31.03.2010
SWPism without the SWP
Mark Fischer looks at the new project of Lindsey German and John Rees
Counterfire is the post-Socialist Workers Party project of comrades associated with the short-lived SWP faction, Left Platform. It is headed by former SWP leaders John Rees and Lindsey German and organised around a presentable website (www.counterfire.org).
Blog commentators such as Liam Mac Uaid have remarked favourably on the relative dynamism of the new online package - “the savvy new kid on the block”, as he dubs it (liammacuaid.wordpress.com, March 8 posting). Now, politically, this probably reflects such comrades’ befuddled politics more than anything else. However, it must be said that the site compares well with many others in terms of its sense of energy (including, let me just add before someone shoots off a sarky letter, our own rather messy interim site, hurriedly established in the aftermath of a hacking attack on us, but now long overdue for a proper redesign). In comparative terms, Counterfire looks and operates pretty smoothly. Much of the rest of the left’s web presence is - appropriately enough, given its nature - tired, amateurish and bereft of vision.
So some talented people are clearly involved and a certain amount of energy is on display (the election of Counterfire supporter Clare Solomon as the president of the University of London Union did its profile no harm either). Its launch press release tells us that it is composed of a “60-strong team, including an investigations team, an industrial unit, arts reviews and peer-reviewed publications”. Elsewhere on the site, the project is more precisely delineated as “a news and theory website from the movements, for the movements” - participants in said movements are invited to “send news, reports, events, photos or videos” for inclusion.
The Counterfire team obviously also have an eye on opportunities for mainstream media exposure; something that has led some to dub them an ‘RCP mark two’ (inaccurately in my view - see below). In its dedicated press area we are confidently informed that “Counterfire contributors can offer expertise on major socio-political themes and events, including the economic crisis, imperialism and war, anti-fascism and women’s rights. They are available for interviews, commissions and quotes and are sensitive to the needs of 24-hour news.”
Feeling in need of some expertise from the comrades, we actually approached the affable press officer for the group, Brendan Montague, to arrange an interview with the Weekly Worker. He came back to us with this:
“I put it to the editorial board and this was the response: ‘The EB of Counterfire is concentrating all its efforts on relating to new activists and those positively engaged in the movements. Counterfire aims to present left politics to the wider world in the best possible light’” (text message, March 24). Which, in case anyone missed it, is a ‘no’.
Of course, the very existence of Counterfire, the sadly familiar ‘squeaky-clean’ nature of its birth and the face it presents to the movement confirm once again that what our paper has written about this period is spot on. Narrow, sectarian exclusiveness has been reinforced following the shipwreck of the various unity projects of the last 15 years or so. Counterfire is yet another product of that process of decline, not a break from it.
Thus, blandly evasive though it is in many ways, we can dissect the reply above and lay bare the sect anatomy it shares with its parent body and much of the rest of the left.
The comrades tell us they are “concentrating all [their] efforts on relating to new activists” (my emphasis). So Counterfire continues the ignoble tradition of its SWP parent in its contemptuous attitude towards other organised trends of thought in the movement. Whatever else it intends to expend its energies on, it is not aiming at the clarification and refinement of political perspectives through a dialogue with what could be broadly categorised as advanced sections of the working class movement. The implication is that it will look to replicate the distasteful manipulation of the new and naive, particularly youth, that is such a foul aspect of the left’s culture.
In keeping with this, it presents itself as a left political initiative that has seemingly dropped from the skies. You will look in vain on its website for mention of the struggles in the SWP that shaped it, the political histories of the leading personalities outside of their involvement in “the movements”, or a balance sheet of the involvement with Respect and failures of the SWP leadership. There is no accounting for why these comrades felt it was imperative to add to an already rather crowded market place of left groups.
In addition to those “new activists”, Counterfire will also address itself to those “positively engaged in the movements” as part of an endeavour “to present left politics to the wider world in the best possible light”. Again, anyone familiar with SWP-speak will see the meaning here. Being ‘positive’ for apparatchiks of Counterfire’s parent body means blind activism that does not trouble itself to reflect critically on the reasons for weaknesses or failures, but instead moves on to the job of building the next demo, the next rally, etc. Indeed, conceding that weaknesses or failures might even exist is regarded as a form of passive sabotage of that all-important next event. (For a fresh example of this sort of bureaucratic cretinism, see the SWP leadership’s insistence that the March 20 Unite Against Fascism debacle in Bolton was a success and now the task is simply to build for a rerun in Dudley on April 3).
Of course, for comrades like German and Rees - deeply implicated in this style of cynically manipulative, top-down politics in their time in the SWP - the epitome of a negative approach in the movement was (and clearly still is) the Weekly Worker. Our insistence on a detailed examination of all the glaring problems of the movement invokes a reaction in these comrades not dissimilar to count Dracula being confronted by Van Helsing. No-one lost any bets in the CPGB office when our interview request was rejected ...
So there are strong elements of political and cultural continuity with the SWP in the Counterfire initiative, despite its sexier packaging. These make the group a less attractive prospect for those with a critical approach and some experience in the movement - but then these are the hardly the types Rees, German and co are in business to draw in.
The real problem for this small group will be the question of political coherence. We have made the point that the political differences dividing the Left Platform faction from the majority of the SWP leadership were virtually miscroscopic. The ingrained method of the SWP over decades has been the endless struggle to build itself by adapting, chameleon-like, to the milieu in which it hopes to recruit newly radicalising militants and youth. Of course, this can produce quite farcical episodes. Many CPGB comrades remember with fondness the early ‘noughties’, when you would see SWPers one day acting like anarchists in some anti-capitalist mobilisation on the streets of a European city, then back in Blighty see the selfsame comrades behaving like timid electoralist Labourites in the Socialist Alliance.
It also produces political strains in an organisation such as the SWP - or Counterfire, come to that. Neither are centralised round a common programme that is fought for, tested and recalibrated in a (sometimes fierce) process of engagement and conflict with advanced layers of the class. Such an approach is an anathema to the political tradition of Cliffism that both the SWP and Counterfire lay claim to. Instead, centralised unity in the SWP was achieved round campaigns that are hoped will provide quick access to easy recruits. As a result, tactical courses of action that would not be counterposed (subject to resources) for any organisation defined by programme are counterposed for the SWP and will be for Counterfire.
The SWP - despite its myriad splits and lower-level desertions - has survived thanks to two features that are not available to the Reesites’ far more modest project.
One, potential tensions are resolved by the organisation as a whole turning to ‘anti-war work’, ‘Respect work’, ‘anti-fascist work’ or whatever. It was noticeable, for instance, that the SWP was all but absent from other events on March 20, as everything mobilisable was pulled to Bolton to confront the English Defence League (or rather, the riot police).
Second, there is the apparatus. The SWP’s cohering factor since the mid-1970s has been a fetishised ‘partyism’ - the operation of a relatively large, bureaucratised apparatus designed to recruit new generations, chew ’em up and spit out the bulk. Within this, people were taught a version of ‘Marxism’ as a cohering ideology for the sect itself, not as a method for orientating the movement as a whole, still less holding its leadership to account. This could never build the sort of genuine mass party our class needs - but it could provide a certain organisational anchorage for SWPers, as they espoused politics other than Marxism (it has sometimes seemed almost any politics other than Marxism) in various campaigns and ‘united fronts’.
With this in mind, one way to look at Counterfire would be as SWPism without the SWP. By definition, such a formation will be far more prone to death by dissolution, as its “60-strong team” lose themselves in the politics of the ‘movements’ they orientate to (given the tensions of sect-life and the growing contradictions of its collective ‘group think’, the SWP’s death is perhaps more likely to be by detonation).
Thus, the front page of the Counterfire website is certainly lively and impressive in the range of issues tackled, but it also conveys a lack of focus - the absence of any central message other than ‘Be active! Protest!’ There are more substantial theoretical pieces, of course, but no ‘joined-up thinking’ between the two.
So what exactly, at the end of the day, is this project? How is this activism linked to a realistic strategy for changing the world? Other than getting active in a campaign and reading Counterfire, what should people actually do?
Lastly, on the possibility of the Reesites ‘doing an RCP’ - that is, emulating the (once) bright young things of Frank Furedi’s defunct Revolutionary Communist Party and reconfiguring themselves into a trend of opinion within the bourgeois media, as opposed to the workers’ movement, some in our organisation have not dismissed their chances.
The anti-war movement allowed comrades like German, Rees and Chris Nineham to access good contacts globally. They have the kudos of having led that mass movement in the first place, of course. They are no geniuses - but they are no fools either. Given the stale and banal nature of much of what passes as commentary in the mainstream media, they may serve a purpose to spice up the odd documentary or panel show here and there, much like some ex-RCPers (now organised around the Spiked website - www.spiked-online.com).
We shall see. A problem for Counterfire will be that the views of its supporters - unlike the Spiked crew - are mostly standard lefty fare and lack the edginess the media may be looking for. On issues such as multiculturalism, the Iraq war or ecology, for instance, the views of the Counterfire comrades - just like SWPers - are not clearly differentiated from those of pretty mainstream left liberal opinion. Apart, perhaps, from their shrillness.
Whether the BBC will think that is money well spent remains to be seen.