11.07.2007
Three faces of SWP
Phil Kent on how the SWP puts on different hats for different purposes
Marxism 2007 presented, as usual, the different faces of the SWP. To mention only three of the meetings I attended, they each represented different experiences.
Iain Ferguson addressed an absolutely packed session on the 'Mental health, equality and the "science of happiness"'. Apparently a theory is gaining ground that if you are depressed it is because you are viewing the world from the wrong standpoint (I would not deny that this could be the cause of unhappiness in some people).
Such a notion is attractive to health bureaucrats and the government for cynical reasons: namely, it allows for the cheaper treatment options; and it puts the blame for mental illness on the mentally ill rather than on the stressful conditions that people, especially poorer people, have to endure in our alienated society. It provides an excuse to cut access to more expensive but possibly more appropriate treatments. In this session SWP speakers from the floor came across as concerned and caring people.
The second example was Paul McGarr's cogent exposition of Marxist historical materialism and our dialectical relationship with nature. I especially liked a contribution from the floor arguing that the arts could be grounded on dialectical materialism too and that our deepest feelings directly unite us with nature. The speaker was just about to move on to Wilhelm Reich's theory of orgonomy - and those moments of experience between ecstasy and insanity when we feel directly 'linked to the cosmos' - when his time ran out. Certainly no fear here of driving ideas to their limits. Later comrade McGarr gave a number of more orthodox examples of our spiritual relationship with nature. I left thinking that science could make us responsible masters of the earth, but it will also need spiritual excitement for a co-evolutionary future.
'The fight or gay liberation in the Middle East' was a curious fish. Islam, we were told, does not get its anti-gay prejudices from muslim religious teachings, but principally as a result of British and French colonial oppression. For example, there were at one time lots of gay brothels in the Middle East (although in my view they were primarily an example of poor boys being exploited by rich men rather than an of gay liberation).
On this question, as with so many others, the SWP's approach is coloured by its theoretical dogma and the method of scientific enquiry falls by the wayside. There was no attempt to explain why, if the west has historically been prone to homophobia and muslim radicals are rejecting western values, homophobia is growing in the Middle East and starting to be officially countered in imperialist powers like Britain.