Letters

Fellowship

On Saturday, the weekend before the National Conference of the Socialist Workers Party, a long-standing member continued his take on the party, penning some thoughts on leadership. But this time the tone was decidedly different, regrettably sadder. Early on in his piece he gave notice: “I will be writing more, over the next weeks, about the years I have spent in the SWP.” Unlike with the former national secretary, Martin Smith, here we may be offered an extended swansong.

What struck me was that this accursed blogger pitched his discussion in terms of how leadership can be conceived. Unfortunately he only considered one conception, but I thank him for motivating me to develop some inchoate ideas I have been living with. What’s necessarily involved in leadership? What makes a good follower? Is there anything else involved in successful practice other than leaders and followers? Why has socialist discourse, perhaps especially since 1914, always stressed how crucial leadership is? And what is lost with that approach, what dangers does it carry?

To put my conclusion first: we need to speak readily not simply of leadership, nor even of leadership-followership, but leadership-followership-fellowship, with the last-mentioned being the condition sustaining the very possibility of a healthy relationship between the other two.

Although I’m probably treating fellowship as a synonym of comradeship, given the perverse contortions the term ‘comradeship’ has been twisted into, let alone the people themselves, I find it somewhat liberating to use a different word, if only to try and think about all this in a new light, and so hopefully in a more productive way.

So I ask the reader to focus on what ‘fellowship’ denotes here. Although it may seem matey, pretty male, strictly speaking it’s neutral, unlike ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’. For those who know their history, the USA had socialist fellowship organisations from the end of the 19th century, and in Britain the Lawrence-Healy group split from the Revolutionary Communist Party, entered the Labour Party, and was at the birth of Socialist Fellowship, co-founded by Fenner Brockway and Ellis Smith.

Returning to our triad, any element, on its own, is one-sided. (For those who must, then, call this non-dialectical.) I think that not just recent history shows that an undue stress on leadership - and its obverse, obedience - is corrosive, demoralising, ultimately destructive, necessarily infantilising the membership, rendering them passive, stunting their development, and preventing some of them growing into a possible alternative leadership.

It should be noted in passing that, be it management trainers or party trainers, there are always leadership schools, never followership schools or fellowship schools. It seems genius has to be cultivated, but being a drone comes with the genes. And don’t even think about a comradeship school - who do you think we are, revolutionary socialists or something?

Moving on, a conceptual improvement on considering just one element is to investigate the leadership-followership relation. This, at least, admits the possibility of reciprocal determination. So instead of an all-knowing, all-seeing view from the top table, supping claret with Archimedes, we can envisage that the followers may themselves come up with interesting and seemingly useful ideas, that can be tested, thereby taking the lead themselves.

But I suggest that something more is needed: the recognition of the force of fellowship, its powers and susceptibilities, the virtuous possibilities within it, bringing alive, bringing health to what too often is a mechanical, top-down relationship between leaders and followers. The living of fellowship, rather than just followership, is enlivening, it’s invigorating, it excites, it can even bring warmth and joy into our political work. And how often do we hear that kind of talk or feel those emotions?

The reason why fellowship adds a spark is because it gives ontic depth to the living of the followership-leadership relation: its recognition allows us to get away from a flat ontology (Roy Bhaskar). When members are organised not just as leaders, as followers and by the leadership-followership relation, so that sometimes they lead, other times they follow, but are also organised in and through fellowship, then the affective bonds between members improve their quality of life, including their political work.

Fellowship helps sustain a healthy followership-leadership relation, not least by encouraging sanity in the organisation (no small feat), realistic expectations, a sensible pace of working, reducing the chances of burn-out, raising the ‘retention’ rate, accepting that one can be a life-long militant and vary the intensity of involvement without experiencing shame and guilt, and in general lead a balanced life that doesn’t harm physical and mental health.

So it would set off the loudest alarm bells if some ruler of an office, a bureaucrat completely off her head, were to declare in a party bulletin that in the upcoming debate one side would have 40 minutes and the other 17. How could a fellow treat their fellow member in such an inegalitarian way? It would strike everyone as madness, pure and simple. It wouldn’t be accepted in the workplace, or the union branch, so why would it be acceptable within the party? Sheer madness, nothing less. That comrade would end up being voted off the central committee; in a healthy party it would have led to social death.

I’ll finish by speaking to the principle of limited terms of office. I’ve always respected Julius Nyerere for not dying in office, but stepping down. Even the US presidency is limited to two terms. But British revo soc organisations? Peter Taaffe: 49 years and counting; Sean Matgamna: 47 years and counting; Alex C, those that are to come ...

Does it really have to be this way? Well, no. Left Unity at its founding conference decided to have in its constitution term limits for occupants of nationally elected posts: “No member may hold a nationally elected post within the party for more than three consecutive years, following which s/he may not stand for election to that post for two years” (clause 4b, page 2).

That’s an example of fellowship, supervening above the leadership-followership relation, mediating it even perhaps beyond the immediate co-interests of leaders and followers. This clause means that Left Unity has to continually produce people with ideas and confidence adequate to the task. There are no guarantees that this strategy will succeed, but it is a bold attempt to give fellowship a chance, and by thinking through how it can be involved at all times in our work it will necessitate us changing our organisational forms, our norms of behaviour, even our expectations of one another.

Fellowship
Fellowship

Gag rule

In the various reports in your paper (December 5) on the recent founding conference of what is, and was already, Left Unity, it is reported that the so-called ‘safe spaces’ policy has been remitted.

It would seem then that Left Unity has no disciplinary process, should any problems arise, other than the informal resort to requesting the leadership body to arbitrate. In point of fact, this is not the case and the ‘safe spaces’ policy remains in full force and is being used to exclude comrades thought doctrinally lacking by those administering it.

That the policy has the potential to be used by those motivated by factional enmities is already apparent, in that individuals administering the policy are leading members of the Left Party Platform. That at least one such person also works closely with the police and has a partner who boasts on his Facebook page of liking porn is worrisome to say the least.

Given that there is a gag rule contained in the ‘safe spaces’ policy, I must again request anonymity for fear of further sanctions.

Gag rule
Gag rule

Distorters

In opposing the reformist ‘aims’ agreed at the LU conference, I didn’t say they stood in contradiction to “the Left Party Platform”, but to “socialism” (‘Making a safe space for left ideas’, December 5). Why must you distort things in this way?

What’s more, if Peter Manson thinks the Class Struggle Platform proposes nothing but immediate demands, he should read the whole thing (available on the Left Unity website) rather than the truncated version (who decided it should be edited down?) that appeared in the conference papers on the day.

Distorters
Distorters

Only for leaders

Can someone please clarify to me why “the stipulation that meetings of such caucuses should be open to all members” is “undemocratic”?

This is a dividing line between a tendency and a faction, and to me it’s enough that both Marx and traditional bourgeois politics all around frowned on ‘hidden factions’ and factionalism (not just the Bolsheviks). Secret caucus meetings should be a no-go, except for the executive committee - and even then for the most pressing and relevant matters only.

Only for leaders
Only for leaders

Wealth gap

Nelson Mandela was a very inspirational and courageous figure. He suffered so much in jail on Robben Island, enduring decades of hard labour, but refused to be broken by the evil apartheid regime. He did so much to force the regime to introduce democracy in South Africa.

The regime didn’t concede defeat out of the goodness of their hearts - it cannot be denied (whatever the mainstream media will say) that it was due to the actions of ordinary (mainly working class) people in South Africa and their allies around the world.

Obvious factors were the extremely courageous actions of black youths in Sharpeville and Soweto, brutally massacred by the regime, and the effect those massacres had on mobilising international opinion into boycotting South African goods and companies like Barclays Bank, which were propping up apartheid.

Less obvious, except perhaps to people in South Africa itself, was black, white and ‘coloured’ workers uniting in trade unions, with perhaps the possibility of general strikes (via ‘dual power’) leading to socialist revolution, forcing the regime to release Mandela and end apartheid. Their prime motive was to preserve capitalism and their own wealth, and so far that has been successful.

This was the position of the organisation I was a member of at the time (the Militant Tendency, now Socialist Party) and the South African organisation it was linked to via the Committee for a Workers’ International (the Marxist Workers Tendency of the African National Congress, now the Democratic Socialist Movement). The DSM has played a leading role in forming, in conjunction with some of the surviving miners, a new political party - the Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp). They have an obituary to Nelson Mandela on their website, which is well worth reading.

It should not be forgotten that Margaret Thatcher called Nelson Mandela, when he was languishing in jail, a “terrorist”. One report on British TV said that in an opinion poll within South Africa nine out of 10 white people said the same thing about him. The racist mainstream media in that country didn’t want to acknowledge that he was actually a lawyer (perhaps they didn’t want the idea that black people could be intelligent enough to qualify in that field!) But the so-called South African Communist Party, that had and still has strong links with the ANC, has certainly not proved revolutionary despite the Tories being concerned about “communists”!

Unfortunately, for many of the poor masses in South Africa, little has changed since apartheid (there are still shanty towns) and disillusionment in the ANC is rampant - particularly after their support for the massacre of 34 striking Marikana miners last year. The ANC is mired in corruption and big business still runs the country, albeit with some black bosses rather than them all being white, as in the apartheid era. There is a massive gap in wealth between rich and poor, and white people own most of the farms as well as businesses (which is ominous considering what has happened in Zimbabwe).

We had a minute’s silence for Nelson Mandela and for others fighting (or who had fought) injustice around the world at an anti-fracking protest in Salford on Sunday. Whereas some of our political views may differ, we quite often (at least) recognise when someone with quite different views is an ally in our fight against mutual enemies.

Wealth gap
Wealth gap

Crackpots

I see that the Weekly Worker (sic) has once again been trawling quotes of mine in some earnest attempt to make a point. The fake CPGB has existed in some form or another for - what? - 30 years? I can certainly remember rubbing unfraternal shoulders with ‘Mark Fischer’ in the real Young Communist League in the mid-1980s.

He has given his entire adult life to an organisation which has never managed to muster more than 50 members. I’m familiar with the notion of the ‘primitive accumulation of cadre’, but 50 members to show for 30 years? Primitive? That’s positively prehistoric.

Yet the same rhetoric masquerading as politics is churned out week after week. If only the rest of the left would listen to and be led by this crackpot, failed outfit, the left would be on the road to … somewhere or other. I’m not that bothered, to be honest. Your irrelevancy speaks for itself. But, when you drag my name into it, this becomes kinda personal. Grow up and account for your own magnificent failure.

Crackpots
Crackpots

Xmas sacking

Following the chancellor’s autumn statement, Santa and his elves will be coming to Middlesbrough town centre with presents from the government for the good boys and girls of Teesside. As we’re all in this together, there’ll be a sack of presents for hard-working people and a sack of presents for rich people.

Come along and join us in celebrating the season of austerity. We’ll be meeting up in the main foyer of Middlesbrough bus station at 10.30am on Saturday December 14 and bringing the government’s festive sneer to various locations around the town centre, accompanied by some topical carol singing. Festive attire is strongly encouraged. Wear your Christmas jumper with pride.

Our protest is being organised in support of the People’s Assembly ‘Can you afford Christmas?’ day of action on December 14, highlighting the impact of the government’s vicious cuts programme on living standards.

For further details of this action and information on our activities more generally, please check out the Teesside People’s Assembly blog at www.TeessidePA.tumblr.com.

Xmas sacking
Xmas sacking

Tables turned

Reports have emerged of Sussex Autonomous Students (sussexasn.tumblr.com) literally turning the tables of the SWP when it tried to run a stall at a demo last week. This is not a way to conduct serious politics and not something to support.

Can we be surprised that this is happening though, with the mishandling of the ‘Delta’ fiasco, other political criticism or the thuggery at some Marxism festivals? Alex Callinicos threatened “lynch mobs” earlier this year, and it looks like they’ve now arrived.

Tables turned
Tables turned

Irreconcilable

In ‘His side is winning the class struggle’, Hillel Ticktin writes: “So the question that concerns us is not whether either of these two policies is ‘right’ from the standpoint of the ruling class, but what is likely to happen” (December 5). This dichotomy between action and interest is alien to materialist analysis, which must always use ruling class interest as an important long-term clue to its policies. A materialist analysis is required for why capitalism chooses not to use its Keynesian toolbox.

The missing explanatory component concerns relations within the big bourgeoisie; the significance of the right-populist epithet, ‘crony capitalism’, has gone unrecognised. The bourgeoisie depends on commodity fetishism not only for obfuscation, but to coordinate as a class, and the paralysing divisions of the ruling class (at least in the US) are products of the intervention of the state. The intervention the ruling class needs to restabilise economically destabilises it politically, by creating irreconcilable differences within the class.

Maintaining class solidarity is a vital part of what policy “is ‘right’ from the standpoint of the ruling class” (see my article, ‘Capitalism and socialism express conflicting reciprocity norms: a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of capitalist decline’, on the Juridical Coherence website - http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.co.uk).

Irreconcilable
Irreconcilable