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There can never be enough resources and emphasis put on political and theoretical development and I would doubt that there is a single branch or branch leadership in the CWI that doesn't discuss political education and the need to theoretically arm our comrades on a regular basis. But I think you underestimate what a task that is.
By the very nature of our relatively open recruitment policy, there is probably a significantly large number of people with a relatively low level of political consciousness.
I don't make any apologies for that - I'd much rather work alongside people who know fuck all about anything but who can potentially be developed, particularly through their involvement in actual struggles, than have an exclusionist policy that demands a particular level of ideological purity before joining. I will leave that to the sects.
They have all the time in the world to focus on theoretical education because they're entirely removed from struggle and from any actual interaction with workers - something which provides a far better basis for political development than sitting around discussing ideas in a purely abstract form.
You can feel free to criticise the pace we do it at but it's certainly not a conscious dismissal of theory.
As for it "not being their fault", my experience is that in some cases it actually is. I'm not blaming people for having a particular level of development but with some people, it's like hitting your head off a brick wall. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, some people just don't get it. That doesn't mean that they lose their affinity for socialism or at least for what their understanding of socialism is - some do of course - but they're just very hard to develop or to encourage to develop. I know people who have been active on the left for decades, would consider themselves Marxists but they're as theoretically shit as they were 20 years ago despite an enormous amount of energy and work being spent on trying to theoretically arm them. Nonetheless I'm happy to continue working alongside them. Maybe you think we should just kick them out though.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror... --- Mark Twain
The IST as an organization does not operate on democratic centralism, and therefore each group in the IST are, for lack of a better word, autonomous of one another.
A leading member of the IS in Canada, for instance, has expressed to me his concern for lack of internal democracy in the SWP, among other things.
Is expression of concern incompatible with democratic centralism?
No, this isn't what I meant.
The point is that if the IST operated in a democratic centralist fashion, with the SWP at it's head, then it would go to show that the internal democracy issues would be throughout the IST.
However, since the IST as an organization does not have that, you don't have the problems across the board.
Apparently in this case it is. Is 'democratic centralism' anything much more than a bit of jargon? And who determines the centre? From my experience of the IS it has been the SWP leadership who've been 'the centre' and others were free to babble on but it would essentially be ignored.
My worst experiences with IST nonsense was in the late 90s around a whole set of issues, domestic and international. The problem I could see was that the line was being dropped from Daddy England and a whole lot of very good activists felt compelled to follow it, not because it was right, but because Daddy said so.
One of the biggest fights we had was over the nature of the Left response to the barbaric attacks on Serbia by NATO. While acknowledging the ethnic/national oppression of peoples in the former Yugoslavia, the IST line was to not allow that discussion to take place. In retrospect, the best position would have been openly admit that the situation was complicated, but that the most vital thing we could do was to oppose imperial aggression against Milosevic and let the peoples of the region sort it out themselves.
Callinicos and the IST have attacked the idea of 'permanent factions', but why not support a multi-tendency approach? In terms of practical political and social struggle, I've often worked better with people who were 'different' ideologically. The narrow scholasticism of splitting over abstract issues is not what the radical Left needs or what our movements need.
