30.04.2003

I'm so excited: Socialist Workers Party

Newspaper: Socialist Worker (weekly).

Other journals: International Socialist Journal (quarterly), Socialist Review (monthly).

Website: www.swp.org.uk Prominent members: John Rees (seems to be numero uno, takes lead in Socialist Alliance and edits ISJ); Lindsay German (Stop the War Coalition convenor and SR editor); Rob Hoveman (SA national secretary); Alex Callinicos (responsible for international work through the International Socialist Tendency and authoritative writer); Chris Bambery (national secretary); Paul Foot (campaigning journalist).

Size: Claims from the organisation vary from 10,000 to 17,000 card-carriers - in truth, closer to 2,000 'real' members (although 'real' is a relative concept here). The organisation has a policy of carding anyone up, so a question you can expect to be asked after about 30 seconds of first encountering an SWPer is "Would you like to join the party?" Don't feel that flattered - they ask everybody. They have even asked me.

Comments: The SWP is deeply unpopular on the left. There are good and bad reasons for this, so it is important that new comrades get a balanced approach to this important organisation. There is a measure of sect-hostility from groups that are essentially SWP-wannabes - less successful organisations lower down the chain who feel they could become the alpha-sect if only the main predator would snuff it. Also, the origins of many of the smaller Trotskyist/Trotskyoid groups scattered around lie in faction fights and expulsions from the forerunner of the SWP in the 1970s, the International Socialists.

Thus, a number of the groups below are led by comrades who have been 'scorched' by the SWP's bureaucratic internal regime and bear grudges, of varying degrees of politicisation. Neveretheless this is the biggest organisation of revolutionaries in the UK, with a talented and stable leadership and a coherent national structure maintained by hundreds of dedicated cadre.

Communists have to take such an organisation seriously - we are not like those who believe that 'if only' the SWP simply winked out of existence, the revolutionary left would suddenly be bathed in golden sunshine. For all its crass politics and anti-democratic culture, without this organisation the Stop the War Coalition would be seriously weakened.

Similarly, we have important criticisms of the organisation's role in the Socialist Alliance - but it was only the (belated) entry of the SWP into the project that made it viable in any meaningful way. OK, so much for balance - what about the criticisms? In truth, the SWP is actually a surprisingly inert and unresponsive organisation. Despite its size, its impact on wider society is absolutely minimal.

For instance, it is instructive that - in contrast to the much smaller Socialist Party - this organisation has been incapable of developing genuinely mass working class leaders. It has the - unfortunately deserved - reputation of converting the bulk of its recruits, whatever their particular talents or potentials, into paper-selling dolts. Thus, a Socialist Worker paper-seller has featured in Coronation Street's 'Rovers Return' - no one from the street has ever joined. The 'party' has no roots, in other words.

The SWP maintains a relatively high level of political activity, with always the next campaign to be built, the next meeting or march to be mobilised for, normally with organiser Chris Bambery telling everyone how excited he already is by the next action. Yet its field of work is actually extremely narrow.

Where are the SWP's trade union general secretaries, councillors or MPs, the layers it influences and organises in the Labour Party, SWP-influenced theatre or film collectives, etc? An often politically ignorant membership is prodded from one campaign to another, from one priority to the next. In any political organisation with a functioning democratic culture, such manipulation would provoke criticism, revolt even.

Yet, apart from a few individuals here and there, the ranks of the SWP remain remarkably passive. This is achieved through a politically pulverising internal regime. Loyalty to the organisation is defined by political agreement with whatever the current line is - disagreement an act of organisational disloyalty. The membership is further disenfranchised by the fact that the SWP leadership have made it a point of principle in the past that the organisation does not have a programme.

A programme for a Marxist party is not an optional extra. It is the means by which we test our day-to-day practice against our overall strategic aims, our fundamental political principles. The SWP line has performed some pretty spectacular somersaults over the years, yet there is no political compass in the organisation, no collective means of gauging how far the leadership has strayed off course. Thus politics for the SWP consists in adapting itself to prevailing moods in society, attempting to give a left coloration to the existing consciousness of the class.

One day, this can mean that it will flirt with Labourism, the next it will adopt blood-curdling anarchist calls to 'fuck capitalism'! - it all depends whether it is on the streets of some council estate canvassing for votes wearing its Socialist Alliance hat or in an expansive piazza of a European city alongside the anarchist black bloc.