06.11.1997

Party notes

The Socialist Workers Party meets in conference over November 8-10. As the SWP is at present the largest of the leftwing sects in Britain, the conference is an important event in our political calendar. It deserves the closest attention and widest publicity.

What a pity then that Socialist Worker will report it only in the most anodyne and turgid terms. No differences, shades, let alone organised opposition - if there is any - will be made public. Instead of a comprehensive report there will be nothing more than a postage stamp article, along with well honed quotes culled from members expressing the required official optimism. That we can predict with almost absolute certainty. The SWP has a typically closed and bureaucratic centralist regime. Unlike those of the Bolsheviks, its debates and deliberations are not for the working class.

Three discussion bulletins have been produced by its central committee (the first two consist of 14 and 11 A4 pages, and are for members only). Frankly, if they are anything to go by, the SWP has got big problems.

Take the nature of the contributions. They are dire, but revealing. The central committee document in Pre-conference Bulletin No1 sets the tone. It is a very mundane and utterly complacent piece.

SWPers are reassured that the Labour vote on May 1 was “a class vote”. There is, naturally, the immediate possibility of rapid growth. All that needs to be done is to prepare for the disillusionment that is “bound to set in as it becomes clear that Labour policies will not be able to deal with the very problems that led people to vote against the Tories on May 1” (p2). The SWP, it should be pointed out, peddles a version of the ‘crisis of expectations’ thesis common on the pro-Labour left after May 1.

Trapped deep in the economistic mire, the central committee fails to notice the - qualitative - transformation of the Labour Party under Blair and his plans to remake the British constitutional monarchy system. There is no mention of PR, the European Union and the euro, the Scottish and Welsh national question, the Tory split, the Northern Ireland peace process, the House of Lords, the death of Diana Windsor or the unpopularity of the monarchy. Thus its main slogan under the new conditions of Blair is ‘tax the rich’. A demand also raised by the Liberal Democrats. Instead of raising the sights of the working class by formulating and presenting an immediate, minimum, political programme - ie, a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, and a united Ireland - the SWP central committee tails existing consciousness.

Neither is the SWP leadership full of initiative. The only serious proposals coming from the central committee are for workplace sales of Socialist Worker and campaigning against student loans. There is an excited - but woefully outdated - call to build the NUS’s November 1 demonstrations. “[We] are looking forward to massive regional demonstrations,” the membership is told. But there is no thought or intention of mounting a political challenge to Blair’s New Labour where it exercises hegemony over the atomised working class - in the ballot box.

Other contributions to the pre-conference ‘debate’ are if anything even worse. SWP cadre appear to be aspiring technocrats, not working class politicians. Sean Vernell, Manchester organiser, goes to great lengths to explain the virtues of petitions. Those who object to them “show more clearly than anything else the sectarian nature of some of our branches” (Bulletin No1, p11). In a similar vein Phil Knight of Neath recommends bookstalls. “There should always be - weather permitting - a small selection of books on the Saturday or industrial sales” (Bulletin No2, p9). Anna Cross from Whipps Cross branch gives the dos and don’ts of “preparing a press release” (Bulletin No2, p10). Note, in the first two bulletins there are only eight individual contributions.

There are only two - relatively - interesting contributions. In Bulletin No1 Mark Boyan tries to tackle the “passivity” that effects “much of the membership” (p13). Richard Morse too is concerned with the “vicious cycle of demoralisation” and failed “great leaps forward” (Bulletin No2, p9).

But where comrade Morse puts down the problems of the SWP to what he calls “small branch disease” and the impossibility of fulfilling unrealistic goals, the diagnosis of comrade Boyan is much more perceptive. He dares venture criticism of the leadership - albeit tentatively.

New SWP members are being told in an introductory ‘welcome’ leaflet that they can “do as much or as little as they feel committed to”. This, of course, stands in flat contrast to the old stipulation that “every member must take and sell Socialist Worker”. Crucially, as the comrade stresses, it completely contradicts the SWP’s purported commitment to the politics of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

It is “not enough”, comrade Boyan rightly says, “to build an organisation that simply calls itself revolutionary”. It “must”, he insists, “actually consist of revolutionaries who have the political understanding and experience to lead the class”. In the SWP this is dangerous stuff. The comrade should watch out in case he finds himself expelled, like so many other honest SWP oppositionists.

The comrade is self-evidently bright. Intuitively he, to all intents and purposes, puts forward the demand for an SWP programme. It “would be useful to have a pamphlet or book which expands on all parts of ‘Where we stand’ and explains how we apply our politics in the current period”. Exactly. The comrade has hit a vital nail on the head. Let us hope he gets a full and considered hearing for his proposal at the London conference.

Jack Conrad