21.10.1999

SWP conference

Party notes

The three-day annual conference of the Socialist Workers Party - currently the largest revolutionary organisation in Britain - starts on November 6. The deliberations of the SWP matter to the workers’ movement. Despite the overblown membership figures that leading SWPers occasionally toss out, there is no doubt that Tony Cliff’s organisation unites several thousand good activists. While it is true that the SWP has never achieved anything like the serious implantation in the class of the Communist Party (or even Militant/Socialist Party fleetingly did), the mere fact of its size makes it of some importance to us.

With this in mind, the state of internal debate and thought revealed by its first Pre-conference bulletin is truly frightening. This slim document is the first of just three bulletins that will be produced by the SWP centre in the lead-up to November 6. (The SWP has no regular internal bulletin and, of course, no open discussion in the pages of its press). The bulk of it is taken up by three reports produced by the SWP central committee - ‘The new world disorder’, ‘How we build’ and ‘Finance and membership’.

‘The new world disorder’ is essentially an attempt to rescue the myopically upbeat perspectives the SWP has lumbered itself with over the last period, while making sure that cadre actually operate with some degree of rationality.

Thus, internationally the 1990s are characterised as “a decade of slow recovery in working class consciousness and combativity” (Pre-conference bulletin No1, p5). There “has been no return to the working class offensive of the 1968-74 period”, but at the same time we have seen “no repeat of the defeats of the 1980s”. Thus, the document talks of the “depressed level of the class struggle in Britain”, the class struggle narrowly equated with the levels of strike activity, of course. This, however, contrasts with the emergence of a “radicalised consciousness”, which is apparently composed of a minority that is “more or less clearly anti-capitalist and a majority who reject Blairism in the name of reformist or left reformist ideas” (ibid).

Thus, on one side there is ongoing “trench warfare” with the trade union bureaucracy. On the other, an “often hidden degree of radicalisation” which “presents a challenge” to the SWP, posing the need for it to grow and become influential. Struggling for a definition of the political patchiness, the SWP leadership defines the period as having a “mosaic nature”, expressed “more in consciousness than in struggle, more partial struggles than sustained struggles, more campaigns than industrial action” (p6). Special mention is therefore made of issues such as “GM foods”, the “Drop the Debt demonstrations, arms sales and June’s Carnival in the city” (p7).

These reflect the “very favourable” conditions, an opportunity for the SWP to move to answer “the massive ideological crisis” affecting British society (‘How we build’, p6). The SWP has charted the “revival in working class consciousness” throughout the 90s, yet paradoxically this leads to no “generalised upturn in the struggle”, in particular in the workplace (ibid). We are thus “neither in an upturn nor a downturn. There is not an audience out there for us on the picket lines. Nor are there the big single-issue campaigns that dominated the first half of the 1990s …” There is a “growing audience” for SWP ideas, but this is because “we are relating to people’s consciousness rather than to struggle …” (p7).

This is an interesting time for the SWP. It has been forced by the pressure of circumstances to revise its long-standing practice of an automatic Labour vote come election time. Yet nowhere in any of the central committee documents is there an assessment of the experience of standing candidates against Labour, apart from the throwaway comment in ‘The new world disorder’ that “creditable votes for the left, including SWP members, shows the potential for providing disillusioned Labour supporters with a socialist alternative” (p5). The leadership concedes that they are in the business of recruiting ones and twos, yet are anxious to maintain the fiction of imminent breakthrough, of big possibilities looming, that has sustained its cadre for over a decade now.

The strains seem to be showing. If anything, the circumstantial evidence from these documents points to a dilution in already low-quality levels of SWP recruits. ‘How we build’ focuses on retention and activating the membership. This is supposed to be a two-pronged strategy - “getting them Socialist Worker each week and getting them to make a commitment to the SWP by taking out a standing order …” (p7).

The notion that it is a key task of a revolutionary party’s cadre to service the inactive membership with the paper and cajole them to take out any type of financial commitment to their ‘party’ is frankly a joke. The SWP leaders actually suggest that their thoroughly Menshevik approach to organisation is in line with the “Bolshevik tradition”. The fact that such substantial parts of these three central committee resolutions are devoted to the issue of finance, of resolving the situation where “every member was not getting the paper each week” (p8) and large swathes not even paying dues, illustrates how hollow the claim is.

The SWP is a sect par excellence - it has little or no rationale for its existence apart from its existence. It lives to recruit, in other words. In the current period of reaction, with few struggles propelling people in the direction of political activism, many new members appear to be individuals that happen to be touched by the SWP because it is relatively big. Cliff’s officers are “winning ones and twos - often after lengthy argument” (p7).

So these are pretty inert recruits in other words, which explains the constant battle to get them to rise to even the most basic levels of commitment. This is also being illustrated in the pre-conference discussion on the ground. In each district, aggregates are being convened, supposedly arranged to allow “members from across the district [to] get a chance to discuss together for longer than a branch meeting allows” (p2). In fact, the aggregates have confirmed what anyone with any experience of the SWP will tell you: membership is increasingly passive and frighteningly ignorant.

The stresses and strains that are beginning to erode ‘party’ unity have yet to find organised expression amongst the rank and file. It can only be a question of time.

Mark Fischer
national organiser