14.09.1995

Hey, hey, Tony Blair ...

Fighting the SWP central committee or reforming the SWP?

THE Republican Worker Tendency suggests that the motivation for the open letter to the Socialist Workers Party on communist unity and democratic centralism is factional. The Revolutionary Democratic Group is “obsessed” and the CPGB is opportunistically going along with it! Opponents present it as a matter of faction rather than politics. But the facts show that this idea is fundamentally wrong.

Four organisations had the opportunity to support the letter - two are factions of the SWP (RDG and International Socialist Group) and two are not factions (CPGB and RWT). The RDG and CPGB supported the letter and the ISG and RWT opposed it. Factions and non-factions are on both sides. Politics and not faction has produced this alignment - in essence the difference between a revolutionary and reformist approach.

Reformist perspective

The clue is provided by the RWT which says the main reason for not supporting the open letter is that the SWP is unreformable. The ISG in contrast is seeking to reform the SWP. The ISG has no known programmatic, strategic or tactical differences with the SWP. It supports all the basic politics of the SWP. Its platform for change is confined to internal democracy.

The Cliffites have trained SWP members to see the party as a democratic centralist Bolshevik organisation. When problems arise, members naturally look no further than democratic reform of the party apparatus. The ISG seems to be the obvious answer.

It supports the IS/SWP tradition. It looks back to a golden age of IS when Cliff was a ‘Luxemburgist’ before he became a ‘Leninist’. It tends to see democratic reform as a ‘family affair’.  It does not want allies outside the ‘family’ because this might queer its pitch with the soft opposition inside the party. The ISG is lukewarm about forming a united front with the RDG and wants to steer an even wider birth from the CPGB.

Ultra-leftism

Reformability is the main question for the SWP’s internal opposition. They want to reform the SWP and have to believe it is possible. But, given the nature of the SWP, reformers are soon disillusioned. Recently Gravesend SWP openly defended Chris Weller, an SWP member unjustly expelled. It wrote to the central committee asking for a written statement outlining the reasons for the expulsion. The central committee refused.

The Gravesend branch has now resigned in protest (letter printed below). It says that “We do not now think the SWP can be reforged, reformed or changed from within.” But they then draw the erroneous conclusion, that the SWP should now be ignored, or we “retreat from active politics in the real world”. A strange conclusion, which indicates a very narrow conception of politics. Reformist politics in the real world is not the same as revolutionary politics in the real world.

The worst aspect of this whole affair is that they seem to have given up the fight to build a revolutionary party. This is not surprising because the SWP was more or less irrelevant to their activity in Gravesend. Should it surprise anybody if the question ‘Why do we need the SWP?’ has become ‘Why do we need a revolutionary party?’

The SWP did not teach them even the basics of revolutionary politics - without a revolutionary programme, strategy and tactics there can be no serious revolutionary activity ‘in the real world’. Only, SWP-style, running around from one campaign to the next - the kind of activity Labour lefts used to do. No wonder the comrades end up substituting the united front for the struggle to build a revolutionary party.

Reformers begin with illusions in SWP politics. Then, as soon as they hit a brick wall, they give up altogether. Ultra-lefts are reformers who have given up. It is well known that ultra-leftism is a mirror image of reformism. Ultra-lefts think like reformists. Naturally they want to make “reformability” the central question.

British Menshevism

The SWP is a British form of Menshevism, which manifests itself sometimes in ultra-leftism (syndicalism) and at other times in centrism (pro-Labourism). The latest example of the SWP behaving like Labour lefts and putting “demands” on Blair was outside the TUC.  The SWP chanted, “Hey, hey, Tony Blair, £4 an hour is only fair.”           As Simon Hoggart commented in The Guardian,  “No doubt, in the spirit of modernisation they will soon be shouting: ‘Hey, hey, Tony Blair, a minimum wage, sensibly and flexibly introduced in the light of prevailing circumstances, should not cause anyone to lose their hair’.” (September 13)

At the root of this is the SWP’s economism and the worship of spontaneity, which leads - hey, hey - to Menshevik reformism. The very idea of reforming them into Bolsheviks is ludicrous. The significance of the SWP is that it has now replaced the old CPGB as the main barrier to bolshevism in the Marxist movement. Open ideological struggle would soon begin to expose this.

This is why the central committee must ‘protect’ its members from Marxist criticism. Sectarian attitudes to other Marxists and expulsion of internal critics is the means of keeping their ideological hegemony.

Main barrier

The SWP central committee is the main barrier to building a revolutionary workers’ party. We cannot build such a party without smashing down that barrier. Building a united communist party in the UK is inseparable from waging a consistent ideological struggle against the central committee. On this there is virtually no difference between the RDG and the CPGB. Hence a faction and non-faction can align themselves politically around an open letter on that basis.

Is the SWP reformable?

For revolutionaries, this is a silly question. Can Menshevik parties be reformed into Bolshevik parties? The Bolsheviks did not waste time asking such nonsense. They fought the Mensheviks ‘tooth and nail’. For the record I do not believe that a Menshevik SWP is reformable into a Bolshevik SWP. Nevertheless many Menshevik workers were won over to bolshevism because of the militant struggle Lenin and co waged against Menshevism.

Nevertheless we draw a different conclusion from the RWT. If the SWP is not reformable, then it is even more dangerous and has to be fought even harder. It certainly does not mean abstentionism.

Fighting the central committee

For us the central question is not reformability; it is how we can defeat them. It is significant that the RWT does not ask this question. Yet building a revolutionary party depends on it. In a period when we need a united communist party and a united front against the Tories and Labour, we must conduct our struggle with the SWP in that context.

Fighting the SWP in Ucatt

Brian Higgins’ letter (Weekly Worker 110) is revealing. He has been fighting the Ucatt union bureaucracy for years. He says, “If we come up against the SWP in the course of these struggles and we have to fight, as sometimes happens, we do this tooth and nail.” As soon as Brian speaks as a militant building worker, a chink of light appears - or is it a chink in our opponent’s armour? The RWT is prepared to fight the SWP “tooth and nail”, but only in the unions. Surely this is economism?

The SWP must be fought with equal ferocity in the political-ideological arena. We need a fighting political organisation for this. If the idea is that I fight it only if it turns up in my backyard, whether that be Ucatt or Gravesend, it is parochialism gone mad.

We must fight it tooth and nail on the question of building a communist party, on democratic centralism and on republicanism and the national question. Can we fight the bosses without a rank and file movement, or Labour without a communist party prepared to stand against it on a republican basis? And who in the Marxist movement is the main barrier to that?

Can the SWP central committee be beaten?

Compared to the nonsense about reforming the SWP, this is the important question. Before we can have any chance of winning we need a weekly paper, a coherent Leninist ideology and programme, a growing opposition inside the SWP and a united front of all those prepared to fight inside and outside the SWP. For the first time I think these conditions may be emerging.

This is where the open letter comes in. What it has demonstrated is not the strength of the SWP central committee, but the weakness and division amongst the opposition. We cannot blame Cliff for this. The fundamental question for the RWT is whether it is prepared to fight alongside SWP members, the ISG, the RDG and the CPGB against the SWP central committee.

Dave Craig
RDG (Faction of the SWP)

We reproduce here a shortened version of the letter to the SWP central committee from Gravesend comrades

AS BRANCH secretary, I have to inform you that the four undersigned members of Gravesend SWP, including myself, today resign from the SWP. This means that effectively there is now no SWP presence in this town.

Despite the small size of this branch our activity and influence locally is considerable and this will continue, except not as part of the SWP.

We oppose the expulsion of Chris Weller of Canterbury branch and your continued refusal to give him reasons for expulsion in writing. We stand in solidarity with a good comrade who has been treated with high-handed contempt by you and whose expulsion was the final straw for us. We fully support his views regarding the lack of democracy in the SWP; the issues raised in his letters to you and the Kent district committee should have been freely debated and acted upon. This was constructive criticism and it was stifled.

Bureaucratic manoeuvres replaced democratic political discussion. We are convinced that the SWP will not flourish if the voices of ordinary members are silenced as soon as they express the slightest disagreement with the leadership.

Whether the silencing of dissent takes the open form of expulsion, as in comrade Weller’s case, or whether it takes the more politically cowardly form of underhand ostracising, which we in Gravesend have recently experienced, the end result is the same - an unhealthy top-down organisation in which an elite claim and, even worse, probably believe that they alone know the true way forward.

To set the record straight, we are not members of any other political organisation. Nor are we aligned to any faction, off-shoot or group within or around the SWP and we have no interest in devoting political energy to these kind of things, which tend to become an end in themselves and a retreat from active politics in the real world.

In any case, we do not now think that the SWP can be reforged, reformed or changed from within. From our own experience we have found that the party is a rigid, sectarian command-structure organisation incapable of listening to the voices of ordinary members.

This is a parody of a revolutionary Marxist party and as such it has become a fetter and a millstone on activity and the development of the class struggle.

The obsession with judging the success or failure of all working class activity in terms of recruitment and paper sales alone is to us a narrow and mechanical approach, which bears little relationship to the true size, strength and influence of revolutionary socialists in the class itself.

This, very briefly, is why we feel that the SWP has nothing to offer us as revolutionary socialists. Having left the SWP, we are not in any sense demoralised or isolated. On the contrary, through many years of experience in activity and campaigning with numerous non-SWP comrades here, we have together built a firmly-rooted working class base in Gravesend which will compare favourably with any SWP branch in Kent.

We think that this kind of united front activity is the most relevant and effective, given the political circumstances today, and we will continue to put our energies into this work.

Gravesend SWP
GE, ME, RH, RW