11.07.1996

Democracy and the SWP

Where does the Socialist Workers Party go from here?

Ostensibly, this is a very successful organisation. It has a widely read weekly press. In its ranks are thousands of committed activists, comrades who comprise a substantial number of the militants in important unions such as Unison. At its top, the SWP leadership is a stable and experienced grouping.

Yet the SWP is unable to shake its ‘big sect’ image. Despite some ephemeral successes with the Anti-Nazi League, the organisation has never led a real movement of the class. This is in marked contrast to Militant Labour - its nearest rival on the extra-Labour Party left - and to the Communist Party, which the SWP sometimes now styles itself the successor to.

Frustration is growing in the ranks, especially over the organisation’s tactics in the next general election. The SWP’s automatic guarantee to vote Labour come what may is causing real disquiet at every level.

Yet there is no real expression of this externally or internally. The SWP remains characterised by a bureaucratic regime where any manifestation of opposition to the official line is regarded as a betrayal of the party, an expellable offence.

This creates unsustainable tensions within this group. At some stage, the contradictions within the SWP will lead it to ‘blow’. Communists and other revolutionaries must not be sanguine about this prospect. It is essential that these very real contradictions are resolved positively, that the thousands of SWP members are not simply scattered to the winds.

Central to this must be the struggle for democracy within the SWP. Here is an organisation that unites an important part of the revolutionary left in Britain today. Whether it unites them in a genuine combat organisation of our class or into a bureaucratic prison cell is the concern of every revolutionary.

At the moment, comrades within the SWP only have the opportunity to form factions once a year, for a brief period, in the lead-up to the national conference. As John Page of Stoke Newington branch of the SWP wrote in last year’s pre-conference Bulletin no2,

“the central committee’s view is that we should debate perspectives on the leadership’s terms once a year and then become regimented tools to be directed into activity, yet the very habit of unquestioning undermines the revolutionaries’ ability to intervene in the class struggle” (p15).

This is very true. The SWPs regime stunts the development of the membership as revolutionaries. It accounts for the fact that the rest of the revolutionary left almost invariably encounters its members as testy and politically illiterate ‘sourpusses’, deeply suspicious and hostile to other revolutionaries, angrily impatient of debate or discussion, deeply frightened and vulnerable. They are most certainly not the independently minded proletarian cadre our class needs. This is the fault of the leadership, the regime of monolithic uniformity they have attempted to impose and the way it has atomised the membership.

The SWP is an important organisation in the workers’ movement. The false positions it adopts can therefore have a profoundly negative effect on the fighting capabilities of our entire movement.

However, what comes first for the current sectarian leadership of the SWP is the narrow interests of the SWP as the SWP, not as the servant of the broader movement it is an organic part of. Thus we get the incredible idea in last year’s Bulletin - in a statement from the central committee banning members from parts of the internet - that one of its main dangers was that other leftists could “take part in discussions that do not concern them” (p21).

The mandarins of the SWP central committee treat not only their own membership with contempt, but also the wider workers’ movement.

Should the working class be delivered as voting fodder to Blair? What should be our attitude to Scargill’s SLP? Should revolutionary organisations move to present an electoral challenge in the next election, or in subsequent ones?

These are questions which clearly Tony Cliff et al believe should not “concern” communists and other revolutionaries. But they are not even for the likes of the SWP membership itself. They may have the chance to be briefly aired at this year’s Marxism; but it is the responsibility of the left of the organisation to cohere itself to present a more effective challenge. This is not simply its duty to the SWP, but to the class as a whole.

Mark Fischer