miéville, C. (2006) Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Miéville, C. (2010) Kraken. New York: Random House Digital, Inc.

Miéville, C. (2012) Railsea. New York: Random House Digital, Inc.

Penny, L. (2013, January 11) ‘What does the SWP’s way of dealing with sex assault allegations tell us about the left?’ [online], New Statesman.

Seymour, R. (2013a, January 11) ‘Crisis in the SWP’ [online], Lenin’s Tomb.

Seymour, R. (2013b, January 12) ‘A reply to the Central Committee’ [online], Lenin’s Tomb.

Smith, S. (2012) Marxism and Women’s Liberation [online]. wearemany.org.

‘SWP’s Serbian Section Splits From IST’ [online], (2013, January 11) [online], Grumpy Old Trot.

Taylor, J. (2013, January 13) ‘Ranks of the Socialist Workers Party are split over handling of rape allegation’ [online], The Independent.

Walker, T. (2013, January 10) ‘Why I am resigning’ [online], Facts For Working People.

[Art Vandelay]

Years ago I very publicly named an activist on the Left as a rapist. I was criticized by many others in our common circles for not respecting a "due process" which didn't exist -- police were contacted some time after the assault and were just horrible to the victim of the attack -- and for not forming a vigilante squad and kneecapping the dirtball.

If we are serious about building an alternative world based on real justice, real democracy, real equality, we need to be able to figure out how to deal with people in our ranks who do terrible things.

I would like to see the radical Left develop community allies who might be able to oversee a complaints process properly. I have found Quakers to be terrific at this stuff. There are other people who work in restorative justice who are great at this.

Our top priority should be on preventing antisocial behaviours. But they happen.

In terms of a socialist or communist ethics, the basis must be honesty. We're all screwed up and could potentially do terrible things. Acknowledging that is necessary for a justice society.

I think that this is a very good idea and perhaps something that deserves its own thread. Why this has never been done before (as far as I am aware) is beyond me.

[Sam_b]

think its a bit silly to suggest that the SWP was the foundation on which so many of these young leftists based their whole affinity with left wing politics.

Ever been in the SWP? Because I have, and I've seen how this works long before this at regional level. The anti-fees demonstrations and Millbank like it or not were a huge recruiting ground for the SWP as a new layer of young people got radicalised. It was the same for most people my age with the war in Iraq. And what tends to happen in the SWP is you'll get those activists and pretty much drain them to a husk. Once you get burned out by politics, you tend to have a break, and that break last a number of years. This is the reason so many on the British left and on here have characterised the SWP's recruitment strategy as one of a 'revolving door' where there is poor retention.

You'll notice, and deliberately, I mentioned "organised left". I did not once be so broad to say "left wing politics" as you somehow suggest. This distinction is crucial, because I'm interested in keeping the organised left credible. I think organisations are important for building, and there are good arguments for them. I remember when the SSP and SSY split in 2006 a lot of good young people and students were lost to the left. Most of them never joined a political organisation again; they were disillusioned with what went on and got burned by one or both sides. That legacy is something that is still being rebuilt in Scotland. To say that it is somehow naive to think the left will lose a lot of good young activists because of the SWP situation is to ignore the lessons of every other split in a major leftist organisation. I suggest we don't make the mistake.


In fact, this break away from the dusty old cults that dominate the left might be the spark that the left itself needs.

If having rape and sexual assault is what the left needs for a 'spark' then fuck the left. If there has been one, it's been a wake-up call to start taking macho attitudes and misogyny in the organised left seriously. It's a sad indite of us when something like this is what we need to get our acts together. To say that the SWP is some sort of 'dusty old cult' is a complete generalisation in the extreme and shows little or no understanding of the evolution of the SWP into the cult it has become now. I use italics here because it was never always this way. Instead of making generalisation we must understand why degenerations happened in this organisation.


Let the SWP disappear, there is literally nothing worth salvaging

Young members and the credibility of leftist organisations are worth salvaging. Our messages should be that all SWP activists should get out now and not go down with the ship, because it's pretty obvious it's going down real fast.

[Hit The North]

There's a lot I agree with in Sam's post above but i don't think it is much of a sharp analysis to label the current SWP as a cult. You just empty out into same shallow pool you've accused others of wallowing in. The SWP in no more a cult than its ever been - I mean who is supposed to be the charismatic leader figure at the centre of this cult? It seems to me that there's precious little charisma going spare among the current CC.

Also, the 'revolving door' critique is soooo boring and its a shame that you now resort to it. The fact is that the SWP have done better than most in terms of retention, otherwise they would not be, by far, the largest group on the UK organised left.

The fact is that there are a number of sociological constraints on building a stable organisation of many thousands of revolutionary socialist activists - and these become more acute in times of low class struggle. Obviously, the SWP has not done everything right, has not always made the best of its opportunities, but what is the ISG going to do that will be qualitatively superior to the SWP's approach?

[Art Vandelay]

Has there been a significant drop of in membership in the SWP since this whole thing came about?

[The Idler]

Has there been a significant drop of in membership in the SWP since this whole thing came about?
Given the SWP culture, that's unlikely to be publicly declared.

[l'Enfermé]

Has there been a significant drop of in membership in the SWP since this whole thing came about?
I don't think we even know for sure how many members they had before this idiocy.

[The Idler]

I don't think we even know for sure how many members they had before this idiocy.
There is a comment in a pre-conference internal bulletin from December
"We have a membership of 7,597 this year, recruited 890 people since this time last year, and last year had a membership of 7,127 (all figures in IB2 2012). We have taken off 420 people from the lists this year."

There were figures for paying members in one of the Internal Bulletins too I think.

[Q]

There is a comment in a pre-conference internal bulletin from December
"We have a membership of 7,597 this year, recruited 890 people since this time last year, and last year had a membership of 7,127 (all figures in IB2 2012). We have taken off 420 people from the lists this year."

There were figures for paying members in one of the Internal Bulletins too I think.

That last sentence is a rather crucial point. The seven thousand odd figure is meaningless as it includes everyone who has indicated to be interested in the SWP in the last two years.

Way to inflate your membership numbers.

The paying membership is around 2.5 to 3 thousand. For the active membership we only need to look to how many people supported this or that faction or the CC (i.e. those bothered enough to sign on the biggest political issue of the SWP since maybe forever): We get no more than a few hundred people.

Or, alternatively, you can look at how many people came to the recent "Unite the Resistance" conference. The SWP boasts about 1000 people came (in reality it was more like 700 people (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/939/utr-sectarian-and-philistine)).

So, depending on how you look at it, the SWP is, at best, about a thousand people strong. And the question is how many of these thousand - these people that are actually active for the party - leave. If most do, the party might as well call it a day and quit.

[Hit The North]

Here's an interesting article, developing Sam_b's charge that the SWP has become a cult:

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/analysis/16236-why-i-resigned-from-socialist-workers-party-swp

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

Ever been in the SWP? Because I have, and I've seen how this works long before this at regional level. The anti-fees demonstrations and Millbank like it or not were a huge recruiting ground for the SWP as a new layer of young people got radicalised. It was the same for most people my age with the war in Iraq. And what tends to happen in the SWP is you'll get those activists and pretty much drain them to a husk. Once you get burned out by politics, you tend to have a break, and that break last a number of years. This is the reason so many on the British left and on here have characterised the SWP's recruitment strategy as one of a 'revolving door' where there is poor retention.

You'll notice, and deliberately, I mentioned "organised left". I did not once be so broad to say "left wing politics" as you somehow suggest. This distinction is crucial, because I'm interested in keeping the organised left credible. I think organisations are important for building, and there are good arguments for them. I remember when the SSP and SSY split in 2006 a lot of good young people and students were lost to the left. Most of them never joined a political organisation again; they were disillusioned with what went on and got burned by one or both sides. That legacy is something that is still being rebuilt in Scotland. To say that it is somehow naive to think the left will lose a lot of good young activists because of the SWP situation is to ignore the lessons of every other split in a major leftist organisation. I suggest we don't make the mistake.



If having rape and sexual assault is what the left needs for a 'spark' then fuck the left. If there has been one, it's been a wake-up call to start taking macho attitudes and misogyny in the organised left seriously. It's a sad indite of us when something like this is what we need to get our acts together. To say that the SWP is some sort of 'dusty old cult' is a complete generalisation in the extreme and shows little or no understanding of the evolution of the SWP into the cult it has become now. I use italics here because it was never always this way. Instead of making generalisation we must understand why degenerations happened in this organisation.



Young members and the credibility of leftist organisations are worth salvaging. Our messages should be that all SWP activists should get out now and not go down with the ship, because it's pretty obvious it's going down real fast.
I work with SWPers on a daily basis, old and new and I personally know some brilliant activists who are leaving as a result of this issue and others that are staying, but this doesn't seem to be of importance in a general sense.

I could say similar things to you as a former SPEW member (which was my actual avenue into organized left politics) - the point for me is that some groups wear themselves out and a fresh start may not be a bad thing. I became disillusioned with SPEW and actually became more active as a result, upon leaving. This is why I made the point of talking about good activists when it comes to the SWP - I left SPEW and became more productive, outside of the constraints of a party with significant internal problems. If someone is a dedicated activist, it is not their party which acts as the basis for that but their own engagement with the politics that they stand for and the reasons they engage in the first place. If the SWP dies, the dedicated activists will move on and adapt, and possibly create new and improved groups of their own.

Apologies if this seems like a dig but much of what the SWP could potentially lose would be paper activists who make up some percentage of their numbers - surely you would agree that the most dedicated activists would immediately wonder how they could organize again in the most effective manner and organize as a result of this question?

The fact that this scandal created this debate and 'sparked' this discussion makes me think that this is the spark that the left needs - it is sad but true. The responsibility is on those accused in the case that is under question and also the party that is under scrutiny due to how they dealt with the matter. The point is that this is a serious question and it should lead to serious conclusions. To me, the simple matter is that the party acted in a questionable manner and that this is indicative of the party, therefore the party itself must come under scrutiny (this leads to questions regarding its future and, of course, alternatives).

Furthermore (and this is my opinion as an activist in the organized left), those conscious and decent activists within the SWP who represent a significant part of the fabric of the organized left (a term you rightly made the point of using and in which many SWPers can be included) should use this opportunity to jump off of this dead horse and start thinking about writing a new page. Like I said, there is nothing worth salvaging but the best of the SWP and as far as my discussions with the SWPers I know (who are brilliant, dedicated activists), there is strong disdain towards the accused involved in this case and also the way the party dealt with it, which is systemic based on the way the party itself works.

I agree with your final paragraph and that was what I was getting at in the first place, minus the credibility aspect, which I don't see as a quantifiable factor that could influence decisions regarding the case of assessing the future of the SWP. To me and many others, the party has lost its credibility as a result of this scenario and there is nothing behind the party that raises it above the implications of this scenario, aside from, perhaps, a historical record, which is one aspect of 'credibility' - perhaps you could define others. My argument is that this aspect of historical credibility doesn't necessarily hold up to the situation in question, and I don't see other aspects of credibility within the SWP that couldn't be salvaged upon the event of the SWP's demise.

Also, I would hazard a guess that this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the SWP's internal issues, based on discussions I've had with current and former members, which raises further questions about the SWP itself and its overall credibility.

[Art Vandelay]

That last sentence is a rather crucial point. The seven thousand odd figure is meaningless as it includes everyone who has indicated to be interested in the SWP in the last two years.

Way to inflate your membership numbers.

The paying membership is around 2.5 to 3 thousand. For the active membership we only need to look to how many people supported this or that faction or the CC (i.e. those bothered enough to sign on the biggest political issue of the SWP since maybe forever): We get no more than a few hundred people.

Or, alternatively, you can look at how many people came to the recent "Unite the Resistance" conference. The SWP boasts about 1000 people came (in reality it was more like 700 people (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/939/utr-sectarian-and-philistine)).

So, depending on how you look at it, the SWP is, at best, about a thousand people strong. And the question is how many of these thousand - these people that are actually active for the party - leave. If most do, the party might as well call it a day and quit.

In all honesty, although there are potential repercussions which hopefully do not come to fruition (many militants getting burnt out and disillusioned with the left), I think it would be best if the SWP folds at this point.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

People who realise that this implosion has potential to completely destroy any credibility for an organised left, that's who.
I think that you're giving too much credit to the SWP.

[Manic Impressive]

What I want to know is why the members of the SWP have chosen this incident as the focal point of their reason for abandoning the party. Especially when there are a million and one other equally good reasons not to be associated with them. To name a few:



Tactically voting Labour
Supporting Iran during the Iran/Iraq war
we have no choice but to support the Khomeini regime
there will be instances where it is wrong to strike
socialists should not support actions which could lead to the collapse of the military effort
Various accusations of anti-semitism
Northern Ireland
The breathing space provided by the presence of British troops is short but vital. Those who call for the immediate withdrawal of the troops before the men behind the barricades can defend themselves are inviting a pogrom which will hit first and hardest at socialists.
Calling for a vote for the Mursi & Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
In fact the choice is clear. A vote for Shafiq would be a vote against the revolution.
A vote for Mursi is a vote against the legacy of Mubarak and for continuing change.
Revolutionary activists will not enjoy voting for Mursi.
If they do not do so, however, they are likely to experience the real nightmare scenario—a president cloned from the dictator they overthrew last year.
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=28611


That's just a few examples, omitting their reformist electoral campaigns and anti-fascism. So in the face of all these anti-working class policy stances what makes this one special? Why does the handling of a rape allegation trump support for capitalist's wars or capitalist parties? Why will the SWP members who have stuck with them through all of that shit or have chosen to just ignore it in favour of "the greater good" or "that was in the past", why will they now leave the party if they didn't then?

It reminds me of this thread a couple of weeks ago. http://www.revleft.com/vb/unnecessary-sectarianism-t177433/index.html?t=177433

"Why does it matter what my party has done in the past?"

If the SWP survives this, will future members be asking the same thing?

[Sam_b]

I might answer some things later, but I am writing a paper.


So in the face of all these anti-working class policy stances what makes this one special?

Because none of these things you mention inherently show that the SWP is a potentially unsafe space for women. Though when people post 'celebrate' videos in the aftermath of details of a woman being raped you tend to miss this point.

[Manic Impressive]

Because none of these things you mention inherently show that the SWP is a potentially unsafe space for women. Though when people post 'celebrate' videos in the aftermath of details of a woman being raped you tend to miss this point.
I posted Celebration by Kool & the gang in reaction to the "death of the left in britain" which is necasserry in order for Socialism to flourish. Every capitalist party that tries to deceive workers with promises of running capitalism better only fosters false consciousness. So yeah if the SWP goes down I'm celebrating.

Your level of a reasonable doubt is also laughable I'm afraid. Statistics however greatly they show a pattern are not evidence and nor should they be. By your logic I should assume you're an obese alcoholic because you're Scottish given the fact that obesity and alcoholism are statistically higher in Scotland than in England. Luckily I don't think that because I rely on things like actual evidence to base my opinions on rather than percentages.

[Hit The North]

"Why does it matter what my party has done in the past?"


An easy question to ask from someone who belongs to a party that never does anything :lol:.

And as for the SWP's so-called reformism, the SPGB thinks it can vote socialism into existence :lol:

So its obvious that any revolutionary socialists, serious about fighting capitalism and looking for a home in the wake of the SWPs dissolution, would not be looking toward the SPGB.


I posted Celebration by Kool & the gang in reaction to the "death of the left in britain" which is necasserry in order for Socialism to flourish.What a stupid remark!


Every capitalist party that tries to deceive workers with promises of running capitalism better only fosters false consciousness. So yeah if the SWP goes down I'm celebrating.

The SWP has never promised to run capitalism better. So we can add lying to your stupidity.

[Manic Impressive]

An easy question to ask from someone who belongs to a party that never does anything :lol:.

And as for the SWP's so-called reformism, the SPGB thinks it can vote socialism into existence :lol:

.


So avoiding all criticism of your former party which you supported for many years in order to attack me personally rather than addressing the arguments. It seems you're already on shaky ground.

If you have any specific questions about SPGB positions I suggest you start a new thread where I'll be happy to answer them. Until then shall we stay on topic?


The SWP has never promised to run capitalism better. So we can add lying to your stupidity.
This one I will address as it is in relation to the topic even though I found it such an easy statement to prove that I thought it not worth while. Your candidates stood for election under the name of Left List.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=14462


We are standing because we think it is important to have an alternative voice that says the working people in London, who produce the wealth of the city, should get some of the benefit of the wealth and shouldn’t have to pay for the crisis.Capitalism

We need an emergency programme of council housing building and an end to sell-offs of existing council housing. All housing should be affordable.Capitalism

Londoners suffer from one of the most expensive public transport systems in the world. We have called for a reduction of fairs to no more than £1 on buses and tubes – and a massive expansion of public transport.
Capitalism

We campaign for an end to all forms of discrimination, and our candidates represent the diversity of London.Capitalism

SWP candidates claiming how they would run capitalism better than the current mob if they were elected.


So its obvious that any revolutionary socialists, serious about fighting capitalism and looking for a home in the wake of the SWPs dissolution, would not be looking toward the SPGB
We've already had inquiries it is more a question of whether we would accept them into the party tbh. They would of course have to renounce their SWP views and since this is an split on the matter of organization rather than ideology I don't know how likely it is that we would find many acceptable candidates. We would of course be happy to teach them about Marxism and socialism.

[Hit The North]

We've already had inquiries it is more a question of whether we would accept them into the party tbh.

Joke. As if any of them would want to join your (dinner) party of librarians.

As for the Leftlist stuff, if you think that any member of that coalition thought they'd get elected, then think again. Nevertheless, in an election, fielding candidates offers a platform for raising issues and possible solutions for the immediate privations suffered by working class communities and the point is to raise and highlight campaigns.

Of course, it's obvious through its non-participation, that the SPGB doesn't care about organising fight-backs against capitalism. Instead it raises abstract slogans and purrs to its self-righteous self about how fucking pristine its utopian politics are. And if you think this is a personal attack, it is only because your sneering, pontificating and pretentious posts are the epitome of these traits.

[Manic Impressive]

Joke. As if any of them would want to join your (dinner) party of librarians.

As for the Leftlist stuff, if you think that any member of that coalition thought they'd get elected, then think again. Nevertheless, in an election, fielding candidates offers a platform for raising issues and possible solutions for the immediate privations suffered by working class communities and the point is to raise and highlight campaigns.

Of course, it's obvious through its non-participation, that the SPGB doesn't care about organising fight-backs against capitalism. Instead it raises abstract slogans and purrs to its self-righteous self about how fucking pristine its utopian politics are. And if you think this is a personal attack, it is only because your sneering, pontificating and pretentious posts are the epitome of these traits.
OK so again I'm going to ask have you got any comments in regards to the issues I raised in this post here? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2565536&postcount=165)

I deeply dislike the SWP as I feel they propagate false consciousness and slow down the path to socialism by focusing on single issues rather than the cause. But that aside how do you account for any of the broadly agreed upon things which we know to be contrary to class interests?

[Q]

The leadership can no longer lead - but a positive outcome to the crisis requires more than the removal of the entire CC, argues Paul Demarty (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/945/swp-crisis-opposition-emboldened-as-demand-for-recall-grows).



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/wwimages/ww945/sm-china2.jpg
China Miéville: Open rebellion

The Socialist Workers Party has been waiting a long time for a revolutionary situation. On some occasions, as with the fatuous ‘All out, stay out’ slogan it advanced to striking public sector workers last winter, it has tried, with dismal results, to force one - or delude itself into thinking there is one. Now, it has got one. But there is only one catch - it is not Britain that has been plunged into such a crisis, but the SWP itself.

I am only half being ironic here. Lenin famously defined a revolutionary situation as one in which the rulers cannot rule in the old way, and the oppressed will not be ruled in the old way. While the outcome of this brouhaha cannot be foretold, there is no denying that Britain’s largest (for now) revolutionary organisation is in chaos. The leadership is defensive and rudderless; and, for once, there is open and militant rebellion against them.

It is not hard to see why. The last week has been utterly calamitous for the SWP’s ruling clique. The release, on Andy Newman’s blog, of the now infamous transcript of the disputes committee report and debate at conference was already bad enough. An appalling misstep such as this absurd investigation into rape charges might have been manageable, had the whole thing been kept out of public view. Now, every SWPer from Aberdeen to Cornwall knows what went on - and so do all the people they have to work with in trade unions, on campuses and in other left groups.

Yet it was the Weekly Worker’s publication of Tom Walker’s resignation letter which exploded the situation. Two days later, the story merited a full page in The Independent, an entry on Laurie Penny’s New Statesman blog, and even the mockery of the Daily Mail. While comrade Walker effectively urged others to follow his example and resign, his article seems to have had the opposite effect (the best proof that it was the wrong advice). SWPers now feel emboldened to come out openly and criticise the leadership, daring Charlie Kimber, Alex Callinicos and their creatures on the central committee to expel them.

Penny’s article quoted the novelist China Miéville, for a start. “The way [the] allegations were dealt with ... was appalling. It’s a terrible problem of democracy, accountability and internal culture that such a situation can occur, as is the fact that those arguing against the official line in a fashion deemed unacceptable to those in charge could be expelled for ‘secret factionalism’.” He also pointed out that “many of us have for years been openly fighting for a change in the culture and structures of the organisation to address exactly this kind of democratic deficit”.1 Not as openly as this, comrade ...

Tomb of the infuriated

Compared to Richard Seymour, the man with whom he has previously teamed up as a democratic dissident, Miéville is positively bashful over this whole affair. Comrade Seymour - who runs the prominent Lenin’s Tomb blog, and now writes for The Guardian - followed up on Laurie Penny’s piece with an absolutely scathing run-down of ‘the story so far’, of the incompetent and shameful attempt at a cover-up and efforts to bully people back into line.

“[The CC] tell members to get on with focusing on ‘the real world’,” he writes. “In the real world, this is a scandal. And we, those who fought on this, told them it would be. We warned them that it would not just be a few sectarian blogs attacking us. We warned them that after we had rightly criticised George Galloway over his absurd remarks about rape, and after a year of stories about sexual abuse, and after more than a year of feminist revival, this was a suicidal posture, not just a disgusting, sickening one.”

He concludes with a call for resistance a great deal more convincing, in its own restricted sphere, than any of the canned rhetoric in the last decade of Socialist Worker: “The future of the party is at stake, and they are on the wrong side of that fight. You, as members, have to fight for your political existence. Don’t simply drift away, don’t simply bury your face in your palms, and don’t simply cling to the delusional belief that the argument was settled at conference. You must fight now.”2

The CC’s response, meanwhile, was pitiful; initially a strictly internal publication, its comment to members was quickly and inevitably leaked to Harry’s Place, and eventually - and grudgingly - put up on the SWP’s own website.3 “We took allegations against a leading member of the party very seriously,” Charlie Kimber pleads; “far from being a cover-up, this sort of open discussion [of the DC report at conference] shows that our procedures and elected bodies are accountable to our membership,” he insists.

In short, it was a repackaged version of the same bullshit that the CC has pushed throughout this affair. Seymour certainly was not fooled; if anything, his reply made his opening salvo look restrained:

“I urge people to stay, and to fight. But one hardly blames those who have had enough of the Kafkaesque nightmare, enough of listening to people spout demented gibberish in meetings and aggregates, enough of hearing the same lies repeated, enough of wildly tenuous historical analogies, enough of cheap Realpolitik passed off as wisdom. How many times can you hear, ‘Well, I was at a paper sale this morning, and no-one mentioned it’, before you start thinking of having people sectioned?”4

Others have now followed the comrades’ lead, and made public their own opposition to the CC. Nathan Akehurst posted a somewhat milder criticism on his blog5; Emma Rock and Ian Llewellyn added their thoughts to Lenin’s Tomb, which has now been thrown open as a platform for dissident SWP members. A new blog has turned up, under the banner of the ‘SWP Opposition’,6 with an open letter to SWP comrades, which we republish here, demanding a “focus on the political implications and challenges ahead for our party and more widely for the movement and our class”. Others have been sounding off, openly and anonymously, on Facebook, on comment threads and wherever else they feel confident to do so.

Non-leadership

The remarkable thing, of course, is that they do feel confident to do so. Barely a month ago, the notion that the internet would be full of SWPers demanding a recall conference and the sacking of the entire central committee - many under their own names - looked pretty fanciful. Yet here we are. And underlying this fact is that ‘the rulers cannot go on in the old way’.

For the first time in decades, the initiative in the SWP has not been with the CC; they have surrendered it spectacularly, wildly underestimating the significance of the knife-edge vote on the DC report, the 11th-hour split in their own ranks and the level of anger that exists over this affair. Having spent years ensuring that an open rebellion could simply never happen, they are utterly at sea now that it has.

They are in something of an impossible position. Comrades Seymour and Miéville are the best exemplars of it; they are both assets to the SWP, with public profiles that lend it some credibility among broader layers of progressive-minded people. Given their notability, and given that this scandal has now reached the bourgeois media, the leadership clique shrinks from expelling them. But because these two get away with it, all opponents in the SWP are emboldened to speak up.

The gravity of the situation should not be overstated. This ‘revolutionary’ crisis is a moment, which still needs to be seized by the opposition. The possibility very much exists for the CC to regain the initiative; it cannot be expected to keep piling mistake upon disaster upon calamity.

There is also an element of ‘confirmation bias’ of which we should be wary - an SWP member calling for the blood of Charlie Kimber is much more noticeable than one who has, indeed, been cowed into submission. Still, there are certainly a great many more in opposition than are visibly complaining on the blogs, with entire branches dominated by people who want the CC out.

The demands that have been thrown up in the course of the rebellion are generally positive - and, more encouragingly, they are marked by an absolutely correct sense that this is the moment that a fight can be won.

The great unifying demand is to recall conference, which appears everywhere; it goes without saying that simply petitioning the CC to call one will not get too far, given that a central purpose of such a conference for many delegates would be to turf it out en masse. Within (broadly) the SWP’s constitution, oppositionists ought to fight for the national committee to call one (though it appears to be packed with loyalists). They are fighting in the branches for a motion to recall conference - for which they would need 20% of branches to sign up. That could be a stepping stone to a full conference. The NC, of course, has up to now never been more than a way for branch delegates to be cajoled into rubber-stamping the latest inane CC diktats - but then, the Paris Commune was merely a mundane bourgeois local authority before 1871.

These are technical questions. The fact that they have been linked - by comrades Seymour, Rock, Miéville, and countless anonymous commenters - to the question of the party regime as a whole is positive and necessary. Seymour suggests “creating more pluralistic party structures, ending the ban on factions outside of conference season and rethinking the way elections take place”; and indeed he and Miéville have repeatedly called for year-round discussion bulletins and other democratic reforms.

The sentiment is present elsewhere, although often in more diffuse forms. Emma Rock: “All party forums should be more than just talking shops and should have real teeth to implement new ideas. Likewise ideology and the development of our political position should not be left to a handful of theorists, but should be engaged in by every comrade in every branch. We should become a true hub for the development of new ideas, and not be left lagging behind groups such as UK Uncut or Occupy.”7

We will leave aside the last phrase, and simply point out that, surely, any revolutionary organisation should seek to arm its militants with theory, to become a ‘hub of ideas’, that its forums should not be talking shops. The SWP has increasingly had the opposite character, however, and simply a correct diagnosis of this problem is an advance.

Root and branch

The gaping hole in all this is political criticism of the SWP’s direction. The dissidents have all set themselves up as ‘defenders of the IS tradition’ against a leadership which has somehow perverted it. This is ultimately wrong-headed. That tradition is thoroughly implicated in all aspects of this disaster, and will have to be dealt with to avoid a repeat - even if the rebellion is successful on its own terms.

A pertinent demonstration is the ‘women’s question’, which is most directly posed by the form the crisis has taken. Most participants - leadership and opposition - have taken pains to stress the ‘proud tradition’ of the SWP in fighting women’s oppression. In fact, it is anything but, as Dave Isaacson makes clear elsewhere in this paper; the SWP’s history on this question is a series of flip-flops, according to the political exigencies of the leadership in particular contexts.

Yet this is exactly the approach you would expect on the basis of Tony Cliff’s reading of Lenin - the leader with the ‘good nose’, who could sniff the air and reorient the party overnight; the leader unafraid to ‘bend the stick’ to keep his troops on the straight and narrow, to make wrenching theoretical turns. This conception of political leadership results necessarily in wild political reverses; but, more to the point, it leads to unaccountable leadership.

The major form this has taken is the alternate accommodation to and anathematisation of feminism. The emergence of the IS and then the SWP as a significant force on the revolutionary left is coterminous with the emergence of second-wave feminism, which (thanks as much to the heady political context as anything internal to it) frequently took on a left tilt, and attempted to articulate itself as socialist in some way.

Yet this is, in a sense, perverse. The Communist manifesto itself calls for women’s liberation. International women’s day started out as a movement of working class women against feminism, and it was the workers movement which made it an international phenomenon (that movement has now been colonised - and that is the word - by feminism). The history of our movement is peppered with women (and men) who have made radical, even at times wildly utopian, proposals for ending women’s oppression and exploitation, explicitly tying it into the socialist project as an integral and inseparable part, and equally decrying feminism every step of the way. If this tradition had not been buried, second-wave feminism would have been dead on arrival.

What intervened was, broadly, Stalinism - the retreat from women’s liberation by the Soviet regime in the late 1920s and onwards; the accommodation by Stalinist parties in the west to trade union sectionalism, and corresponding development of a sexist internal culture and philistine political attitude to women. Similar maladies afflicted many of the Trotskyist groups - including, until the launch of Women’s Voice, the IS/SWP.

‘Feminism’ today does not mean the same thing as it did when Zetkin, Kollontai and the others were attacking it. But the fact that many SWP members are happy to self-describe as ‘feminist’ is ultimately a function of the failure of the IS tradition to live up to its billing. This tradition, after all, is the armour that supposedly protected the SWP from all the depredations of Stalinism, uniquely on the far left. Yet its utter confusion on the question of feminism is a direct result of its failure to do so. The thoroughly and obviously Stalinist handling of the recent furore is another index of that failure, and it is hardly a novelty, as generations of ex-SWPers will readily attest.

The present crisis in the SWP is, in fact, a result of the secular decay of its political tradition. Very well; we are all, in this period of reaction, products of decades of entropy. This paper derives from a rebellion against ‘official communism’. There is no reason the SWP could not buck the trend - but the obstacles do not end at the current CC: they include the political tradition and method they claim, with some justice, to defend. A revolution in the SWP, like any revolution, will have to involve more than a change of personnel.

[email protected]

Notes

1. www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/01/what-does-swps-way-dealing-sex-assault-allegations-tell-us-about-left.

2. www.leninology.com/2013/01/crisis-in-swp.html.

3. www.swp.org.uk/14/01/2013/response-attacks-swp.

4. www.leninology.com/2013/01/a-reply-to-central-committee.html.

5. http://nathan-akehurst.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/notes-on-swp-crisis.html.

6. http://swpopposition.blogspot.co.uk.

7 www.leninology.com/2013/01/guest-post-on-crisis.html.

[Sam_b]

This has just been broken by Counterfire:
(http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/analysis/16236-why-i-resigned-from-socialist-workers-party-swp)

Donny Mayo (his name has been altered for all the usual reasons) was until recently a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party


I have written this article as an attempt to understand the rapid descent into madness of the party I had been a member of for 11 years. I respect and admire the many comrades who have not yet left the SWP but are fighting as hard as they can to hold the leadership to account (which in this case means overthrowing it) for events of recent weeks. However much I hope they win, it is my belief that they will not succeed and that a substantial realignment on the left is necessary in the near future.

I have chosen to publish on Counterfire despite the fact that the CC will use my article to divert from its failings by suggesting that the crisis was a plot against the party all along. I have done so because I want to make it clear that I do not believe (as some who are critical of the CC do) that beyond the SWP there is just wilderness; because rather than just state the need for dialogue with the rest of the radical left I wanted to actually take part in it; and because, as much as I disagreed with many of their reasons for leaving at the time, I do think those who formed Counterfire made a number of prescient criticisms when leaving the SWP and, moreover, when viewed in the context of a global crisis of old-style Trotskyist Leninism, they seem to me to be on the right side of history and the SWP as-is on the wrong side. I do not think simply joining Counterfire is an answer to all our problems. But I do think those interested in preserving the best bits of the International Socialist tradition should be working with them and I am convinced that they would be an important part of any radical left realignment of the sort the English left so desperately needs.

The Socialist Workers Party is dying. For all the good it has done over many years, it has imploded over allegations of sexual assault and its inability to deal sensibly with them.

It will continue to limp on for at least a few more years but the descent into cultishness will now be rapid. Those who have chosen to 'stay and fight' will be expelled or driven out soon enough (although I do, of course, wish them the best of luck in their fight) and those who see the need to 'defend the line' will find themselves saying and doing things they never dreamt they would say or do; they are in the process of crossing an intellectual 'line in the sand' from which their political minds will probably never recover.

It is not the intention of this article to rehash the allegations, or the grim events of the past few weeks (there are plenty of articles, many very good, that do that already). My aim here is to place recent events in a political context, to try to understand how and why this could happen, the better to build a new left in which this could not happen again.

Much of what has been written about the affair focuses on questions of democracy. Undoubtedly there are questions of democracy at play here. But if this is the case then there must also be deeper questions that need answering. How have thousands of decent people, who consider themselves fighters for liberation, allowed such a sham democracy to persist? What are the ideological justifications that allow good comrades to perform such contortionist arguments?

Many have also focused on the question of patriarchy within the left. This is an important question. Clearly nothing like this would ever have happened with gender roles reversed. Clearly, as much as people can be intellectually aware of the arguments for women's liberation they can still act in the ways socially ingrained in them by a patriarchal capitalist system. In this particular case there is also the question of power. But the question of power again raises deeper ideological questions: how could many thousands of good comrades, who are usually so suspicious of power and the powerful be so in awe of power on this occasion as to let this happen?

Here I want to focus on some of those deeper questions. I want to argue that the SWP, for all its many good points and many good members, has suffered for many years from a structure and an ideology that is, in the final analysis, unable to cope with the myriad ways the world has changed over the past thirty or so years. Despite some major successes, most notably the role played in the anti-war movement, the SWP has suffered a slow build up of problems resulting from this, one which has accelerated in recent years and culminated in the recent implosion.

The question I want to answer boils down to this: how did it come to be that to accuse "comrade delta" of sexual assault was seen, in the eyes of so many, as code for an abandoning of the idea that the working class could transform the world, as an existential attack on the SWP?

Why was the leadership willing to jeopardise the entire organisation, jettison a whole layer of youth, over the supposed infallibility of just one comrade?

Here I think we have to look at the long-term trajectory of the SWP and also the decline of pretty much all the other groups that follow the Trotskyist model of Leninism.

It seems to me that for at least 30 years now any attempt to understand something that had changed about the world has been clamped down on as a revisionist shift away from revolutionary politics.

This wasn't without reason. When the euro-communists said the working class had changed they were shifting to the right. But the problem is the working class had changed. When people talk about financialisation they often are talking about a shift towards a reformist variant of Keynesianism. But the problem is financialisation has happened.

The international socialist tradition was different to other Trotskyisms. It was heterodox. It wasn't theological. It didn't elevate small group politics to the level of principle.

But the SWP of today is not like that at all. It is orthodox. They might let young people write for the paper or the journal but nobody wants or asks them to write anything new or interesting - these articles are marked like a GCSE English comprehension question only with Harman substituted for Shakespeare.

Anything already written down is orthodoxy. Anything else is heresy.

The problem though is that the world has changed. Neoliberalism has made life harder for a generation. Work is different. The unions look different. The battle for women's liberation is in a new place. Imperialism has changed. The third world has been transformed. The information revolution has changed the nature of both capitalism and resistance to it.

These are things we should be talking about. But to even gesture towards them is heresy.

Radical left ideas have flourished since the crisis. But the truth is almost none of the best thinkers on the radical left are from a Trotskyist background. Many are not Lenininst. Some (the horror) are not even Marxist. But the traditional left ignores them at its peril. It is the job of revolutionaries, as Marx did in his time, to synthesise the insights of the best anti-capitalist thinkers with the fundamental principle that it must, and can only be, ordinary people who bring about a society free from the horrors of capitalism. The SWP though ignores and dismisses thinkers just because they are from 'outside the tradition'.

That is why even the SWP's flagship Marxism festival has been played down. In an Internal Bulletin article that massively over inflated the membership figures (the reality is around 2,500, they claimed 7,500) the central committee actually lied about Marxism the other way - they made it 1000 smaller than it really was. They spent one sentence on Marxism but a whole page on SWP 'educationals'. Why? One brings in outsiders, critics, heretics, new ideas; the other is totally safe repetition of things that were written in the '80s.

Listing the successes of the previous year, the central committee listed Walthamstow's anti-fascist demo (it was good, but a big demo against a spent force in multicultural left labour area which we spent six months building) and the Unite the Resistance conference (smaller than Right to Work, which was smaller than Organising for Fighting Unions) but clearly do not see relating to a new wave of ideological radicalization as a success (in fact Marxism disturbed them, they didn't feel at home there).

Once any criticism of the religion - I say religion because that is what it is when an ideology becomes organisationally frozen in the past - once any criticism is labelled heresy - it is only a short step to what we have now. To the Sopranos' model of leadership that the party suffers from. The mafia approach to criticism.

Because anything from beyond the brains of the central committee must have originated in the scary outside world. It must therefore be a Trojan horse for autonomism or reformism or Chris Bambery or whoever the main enemy is today.

Good ideas can only come from dead people or the central committee. A monopoly on ideas means a monopoly on power. And that is not the organisation I wanted to join, that I built, that I fought for, that I defended.

I didn't join a socialist organisation so that I could be told I shouldn't talk about how working life has become more precarious - lest I cede ground to 'autonomism'. Where feminism is a dirty word, used like it describes a disease ('creeping feminism'). Where autonomism is used as a swear word. Where instead of celebrating the rise of Syriza the CC look for reasons to condemn it. Where instead of celebrating the role new technology can play in building mass movements the CC ignore or dismiss it. Where people who read books beyond our tradition are seen as dangerous (some of those who left to form the Scottish ISG were told they read "too much Harvey, not enough Harman"). Where ideology is seen as a deviation from honest workers' struggle. Where real workers' struggle is seen as a deviation from getting a big (or at least bigger than the NSSN) audience in friends meeting house.

That's not the organisation I joined. That's not the tradition of the SWP. That's not a party that will attract and recruit the best anti-capitalists of our generation - and it's certainly not a party that will develop and keep hold of them.

This is not just a problem faced by the SWP, but by all parties that have followed the orthodox Trotskyist version of Leninism. How does the first generation of leaders loosen its grip and let a new generation lead? How, when so much of the organisational life has orbited around defending obscure interpretations of irrelevant theoretical arguments, how to change tack, to change those arguments when the outside world changes? How to deal with a structure so brittle that the tiniest criticism is treated as the greatest heresy?

And, as times move on, as a whole generation now has grown up under neoliberalism and instinctively (even if not theoretically) understands the changes wrought by it, it becomes harder and harder to hold the line. And as the internet disrupts previous models of organisation (it does for the capitalists too by the way), 'democratic centralism' becomes an increasingly cultish mantra.

I believe that the International Socialists were the best organisation on the British left in the 60s and 70s. I believe that the SWP had many things going for it. I think things possibly were salvageable. There was a conscious effort to 'modernise' the SWP after Seattle and the mass anti-war demonstrations. But then, for whatever reason, the leadership (including those who have since split) retreated from these attempts. After the failure of Respect though, the retreat became a full-on rout. Modernisation was consciously reversed. And in the context of the gravest capitalist crisis since at least the 1930s, the Arab Spring and the European Autumn, this was not the time to retreat from the outside world.

And so it became the case that the SWP suffered the same problems that had haunted the rest of the Trotskyist-left. Splits along essentially generational lines, brittleness to the point of absurdity (treating criticism of "comrade delta" as the abandonment of classical Marxism) and sectarian retreat and isolation.

Almost everyone who joined with me around the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements has already left the SWP (in fact it has retained between ten and twenty subs paying members for each year 2000-2005). The generation who joined over Millbank will mostly leave over this. Does any serious comrade, hand-on-heart, believe that the next generation of recruits won't also be driven out? That, before all the older cadre retire, the SWP will be able to renew its leadership?

And with each blow, the sectarian retreat becomes worse. The 'Millwall' attitude (nobody likes us we don't care) has become especially pronounced over Syriza and, on a smaller scale, the SWP's expulsion from the Unite United Left. But it will become far, far, worse over recent events. The fact that some of my former comrades have spoken of the need to 'defend revolutionary democracy from the bourgeois press' in this situation makes me feel profoundly disturbed.

So what can be done? I don't pretend to have the answers but I think that by understanding the context of this implosion we can at least avoid some wrong answers.

This was not just a case of 'one bad apple': there was something fundamentally wrong before that. This case just highlighted the fact that there is no 'reformist' (i.e. slowly and softly within the organisation) solution to those fundamental weaknesses. This was not just a question of structures: the lack of democracy resulted from a lack of ideological openness and a retreat from trying to understand changes in the real world.

Any solution has to take into account the generational shift away from orthodox Trotskyist organisations. It has to understand that the splits in Britain in the past decade have occurred roughly along these lines. That whereas splits on the far left generally lead to small rumps that degenerate and disappear all of these groups have actually improved since their splits - suggesting that they are on the right side of history and their 'parent' organisations the wrong side.

Reform inside the SWP is not an option: they will expel anyone who tries and the brand is now utterly toxic anyway.

Leaving to form a new version of the SWP is not an option: it is an historically outdated model and the last thing the British left needs is another small Trot organisation.

My hope is that something will rise in the SWP's ashes. That enough people will leave, soon enough, and together enough (i.e. not just drifting off) so as to allow for some sort of regroupment of the radical left; a coming together of those who understand some of the problems described here (and many others who never felt any of the existing organisations were what they were looking for) into something much more plural.

I have been a member of the SWP for eleven years. For the first few I believe its hegemonic role on the far left was a very positive thing - look at the response to 9/11. In recent years I think it has been much more ambiguous (indeed if 9/11 had happened again I am not sure it would have been willing to play the same role). I think it would be truly disastrous if, after recent events, the SWP were to continue to to play a hegemonic role on the far left. But I don't think it will be able to do so. The task now is to ensure that whatever does fill that role can learn from its mistakes.

[Lucretia]

What I want to know is why the members of the SWP have chosen this incident as the focal point of their reason for abandoning the party. Especially when there are a million and one other equally good reasons not to be associated with them. To name a few:



Tactically voting Labour
Supporting Iran during the Iran/Iraq war
Various accusations of anti-semitism
Northern Ireland
Calling for a vote for the Mursi & Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=28611


That's just a few examples, omitting their reformist electoral campaigns and anti-fascism. So in the face of all these anti-working class policy stances what makes this one special? Why does the handling of a rape allegation trump support for capitalist's wars or capitalist parties? Why will the SWP members who have stuck with them through all of that shit or have chosen to just ignore it in favour of "the greater good" or "that was in the past", why will they now leave the party if they didn't then?

It reminds me of this thread a couple of weeks ago. http://www.revleft.com/vb/unnecessary-sectarianism-t177433/index.html?t=177433

"Why does it matter what my party has done in the past?"

If the SWP survives this, will future members be asking the same thing?

This episode is considered particularly egregious by the party membership because it is an offense against what is often considered to be identity politics, rather than class politics. The party uses its alleged strength in this area as a basis for much of its recruiting. So when it plays the hypocrite, the results can be damaging.

[Sam_b]

We have released a statement. (http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2013/01/comment-on-the-swp-crisis-sexism-the-left/)

“Donny Mayo’s” statement, published by Counterfire, is one of the most useful interventions into the debate that we have encountered so far as it provides a serious engagement with the organisational deterioration which has led the SWP to its current, most probably terminal, crisis. For this reason we have chosen to endorse this statement, with further comment from the ISG.

We are disgusted and dismayed by the recent reports of how the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) investigated a rape case. As a rule, we do not comment on other socialist groups. We have seen the toxic impact of rivalry and point-scoring on the Left, and we prefer if possible to stress our common values and to focus our critique on the capitalist system. However, silence is not an option in this case. There appears to be no doubt that some SWP members, and certainly the leadership, are complicit in sexism and the cover-up of sexual violence. It is our duty, as socialists, to take a stand against this.

Some of the details recently leaked are particularly distressing, and are reminiscent of the worst practices of institutional sexism. We do not wish to dwell on these points here. However, whilst sexual violence is a societal problem and it is far from unique to the SWP, suffice to say that this was a deplorable way to investigate a rape case. The way in which it was handled served only to replicate the culture of victim blaming and rape apologism which perpetuates the oppression of women.

We don’t deny that many of the SWP’s members fight for women’s liberation. This should be a given for socialists. But this evidence is irrelevant to this accusation. Indeed, in this context it amounts to serious complacency, trivialising a very grave issue, and setting an ugly precedent that must be opposed.

We welcome the rebellion by so many SWP members, of all ages, who are taking a stand against the way the SWP leadership has handled this case. Its leadership, who put ‘party unity’ over the elementary principles of justice, represent all that is outdated in socialist organisations. We believe many members still have a key role to play, but staying in the SWP will not do them any credit – the brand is now toxic.

As a new socialist group, we see it as our duty to end the culture that lets sexism go unchecked. If we fail to speak out at this moment, we risk letting bad habits form into bad institutions. We will take this case as a wake up call. To change society, we must change the Left’s unreconstructed practices on oppression, power, and internal democracy. We need a complete overhaul of everything this episode represents and it is vital that all anti-capitalists step up to these challenges.

Suki Sangha and Sarah Collins, National Secretaries of the International Socialist Group

[Manic Impressive]

I tell you one thing that's really impressed me in all these statements from former and leaving SWP members, other groups and of many posters here on revleft is the recognition that the model of internal democracy used by groups like the SWP is insufficient. That's a positive step forward and I really really hope they all follow through with it.

Here's to one member one vote!

[blake 3:17]

China Miéville on the current crisis:


This vicious cycle must be broken. To renew our party, in other words, must mean to trust in the membership, to encourage independent thought and comradely discussion. This in turn will enable the members not only to select the leadership we deserve, but to hold them to account in a way both we and they deserve.

Accordingly, not only is this fight one for the SWP’s survival as an interventionist force, but it is one that can only be won by a root-and-branch rethinking of how we operate. The scale of this catastrophe of their own making is slowly dawning on the leadership. It is inevitable that they will start to offer some kind of carrot-and-stick response, likely designed to minimize changes to the structures to which they have shown themselves wedded. We must be clear on the scale of what is needed. The removal of one or two people from positions of prominence would clearly be inadequate.

Full article: http://www.leninology.com/2013/01/the-stakes.html

[Q]

The Weekly Worker is publishing a statement (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/945/opposition-blog-doubts-exist-over-authenticity) from the new 'SWP Opposition' blog, but doubts over the blogs authenticity remain, reports Peter Manson



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/wwimages/ww945/HAL9000.jpg
Friend or foe?

The Weekly Worker is publishing this statement from a blog from the newly created ‘SWP Opposition’ (http://swpopposition.blogspot.co.uk). If genuine it shows that the open rebellion against the bureaucratic-centralist SWP regime is reaching new heights.

However, the big problem is that many comrades in SWP circles are sceptical. I have been told - including by those who you would expect to be in the loop - that no-one knows who is involved. One comrade closely associated with the Democratic Opposition told me: “We are warning comrades away from it”. It was the comrade’s “firm belief” that SWP Opposition is actually a “front” for the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Those who like conspiracy theories may prefer the notion that it is a central committee provocation, designed to lure actual or potential dissidents into revealing their identities.

In response to my enquiry, I received an email from the SWP Opposition stating that the new faction has the support of “27 members” (“and growing”), including “two former full-time organisers and current and former national council members”. The trouble is, nobody - including, as far as I can tell, those associated with the officially recognised opposition factions set up before the January 4-6 conference - has any idea who these might be.

In view of the expulsion of four comrades just before conference simply for exchanging ideas (including discussing whether to form a pre-conference faction - and then deciding not to), it would be unsurprising if genuine oppositionists decided to maintain secrecy. However, more and more comrades are now openly coming out in opposition to the CC, to its abysmal anti-democratic practices and its disastrous mishandling of rape allegations.

Surely now is not the time to ‘keep your head down’. The campaign for democracy has been building a head of steam and so far no moves have been made against prominent blogger Richard Seymour, for example. If everyone came out openly at this time, the CC would have a real problem. If comrades are not convinced, I would suggest that any secret faction could, for instance, be fronted by one or another ex-member whom everyone trusts.

Whatever the truth about the SWP Opposition, there is no doubt that the SWP leadership - however much it pretends it is now a case of ‘business as usual’ - is floundering.


Open letter to fellow members of the SWP

Dear comrades

Conference is usually the time where the party unites behind the perspectives agreed and the central committee are given the mandate and authority with which to lead us during the struggles of the coming year. The events of the past few months have already given our enemies plenty of ammunition to attack the party. However, the debates leading up to and including those at conference have not successfully addressed the outstanding issues and concerns raised in the pre-conference period and, if left unresolved, will only continue to damage the party further.

The serious allegations made against a leading member of the party have unleashed questions not just about the handling of the case itself, but also around the standard of democracy, accountability and organisation required within the party. We do not wish to revisit the details of the case brought to the disputes committee, but instead focus on the political implications and challenges ahead for our party and more widely for the movement and our class.

We reject the comments made by central committee members and others that to turn inwards now would harm the organisation. There are serious questions outstanding and not to address them will risk the long-term future of the revolutionary socialist project we are trying to build. We are founding this faction as a rallying point for those who believe, as we do, that the issues and concerns raised warrant further debate and discussion.

For a democratic, effective and united revolutionary socialist organisation, join us and fight for change from below.

Yours for socialism

SWP Opposition

http://swpopposition.blogspot.co.uk

[BOZG]

The Weekly Worker is publishing a statement (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/945/opposition-blog-doubts-exist-over-authenticity) from the new 'SWP Opposition' blog, but doubts over the blogs authenticity remain, reports Peter Manson

Love how they ignore the fact that there are also accusations that this opposition is a CPGB front too.

[Manic Impressive]

The thing to take into consideration about those who want to stay and fight is the financial aspect. A party the size of the SWP must have considerable assets. So whoever is the last one's left will inherit those assets a long with the toxic brand. But once you are the last onez left you can easily merge into someone else or change your name or whatever. A call to "stay and fight" might be a call for "stay and fight (for the money)".

[The Idler]

Love how they ignore the fact that there are also accusations that this opposition is a CPGB front too.
Probably because the accusations are from the same people who usually argue small groups are too insignificant to influence things.

[Android]

The thing to take into consideration about those who want to stay and fight is the financial aspect. A party the size of the SWP must have considerable assets. So whoever is the last one's left will inherit those assets a long with the toxic brand. But once you are the last onez left you can easily merge into someone else or change your name or whatever. A call to "stay and fight" might be a call for "stay and fight (for the money)".
Nothing I have read or heard indicates this. Do you have any evidence for this or are you simply speculating?

[Manic Impressive]

Nothing I have read or heard indicates this. Do you have any evidence for this or are you simply speculating?
speculating wildly. I still think it could be a motivating factor for some people although obviously not all who choose to stay and fight. Some will stay out of an undying loyalty or because they believe the CC are in the right.

[Android]

speculating wildly. I still think it could be a motivating factor for some people although obviously not all who choose to stay and fight. Some will stay out of an undying loyalty or because they believe the CC are in the right.
It is a possible motivating factor. But I have not seen or heard anything to suggest it is a likely one.

Besides 'undying loyalty'. I think the rationale of SWP oppositionists for staying in is that they see an opportunity to have a recall conference and overthrow the CC.

[The Idler]

SWP crisis: who is saying what (http://www.jimjepps.net/?p=273)

List of articles

[Raúl Duke]

An easy question to ask from someone who belongs to a party that never does anything :lol:.

So we can add lying to your stupidity.

Hey now, keep it civil.

[blake 3:17]

"http://swpopposition.blogspot.co.uk/" is gone at the moment. The FB discussion in my circles is interesting. Mostly around who's saying something and who isn't... I think it's pretty painful for a number of people who come out of the IST tradition, even if they'd distanced themselves from it to degrees.

The finances are a curious question. To run a paper, magazine, and journal isn't cheap, especially as consistently and professionally as it's been done. There are serious problems of small bureaucracies forming in far Left groups. Often people have fronted money or property, people are relying on usually meager wages working for the revolution, and it is hard to find work after being a professional revolutionary.

[blake 3:17]

I thought I'd seen this on the board but can't find it. It's the SWP's National Secretary defending the disputes committee, CC and anyone who doesn't disagree with them. It's main claims are they're right and everyone else is wrong, they're pro-choice, they're better at dealing with sexism than the BBC, references to it holding a 'sharia court' are racist, and they'd do what any trade union would do. Not very impressive. No issue of internal democracy is mentioned.

Link here: http://www.swp.org.uk/14/01/2013/response-attacks-swp

I've copied the editorial in the "spoiler" below, mostly because I think it might disappear...
Response to attacks on the SWP
There has been a series of attacks on the Socialist Workers Party in the media and by assorted bloggers. They concern the party’s handling of serious allegations against a leading member and the arguments (partly arising from the case) leading up to and during our recent conference.

This was an internal matter and we had promised full confidentiality to all involved. So we strongly condemn the publication of a transcript of a closed session of the conference discussing this case. The transcript was publicised against the wishes of the complainant herself.
The attacks are a travesty of the truth. We live in what remains a profoundly sexist society, as is shown by the sex abuse scandals and cover-ups in mainstream institutions such as the BBC and the police.

However, the SWP is not an institution of capitalist society but fights for the overthrow of the system. Our party has a proud tradition of fighting for women’s liberation, as is shown, for example, by our consistent campaigning over the decades to defend abortion, and by our criticism of George Galloway for his remarks about the Julian Assange rape accusations.

Reflecting this tradition, our internal structures seek to promote women to leading roles and deal rigorously with any action by any member that is harmful or disrespectful of women. It is in the context of this commitment that we took allegations against a leading member of the party very seriously.

Unlike the BBC or any other establishment body faced with such an allegation an investigation into this complaint immediately was set in place. The complainant made the choice not to go to the police, who are notorious for their systemic failure to defend women. Instead she asked for her complaint to be heard by the body within the SWP charged with dealing with disciplinary cases, the Disputes Committee. We respected that choice.

The Disputes Committee is a body of experienced members who had been unanimously elected by the previous conference. The attacks on it as a ‘sharia court’ are little short of racism. After a lengthy and thorough hearing, the Disputes Committee did not uphold the accusations and decided to take no disciplinary action.

Five of the seven members hearing the case were women, and one has experience as a rape counsellor. These included two members of the Central Committee, the elected leadership body of the SWP. Its members (who are always a minority on the DC) work with the DC to ensure the political integrity of the party, and to ensure the concerns and decisions of the DC are fed into the CC's work. At all times great efforts were taken to support the complainant. Had the Disputes Committee believed that the accused person was guilty, it would have expelled him from the SWP immediately.

The case was discussed at length at a session of our conference, which voted to accept the report and overwhelmingly re-elected the Disputes Committee. Far from being a cover up this sort of open discussion shows that our procedures and elected bodies are accountable to our membership. If this case had been raised within a trade union or any other organisation there would be no question that the matter should be treated with complete confidentiality. This basic principle should also apply in this case.

As far we are concerned, this case is closed. This is not a ‘cover up’. It is a determination to reflect the decision of our conference. We believe that both parties to the case should have their right to confidentiality and their right as members in good standing respected.

In solidarity

Charlie Kimber
SWP National Secretary
on behalf of the SWP Central Committee

[Crux]

This is the first branch statement I have seen against the SWP CC:
Sussex SWSS open letter to the Central Committee (http://www.leninology.com/2013/01/sussex-swss-open-letter-to-central.html)

[BOZG]

This is the first branch statement I have seen against the SWP CC:
Sussex SWSS open letter to the Central Committee (http://www.leninology.com/2013/01/sussex-swss-open-letter-to-central.html)

Leeds SWSS (http://grumpyoldtrot.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/swp-leeds-university-swss-statement/) came out against the CC at the very beginning. I also read that a SWSS group in Liverpool had come out too but haven't seen their statement.

[Q]

Podcast commentary on the crisis (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts/podcast-swp-rebellion-gains-momentum) (20 January)

[Q]

Commentary by Richard Seymour (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/reply-to-party-notes.html) on the recent Party Notes:


Each week, Party Notes apprises SWP members of news about the party's work, and the perspectives arising from it. It is intended to help members orient themselves in the frontlines they fight on. This is the theory. In practice, it has become a propaganda sheet for the Central Committee in its internal battles, so manifestly fraudulent in its claims that it ceases to be useful to members.

This week's Party Notes consists of two elements. The first is a description of the successes of the party in recent days. How many demonstrated here, how many copies of Socialist Worker were sold; how many attending this steering committee meeting; how 'warmly received' a Central Committee member was at a meeting on Marxism and Feminism. All this might under normal circumstances simply describe the many small actions undertaken by a revolutionary socialist party in a weekend. This would be integrated into a wider perspective about how we can help take the relevant struggles forward. Not this week.

This week, the sole purpose of this list of humble achievements is to wage a fight within the party. The first section of Party Notes concludes, "Such examples above - and there are many others - give the lie to the idea that the party is facing annihilation or isolation." They do nothing of the kind, of course. It is like claiming that a condemned man is liberated because he has a few last meals before him. Crisis - what crisis?

That narrative concluded, Party Notes goes on to allude to "a lot of discussion and argument since conference". Quite what this might concern is left to the reader to deduce, since its substance is not touched on. This is followed by a delphic reference to "some of the material that has appeared on blogs, Facebook, etc." (I think this means us). It goes on: "People are tried of slurs, lies and unsubstantiated allegations." Apparently oblivious of the glaring irony in this, it goes on to unleash a wearisome tirade of slurs, lies and unsubstantiated allegations.

"It is also clear that as part of the discussions some people are raising a wider debate about the direction of the party. This does not mean that everyone who has raised issues about the recent events is attacking our political tradition." We thank the Central Committee for this genuflection to nuance, at least. Not everyone is a festering sore of heresy... "But some are seeking to overturn important parts of what we stand for." Again, I leave the irony to hang - the gallows reference is advised. "There are some people who want to replace a Marxist analysis of women's liberation with one centred on patriarchy theory. Others believe that changes in capitalism have altered the structure of the working class so fundamentally that it is no longer the key element in the battle for socialism."

This represents the first attempt by the Central Committee to engage with the politics of the emerging opposition. It also represents a pack of lies. The first claim probably refers to my blog on 'patriarchy and the capitalist state', where I tentatively suggest that a greatly revised and historically delimited concept of patriarchy might have some use to marxist analysis. Whether one agrees or disagrees with this, it hardly represents an attempt to overturn the "Marxist analysis of women's liberation". The important concepts deployed in that essay are 'gender projects', of which patriarchy could conceivably be one, and 'gender formations'. At any rate, I have expressed and have no interest in changing the party's theoretical approach to this issue based on a single exploratory blog post. And it plays no concrete role in the politics of the opposition. I should not have to spell out this obvious point.

The second claim most likely alludes to a perspective elaborated by Neil Davidson, which argues that the party has failed to grasp at a theoretical level the changes in the structure of the working class in the era of neoliberalism. By no means does this argue that the working class "is no longer the key element in the battle for socialism." What has happened here is that some very ugly internal habits, wherein sections of the leadership crudely polemicise against theorists in the party who displease them, or seem to break some holy tablets of Cliffism, have been instrumentalised in a battle for the CC's position. Not only that. Since previous changes have resulted in Party Notes being published on the SWP website, this petty, mean-spirited, controlling streak has been made public. The only plus side of this as far as the leadership is concerned is that it represents a slight step up on recent standards. Until now, the CC's most distinguished public defender was Gilad Atzmon, who is convinced that they are collateral victims of a Jewish plot to ruin Atzmon's career as a serious political analyst.

Yet this feeble, belated retort to the opposition is notable for one thing above all: it reiterates in warmed up terms the charges of 'creeping feminism' and 'autonomism' dished out to party members in the run to conference. Coming after a conference in which the party was more divided than it has ever been in its history, and in the context of the most serious crisis in the party's history which the Central Committee still refuses to take any responsibility for, this treats members like docile idiots. It is an insult to our intelligence and capacity for serious reflection.

Nor does it end there. Party Notes assures readers that something will be done about the heresy at the National Committee meeting on 3rd February. It also notes that motions for a special conference are being passed in a number of branches and, completely arbitrarily, insists that all such motions "have to be in by 5pm on Friday 1st February. This is to make the NC aware." The leadership has no constitutional authority to set such an arbitrary limit. We admit that the NC must be made aware of motions for a special conference passed by branches. But it can just as well be made aware on 2nd February, or 28th February, or 12th March, or any other date on which a branch chooses to pass such a motion.

The purpose of this is to use the National Committee meeting as the base from which to attack the growing opposition among members, and end the dispute on the CC's terms. Those terms, made clear in Party Notes, are very simple. The Central Committee will stand by its train wreck of a strategy, and insist that the party endorse its indefensible position, even to the point of destroying the party's ability to be the effective, 'interventionist' force that the leadership claims to defend. There isn't even any sign of a minimal gesture, such as removing 'Comrade Delta' from party work - quite the opposite. Clueless and vindictive, they acknowledge no crisis, register none of the damage being done to the party's work, and offer no sensible lead.

Members have to think fast about how they want to respond to this. This is the first sign of a coordinated response to this crisis by the Central Committee, and it is a response that aims to bring the membership to heel. And if this is lost, then the party is lost.

- Richard Seymour

[blake 3:17]

It seems really like they're just hell bent on self destruction.

My new, completely unproved but possible and a bit cynical, theory is that they've recognized the organization is sunk, and are trying to alienate both the base and prominent members. The motive behind that might be covering up something(s) which they don't want exposed or simple financial interests.

When they expelled Claire Solomon in 2009 for 'autonomism', it was totally bizarre. From Solomon's blog:
On Saturday, however, I was expelled. (addition to original post) I was expelled for 1) putting on an event called Mutiny which they claim was autonomist 2) for sending 6 friends a private email and 3) I was accused of 'lying', ie for not accepting that this was a factional email or event. Link: http://solomonsmindfield.blogspot.ca/2009/11/party-to-win-clare-solomon-expulsion_23.html

From the Express:
STUDENT PROTESTS GIRL 'TOO EXTREME FOR SWP'


Marxist firebrand Clare Solomon, 37, was described as a “danger” to the SWP

Sunday December 12,2010
By James Murray

THE main organiser of the student protests was thrown out of the ultra-left Socialist Workers’ Party because of her extremist views.
Marxist firebrand Clare Solomon, 37, was described as a “danger” to the SWP after quitting last January over a clash of beliefs.
She was thrown out with Alec Snowdon for trying to set up a power faction, according to an article for the SWP by author Clarke Benitez.
WIN A LUXURY CRUISE FOR TWO WORTH £2,500!
Mr Benitez said: “The Central Committee judged their membership of this minority platform to be a danger to the SWP.
“Although the constitution granted them a right of appeal, neither was allowed to address a hearing which confirmed their expulsions.”
Miss Solomon is president of the *University of London Union, which has 120,000 student members. She has become the face of the organisers after being interviewed by the BBC when she admitted helping to break into Millbank Tower.

Link: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/216930/Student-protests-girl-too-extreme-for-SWP-

There've been a couple of snipes on Solomon in this thread or related. I do not know her and have no connection to her other than having read her blog.

[BOZG]

Behind the Iron Curtain (Crisis and the SWP) (http://jghuyt.blogspot.ie/?m=1)

Blog post from the Irish SWP's former youth organiser who resigned a few weeks back (prior to and for reasons other than this) on what's being said in Ireland. Their members have been extraordinarily quiet on Facebook on this issue in so far as even the CC's statements aren't being posted.

[Crux]

Commentary by Richard Seymour (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/reply-to-party-notes.html) on the recent Party Notes:
Jesus christ. So the horrible mishandling of the charges against Martin Smith/Comrade Delta is not the problem, feminism is the problem? Well, let's hope this is the end of the SWP then and CC are left with only themselves and a small rump of supporters and hacks.

[Crux]

Fightback! (formerly known as the Worker's Party) in New Zeeland's take on it, note: the authout is a former member of Socialist Worker the up until pretty recently affiliate of the IST in NZ:
SWP: Sexism on the left (http://workersparty.org.nz/2013/01/21/swp-sexism-and-bureaucratic-centralism-on-the-left/)

[blake 3:17]

But even a bourgeois court wouldn’t dare have the case judged by colleagues of the accused.

From the link from the New Zealand group posted above.

[BOZG]

Statement in support of the opposition from a member in Ireland (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-message-of-support-to-swp-opposition.html)

[The Idler]

3JllQnXl208

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

The breathing space provided by the presence of British troops is short but vital. Those who call for the immediate withdrawal of the troops before the men behind the barricades can defend themselves are inviting a pogrom which will hit first and hardest at socialists.


Yea! If they pulled out then those damn Catholics would have set up concentration camps! Oh wait that was the British....

[BOZG]

Yea! If they pulled out then those damn Catholics would have set up concentration camps! Oh wait that was the British....

It's not unknown for them to deny having said that. Or a whole lot of other things.

[Popular Front of Judea]

That reminded me of this fascinating story: 'Where Did All the Comrades Go?' "Max Cotton tells the story of how the Communist Party's money, people and ideas continued to play a critical and sometimes surprising role in British politics after its demise."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01ptbx2/Where_Did_All_the_Comrades_Go/


The thing to take into consideration about those who want to stay and fight is the financial aspect. A party the size of the SWP must have considerable assets. So whoever is the last one's left will inherit those assets a long with the toxic brand. But once you are the last onez left you can easily merge into someone else or change your name or whatever. A call to "stay and fight" might be a call for "stay and fight (for the money)".

[RedAnarchist]

I've not read the entirety of this thread, but I don't think anyone who professes to be a revolutionary leftist should be defending a rapist, and this is hardly the only incident of sexism on the revolutionary left. We should be holding other leftists to an higher standard, because we ought to know better.


The far left cannot face up to rape and its ignorance is killing it. The willingness to excuse the humiliation of women has already destroyed the reputations of Julian Assange and George Galloway. Now it is destroying the Socialist Workers party, which is not only Britain's largest Marxist-Leninist group but the most unscrupulous gang of hypocrites I have ever met.

The SWP's crisis began when a woman member alleged that a senior figure in the party had raped her. The SWP refused to name this hero of the proletarian vanguard; unlike the "bourgeois courts", revolutionary socialists hide the identity of alleged rapists. Nor did it call the police. Instead, it sent the man it called "Comrade Delta" to the SWP's disputes committee. The seven "judges" had no independent evidence – how could they when they were a bunch of Trots rather than a competent court? Nor were they impartial. They knew the "accused". They valued the "leading role" he had played in the party. And they acquitted him.

Friends of the woman say she feels "completely betrayed". Party loyalists have increased her despair by whispering that she was a conniving harlot.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/03/far-left-no-place-feminists-rape

[blake 3:17]

Open letters from trade union and intellectual friends of the SWP who are dismayed by its goings on: http://openletterswp.wordpress.com

Edited to add: A thoughtful piece by a former member of the WRP on its disintegration in the 80s: http://www.jimjepps.net/?p=328

[Mather]

I've not read the entirety of this thread, but I don't think anyone who professes to be a revolutionary leftist should be defending a rapist, and this is hardly the only incident of sexism on the revolutionary left. We should be holding other leftists to an higher standard, because we ought to know better.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/03/far-left-no-place-feminists-rape

I agree with what your saying but I hope your aware that Nick Cohen (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nickcohen) is probably the last person whose opinion you would want on this or any other matter.

[thethinveil]

Concerning Klein's political position - I think she has been influenced by anarchists tactics through her participation in anti-globalization protests. I know the first person who suggested her "no logo" to me was an anarchist. But Naomi was raised by Trots, and is a red diaper baby. She leans as far left as the mainstream will allow which is basically the position of a social democrat.

[RedAnarchist]

I agree with what your saying but I hope your aware that Nick Cohen (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nickcohen) is probably the last person whose opinion you would want on this or any other matter.

To be honest, I wasn't aware, the article was linked to on Facebook.

[blake 3:17]

Nick Cohen is friggin god awful, but if he's on point? Klein has moved in interesting directions and pretty consistently to the left.

[bricolage]

nick cohen writes the piece as a way to smear everyone on 'the left', and when he means the left he doesn't just mean leninist sects you knows he's thinking of anyone that didn't shift to his neoliberal euston manifesto outlook. plenty of people have written about the swp lately and almost all of them are worth reading more than pieces of shit like cohen.

[Mather]

Nick Cohen is friggin god awful, but if he's on point? Klein has moved in interesting directions and pretty consistently to the left.

The main reason I object to Nick Cohen's article is not just because of his politics, though it is true that he is a political reactionary and has some pretty shit views. The main reason for me is his hypocrisy and his dishonesty. He hates the entire revolutionary left, doesn't matter if your an anarchist, socialist, communist, trotskyist etc. Given that the victims in this case are revolutionary leftists themselves, I doubt Cohen would think highly of them if we are going to go by some of the things he has said in the past about revolutionaries. He also has a habit of smearing the entire revolutionary left with the mistakes of groups like the SWP when they opted for some pretty awful positions. Nick Cohen did not write this article to support the victims or to pose a positive alternative to the crisis within the SWP, he wrote it purely to smear the entire revolutionary left as most of his previous articles have done. So some hack like Cohen is in no position to lecture others when he gladly uses the very same means in his own journalism.

There are plenty of good critiques of the SWP from both within and outside the party and recent events within the party have started debates which were long overdue.

As for Naomi Klein, her politics seem to be some sort of half-way between the NDP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democratic_Party_(Canada)) and the more moderate sections of the anti-globalisation/anti-capitalist movement. Have they changed recently?

I enjoyed reading both No Logo and The Shock Doctrine and I find her to be much better at writing and dealing with themes like corporate branding and the power of advertising than on actual politics.

[Sam_b]

I'll be brief, but I just wanted to highlight some stuff about the Nick Cohen 'article' in the Guardian, which in my view should be wholeheartedly rejected and condemned. Cohen's intent is to deliberately fan the flames of a fire of which he has nothing to do with - and by this I don't mean it is only the left's problem, but the fact he has an agenda. Cohen has had it in for the far left for a number of years, which was particularly seen (and it is in his article) with his support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how he sees anything that isn't soft-left pro-capitalism as 'Stalinism'; 'dictatorship' and so on.

From the article, it is obvious he knows little about the problems at hand. He bemoans that the police were not brought into the SWP situation despite the victim wishing they were not contacted. He goes on about sexism in the SWP yet condemns Richard Seymour and those trying to challenge the CC for no other reason aside from how Seymour has smacked down his pro-imperialism pandering on more than one occasion. It is infuriating.

Cohen talks of the SWP having a 'foul Leninist tradition'. It does not, or not anymore (see Callinicos' article for Socialist Review which has nothing to do with Leninism but much about supporting the CC and witch-hunting the critics). I will defend the Leninist tradition because I still believe in it, and this SWP affair shows the party has dropped that model and become a whole new breed of mad cult entirely.

In short, I think many observers, even outside the left, have made good articles and contributions to whats going on. Nick Cohen is not one of them, and I advise those who seek the truth to reject it.

[Mather]

I'll be brief, but I just wanted to highlight some stuff about the Nick Cohen 'article' in the Guardian, which in my view should be wholeheartedly rejected and condemned. Cohen's intent is to deliberately fan the flames of a fire of which he has nothing to do with - and by this I don't mean it is only the left's problem, but the fact he has an agenda. Cohen has had it in for the far left for a number of years, which was particularly seen (and it is in his article) with his support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how he sees anything that isn't soft-left pro-capitalism as 'Stalinism'; 'dictatorship' and so on.

From the article, it is obvious he knows little about the problems at hand. He bemoans that the police were not brought into the SWP situation despite the victim wishing they were not contacted. He goes on about sexism in the SWP yet condemns Richard Seymour and those trying to challenge the CC for no other reason aside from how Seymour has smacked down his pro-imperialism pandering on more than one occasion. It is infuriating.

Cohen talks of the SWP having a 'foul Leninist tradition'. It does not, or not anymore (see Callinicos' article for Socialist Review which has nothing to do with Leninism but much about supporting the CC and witch-hunting the critics). I will defend the Leninist tradition because I still believe in it, and this SWP affair shows the party has dropped that model and become a whole new breed of mad cult entirely.

In short, I think many observers, even outside the left, have made good articles and contributions to whats going on. Nick Cohen is not one of them, and I advise those who seek the truth to reject it.

+1

Although I disagree with you on the leninist issue, your totally right about Nick Cohen.

He has had in for the revolutionary left ever since the Iraq war and for the last decade has been churning out the same old articles like a broken record player. He is more than happy to use the very means he condemns others for using. Like I said before, a hypocrite.

[BOZG]

Two statements today, the first (http://socialistunity.com/swp-new-faction-declared/#.URUrhaV9KSo) is the declaration of a faction by 10 CC members, 3 ex-CC members and 51 members including people like Pat S (current? chair of the Disputes Committee), Ian Birchall and Mike Gonzalez.

And the second (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/statement-of-democratic-renewal-platform.html) is the declaration of the Democratic Renewal Platform, the group around Richard Seymour and the International Socialism blog, who are joining the first faction as a organised platform within it.

[Sasha]

renamed the thread to more accurately reflect the situation this has developed in.

[blake 3:17]

And the second (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/statement-of-democratic-renewal-platform.html) is the declaration of the Democratic Renewal Platform, the group around Richard Seymour and the International Socialism blog, who are joining the first faction as a organised platform within it.

Was just going to post this. For what it's worth, leaders in the IST tradition have been circulating this internationally...

[BOZG]

Was just going to post this. For what it's worth, leaders in the IST tradition have been circulating this internationally...

Cheers for that info. It's interesting that the Seymour group is immediately distinguishing itself within the faction. I presume they are somewhat skeptical of the others involved, maybe see them as too much of a loyal opposition.

[Lucretia]

Two statements today, the first (http://socialistunity.com/swp-new-faction-declared/#.URUrhaV9KSo) is the declaration of a faction by 10 CC members, 3 ex-CC members and 51 members including people like Pat S (current? chair of the Disputes Committee), Ian Birchall and Mike Gonzalez.

And the second (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/statement-of-democratic-renewal-platform.html) is the declaration of the Democratic Renewal Platform, the group around Richard Seymour and the International Socialism blog, who are joining the first faction as a organised platform within it.

The new faction appears to be a fig leaf. It doesn't even want to re-examine the case that has sparked the controversy in the first place.

Also could somebody please run the new thread title through a spell checker? It's got my spidey spelling-senses a-tinglin'.

[BOZG]

The new faction appears to be a fig leaf. It doesn't even want to re-examine the case that has sparked the controversy in the first place.

Also could somebody please run the new thread title through a spell checker? It's got my spidey spelling-senses a-tinglin'.

I asked psycho to change the title originally but then didn't want to be mean to him about his spelling. Was going to ask a mod to quietly do it.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

[The Idler]

Was just going to post this. For what it's worth, leaders in the IST tradition have been circulating this internationally...
I thought the British SWP were the leaders in the IST?

[l'Enfermé]

Fixed the thread name, is everyone happy now? :grin:

[Hit The North]

Fixed the thread name, is everyone happy now? :grin:

No, because the thread title claims that the allegations were "brushed off" whereas, in fact, the accusations were investigated by the Disputes Committee.

[Lucretia]

No, because the thread title claims that the allegations were "brushed off" whereas, in fact, the accusations were investigated by the Disputes Committee.

Perhaps the more objective title would be that there are "allegations that rape accusations were improperly handled by the SWP CC."

[Q]

The CPGB published a helpful overview of all the stuff so far (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/feature-swp-in-crisis).

[vanukar]

"
An unprecedented open revolt against the central committee has turned into a battle for the soul of the Socialist Workers' Party."



lol I love how they act like this is some global concern

you boys gotta stop reading this - it's bad for your health

[Sam_b]

lol I love how they act like this is some global concern

I think challenging sexism and supporting the victims of rape are global concerns.

[vanukar]

It's the SWP, not the CIA.

[blake 3:17]

It's the SWP, not the CIA.

For many many years, the British SWP has been presented as the largest, most substantive socialist group in the Anglo-American sphere. They have done some exceptionally good work on mass mobilization, providing crude but decent introductions to socialist and Marxist thought, and having a fairly superficial base in the student and trade union movements.

It is easy to join but difficult to participate in.

They also presented a continuity between the Russian Revolution, anti-Stalinist Marxism and contemporary social movements.

I think some of the factional opponents are naive on many points, but they do recognize that a politics of liberation is being mutilated at present. The SWP is a sect, but has managed at many times to either not appear as such or transcend it.

I've had very good experience with people who were either in the British SWP or in the IST.

On whole, I think we're better off without the organization, while trying to keep as many of its members a part of radical and revolutionary politics.

Edited to add: From some stoopid statement from the leadership --
We therefore condemn the actions of those members who have circumvented these principles by campaigning to overturn conference decisions outside the structures of the party, using blogs and the bourgeois media. Effin radicals always using means of communication....

[bricolage]

so it turns out callinicos has actually gone mad...

Alex Callinicos led off:

There are two types of group that are trying to change the party by fait accompli. The first group seeks to create external pressures. China, and I suspect Richard, encouraged Laurie Penny to write in the Independent. The letter from Peter Thomas and co, and interventions from ISO members, fit in here. PT and co are in part motivated by legitimate concerns about the case, but also it reflects the political ambitions of the Historical Materialism editorial board: it’s a repeat of ‘NLR syndrome’—Perry Anderson sought to profile himself as self-appointed generalissimo of the class struggle; these HM editors see themselves in a similar light. The ISO’s behaviour is particularly shocking: relations with them had been improving, but now their behaviour is threatening to “destroy” this.

The second group that are trying to change the party by fait accompli is the faction that declared this week.. I’m shocked by this. They have breached the long-standing principle that we do not have permanent factions.

The one-day special conference on 10th March will provide a full opportunity for discussion. It will be an opportunity to reaffirm the decisions taken at the January conference. Whatever comes out of it will have to be accepted by everyone. Anyone who doesn’t accept “will attract the righteous anger of the bulk of party members.”

Alex then summed up the session: The crisis has been driven from within the party. Richard Seymour is the principal culprit. He is an eclectic thinker; he grabs ideas from everywhere—including even Bob Jessop!—and throws them into an “incoherent mess.”

Martin Smith must be allowed to fully return to political activity. Hannah’s analysis of the students is wrongheaded.

The students are not some vanguard on issues of oppression, as she implies; rather, they’ve lost their way as a result of our flawed approach in 2011—as Joseph outlined. There’s no way a 3 month discussion period before the special conference will be allowed. It would “destroy” us. If party members refuse to accept the legitimacy of the decisions taken at the special conference, “lynch mobs” (his words) will be formed. [He didn’t say whether or not he’d give a green light to such organisations.]
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/callinicos-threatens-lynch-mobs

[Crux]

Was about to post that "summary". They truly deserve everything that's coming their way. So how long before they start expelling people en masse?

[Q]

I also found this letter by Jara Handala in this weeks' Weekly Worker interesting:


Callinicos faction

February 8 was the turning point in the Socialist Workers Party crisis - the declaration of a faction, In Defence of Our Party (‘Defence’). Until then the Democratic Renewal platform, with China Miéville and Richard Seymour as spokesmen, had bravely made the first move, but it seemed they would probably amount to low-hanging fruit - no problem for the harvesting machine which is the undeclared permanent Callinicos faction. But Defence is quite a different proposition.

Defence’s founding statement is signed by 10 of the 50-strong national committee; three recent ex-central committee members; Pat Stack, the current chair of the disputes committee, and in that post when the seven heard the Martin Smith case; well-known writers and stalwarts like Ian Birchall, Colin Barker, Mike Gonzalez, Cathy Porter and Dave Renton; and notably a host of middle cadre, including key trade union fraction activists and other experienced members - crucial links between HQ, the branches and the SWP’s trade union work. The landscape has now been transformed.

The next day, the CC announced a conference to draw a line under it all - again. What does its statement reveal?

Firstly, the CC is politically weak. Its point 4 begins: “The CC does not accept the right to form factions outside the three-month pre-conference discussion period.” But two factions exist. What is the CC going to do about it? If it believes these are illegal then it has the duty to act. It did this with the Facebook Four, before conference - expelling them without a hearing, by email.

It could, if it were to be conciliatory, go to the disputes committee (with the chair and the two CC appointees stepping aside), and test its interpretation of the constitution. And this is the problem. The Defence founding statement included the whole of what the constitution has to say on factions (article 10). It did that because it knows factions are legal outside the three-month pre-conference period: it is simply that members have accepted the norm not to exercise that right.

The CC has decided not to act on this ‘indiscipline’. It has chosen to capitulate after verbally raging against the beast. This means, given what it says, it is behaving incoherently in not carrying out its duty to protect the party. But its inaction is rational because it recognises it is politically weak.

And let’s be frank: the occupants of the CC seats, through election by slate, act as a permanent faction, moreover an illegal one, as it is not a response to a policy or decision; which is why it is undeclared, secret. The CC is not occupied by servants of the membership, facilitators of their work. The fact that the Callinicos faction was elected into office shows how inadequate procedures and practices are within the SWP - hence the current widespread revolt.

Secondly, it is clear that voting for the March conference has a dire consequence for those CC members. There are three conditions of SWP membership, including that one “accepts its constitution” (article 2). In trying to have a conference without the three-month discussion period the CC has demonstrated that it does not accept the constitution. Announcing a March conference is acting beyond the powers available to the CC - any CC. In refusing to adhere to the constitution, to accept it, this group is using the CC to substitute itself for the membership, through their actions placing themselves outside the party.

The permanent Callinicos faction (undeclared) is semi-paralysed. It has its supporters everywhere, and many, many members with doubts about its management performance are prepared to circle the wagons in the face of the onslaught unleashed by the Daily Mail and others. It is using its control of the apparatus to bear down on members.

But there is some paralysis. Importantly, no disciplinary action has been taken against faction members - they are being subjected to bullying and more immediate retribution. The weekly Party Notes internal bulletin said nothing about Mark Bergfeld’s resignation or the two factions. Instead it carried the CC statement, but with this factionalising addition: “see below if you wish to support the statement”. So only one faction gets access to Party Notes. This is how the permanent Callinicos faction uses the apparatus as its personal property. It has appropriated the communal property for itself - privatised it, stolen it from the membership.

The CC says the purpose of the March conference is “to reaffirm the decisions of January’s conference and the NC, resolve recent debates, clarify some elements of the constitution and move the party forward” (point 10). So a plebiscite plus some things up the CC’s sleeve. I learnt a lot from my grandparents, who told me about Mussolini and Hitler, and the usage they made of plebiscites.

But what is wrong with groups of comrades putting forward their ideas, even resolutions? Human development has been based on voluntary association. Maybe some comrades want to get together to just discuss an idea, even a tactic or a strategy, without crafting a resolution. Others may want to change a policy or decision (as allowed in the SWP). Still others may want to change a theme of the party’s work, perhaps after many years of collective study. Or a strategy. Maybe even propose a programme, or at least its principles. Then there is the matter of longevity, of how long these associations should last: we can do better than just talk about temporary and permanent.

There is also the matter of where the discussions take place. The CC statement emphatically says: “Pre-conference discussion takes place in these aggregates, not branch meetings” (point 10). I wonder why that is? The constitution tells us: “… district aggregates are held where CC members present members with … an outline of party perspectives”. Those CC members are busy bees. Can’t have branches talking about all this without adequate supervision. Who knows what they may end up thinking - and doing? It is so paternalistic and controlling. Strangling.

Like the mafia, the CC statement ends with a generous offer: “The special conference must be the final word. We demand factions accept that - in practice, not words” (point 11). “Must”, “final”, “demand” - The message is clear: the permanent Callinicos faction is prepared to cull the membership.

That undeclared faction inherited a party structure unsuited to a healthy and efficient internal life. After the Respect experience it allowed some changes. But it finds continuous debate - shall we call it permanent debate? - impossible to live with if the party is to “move forward united” and “throw itself into the class struggle” (point 2). Differences need to be managed in institutions to make them productive and to help the organisation be healthy. That is normal in business and in civil society, and it is rational.

Professed revolutionary organisations are no different. Scientific socialists have nothing to fear from permanent debate - but that is not the case for the rulers of unhealthy organisations. The SWP membership deserve better, and they are showing they can do better.

Jara Handala
email

[blake 3:17]

There's a reference in there about the three conditions of membership. Looking at their website, it appears you can join by agreeing with their participation in Stop The War and United Against Fascism, and by making a monthly financial contribution.

Sounds like any social democratic party, but they usually want a smaller amount of money annually.

[l'Enfermé]

Perhaps the more objective title would be that there are "allegations that rape accusations were improperly handled by the SWP CC."

No, because the thread title claims that the allegations were "brushed off" whereas, in fact, the accusations were investigated by the Disputes Committee.
Ok, this sounds rational to me, plus 3 mods thanked Lucretia's post, so I've changed the thread name to "Allegations that rape accusations were improperly handled by the SWP CC".

[Q]

Ok, this sounds rational to me, plus 3 mods thanked Lucretia's post, so I've changed the thread name to "Allegations that rape accusations were improperly handled by the SWP CC".

To be honest, I think "Existential crisis in SWP" would suffice now.

[Q]

Bureaucrats fear the ‘dark side of the internet’ in the same way they previously feared the printing press and the photocopier, writes Eddie Ford (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/949/swp-and-the-internet-let-a-thousand-blogs-bloom)

Personal note: It's funny/sad to see how much of the mentioned arguments against open discussion on the internet ring a bell.



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/wwimages/ww949/sm-devolution.jpg
Evolution: danger?

Fundamental to Marxism is the notion that there can be no socialism without democracy. One needs the other. They are inseparable. Socialism which is not democratic is not socialism, but something inimical to universal human emancipation. Therefore Marxists stand for the open clash of contending ideas. Their free flow and unfettered debate. Without this uninhibited exchange we are left in a state of relative ignorance, unable to develop our political understanding and consciousness - effectively leaving power in the hands of privileged bureaucrats and autocrats, big and small.

Which brings us to comrade Alex Callinicos (‘Stalinicos’) and his now legendary, or infamous, article for Socialist Review, ‘Is Leninism finished?’1 Quite deservedly, the eminent professor and member of the Socialist Workers Party central committee has been mercilessly mocked by imaginative leftwing critics armed with Photoshop - portraying him as Darth Vader, etc. Our regular readers will know the words which attracted such ribaldry: “One thing the entire business [recent open opposition within the SWP] has reminded us of is the dark side of the internet. Enormously liberating though the net is, it has long been known that it allows salacious gossip to be spread and perpetuated - unless the victim has the money and the lawyers to stop it. Unlike celebrities, small revolutionary organisations don’t have these resources, and their principles stop them from trying to settle political arguments in the bourgeois courts.”

Comrade Callinicos’s ‘egalitarianism’ is totally spurious, of course. His prurient concern about “salacious gossip” is motivated by an instinctive bureaucratic reflex to hit out against a subversive technology - a near instant form of global communication - which he and the monstrously bloated SWP apparatus have no way of managing. In other words, they are control-freaks on a level that far surpasses anything ever attempted by the Blairites or even the old ‘official’ leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. A sort of perverse achievement, you could argue.

Another revealing insight into the SWP’s weird control-freakery can be found in Pat Stack’s contribution to the latest circular by the emerging In Defence of Our Party faction. Comrade Stack is the chair of the organisation’s thoroughly discredited disputes committee and the only person on it to dissent against the decision to ‘clear’ ‘comrade Delta’. Though rather ironically prefacing his interesting comments with the stricture that “Under no circumstances should this text be posted on the internet”, since it is intended “for members of the SWP only” - some chance - he wisely advises the SWP leadership to “take a chill pill over social media”. Yes, he admits that this new-fangled social networking is “alien” to him, but acknowledges that it is “perfectly normal” for his nieces and nephews to “share almost everything” on Facebook “bar the darkest secrets” - maybe them as well.

Tellingly, comrade Stack recounts how at conference an “older comrade” slid over to him and said that “we’ve got to stop all this Facebook stuff” - expressing the typical bureaucratic mentality we have come to expect from the SWP old guard. Uncontrolled free speech is a threat to ‘the party’ - or, rather, the entrenched central committee. He goes on to venture: “I feel this attitude was typified by the majority of the CC’s response to the internet debate last year. I remarked to somebody that the leadership sounded like ageing CPers in the late 50s and early 60s denouncing rock and roll as an evil expression of American capitalism … If we want young comrades to take us seriously, we need to seriously listen to them about this stuff, instead of panicking about what a seriously run website might do to the review, the journal or even the paper; we have to instead ask, is it serious not to have a well-run website that is absolutely central to our political/organisational priorities?”

What comrade Stack says is quite correct. If the SWP is to survive at all as any sort of viable organisation, the leadership - if you excuse the term - needs to ruthlessly ditch its ingrained hostility to members freely discussing and debating their views using whatever technology comes to hand. Like, first and foremost, the internet - which, barring some catastrophic development, will not be going away fast. Sorry, CC comrades.

Highly unequal

However, the omens are not good. The SWP CC has form. Back in 1995, if not before, the CC - especially Tony Cliff, it seems - got worried by the new ‘middle class’ phenomenon that was the worldwide web. Specifically, they became concerned by the unsupervised discussions breaking out on the then International Socialist List, which they disapprovingly noted was the result of a “private initiative” by comrades belonging to the SWP’s International Socialist Tendency in various countries. Dismayingly, for the CC, “as far as we can tell, the leaderships of their organisations were not consulted” and - even worse - “certainly no reference was made to the SWP central committee”. Horror of horrors.

Deploying the sort of language and arguments that strikes an unfortunately contemporary note, the CC aristocratically pontificated about how “very little hard information” was sent out through the IS List anyway and what you did find was “usually banal or irrelevant” - according to them, the arbiters of truth and wisdom. Indeed, tutting like an old schoolteacher, they told the SWP membership two decades ago that “much of the content of the messages consists in trivialities and gossip about the internal affairs of various groups” - as if the way a group aiming to lead the working class conducts its elections or holds its leaders to account is of no concern to comrades in other countries or to the working class as a whole.

Then when you consider that some users of the IS List seemed to “subscribe to the fantasy that communication via the internet is fundamentally more secure than that on the telephone”, the CC could only wearily conclude that overall the IS List was of a “highly dubious nature”. Open to abuse. After sternly lecturing SWP members to reject the “media-promoted mania for the internet” and how any “sensible socialist should not fall for the immense hyping of the internet by papers like The Guardian”, etc - peddling “technological novelties” that will never catch on - SWP members were given an anecdote (not “gossip”, of course) about a debate that had just taken place at Marxism concerning the merits or otherwise of the internet, where someone accused the SWP leadership of “technophobia” and a “desire to suppress debate” - what a scurrilous suggestion!

So on August 2 1995 the CC issued an edict that SWP members should not use the IS List.2 In justification, it trotted out the same bogus egalitarianisms that Alex Callinicos employed to warn us about the “dark side of the internet” - it disadvantages the poor old proles. Hence it was claimed: “Access to the internet, as to any technology, is determined by capitalist relations of production. It is therefore highly unequal, and conditioned by the bosses’ domination of the economy and the state.” Furthermore, “only a small minority of our members have access to the internet” and this - apparently - “reflects the fact that internet users are, in general, concentrated in universities and in upper-echelon white-collar jobs”. Consequently, it was argued, discussions take place on the IS List “from which most comrades are excluded”. You would almost believe that the SWP bureaucrats are friends of the downtrodden.

Not only that, they continued, but we “lack the means to make the list accountable” to the organisations making up the IS Tendency - for “accountable” read ‘controllable’. Instead political debate must “take place through the party branches and at national meetings and conferences, where all comrades can participate directly or through their elected delegates” - under the watchful eye of the full-timers and the subservient middle-ranking cadre. Almost comically, the CC statement denounced “irresponsible gossip” by a “self-selected and relatively privileged clique” - not referring to themselves, naturally. None so blind. Getting more desperate, but inadvertently more truthful, the CC testily explained that this global means of potentially anonymous debate might lead to the extremely undesirable situation where others could “take part in discussions that do not concern them” - perhaps over the character of the ex-USSR, the nature of the epoch or even the accountability of the SWP leadership - such ‘internal’ matters should only be the preserve of the priesthood; not the sheep who happen to be the membership or the wider working class. Just do as you are told and sell more copies of Socialist Worker. In fact, the CC intoned, the internet as a whole is a “diversion” from the “face-to-face discussion” involved in flogging the paper, recruiting new members, agitating for the next demonstration - and nowadays, chasing the tail of the English Defence League, etc.

We also heard the same kind of censorial, routinist crap from the SWP tops during the days of the Socialist Alliance - criminally sabotaged by both the SWP and the Socialist Party in England and Wales, who put their own narrow, sectarian interests before the project of building left unity. Fairly predictably, the SWP was unenthusiastic - to put it mildly - about the idea of an SA discussion list, but were in the end outvoted by the other groups. A moment of sanity. But the pervading SWP attitude was that the discussion lists were essentially a waste of time, as members would be bogged down in never-ending and fruitless debates with - yes, you guessed it - “the sectarians” (not that they openly said the same about discussion and debate within the actual SA branches). Instead, SA members should be getting out into the ‘real world’ and ‘making a difference’ - ie, joining and building the SWP. The party. Presumably, the ‘real world’ starts and ends with the SWP - here be dragons beyond.3

Swaddled

Of course, the arguments presented by Alex Callinicos and the CC are just as absurd today as they were in 1995. After all, is it not true that there was “highly unequal” access to the telephone (now the most beloved technology device of the SWP CC) when it was first invented? Then again, you could say exactly the same about letters - given that only a tiny minority were literate for most of recorded history.

So would the SWP apparatchiks, if they had been around at the time - a truly terrifying thought - have argued that use of the letter or phone should be carefully controlled on the basis they are “conditioned by the bosses’ domination of the economy and the state”? God only knows what the SWP tops would have made of the photocopier, a highly dubious invention purposely designed to do little more than spread “salacious gossip” and worse. Yet it appears for the SWP bureaucracy that some technological developments are more “highly unequal” than others.

Plain fact of the matter, at least for Marxists, is that no means of communication - or technology - in and of itself can be backward or reactionary. An utterly irrational notion that leads to madness. Remember the Unabomber? How any technology is used, or abused - whether it liberates or oppresses - is determined by the level of class struggle in a given, historically concrete, society. Gas ovens can be used to cook nice food or burn the bodies of those you have murdered. The internet can be used to Tweet inane slanders about your drinking partner last night or to expose the dirty secrets of the ruling class or the government.

One thing communists cannot deny though is that the SWP leadership is absolutely right to be deeply nervous about the ‘threat’ the internet poses to its police regime. Spot on, comrades. Without resorting to cyber-utopianism or libertarianism, as some do, here is a medium/technology which undermines the CC’s hold on power - a universal acid dissolving its grip over the membership, no longer cowed. It is the bureaucrat’s worst nightmare come true. As blogger ‘Soviet Goon Boy’ puts it, “ideally” the CC would like to retain a “monopoly of information in the party”; however, this is just not “humanly possible” any more - “Charlie Kimber may not recognise the internet, but the internet recognises him”.4 You can purge and expel, SWP CC, but you can’t hide.

Another thing communists can safely say is that Marx would have taken to the internet like a duck to water. Openness activates and enhances the “public mind”, as Marx said, and the free press - or internet - is “the omnipresent open eye of the popular spirit” - the “merciless confessional that a people makes to itself, and it is well known that confession has the power to redeem”. The only alternative to an open and “merciless confessional” communist press is, as Marx also argued, to keep the movement like a “person swaddled in a cradle all his life, for as soon as he learns to walk he also learns to fall, and it is only through falling that he learns to walk. But if we all remain children in swaddling-clothes, who is to swaddle us? If we all lie in a cradle, who is to cradle us? If we are all in jail, who is to be the jail warden?” Words that Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, etc - who claim to be revolutionary Marxists - would do well to dwell upon.

For us in the CPGB, we shall continue to do what we can to support and encourage the rebellion we now see underway against the SWP jail wardens. To borrow from Maoist phraseology, what the SWP urgently needs - like the British left as a whole - is a cultural revolution: let a thousand flowers bloom, not to mention a thousand more oppositional blogs and Facebook pages.

[email protected]

Notes

1. Socialist Review January 2013: www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12210.

2. http://www.angelfire.com/journal/iso/ist.html.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons.

4. http://sovietgoonboy.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/the-swp-crisis-some-reflections.

[Q]

The central committee has once again failed to reassert control. But dirty tricks are inevitable, writes Paul Demarty (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/949/swp-crisis-twilight-of-the-idols)



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Ian Birchall and others - middle cadre no longer on knees

At this point, it is fair to say that the latest attempt by the Socialist Workers Party’s leadership clique to forcibly end the dissent in the ranks has backfired disastrously.

The central committee wanted to use the meeting of the national committee - packed with loyalists - to draw a line under things definitively. For a moment, it looked almost like it had worked. The CC motion to the NC (elected at conference on an individual voting system) was passed by 39 votes to eight; a dissident motion from academic Jim Wolfreys fell by the same margin.

Everything, suddenly, went quiet. Nothing appeared on the opposition’s International Socialism blog for three days. The news cycle abhors a vacuum; rumours started flying around. There were even whispers that some kind of deal had been reached - the opposition was said by some to have offered their silence in return for clemency when it came to the matter of disciplinary action.

Another faction

The truth, as it turns out, was the exact opposite. Mark Bergfeld had resigned from the CC, and issued a scathing indictment of his erstwhile colleagues. More importantly, a new faction had been formed. Initially, it surfaced as a motion submitted to the NC but not circulated by Charlie Kimber and his goon squad, with some 163 signatures attached to it.

In practice, it seems to be a continuation of the shortest lived faction in history - the Democratic Centralism faction, which attempted to split the difference between the CC supporters and the Democratic Opposition before conference. Many of the names on the initial list of 163 were the same, certainly. By the end of last week, they had formally constituted themselves as a faction, under the name, In Defence of Our Party; as of February 12, they claim 389 members. Encouragingly, they have accepted the membership of the International Socialism bloggers, who have constituted themselves as a platform called Democratic Renewal within the faction.

What do the comrades in the new faction want? Firstly: “recognition that discipline in a revolutionary party is political - not administrative - and fundamentally a matter of conviction. This means that if contentious decisions are taken that do not have overwhelming support, the leadership cannot simply demand loyalty, but needs to try to win the membership politically to its position over a period of time.” A statement of the bleeding obvious, you would think, but not in the SWP.1

Secondly, they point out that “comrades need time and space to honestly debate the issues we currently face if we are to reach a political resolution that has the overwhelming support of members”. On slightly shakier ground - but still partly true as far as it goes - the comrades argue that “feminists are not our enemies, but potential allies”.

They also put forward “a number of immediate measures” to handle the present crisis, including the standing down of ‘comrade Delta’, whose alleged crimes sparked the crisis, from public SWP work, and full support for those who made complaints against him; rejection of disciplinary action against dissidents; and a “review of disputes committee procedures”.

This is hardly the most radical platform, but the faction itself is hugely significant. The fact that 389 members have signed up is a challenge to the leadership in itself, of course - it is the names on the list, however, which will have given it the most disquiet. These are not nobodies in the SWP. They are not semi-detached public figures (as Richard Seymour and China Miéville have been portrayed), nor are they head-banging students.

The faction includes a whole raft of middle to senior cadre, including 10 members of the NC and perhaps as many former members of the CC; it includes people of unimpeachable moral authority within the SWP, such as Pat Stack and Tony Cliff’s biographer, Ian Birchall. It is one thing to fold Richard Seymour into an amorphous morass of hostile anti-Leninists and ‘creeping feminists’. Ian Birchall simply does not fit the bill.

Conference U-turn

It was too much for the CC, in the end. Having spent every bit of energy it could muster on preventing the opposition from forcing a ‘special conference’ - from ruling motions out of order on technical grounds, to imposing an arbitrary February 1 deadline for such motions - it has executed a whiplash U-turn and called one itself.

The CC’s statement on the matter is remarkable principally for being almost identical to every other statement the CC has put out so far during this crisis. There are the usual attempts to foster a ‘bunker mentality’ among the membership, shoring it up against ‘attacks’; the usual guff about how the Delta case was handled with the utmost propriety; the usual scare stories about the horrors of permanent factions. There is just that one, tiny, almost insignificant difference: that one week ago, such ‘arguments’ were being mustered against the idea of revisiting the affair at a special conference, but now they have mysteriously become arguments for doing so.2

So, for all the bluster, this has to be read as a humiliating climbdown. It is an admission that, despite bullish talk to the contrary, it is not some insignificant minority unconvinced by the CC’s attempts to ‘draw a line’ under the whole affair. If it was, why such difficulties? Ignore them; expel them; move on. No - this truly is, as the oppositionists have been arguing all along, an existential crisis. This conference has been forced on the CC - the 163 signatories of the aforementioned ‘misplaced’ letter to the NC threatened to add their weight to the campaign to get motions for a recall conference through branches, and it was no longer possible to avoid that outcome.

Calling the conference itself affords the CC what measure of strength it can achieve in this position: having been forced into it, it will attempt to make sure the conference is home turf. To that end, it is playing silly buggers with the procedures. It has set the absurdly early date of March 10 - which gives comrades barely a month to discuss matters. There will be one internal discussion bulletin (IB) - as if discussion is possible on that basis. It is aggregates (regional meetings) which are to elect delegates, meanwhile, rather than branches - and aggregates are more likely to be at the mercy of full-time apparatchiks, being further removed from the rank and file.

Prepare to fight

To their credit, both the IDOP faction and the Democratic Renewal platform know this game all too well.

An internal IDOP bulletin states: “Many people have contacted us to say that they think the timetable the CC have proposed is too short, and that we can only resolve these issues effectively if comrades have adequate time for discussion.” A serious discussion would require “two IBs - two so that comrades can make written responses to the articles in the first IB - and aggregates. We feel that the aggregates can only start after the IBs have been produced, so that comrades are able to have informed discussion based on IB articles. This means that, if there is to be an adequate pre-conference discussion, the conference cannot take place until after Easter.”

More punchily, the DR platform recognises what is going on: the CC “calls a special conference on March 10, just over four weeks from now. We want a special conference. But this is, in fact, a manoeuvre of exactly the same type as the arbitrary deadline imposed on motions for a special conference prior to the national committee. Its purpose is approximately the same: to drastically curtail the period of debate.”3

Unfortunately, this will not be the half of it. A more recent statement of the DR platform comes with the self-explanatory headline, “Stop the bullying!”, and proceeds to outline the terrible logic that leads from facile straw-man attacks, to denunciations, to an atmosphere where comrades are apparently being threatened with violence.4 More broadly, the CC is determined to win this conference - at whatever cost. That means intimidation, gerrymandering and all the rest.

The opposition is growing, and it is on the front foot at the moment, but it has a difficult fight ahead. The most immediate aim, of course, is to circumvent - however possible - the arbitrarily foreshortened timetable for the conference; and then to fight what will inevitably by a grubby guerrilla war for delegates and motions on terrain chosen by the CC.

The counterpart to this must be ‘preparing for the worst’ - the still likely eventuality that the CC gets the conference it wants. The DR comrades are correct to highlight the bullying of SWP members by the apparat, and correct also to provide practical advice to those being ‘taken aside for a little chat’ at branch meetings.

More is needed, however. Every anti-democratic manoeuvre needs to be exposed. Every branch decision steamrollered by a local apparatchik, every implied threat of violence, every rigged aggregate vote should be documented in full view of the SWP membership and the class. Let the world see exactly how these so-called ‘socialists from below’ conduct their affairs. In short, a rigged conference must be delegitimised, just as the NC meeting was delegitimised. It is only natural, after all, for it is perverse to suggest a rigged conference is legitimate in the first place.

‘Unpolitical’

That said, there is everything still to play for. The CC has not yet lost by a long shot, but it has never really regained the momentum in the last month. It has been exposed repeatedly as a politically spent force, unable to find anything to say, unable to advance discussions beyond non-specific complaints about ‘slurs’. The only advantages it retains are bureaucratic (which is not, alas, to say they are insignificant).

It is thus worth a final comment on a particularly hypocritical accusation, wheeled out against the pre-conference factions and repeated in the statement calling the new conference. “The faction document is extraordinarily unpolitical,” Kimber and co whinge. “It has nothing to say about the economic crisis and the fightback, the battle against racism and fascism, the union bureaucracy and the rank and file, Unite the Resistance, anti-imperialism, building the SWP - or much else.”

It is, of course, unsurprising that a document intended to combat internal bureaucracy fails to discuss a whole list of other questions. However, leaving that aside, the CC’s response is utterly hypocritical. It is true that the leadership has plenty of policy on all these areas (if we are prepared to extend the definition of the word ‘policy’ to include platitudinous horseshit), and the opposition has said little about any of those things (we note, however, the rather significant omission of women’s liberation from the list).

Yet the SWP leadership has allowed this to happen, because its mercilessly bureaucratic modus operandi has precisely a depoliticising effect on the rank and file. It is worth remembering that two short months ago, there were not yet any factions in the SWP; this period of ‘great chaos under heaven’ is the first time in many newer comrades’ political careers that thinking independently of the leadership has become a burning necessity.

It is to be applauded that, among the opposition, the germs of serious political discussion have started to appear. Mostly this has focused on the women’s question, unsurprisingly, and has been of varying quality. (Even Pat Stack has put his oar in on this one.) Yet, on another level, debate is simply inevitable, and illustrates how much effort the SWP leadership puts into preventing such discussions.

SWP members should ask themselves: will the level of debate and comradely exchange of ideas be higher under the status quo ante, the bureaucratic regime that currently drives the SWP to the edge of destruction, or under a healthier democratic structure? Which option is really “unpolitical”? That is the decision that faces the SWP today: an internal revolution and with it the possibility of political renewal, or sectarian oblivion.

[email protected]

Notes

1. www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/new-faction-launched-in-the-swp.

2. www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/a-revolutionary-situation-develops-in-the-swp.

3. http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a-brief-note-on-ccs-call-for-special.html.

4. http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/stop-bullying.html.

[The Idler]

16 February, 2013

SWP: LOSING GRIP OF REALITY (http://socialistunity.com/swp-losing-grip-on-reality/)

Category: Articles (http://socialistunity.com/category/articles/) — By: Andy Newman (http://socialistunity.com) at 4:00 pm
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This leaflet handed out today by SWP members at UNISON’s women’s’ conference in Liverpool sums up the disconnect between how loyal party members perceive their current crisis, and how the outside world sees the issues.

[Q]

"Lynch mobs" are being threatened with now! (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/callinicos-threatens-lynch-mobs) As expected a full (constitutional!) 3 month pre-conference is off the charts, as it would "destriy" the SWP, according to Callinicos anyway...


Callinicos threatens "lynch mobs"

The CPGB has been sent a copy of an explosive account of a recent ISJ meeting


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Bureaucratic fury, not righteous anger

CPGB Intro

This report of a recent 'International Socialism Journal' meeting gives a taste of the bullying, intimidating atmosphere that is building in the Socialist Workers Party as the beleaguered central committee and its supporters feel the crisis escalating out of control and take out their rage on the opposition and its legitimate concerns.

Certainly, if the comments and general attitude the report attributes to the likes of Alex Callinicos are accurate, it lends credence to the claims from the Democratic Renewal comrades that aggressive, bullying behaviour towards oppositionists is widespread, including in some cases the threat of physical violence. (http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/stop-bullying.html).

Such methods - and the people who promote them as a means to resolve political differences between comrades - should have no place in the workers movement.

All comments in brackets etc. are those of the orignal author. The report begins below.



ISJ Report

Alex Callinicos led off:

There are two types of group that are trying to change the party by fait accompli. The first group seeks to create external pressures. China, and I suspect Richard, encouraged Laurie Penny to write in the Independent. The letter from Peter Thomas and co, and interventions from ISO members, fit in here. PT and co are in part motivated by legitimate concerns about the case, but also it reflects the political ambitions of the Historical Materialism editorial board: it’s a repeat of ‘NLR syndrome’—Perry Anderson sought to profile himself as self-appointed generalissimo of the class struggle; these HM editors see themselves in a similar light. The ISO’s behaviour is particularly shocking: relations with them had been improving, but now their behaviour is threatening to “destroy” this.

The second group that are trying to change the party by fait accompli is the faction that declared this week.. I’m shocked by this. They have breached the long-standing principle that we do not have permanent factions.

The one-day special conference on 10th March will provide a full opportunity for discussion. It will be an opportunity to reaffirm the decisions taken at the January conference. Whatever comes out of it will have to be accepted by everyone. Anyone who doesn’t accept “will attract the righteous anger of the bulk of party members.”

[At the start of the discussion, incidentally, Alex barked at Amy Gilligan, insisting she stop taking notes. He, however, continued to cheerfully fill his notebook with copious notes throughout the meeting, as well as typing into his Blackberry. Alex tends to justify this sort of double standard with the term ‘political morality.’ Which seems to mean: whoever is trusted by the CC can do as they please, whoever is not, cannot. Are there echoes here of Gerry Healey’s catchphrase, ‘revolutionary morality’?]

The discussion kicked off with some comrades expressing their intense anger.

Sheila Macgregor, for example. Paul Blackledge later on.

But they were not angry either that the SWP has dealt with something as important as sexual harassment with appalling ineptness (not to say a cover up) or with the way the CC attempted to shut down the resulting debate. Rather, they were furious at those of us who’ve been “making a fuss” about such matters.

Sheila is “very angry”. We should not hold a special conference! We just had a conference, at which the issues were “all” fully aired! The present turmoil was started by party members. The SWP's reputation is not in fact suffering damage in the ‘outside world.’

Paul shared Sheila’s fury and directed some harsh words at the ISO.

Gareth Jenkins made some general and unsubstantiated allegations that members of the faction were spreading lies and half-truths. He then defended the CC’s behaviour over Jamie Woodcock, noting that the CC had merely “suggested” that Jamie’s nomination be rescinded—unaware that to even call this a half-truth would be absurdly generous.

Jane Hardy: Any damage to the party has been the result of “the blogging”. She compared Richard Seymour to UCU leader Sally Hunt: both seek to push debate out of the branches and conference (she offered not a shred of evidence that Richard wishes to do this) and onto “email voting” and internet discussion.

Joseph Choonara: Why are the students in revolt? Because we made a mistake in 2011, when students joined around the Millbank etc movement. We should have made a sharp turn toward SWP theory in the SWSS groups.

Colin Barker: Defended his adherence to the faction, and insisted that we’re an organisation that welcomes heterodoxy, one that has the confidence to show tolerance toward comrades who take positions with which most of us disagree.

There were excellent contributions from Jamie, Simon Behrman and Neil Davidson, repudiating the accusations against our faction. (In Simon’s case though, he also took some swipes at those of in the Renewal grouping.)

Gareth Dale: Disagrees with Sheila’s argument that nothing’s changed in the outside world. First, it has. Generally, to the detriment of the SWP’s reputation, but not simply that. For example, anarchist friends of mine have congratulated us on the seriousness with which we’ve approached the issue, and mentioned that they—who experienced similar difficulties in dealing with sexual harassment—have found our campaign inspiring. But even if the outside world is oblivious, a special conference is still necessary, due to the tumult in the organisation etc.

Agreed with Joseph Choonara who argued that the resolution to this cannot be administrative but must be political and suggested these issues need to be fought out at the conference, but also developed in the pages of our publications over the next year or more.

Callinicos has taken a swipe at Richard over his enthusiasm for Poulantzas, but had not Callinicos himself been similarly enthusiastic for Althusser, in the 1970s? Linked this to a point made by Neil: the party has to be big enough to include the likes of David Widgery as well as Chris Harman. Sheila’s warning—at the last ISJ meeting—that Neil’s recent ‘revisionism’ on permanent revolution is an “attack on the IS tradition” is an example of precisely the wrong approach to drawing boundaries.

Talat: “Richard Seymour is a friend of mine. But he never goes to meetings. He and China think they’re above the rest of the party.” She then went on to express her disgust at those of us who draw comparisons between the SWP’s procedure for dealing with harassment allegations and that of institutions, such as trade unions, “which are part of capitalist society”—the implication being that the SWP is not.

Hannah Dee: Spoke up strongly for ‘the students’. They’ve been particularly attuned to issues of feminism, oppression etc. No wonder it’s they who’ve been at the forefront in recent weeks.

Adrian Budd, to Alex: At the outset, you said that the point of the special conference is “to reaffirm the decisions taken at conference.” That’s surely the wrong way to go about it—to present it as a way of rubberstamping decisions already taken. Surely it should be about airing the points of contention fully. To this, Alex barked a surly “That’s what you think!”

Alex then summed up the session: The crisis has been driven from within the party. Richard Seymour is the principal culprit. He is an eclectic thinker; he grabs ideas from everywhere—including even Bob Jessop!—and throws them into an “incoherent mess.”

Martin Smith must be allowed to fully return to political activity. Hannah’s analysis of the students is wrongheaded.

The students are not some vanguard on issues of oppression, as she implies; rather, they’ve lost their way as a result of our flawed approach in 2011—as Joseph outlined. There’s no way a 3 month discussion period before the special conference will be allowed. It would “destroy” us. If party members refuse to accept the legitimacy of the decisions taken at the special conference, “lynch mobs” (his words) will be formed. [He didn’t say whether or not he’d give a green light to such organisations.]

[Q]

The "In Defence Of Our Party" Faction are holding a caucus in the run-up to a special conference of the SWP. In other news, the expulsion of the 'Facebook Four' has been upheld

Source (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/idoop-faction-caucus-agenda-and-documents).



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It's good to talk

Today (Sunday 17 Feb) the IDOOP faction are caucusing in preparation for the conference, in only a month's time on March 17th. Their planned agenda, discussion documents, and motions being put to the caucus can be found below.

It has also come out that the party's Disciplinary Committee has decided to uphold the expulsions of four members for 'factionalising' prior to the last conference, or, having a conversation on Facebook about whether to form a pre-conference faction. How exactly SWP comrades are supposed to get a faction together when discussion of it is verboten, must be a dialectical conundrum requiring special insight.

Apparently, the comrades will be free to re-apply for membership of the SWP in 18-24 months time. Good to know!

Download the documents individually below, or get them all in a ZIP file (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/IDOOP_faction_docs.zip).

1. Faction Caucus Agenda (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/1.+Faction+Caucus+Agenda.doc)

2. In Defence of Our Party (.pdf) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/2.+In+Defence+of+Our+Party.pdf)

3. The International Socialist Tradition and the current crisis in the SWP (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/3.+The+International+Socialist+tradition+and+the+c urrent+crisis+in+the+SWP.doc)

4.Womens liberation (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/4.+Womens+liberation.doc)

5. DC proposals (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/5.+DC+proposals.doc)

6. Statement regarding Dispute Committee challenge at conference (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/6.+Statement+regarding+Dispute+Committee+challenge +at+conference.doc)

7. Students (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/7.+Students.doc)

8. Student Strategy (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/8.+Student+Strategy.doc)

9. Internet (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/9.+Internet.doc)

10. Internet six points (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/10.+Internet+six+points.doc)

11. Under No Circumstances Should this Text be Posted on the Internet (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/11.+Under+No+Circumstances+Should+this+Text+be+Pos ted+on+the+Internet.doc)

12. IDOOP, Our Strategy (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/12.+IDOOP,+Our+Strategy.doc)

13. Resolutions for IDOOP faction meeting for SWP special conf (.doc) (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/idoopfactiondocs/13.+Resolutions+for+IDOOP+faction+meeting+for+SWP+ special+conf.doc)

[Q]

The CPGB publishes a report (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/in-defence-of-our-party-timidity-in-the-face-of-the-cc) of the caucus of the SWP's opposition faction, and the disappointingly soft approach they look to be taking in the struggles to come.



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Keeping quiet is no use

We publish below a report, by comrade Rob Owen, of the first caucus of the Socialist Workers Party's In Defence of Our Party faction (IDOP), which took place on Sunday.

Unfortunately, it appears that the faction has adopted a 'softly softly' approach, aiming to reach an amicable resolution of the current crisis through a 'reasonable' approach to the Central Committee. "We are committed to maintaining as good a relationship as possible with the CC," Owen writes. The comrades also voted to cease all public criticism of the CC on the internet.

The obvious problem with this approach is that the CC is committed to being 'unreasonable', and continues to throw smears at the oppositionists, and intimidate the 'disloyal'. CC members even staged an idiotic stunt at the faction meeting itself, taking Tony Cliff's widow Chanie Rosenberg along in an unsuccessful attempt to gain entry by means of the quasi-divine aura that the Gluckstein-Rosenberg clan may still have in the minds of SWPers (there is an elliptical reference to this incident in Owen's report).

Timidity in the face of all this is inadequate - IDOP needs to gear up for war, not some kind of 'sensible compromise'.

Paul Demarty

In Defence of Our Party caucus: report

The fraction caucus yesterday was attended by over 150 faction members from across the country. There was a lively debate around what the faction’s more developed positions on a number of issues should be. There was also a discussion running through the day about how we conduct ourselves in such a way as to hold the party together and seek to win comrades to our point of view.

Sessions

The first session stressed the importance of the SWP and why we are committed to saving the party and minimising the loss of members. Comrades also addressed the reasons why the disputes committee case with Comrade X has provoked such a large crisis. Contributions touched on the political nature of decisions about any comrade’s responsibilities in the Party, the need for action over proposals for the disputes committee, and our record over oppression being damaged by this issue hanging over us. There was also discussion on some of the wider questions about democracy and internal culture highlighted by the crisis. The document by Jim W, Hannah D and Rob O was adopted.

The discussion on the disputes committee gave comrades a real chance to discuss how the disputes process could be improved in such cases. Comrades also spoke making it clear why the faction opposes the use of terms like 'rape apologist' or 'rape denier' which should have no place in the debate. The caucus heard a number of comrades speak and the committee will be amending the document put forward by Pat S that was circulated for discussion before the caucus in the light of various amendments from fraction members.

A motion to include the reinstatement of the four comrades as a demand in the faction statement was voted down by the meeting. Speakers for and against the motion said that they personally opposed the expulsions and would support challenging them at national Conference when the disputes committee report is formally heard.

The session on students went through the problems that have arisen post-conference for the student fraction as a result of the DC case. After contributions from students around the country the document submitted by Amy G and Mark B was accepted.

The discussion on the internet was a contested, but fraternal, debate on the role of the internet. It was agreed in a near unanimous vote to stop the commentary on blogs and Facebook and use the channels opened up by the faction to conduct the argument internally within the party.

Contributions by Ian B and Shanice M closed the caucus on a positive message stressing the best elements of the SWP and what there is to fight for.

Documents will be circulated by the committee which will meet early this week.

The strategy now:

The caucus unanimously agreed to move forward as one united faction around a strategy of trying to win the Party to a sensible position over our key points. It was agreed that to do this meant conducting ourselves in a political way and being careful not to get drawn into the very confrontation approach some comrades supporting the CC have adopted.


Where not already running, we need faction caucuses in every district to start to coordinate work
We need district ring rounds aiming to pull as many people as possible towards our position
We need to draw up lists ahead of the aggregates of who is going and who will support us, focusing on meeting and discussing with comrades where we think there is some chance of pulling them towards supporting some of our positions
Detailed discussion on who, and how many, candidates IDOOP will stand for conference based on the amount of support we have locally.
Invite speaker in via fraction committee for the extended contribution at aggregate if would help in your area. We have to try to give 3 days’ notice to CC on who this will be.
We will need to pass motions through branches to for discussion at conference. The committee will be producing motions and we’d recommend that these are the ones we try to get through as many branches as possible.


Meetings:

Sunday’s meeting was a caucus to establish the political ground for the faction. A vote on whether to open the meeting to comrades outside the faction upheld the original decision that this would not be helpful in allowing the faction to clarify its views. The CC had been informed of this in advance. It was, therefore, surprising that some supporters of the CC’s position since conference arrived at the caucus with the expectation they could attend.

The discussion with these comrades was polite and they respected the decision of the faction that it was to be a closed caucus.

We are committed to holding meetings open to the whole party and the newly elected faction committee will begin the process of planning these events. If Districts want to hold their own please be aware these must be publicised by the national office. This is best done via the faction committee.

The meeting elected the following comrades on to the faction committee to coordinate this work nationally.

Pat S – Camden
Hannah D - Euston
Jamie W – Tower hamlets
Jim W - Euston
Amy G – Cambridge
Rosie W – Sheffield North
Ian A – Bury and Prestwich
Arnie J – UEL SWSS / Newham
Rob O – Croydon
Neil D – Edinburgh
Colin W – Hackney
Laura J – Waltham Forest
Ciara S – QMU SWSS / Tower hamlets
Mike G – Glasgow
Pete G – Hackney
Robin B – Euston / LSE
Sam J – Leytonstone
Shanice M – KCL SWSS / Euston
China M – Brent and Harrow
Brian P – Leeds

Meeting the CC

There was also a short meeting with members of the CC and the conference arrangements committee on Saturday. Pat S, Colin W and Rob O attended on behalf of the faction. This was just a meeting to clarify the rights of the faction. The CC made a number of proposals most of which were acceptable and some of which we requested small changes to. We expect the CC to approach us with whether these changes have been accepted early this week.

We are committed to maintaining as good a relationship as possible with the CC through these meetings and hope to reach an agreement that is fair to everyone concerned.

Rob Owen
on behalf of the faction committee

[Crux]

http://sphotos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/16484_10151242518195448_888379511_n.jpg

[Q]

Yeah, you had to join the faction beforehand and couldn't join on the day itself. A reasonable precaution I think.

[Q]

The CC is moving towards a complete car crash it seems (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/swp-central-committee-motion-to-special-conference)...


Followers of the crisis in the Socialist Workers Party will find this, the motion its Central Committee is to put to the forthcoming special conference, drearily familiar reading. In fact, there is almost nothing new in any of the numbingly repetitive motions and statements these bureaucrats come out with.

That they are sticking to this approach tells us two things: firstly, while the CC is keen to arrogate itself absolute authority, there is no chance of it taking responsibility for the disasters that result from its blundering use of that authority; and secondly, that there is little to no chance of any compromise being reached between the opposing camps in the SWP.

CC motion to special conference 10 March 2013
1) The Socialist Workers Party stands out on the left by the fact that it has a history of genuine democratic debate without permanent factionalism. We have developed democratic and accountable structures from our branches, elected district committees, the national committee and disputes committee, central committee, party councils and conference. In the recent period these structures were re-examined and strengthened by the work of the SWP democracy commission. We have full confidence in these structures and the method of democratic centralism.

2) This Special Conference notes that the commission on “What sort of party do we need?” that set out the democratic principles guiding our current practice was approved by 239 votes to 91 by annual conference in January 2013.

3) At the core of democratic centralism lies the understanding that we have full and honest debate among comrades in order to reach decisions followed by united action to implement and argue for those decisions.

4) We therefore condemn the actions of those members who have circumvented these principles by campaigning to overturn conference decisions outside the structures of the party, using blogs and the bourgeois media. Many of these contributions have been characterised by the use of slurs, abuse and un-comradely language that seem designed to stop serious debate and make joint work impossible, as well as damaging the party’s reputation.

5) The debates inside the party have been fuelled by the outcome of the Disputes Committee report to conference. This Special Conference affirms its belief in the integrity of the comrades on the DC and of the investigation they conducted. We note the DC was re-elected without challenge at the January 2013 conference. The DC report was approved by conference and the case concerned must be regarded as closed. This means that both comrades involved in the case are members in good standing, with the right to engage in political activity as party members.

6) This Special Conference notes that immediately following the original DC hearing of this particular case, information about it was leaked to people, some hostile, outside the party. This helped fuel rumours and misinformation about the DC within the party. This Special Conference also notes the disgraceful covert recording of the DC session at conference and the appearance of a transcript on a site hostile to the party, in addition to the reports and debates in public blogs and internet forums regarding these internal party arguments.

7) This has created difficulties for any future DC hearing. Therefore it is in this light that this Special Conference thinks it sensible to consider these issues, in particular:

How the future confidentiality of DC proceedings can be safeguarded
How future findings of the DC should be reported to the party
Examining these issues would also provide an opportunity to clarify our disciplinary procedures more generally and propose changes to these procedures where necessary. This should be the responsibility of a committee composed of the four members elected from the National Committee at its last meeting, four members elected from this special conference, two from the Disputes Committee and one from the Central Committee. This committee will report to a subsequent meeting of the NC, which will draw up proposals to be put to the next Annual Conference.

8) This Special Conference regrets the fact that, following the NC meeting at the beginning of February, some comrades decided to form a faction specifically around the Disputes Committee case. Their use of a spurious interpretation of the party constitution represented a break with our traditions of democratic debate, which were reaffirmed by the annual conference in January. The Special Conference demands that all factions and “platforms” disband immediately after the conclusion of this conference and instructs party members involved in producing blogs on internal debates such as the “International Socialism” site to take them down immediately after the conclusion of this conference.

9) Student work has always been the lifeblood of the SWP, and the Special Conference expresses its pride in the successes of our student comrades during and after the movement of November-December 2010. But it is clear that our student work has been disoriented by a failure sufficiently to recognise that this phase of the movement has ended and to focus on ideological and political struggle. The debates that have been developed must be pursued patiently and on a political basis. Nevertheless, this Special Conference reaffirms that the Socialist Workers Student Societies are support organisations of the SWP and that student members of the SWP are bound by the decisions of party conference and other leading bodies. The Central Committee has the authority to direct student work, as it has over all areas of party work.

10) We believe that underlying many of the recent debates in and around the party lie a series of vital political questions where we need to seek urgently to assert, develop and win our political tradition. Some of the key debates include:

The changing nature of the working class.
Lenin’s conception of the party and its relevance in the 21st century.
Oppression and capitalism.
The trade union bureaucracy and the rank and file.
The radical left, the united front and the SWP.
The role of students and intellectuals in revolutionary struggle.
The value of new electronic media in the ideological and organisational work of a revolutionary party.
11) The Special Conference supports the CC and the NC in their strong commitment to leading and facilitating extensive discussion and debate around such issues in every forum of the party. This requires a serious, systematic and urgent effort in all our publications, through branch and district meetings, wider party events such as Marxism and through educationals and day schools.

[blake 3:17]

"7) This has created difficulties for any future DC hearing. Therefore it is in this light that this Special Conference thinks it sensible to consider these issues, in particular:

How the future confidentiality of DC proceedings can be safeguarded
How future findings of the DC should be reported to the party "

It's an amazing state of denial. I keep expecting something reasonable to appear from the leadership, but should know better.

[Lucretia]

Attempting to keep debates internal is one of the hallmarks of a Leninist party, and I don't see anything wrong with that principle. I can't help but feel that much of the criticism on this thread is opportunistic piling on by people using this controversy as a vehicle to push agendas they've been less successful at pushing for years. That's not to say, of course, that this particular case doesn't represent a huge fuck-up on the part of the SWP CC, but it's important to disentangle the case from the sweeping attacks on democratic centralism issuing forth from groups like the CPGB-PCC, which as far as I know aren't actively engaged in anything politically besides putting out a leftist gossip rag. As it stands, the issue is a public one thanks to a notorious lack of internal discipline in the organization, so the party should resolve it publicly. But I see nothing wrong with trying to keep future internal disputes outside the public eye.

[The Idler]

Andy Newman replies to Pat Stacks comments on non-SWP bloggers as filth
http://socialistunity.com/what-is-filth/

Cathy replies to SWP leaflet at UNISON Womens Conference
http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/unisons-national-womens-conference-the-rape-denial-debate/
and
http://toomuchtosayformyself.com/2013/02/22/unison-women-the-swp-and-the-vote-to-support-rape-victims/

[ind_com]

Have judicial actions been taken against the person accused? Sorry to ask, I am not well-informed about this.

[Red Enemy]

I can't remember where, exactly, but I remember reading Jim Higgins (former IS member) discussing sexism as a problem in the IS and with Cliff.

Also, Dunayevskaya says as much in a critique I seen somewhere.

[blake 3:17]

Have judicial actions been taken against the person accused? Sorry to ask, I am not well-informed about this.

No. It seems unlikely at this point.

[The Idler]

Judicial actions are probably fatally compromised now.

Soviet Goon Boy" asks would you let your daughter join the SWP? I'd have to answer no.

[Q]

Copies of the motions (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/idops-conference-proposals) which IDOOP will attempt to put to the upcoming Special Conference have been made available.

IDOOP currently has 480 people signed up. The CC claims another 500. So, say two to three hundred still haven't decided either way, this has split the party in half.



http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/carousel/Alex-Callinicocropped.jpg
Concessions? Not sure if serious....

In Defence of Party Unity

Comrades on all sides of the debate over the crisis in the party share one common aim - to defend the best interests of the SWP. Disagreements over internal questions of this nature are not differences in perspective or a break from the ideas of Leninism. That they have been treated as such is a major cause of the crisis gripping the party. The culture of debate was a central part of the democracy commission. The SWP must be capable of accepting, discussing and overcoming matters of political difference if we are to operate as an effective revolutionary organisation. These questions are best resolved through debate and argument rather than disciplinary measures.

Special conference notes:

Many comrades feel they have been marginalised because they have expressed concerns over the CC's handling of the disputes case and its aftermath. In a number of districts, and the party office, trusted comrades have been removed from roles as a result of opinions expressed internally over this question.

In particular our student comrades have experienced a fractious relationship with the CC since conference. The central committee has rapidly changed perspectives agreed at conference. Our leading comrade in NUS was barred at short notice from re-standing for the executive. While the CC has the right to change perspectives and remove candidates, it is highly unusual for this to be done without proper discussion or a serious attempt to win comrades to the new perspective. The CC's actions appear to be driven by internal considerations relating to positions students have taken on the dispute. This has involved a number of false arguments about the problem of autonomism, feminism and the failure of students to take an"ideological turn" which has angered students proud of their record in fighting for our politics on campus.

It would be a disaster for the SWP if comrades were to continue to feel disenfranchised from party work as a result of positions taken over this question. We need to draw a line under the matter so the party as a whole can continue to discuss the broader questions raised by the crisis in a constructive way.

Special conference resolves:


That, as stated in the CC motion to the special conference, there needs to be an on-going discussion through the appropriate party structures, events and publications. Whether comrades were supporters of the CC statement or the faction should have no bearing on their role in that discussion.
That the report from the democracy commission provides the basis for the party to move forward and reassert a genuine culture of debate and discussion.
That the CC takes a lead in organising to overcome rifts that have opened up between comrades in some districts/branches over this issue and take practical steps to ensure no one feels marginalised.
That the CC take steps to show student comrades that they are considered an integral and valued part of our party. This should include facilitating a proper period of discussion about student perspectives.
That there should be no attempt to reorganise national, district or branch responsibilities in response to comrades positions on the dispute and its aftermath if we are to maintain unity in our work locally and nationally.


Motion on role of comrade X


We are for the unity of the party and believe it is vital that the special conference provides the opportunity for a swift, political resolution to the current crisis so that we can move forward with maximum clarity and minimum loss of members. We accept the decisions of conference and are not seeking to have them overturned.
The outcome of conference was to confirm the disputes committee report. Conference did not clarify the role of Comrade X.
This lack of clarity remains a divisive issue and a potential flashpoint. This is not a matter of guilt or innocence. The question of whether it is appropriate for X to continue to represent the party in its united front work is a matter of political judgement. Such judgements are frequently made regarding comrades' roles and have nothing to do with disciplinary action.


Special conference resolves:


That Comrade X stands down from any paid or representative roles in the party or united front work for the foreseeable future.


Motion on the Dispute Committee

Special Conference Notes

1. Dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct is often very difficult, but the party must strive to address both the political questions they raise, and also to learn from the experience to improve, where possible, the procedures for handling such complaints in the future. Taking these actions constitutes an appropriate political response to the concerns raised.

2. Concerns relating to the composition of the disputes committee and potential or perceived conflicts of interest the line of questioning pursued with the two women involved in the case what approach the DC should take when a serious criminal charge such as rape is involved and how the DC addresses political questions of conduct when complaints of a sexual nature are involved.

Special Conference Resolves:


To elect a commission to look into all aspects of disputes committee procedures regarding cases of sexual misconduct.
That this commission should consists of 6 members elected at conference and one CC nominee, and one DC nominee.
That such a commission should have the powers to co-opt up to three comrades with appropriate professional expertise.
That this commission will take written and verbal submissions from comrades interested in contributing to the process.
That this commission shall present its recommendations in the first IB of the next pre-conference period, to be voted on at the January 2014 annual conference.


Download Faction list here (http://cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/FactionList0221.doc)