12.06.2002
Divisions in SWP surface
Has Chris Harman become a CPGB ally?
An article in the June 8 issue of Socialist Worker signals a struggle of some sort in the top echelons of the Socialist Workers Party. The column - titled 'A different kind of party altogether' and penned by the paper's editor, Chris Harman - must mean that tensions are growing, even if visible split lines have not yet appeared. Given the article's subject matter, it is ironic that we have to subject it to such microscopic textual analysis to identify what it might be saying about political divisions in the SWP leadership. In it, comrade Harman contrasts the degenerate culture of the party lorded over by Stalin with the open, democratic ethos of the organisation originally built by Lenin. Yet every time the comrade explicitly praises the healthy practice of Lenin's Bolsheviks, he implicitly damns the sect insularity and bureaucratic centralism of today's SWP. Thus, the article fulsomely praises openness - and leaves us wondering exactly why it has been written. Under Stalin, comrade Harman tells us, "there was no possibility of members discussing politics". "Anyone who questioned Stalin's decisions faced instant expulsion from the party "¦" (all quotes from Socialist Worker June 8, unless otherwise stated). Under Lenin, in contrast, "the history of the party is the history of heated debate "¦" True, but then he adds eight explosive words. Comrade Harman writes that the "heated debate" that often embroiled the party "took place openly in the party's paper, Pravda." To ensure that no one misses the import of what he writes, comrade Harman then piles on a few examples. He cites April 1917, when "the majority of the party took a different position to Lenin. When one of Lenin's articles was published in Pravda, an editorial written by Stalin expressed disagreement, saying Lenin was out of touch." In the July of that fateful year, Harman recalls that "workers and soldiers in Petrograd" wanted to overthrow the Kerensky government immediately, while "the majority of the Bolsheviks thought this premature". Although the more cautious approach was held by a majority, "large sections of the party disagreed openly, and the Bolshevik soldiers' paper supported the attempt at a rising". Lastly - and most controversially - he writes of Zinoviev and Kamenev fighting the decision to launch the October rising "to the point of arguing against the insurrection in public". Outraged, Lenin unsuccessfully demanded their expulsion from the party for this "scabbing" - yet Harman marshals even this as an example of the healthy culture of "open discussion within the party" that marked Lenin's organisation out. Correctly, the comrade locates the objective need for this type of approach to the democracy of the organisation. Without it, building a genuine party - one with hegemonic influence over wide swathes of the class - would have been impossible. The debates "took place because it was the party of the most militant workers "¦ Free discussion was necessary if a policy was to be hammered out that would enable these militants to give a clear lead "¦" (my emphasis - MF). We warmly welcome this article. It explicitly defends an approach to party democracy and debate long championed by this paper - and long ridiculed and rejected by much of the left. In it, comrade Harman makes himself our ally on the party question. Like us, he places no conditions of size or political contingency on revolutionaries operating a healthy regime. Presumably therefore, this is the way communists should organise now. This idea raises some further - quite tantalising - questions, of course. After all, the comrade is writing as the editor of a newspaper that allows no open debate between comrades in its pages whatsoever. The 'party' template of the SWP dictates that the open expression of political differences in any forum - let alone in the group's paper - is considered a disciplinary matter of varying degrees of seriousness. In January's Socialist Review, Paul Foot clumsily articulated this pernicious idea in an article on the revolutionary party. Speaking of party discipline, he suggests it flows from the certainty that "when we think, debate and act we do so with others inspired by the same ideas and the same objective" (Weekly Worker February 7 - my emphasis). I commented at the time that if a presumption of SWP 'discipline' is that the membership have the same ideas, then disagreement becomes an act of indiscipline, a challenge not simply to the views of the majority, but to the organisational integrity of the group as a whole. Thus, the numerous abrupt policy volte faces of recent years by the SWP leadership - most importantly, the reversal of its stubborn opposition to electoral work - must have provoked controversy, along with majority and minority positions internally. Yet where has this found expression anywhere, let alone in the pages of the organisation's press? In truth, when Harman writes of those who questioned the political zigzags of Stalin facing "instant expulsion from the party", he is simply describing a more extreme version of SWP inner-party life. As one group of ex-members put it, "Successive layers of cadre are driven out of the party, or into passivity in the party, every time the leadership makes one of its characteristic 'turns'" (International Socialism Group Democracy and the SWP 1994, p11). The SWP regime has become a byword for bureaucratic centralism, for the lack of substantive democracy for its membership. Here is an organisation that has no internal discussion bulletin, let alone open debate in Socialist Worker. SWPers are prohibited from forming themselves into factions or organised tendencies outside of strictly limited periods in the lead-up to conference (a ban that ensures that these groupings only have the time to cohere around sub-political or technical platforms). Indeed, such was the leadership's insistence on thought-control over its rank and file the SWP leadership under Tony Cliff attempted to prohibit their comrades from using internet discussion lists - a paranoid ban that inevitably broke down as the internet became a more widespread political tool, but which still occasionally resurfaces in the form of tetchy complaints from SWP apparatchiks over the use of lists for "sectarian" criticisms of their group. Comrade Harman's short column is thus a pretty devastating attack on the culture of his organisation as it has evolved over the last 30 years or so. More than that, it runs counter to the dominant culture of bureaucratically imposed political monolithicism that continues to dominate the revolutionary left. For instance, readers should recall the December 1 2001 Socialist Alliance constitution conference. Acting as the SWP's attorney on the day, Mark Hoskisson of Workers Power - in a truly wretched speech - rubbished the idea of an open, democratic SA paper that would give space to the divergent views in our ranks. We would produce a "tower of Babel", he gloomily predicted. Presumably, the cacophony of discordant voices in its pages would be incomprehensible both internally and - by implication - to the advance workers that would constitute the paper's main audience. This was an explicit version of the nasty little anti-working class mantra so beloved of many 'ordinary' comrades on the left, including SWPers - 'Arguments-in-the-paper-just-confuse-the-workers,' we have been told over and over again. A despicable attitude to the working class. Comrade Harman's short article contradicts this nonsense very effectively - but at what price for the supposed 'unity' of the SWP tops? Given the politically pulverised nature of the SWP membership, we have predicted that the inevitable divisions that would affect this organisation would first manifest themselves at a leadership level. But without a culture of genuine democratic centralism, we warned that the group's organisational unity could prove to be short-lived when political schisms surfaced - the danger of political disintegration loomed. It still does. Clearly, something is happening in this important component of the Socialist Alliance and Scottish Socialist Party. Given that - despite comrade Harman's paeans of praise to Bolshevik transparency - we are not being told what exactly, it is legitimate to speculate. First, we have been informed by 'tired and emotional' SWP leaders that comrade Harman belongs to the trend of the SWP that views both the SA and SSP projects with deep mistrust. The unreconstructed 'sectarians', if you like. In Scotland, SW has vanished from public view under the conditions of entry into the SSP. Even the appearance of Welsh Socialist Voice - paper of the Welsh Socialist Alliance - seemed to provoke disquiet amongst sections of the SWP apparatus. At a sparsely attended aggregate in Cardiff in April, the SWP's full-timer in Wales tore a strip off the assembled SWPers and poured scorn on WSV: "a disgrace", she uncharitably dubbed the inoffensive new journal. We can safely assume that the Harman trend is in a minority on the SWP leadership. Thus, when he cites Bolshevik traditions of open debate and democratic access to the party newspaper for dissenting views, this could be an appeal for his minority opinions to find space. After all, his column warns against the notion of infallibility - "Nor is it true to say that Lenin always believed the party was right and could never make a mistake". Perhaps the man - as a 'party fetishist' - is rediscovering some healthy traditions of genuine communist organisation as he bucks what he perceives of as the trend towards liquidationism embodied in the SA/SSP/'united front of a new type' projects of the SWP leadership majority (Weekly Worker April 25). Readers could legitimately complain that the latter part of my article is rather tentative and replete with words and phrases like 'perhaps', 'could be', 'seemed to' and even 'something is happening'. This reflects the continuing grim reality of the SWP political culture - we simply do not know for certain what is happening in its ranks, despite the fact that it remains the largest revolutionary group in our common movement. Comrade Harman has written an article that appeals to a very different tradition, that of Bolshevism. We should all hope that the culture of democratic transparency that was synonymous with Lenin's party comes to dominate not simply comrade Harman's organisation, but the entire left. And soon. Mark Fischer
Worker