08.07.1999
Marxism
Party notes
‘Marxism’, the Socialist Workers Party’s annual school, starts on Friday, July 9. This event will be the largest ‘educational’ gathering of leftists and revolutionaries in Britain this year. Over the course of seven days, thousands of comrades - predominantly young - will attend the event, where they will be instructed in the SWP’s version of socialist politics. This is both positive and negative.
We are not sectarians. We believe that - particularly in a period such as this - the fact that thousands are coming together, listening to speakers, reading revolutionary journals and being encouraged to delve into some of the basic texts of the Marxist tradition can only be a good thing. Moreover, it is far better that these comrades are organised rather than unorganised. For many, it will be their first experience of left politics. It will inspire hundreds and lead them forward to an active engagement with socialism.
Of course, our qualification is that much of what is being taught is not ‘Marxism’ at all, but the economistic world view of the SWP. The two - as we have extensively argued in these pages - are not necessarily the same thing.
In an unsigned article entitled ‘Tasks for the left’ (Socialist Worker June 26) it is maintained that one of the central challenges facing the left is the fight to achieve “clarity of ideas”. To do this, “we need serious discussion. To be effective, the left must debate and at times argue over the situation we face and the way forward”. And “that” - apparently - “is why ‘Marxism’ … is more important than ever. It will bring together important strands of the left in order to discuss these very questions” (my emphasis).
Of course, the SWP’s method excludes the fight for “clarity of ideas”; it does not facilitate it.
First, because when the SWP refers to “important strands” on the left, it is clear from the itinerary of ‘Marxism’ that what it means are social democratic trends to the right of it. There are no scheduled debates with other revolutionary groups in the workers’ movement. Indeed, we know from previous years that SWP cadre often act with outright hostility - up to and including physical assault - against other revolutionaries who have the temerity to distribute literature or try to intervene at their event. Revolutionary ideas - even mangled SWP versions of them - are infinitely more coherent and logical than those of left reformism. No matter how erudite, at the end of the day they present little theoretical challenge to the towering abstractions of the SWP, in other words.
Second, while there will be some debate at ‘Marxism’, there remains no provision for SWP dissidents to air their views, neither internally nor externally. The nature of this bureaucratic centralist regime is fundamentally at odds with creating a party of independently minded, self-activating militants. Instead, it has the tendency to create what Trotsky called - when writing on the subject of party education in 1909 - “self-satisfied semi-literates. A repulsive figure - whether worker or intellectual” (cited in H Ticktin and M Cox (eds) The ideas of Leon Trotsky London 1995, p372).
Parroting the ‘line’ - the modus not simply of ‘Marxism’, but also the educational activities of most of the left - is foreign to Marxism as a genuinely critical, controversial science. In this context, it is instructive to recall Kamenev’s telling observation against Stalin’s doctrinairism when discussing Lenin’s writings:
“Lenin did not write and could not have written a textbook of Leninism. I am even afraid that every attempt to expound the teaching of Lenin in paragraphs, divisions and sub-divisions, to create any kind of a ‘handbook’ of Leninism, a collection of formulae applicable to all questions at any time - will certainly fail. Nothing would be more foreign to Lenin in his work than any tendency to catechism … [his work is] permeated through and through with anxieties and lessons of a particular historical situation …That is why we approach the real science of Lenin through a consideration of his complete works in the light of contemporary events” (cited in P Le Blanc Lenin and the vanguard party New Jersey 1990, p344).
Take a look at Lenin’s Collected Works. In them, we see Leninism in its natural habitat - that of fiercely rigorous, exacting and open polemical struggle against not simply other trends within the workers’ movement generally, but also within his own shade, faction or party. It was this open clash of ideas, the attempt to publicly engage with others within the workers’ movement at the highest possible level, that lends Lenin’s writings their enormous value. We see in Lenin a genuine search for the “clarity of ideas” that the SWP apparatus professes to believe in.
This is why the CPGB strives to introduce controversy and the clash of opinions into seminars and meetings. Our forthcoming Communist University will feature speakers from an extraordinarily wide variety of political backgrounds on the left (see p3 of this issue). This is not an expression of our organisation pleading for a theoretical truce - far from it. Simply, it creates the best possible conditions - of light and air - for the correct ideas to thrive, defeat mistaken views and become strong. The SWP’s approach nurtures opportunism.
Of course, we have our own problems with theoretical passivity in the ranks of our organisation, something we have publicly referred to in this paper. At least - however - we recognised it as a weakness.
Sadly, in the SWP it appears to be a basic requirement of retaining membership.
Mark Fischer
national organiser