I don't share your interpretation of Lenin's What Is To Be Done, I guess. I don't see him favoring agitation over propaganda in that work. Rather, I seem him stressing the need for moving beyond agitation around immediate demands, and toward propaganda work. If anything, he was responding against the strategy that you attribute to the SWP-UK. Lenin sharpened his formulation of this in his later work "Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder." He says: As long as it was (and in as much as it still is) a question of winning the proletariat’s vanguard over to the side of communism, priority still goes to propaganda work; even propaganda circles, with all their parochial limitations, are useful under these conditions.
...and then of course beyond that you have the groups' deep and vindicated distrust of the union bureaucracy and the Labour Party, as a bourgeois workers party. I don't find Cliff's State Capitalist analysis particularly compelling which is why I would describe myself as sharing their strategy rather than necessarily all of their theoretical ideas. Hope that answers your question.
I tend to think of it as an attempt to follow the course Lenin set forth in 'What is to be done'. They were an agitation group (who favoured rallies and strikes as their setting for dialogue) as opposed to a propagandist approach where the majority of the theory is divulged through writing. The IS were militants in the sense that they thought the vanguard party should be where the struggle is, which is of the course the work place. The SWP always had a reputation for activism. Essentially I find common ground with their industrial agitation strategy and their view that workers power rests in the work place, industrial action demonstrates the latent power of the workers, building solidarity increases the likelihood of victory, victories breed confidence, and confidence is the prerequisite for growth in working class political consciousness....
How would you describe the revolutionary strategy of Cliffism?
1986 saw the defeat of the miners' strike and the culmination of the "downturn". From that point on I believe that the party suffered a collapse of confidence in the class struggle in Britain and as a result took a Eurocommunist-esque deviation into fighting battles other than the class struggle. The Anti-Nazi League and Stop the War, while admirable side-projects, became the rasion d'etre of the post-86 SWP. The disorientation and disillusion of this period lead to the fracturing of the group into a variety of splits and splinter groups, the inevitable marginalisation of the SWP as a serious revolutionary party and, essentially, the collapse of the organisation into a small, scattered, anti-democratic sect centred around a cabal of theorists and academics with little or no experience of struggle. I don't hold to everything Tony Cliff or the other SI members stood for but on the matters I think most important, i.e - revolutionary strategy, I find myself in strong agreement.
Why do you mark 1986 is a pivotal year in the history of the SWP(UK)?
