WeeklyWorker

14.09.1995

Getting active

Comrade Tanya from South London explains why she has recently joined the SWP, posing the question, “Is the SWP the ‘true’ revolutionary party?”

I am a revolutionary socialist, unattached to any party, union organisation (I’m unemployed) or other political affiliation. I believe in revolution and am an orthodox Marxist. I think Lenin was the supreme party builder and Trotsky was a brilliant tactician. Together they significantly shaped and developed a set of ideas and practices called bolshevism. That probably makes me a Bolshevik, but not a Trotskyist or a Leninist.

I think the Socialist Workers Party most clearly follows the spirit and the letter of bolshevism, as put down at the Third International. In other words, I think the SWP has taken Lenin’s advice.

I am not 100% sure about anything - ultimately time will tell. But the SWP has helped me take responsiblility for the necessity of revolution and socialism by:

  1. Being active and campaigning and mobilising for all sorts of struggles.
  2. Producing a paper which is easy to read but also informative, revolutionary (not reformist) and realistic.
  3. Producing a vast amount of literature on every topic imaginable which educates me, but also makes me feel that I am not the only one in the world who saw things that way.
  4. Being an organisation which people I respect and like feel they can be a part of.

There was a time when people felt like this about the Communist Party, but it seems now the CP cannot inspire as it once did.

I grew up with the CP. My dad read the Morning Star and was a communist. (Unfortunately, he felt that the CP was not Stalinist enough for his liking!) So I was once inspired by the aims of the CP, but the decline had already reached terminal stages by the time I reached adulthood.

Where is the CP now? Small and not in evidence in the struggle. Producing a paper which doesn’t articulate my political beliefs as clearly and as fully as Socialist Worker.

So I’ve been won over by the arguments of the SWP and by the combination of theory and practice which differentiates the SWP from most other parties. I’m not blinded by its size, although I tend to think that because of its size any revolutionary party which is going to lead will either be a faction of the SWP or the SWP itself. I think I am seeing a gathering of forces of the left within the SWP - and in that sense size does matter.

Of course I could be wrong. Perhaps the victorious revolutionary party will come from somewhere else - but the precipitous decline of other parties suggests otherwise at this historical moment.

Perhaps the SWP will fall away like the others but right now at this moment the SWP is the party which most effectively organises and agitates within the working class and makes the biggest contribution to the struggle.

After I join the SWP I will need people on the outside keeping my vision fixed clearly on what is going on inside the party. This is exactly the relationship of the working class to the party: a force for realism and a brake on us when we float into the air somewhere and theorise ourselves out of the struggle.

I think the SWP has kept in touch with the working class and I think that has been beneficial to the party and the class. That does not mean reformism or economism, it means revolutionary realism.

Remember, we are on the same side! Comrades, united we stand, divided we fall. Let’s see if we have a chance for revolutionary unity.