24.11.2005

Rightist liquidation threatens

Ian Mahoney reviews the SWP's Pre-conference bulletin

Internal documents of the Socialist Workers Party are always pretty shocking. It becomes immediately apparent from reading them that, below leadership level, this is an organisation that is practically incapable of thought. For example, the Respect turn is a dramatic one. One might expect ordinary members would be positively gagging to put their thoughts, criticisms, doubts and suggestions about the new arena of work down in black and white for other comrades to consider.

After all, the SWP ordinarily has no internal bulletin whatsoever (this one is simply the first in a very short series of (normally skimpy) documents produced in the lead-up to its annual conference); it has no internal web discussion lists; there is no space in Socialist Worker for critical commentary on the party’s work; and its annual conferences are actually more akin to rallies to buff up the morale of the foot soldiers than the genuinely sovereign leading organ of the group.

Thus, every year I expect a thousand ideological flowers - and good few weeds - to bloom in the run-up to SWP conference: every year, I am disappointed … This first Pre-conference bulletin contains just six articles, taking up eight A4 pages. A total of just 8,700 words.

That said, there are moments of interest here - although, as with SWP public pronouncements, it is necessary to glean what might be the truth from the obtuse way the SWP believes politics should be packaged. Nonetheless, some clear features of the current programmatic and organisational crisis of the SWP emerge.

First, the anecdotal evidence from around the country is of a fraying of structure, a loss of coherence and membership, is confirmed in several contributions. The piece from the SWP central committee - ‘Conference perspectives 2005-06’ - employs a phrase it has used before to describe the current situation of its members. They are “dispersed across the battlefield”. This dispersal is clearly causing political problems, which the leadership - characteristically - addresses with organisational prescriptions.

Thus, it is noted that there is a need to “rebuild the profile of the party” (p4 - my emphasis in all quotes unless otherwise stated). SWPers who are central to the various “united fronts” the SWP is involved in have a tendency to “act without collective discussion or support from other members”. If the SWP is to continue to influence the movement, “the party must strengthen its own structure, articulate its own strategy more clearly and, above all, increase its size” (p5).

There is a clear concern in this CC contribution that the SWP is losing its political shape. Yet it has no credible answers to halt this process other than quite forlorn calls to strengthen the apparatus: “We need more and regular caucuses that hammer out the party’s attitude on the important tactical and strategic discussions in the movement and we must insist that our comrades in leading positions abide by these decisions” (p4). There is a need to “strengthen the district structure … and the branch structure” to facilitate this. Without these measures, “key activists” on the various political fronts “simply become a clique unable to influence the SWP members, never mind the wider movement” (ibid).

It is patently obvious that for the SWP leadership the recent debacle in the civil servants union casts a shadow over this discussion. Its two leading union activists in the PCSU - Martin John and Sue Bond - developed a propensity for rightist accommodation and opportunism over a period of years. This culminated in the duo’s support for the pensions sell-out and the subsequent resignation of the organisation’s most prominent activist, comrade John (Weekly Worker November 17).

The SWP central committee appears to recognise - perhaps even instinctually - that this period could see the same process of fragmentation become commonplace. The organisation - primarily via the Respect turn - has confirmed itself in a method that is consistently about appeasing the right. (Never the left, of course. SWP comrades who criticise the work of their party from the standpoint of Marxism can expect very short shrift, in stark contrast to the indulgence shown to the like of comrades John and Bond.)

For the CC, the only solution is to strengthen the structure. Instructively, SWP comrades are not warned of the dangers of liquidation. They are not told that the organisation must understand politics; they are simply informed that the key to coherence is a regular meeting that will police their work more closely. In fact, the only effective way to approach the problem - through a political fight for the programmatic coherence of the group - is an anathema to a leadership whose ingrained method is impressionism and a series of get-rich-quick political scams.

In this, ominously for the SWP, there is an echo of the manner in which the clueless Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party attempted to fight the political fragmentation of his organisation along national lines, as the formation of the Scottish Socialist Party loomed. In an eerie anticipation of some of the SWP CC’s ‘solutions’ to the political stresses on its organisation, Taaffe wrote:

“At all times the consciousness of a separate revolutionary organisation must be engendered in the minds of our members by the leadership … It is essential that we meet separately and regularly, preferably on a weekly basis, to discuss the way forward, to collect dues and recruit to our party.”

As we noted at the time, “the ‘distinctive’ character of a revolutionary organisation cannot be defined or defended through the technicalities of dues collection and ‘separate’ meetings. The need for separate organisation flows from a programme that expresses proletarian independence - the distinct revolutionary interests of the working class as a whole” (Weekly Worker May 14 1998).

The subsequent fate of the SP - comrade Taaffe’s sterling defence of the need for weekly meetings notwithstanding - should perhaps give SWPers pause for thought.

The second important theme to note from this bulletin is the fear amongst some leading members that the group may be in the process of losing its political coherence from the top down, not simply in isolated pockets of “key activists” who are “dispersed across the battlefield”.

This concern - that the SWP as a whole is in some danger of losing its distinctive identity - is evident in Dave Crouch’s critical comments on Socialist Worker, for example (reproduced opposite). He seems to be coming from the Harmanite wing of the SWP - and therefore fires indirect, often purely technical, barbs at the Rees, German, Bambery triumvirate. Last year’s changes to the contents, format and style of the paper “threaten to dilute its leadership role”. The “political risks” he points to in “opening the paper so wide to non-party voices” go beyond the danger of “repetition and bluster” and “insufficient structured argument and fact”. The paper is losing its shape; it is becoming “disjointed and incoherent” (p8).

Comrade Crouch’s description of some of the more obvious problems of the new format Socialist Worker is fair enough. His prescriptions for solving them - in keeping with the method of his leadership - do not go beyond editorial interventions to rein in the meanderings of guest writers or to change the ‘feel’ of the paper through a rejuggling of layout.

This is hardly political. Certainly, non-SWP writers could - but don’t - bring an interest and breadth to the pages of Socialist Worker that some of Chris Harman’s staff writers have lacked in the past. But that is not what they are there for. They are there for reasons of respectability and offer nother much other than banal platitudes. However, comrade Crouch should ask himself why the fuzzy arguments of these authors are not countered? Why are their ideas not actively and energetically contradicted by other writers in the pages of the paper? Rather than “engage with … ideas and the people who hold them”, as the comrade suggests, Socialist Worker simply features them uncritically (p8).

Again, the answer is to do with politics and programmatic method and cannot be addressed through organisational tweaks. It is a direct product of the established SWP method. Alex Callinicos outlined the operative content of this in a polemic with the SWP’s former co-thinkers in the United States who were raising doubts about the concrete application of this approach in the anti-capitalist movement. As this leading SWPer put it, the primary task of Marxists is to “make themselves part of the movement, starting not from their disagreements with other activists, but from the much larger area of agreement that [unites] the entire movement” (see Weekly Worker October 2003).

Such an approach lends itself to the blurring of divisions between the formal Marxism of the SWP and its clones and other - spontaneously generated, non-Marxist - ideas and trends. The SWP’s play for the big time may be highlighting this particularly starkly during this period, but it has always been there, comrade Crouch.

Lastly, it is worthwhile returning the contribution from the CC, this time on the question of the government’s offensive on counter-terrorism and - by implication - the religious hatred laws.

Thus, on the supposed intimate link between the London bombings of July 7 and the Iraq war, the CC notes that “the spectrum of opinion in the anti-war movement held firm”, with the partial exception of Ken Livingstone. However, “more divisive inside the movement” has been the question of the threat to civil liberties created by the government’s draconian new laws.

“As in every community under pressure [from the political establishment] … the muslim community has produced a number of different responses.

“On the right some have sought to accommodate to the government, turning inward and indulging in lengthy heart-searching about the faults in islam or the lack of integration. Some have simply kept their heads down for a longer or shorter period. A tiny minority, in part in reaction to those accommodating to government pressure, have reacted by stressing their rejection of all politics and ‘western’ political values.

“If this political process is allowed to continue without the intervention of the left, a very dangerous and malignant dialectic can develop between these poles. The more some accommodate to the government’s scapegoating, the more others reject them, and with them ‘politics’ as a whole” (p3).

The “intervention of the left”, however, is not to take place on the basis of the universalist, genuinely liberating project of Marxism and communism. SWPers are told that the destructive logic of the differentiation in the muslim population can only be prevented “by a united, integrated, radical anti-war movement that defends civil liberties and the muslim community”. Why we should be seeking to hold the left and right together on some classless basis we are not told.

The notion that this political differentiation inside the muslim population will not reflect itself inside Respect is untenable, of course - although the CC contribution steers clear of mentioning this almost inevitable development. Instead, the Stop the War Coalition is prioritised (indeed, over-prioritised, some might say. Emphasis is put on the “political centrality of the STWC … it is capable of a greater, united, sustained mobilisation of radical forces in Britain than any other organisation … Sustaining it is the first task of any revolutionary” [p3]).

There are also strains caused by the contradiction between the narrow sect exclusivity of SWP and the professed aim of building an open, pluralist and inclusive organisation in the form of Respect. For instance, it is stated that “Respect cannot be reduced to an activist core and expected to succeed” (p4) and that it needs a “working decision-making structure [without which] we fail to engage all the constituent elements of Respect in organising the work and so reduce Respect to an SWP front”.

In fact, this is a repetition of a familiar problem that crippled the development of the Socialist Alliance. As a number of independent comrades who witnessed Oli Rahman’s wretched performance at the Respect conference will tell you, it is a singularly unappetising prospect to be bullied by people who tell you that the best you can hope for is to be an unthinking, foam-flecked activist for an organisation with no paper and that treats with contempt the notion that there should be genuine accountability, transparency and democracy. (‘How dare people call for minutes from the leadership when we all should just be knocking on doors!’) So note the psychologically instructive choice of words in the above quote - the “decision-making” process that the SWP has in mind for rank and file members of Respect is limited to “organising the work”. In SWP-speak, this means involving people in deciding the venues and times for leaflet distribution. SWP control-freakery simply cannot countenance open discussions about what might be in those leaflets, what subjects should be addressed and how.

An SWP constitution is included in this first bulletin and in it we are told that “permanent or secret factions are not allowed” in the SWP (p10). This, of course, is a monumental example of hypocrisy on behalf of the leadership. In truth, it is organised as a permanent, secretive group within the party. Ordinary SWP members - let alone the working class - have no idea what debates animate the CC, what nuances of opinion exist at its meetings and what their own leaders actually think. No wonder the very idea of democracy in Respect provokes such a disdainful attitude from these people.

For the mandarins of the SWP politics is organised not simply as a conspiracy against the workers’ movement, but as a conspiracy against their own members.