Would the workers party in Ireland consider themselves as UK socialists?
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UK Socialist parties
Does anybody have any reliable info on the membership composition (in terms of numbers and % of members active) for some of the UKs Socialist parties?
Reason I ask is that I was reading somewhere that Scargill's Socialist Labour Party (which I thought was by and large defunct) had a total of 6,000 members, which seems high.
Wondering how many members (and how many are active) it really has, and also the likes of the CPGB, SWP, SPEW, SPGB, RCP, NCP etc. I know teh CPGB-ML is tiny at around 100 or less, or so I have heard.
Would the workers party in Ireland consider themselves as UK socialists?
SWP claims about 6,000 I think
CPGB I'm sure can't be more than a 100 or so.
SPEW would probably be a few thousand.
Dunno really.
It's all pretty irrelevant.
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
I remember there being some controversy over that. If I recall the SWP was using a method of counting "members" that inflated the number of people who could reasonably be said to give political support to them.
EDIT:
This is what I was thinking of.
"From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation."
- Karl Marx -
I would guess the SWP and SPEW are roughly both 2,000 each. Last time SPEW had a big get-together in London -- some sort of conference, can't remember exactly what it was for -- the official number of active (and not just folks who pay a monthly sub) was something like 1,987, but we've probably around 2,000 now. Anyway to analyze the success or "how good" an organisation is by their numerical strength alone seems somewhat erroneous. To be sure, it may be easier for a party to organise on a daily basis simply if they have more members, but I don't think numerical strength in itself is always directly conducive to a party's success. From what I know there's roughly around 57 (perhaps 67) far-left groups in the UK, all with varying levels of activity. SPEW and SWP are equally the biggest.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew
I also think it needs to be stressed that having more and more people together in a party means nothing if there is no actual mass movement to relate to.
You can collect as many socialists together as you like as long as there is no self-organisation in the workplaces and communities, as long as there is no concentrated solidarity and affinity in this areas you are just a bunch of dreamers hanging around with each other.
I also maintain that genuine organisation will arise out of prolonged revolutionary struggle itself and near to all (probably all) organisations that exist now will be swept away at this time. As such I think looking at the strength and sustainability 'cracks' in capitalist normalacy and relations (strikes, occupations, riots, rebuilding the commons...) is far more representative of how far we are progressing than how many pro-revolutionaries are in groups x y and z.
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
