05.01.2006

A loyal rebel

On the eve of the Socialist Workers Party's annual conference this weekend (January 7-8), SW Kenning looks at what is going on behind the scenes and the official claims of one magnificent success leading to another

Pre-conference bulletin No3 should be of interest to the wider workers’ movement. Why? Firstly, simply because the SWP matters. It plays a leading role in the Stop the War Coalition, Respect and Unite Against Fascism and its activists staff many trade union committees. More importantly - much more importantly - any attempt to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party that tries to avoid the SWP, or go round its machine, cadre and undoubted influence, is either pure self-deception or a cruel joke. Either way, all such schemes - in the Labour Party and out - are bound to fail.

To build a party in more than name one must go through the SWP. First and foremost that means an ideological war. The SWP must be politically defeated.

So when veteran SWPer John Molyneux announces his candidature for the forthcoming election to the central committee it is vital to take note. Not least because of the undemocratic slate system, he has little or no chance of being elected. Yet the simple fact that he is standing is an event in itself. For the last 15 or 20 years elections to the SWP’s central committee have been uncontested!

On what platform is comrade Molyneux standing? There is nothing militantly Leninist or particularly radical about it. Indeed, as he confesses himself, it is a “simple platform” … and it conspicuously fails to challenge the central committee when it comes to today’s strategy, not least the disastrous Respect popular front. A weakness fully exploited in the central committee’s reply: “John’s complaints [are] about a central committee that no longer exists … What are his complaints about the present CC?” .

Comrade Molyneux highlights the lack of honesty that has built up over the last decade or so and how the central committee assesses the results of political interventions. Despite repeated boasts about the role of the SWP there has been a decline - both in membership and Socialist Worker circulation. Molyneux calls for honesty and a modicum of democratic accountability.

On one level, given the general atmosphere in the SWP, it is no surprise that Molyneux constitutes almost the sole critical voice to be found in the Pre-conference bulletin Nos 1-3 (see Weekly Worker November 24 and December 8 for the truly dire nature of the bulk of the ‘debate’ so far).

His intervention actually contains little that is new. Last year he raised his rather mealy-mouthed doubts about the lack of meaningful inner-SWP democracy (see Weekly Worker November 18 2004 for our comments on his original critique).

Nevertheless, to read a leading member deflate SWP hyperbole about its size and the circulation of its press is confirmation for this paper of what we always knew. We have long catalogued the decline of the SWP amidst the hysterical promises to an increasing bewildered and demoralised rank and file that the imminent breakthrough will come with the next demo, the next election.

There are not 10,000 fighters for Cliffism. Nor has the SWP even got 5,000 members. Given those who do not pay dues, real membership - as opposed to those recruits made and lost in the space of a year - the figure is much nearer 2,000.

Molyneux wants an explanation. Why despite all the hype has the SWP declined in recent years? The central committee replies that the SWP’s united front work only produces slow results. This claim hardly matches the experience of the communist parties in the 1920s. Their membership did soar. It was sectarianism which saw them stagnate and then rapidly lose membership. Popular front projects too - not dissimilar to Respect - added many recruits, albeit at the price of derailing them politically.

Given the bureaucratic centralist nature of its regime - as we have argued many times before - a revolution in the SWP must begin above. Molyneux might or might not rally support. However, even if he is fantastically successful, that will result not in a civil war and the ousting of the John Rees clique. Rather it will result in a purge - of Molyneux and co.

Despite this, any crack in the facade of SWP uniformity must be a good thing. It will encourage more of the comrades to think.

Despite some telling comments, Molyneux’s platform is extremely weak. The central committee has little difficulty in landing some effective counter-punches. For example, he feels the need to end his contribution defensively - to “avoid misunderstandings”. He stresses his complete loyalty “to the historic positions of the SWP and the IS”, he also wants it known that he “strongly” supports the SWP’s “united front initiatives, including and especially the Respect project”.

In other words, apart from the culture of overblown hyperbole emanating from HQ and the lack of democracy, everything the organisation is doing today is fine and dandy.

However, in the past - “particularly in the 90s”, perhaps - these same flaws produced serious political deviations. The lack of democracy compounded the problem in the sense that without “adequate and honest information about the state of the party it is very difficult for [members] to participate in democratic debate about its strategy and tactics. Moreover they are not really expected to do so, whatever the formal democratic procedures.”

In other words, at the bottom of the problems of the SWP’s awful culture lie strategic questions -“the question of perspective”, as comrade Molyneux puts it.

Thus, despite Molyneux’s ritualistic genuflection towards the positions of today’s leadership, it is an inescapable fact that his criticisms, even by implication, relate to the contemporary “question of perspective” - that is, Respect and his organisation’s dominating and controlling role in that popular frontist party formation. Form and content make up a dialectical unity - they cannot be separated. One cannot be good, the other bad. If one is bad, so is the other.

Comrade Molyneux has already described the practice of denunciation and cold-shouldering. Any half-serious criticism of the leadership line brings down an avalanche. Raising differences, he has said, is “a highly disagreeable experience with little prospect of success” (Weekly Worker November 18 2004) - probably a gross understatement.

The hysterical reaction of comrade Dave Crouch to our reprint of his contribution in Pre-conference bulletin No1, which criticised the populist drift of Socialist Worker from a Harmanite viewpoint, gives a chilling glimpse of how dissenters feel intimidated and fearful (Weekly Worker December 8 2005). In a frantic statement to this paper, the comrade declared that he was “not a member of” the CPGB - as if anyone other than a witch-hunting bureaucrat could have made such a ridiculous charge on the basis of anything comrade Crouch had written.

But then the SWP employs and is led by witch-hunting bureaucrats.