18.07.2013

ISNetwork: Entropy, therapy and eclecticism

The International Socialist Network is still trapped by SWP politics, argues Harley Filben

Given all the excitement at Marxism this year, it was almost easy to miss the presence of the direct product of the Socialist Workers Party’s last bout of internal upheaval - the International Socialist Network, which split off after the ‘conference of a special type’ in March.

As a faction, the Democratic Renewal Platform, the core of today’s ISN, was characterised by relative hardness. The faction was launched off the back of scathing public criticism from Richard Seymour and others; they were the oppositionists who indulged least of all the fantasy of a sensible, unity-saving compromise with the leadership (although they ultimately capitulated to the strictures of fighting alongside the ‘softer’ opposition too).

Hardness is not their most obvious attribute now that the comrades have emerged into the harsh light of the outside world, however. The ISN’s appearance at Marxism gave the rest of us an opportunity to see how the new organisation is shaping up, and it is proving to be pretty amorphous.

First of all, it is worth noting that the comrades might have decided not to come at all. Such was the judgement of the first leadership meeting several months ago - an indicative vote decided against showing up at Marxism, only to be overturned at the next (along with one or two other decisions). Behind this lie different opinions on how much the new organisation owes the old, and their erstwhile comrades in opposition in particular. Is the ISN inside the ‘International Socialist tradition’ or out of it? Is it Leninist or ‘libertarian’? It really depends on who you ask.

The ISN held two fringe meetings. The first was on ‘Feminism and the left’, and lined up a series of people - including a couple of current SWP members, ISN members and the unavoidable Laurie Penny - to argue that the left has an underbelly of terrible sexism and for the adoption of feminism tout court. One speaker, Aamna Mohdin, expressed herself in the form of a kind of prose poem, a series of statements starting with the phrase “Rape culture is ...” (and unfortunately not ending with ‘... an unhelpful conceptual framework for understanding the causes and consequences of violence against women’). This was met with wild whooping from Laurie Penny and cheering from the 40 or so people crammed into the shoebox-sized, swelteringly hot Jeremy Bentham pub and about the same number listening via a speaker on the forecourt outside.

Less physically gruelling was the following day’s meeting, taking place on the lawn outside Birkbeck College. It was a more or less informal discussion of the potential for left realignment and regroupment, with probably 40 to 50 comrades present at one time or another - apart from the ISN, there were four members and supporters of the CPGB, half a dozen from Workers Power and a smattering of others. Ahmed Shawki and Paul Le Blanc of the American International Socialist Organization were also present, mostly observing from a distance.

Among these others were Simon Hardy and Luke Cooper of the Anti-Capitalist Initiative and Liam Mac Uaid of Socialist Resistance, and the discussion was in a sense an extension of fraternal talks between SR, the ACI and the ISN, which have been taking place recently. Again, ISN members present seemed to have very different ideas about what regroupment means - for Paris Thompson, one of the infamous Facebook Four expelled by the SWP for not forming a pre-conference faction late last year, it was the first step on the road to “a mass Communist Party with a Marxist programme”, an aim we obviously share.

A young comrade from Bristol, Sam, seemed much less enthusiastic. He feared that the talks would lead to SR hegemony, since the latter has an “apparatus” unlike the ISN or ACI - instead, we should aim for a “confederation” in which diverse groups, from anarchists to Trotskyists, to anyone else, could unite around non-specific activities.

Most contributions from younger ISN comrades (ie, that part of their membership that came out of the recent split) veered between these poles, often in the same speech. Comrade Hannah from Sussex was quite clear that the split was not made necessary by the ‘comrade Delta’ rape charge in itself - after all, there would always be more rapists, and we did not want to end up spending all our time as “detectives”. If the SWP had opened up and started producing a monthly discussion bulletin, say, she would have stayed in. On the other hand, not being caught up in the SWP machine left her freer to contribute to activities that she joined the SWP to do, such as the recent Sussex University occupation, and now she would not join a ‘party’ organisation again.

CPGB comrades - as well as some of our more hidebound Trotskyist comrades in WP and the International Bolshevik Tendency - did our level best to cut against the anti-partyism on display, but what was remarkable was how resistant ISN and ACI types were to actually responding to these arguments; taken together, we added up to a significant minority of the meeting, and most of us spoke. The tone was consensual rather than discursive, and I suppose we were all left to conclude we would have a jolly good time together building Left Unity (enthusiasm for Kate Hudson’s and Andrew Burgin’s latest wheeze seems to be almost the only point of commonality among the ISN).

This was frustrating, and may have been especially so for Workers Power comrades. WP has been invited to the regroupment discussions by the ISN, and is keen on wider participation from different revolutionary groups, but SR is blocking that. The wildly different levels of enthusiasm for this little initiative within the ISN does not augur well for WP - after all, given the previous levels of consistency, it may find its invitation to participate rescinded at the next leadership meeting, depending on who bothers to turn up.

Some older ISN heads - previous generations of SWP expellees, mostly - also piped up, but often talked like slightly more grounded SWPers of the standard type. Ben Watson had attended the opening rally at Marxism, and liked the cut of Jerry Hicks’s jib. Keith Fisher was sceptical of grandiose programmatic proclamations - like Tony Cliff before him, and Alex Callinicos today. An older comrade, John, spoke of how traumatised he was to be expelled from the American ISO, and how cathartic it was to have found the ISN - there was a slightly ‘group therapy’ feel to some of these activities (the collective elation at the ‘Rape culture is ...’ speech being a case in point).

The ISN has the real problem - which, alas, many of its members consider a virtue - of having almost no coherence whatsoever. This is a problem which inevitably follows from the circumstances that gave it birth: the spectacular implosion of a comically bureaucratic group. Factional struggles tend to cohere around what dissidents oppose, rather than what they support - all the more so, when internal polemic is circumscribed in the parent organisation. The question ‘What now?’ hangs over the comrades.

Asking that question is a liberating experience for especially the younger comrades, who have always had sensible elders like Weyman Bennett to answer it on their behalf. It can quickly come to feel like an albatross, however.

This situation is, again, inevitable - it is not inevitable that it should end in dissipation and a drift back into mainstream society. It is difficult, however, not to see the centrifugal forces at work here, not least due to the fact that the comrades are asking that question - ‘What now?’ - in the wrong way. What looms largest for them is the entirely natural instinct of any radical to get stuck in and make an impact on society. This is an instinct that a serious Marxist organisation would temper by emphasising the need for long-term planning, strategic thinking and (hardest of all) a sobering look at the balance of forces before plunging into the fray; with theoretical education and the patient transformation of members into leaders. The SWP is not such an organisation, and has encouraged instead a breathless desire for constant mobilisation. Untempered steel shatters at the first heavy blow.

So the biggest weakness of the ISN is not that it is not clear what it stands for just yet, but that its comrades are unwilling to take the time out to give that some serious thought, and work out what - if anything - unites them beyond having once been members of the SWP. They have scurried into Left Unity, but hardly act as a coherent bloc within it.

They may have entered into ‘regroupment talks’ with SR and the ACI, but it is patently obvious that the level of enthusiasm for such talks varies wildly. The biggest obstacle to such regroupment is that the ISN has not yet regrouped with itself; the ACI, equally, is divided on the question (and the semi-presence of WP further complicates the matter). If things continue as they are going, the net result will be, at best, a slightly bigger SR. Yes, after all, it has an apparatus - and, more importantly, some kind of historically constituted political coherence.

In this situation, the negative criticisms of the SWP become positive political proposals via the line of least resistance. The manifold failures around the Delta case are to be dealt with by opening up to ‘feminism’, and specifically to the ‘loudest’ form of feminism, the presently fashionable, but intellectually moribund ‘rape culture’ ideology. If we are sufficiently disgusted by rape culture, then that amounts to - as more recent oppositionists in the SWP put it - “putting our politics on women’s oppression into practice”.

Yet the Delta case is almost the worst possible lens through which to observe the SWP’s failings on the women’s question. That disputes committee would have ‘acquitted’ the comrade of anything: from murder down to embezzling £50 for a gram of cocaine. It tells you nothing about the SWP’s supposed ‘sexism’. On the other hand, the SWP advocated, not long ago, a vote for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - a call enthusiastically defended by ISN leading light Richard Seymour when it was made. If I were a mischief-maker, I would suggest the following proposition to his comrade, Aamna Mohdin: rape culture is calling for a vote for organisations that legitimise marital rape and domestic violence, purely because it happens to be politically convenient at the time ...

Hatred of the SWP’s bureaucratic internal norms becomes advocacy of horizontalism, networkism and liquidationism. The heritage of Bolshevism can be rejected either on the spurious basis that it is inherently undemocratic, or on a superficial analysis that it is ‘outdated’ in the age of Twitter and the precariat. Both notions are easier to arrive at than a genuine historical analysis of the revolutionary movement, which offers no quick, clean solutions and takes time. It requires, in fact, time out of head-banging activism, and a willingness to re-examine the exaltation of that activism by the likes of the SWP.

The conclusion is simple - having broken acrimoniously with the SWP, the ISN is still completely trapped in the broader headspace of SWP politics. Behind the latter’s bureaucratic regime of hyper-mobilisation and the priestly liturgy of state-capitalism/permanent arms economy/deflected permanent revolution, there has always been a void filled with basically liberal moral outrage at the obscenity of capitalist life. Now that the ISN comrades have taken themselves outside the regime, there is a good deal less separating them from their outrage. It will lead only to further fragmentation.