19.09.2024

Amy Leather vanishes

What lies behind the mid-term changes at the top? The central committee limits itself to a single gnomic pronouncement. Meanwhile, Paul Demarty investigates

Every Monday, members of the Socialist Workers Party receive their weekly organising bulletin, Party Notes, in their email.

Its contents vary so little, frankly, that it is easy to miss when there is truly something of note. But on September 2, buried in the usual roll-call of upcoming demonstrations and fund drives, there was an item that was something like news:

The central committee would like to make comrades aware of two changes to the CC. The first is that Amy Leather has decided to step down from the CC. We would like to thank her for all her work over the years. The second is [that] Tomáš Tengely-Evans is taking over as editor of Socialist Worker this week, replacing Charlie Kimber. Charlie will remain on the CC. The proposed slate for the central committee standing for election at conference this year will be circulated in Pre-Conference Bulletin one. Comrades are able to put forward an alternative slate.

No further details seem to be forthcoming. The question thus arises: why have these comrades stepped down from their positions, and why now? After all, Socialist Worker editor is a central responsibility. As for comrade Leather, she was joint national secretary, and widely recognised as effectively being in charge of the SWP apparatus.

There is the possibility that there is no real political interest here. People get burnt out, or just plain ill, and need to step back from their roles; or there is some family emergency, or whatever. If this were the case, surely the SWP CC would think nothing of adding ‘due to illness’ or ‘due to family circumstances’; although, having said that, the SWP is prone to a certain amount of ‘toytown Bolshevism’, when it comes to internal secrecy (more of which anon).

Backstory

All interpretations are necessarily speculative and based on hearsay, therefore; but let us propose one. The story starts - when else? - in 2013, when the SWP was tearing itself to pieces over allegations of rape against CC member Martin Smith, which had been dismissed by the internal disputes committee (DC) the previous year. A faction had formed to contest this at the SWP’s annual conference, when the DC offered its report, but the faction’s members were immediately expelled for technical breaches of the official procedures (factions are only permitted to exist in the pre-conference period and labour under various rules that more or less guarantee that they cannot prevail against the only permitted faction, which is to say, the central committee). The furore this created resulted in the formation of two much larger opposition factions.

The DC report is usually a formality, but this time was approved only on a knife-edge vote. Transcripts were leaked to various left outlets, including this one, and rapidly published, resulting in the factional struggle becoming public (and therefore illegal, according to SWP rules). The response of the leadership was to adopt a siege mentality, brook no compromise and drive what was probably around half the active membership out of the organisation. Yet all this was happening - again - publicly, generating coverage in the bourgeois press, and so quickly destroyed the group’s reputation, such as it was, in the wider movement. The subsequent decade of SWP history has seen the organisation duck and dive endless attempts to proscribe it on campuses and student unions, and occasional attempts, fruitlessly, to draw a line under the matter.

The last such attempt came this May, with a formal press release accepting responsibility for various failings in the handling of the Smith case, which we discussed at the time.¹ That statement seemed to come out of the blue, as well, but presumably did not. It was an indication that this fiasco was still being used to attack the SWP - an impression confirmed at least by anecdotal reports.

What does this have to do with Kimber and Leather? For a start, they are two of the eight current CC members who were also elected to the leadership at the conference which sparked the crisis. As national secretary at the time, Kimber was formally responsible for the various purges that followed. Leather, meanwhile, emerged over the course of the year as the most vociferous defender of Smith, and the most unhinged in her demands for retribution. It would certainly not take anybody much Googling to discover that.

It also raises the question: how does she feel about the SWP writing grovelling statements on its failures during that struggle? All statements on this are bound by collective CC responsibility. We have no idea if the decision to address this was contentious, but with such overwhelming continuity of personnel with the 2013 regime, surely it must have been.

According to some anonymous reports, Leather has faced criticism internally for failing to promote the May statement. Her name was curiously marginal at this year’s Marxism festival - while last year she gave a speech at the closing rally, this time around she offered one talk on the rather recherché topic of ‘The invention of the western diet: capitalism, food and colonialism’: diverting, no doubt, but it was not lost on savvy attendees that this was something of a downgrade.

So that is the working theory. It is, as we warned, not based on much - a rough coincidence with the latest attempt to address the unending fallout from the Smith case; a few historical details; whispers on the grapevine (people are used to calling the Weekly Worker a ‘gossip sheet’ for far better sourced articles than this one). It is perfectly possible that there is some other, perfectly reasonable explanation for the discreet disappearance of Amy Leather, and the changing of the guard at Socialist Worker.

Openness

We do not have any such explanation, however, because the SWP refuses to offer one - indeed, it has not even told anyone of the changes outside its ranks. (The SWP’s Wikipedia page still erroneously lists Leather as joint national secretary.)

This is the real problem here. Imagine, if you will, the Labour Party announcing the resignation of its general secretary in a membership mailout with no explanation. No doubt journalists would get to the bottom of it in short order, but a big part of the story would be the absurd, bungled secrecy of the whole affair. The SWP holds itself to lower standards than the routine expectations we all have of bourgeois parties (or frankly of village lawn-bowls clubs).

This is perhaps understandable if our little theory is correct. The other six surviving members of the 2013 CC are equally culpable in the catastrophic mishandling of the Smith case. Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s leading intellectual, even at one point threatened the opposition with “lynch mobs”.² Why should Leather go, and not him? Maybe because he has at length repented for his role (but, if he has, he has kept it to himself). Such minor matters of political accounting are conducted strictly on a ‘not in front of the children’ basis.

This contempt for SWP members’ intelligence - never mind us poor souls who merely have to work alongside the SWP in the wider movement - is ultimately indissociable from the political method and strategy it employs. For the SWP, the ordinary consciousness of workers under capitalism is rendered docile and reformist by the basic operation of the system, and moreover the proceduralism of bourgeois politics. This veil is pierced when workers move into action, and likewise when the oppressed move to confront their oppressors. This leads to the valorisation of strikes and demonstrations, and the subordination of all other goals to getting people out on the picket lines and the streets.

This in turn demands total centralisation of activity, since the largely passive SWP membership must be dragooned into action according to the latest passing obsession of the leadership. The regime thus allows no room for debate. There is no worse fate for the SWP than the existence of rival strategies and tactics. Thus the leadership must present a monolithic outward face to the membership, and the membership must likewise appear as a monolith to the outside world. This results in a vicious cycle of intellectual deskilling: members are never asked to decide on a political matter, and thus their ability to do so withers on the vine, leaving initiative all the more concentrated in the leadership.

It is this culture that makes it so difficult for the SWP to account honestly for its changes of leadership, but it is also this culture that makes it more likely for scandals like the Smith case to emerge - and more or less guarantees a full-blown crisis when they do. The command and control structure introduces a steep hierarchy between leaders and members - and hierarchy enables mistreatment, including sexual exploitation, of those below by those above. (It is one of the many reasons we are all trying to get rid of it.) Once the scandal blows up, the appearance of monolithic unity is destroyed, which will inevitably be interpreted as an existential threat to the group, and thus lead to the sort of purges and recriminations we saw in 2013.

Leninism

All of this is done in the name of ‘Leninism’ - as the title of one Callinicos fusillade of early 2013 has it, “Is Leninism finished?”³ He thought not, and presumably still thinks not; but his interpretation of Leninism is one of a minority “vanguard party”, which “collectively intervened in the struggles of the Russian working class … help[ing] to advance the struggle in question”. By doing so, they encouraged support for Bolshevism in a kind of “dialogue” with the class.

This is a false reading of what Bolshevism was, as we will see, but perhaps more striking than the theoretical difference is the different attitudes to open political struggle of the SWP and the Bolsheviks. Callinicos’s article, after all, was directly a rebuke to people who refused to dissolve their faction after the short period oh-so-generously allowed it by the SWP rules. He denounced them for bringing their criticisms into the public eye.

The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were not, to begin with, a party as such, but a public faction, formed after the 1903, 2nd congress, of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, led the previously existing Iskra faction to split. Far from winding up after a short period, they continued with their own press, elected leadership and duma deputies (until 1912 when the Menshevik liquidators were expelled). They did not keep the reasons for their split as a private matter, but explained and explained again in open polemics such as Lenin’s One step forward, two steps back (1904). They published the stenographic minutes of the congress, so that people - whether revolutionary workers or tsarist secret police - could check out their factional origins.

But then the Bolsheviks had a very different idea of what making a revolution meant. Yes, particular spontaneous struggles were important, but the point was to use all available methods to expand the membership deep into the Russian working class. A member of the party was not some automaton, to be activated in pursuit of the latest shiny initiative, but a thinking activist, who understood Marxism and had the requisite street smarts to not get arrested by the tsarist police. It was not a minoritarian, but a majoritarian, strategy - and as such placed much higher demands on members than being mere speaking tools. If they were going to run society, Russian workers had to learn the ropes of running anything at all as soon as possible.

Callinicos was at least proven right about his opponents at that time, who largely collapsed into liberal identity politics with a little sprinkling of socialism. Can we blame them, however, given the nature of the ‘Leninism’ they were taught by SWP leaders, and the grotesque results it produced in 2013?

1. ‘Regrets, they’ve had a few’ Weekly Worker May 23: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1492/regrets-theyve-had-a-few.↩︎

2. P Demarty, ‘Lynch mobs and lèse-majesté’ Weekly Worker February 21 2013: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/950/swp-crisis-lynch-mobs-and-lese-majeste.↩︎

3. socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/leninism-finished.↩︎