30.10.2025

False party concepts

Left organisations which stand for managerialist organisational conceptions function as actual outworks of the fortifications of capitalist rule. Mike Macnair criticises the Cliffite SWP and the Grantite RCP

Last week,¹ I referred briefly to the Socialist Workers Party central committee’s document, ‘Party democracy: what we should defend; what we should reconsider’, in the SWP’s Pre-Conference Bulletin No1 (PCDB1), making the point that this document argues in essence that “we should defend” 95% of current SWP practice, and “we should reconsider” 5%.

It happens that the Revolutionary Communist Party’s The Communist issue 37 (October 22) carries two articles about the tasks of a ‘revolutionary party’ that are part of the same story of far-left managerialism as the SWP’s bureaucratic-centralist “party democracy”, and, in addition, an argument from Fiona Lali against taking issues of political democracy in Your Party seriously - the standard Trot-bureaucrat argument that ‘the regime is not a political question’. This makes it worth addressing both lines of argument about the tasks of a party - and the SWP on YP. I am not actually going to discuss directly the familiar story about the details of the SWP’s bureaucratic centralism.

Both lines of argument share certain common ideas. The first is - as with the Morning Star/CPB and SWP perspectives discussed last week - the delusional belief that their own organisation is the ‘revolutionary party’ and other similar organisations (of similar sizes or smaller) are to be disregarded.

Associated with this idea: the immediate tasks are about linking ‘the revolutionary party’ to newly radicalising forces (as opposed to ‘wasting time’ talking to other leftists). And, for both the SWP and RCP, what this means right now is recruitment campaigns among students.²

‘Leadership’

A third associated issue is the underlying tasks of ‘the revolutionary party’. These tasks are of ‘leadership’, meaning the practical immediate direction, of ‘struggles’ - primarily street and strike struggles. Thus SWP comrades “need to build an organisation of interventionist Marxist cadre: comrades with an ideological depth and critical mind who are able to initiate, shape and reflect on struggles in the world”; and “Any discussion that is not situated in … the need for intervention in actual struggles, is likely to become internalised and abstract.”³

The SWP, of course, opposes a party programme. The RCP reaches the same result, while claiming to have one, by arguing that:

The method of Marxism is a guide to action. The revolutionary party is, first and foremost, its programme: a set of ideas and perspectives. Our method of organising flows from this.

The task now is to build a strong communist force, steeled in the methods and perspectives of Marxism, which has won political authority among workers and youth in advance of revolutionary events breaking out.⁴

The “programme” here does not mean a summary political programme of the sort of the 1891 Erfurt programme, the 1903 programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, or the 1919 programme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). This is visible, on the one hand, in the references to “ideas and perspectives” and “methods and perspectives” - indeterminate expressions.

It is visible, on the other hand, in “Our 10-point programme” on page 2 of The Communist, which is a set of advertising-style slogans adapted to the immediate moment: starting, for example, with “No trust in Starmer’s big business government! No to austerity: Overthrow the billionaires and their profit system!” The effect is that this “10-point programme” gives substantially less information about what the RCP stands for as an organisation than do the (also summary) Socialist Party in England and Wales ‘What we stand for’, or that in Socialist Worker, or the Weekly Worker’s ‘What we fight for’.⁵

What is left as the political basis of the organisation is, in substance, belief in the “unbroken thread”⁶ of revolutionary continuity running: Lenin - Trotsky - Ted Grant - Alan Woods. At this point it is worth mentioning briefly that the Grant group, starting out as opponents of Labour Party entry in 1947-49, drifted into entry and by the 1960s were advocates of strategic entry.

This policy worked for them because they were left alone in the Labour Party youth organisations by other Trotskyists turning to open work: first, in the early 1960s, the Socialist Labour League led by Gerry Healy; then, in the late 1960s, the Socialist Review group led by Tony Cliff; and the International Marxist Group. They were able to hold on to the (now defunct) Labour Party Young Socialists, because - though the ‘official’ Communist Party ‘ice-picked’ Militant in the National Organisation of Labour Students - the CP-led trade union broad lefts protected them from witch-hunting until the Eurocommunist takeover of the CPGB. They were, then, able to recruit among newly radicalising youth in the LPYS branches, without facing competition from other leftists.

In 1985-87 they began to be seriously witch-hunted, and in 1991-92 the group split, with the Taaffe wing turning to open work and the Grant wing - the origin of Socialist Appeal/RCP - defending strategic entry. Since then they have passed from being, in the 2000s, the most gung-ho enthusiasts for Venezuelan ‘Bolivarianism’ (Woods in 2014 began to see that there was at most an ‘uncompleted’ revolution, and now recognises the current Venezuelan regime as left-Bonapartist⁷); in 2014, Scottish left nationalists;⁸ in 2018, advocates of a campaign to restore the Lassallean old clause four of the Labour Party’s constitution;⁹ - and, in 2024, to rebranding as the RCP.¹⁰ There is continuity of personnel through the old-timer, Grant, and perhaps continuity of ‘method’, but nothing like continuity of political line.

The significance of this point is the project of building “a strong communist force, steeled in the methods and perspectives of Marxism, which has won political authority among workers and youth”. This “authority” cannot be acceptance of a definite political programme (which is absent), but only personal authority of the RCP’s ‘cadres’ in giving immediate practical direction of ‘struggles’.

The logic of this concept of ‘leadership’ of ‘struggles’, in the case of both the SWP and the RCP, is of a need for organisational separation from the rest of the far left, and the pretence that it does not really exist. The reason is that the object is to make a relation between the ‘cadres’ of this group and the masses; and the fact that (for the RCP) the SWP, SPEW, the CPB and several smaller groups will also have (competing) proposals on how to take the immediate struggle forward, is an obstacle to the RCP winning “political authority among workers and youth” by leading ‘struggles’.

It is, of course, equally an obstacle to “winning political authority” in this way for the SWP, or SPEW, or, on a smaller scale, the Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), or Anticapitalist Resistance, or Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st century, or Workers Power … and so on.

(I leave the CPB out of this list, because it has an actual political programme, Britain’s road to socialism, to which militants could be won, as opposed to “transitional method” ideas.)

This conception of “winning political authority” through providing leadership, meaning immediate practical direction, to “struggles”, with the result that competing groups are to be wished away or are mere obstacles, means that groups that have this conception cannot function loyally as minorities fighting for their political views in wider regroupments of the left.

They are driven, in the first place, to attempt to ‘seize the initiative’, resulting in the creation of multiple competing front organisations. They are driven, secondly, to seek privileged relationships with ‘official left’ bureaucrats, which will enable them to think of themselves as ‘leaders’ when what they are actually doing is acting as bag-carriers for the official left’s usual Grand Old Duke of York policy (“he had ten thousand men … he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again”).

They are driven, thirdly, to split the broader regroupment, when they lose organisational control or when their members become exasperated by the need to work with minorities who disagree with them, but cannot easily be called ‘reformists’.

The RCP under this name has only a short history. Socialist Appeal and before it Militant were consistently isolationist towards the rest of the organised left, on the ground that by not being in the Labour Party, the rest of the far left groups were ipso facto ‘sects’. (It was relatively marginal that smaller groups within the Labour Party were also to be characterised as ‘sects’, though Militant’s argument that other groups were ‘sects’ because they were separate from Labour did not work for those who were not.)

We (leftists around at the time) were all startled when the Militant majority’s turn to open work in 1991-92 led to greater openness towards the rest of the left - temporarily, as it turned out, when SPEW split, in December 2001, from the Socialist Alliance it had created. Now the RCP has turned to open work. Hence the drives towards splittism and towards acting as bag-carriers for official lefts created by the project of ‘winning political authority’ through providing leadership, meaning immediate practical direction, to ‘struggles’ will become more transparent.

Much longer

The SWP has a much longer open history. The 1977 launch of the party was expected to marginalise the rest of the left groups (but did not). Rock Against Racism was perhaps the last instance of the rank-and-file creativity of the old International Socialists, which did not claim to be ‘the party’ and had not been fully ‘Bolshevised’, meaning bureaucratised. But it allowed the SWP to launch the Anti-Nazi League in collaboration with the old CP and various ‘official lefts’ and celebs, and thereby escape from the annoying need to work with the rest of the far left in the labour movement-based, local delegate, anti-fascist/anti-racist committees that had developed in 1974-77.

In 2000 the SWP was drawn into the London Socialist Alliance and effectively took the national version over, when SPEW split in December 2001. Meanwhile, however, another hook-up with ‘official lefts’ in Stop the War Coalition rode the wave of opposition before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2003-04 the SWP decided to cash this by dumping the Socialist Alliance in favour of the Respect alliance with George Galloway and mosque-based opponents of the Iraq war.

But this did not last long either: when the SWP lost control in autumn 2007, it split Respect. Till the last minute this split was a matter of underhand manoeuvres and rumours publicly denied. The result, in turn, was wholly unprincipled splits in the SWP itself, with a small group going with the Galloway wing of Respect, and another, including former SWP central leaders, forming Counterfire - reflecting the Renaissance court-style internal politics of the SWP leadership.

The history since has been of a series of SWP fronts of one sort or another, largely self-isolated from the rest of the left. In StWC they had a history of making local splits when they lost, or could not obtain, organisational control; the same seems now to have recurred in Your Party.

Your Party

The RCP may have decided that Your Party is doomed to fail: which might well be true, given that the anti-democratic commitments of the ‘official lefts’ involved in its creation have resulted both in the substitution of managers’ and advertisers’ ‘consultation’ forms for democratic decision processes, which will tend to demobilise support, and in court intrigues at the top leading to endless ‘briefing’ against opponents within the leadership, most recently to claim litigation will be started.¹¹

However, the RCP’s most recent published positions are in The Communist for October 22. Fiona Lali in ‘Fortnight with Fiona’ (p10) reports her intervention in the session at ‘The World Transformed’ (October 10-12 in Manchester). She “argued that the main argument we should be having within the movement is around political perspectives and our programme”:

Some in attendance questioned me, and said that the question of internal democracy supersedes the programme (for now) because without good organisational structures, there can be no political debate …

… now people are concentrated on fixing the constitution, which unfortunately comes at the expense of promoting the politics that would re-invigorate the party’s launch.

The focus should remain on the politics. With Ukip emboldened enough to take a stand in Whitechapel, the need for a fighting, anti-capitalist party has never been clearer. Working class people cannot wait.

Here ‘perspectives and programme’ is reduced to the SWP-style policy of ‘confronting the fascists’. The argument is not one for debating programme in YP - which could, to the extent any debate is possible at all, be done around the feeble ‘Political statement’. It is an argument for disregarding questions of ‘the regime’.

There is, of course, a certain basis for this in Trotsky’s arguments in 1937 on opposition in the US Socialist Workers Party. But this is to disregard his earlier arguments in 1923 in The new course and 1928 in The Third International after Lenin.¹² Or, more formally, because it was actually adopted by vote, the 1931 resolution, ‘The International Left Opposition, its tasks and methods’:

The foundation of party democracy is timely and complete information, available to all members of the organisation and covering all the important questions of their life and struggle. Discipline can be built up only on a conscious assimilation of the policies of the organisation by all its members and on confidence in its leadership. Such confidence can be won only gradually, in the course of common struggle and reciprocal influence. The iron discipline which is needed cannot be achieved by naked command. The revolutionary organisation cannot do without the punishment of undisciplined and disruptive elements; but such disciplinary measures can be applied only as a last resort and, moreover, on the condition of solid support from the public opinion of the majority of the organisation.

The frequent practical objections, based on the ‘loss of time’ in abiding by democratic methods, amount to shortsighted opportunism. The education and consolidation of the organisation is a most important task. Neither time nor effort should be spared for its fulfilment. Moreover, party democracy, as the only conceivable guarantee against unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits, in the last analysis does not increase the overhead costs of development, but reduces them. Only through constant and conscientious adherence to the methods of democracy can the leadership undertake important steps on its own responsibility in truly emergency cases without provoking disorganisation or dissatisfaction.¹³

This can stand as a permanent rebuke to the modern Trotskyists against their actual organisational methods. In relation to comrade Lali on discussion at ‘The World Transformed’, what it, in effect, prophesies is the actual disorganising effect of the YP leaders’ anti-democratic control-freakery.

Adam Booth, editor of The Communist, writes on pp2-3 on ‘The movement, the left and the role of the communists’. He talks about “the shambles surrounding the foundation of Your Party”:

Instead of discussing the party’s programme, its founders have bickered over secondary organisational questions, giving the distinct impression that they lack direction and seriousness.

Consequently, young activists looking for a political home have flocked to the Greens, attracted by new leader Zack Polanski’s bold rhetoric against the billionaires and big landlords.

A growing layer, meanwhile, is drawing even more radical conclusions - getting organised as revolutionary communists with the RCP.

The last paragraph here is largely self-deception. The RCP remains at best not much above 800-strong; the SWP is organising a similar recruitment campaign among students, with larger staffing resources; meanwhile, Green Party membership has doubled to 140,000.¹⁴

And the RCP precisely does not have a programmatic alternative to offer, since, as I have already said, its “10-point programme” is merely a set of advertising slogans addressing the immediate moment, and what lies behind this set of slogans is merely delusions about “the unbroken thread”.

Let us turn now to the SWP CC on YP in ‘Revolutionaries and Your Party’.¹⁵ The SWP CC argues that “The roots of the Corbyn-Sultana fallout, and the problems at the top, are political. They are rooted in electoralism and labourism.” The document argues for political democracy in YP: “real democracy is the antiseptic that can clean out the infection of factionalism and backroom deals”.

Indeed, it goes on to make some excellent points on this front:

5. We support moves to democratise YP. We are for a national network of YP branches, which can hold proper discussion and debate about policies and elect delegates to local, regional and national conference and leadership bodies. We oppose moves to prevent members of existing political parties or networks from joining YP. It is outrageous that a small clique made this decision rather than allowing members to decide. We should join YP regardless of this prohibition. The only argument for excluding groups is if they have rotten politics, stand against YP at elections or organise against YP. We support grassroots democracy, not ‘one member, one vote’ online polls that privilege the high-ups. We want elections for conference delegates, not ‘sortition’ - the drawing of lots that means people are unaccountable and not chosen on a political basis.

Some of this is excellent. But not all: eg, “have rotten politics” is an extremely slippery idea; equally what would count as “organise against YP”?

Equally, if not more, importantly, the idea of “the infection of factionalism” is conceptually inconsistent with “We oppose moves to prevent members of existing political parties or networks from joining YP.” If groups (including the SWP) join YP, they will precisely be … permanent factions.

What counts as ‘democracy’ in SWP eyes is also a problem:

We want more big rallies, such as in south London or Leeds [organised by the SWP], but we also want lots of the smaller meetings that bring people together.

This is not easy. The territory is bedevilled by sectarian insistence on the importance of this or that group, figure or organisational method. But we know that most people do not want their local group to become a mini-version of the factionalism at the top. And we must use this.

Big rallies is the standard SWP method for bag-carrying for the ‘official lefts’. ‘Sectarian’ is code for open discussion of stuff the SWP does not want to discuss.

Indeed, the SWP wants to build YP on the basis that “YP, if it eventually involves hundreds of thousands of people, will be a social democratic party” - and of building the SWP as the revolutionary party alongside YP.

What are the politics that this will involve? In point 4: “We should support, for example, moves for YP to support trans+ and non-binary rights, to welcome refugees, for the abolition of all anti-union laws, to oppose Nato and to reject Zionism. We also support Zarah Sultana’s moves to legislate to prevent MPs being landlords.”

This is even less an alternative programme than the RCP’s ’10 point programme’. It is merely some issues that conjuncturally look agitational (and largely merely tails Zarah Sultana). More clearly SWP-speak is:

6. Absolutely central to our approach is the primacy of struggle, not elections. It is crucial to insist that YP must mobilise its members in action - against the racists and fascists, for Palestine, for protest rights and against state repression, for a mass demonstration around the November 26 budget, against digital ID and so on. It is a failure that a mailing list of 800,000 has not been used in this way. Mobilising YP supporters on the streets and in workplaces could make an instant difference to the political scene.

Street, street, street. It is almost certain that the 800,000 who signed up come from the Palestine movement on the streets. But I argued last week that the CPB and SWP belief that trade union leaders could mobilise their members if they were only willing to do so was misconceived: they have difficulty turning their membership out when they want to. The same goes for YP trying to mobilise beyond the Palestine demos.

The reason is that the 1974-79 Labour government’s trade union and employment legislation, and the trade union leaderships’ internalisation of that legislation, destroyed the foundations of the ability of the unions to mobilise more than limited action. A central role in this was played by the centralisation of union finances: the payment of union dues to the national union, first by deductions from pay, then by bank standing orders and direct debits. By savagely weakening the possibility of local action and creativity, the new regime savagely reduced the ability to mobilise effectively for national action. But this is, of course, not only the unions. The far left has followed suit.

This brings us back to the beginning: the demobilising effects of the YP leadership’s centralist control-freakery and pretences of democracy. These grow out of the political culture of the post-1974 trade union movement, of the post-rate-capping and expanded judicial review local government, and of the student union executives as a career path on the road to working for parties, trade unions and local government. They are forms of the tyranny of the bureaucracy.

The SWP wants to oppose the phenomenon. The problem is that its anti-factionalism and concept of what counts as ‘intervention’ actually does the same thing - diseducating and demobilising - to the SWP itself.

Its document, ‘Party democracy: what we should defend; what we should reconsider’, actually displays worries about the effects. But it clings to the ideas that branch committees “[work] under the direction of the CC along with full-time party organisers they [the CC] appoint” (PCDB1, p26); that “we rightly reject permanent factions, or the construction of a revolutionary party built around internal ‘platforms’ (p27); and that “the CC should be able to conduct its discussions with confidence that the content will not be shared more widely” (p27). The inevitable result is that the SWP cannot possibly hope to effectively oppose the very same commitments to centralised apparatus control and anti-factionalism that are poisoning YP. De te fabula narratur (‘The story is about you’).

Larger

The problem is at the end of the day even larger. ‘Capitalism’ and ‘the billionaires’ are codes for a world in which human beings’ common productive activities are coordinated mainly through money: partly through markets, partly through tax-raising and borrowing-based states. They are only to a limited extent coordinated through family household ‘self-sufficiency’. ‘Tax the rich’ will merely fail because the rich will move money offshore (and also destroy the British economy, which depends on being an offshore centre). “Don’t simply tax the super-rich, but seize their wealth” (RCP, ‘10-point programme’) is even more problematic, because it would result in the money ceasing to function as money: hyperinflation in Russia in 1917-24, for example.

What is then necessary is to take over and plan directly actual productive activities - planning ‘in kind’, not merely monetary solutions.

But this in turn poses the question: how do we collectively decide what to produce? Here the lesson of the Russian Revolution and its outcome is that we need political democracy and self-government at every level, from the factory department up to the globe (or at least the European continent). That in turn requires transparency, and freedom to organise - no bureaucratic speech controls, no bans on parties or factions - because the Soviet experience, and that of all the other Soviet-style regimes, shows us that without political democracy there can be no rational economic planning and the society is forced back to capitalism.

The consequence, then, is that left organisations that stand for managerialist organisational conceptions function as actual outworks of the fortifications of capitalist rule, actively promoting, through their Soviet-style party conceptions, the idea that socialism is impossible and ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism.

It is time to make a break from all this stuff.

1. ‘Down memory lane’ Weekly Worker October 23 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1558/down-memory-lane).↩︎

2. SWP PCB1, ‘Seizing the key link’, p9: “… student work … is the key avenue for building the SWP”. Lotta Angantyr, ‘The task of communists’ The Communist October 22, pp14-15: “… the reason we have been able to take more of a lead in [Cambridge and Sheffield] is because we have built a strong base, particularly on the campus …”↩︎

3. PCB1, ‘Seizing the key link’, p9, and ‘Party democracy’, pp24-25. This second claim may explain the reduction of really serious theoretical interventions not linked to immediate perspectives in recent issues of the International Socialism journal (see the tables of contents at isj.org.uk/back-issues).↩︎

4. Lotto Angantyr (note 2), p14.↩︎

5. www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/408/16-05-2021/what-we-stand-for; Socialist Worker October 22, p12; Weekly Worker October 23.↩︎

6. The title of Grant’s book collection of articles: see www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1989/tut/index.htm.↩︎

7. ‘Is US imperialism pushing for regime change in Venezuela?’ The Communist October 22, p6. (The title is seriously odd, since it is perfectly obvious that the answer is ‘yes’ - the US is pushing for regime change in Venezuela, and has been doing so, by varying means, for years.)↩︎

8. D Harvey, ‘Doing a Scottish jig’ Weekly Worker November 27 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1036/doing-a-scottish-jig; socialist.net/britain-ssp-crisis251104).↩︎

9. J Conrad ‘Why revive a stinking corpse?’ Weekly Worker Feb 15 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1190/why-revive-a-stinking-corpse).↩︎

10. C Collins ‘Another sect is rebranded’ Weekly Worker May 9 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1490/another-sect-is-rebranded).↩︎

11. ‘Your Party to launch legal action against three of its ‘rogue’ founders, sources say’ The Guardian October 28 (www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/28/your-party-to-launch-legal-action-against-three-of-its-founders-sources-say).↩︎

12. The 1937 text is available at www.internationaliststandpoint.org/leon-trotsky-on-democratic-centralism-and-the-regime; New Course convenient extracts are at www.internationaliststandpoint.org/trotsky-on-the-internal-regime-of-the-bolsheviks-extracts-from-the-new-course; TIAL: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti07.htm (pp2-11).↩︎

13. Available at wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_International_Left_Opposition,_Its_Tasks_and_Methods.↩︎

14. The current edition of The Communist does not give any indication of membership numbers. The Green Party: ‘“We have to book bigger rooms”: Green membership surge causes novel problems’ The Observer October 26 (www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/26/green-membership-surge-zack-polanski).↩︎

15. 2025 PCDB1, pp16-17.↩︎