04.07.2001

Marxism 2001

Heat and light

Billed in its pre-conference timetable as the leading left educational event in Europe, the Socialist Workers Party's annual 'Marxism' kicks off on Friday June 6 with a 7pm rally in Friends Meeting House, in London's Euston Road. (For the full timetable of 'Marxism', visit www.swp.org.uk). This meeting is titled 'A new politics for a new movement' and premiers themes that will run throughout the week - the burgeoning new movement against global capitalism and the space that has opened up the left of New Labour.

Over the course of seven days, thousands of comrades - predominantly young - will attend the event, where they will receive a grounding in the SWP's version of socialist politics. This year in particular, the organisation is making efforts to intersect with the new layers of anti-capitalist youth that have been activated against injustice and exploitation. The claimed attendance for the past few years has been around 6,000. Perhaps the SWP's work in the Socialist Alliances and anti-capitalist movement may translate into significantly higher numbers attending - we'll see.

Hopefully, this will prove to be the case. It would be a good thing if previously unattached leftists started to listen to revolutionary speakers of various stripes, to have the chance to pick up Marxist classics, and if they so wish join the SWP. Organised, they can learn lessons quickly.

We have commented for several years that the SWP is undergoing a process of change. So far, this has not really reflected itself at 'Marxism', not in the tone and tempo of the event, nor in how the organisation chooses to present what it dubs the 'key debates' on the left. The itinerary of this year's event is sadly familiar to comrades who have followed the SWP over the years. This is an organisation that is happy to debate with social democratic and other trends to the right of it. It feels distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of discussing with other revolutionary positions in the workers' movement.

Social democrats are 'easy meat', of course. Revolutionary ideas - even the sometimes mangled SWP versions of them - are infinitely more coherent and logical that those of left reformism. No matter how eruditely they express them, the likes of Tony Benn, Susan George and Hilary Wainwright will present no genuine challenge to the leaders of the SWP, a talented group.

At a molecular level, in the Socialist Alliances around the country, this is certainly changing. Slowly, sometimes kicking and screaming, individual SWPers are being drawn into arguing politics with revolutionaries from different traditions. This finds no real reflection at this year's 'Marxism', however.

Of course, the situation will have changed quite dramatically from previous years in some ways. In the old days, SWP cadre often responded with outright hostility - up to and including the occasional assault - against others who had the temerity to try to intervene or even distribute literature. This has caused problems for the rest of the left, of course. But mostly, it has bred strains of political weakness into the SWP itself, weakness that could still lay it low.

An education event like 'Marxism' - which will not feature the theoretical clash of revolutionary ideas at the highest possible level - does not train a party of independently minded, self-activating working class politicians. It tends to create what Trotsky - writing on the subject of party education in 1909 - called a "self-satisfied semi-literate. A repulsive figure - whether worker or intellectual."

Are the rank and file of the SWP theoretically equipped to deal with the challenges of the new period? Everything that previously anchored the group and its ideas appears to have been thrown into flux.

• On June 7 the SWP played a prominent role in mounting the largest united left electoral challenge in England and Wales for generations. This marks a huge shift for this group from its days of boycotting elections and automatically voting Labour principle, claiming that any leftwing challenge to Labour at the ballot box was to invite 'reformist' and 'electoralist' infection.
• While formally the SWP still regards permanent factions as a great evil, in Scotland they have actually become one - the Socialist Worker platform - when they joined the Scottish Socialist Party (it will be intriguing to hear how Chris Bambery squares the circle in his 'Marxism' session on 'Democratic centralism' on the evening of Thursday July 12).
• The Scottish move effectively unravels the SWP packaging of itself as "the Party". The group has assiduously built into its comrades a contempt for the rest of the revolutionary left over many years of sectarian training. Yet now its members find themselves working with the left, being told to be 'nice' to them. At the same time SWPers occasionally have their sectarian fur smoothed down - 'Don't worry,' they are occasionally told. 'We'll build a new periphery around ourselves then fuck off the sects' - the strains of this new turn are manifest. Some SWP comrades find it almost physically painful; others take to it readily, happy to slough off the sectarian skin.

How can an organisation maintain its theoretical and organisational coherence as it goes through such an important period of change without democracy and open debate?

In our educational events, the Communist Party attempts to introduce controversy and the clash of opinions - hopefully light as well as heat can be generated. Our forthcoming school, the Communist University (see below), will feature speakers from a wide variety of revolutionary political traditions, including the SWP. Their ideas will be treated with respect, but never kid-gloves.

Ian Mahoney