10.04.2025

Squaring the circle

SWP tops flip-flop between left syndicalism and electoral opportunism, says Paul Demarty - sometimes too quickly for hapless editors to keep up

Our story today begins with what the journalistic trade calls a ‘stealth edit’.

When a publication gets something wrong, it is common enough - especially in the internet age - for the online version of the offending article to be changed. Best practice is to call attention to the change with a note - “an earlier version of this article stated X; we regret the error.” A stealth edit omits the explanation; and so it is generally considered bad form, a failure of honesty (albeit hardly the most serious class of such failures in that ethically inconsistent profession).

So to the confusion experienced by our own Jack Conrad, who was struck enough by a couple of sentences in an article by Socialist Worker editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans on the need for a break from Labourism to make a specific note of it: “A break from Labourism would mean seeing working class struggle as more important than winning elections. It means subordinating electoral calculations to boosting the real struggles of the working class.”

When trying to find this passage to quote it in last week’s Weekly Worker, however, he came up blank. It was apparently nowhere to be found on the Socialist Worker website. Had he imagined it? Was he going mad? As it turns out, no: while the above version is still the one in the PDF version of the paper,¹ a rather more muted version appears on the HTML page for the article: “A break from Labourism would mean seeing working class struggle as most important in winning change. It means subordinating electoral and parliamentary calculations to boosting the confidence and organisation of the working class to fight.”²

We do not know when the change was made, except that it was made early - the first version of the article archived by the Wayback machine has the second version of the text. Perhaps it was corrected pre-publication and the former version snuck back into the print edition by way of an editorial cock-up - such things happen in life. The fact remains that the first version was written in good faith, and at some point sanded off by ‘wiser heads’.

Illustration

This little textual flip-flop is, in its own way, a useful illustration of the current state of the SWP, at this point in its development. It has been through a long period of anarchistic anti-electoralism, which is the organisation’s resting position anyway, and served as a convenient pretext to keep its forces outside the Labour Party in the Corbyn period. It is this that is strongly expressed in the first version - “working class struggle [is] more important than winning elections”, subordinating electoral calculations to the “real struggles of the working class”.

Yet, as comrade Conrad noted last week,³ the SWP is in the habit of lurching from this resting position into electoral work on extremely limited politics - this or that variant of the left Labourism which was comrade Tengely-Evans’s object of polemic. Some indications are that such a shift is underway. The SWP attempted to intervene in last year’s general election by standing Maxine Bowler as a ‘pro-Palestine independent’; one had to dig pretty deep into her election literature to discover she was a socialist, let alone an SWP veteran.

Summit

Now we have We Demand Change, the SWP’s attempt to gather up some of the remnants of Corbynism. It was to WDC’s ‘Summit of Resistance’ a couple of weeks ago that the Socialist Worker article was addressed, and the softened version - which does not contrast “working class struggle” (in SWP terms, strikes and street protests) to electoral work directly, and no longer states openly that electoral work is not “real” struggle - seems designed to at least keep the door open for what seems a hopelessly indeterminate initiative that certainly includes strongly electoralist elements.

It is this situation that Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s leading intellectual, attempts to address in a more recent article.⁴ WDC is a “potential game-changer for the radical left in Britain”. His argument for this is simply that 2,000 people turned up to the ‘Summit of Resistance’, all of whom opposed the “ultra-rightwing Labour government”. That in turn poses the question of a “left political alternative” to Labour, which turns out to be “complicated”. With Labour unpopular despite its “hollow” super-majority, the way is clear for Reform to gain control of the backlash. Unfortunately, WDC

can’t fill the gap. Its strength lies in how it brings together different activist coalitions with its own agenda. These coalitions involve people who want to see a radical left electoral alternative. But the summit also drew in supporters of Labour, the Greens and of no party at all. It would be disastrous to divide all the participating coalitions - and We Demand Change more broadly - along partisan lines.

Yet it still has an important role to play:

If We Demand Change helps to promote the development of mass struggles against Starmer, the resulting confidence can invigorate a left electoral alternative … Just as the Palestine solidarity movement helped to power the massive response that overwhelmed the fascist gangs last August, the confidence gained by participating in broad and militant movements against the cuts can feed the electoral front.

This is an even more “electoralist” version of the matter than Tengely-Evans’s revised paragraph - now a “left political alternative” (clearly conceived in electoral terms) is strongly favoured as a positive outcome. Yet the approach is strangely passive. If an upsurge in “mass struggles” should occur, that would increase the likelihood of such a left alternative to emerge from … where? Labour? The Greens?

Frankly, if you are already among the left-Greens participating in WDC, doesn’t such an alternative already exist? Aren’t the Green Party’s policies, on paper, to the left - issue by issue - of Starmer’s Labour? Don’t they already have a bridgehead in the Commons? To explain why this is not adequate would entail explaining why the Greens’ politics amount to petty bourgeois utopianism; but that would put in question their role in this latest SWP front; so Callinicos does not bother to offer a reason to reject them.

Perverse

This is, in fact, a perverse result of the very core of SWP politics. The group proposes, as we have seen, that confidence and consciousness accrue to the working class as a result of direct struggle against the bosses and the state. At the moment of direct struggle, any disunity is a liability: we forego it for the duration of the strike, or so long as it takes to put the demonstration together. Yet the disunity remains.

SWP theory expects such divisions to be overcome by the educative function of the struggle itself. The empirical record is, at best, uneven. This is because all sustained direct struggles immediately pose questions of general politics: a strike that spreads and becomes general, for example, immediately poses the question of general social production, of taking over production - otherwise the strikers will merely starve. If we do not already have sufficient unity concerning the next step, there is perhaps a small chance of a mass Damascene conversion of the reformists, Greens, and even working class Tories to revolutionary socialism. There is a far higher chance of the whole thing falling into disarray and defeat. Trade union bureaucrats are many things, but they are not stupid. Their timidity is in part an awareness of the danger of overplaying their hands.

By staking everything on the experience of direct struggle, the SWP sets itself the role of preparing the ground for provoking such struggle at any cost: which means, in an important respect, acting as if the strike is already on, brushing aside disagreements, which might invite caution. It is impossible to do this purely ‘externally’, and so the group’s internal culture has increasingly been characterised by membership passivity and leadership-monologism, punctuated by occasional crises.

Yet, precisely because questions of general politics are inescapable even within the direct struggle, it is those moments where - however imperfectly - we move towards this territory that become decisive for the left (the Corbyn experience being a recent example). The SWP cannot avoid being affected; and so it is periodically pulled into electoral activity (the default form of contestation over general politics in bourgeois ‘democracies’). Since its only operative conception of electoral activity is as a reformist temptation, it naturally concludes that its electoral activity must be, for practical purposes, reformist in political content.

Thus the oscillation between almost anarchistic syndicalism and episodes of total opportunism - and, for that matter, the fact that SWP protest fronts are so decidedly near-apolitical. Managing such oscillations well requires a certain intellectual agility; but this very form of political activity, as we mentioned, tends to suppress internal disagreements, which in turn prevents such agility from being spread through the organisation, since people will inevitably disagree on what the key issue is, or what the immediate possibilities are, infringing on the right of the leadership to enforce their latest turn on the membership. Lenin, Tony Cliff famously argued, had a good nose (he was, of course, justifying his own political techniques rather than those of Lenin). The ‘nose’ theory of politics, however, inevitably entails that only Lenin (or Cliff, or Callinicos … ) is allowed to ‘sniff the air’.

Thus we arrive at the strange disagreement of the editor of Socialist Worker with himself. No doubt he will be, from here on out, solidly on message - until that message changes again!

1. socialistworker.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/sw2945p13-combined-compressed.pdf - see page 11.↩︎

2. socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/labourism-is-holding-us-back-the-left-must-break-with-it.↩︎

3. ‘Labourism without Labour’ Weekly Worker April 3: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1532/labourism-without-labour.↩︎

4. socialistworker.co.uk/alex-callinicos/alex-callinicos-building-the-left-political-alternative-to-labour-complicated-but-essential.↩︎