18.07.2013

Not taking into account the specific conditions

Another session on Leninism, another show-down. Sarah McDonald was there

There were certain sessions at Marxism 2013 where the Socialist Workers Party’s internal crisis was likely to rise to the surface. The discerning attendee needed only look for the sessions under ‘Leninism in the 21st century’ to infer ‘SWP leadership versus opposition’.

The panel debate between Paul Le Blanc, SWP central committee member Esme Choonara and social-imperialist Gilbert Achcar on ‘How should socialists organise?’ was no exception. The 600-700 comrades shuffling into the packed hall in the oppressive heat would have had an inkling that things were only going to get hotter (except for the poor woman next to me, who had planned to go to a ‘How to fight the fash while defending the NHS’ type session, but had accidentally ended up in the wrong meeting).

First to speak was comrade Le Blanc, who meandered around the subject in his 12 minutes. Interestingly, he did not shy away from commenting on the SWP’s crisis, though his criticisms were characteristically of a very diplomatic nature. He commented that he does not regard any current organisation on the left as ‘the revolutionary party’, or even the revolutionary party in embryo. Comrade Le Blanc seems to feel that the SWP’s behaviour in acting as though it were the party might have contributed to the current crisis. He also mentioned the need for programme - as this is something the SWP notoriously does not have, it could be inferred that he thinks this is a problem, allowing it to flip unaccountably from opportunist position to opportunist position.

He ended a lot more candidly, commenting that the working class is now clearly different from how it was at the beginning of the 20th century, so we have to think about how we apply Leninism today. We still need democratic centralism - and that means facilitating debate within our organisations. The concern is now that, instead of revolutionary organisations coming together, we have a situation where they are coming apart.

Esme Choonara chose to mostly ignore what everyone else was thinking about for her 12 minutes. We got the usual ‘uprisings, Egypt and austerity’ that we have come to expect from the SWP when confronted by its internal crisis. Then she talked about Left Unity as a radical, left-reformist organisation that is nonetheless welcome in raising people’s consciousness - it is not the answer though, because the SWP obviously is, as the revolutionary party in waiting. She questioned the idea posed by comrade Le Blanc, that the party does not exist, even in embryonic form, but only with the comment: “I think we’re a pretty lively bunch of people” (if only the membership would stick to being lively in areas where the CC instructs them to be and stop this pesky internet nonsense).

Comrade Choonara ended with a defence of SWP-style democratic centralism. Permanent factions stop the party from being effective, as comrades will always be loyal to their faction over and above ‘the party’. In her closing remarks she cited the Scottish Socialist Party (incidentally, not a democratic-centralist organisation) as a prime example of this. One could easily make the counter-argument by referencing the Bolshevik Party. And Gilbert Achcar did.

Achcar did not pull his punches. He said that “the need for unity in action” was a false debate and that no-one on the panel would dispute this. He viewed Left Unity (a project he is currently involved with) as a place where revolutionaries can work and to present it as “left reformist” is sectarian. I agree with comrade Choonara on this point: LU’s politics are clearly left-reformist, with their odd, sepia-coloured nostalgia for the post-war era, but it does provide a site in which comrades can at least get together - something that has been missing on the left in Britain in any meaningful way for several years now.

Achcar correctly noted that the destruction of the SWP would represent a major setback and that it needs to act to avoid self-destruction. He argued that the SWP reduces Leninism to democratic centralism (in fact it misunderstands democratic centralism and imposes its own bureaucratic centralism). He commented that the current SWP was less democratic than the pre-1917 Bolsheviks, who were operating under considerably more difficult circumstances. In this country, at this time, the left can go about its business legally, without fear of being sent to Siberia, yet in the absence of such conditions the Bolsheviks had open factions and expressed sharp disagreements in public. By contrast, the SWP had suspended four of its members for publishing a blog (or was it the heinous crime of opening a bank account?). Achcar asked, “Are you in civil war here?” He said, nodding in the direction of Alex Callinicos, who was sitting in the front row, that he had predicted the current crisis to the comrade years ago and now it is here. Achcar is right: we are not operating in civil war conditions, but there is a civil war being fought out in the SWP.

I managed to get in as the first speaker from the floor, and hopefully my contribution helped stop SWP loyalists from avoiding the argument and talking instead about Egypt, Greece or the bedroom tax (well, for the most part, at least). I argued that the SWP must adopt genuine democratic centralism if it is to come out of this crisis without destroying itself. That it does not mean “democracy for three months, centralism for nine”. That instead it must allow permanent factions to operate within its ranks, to organise, to publish independently in print and online and that room should be made within its publications for opposing views to be debated. After all, surely as Marxists we believe that the working class is the class tasked with the liberation of humanity. That the working class must emancipate itself and that if we as Marxists are the most conscious part of that class, it is not our job to lie to or patronise. Debates should be had openly and honestly in front of the class, rather than remain hidden away for fear that it would be ‘confusing’ or irrelevant to ‘ordinary workers’. The same ‘ordinary workers’ could read about the SWP’s internal crisis in the Daily Mail, The Guardian or on the BBC website, but not in Socialist Worker. In terms of the impact upon the SWP’s own members, I argued that, rather than debate being a distraction from going out and fighting the class struggle, to argue out your politics openly and sometimes very sharply with your own comrades makes for better, more hardened, more articulate, more intelligent cadre.

During the course of the debate the SWP leadership’s treatment of its opposition was the main theme. While mostly loyalists spoke, oppositionists too came in on the discussion. The crisis facing not just the organisation, but individual members, was all too evident. As was true of this year’s Marxism in general, there was a lot of pent-up emotion, with comrades on both sides clearly suffering from the experience. Understandably given that comrades put so much of their lives into politics and their organisations, no-one should take what is happening lightly or with any sense of Schadenfreude.

Alex Callinicos got the last word in from the floor. He said that if he has learned anything from this it is that he is more opposed to permanent factions now than he was a year ago. In which case, evidently, he has learned nothing.