By Alex Callinicos, from SWP pre-confernce Internal Bulletin #4
The Socialist Workers Party is currently facing a double challenge – to come to terms with the damage caused by the collapse of Respect and to reorient in the face of what appears to be the most serious economic crisis the capitalist system has faced since the 1930s. Not surprisingly, the result has been a vigorous and many-sided debate on a variety of different though largely inter-connected issues. This is nothing to be afraid of – indeed, some of us might say that this is what the party has needed for years. Conducted in a responsible and comradely way, this debate can strengthen the party.
John Rees certainly has a very powerful claim to have his voice heard in this debate. He was a major protagonist in the Respect crisis. He was consistently advocated a strategy for the party in response to the economic slump – though thoroughly misconceived, this strategy deserves a hearing. Finally, the outgoing Central Committee has not included him on the slate for the new CC we are recommending to January’s national conference. For all these reasons, every member of the SWP will be interested in what John has to say.
Unfortunately, John’s document, ‘Where We Stand’ (already circulated by email in a somewhat different form from the version that appears here) doesn’t really rise to the level demanded by such an important set of debates. In order to defend his personal position John has sought to turn the real, but in many ways quite localized disagreements on the CC into a set of systematic differences. In the process he has had to engage in quite a lot of inflation, distortion, and innuendo. He has also attacked aspects of the party’s work on which he raised no significant disagreements in the past.
In this reply, I’ll try to stay on the high ground and concentrate on the main political questions, though I will, from time to time, have to correct various factual assertions and misrepresentations made by John. Let’s start with the issues that John emphasizes as a way of providing himself with protective cover – namely the party’s response to the economic crisis
and the CC majority’s alleged opposition to recruitment – before considering the origins of the differences in the leadership and concluding on the question of democracy. In the course of this I shall make some comments on Lindsey German’s document, though I think it adds little of substance to the debate.
On perspectives
The most important political question facing the SWP concerns how we respond to a rapidly developing global economic crisis that looks set to be at least as serious as that of the mid-1970s and conceivably as bad as that of the 1930s. John offers a systematic critique of the CC majority, claiming that we have been slow to wake up to the severity of the crisis or to orient the party towards it, that we are abandoning the stress we have put in recent years on building united fronts, and that we have failed to grasp the centrality of the People before Profit Charter. All this is associated with a break with the method of building the party through decisive leadership that Tony Cliff learned from Lenin and its replacement by a ‘‘‘buffet lunch’ approach to leadership – come whenever you like and take a bit of whatever takes your fancy’
I’m tempted to follow the American Trotskyist Max Shachtman and say that even the punctuation marks in these statements are false. But it’s dangerous to make jokes in a factional situation. One I made at the Manchester aggregate is twisted by John in the original version of his document into the admission that I’d ‘been late in seeing the depth of the recession’. Let’s try and get at the substance involved.
In the first place, I completely reject the claim that the present leadership has been slow to face up to the impact of the crisis. As a theoretical tendency we have consistently defended an analysis of the prolonged period of crises and slow growth that capitalism entered at the end of the 1960s as a result of a pronounced fall in the general rate of profit against bourgeois boosters of globalization, sundry reformists and academic leftists, and even some of our sister organizations (this analysis was an issue in the debates with the International Socialist Organization in the United States at the end of the 1990s).
Far from being taken aback by the onset of the financial crisis in August 2007, we saw it as a vindication of our analysis and have placed the developing slump at the centre of our arguments. This is evident from – among a plethora of examples – successive issues of International Socialism, the two Political Economy schools in autumn 2007 and 2008, numerous of my weekly Socialist Worker columns, the articles by Chris Harman and me in the October issue of Socialist Review, the interventions both of us made at successive Historical Materialism conferences, the document on the economic crisis in IB2, and the IS Tendency statement on the crisis reprinted in IB3.
This body of analysis – that will be further developed in the books that Chris Harman and I have written, due to be published in 2009, and another one I have been commissioned to write – may contain all sorts of errors. It certainly will need correction, updating, and further development. But it bears witness to the seriousness with which the present CC takes the economic crisis.
John makes the mystifying statement that ‘There is no theoretical agreement on the CC about the likely depth and length of the recession.’ What’s puzzling about this is that John has said or written nothing of any substance about the crisis since the financial markets froze in the summer of 2007. Of course, in fairness, he has had other preoccupations, but it’s still news that he has any distinctive theoretical position on these questions.
Instead, John objects when those of us who have contributed to our analysis of the crisis exercise a degree of caution about making precise predictions. For example, I wrote in the October Socialist Review: ‘The complexity of the capitalist economic system, in which different mechanisms and tendencies interact, means that it’s hard to predict the course and severity of the present crisis.’ Such remarks would seem to any serious student of Marxist political economy a statement of the obvious. But for John they are admissions of weakness. He and his supporters go around saying: ‘The CC majority think we can’t have a perspective because we can’t predict anything.’ This is ridiculous.
A Marxist understanding of the world allows us to anticipate the broad line of development, but not to predict precise turns of events. For example, the crisis in the financial markets turned into a full-scale crash after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September. This event arose from the interaction between an ideologically motivated (and catastrophically miscalculated) decision by the Bush administration not to rescue Lehman’s and a conflict between US and British company law that prevented Barclay’s from mounting a private takeover. If John really thinks he can predict the precise form of such complex turns of events then he could be making a lot of money working for a hedge fund.
What about the accusations of the majority’s ‘slowness’ in developing a practical response to the economic crisis? In the first half of the year, the crisis took mainly the form of paralysed financial markets. The most important effect on ordinary people’s lives was the collapse of house prices and the drying up of mortgages. There has been a quantum-leap in the severity of the crisis since the summer, with output beginning to fall fast, and soaring closures and redundancies. Maybe we could have done more to prepare for the development of the recession in the early part of 2008, though it would have been difficult to have gone beyond discussion and some planning. There were practical reasons why our focus was elsewhere.
In the first place, the most significant external development had nothing to do with signs of a developing recession, but was in response to another dimension of the economic crisis, namely the impact of accelerating inflation on living standards – the pay revolt, especially, though not exclusively, in the public sector.
Secondly, at the same time as relating to the pay revolt (in some success in a number of unions), the party had to put considerable energy and resources into campaigning in the May elections in London and other parts of the country. The returns of this intervention were, of course, pretty negative in London (though somewhat better elsewhere). Does John now think we were mistaken to have run in the GLA elections? Does he think the SWP Industrial Department shouldn’t have thrown everything it could at the pay revolt?
If he does, then he should have the honesty to acknowledge that he didn’t oppose either of these interventions at the time (indeed, of course, he led the Left List campaign) and therefore must take his share of responsibilityfor what he now believes – wrongly, in my view – to be mistaken decisions.
What leadership of a revolutionary party requires above all is, first, as Lenin put it, ‘the concrete analysis of concrete situations’, and, secondly, the capacity to respond quickly to sharp turns in the objective situation. The present CC has certainly been hampered this year by its internal differences. But that hasn’t prevented us from correctly weighing the objective situation and from pointing the party in the right direction.
In particular, the September National Committee was really important – less because of the row over the Left Alternative National Council than because this was preceded by a sharp argument over perspectives.
The clarity achieved by this debate – as well as the support the CC majority received from the NC – gave the impetus to turn the party sharply towards a focus on responding to the economic crisis and building resistance to its effects on working people. This is reflected in, for example, in the ‘Socialists and the Crisis’ meeting to mobilize the party in London on 8 October, the protests at the Bank of England and Canary Wharf, the Bookmarks pamphlet on the crisis by Chris Harman, and the mini-Marxism on 6December,
This is not to say that our response to the crisis hasn’t faced difficulties. The problem is not, as John claims, that the CC has failed to bend the stick. On the contrary, we have bent it too far for his liking. Thus he complains that I ‘told the South London aggregate that “It’s clear that Stop the War will be less important in the future.”’ What I did, in the first place, make clear (not just in South London but at all the other aggregates I spoke at) was the strategic long-term importance of the Stop the War Campaign, reflecting the analysis that John helped to develop at the end of the Cold War and that stresses that American imperialism has no choice but to rely on its military power to help maintain its competitive position.
But I went on to argue that Stop the War could have the kind of over-arching centrality to our work that it has had since it was launched in the aftermath of 9/11. It can’t be what Galloway called ‘the mother ship’, from which all other initiatives spring. This is partly because the economic crisis has come to occupy centre-stage. But it’s also true that, though popular opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remains very high, the mobilizing power of the issue has declined. Compare the demonstration against Bush’s visit to London in October 2003, when more than 300,000 people marched on a weekday, with that against his return last June when a few thousand turned out.
To repeat: this isn’t an argument for abandoning Stop the War – Obama wants to escalate the Afghan war and may perpetrate atrocities elsewhere. And it’s perfectly possible that the result may be an upsurge in mobilization, as took place in response to Israel’s Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. But this doesn’t alter the current situation. If John wants to challenge this analysis, then he’ll have to come up with one of his own.
John’s complaint occurs in the context of the accusation that the CC majority is engineering a ‘full scale retreat from united front work’. This is nonsense. We need to continue to build and develop the existing united fronts – Stop the War, UAF, Defend Council Housing, and so on. We also want to help initiate and build united fronts that combat the effects of the recession.
Here there is a real disagreement. John accuses the majority failing to recognize the centrality of the Charter to our response to the recession. His error is instructive because in a certain sense it dovetails in with the criticism of the CC raised by some comrades – notably Ian Allinson, Neil Davidson, and Unjum Mirza – who, though hostile to the Charter and to John personally, accuse us of failing to provide the party with a strategy for the recession.
It’s important to see that, for John, Stop the War provides the model for the Charter. At the NC in September he called for ‘a massive centralized effort’ to build the Charter. At a CC meeting during the summer he said ‘the recession is the new war’. In other words, John believes that the SWP is in a position to initiate a mass united front campaign comparable to what Stop the War during its upswing in 2001-5.
The reason why John is mistaken can be seen at two levels. First, the economic class struggle is different from that of the struggle against war. In autumn 2001 the existing peace organizations were weak and conservative. The sheer shock of 9/11 and fear of the American response created a space where, by moving very quickly, we (including John, to his great credit), along with other anti-imperialists who shared our sense of urgency, could rapidly initiate a new kind of anti-war movement that grew very rapidly through a cycle of dynamic and expanding mobilizations.
In the economic class struggle, the organized working class is, of course, of central importance. That means there’s no getting round the trade union bureaucracy, which is an immense conservative force, relative to which our weight is much less than it in the anti-war movement. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing than we can do. On the contrary, we have been able to do a lot in the unions where we have some base – eg the NUT, PCS, and UCU. But getting support for initiatives is a much more complicated business in the unions.
Of course, the bulk of the union bureaucracy is involved in Stop the War as well. But the situation is different there. It costs a trade union general secretary nothing to make a speech at an anti-war rally and only money to make a donation to Stop the War. But united fronts are about action and action against the recession means, for example, resisting the public sector pay limit or fighting pay-cuts in the private sector. Leading trade union bureaucrats are only going to sign up to that under immense pressure from below.
Though John attacks the idea of the Charter as a petition, his own conception of it seems to be as a series of big rallies. He lists some of the speakers at these meetings – Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Larry Elliot, Paul Mason, Sally Hunt, Tony Kearns, and Caroline Lucas. This is impressive enough, but MPs and journalists can’t deliver action, and the trade-union officials have shown no sign of doing so.
The problem is compounded by the fact that we have seen the most important working- class action this year – the public-sector pay revolt – collapse in the last couple of months. This is all the more significant because it was the doing of the left wing of the union bureaucracy. This partly because of the pessimism of large sections of the left – the apparent belief of the Socialist Party, for example, that economic recession automatically means a collapse in working-class resistance.
But the larger picture is important, as well. By apparently moving leftwards, pumping money into the banks, adopting Keynesian measures to stimulate the economy, and moderately increasing taxes on the rich, Gordon Brown has brigaded the bulk of the Labour Party and the union bureaucracy – who were openly in revolt against him at the time of the party conference in September – behind the government. In the short term, at least, this has seriously undercut our ability to find national partners in fighting the recession.
This analysis is important for the comrades demanding a detailed ‘strategy’ against the recession. Marxist thought is necessarily strategic because it’s about not just analysing, but about intervening in the objective situation, pressing at the knotty points where all the social contradictions are concentrated. But strategic interventions depend on a realistic assessment of the alignment of forces. And the truth is that, at the moment, the alignment of forces isn’t very favourable to building united fronts against the effects of the recession at the national level.
The implication of this assessment isn’t that we should sit and wait for the situation to shift. We need to seize every opportunity we can to build united resistance to the effects of the recession. This will often meet taking primarily local initiatives to resist closures, redundancies, and repossessions. But local campaigns plainly aren’t enough. We need to look for openings at the national level, as well. The Charter has a role to play here, so long as it’s understood as one initiative among others.
The G20 summit on 2 April is an opportunity to build a broad mobilization that includes opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but that focuses on saying no to the ruling-class efforts to make working people and the poor pay for the crisis. If successful, this mobilization might facilitate continuing united action.
John will no doubt dismiss the open and experimental approach that I am setting forward as ‘reacting after the event to resistance as it arises’. This is an astonishing attitude for someone who parades their affinity with Tony Cliff – the same Tony Cliff one of whose favourite mottoes was ‘suck it and see’, his more down to earth version of Lenin’s misquotation of Napoleon: ‘You commit yourself and then you see.’ Any serious revolutionary intervention involves a pragmatic element – of taking up a position, translating it into action, and then assessing how successful the intervention was. There is absolutely no shame in saying that the perspective that has emerged over the past few months is a work in progress.
We have carried out a sharp turn in the party’s work and we are still in the process of establishing the most effective way of operating in a rapidly changing situation. New perspectives after a big shift in the objective situation are always a work-in-progress.
Cliff first formulated his analysis of a downturn in the British class struggle in early 1978. It took over four years for the party to develop, through a process of trial-and-error, a detailed perspective involving retreating from rank-and-file groups, focusing on general Marxist propaganda around geographical branches, and changing the nature of Socialist Worker. We first began to sense the emergence of the anti-capitalist movement in mid- 1999. It took two and a half years – and a fierce factional struggle in the IS Tendency – before it became clear how we should be working (and even then, as we will see below, there were difficulties).
Anyone who thinks a complete perspective should spring fully-formed from the head of the leadership is just kidding themselves. With luck, we can speed up the process of developing the new perspectives, but this will involve the party as a whole, individual comrades, branches, and districts, as well as the Central Committee itself, taking initiatives and then assessing the results through collective discussion. John’s grand-standing about the Charter is of little help in this task
Building the party
The logic of John’s accusation that the CC majority is abandoning united-front work is that we are retreating into a party-building propagandist perspective. Indeed he does accuse us of this, but he also charges us with being bad at party-building. To assess these charges, let’s turn to the much more objective way of addressing the issue that is offered by Neil Davidson in his document in IB3.
Neil offers a wide-ranging critique of the whole model of party-building we developed in the mid-1970s. Like Chris Harman and John Molyneux, I welcome Neil’s document because of the clarity and provocation with which it poses important questions, even though I disagree with him on many points of detail and in the conclusions he draws.
Plainly merely doubling our membership, from 3-4,000 in the mid 1970s, to 8-10,000 in the late 1990s is a disappointing record given how high our ambitions were (and still remain) – to build a mass revolutionary party capable of leading the working class in a struggle for political power. But – given that the quarter century in question encompassed the most decisive defeats that the British workers’ movement suffered during the 20th century – not simply maintaining our organization, but doubling its membership looks like a pretty solid achievement, of which we can be can be proud.
The really interesting question is why the SWP hasn’t grown in the period since Seattle and 9/11. If a decade ago someone had told be that we would help lead a movement that would organize a demonstration of two million, I would have predicted that the party would grow to 20,000 or 30,000. Instead we have had to run to stay in the same place. Why?
John’s explanation seems to be largely subjective error on the part of the SWP leadership: On reflection it appears we made a double error in the course of the last 10 years. Firstly we did not insist that every SWP member should fight to build the united fronts. Secondly we did not party-build systematically enough while we were involved in the united front.
These are, of course, contradictory aims and therefore hard to combine in practice. But we could have done better than we did. Since John has been a member of the CC for the past ten years, this seems to be a rare moment of self-criticism in a document all too eager to attack others. And what he says isn’t wholly mistaken. But it is the wrong way, in my view, to approach the problem.
To put the emphasis on our own failures ignores the fact that nowhere else in Europe, or indeed the world, has any other far left current succeeded in achieving a major qualitative breakthrough in the era of Seattle. Thus the LCR in France hopes that the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) it is launching at the end of January will have 10,000 members. This would be a step forward compared to the Ligue’s membership of 3,500, but hardly a leap into a qualitatively different terrain.
It therefore seems much wiser to start, as we normally do, with the objective situation. The nine years since Seattle have seen a massive political radicalization directed against neoliberalism and war. At the level of mass mobilization on street demonstrations this radicalization has been unrivalled. But Marxism of any kind has had the smallest influence it has enjoyed since the revolutions of 1848. The most coherent and influential alternative worldview has been what one might call Chomskyanism – an ideology that is firmly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist but that is different from Marxism in its denial to the working class of a central role and its rejection of socialist political organization.
It isn’t hard to explain the relative weakness of Marxism. Two objective factors seem important. The different sectors of the traditional left suffered in the decades before Seattle a prolonged crisis as a result of the defeats of the later 1970s and the 1980s that was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberal triumphalism that followed it, and the progressive shift of the social-democratic parties in a social-liberal direction,. Secondly, while there have been significant victories for workers in different countries, there has been no generalized reversal of the earlier defeats, let alone anything resembling workers’ resuming the offensive struggles of the last upturn of 1967-76.
So, on the one hand, Marxism has been a weaker ideological reference point, and, on the other, it has been harder to prove in practice the centrality of workers’ struggle to any project for social and political emancipation. (This is, incidentally, one reason why the Greek explosion is so interesting, since it occurred in the European society where the conditions of the 1970s have survived most strongly.)
None of this means that it is impossible to win people to organized Marxist politics. On the contrary, we do it all the time. But it is more an effort to do so in a period of undoubted radicalization where the natural terminus point is no longer (as it was from the 1880s through to the 1970s) some version of Marxism. This brings us to the subjective factor. Is the problem that we just haven’t tried hard enough, as John suggests? Again, the answer is a bit more complicated. After Seattle we were confronted with the development of new movements of resistance, initially against neoliberal globalization, but increasingly, in this country at least, against the war on terrorism. We decided very quickly to put the emphasis on what united us with the other forces in these movements, irrespective of their political backgrounds – reformist, Stalinist, orthodox Trotskyist, liberal, anarchist, or whatever, rather than on our differences with them, and to give priority to building these movements on a united front basis. This choice was hotly contested within the IS Tendency by the ISO (US), which responded to these movements in a sectarian way, starting with the differences, but it was, I still believe, correct.
Nevertheless, this strategic reorientation has significant practical implications. In the first place, deciding priorities is above all about allocating resources. Many of our best, most active comrades threw themselves fully into the movements – a shift represented by the fact that three prominent, very talented CC members worked effectively full-time for Stop the War, but that was reflected at every level of activity. This took resources away from party building.
John complains that we should have built both the united fronts and the party, and indeed we emphasized that building the movements was the key to building the party. In a fundamental strategic sense this was right: if we hadn’t made the turn to the movements we would have withered into a sect. All the same, resources devoted to one purpose are taken away from another. Try as hard we could, giving priority to building the movements meant there was less energy and people for the SWP.
John might say that the problem was compounded by fact that quite a lot of comrades were not actively involved in the new movements. In some cases this may have political resistance – the feeling we were liquidating our politics, distrust of Galloway, etc. But more common, I suspect, was the problem of attrition – of comrades who had joined in the 1980s and 1990s, drifting into middle age, and using a shift in party work as an excuse to take a back seat. Perhaps we could have won more of these, but a feature of the practice of party-building developed by Tony Cliff that John normally so commends is that we lead by example, ‘create facts’, and then use our successes to bring other comrades along.
This problem was exacerbated by a second one, that of the branches. A party life centred on geographical branches had allowed us to survive the 1980s and 1990s but in the course of the latter decade the tendency of the branches to become too self enclosed and passive became an increasing preoccupation. There was a lot of tinkering around with the branches that didn’t overcome the problem and that many comrades think were counter-productive.
Then came the era of Seattle. The CC decided that the branches had become an obstacle to the necessary turn outwards and in effect scrapped them. The suspension of branch meetings in London during the GLA elections in 2000 symbolized this shift. I accept my share of this responsibility for this decision, which may indeed have been justified in order sharply to break with the past. But, right or wrong, scrapping the branches had consequences directly relevant to John’s and Lindsey’s complaints about party organization.
Scrapping the branches removed one key agency in recruiting comrades. More important, it meant that if we recruited someone, they had nowhere to go. Unless they were firmly attached to one of the united fronts, the individuals would drift into a shapeless mass of semi-detached members and all too often disappear.
But the collapse of the branches meant that all sorts of other party activities were undermined. The distribution and sale of party publications was, for example, badly weakened. In his effort to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the present CC majority, John complains about the chronic difficulties of party finances. This is surprising since these difficulties date back at least a decade, and John has, like the rest of us, taken part in many discussions about how to overcome our financial problems,.
There are various causes, but the most important, in my view, lies in the obstacles we have faced in achieving and maintaining the level of subs income that we could realistically expect, given the size of the membership, and that is required to finance the activities in which we need politically to engage. If branch organization were stronger, it would be much easier to overcome these problems.
These facts are important because, in their eagerness to rubbish the party, John and Lindsey conveniently forget that they, like me, took part in the decisions that led to the collapse of the branches. Indeed, when in the summer of 2003 Chris Bambery made the modest proposal that party branches should start meeting fortnightly, Lindsey, with the support of Chris Nineham, vehemently opposed him (though John, to his credit, did not).
The weakness of the branches nevertheless became a matter of increasing concern inside the party in 2003-4: on the Central Committee this concern was consistently articulated by Chris Harman. One of the most important initiatives that Martin Smith took after he took over as National Secretary in the summer of 2004 was to give priority to methodically rebuilding party organization. This has involved developed a team of comrades around Martin at the National Office, some of whom have joined the Central Committee. Their collective achievement is visible – in the recruitment figures, in the revival of the branches, in the successes we have had in student work, and in the good run of Marxisms we have enjoyed in the past few years. These results are so evident that they make John’s assertion that the origins of the divisions on the CC lie in Martin’s opposition to Lindsey’s November 2007 document on recruitment (appended to John’s document) seem quite ridiculous. Saying that Martin Smith is against recruitment is like saying the Pope isn’t a Catholic. One of the main things he has done is to organize several waves of Why You Should be a Socialist rallies whose aim is – recruitment.
John, following Lindsey here, counterposes to these rallies monthly branch public meetings. Why on earth we should have to choose between these is beyond me. Of course we should aim to have regular good local public meetings where we recruit. But why shouldn’t we have more less frequent rallies with a couple of national speakers, special publicity, and extra support from the centre? Is this really an issue that it’s worth dividing the party over?
Lindsey’s November 2007 document actually seems to argue for these rallies, but it also proposes what she calls a ‘recruitment drive’, which she compares with the kind of blitzes that Cliff directed on several occasions, notably in 1973 and 1977, and which were more recently pursued in the early 1990s. These were operations were recruitment took priority over everything else the organization was doing.
Personally I have no objection to such campaigns in principle, but they make sense only in very specific conditions. Did these prevail in November 2007, when the party was still reeling from the split in Respect? I very much doubt it. Pursuing a highly centralized recruitment campaign would probably not have produced very good results and might well have exacerbated all the problems – for example, the divisions between active and passive members and overreliance on the centre – that John rails against in an exaggerated way.
To sum up, there is certainly no reason to be complacent about either the size or the functioning of the party. But the problems involved are quite deep-seated, to a large degree long predating the present divisions of the CC. It is to the credit of the present majority that it includes the comrades who have made a concentrated effort to strengthen party organization. John’s and Lindsey’s portrayal of various real or exaggerated weaknesses in their polemic against the majority is evidence more of desperation than of any resembling a serious and constructive analysis.
Origins of the present crisis
So how on earth did we get to this point? The answer has nothing to do with any arguments, real or imagined, about recruitment. It was the crisis in Respect that has fractured the Central Committee. It’s true that shortly before news of John’s disastrous acceptance of the donation appeared in East London Advertiser in early December 2007 there was a row over Lindsey’s proposals on recruitment. But the real dynamic driving the row was a displacement of the tensions that had been building up in the CC for the previous three months. In itself the blow-up over Lindsey’s proposals was a storm in a teacup that would have soon been forgotten if a much deeper fracture hadn’t opened up on the CC.
The Central Committee has produced a detailed assessment of the Respect crisis and the party’s response, and it would not be useful to rehearse the arguments set out there in much detail. But that document makes absolutely clear that political responsibility for the destruction of Respect lies with George Galloway and his allies.
Therefore Lindsey’s claim that John is being made a scapegoat for this disaster is nonsense. The problem was rather that the crisis in Respect exposed certain systematic weaknesses in John’s methods of working – in particular a failure to respect the collective decision-making of the party and, in large part as a result, to make serious mistakes that caused him to lose the confidence of the majority, not just of the leadership, but of the party cadre as well.
If one wants to set a date for the beginnings of the crisis, it would be 25 August 2007, when the CC held a special meeting to discuss our response to George Galloway’s letter denouncing John. A meeting had already been fixed for 4 September between representatives of the CC and Galloway and his allies. The CC discussion was dominated, one might say paralysed, by John’s adamant insistence that he issue a public response to Galloway in advance of the 4 September meeting.
Most members of the CC thought it would be unwise to prejudge the results of this meeting. This was a tactical issue with no issue of principle at stake on either side. But most comrades there were taken aback by the vehemence with which John, with the support of Lindsey German (and also with a degree of sympathy from me), insisted on having his way. The tone was ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’.
It was that argument began the fracture on the CC. What produced the polarization was the assumption on John’s part was that he should define the leadership’s line on Respect. This reflected, more generally, how work on both Respect tended to be reported to the CC. While quite a lot of information would be shared with the CC, it wasn’t on a basis that really invited discussion or dissent.
In retrospect, this represented a breach with how the party has intervened in united fronts. It was always taken for granted comrades involved in leading united fronts would be under particular pressure to adapt to their reformist allies. The role of the Central Committee would be to support these comrades, but also to act as a counter-pressure to any tendency of rightward adaptation.
This mechanism broke down in the case of Respect. No doubt this was a consequence of how this united front was established – as an initiative in which two comrades who were both already powerful members of the CC and also central to Stop the War played a leading part – but it was a failure on the part on the leadership as a whole to allow it to become entrenched. In any case, once the Respect crisis had exploded, this pattern had to change. John complains ‘there never has been an area of party work that has undergone such scrutiny as the Respect work.’ What else did he expect? In effect, he appealed to the party’s aid to fend off an attack from the Galloway faction that developed into a potentially mortal threat to the SWP itself. Of course, the Central Committee and the party membership as a whole were going to demand a detailed say in how we responded.
The real problem was that, under the spotlight, John committed a series of errors that both undermined our confidence in him and exposed a persistent tendency to flout collective decisions. Rather than descending to the level of tittle-tattle, let’s concentrate on the most visible of these errors, the OFFU donation – not, as Lindsey asserts, in breach of double jeopardy, but it exposed John’s weaknesses most starkly.
There were three things wrong about what he did. First of all, John shouldn’t have accepted the donation without the prior approval of the CC. Just because of the growing tensions with Galloway, the fact that the latter’s adviser expressed his opposition to diverting the money to OFFU should have been a reason for extreme caution. Instead, the first I knew of the donation was just before we were to meet Galloway on 4 September 2007, long after John had accepted it. The fact of the donation was reported to the CC on 5 September, but – because they were on holiday – Weyman Bennett, Judith Orr, and Martin Smith only found out in December. This was a failure of communication for which the four comrades who met Galloway – Chris Bambery, Lindsey German, John Rees, and myself – must share responsibility.
Secondly, John shouldn’t have accepted the donation all. While it would be a mistake to say that workers’ organizations should never accept money from bosses, it was wrong to accept a donation for a rank-and file body from a businessman with privatizing associations. It’s true that, when I first became aware of these associations, about ten days after the meeting with Galloway, I was slow to alert the rest of the CC to them. But of course, by then it was too late to do anything about the use of the cheque. There was no intention to cover anything up on my part; I was simply too preoccupied with other aspects of the fight. I apologized at the January 2008 conference. John draws attention to my error, though you might have thought he should be more worried about the beam in his own eye than with the splinter in mine.
Thirdly, revelation of the donation destroyed OFFU, a very promising trade union initiative that would have come in very handy now. John completely fails to acknowledge this fact – rather surprisingly given his apparent preoccupation with building a united front against the recession.
John tries to throw dust in our eyes by comparing the donation to Morrissey’s financial support for the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival back in April. This shows that John still doesn’t get it about what he did wrong. There is simply no comparison between the two cases. Ten days before the Carnival UNISON withdrew its financial support for the Carnival, essentially because of its political opposition to Lindsey German, Left List candidate for Mayor, speaking there. Morrissey offered £28,000, and another associate £7,000, to help cover the gap. There was nothing secret about this – it was, for example, openly discussed at the LMHR steering committee, nor was there anything to be embarrassed about.
You would have thought that John would have been grateful that this rescue had been mounted, since otherwise the Left List might have been blamed for damaging the Carnival. Instead he tries to make a factional issue of the affair. Worse still, he doesn’t even bother to get his facts right, claiming that the donation was for £75,000 and was made to Unite against Fascism – assertions that are likely to cause problems in both LMHR and UAF. Not content with being involved in the collapse of Respect and having blown OFFU apart, John is now undermining two other united fronts. This is typical of the reckless behaviour that led us to decide that he could no longer remain on the Central Committee.
It was the revelation of similar recklessness over the OFFU donation that caused the accumulated tensions in the CC to explode in December 2007. It determined the majority of the committee to demand that John stand down as National Secretary of Respect. This was something that it was entirely within our rights to do so. Over the years, numerous
members of the CC have had their responsibilities changed or have been told that the rest of us thought they shouldn’t be re-nominated at the next conference. Most haven’t liked this, but they accepted the collective decision. But in this case we encountered intense resistance, not just from John, but from Lindsey, Chris Nineham, and (in a considerably more measured way) Chris Bambery.
In the end, the majority decided not to insist on their rights and agreed on a compromise proposed by Lindsey, under which John’s position would be reviewed in a few months’ time. In the circumstances, I think this was the right thing to do. The party was still reeling from the Respect split and we had the London elections to confront. The compromise allowed the CC to fight on a united basis for our GLA campaign – something that John never acknowledges.
But the GLA campaign was a disastrous failure, compounded by the desertion of the Tower Hamlets councillors (and another important ally, Mukul Hira, who stood in Camden in 2006 and 2008). I think it’s fair to say that most people in John’s position would have acknowledged the extent of the setback and resigned as National Secretary of the Left List (as our bit of Respect had become). Had he done this in May or June then I think he would have received much sympathy and been able to begin to rebuild his standing in the party and in the wider movement.
Instead John tried to carry on as if nothing had happened. Indeed, he gave the impression that the Left Alternative (yet another name-change) would try to continue as a national electoral project. This was too much for the CC majority. There was the mother of all rows about this at our meeting before Marxism 2008. Subsequently we insisted that John stand down as National Secretary of the Left Alternative and give up responsibility for the party’s electoral work. This involved a laboriously negotiated compromise whose aim was not simply to keep John on the CC but to give him a continuing prominent role in our external work through a shared responsibility for the Charter.
This seemed to me, particularly in comparison with how various leading comrades were in the past bundled unceremoniously off the CC, a pretty good deal. But John effectively blew it up at the Left Alternative National Council on 6 September 2008. What this witnessed was a coordinated announcement of three resignations from this body – by John, Lindsey, and Chris Bambery. This amounted to a public protest against the CC’s decision to remove John from responsibility for our electoral work. It made what would have in any case been a difficult meeting quite unmanageable.
Lindsey tries to justify her resignation speech by saying that the CC were aware that she would be making it. It’s true that both during the negotiations over John’s removal and at subsequent CC meetings she had expressed, as she puts it, her ‘decision to resign’, from the Left Alternative NC. Of course, as comrades have pointed out, this wasn’t up to her – it was a decision for the leadership as a whole. But the feeling in the majority was that it would have silly to have insisted on this. Nevertheless, expressing an intention to do something isn’t the same as deciding how it will be done. There was no need for Lindsey to announce her resignation in a speech (particularly one that made references to ‘scapegoating’ that many of those there interpreted as an attack on the party). She could have resigned so by email or letter.
Lindsey didn’t make any effort to discuss the different options at the CC, even though the Left Alternative was a regular item on the agenda, nor did she or John attend the SWP caucus the night before the LA NC. She may indeed sincerely believe that she did nothing wrong – but this belief is a symptom of how far the normal accountability of the most leading comrades had broken down in Respect. The handful of comrades who did make the pre-NC caucus can confirm that the only resignation that was discussed there was John’s, reflecting the fact that we were not expecting Lindsey to make a resignation speech, let alone that Chris Bambery would announce that he would be standing down from the NC at the Left Alternative conference.
When at the next meeting of the CC the majority expressed their anger at what happened we were warned that if we went public this might split the party. We took this as a threat. This blackmail had the opposite effect to that intended. It determined us to take the issue to the SWP National Committee the following weekend since the alternative would be a permanently divided and paralysed leadership.
A resolution from the majority endorsed the CC’s decision to remove him from this responsibility, and did not restrict itself, as John asserts, to ‘saying that [he] was no longer responsible for electoral work’.
Confronted with this resolution and realizing that they were isolated, the minority responded by ducking and diving, refusing to address the arguments. Lindsey, for example, claimed to support the resolution and John’s removal – even though at the CC she had given her disagreement with this decision as her reason for wanting to resign from the Left Alternative NC, but refused to acknowledge that she had do anything wrong or to apologize for her speech the previous weekend.
These evasions did not prevent a overwhelming majority of the NC passing a resolution clearly intended as a rebuke to the three comrades’ actions at the Left Alternative meeting. Since I spoke on behalf of the CC majority, I want to correct two misrepresentations of what I said. First, I did not endorse Lindsey’s insistence that we ‘draw a line’ under the affair. I said that we had to try to establish the leadership as an effective, politically coherent collective: whether or not a line should be drawn would depend on whether it would contribute to achieving this aim.
Secondly, I gave no ‘assurances’, absolute or otherwise, about my support for John’s continuing membership of the CC. I explained that the compromise in the summer had been a way of allowing John to continue as an active member of the leadership and for the party to make full use of his talents. I said nothing about the future, because the point of the NC
meeting was to settle the party’s attitude to what had just happened. The question of future membership of the CC was a matter for the conference and the discussion leading up to it. Which brings us to where we are now.
The Central Committee, by ten votes to two (John and Lindsey absented themselves from the meeting), have decided not to re-nominate John. Some comrades ask why we are not suggesting Conference should not re-elect the other three comrades who supported him at the beginning of this fight. It’s true that Lindsey and Chris Bambery were involved in the
orchestrated resignations at the LA NC. They were wrong to have done so.
But neither they nor Chris Nineham have shown the same pattern of recklessness and unaccountability that John has consistently displayed. Lindsey and Chris Nineham appear to support John’s efforts to generalize the disagreements, but Chris Bambery does not. There is no case at present for treating all four comrades as a homogenous group. As far as the Central Committee is concerned, the issue is John.
This doesn’t mean that the issues at stake are, as some comrades say, ‘about personalities’. Holding even the most prominent comrades accountable is a political issue. Of course, this is an inconvenient position for John himself. Hence the constant effort to widen the front and involve others – symbolized by a document written by John, but called ‘Where We Stand’. In doing so he not only exaggerates the real, but quite limited political differences on perspectives and party-building that exist on the CC, but mounts an assault on the condition of the party that, if anyone else had made it, he and Lindsey would have been the first to denounce.
Moving on
Neil Davidson’s document has been widely welcomed because it articulated a widespread feeling that the Respect crisis revealed that something had gone wrong with the party’s democracy. John has blown hot and cold on Neil’s document – responding positively when he believed he could extract some factional advantage from it, becoming more hostile when
he realized that Neil and his co-thinkers weren’t prepared to join an unprincipled bloc against the CC majority. In the first, emailed version of his document he accuses the majority of this kind of manoeuvring, asserting that we have welcomed Neil’s document ‘to conciliate critics [,] not for principled reasons’.
In fact, my own attitude to Neil’s arguments is very similar to Chris Harman’s, who has been privately been expressing for many years the kind of views stated publicly in his reply to Neil. Like Chris, I think the problem is less one of structure than of ethos. In other words, formally party structures are highly democratic, but the culture of internal debate has been much weaker in recent years, and more broadly the party has been over-reliant on top-down initiatives from the CC.
This doesn’t mean I agree with Neil when he questions the broader model of party-building we have followed since the 1970s (Neil is, of course, right that there is more than one way of being a Leninist organization, but there are real strengths in this particular version). The combination that we have of evolved of a strong centralized political leadership supported by a relative large apparatus of full-time workers and an activist membership sharing widely diffused and sophisticated Marxist theoretical culture gives us extraordinary capacities of intervention. We could have had nothing like the impact on the movements here in Britain and internationally without these particular organizational qualities, which are the inheritance of how we have worked for the past 30 years.
But Neil is right that the Central Committee, scarred by the crisis of the late 1970s, has been very cautious about expressing public disagreements, and indeed has become more cautious over about this over time. This tendency has been reinforced by features that become more prominent in the 1990s. Sustaining party activity in a period when, after a series of big, though unconnected mobilizations in 1990-4, was remarkably lacking in serious struggles required increasing doses of voluntarism on the part of the centre. At the centre itself a certain hothouse atmosphere and excessive preoccupation with trivial internal infighting and backbiting developed.
Contrary to what John says, it was in these years that the weight of the centre relative the membership was strongest.
The post-Seattle period offered a welcome opening of the windows and gave many comrades the opportunity of developing stronger roots in different movements and unions. This has generated its own problems – above all the danger of fragmentation – but it has produced a stronger and more self-confident cadre. It is this cadre that, having stood firm amid the splendours and miseries of the Respect experience, is now calling not just John as an individual, but the entire CC to account. This too is welcome. Some of the CC majority were at the centre of the party in the 1990s. We became deeply unhappy about some of the things that happened then.
As strongly as Neil, we want to see party democracy strengthened. What that will involve needs to be discussed in a thorough and open-minded way. The CC has suggested that the election by the forthcoming Conference of a Commission on Party Democracy would provide a good framework for this discussion, but that is for Conference for decide.
John, consistently enough, sets himself against this discussion. Or, more precisely, he’s only concerned about democracy when it favours his own case. Thus he complains that that the CC decided not to produce a fourth pre-conference Bulletin, insinuating that this was an attempt to suppress discussion. What we in fact decided was that the brute reality of the
Christmas break made it impossible to produce a Bulletin that would be open to the party as a whole with deadlines that would give comrades a fair chance of contributing to that Bulletin.
Instead, to facilitate the discussion, we decided to produce and circulate a set of documents, including an updated perspectives document and whatever John wanted to write in his defence. John decided instead initially to circulate his document electronically – apparently toall and sundry, whether or not they are party members.
One of the great advantages of the Democracy Commission would be that it could review and seek improvements in how we conduct internal debates (the issue of how documents are circulated is one thing we need to look at, given the way in which some have been distributed by email in a fairly random way).
But I don’t think we need feel particularly ashamed of the present one. It’s true that the Central Committee didn’t launch the preconference debate by announcing a decision to drop John from the slate. That was because we were preoccupied with turning the party towards resistance to the recession and so started with the economic crisis and political perspectives.
But, as soon as we decided on the recommended slate, we announced it to the party, more than six weeks before Conference – the first time the slate hasn’t been announced only at the Conference itself.
This allowed the slate to be discussed at most aggregates, again for the first time in the party’s history. Some aggregates missed it. If Conference does decide to elect a Democracy Commission, it should take a look at how to ensure things work better in future. But no one can deny that we are having a rich and thorough-going debate.
John appears to see this opening up as a threat. In fact, in many ways it resembles what happened thirty years ago, when the party experienced another crisis of adjustment (in that case to the downturn in class struggle) and the leadership split. Revolutionary parties don’t develop through a smooth, simple process of quantitative growth. If they are living organizations embedded in wider movements and struggles, then they undergo sometimes sharp and painful crises.
That’s how I see the present crisis – as a sign the party is alive. If we respond to it in a political, responsible, and honest way, whatever our different views, then we can emerge from it strengthened.
The problem with John isn’t that he disagrees with the CC majority. Disagreements are necessary to the development of a living party. But John sees everything through the distorting lens of the struggle to maintain his personal position. This leads him to inflate real, but quite specific disagreements into systematic differences and to rubbish aspects of the party’s work for which, as a CC member for the past 14 years, he must share responsibility.
For a year now the Central Committee has had to grapple with the unrelenting struggle of an undeniably talented comrade to shield himself for being held to account for the mistakes he has made. For those of us with a long history of party membership, who remember the many personal sacrifices made by individual comrades and their disciplined acceptance of unwelcome decisions, John’s behaviour is nothing short of a scandal. It is time that this conflict was brought to an end. That is why I support the CC’s decision not to recommend John for re-election.
Jock McTrousers on said:
Right – now I understand. Give it another 20 years or so to get your perspective right, then get back to us.
David Broder on said:
It’s amazing how virulent the language used in this is, and how Callinicos above all others previously really lays into Rees. Bizarre, of course, that this level of “revelations” and criticism of the individual is coupled with zero mention of Callinicos’ own past positions; triumphalism about membership figures; and the pretense that the SWP is “formally” democratic but not sufficiently “lively” for this to work… given that you can’t even have a permanent faction, never mind debates aired openly in the paper.
That said, I don’t agree with the Weekly Worker prediction of “the mother of all splits”… can you really imagine any of the factions involved setting up other groups? These are hardly split questions, it is a hopeless muddle of organisational and personal rows, in which the banner of ‘democracy’ is raised entirely opportunistically – I doubt this current openness will either permeate through the whole membership, or last for long.
Ed D on said:
The juicy bit starts about half way.
faceless on said:
I propose an intellectual battle to the death – chess, monopoly, general knowledge and scrabble. It would be like ‘It’s a Knockout’, but with geeks.
redbedhead on said:
David: “Bizarre, of course, that this level of “revelations” and criticism of the individual is coupled with zero mention of Callinicos’ own past positions”
Did you read the document? He mentions in several places his own positions – on splitting branches in the 90s, on his support for Rees at particular moments. What do you want precisely, a spreadsheet?
“given that you can’t even have a permanent faction, never mind debates aired openly in the paper.”
Um, the ISJ has had numerous debates from within and without the tendency. That’s one of its roles. This fetishism of some for focusing the newspaper internally is frankly, bizarre, given that the SWP puts out multiple publications, each of which serves different purposes in the political and practical struggle. Sheesh. As for “permanent factions” – why also is this fetishized as somehow more democratic? If you permanently disagree with the party, um, maybe you should be in your own organization. There are certainly numerous arguments as to why permanent factions make an organization both less democratic and less effective. For instance, having both an SP and an SWP makes it more possible to see in practice which set of politics is most effective under given conditions, etc.
Ray on said:
Permanent factions are the left sects version of the Lib Dems proportional representation. It just leads to indecisive coalitions where the politics is diluted to its lowest common denominator to keep everyone happy. A recipe for splits, stagnation and passivity.
Michael Fisher on said:
David McNally in the Canadian journal New Socialist argues:
“In times of disarray for the Left, the most scrupulous honesty is at a premium. So let us begin with a hard truth: the revolutionary socialist Left is today more marginal, more disconnected from the day to day experiences of working class people than at any time in the last 150 years. This reality has produced two main reactions within the left: retreat and denial.”
This seems to me about right.
All sides in the current debate within the SWP are in a state of denial. The source of the collapse of Respect, and the failure of the SWP to grow in manner consistent with its analysis, lies not with John Rees or those who wish to marginalise him. The source lies in the failure of the SWP to adequately theorise and understand the nature of the period we are in.
This failure is so common across much of the activist left (including among those who are currently observing and commenting on the emerging split within the SWP from the outside) that discussion of the weaknesses of this and that socialist group on this site (among many others) refuses to engage with the fundamental economic, technical, political and ideological changes over the past 30 years that render building a credible electoral alternative to Labour highly unlikely.
The problem of denial links the SWP with most other groups on the radical left. Focusing on the particular weaknesses and failures of Rees, German and Callinicos et al is a useful and effective means of confronting that denial and acting accordingly.
optimistic Larry Nugent on said:
No conflict resolution.
Just the blame game on all our houses. the conference wall will be screaming UNITY.
Will the protagonists in the trenches be seeking UNITY.
There is a mother of all splits happening before us. Leave them to self flagellation. They must enjoy it
Ray on said:
Yes, the failure of the SWP to grow has not affected the rest of the left. The Bennite’s are flourishing. Stalinist’s are picking up recruits in the thousands and revolutionary organisations around the world are leaving the SWP in the dust. The rest of the left, apart from the SWP, is in such a good state that it’s having to form united fronts of reformists and revolutionaries just to kick start some sort of redevelopment.
It’s as if 30 years of neo-liberalism, Thatcher, Reagan, Bush and Blair haven’t had any impact on working class organisation and the level of struggle according to those who blame the SWP for not sustaining its membership levels of the late 80’s, early 90’s. This is ironic considering that the SWP is still the largest left organisation outside of Labour. It must be doing something right to have retained this position compared to the withering away of virtually every other organisation on the left in the UK.
But don’t let that stop you spinning another yarn about the SWP on SU.
Charlie Marks on said:
Aw fer fuck’s sake! When I saw this feeded in bloglines I thought the prof had penned a mercifully short rebuke, but no, pages and pages of argument that I’ll simply HAVE to read if I’m to keep abreast of this whole affair…
Jenkins on said:
`The Socialist Workers Party is currently facing a double challenge – to come to terms with the damage caused by the collapse of Respect . . . ‘
It opens with a lie and degenerates from there on. This narrative is getting thinner and thinner and the inability to face the truth about the SWP’s methods in Respect other than through denial and the bureaucratic exclusion of Rees even though he acted in all their names means that nothing of any use will emerge from this split and no lessons will be learned.
gobsmacked on said:
#6 Someone really does need to get a hold of Ray and tell him the line. The SWP has supported PR in recent years since it took up electoral work. There has been no CC decision, never mind a conference resolution, reverting to the SWP’s former abject support for an undemocratic electoral system which only benefits the Tories and New Labour.
#9 Now Ray is just having a laugh surely. The SWP has provided no serious analysis of the political situation for years. Nowhere do you have an explicit acknowledgement in the literature that the level of class struggle is a fraction of what it was in the so-called downturn, or an acknowledgement of lengthy economic stabilisation and growth. That is why the SWP have been so disarmed in the past and why they are disarmed now that, like stopped clocks, their leading “theoreticians” are claiming vindication for their economic insights.
The fact the rest of the left is not doing very well either should hardly be consolation – see Cliff’s constant warnings against triumphalism when the SWP’s alleged superiority was in fact just the tide going out.
BarryKade on said:
As a pissed off ex-member I watch with a mixture of Schadenfreude and real horror. This ‘debate’ between members of the leadership of the SWP is taking on a harsh tone. This partly reminds me of the dynamic of the split between the I.S.O in the states and the SWP/IST.
A factional dynamic gets into what might often be only a hairline fracture, and begins to widen it through polemical exaggeration of the others position, until propaganda, denunciation and pure mud slinging replace actual communication and constructive argument. Splits take on this momentum. This feeling from the ISO split of watching a car crash in slow motion came back to me with the Respect split between the SWP and Galloway (+ nearly everybody) else at the end of 2007.
But this isn’t to argue against the open culture of debate that the CC’s paranoiac fear of a split has stifled for decades. This tearing each other apart is merely the other side of the coin of the forced uniformity and lack of proper debate. The SWP CC pretend in public that they have no disagreement – then suddenly when they do they cannot argue it through clearly. They have to make rude caricatures of each others positions, and then deliberately misunderstand what each other is saying, like deaf pantomime dames. The same happened with Respect – first an enforced lack of debate, with no questioning of the contradictory or problematic aspects of Respect and an alliance with Galloway and the forces around him. Only shrill praise was allowed. Then with the first and quite mild open disagreement, suddenly there are only shrill denunciations, parody and caricature, until a split was inevitable. What will Rees, Harman or Callinicos accuse each other of next? Ballot rigging? or Communalism?
But I doubt there will be a significant split – (although with this dynamic Rees might end up outside the organisation, given its history). Because there is only one clear fault line for a significant split, and neither faction are lining up neatly along it.
There are two clear positions that exist to support a split – one proposes building a broad left formation or general united front to work within – the other proposes to build the SWP as a stand alone unit .ie. the IS / SWP’s traditional practice since leaving labour in the late 60’s. However, neither side will bite this bullet. Rees clearly proposes the Charter as a general anti-recession front, perhaps in continuity with his united front of a special kind around the S.A and Respect. However, he then spends a large part of his document striving to prove his ‘party building’ credentials around talk of recruitment drives, etc. Perhaps he the reason he seizes on this may be partly to refute any accusation that he is all ‘united frontist’ and not ‘party building’. Likewise, Callinicos and CC majority claim that broad left of labour formation remains their strategy, – only just not now, or in this period even. So members don’t get a clear choice of these two perspectives or strategic options confronting each other. And besides, anyone wanting to pursue the broad left formation / general-and-permanent-all-purpose-united-front – they would probably have split with Hoveman and Ovenden etc last year.
Callinicos clearly demeans and diminishes himself hear as he scrambles to distance himself from Rees, while also defending the overall record and authority of the CC! So Rees it is emphasised, was an unaccountable figure vis-a-vis Respect and the CC, signalling and abandonment of collective responsibility on behalf of the CC. Of course, Callinicos knew more than others on the CC about what Rees was doing – now we witness his descent from the lofty realms of theory to engage in the tit-tay of he-said-so-she said.
I’ll stop here for now!
This debate could benefit (and not just damage) the SWP if it were based upon clear principles and different perspectives and strategic options. Instead it is all self-justification, recrimination and manoeuvring for personal position.
Jenkins on said:
`What will Rees, Harman or Callinicos accuse each other of next? Ballot rigging? or Communalism?’
I predict conference stuffing.
It is definitely `self-justification, recrimination and manoeuvring for personal position’. Rees is already hinting that he will spill the beans on some juicy internal goings on (the £75k donation is just a taster) if he is dropped and the CC are desperately trying to keep German in as a hostage against Rees doing that. So why don’t they just let him stay? Because somebody has to go. They can’t afford their top heavy machine anymore and if Rees stays it will be one or more (possibly much more) of them going. It’s dog eat dog. Let’s hope a faction forms from below on the basis of politics and truth rather than naked self-interest.
gobsmacked on said:
#14 Accusations of undemocratic manouevring are already being raised by German. She complains about delegations being elected by meetings smaller than the number of delegates being elected, of Sheffield having passed a resolution without those being criticised present to defend themselves and the Sheffield delegation being elected on a mandation basis, contrary to past SWP practice. Not much to take to the Electoral Commission methinks!
prianikoff on said:
Unless this was written some time before the 2nd World War, describing Max Schachtman as a ‘Trotskyist’ is a bad start.
Rees is being treated as the fall-guy for decisions that should have been monitored by the whole leadership.
If Rees’s actions brought violated party rules and brought the SWP into disrepute, he should have been taken through a constitutional disciplinary procedure.
Differences in political perspective aren’t grounds for removing him from the C.C.
The fact that the whole affair has turned into such a debate indicates that the real questions involved are deeper than Rees’s actions as an individual.
Professor Callinicos is rather too defensive about the record of the C.C. majority over the past few years. His own role in the expulsion of the I.S.O being a point in question.
On the recession, the SWP and other left organisations were all slow to realise the seriousness of the situation and the PbP Charter hasn’t been altered to take it into account. Therefore many of its demands don’t have a cutting edge in terms of organising resistance to growing job losses.
The main problem in the SWP is the lack of political autonomy of branches and their inability to hold the C.C. accountable. Something that developed as far back as the 1970’s with the expulsion of the Left Faction, Right Opposition and ISO/Workers League.
This doesn’t mean branches “doing their own thing” – a form of federalism. It means that they should be able to meet, discuss political perspectives, pass motions, monitor and control the activity of full-timers and the C.C.
Rather than addressing this, what’s happening is a damaging factional dispute by members of the C.C. jockeying for position.
Unfortunately, none of the contestants has an impeccable record and it’s therefore likely to be seen as an argument in a tea shop between the pots and kettles.
BarryKade on said:
I suppose the real surprise is Callinicos’s revelation that the CC majority wanted Rees’s resignation as Respect National Secretary in DEC 2007!!! Is this the first time this has been made public?
Obviously looks remarkably similar to the demand Galloway was accused of making in Sept 2007! (Only Galloway merely called for a parallel post of organiser – to be filled by another SWP member alonside Rees). But it seems both the SWP CC and Galloway decisively turned against Rees after hearing about the Dubai Cheque. So all this stuff about the Galloway letter being an attempt to subordinate the SWP via an attack on Rees may have merely been an attempt at making an all powerful and rogue SWP leader more accountable – a demand the SWP CC would soon come to itself?! (Of course Galloway may have had multiple intentions – and so may the CC).
Does this mean that the Respect split was avoidable?! – The SWP CC could have demoted Rees in 2007 and kept Respect? On one level, yes. However, the elements within the CC who moved against Rees are also the ones least supportive of the Respect project – and are probably OK with getting rid of both.
Rosa Lichtenstein on said:
#7, Michael:
“In times of disarray for the Left, the most scrupulous honesty is at a premium. So let us begin with a hard truth: the revolutionary socialist Left is today more marginal, more disconnected from the day to day experiences of working class people than at any time in the last 150 years. This reality has produced two main reactions within the left: retreat and denial.”
Absolutely correct, and not only is Alex in denial here, so are many of those who post at SU. Until we address the structural and ideological reasons for our long-term decline, it will continue.
I try to outline what some of these are here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_02.htm
Ian on said:
Rosa, 19. More debate about philosophy? Strewth. Youre all as bad as each other.
How about some action
Joseph Kisolo on said:
Won’t add anything as BarryKade comment 13 gets it pretty much spot on.
virtual reality on said:
#16 It really did not need the magic insights of the world’s greatest living Marxists to note that the world economy was in an increasingly precarius state due to the credit bubble. You only had to read, say, the Financial Times or the Economist over the last year to know this. Indeed this is exactly where the ISJ analysis came from.
The real problem is not the game of economic commentary but the broader economic and political analysis. The SWP leadership has dogmatically clung to the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” theory and used it to suggest that the last thirty years were either years of stagnation or deep instability. Their use of the trpf was not based on any empirical evidence bar some theses of dubious methodology dating back to the 1950s and a ridiculous determination not to account properly for the countervailing tendencies to the trpf.
This economic semi-catastrophism which completely failed to take account of the stabilisation and sustained growth in the world economy over the last thirty years, albeit punctuated by relatively brief downturns, plus a complete failure to theorise the long-term secular downturn in the industrial struggle which makes the “downturn” look like an upturn are the SWP’s major theoretical failings.
Incidentally, for a better and more empirically based analysis of the world economy from a left perspective read Andrew Glyn’s Capitalism Unleashed.
Liam on said:
“that document makes absolutely clear that political responsibility for the destruction of Respect lies with George Galloway and his allies.” Blimey! Who could have expected that?
A rather different take on the matter can be found at http://liammacuaid.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/a-reply-to-alex-callinicos-on-respect-alan-thornett/
or http://socialistresistance.org/2008/12/19/a-reply-to-alex-callinicos-on-respect-alan-thornett/
Ger Francis on said:
here is a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of this document. On the one hand Callinicos is rightly scathing of Rees’s behaviour in Respect. On the other, he reverts to the blaming George, Salma and the rest of us for the split, absolving the SWP from any responsibility for it.
Yet at the meeting on Sept 4 between George et al and representatives of the SWP, the single biggest item that dominated discussion was the OFFU cheque. George spent most of his time talking about it. In his typical haughty way, Callinicos dismissed those concerns. As indeed he did so again at the all-London SWP members meeting.
If Callinicos had shown a fraction of the contrition about the OFFU cheque then, that he does now, tensions towards a split would have been significantly lessened. If the SWP leadership had been prepared to acknowledge then, what they are shouting about now, that there were problems with John Rees’s style of leadership, the split would have been avoided. I have no doubt about that. (After all, unlike Callinicos, we were not asking for John’s head. We simply wanted someone to work along side him – and even suggested another SWP member to make it more palatable to them – in order to restore confidence in the National Secretary position. George’s other demands for more rigorous accounting and budgeting and an elections committee were uncontroversial).
Of course, the underlying objective political difficulties would have remained. And tensions associated with them would have continued. Respect found itself on terrain not of its choosing. The anti-war tide was receding, the fracturing of traditional political loyalties which were pronounced in sections of the Muslim community, was less pronounced beyond it, plus we entered into what was for many of us a whole new and ugly world of having to deal with electoralist pressures specific to South Asian communities.
But the challenge for a mature political leadership would have been to navigate a way through all of this. On that score, Callinicos, the rest of the SWP leadership and the cadre that supported them, spectacularly failed at the task in hand. For a party that sets itself the not immodest task of seeking to lead the working class, and behind it other classes, in a united front to overthrow capitalism, the fact the SWP leadership could not unite with the most left wing MP in the country and the most left wing Muslim activist in the country, speaks volumes about the pretensions of its leadership and the strong ultra-leftist current that runs through it.
spot on on said:
#24 Ger Francis brilliantly sums up the charge sheet against the SWP leadership. All the leading members of the Central Committee should do what Callinicos says Rees should have done and resign for this appalling debacle in the following order of responsibility – Rees, German, Callinicos, Bambery, Harman and Smith. They are all guilty. The others are guilty too, but they were largely onlookers and perhaps should be let off with a community service sentence and some lengthy hanging of heads in shame. That should also apply to the CC’s cheerleaders Molyneux and Simons to name a couple.
Macallum on said:
the apparent belief of the Socialist Party, for example, that economic recession automatically means a collapse in working-class resistance.
News to me as a member of the SP but typical distortion. Someone should mention this to those cdes leading a campaign in the car industry.
prianikoff on said:
#22 “The SWP leadership has dogmatically clung to the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” theory”
So there’s still some hope for them?
Amongst the measures the capitalists took to restore their rates of profit were moving production to cheap labour areas, casualisation of labour and not including pensions in wage rates.
Recycling money from China and the Middle East allowed the banks to extend loans to workers and trap them in debt.
Also, surprise, surprise! – Capitalists lie about their profits,
Enron simply moved their losses off the books.
They were just the tip of an iceberg.
All of these measures failed.
A Global economic meltdown has been predictable for at least 10 years, since the “Asian Tigers” crisis.
While the exact timing was difficult it should have been apparent from the first banking failures that it had arrived.
Most bourgeois commentators argued that different parts of the economy were insulated from one another.
Manufacturing wasn’t affected by finance etc..
Britain, or Ireland, or Iceland were “better-placed” to weather the crisis.
All of this proved to be nonsense.
But this sort of thinking also infected “Marxists” who’d deluded themselves into thinking that globalisation had altered the parameters of struggle.
If anything, the SWP leadership’s caution reflected its acquiesence in such thinking. i.e. the struggle was against globalisation and neo-liberal *policy* rather than against capitalism.
A similar tendency is to imagine that Left Keynesian policies will succeed without fundamentally challenging the ownership of capital.
external bulletin on said:
Yet another document that damns Rees for his reckless actions in Respect, but cannot even for a second concede that maybe Galloway had a point in his letter to the Respect National Council in August 2007.
The logic of this is absurd. Galloway talks of exactly the same behaviour that Callinicos and others do, yet at all times the pretence must be maintained that Galloway “denounced” Rees (who was never mentioned by name).
The simple fact is, Callinicos’s intellectual dishonesty (claiming that Rees was denounced in the letter when he wasn’t, in a document that does nothing but denounce Rees) negates any credibility his analysis has. Ditto Neil Davidson and all the other contributions to the debate from inside the SWP.
It’s an untenable line: Rees has to go because he was too reckless, shouldn’t have accepted the OFFU cheque and behaved unaccountabily. But Galloway talked of pretty much identical behaviour and is somehow to blame for the wrecking of Respect.
Nas on said:
External bulletin and Ger Francis make an unassailable point.
Why did criticism of Rees from allies in a united front merit going to war, but within the SWP a year later be grounds for removing him from the leadership?
I found Callinicos’s defensiveness over his own knowledge of the Offu affair very revealing.
PhilW on said:
None of the various factions in the SWP can admit that the SWP was wrong in splitting from Respect. They are skirting around this issue and the POLITICAL differences between them look far too trivial for what is rapidly becoming a nasty faction fight.
None of them mentions the “vacuum to the left of labour”. Has it disappeared? Without Respect, the SWP now has no perspective. This “inconvenient truth” is what underlies the “debate”
Nas on said:
It really is worth SWP members rereading Galloway’s letter from last year and asking themselves why they went along with Rees’s madness then when it’s now acknowledged by the likes of Molyneux that he should already have resigned.
mr smith goes to washington on said:
#25 Maybe Smith should be higher up the resignation table. It was he, at Rees and German’s command, who wanted to wreck Respect in Spring 2007 by trying to force Salma Yaqoob into a loyalty test.
This followed her expressing her concern that it would alienate some of Respect’s Muslim supporters who were keen to reelect Livingstone if German stood for mayor. It was a reasonable argument made in the interests of Respect’s electoral success (including German’s election to the Assembly) whether or not you agreed with it, but Yaqoob, according to those who must be obeyed, had become a fifth column for Livingstone.
This was all a cunning plan therefore to stuff German’s electoral chances whilst appearing to do the opposite. Yaqoob was to be set a loyalty test and drummed out of Respect if she failed it. That was Smith/German/Rees/Bambery’s plan. It came to nothing as Salma did not press her case to the Respect National Council.
As for Smith being ignorant of the OFFU cheque, it must have been a bloody long holiday he was on apparently with no telephone or other means of modern communication. Where was he? In the Amazon rain forest?
Nas on said:
#32 Indeed. There is a huge amount of back-covering going on over the Offu business here. And it’s Smith’s and Callinicos’s backs that are the most hopelessly exposed.
David T on said:
Who should we support?
I say – Callinicos.
After all, Callinicos, because he is an aristocrat
By contrast, John Rees is a filthy little oik.
Bill Bo Baggins on said:
I note that the good Prof nicks the name of Mark Steel’s book, the irony
the revolution is imminent on said:
#27 Prianikoff, you really are a prize twit. Personally, I think the global economic meltdown has been predictable for the last 200 years rather than the mere ten in which you have been predicting it. And indeed it has been predicted many times.
passing leftie on said:
Whatever’
Mike on said:
Post #30 “None of the various factions in the SWP can admit that the SWP was wrong in splitting from Respect. They are skirting around this issue and the POLITICAL differences between them look far too trivial for what is rapidly becoming a nasty faction fight.”
There are no hard factions in the SWP at present. What appears to have taken shape is a factional struggle between two parts of the CC and even that is muddled due to the shared history of the majority and minority factions. Despite which any revolutionary, as opposed to renegades from Marxism like Grr Francis, ought to sympahise with the majority which shows signs of being under the pressure of parts of the groups cadre who have never been happy with the Respect escapade and the disgraceful populism that went with that idiocy.
In post #2 my chum David Broder wrote “These are hardly split questions, it is a hopeless muddle of organisational and personal rows, in which the banner of ‘democracy’ is raised entirely opportunistically – I doubt this current openness will either permeate through the whole membership, or last for long.”
Y’know thinking about the questions are far more serious than those that led to the development of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP. Which disputes were concerned with questions of personality, organisation and democratic functioning. Damn sounds exactly like they were debating the same questions as the SWP today!
More seriously I find your cynicism alarming in one so young David. Perhaps the leadership of the SWP, even Cde Harman, would like to close down debate as soon after conference as is possible. Indeed that might be the result of a commission that removes debate from the membership to closed rooms. But is it not a fact that sections of the group are more or less openly going far beyond the positions of the CC? Is it not a fact that the CC majority, from reading the document of Cde Callinicos, is under some considerable pressure from sections of the rank and file? And should not this section of the SWP be encouraged?
Kevin Williamson on said:
“If a decade ago someone had told be that we would help lead a movement that would organize a demonstration of two million, I would have predicted that the party would grow to 20,000 or 30,000.”
Delusional on both counts.
This reminds me of what happened in the wake of Tommy Sherdian’s Bill against warrant sales in the first term of the Scottish Parliament. Sheridan (and some in the SSP) tried to take the credit for the Bill to end warrant sales when in fact it was a joint effort in Parliament and had the support of the SNP MSPs and others.
Upon realising that the SSP wanted all the glory and kudos – without acknowledging the assistance of others – the SNP group turned their backs on SSP Bills during the second term of Parliament. Once bitten.
The point is that the SWP are now wanting the glory and kudos of having “lead” the anti-war movement. Utter bollocks. If the Lib Dems had called the Jan 2003 demo it would still have been 2 million strong. It was a global mobilisation that particualar day not something being “lead” by the SWP or anyone else.
I hope that in future the left will draw the appropriate conclusions and turn their backs on any front organisations that the SWP claim to lead, turn their backs on demos and conferences that the SWP call, and organise locally without consulting them.
Ignore them and they might stop acting like fannies.
Rosa Lichtenstein on said:
#20 — Ian:
“More debate about philosophy? Strewth. Youre all as bad as each other.
How about some action”
We have had 150 years of largely unsuccessful action, and 70 years of almost totally unsuccesful Trotskyist action. It’s high time we looked at our core theory.
That’s quite apart from the fact that I am an anti-philosopher — and it is integral to my thesis that philosophy is partially responsible for the dire state of the left.
berlinalexanderplatz on said:
I also think External bulletin and Ger Francis have a point.
The strength of the document is detailing what it calls the unaccountability and recklessness of the swp’s respect work under rees. But it’s much weaker in linking this to the question of party democracy within the swp, although one might well think the two are connected; a cc directly accountable and responsible to the membership would make for a body more likely to be emboldened to hold (as well as more justifed in holding) individuals with special areas of work accountable to itself.
Now, what’s interesting here – often these bits are tucked away in subordinate clauses – is eg the statement
” Neil Davidson’s document has been widely welcomed because it articulated a widespread feeling that the Respect crisis revealed that something had gone wrong with the party’s democracy. … my own attitude to Neil’s arguments is very similar to Chris Harman’s, who has been privately been expressing for many years the kind of views stated publicly in his reply to Neil. Like Chris, I think the problem is less one of structure than of ethos.”
Now if at least one of the cc has been ‘privately expressing’ this ‘for many years’ how is it that, in replying to Molyneux on 5 jan 2006, the cc could write:
John has one final argument against the CC. It says, in so many words, that we are “undemocratic”, despite “formal democratic procedures”. … John’s argument is completely phoney. For he himself has been present at CCs, national meetings and conferences through all these years – and so have many other comrades with long experience in the party, often with high standing within their unions precisely because they are willing to stand up and speak their minds. If such people (including John, remember) have not challenged the CC’s line, it is certainly not because they are intimidated by the CC. It may even be because they agreed with the CC line.
It’s one thing to ignore failings, but quite another to suggest they dont exist when privately one admits they do…
Halshall on said:
AC’s we can and did no wrong (ie: the CC majority) vis the Respect split; and his emphatic repeat early on of the old lie that the split in Respect was all GG’s fault, completely undermines the cred of his present position that it was JR that done it (but rather badly).
To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, ‘You can fool some SWP members all of the time, and all of them some of the time, but you can’t fool all of them all of the time.’
Nevertheless the split has seriously undermined the cred of the ‘left of Labour project’ generally but perhaps [I dearly hope]not permanently.
I believe that united fronts are the way forward to begin to repair the damage. And that has to of course fully include SWP comrades.
chjh on said:
Was the SWP wrong to see George Galloway’s letter as an attack on us? If we were wrong, we were in good company. At the time neither Andy nor Liam were Respect members – Liam had actually left Respect because of his disdain for the SWP. Both welcomed George’s letter, specifically because they saw it as aimed at reducing the SWP’s political influence within Respect, rather than because it was about a particular individual. Both published it in order to publicise this both inside and outside Respect, thus strengthening the likelihood that the SWP would see it as an attack on ourselves. After all, if two blogs who are open about their political opposition to the SWP welcome this initiative as helping their cause, that’s going to look very much like an attack. If we were wrong to see this as an attack on the SWP, were they similarly wrong? And if open and honest discussion within Respect could have defused the crisis, how much responsibility for the blow-up rests with those outside Respect who did their best to spreadthis as widely as possible?
Karen Elliot on said:
I think this document is superb. Alex’s account of Rees’s behaviour during the Respect split and subsequently is entirely plausible and, reading between the lines, what he offers is more than an apologia for the CC and a passing off of their collective sins onto Rees’s shoulders. His conclusions aren’t far reaching enough and he’s complacent about what needs to be done, but it is a matter of degree.
As I’ve said elsewhere, one thing that could move matters on decisively would be the removal of German from the CC along with Rees. Alex is correct to emphasise the need for a unified CC, and right too to insist that it is impossible while Rees is still on it, but any reasonable person would conclude that the same holds true of Lindsey German, as she has been central to every stunt Rees has pulled as well as in propagating a culture within the party of control and command. To call for the heads of Bambery and Nineham as well would be unnecessary formalism (though you might like to drop Nineham on the grounds of general irrelevance, but that’s another matter), if only the CC accept that the problems were not caused by one man behaving erratically but by the peculiar politics developed by Rees and German together over many years, of which Rees’s recent behaviour is only a logical corollary. Those politics have been in evidence for decades and have been commented on and analysed by others in the past. It was only when the Rees-German faction began to put their ‘project’ into action in the wider world that it crashed against the rocks of reality, exposing Rees once and for all and causing huge damage to the party. That is why it needs to addressed urgently, and why it is not good enough to sack Rees alone but must involve his partner taking the long walk with him.
Supporters of Neil Davidson’s document (and I believe that there are now a great many more of them) should pursue their calls for a properly empowered democracy commission which can reconsider the organisation and culture of the SWP and propose changes, but they should withdraw the call to delay making changes to the CC (which anyway can only ever have been inspired by a desire not to let Rees take *all* the blame, no matter that they saw him anyway as the main culprit and laughed off his attempt to make common cause with them.) They should call instead for the CC majority to go the whole hog and propose a slate which removes both Rees and German from the CC (and, in Rees’s case, from any other positions of authority.) Without this, no one will take seriously Alex’s recognition in the documents argumentation, if not its conclusions, that there has been a problem with the bullying, ‘managerial’ style of leadership in the SWP for some time, the blame for which cannot simply be laid at the feet of one man.
#32: To call for the head of Martin Smith in these circumstances is absurd – from most accounts he has been at the forefront of challenging Rees and German, once he worked out what damage they were doing. Frankly, it might be more appropriate to give the guy some sort of medal.
The changes that need to take place in the SWP are radical and thoroughgoing, but they don’t necessarily require a total overhaul of its leadership. Rather that leadership should be tested, individually and collectively, in the forthcoming debates to see how genuine its commitment is to rooting out the problems in the party. For all that you can argue that it is the low level of militancy in the wider world, and the failure to make significant gains (in fact, the decline of the membership over a long period) that’s at the root of the problem in the party, that is perfectly compatible with understanding that the rot started at the head, among the party leadership. By the same token the cure also needs to start at the head, not only so that the Rees clique are removed from the leadership but in order for the CC majority to prove to the rank and file that they are not simply trying to buy time but recognise the source of the problem in their own ranks. Throwing Rees to the wolves is only a start. They need to realise that a job on the CC is not for life, and has to be earned, and that Lindsey German has forfeited that right.
Having thought for a long time that what was needed was an uprising of party members against the CC, I think Alex has proved that the CC is not a lame duck, and that while it has been severely compromised, at least some of them understand that and are prepared to envisage real change. In that case the job now would be to continue to press for re-evaluation and change within the party – a democratic overhaul – but to test the CC’s claim that they are aware of this by pressing them now to prove that they are ready to draw the necessary conclusions.
external bulletin on said:
chjh – surely a political attack, if that’s how you saw it, should’ve generated a properly political response, rather than outrageous claims of a “witch hunt”, the publishing of “transcripts” of meetings so that Galloway would refuse to meet with SWP members in case he was recorded, the rigging of the conference (including refusing to convene the CAC properly), the lying about a National Council meeting being organised, in order to stump the opposition, and so much more?
Why did the SWP have to blow up the whole organisation? Why not say “ok, you want to reduce our political influence, we’re going to win the day by force of argument”?
If the SWP was the numerical majority in Respect, why the need to, in Martin Smith’s words, “go nuclear”?
Why the need to lie so much about people in the SWP who opposed Rees? Why the need to clamp down so hard on opposition?
external bulletin on said:
“To call for the head of Martin Smith in these circumstances is absurd – from most accounts he has been at the forefront of challenging Rees and German”
He spearheaded the intimidation and bullying of people who disagreed with the party’s line.
None of the main CC members deserve their positions. All of them either actively participated in the smashing up of Respect or the smashing up of the opposition.
If Martin Smith had any interest in party democracy, why hold off on printing Mark Steel’s article and pretend Mark wasn’t an SWP member? Why go round talking of people like Kevin Ovenden as an “enemy” when what we’re talking about were strategic and tactical differences? Why tell the pre-conference aggregates that almost no members had left the party over the Respect split, when everyone now seems to be admitting that there’s a “crisis” over it?
The only people who emerge from this without a tarnished record are those like Charlie Kimber, who stayed completely silent during the whole thing. But by doing so, they lose any claim to be able to lead the class: Cowards don’t get to lead.
Hugh Kerr on said:
Kevin I normally find your posts fairly intelligent however this time you have let your hostility to Tommy Sheridan distort your post and it is largely irrelevant to the debate here.For the record I worked with Tommy Sheridan on the bill to end warrant sales in the parliament and let me tell you it was 95% Tommys work on the bill that got it through.Yes we got Alec Neil of the SNP and John Mcallion of Labour to sponsor the bill but as they will tell you, Tommy and Mike Dailly who drafted the bill did the work.Yes the SNP voted for the bill as did many Labour MSPs but this was because they knew they would be crucified by their constituents if they didnt which is why even the Labour and Liberal executive had to give in and accept the bill. The reason the SNP didnt support any more of Tommys bills is they could see the writing on the wall and they were losing votes to the SSP which resulted in 6 SSP MSPs being elected in 2003.You should remember all this Kevin since you were a member of the SSP at the time and a columnist in the party paper.I know you want to renounce your trotskyist past but dont try and rewrite history to justify it I should leave that to the current protoganists in the SWP internal debate they seem to be quite good at it!
Horza on said:
Karen, I admire your post. Your assessment is admirably objective, given that you have good reason to be sceptical and bitter towards the CC. If anything I think you might be too generous.
On the whole I share your positive assessment of the document and it seems especially strong on wider perspectives. But what did you make of this: ‘the issue of how documents are circulated is one thing we need to look at, given the way in which some have been distributed by email in a fairly random way.’? It is only a minor aside, but doesn’t it reveal a deep rooted ‘not in front of the kids’ mentality?
The SWP should be moving to a situation where it has more visible debate not less, such as own website forums where these kinds of documents are posted and members can chip in comments.
Secondly, I wonder about the ISO. I don’t know enough about them to really be confident here, but they have recently appealed for fraternal relations with the SWP, in respect to sharing articles and speakers. This seems very reasonable, are the differences between two IS tradition parties really so deep as AC tries to portray them (not so much in this document but elsewhere)?
I admire the admission of mistakes that is present in this document, even if they are carefully qualified, it is a massive step forward on any previous CC document I’ve seen. But I wonder as the person most responsible for the rupture with the ISO whether he will find it hardest to make a turn on this issue. A turn that I think is necessary.
I completely agree with you about LG. Her control systems were far tighter and far better tuned to sensing dissenters than those of JR who in my day was surprisingly naive about such things.
Finally, I really think it is vital the reformers get a majority on the committee to improve democracy. This could all so easily die down without a qualitative change of culture.
Jenkins on said:
This is a CC that doesn’t even know it’s made mistakes so the only conclusions it can draw is `more of the same’.
prianikoff on said:
#47 I’d tend to trust Hugh on that. I’ve found him to be a very solid, practical socialist ever since he spoke at a meeting on the Housing Finance Act organised by our IS branch back in the 70’s.
Meanwhile, back to the question of the economy raised by a unpleasant right wing turd earlier.
Meanwhile back in the real world:-
In September 2007, Socialist Review had an article by Chris Harman on the financial crisis which had erupted in the US during August.
This involved the collapse of Bear Stearns and two US Hedge Funds.
Ironically, the editor of SR titled this “The Financial Panic that never was”.
Harman correctly pointed out that several major recessions since 1998 had only been averted by the intervention of the US Federal Reserve.
But he made no prognoses about its implications for the British economy.
These turned out to be acute, since the Northern Rock bailout happened on September 14th 2007.
Socialist Worker rightly called for the bank’s Nationalisation without compensation.
But it still didn’t seem to think it was a sign of a generalised economic crisis.
In October an article by independent journalist Graham Turner appeared in SR, “The global economy – solid as a rock?”
This recognised what had happened was a watershed, but restricted the analysis to blaming Brown’s Monetary policies.
(Turner is a well known Left Keynesian, who has argued for lower interest rates for some time – a demand echoed by George Galloway.)
It was only in May of 2008 that the Review carried an article by Joseph Choonara which attempted to apply Marxist theory to the recession.
Followed by a similar article by Chris Harman and now, a special supplement to “Socialist Worker”
Rees alludes to this response in his IB article.
But so far, there’s been no real evidence that this has informed a change in political slogans.
The People before Profit Charter being the SWP’s main vehicle for these.
But Respect should take note too.
It should by now be clear that this is not “just another” economic crisis.
The ability of the world’s biggest capitalist governments to deal with it is under increasing strain.
As the fault lines open up, so do the underpinnings of political stability.
The Greek events and US occupation are just the opening shots.
It’s up to any political leadership to be able to offer these movements the slogans and programme to fight with.
chjh on said:
# 45external bulletin – you don’t answer any of the points I made, but you do inadvertantly point out one aspect of the problem. Non-members of Respect circulating internal Respect documents to all and sundry – good; the SWP releasing a transcript of a meeting we attended to our members – bad. How is that not double standards?
The serious point I’m making is that the hatred of the SWP (and no, that’s not too strong a word)that came out of the debate was too deep-rooted to have been caused by any mistakes we may have made. Some people had an animus against the SWP, and saw Galloway’s letter as a stick to beat us with. I don’t think that was a misunderstanding on their part.
Jenkins on said:
chjh: you are deluded my friend. The SWP created the hatred. Your conspiracy theory doesn’t wash anymore. Why would Galloway have entered an alliance if there was such a hatred in the first place? How come the charge against the SWP’s wrecking operation was lead by SWP members who were then expelled. The truth is the SWP saw Galloway’s letter as a stick with which to beat him for their own internal factional reasons. A letter that was the result of exasperation at the back stage antics of Rees and Co. An excuse to go nuclear and break up another promising initiative when they were done with it. Unfortunately for you, unlike the SWP’s membership, other members of Respect weren’t ready to be chewed up and spat out.
Anon on said:
Just a post-note
To all those who are in receipt of salary’s from both Respect’ SWP’ Left List’ whatever
Honestly would they be out fighting the fight putting in the hours standing out on picket lines delivering leaflets ?
Come on Honestly!
Nas on said:
chjh – the criticisms of the Rees regime in Respect made in George Galloway’s are milder than, but also fully vindicated by, Callinicos’s document. So: it’s right to defenestrate a CC member when we say, but equally right to smash up a united front when our allies make exactly the same points but more moderately and with more modest reform proposals.
Whichever way you look at it, that’s a rather arrogant position.
Mike on said:
Horza in post #48 wrote referring to Cde Callinicos “But I wonder as the person most responsible for the rupture with the ISO whether he will find it hardest to make a turn on this issue.
In fact a friendly reply penned by AC has already been sent to the ISO. But please bear in mind that the ISO are NOT asking to rejoin the IST but are rather seeking the kind of relations they enjoy with the LCR in France.
external bulletin on said:
“you do inadvertantly point out one aspect of the problem. Non-members of Respect circulating internal Respect documents to all and sundry – good; the SWP releasing a transcript of a meeting we attended to our members – bad. How is that not double standards?”
Um, I never passed comment on the SWP documents being published. You’re also looking at it backwards.
The SWP makes a point of demanding that its documents remain secret – but John Rees made a point of publishing a transcript, recorded by another SWP member, of a meeting (ie it wasn’t just Rees doing it).
The hypocrisy is within the SWP again, I’m afraid.
The reason for not answering your points is that your points start from a false premise: If it was a political attack, you don’t do what you did, you deal with it politically. It’s irrelevant if people sought to reduce the SWP’s political influence – if that’s what happened, you still fight it politically. What happened was not a witch-hunt, was not an “attack on the left” and was not a “denounciation” of Rees. The SWP did everything it could to smash up Respect, losing all its allies in Respect in the process.
If Liam and Andy’s actions were a political attack, wouldn’t the revolutionary party, the vanguard party, set an example to the whole movement and deal with it in the most high-level political way possible?
Don’t you think that’s better than the wretched behaviour we saw from the leadership of the SWP last year, continuing now with shrieks of “It’s not fair!” when the “personalisation” of the debate turns towards them?
Mike on said:
While generally agreeing with the analysis of the SWP internal struggle put forward by Karen Elliot, which seems to have moved closer to my own views over the last day or so, I do disagree with some of her points.
Karen in post #44 “Supporters of Neil Davidson’s document.. should call instead for the CC majority to go the whole hog and propose a slate which removes both Rees and German from the CC.
Rather pointless given that the document from Cde Callinicos strongly suggests that unless Nineham and German toe the new line they will be out at the next reshuffle anyway. It also strikes me that the majority wish to draw Bambery to their side the better to maintain continuity of leadership.
“To call for the head of Martin Smith in these circumstances is absurd – from most accounts he has been at the forefront of challenging Rees and German, once he worked out what damage they were doing. Frankly, it might be more appropriate to give the guy some sort of medal.”
I think we need to ask why Cde Smith has been fighting Rees within the CC and more generally consider his position. Now the fact of the matter is that he is head of the groups apparat and depends on it for his income. Whether or not for such material reasons or for reasons of Leninist ideology he has an interest in fighting against those elements that would liquidate the SWP such as the deserters to populism who departed the SWP in favour of Galloways cesspit or the likes of Rees.
Moreover the comrade has not chosen fit to take the struggle against liquidationism (Grr Francis) and opportunism (John Rees) into the ranks of the SWP. This is in stark contrast to Cdes Harman and Callinicos. Perhaps more importantly, actually theres no question the class struggle is always more important, his line in the unions is to the right of that historically associated with the IS Tradition.
Now I hope that like other members of the CC Majority he can reassess his own role but until we have evidence its a bit early to coin a medal for the comrade.
Jenkins on said:
Respect certainly should not allow the SWP CC to get away with getting rid of Rees on the grounds that Respect was a mistake and therefore further backhandedly attacking Respect. Rather it must continue to point out that the SWP’s attitude towards Respect both when they were for it and when they suddenly became against it stank to high heaven and the whole rotten self-serving SWP CC are implicated from Rees to Callinicos. Any decent SWP members remaining will not go along with this charade.
BarryKade on said:
Re post # 53 by chjh –
Charlie, its probably best to avoid that sort of victim mentality: “everybody hates us, everything they do is a plot to destroy us”. Not a good place to be, doesn’t lead to a balanced revolutionary practice. Its one of the pathologies of small ‘in group’ mentalities that leads to cultish behaviour – a result of the relative marginalisation and isolation enforced by objective circumstances perhaps, but one that must be resisted rather than indulged.
Speaking for myself, I both respect and value the SWP’s work and existence, and also get extremely annoyed and critical about aspects of its behaviour. Maybe you could call it a love/hate relationship with the party – one I have held during decades of activism sometimes inside, sometimes outside the party.
But yes, the decades have left a whole layer of left activists who distrust the SWP as much as they support it, while also continuing to have to work alongside it. Those who have left under a cloud, or who fellow travellers who have been in a united front that has suddenly had the plug pulled – be it the ANL mark 1, the miners support groups or Respect. It is always a good exercise for SWP members to try to imagine what it is like to be a non-party socialist or activist who works alongside the SWP in a UF. Only when I left the party and tried to keep working with it did I realise what people moaned about!
Often the SWP has alienated other activists or its own past cadres, only for the CC to push out and try and recruit a new generation – often of students – who have no memory of the mistakes and rows of the previous period. However, these manoeuvres come back to haunt you, – the accumulated historic layers of disgruntled former allies and members cannot be sent to some gulag, but remain in their local activist scenes! But Charlie, it is a far more mixed, complex and ambivalent emotion than mere hatred!
Ray on said:
“The serious point I’m making is that the hatred of the SWP (and no, that’s not too strong a word)that came out of the debate was too deep-rooted to have been caused by any mistakes we may have made. Some people had an animus against the SWP, and saw Galloway’s letter as a stick to beat us with. I don’t think that was a misunderstanding on their part.”
The self serving revisionism that Galloway’s supporters use to justify their continued attacks on the SWP rather gives the game away.
If the attacks on the SWP had only been limited to the split then perhaps this might justify their argument that they are angry about a specific political disagreement but the reality is that even before the split Liam and Andy were sharpening their knives.
Every aspect of the SWP’s activity has been under assault on SU – not just the issue of the split. For example Galloway’s Respect tried to undermine the LMHR Carnival by organising their own event. They also backed Livingstone at the expense of a united left opposition to Labour. Galloway called for a vote for New Labour in Scotland and is still cosying up to Livingstone.
RR’s claim that the split was not political but the SWP going nuclear really doesn’t fit the evidence. What is clear is that the obsession on here with all things SWP is really a reflection of a hostility to its politics not towards individuals in the SWP or a so-called lack of internal democracy. Regardless of how the SWP reorganises itself or who it elects to its CC there will continue to be political differences with RR and that’s what Andy, Liam and Galloway cannot tolerate. So much for their cries of plurality and democracy. Especially when we are all aware that Galloway controls Respect policy and SU is a mouthpeice for it’s leading members.
Over a year has passed since the split and the bile and hostility from those who claim the SWP went nuclear has never subsided. If anything, judging by the response of Galloway acolytes such as ‘external bulletin’, it has increased to fever pitch. This current feeding frenzy on SU only goes to show that those hostile to the SWP in Respect were never interested in negotiation during the process of the split. They had made their minds up that the SWP were preventing their (i.e. Galloway’s) political agenda from dominating Respect.
It’s quite evident from the hostility on on here and its leading members attacks on StWC, UAF and LMHR and the SWP’s union work that RR’s primary aim has been to damage any attempt by the left to work with the SWP. This campaign of hostility from RR’s leading members is not the behaviour of an organisation that claims to want unity, plurality and democracy. But it has inculcated a fragile form of sectarian unity on a blog for those who have nowhere else to go and who share a common hatred of the SWP. Sad really.
Andy Newman on said:
#43 & #53
Charlie
It is a bit of a tired old theme you playing the victim and claiming that people are and were motivated by “hatred” of the SWP.
Have you asked yourself what led to the level of distrust toward the SWP, and whether perhaps people might be justified in not trusting the SWP?
My own falling out with the SWP occured because I had a tactical disagreement with Rees over the manner that the Socialist Alliance was wound down. This led to Rees ringing me several times while i was at work in a hectoring manner, and including him telling a number of highly unprofessional lies about other leading members of the SA, (Conrade x is alsways drunk, etc) and making the ridculous claim to me that becasue the SWP is the “biggest relolutionary organisation in Europe it is (In JOhn Rees’s own words) always sctarian to disagree with the decisions of the SWP.
After a particulrly ludicrous attempt to intmidate me into line in the coffee bar at the 2004 Stop the War conference I resigned from the SWP, and the result was a whispering campign against me, including a number of outright lies.
Most ludicous was the repsobnse when I went to the laucnh meeting for Respect in bristol, the start f the 2004 Eiuro elections, where I wa saksed to explain the electoral system, and what our chances were, and I accuralet forecast that respect might get around 0.5% in the South West (they did get 0.7% ). A leading SWP memer in bristol said I was ourtrageously pessimistic and shouldn’t e listened to, and he predicted they would win two MEs in the South West (that would require getting more votes than the Labour party, around 22%)
I was disgusted to see SA meetings packed by SWP members who had never before been active in the SA, voting to close down organisation that they had played no part in, and diverting the funds to respect. even though many of the SA members present had no intention of joining Respect.
Of couse, many of those comrades could have been persuaded to join Respect if they had been given time to make that descion for themsleves, and won over politically, but instead bureaucratic manouvres and packed meetings were used instead.
So when Galloway made a political critique of thwt way of working, I naturally found it appealling; artiuclarly when it was followed by the very Salma yaqoobs, documents outlining an entriely different vision of Respect as an inclusive broad left organisation./
Jenkins on said:
`Over a year has passed since the split and the bile and hostility from those who claim the SWP went nuclear has never subsided.’
Every single one of the `internal’ documents either starts with an attack on Respect or contains one or many more within it.
BarryKade on said:
Ray at post # 62 – my post immediately above at # 61 can also be addressed at you. (Infact I was going to add that Charlie is in danger of sounding as paranoid as you often do, Ray).
But also, it is not useful to portray these arguments on this blog and elsewhere as simply Respect supporters verus the SWP.
For example I am not a member or enthusiast for Respect or Galloway. I don’t have confidence that Respect without the SWP (or another significant body of socialists in it) will be an attractive or viable vehicle for the left. But merely attacking the obvious weaknesses of the post-SWP Respect does not excuse the SWP CC’s mistakes. One expects higher standards of political clarity and principle from the leadership of revolutionary Marxism, than one does from a rag bag of reformists. Plenty of other critics of the SWP on here are also much more critical of Respect – like Mike or Karen Elliot. You really need do more than caricature the debate to fit your comfort zone of cozy preconceptions if you are to have any traction in this discussion, comrade Ray .
Nas on said:
Jenkins – and the professor says the split in Respect was what did it for the SWP CC.
Anon on said:
Galloway back to Scotland
http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/newsfeed/2008/12/21/george-galloway-ready-to-take-on-commons-speaker-78057-20985806/
D on said:
The thing is, if Rees is so bad then how on earth did they not spot this earlier, before they put him in charge of the Respect project? I think maybe there is a little jeolousy that he got a taste of the limelight and they didn’t.
BarryKade on said:
#67 – Galloway has been a defender of Commons Speaker Michael Martin – now he might want to unseat him over the Green affair. Principled opposition to Martins facilitation of police intrusion into parliamentary politics? Or a simple desire to do whatever to remain in the parliamentary game? Whatever!
Adamski (non-SWP) on said:
The CC has shown less leadership, imagination and audacity in building a coherent response to the recession that one might expect.
Obviously the terrain is shifting quickly: Locally – having small forces – have attempted to ‘bend the stick’ to one issue that could provide the focus for building a bigger movement capable of taking up more issues – at first it seemed fuel poverty might be the issue, then the focus shifted to the bailout of banks and house repossessions, then the issue of job cuts hit particularly brutally (almost quarter of the job losses in Britain in the last month have been in South Wales alone), but there seem to have been little national initiatives from the leadership of the SWP to build broader movements around the crisis.
Leaving aside the debate on the internal regime in the SWP
that others are dealing with, AC calls for concrete analysis of concrete situations, but gives few concrete proposals for local work around the crisis. JRs proposal that a StWC style united front can be built. around the crisis is perhaps naive, but at least offers some kind of initiatives – I don’t see any concrete proposals from AC (admittedly the document was intended as a reply to JR)
This compares, for example, with ND who proposes as an example the issue of house reposessions. One can imagine joint work inititated with organisations like Shelter, Big Issue, housing charities, DCH, trade unions, local politicians etc.
The idea of Scottish socialists for a day of action against fuel poverty could provide an example of a way to created a major focus for popular mobilisation. With a broad consensus from almost 100 Labour MPs, the entire left, the TUC, a coalition of charities/NGOs including Help the Aged, Barnardo’s and Friends of the Earth launching a “Fuel Poverty Charter” we could have the basis for a Britain wide day of action.
Instead the pressure that built up in the run-up to the Labour Party Conference has been allowed to peter out. The role of socialists within this consensus would be to shift it leftward towards demanding a return to public ownership as the only viable solution to fuel poverty (or rather corporate greed), as it happens this consensus is one that is quite mainstream among working class people.
“The clarity . . . gave the impetus to turn the party sharply towards a focus on responding to the economic crisis and building resistance to its effects on working people. This is reflected in, for example, in the ‘Socialists and the Crisis’ meeting to mobilize the party in London on 8 October, the protests at the Bank of England and Canary Wharf, the Bookmarks pamphlet on the crisis by Chris Harman, and the mini-Marxism on 6 December”
It is true that building a united front(s) around the recession is complex, but it’s notable that all inititatives mentioned by AC are based on “the Party” (sure it is understandable that SWP members will want to get clarity themselves so as to build a movement) & propagandistic, AC doesn’t mention any attempt to build broader movements of the working class taking mass action. JR is quite right to say the failure of the SWP to priorities what could have been a major conference sponsored by the London UCU at which Tony Benn, left wing journalists etc. spoke was unfortunate, such a conference would have helped bring together a layer of activists if it had been properly organised and built.
SWP members reports of ACs closing speech at the Mini-Marxism that I have heard expressed surprise that the only thing he seemed to be saying was “build the party”, with no practical suggestions of how movements might be built, how a broader movement of the class might be formed.
The Mini-Marxism event itself was scheduled at the same time as a major climate change march – which was bigger & broader than recent anti-war and anti-fascist marches – which I personally thought was a bad move, and displays a lack of committment to building a working class environmental movement.
Interestingly a major slogan on the march was “Green New Deal” not referring to the specifics of the programme of that name, but rather the idea of relating solving climate chaos with dealing with the recession. Where I live this idea was raised independently at a PBP Charter meeting on the jobs massacre in South Wales in my local where a Plaid Cymru AM talked about how the idea of a Green New Deal could become a focus for agititation with communities where massive job losses are taking place becoming centres for the new green technologies etc.
I might also raise the importance of the model of “Direct Action Casework” in the coming period?
Phil on said:
chjh – “you’re doing this wrong” is a criticism; “you’re doing this wrong and it needs to change” is a challenge; “you’re doing this wrong, like the untrustworthy scumbags you are” is an attack. Galloway’s letter was critical and challenging, but I don’t think anyone could call it an attack. In any case, the trick in handling disagreements is surely to treat attacks motivated by sectarian hostility as if they were constructive criticisms, not vice versa.
Adamski (non-SWP) on said:
“Where I live this idea was raised independently at a PBP Charter meeting on the jobs massacre in South Wales in my local”
This should read “in my locale”, we don’t have meetings in my local pub! (Though as an aside I was disapointed that my idea for a response to the demise of our local working class social centres in the form of a local “Save our Pubs” united front got little, or rather no, support from the SWP!)
BarryKade on said:
Anybody else notice Callinicos’s mention of the tensions around the LMHR carnival? Unisons withdrawal of financial support because of German’s proposed keynote platform speech promoting the left list?
Remember the debates on this blog at the time? How critics of the SWP leadership challenged the use of LMHR to promote the left list? The SWP had always been so careful over decades of ANL work not to break unity with labour and the unions against the fascists. Yet this hard won unity was then almost thrown away by the desperate attempt by the Rees and German faction to promote the sinking left list on the back of LMHR. This left-sectarian manoeuvre went against all the hallowed traditions of the SWP.
Its interesting to note how so many of the critical views of Rees and German’s leadership raised by ‘sectarian bloggers’ were also held by other elements of the CC! Amazing really – I had no idea.
Jenkins on said:
`SWP members reports of ACs closing speech at the Mini-Marxism that I have heard expressed surprise that the only thing he seemed to be saying was “build the party”, with no practical suggestions of how movements might be built, how a broader movement of the class might be formed.’
If the CC majority get their way uncontested then the SWP membership will be withdrawn from politics for the coming period at a time when capitalism is in crisis and discussions are taking place everywhere. On the other hand, if the Rees and Co. faction emerge triumphant the SWP’s efforts to reach out will be headed by a bunch of total incompetents and disorganisers.
Kevin Williamson on said:
“You should remember all this Kevin since you were a member of the SSP at the time and a columnist in the party paper.I know you want to renounce your trotskyist past but dont try and rewrite history to justify it I should leave that to the current protoganists in the SWP internal debate they seem to be quite good at it!”
Hugh, there’s no hostility to Sheridan in my post. Nor any revision of history. I’ve still got a copy of the SSP’s draft 2003 manifesto which originally stated that Tommy Sheridan single-handedly beat warrant sales. This was spotted just before it went to press and was subsequently ammended to “Tommy Sheridan played a leading role in beating warrant sales.”
In itself this is neither proof of anything nor particularly important but the former approach was part of a general approach to progandising that saw a section of the SSP leadership develop sectarian tendencies after the 2003 gains. It reached a low point with Colin Fox’s sectarian control freakery which ruined the Calton Hill event of 2005. To be fair Sheridan wasnt the worst and certainly wasnt as sectarian towards working with the SNP and the Greens as the likes of Colin Fox was back then.
Because the leadership of the SSP, and a wide layer of SSP organisers, from the party’s inception, had internalised old Trotskyite methods of working it couldnt help itself claiming the credit for things it didnt achieve alone.
With STWC the SWP have gone down the same route that every Trotskist organisation goes down – claiming that their particular organisation’s “leadership” ensured the success of the poll tax struggle/the anti-war movement/anti-facsist movement/fill in the blanks. Its a form of leadership fetish. The need to be seen to be as “leaders” in preparation for the glorious day, freedom for Tooting, etc. Its a bit sad really.
Ian on said:
40. Rosa
Im also anti philosphy. Looking at the volume of your website fills me with the same dread as reading Hegel or any of the other Philosophers.
Im not a member of any Trotskyist organisation, just an ordinary socialist Trade Unionist. Where do I fit in with this in your weird world Rosa?
BarryKade on said:
Post # 70 by Adamski. Great post! Yes, I think we need a big discussion here on concrete proposals for working class self defence from the capitalist recession.
I think we need a programme of immediate demands combined with seriously organised direct actions. I admire the climate camp people for using well prepared direct action to focus an issue. The ‘substitutionalist’ dangers of such a direct action strategy could be mitigated by reaching out and rallying support for any actions via conventional demos and street petitions etc. But it would be a pro-active strategy. The way the SWP leadership focused energy around launching Respect by sustained work on the key area of East London is a good example. We need to select a key ‘pilot’ area and focus on it – understanding that this can then become a national focus and spread.
Who knows – perhaps the revolt against post office privatisation could be that key area. Be good to have a new thread (Andy?) to focus discussion on these questions.
Also, as an aside – climate change barely features in these ‘internal discussions’ amongst the SWP’s leadership. Yet these discussions are really about refocusing the party on a new set of tasks for the future – which must of course address the combined ecological and economic crisis of capitalism.
Hugh Kerr on said:
Ok Kevin I accept there were these aggrandising tendencies in the SSP but Tommy wasnt part of it indeed he always paid tribute to Alec Neil and John Mcallion and as you acknowledge was instrumental in setting up the Independence Convention with the SNP.As for me I find it amusing that the SWP are having a similar debate to the one that preceded our expulsion from IS in 1975 when we tried to put democracy into democratic centralism, what was it the old man said “history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce”
Clive Searle on said:
I find chjh’s points so very depressing because a comrade of his calibre with his grasp of history should be able to see better then ‘everyone is out to get us’.
Let us be absolutely clear here. George’s letter was a letter to the Respect NC. Whatever the Weekly Worker, AWL or, heaven forbid, Andy/Liam thought about it was not particularly relevent. At the time, I welcomed George’s letter – not because it was going to reduce the influence of the SWP within respect but because it was clear that there were serious problems within the organisation that needed sorting out. The National Office had, for example, produced not a single Respect leaflet for almost 6 months, despite having an office with three or four members of staff.
The experience of the two by-elections in the previous two months showed both the successes we could have and the risks we faced if we were not serious about building the organisation. A few months earlier, in North Manchester we had been treated to the bizarre event of an SWP meeting entitled along the line of ‘Socialists and Respect’ called amazingly on the same night and half a mile away from where the local Respect branch was meeting on its regular night. Clearly there was a problem with the way some SWP members viewed their work in this United Front. For those of us, who never liked the ‘United Front of a Special Kind’ formulation, we at least thought they should be treating it a little more ‘special’. I wanted more involvement, not less, but it was clear that the way the national office worked – under the leadership of John Rees – was not particularly successful.
OFFU was a case in point. In Manchester we enthusiastically backed the idea – though myself and others were unhappy that only OFFU material was produced for the Time To Go demo in Manchester in September, not because we opposed OFFU but because we thought we should have had specific Respect material too. After all, a majority of those on the demo wouldn’t be in unions.In the end Manchester Respect spent two hundred pounds producing a Respect leaflet the night before the demo. But we went out and built the conference. In the end my union branch paid for 10 or so delegates to attend.
However, in the run up to the conference the problems set in. OFFU meetings were organised without reference to the local respect steering group – including the SWP member on that steering group with responsibility for union work. Myself – who edited both the local newspaper, website and operated the email list was not informed of meetings – so I was unable to tell people about them. Amazingly an OFFU steering group was created without the leading members of Respect in Greater Manchester being informed. Indeed, after the conference the only time I was contacted with regard to OFFU, was when Colin W. phoned me to ask me to transfer the fighting unions domain name I had registered to him for the new OFFU website. So OFFU was being run, it appeared, as a subsidiary of the SWP, rather than Respect – that had set it up with the aim of deepening Respect’s roots in the unions. This, I believe, is what allowed the cheque business to occur. Had the Respect NC been told about the offer of the money, I have no doubt we would have turned it down. But we were never told. (In fact here I have a real beef with George as I believe he should have informed the NC as soon as he heard about it rather than trying to resolve the issue privately with the SWP at the 4th September meeting.) Indeed it was this ‘softly softly’ approach which allowed Rees and EGL to pen a reply to Galloway which attempted to refute his claim that the OFFU conferncee had lost £5000 with the claim that the “cost of the conference was exclusively carried by Organising For Fighting Unions from its own funds raised through conference fees, trade union and other donations.”
We now know what “other donations” were – but clearly Rees’ style of ‘leadership’ was at fault here. Had the full leadership of Respect been included in these decisions then the whole sorry debacle would have been avoided. An here Alex is absolutely correct – an organisation like OFFU would be quite useful now.
So the mature, rational thing to do when an organisation is punching below its weight is to look at the issues and resolve to improve on our weaknesses.
GG’s letter made some mild suggestions for improvement. The most controversial one of which – the National Organiser – was accepted by Rees at the NC meeting on 29th September. It should be noted that this position was agreed by the CC. I was told that this compromise had been agreed on, if I recall correctly, the 26th September but had to be agreed by the whole CC which met on the next morning. I can only assume that this happened as Rees added his name to the motion proposed by Alan Thornett the 29th September.
Most of the NC went away reasonably happy. I reported to a Manchester wide meeting on Monday night that the issues had been resolved – I recall saying “We all looked into the abyss and then decided not to jump”. Meanwhile it appeared that Rees and his allies were preparing to jump afterall.
Now it is a mystery when the CC decided that, in Alex paraphrasing of Rees that the “attack from the Galloway faction …. developed into a potentially mortal threat to the SWP itself.”
Was it before they knew about the OFFU cheque. Was it after Rees had reneged on the agreement reached on the 29th September? Was it after he told another NC member that the SWP might ‘walk away’ from Respect? Was it after the first set of negotiations about leaving Respect? Or was it after the launch of the calculated insult to the rest of the left in Respect that there was the ‘witchhunt’ against socialists?
It’s hard to tell form Alex’s piece – or indeed from any of the other ‘thinkers’ in the debate as they all seem to agree that Rees needed defending and Galloway ‘resisting’.
But what is remarkable is that the leadership of the SWP – and following them many members clearly believed and acted as if there was a ‘potentially mortal threat to the SWP itself’. Now this despite repeated denials from the supposed’witch-hunters’.
To me it is always a mystery when I crossed the line between a potential (Lindsey German thanked me for my contribution at the 22nd September CC) to being part of the witchhunt. Was it because I’m an old friend of Kevin O or perhaps because I shared my thought with Micahel Lavalette that Martin Smith’s party notes were winding up the crisis rather than defusing them…or perhaps because no witch hunt existed but Rees et al thought they could drive Galloway out instead. I recall having a 90 minute telephone conversation with a leading SWP member and Respect NC member the day before the ‘witchhunt petition was sent out by email. In that whole conversation there was never a mention of witch-hunts or indeed any attempt to drive the SWP/socialists out of Respect. I was never asked to sign up. Yet the next day his name appeared very prominently on the list of initial signatories.
I believe that the witch hunt nonsense was the most damaging thing to occur in the whole debacle. It poisoned relationship between fellow socialists, many of whom had worked together for decades. If John Rees was the architect of this, those that went along with it share their own level of responsibility.
So I wish the SWP well in their debate – but an honest accounting – on all aspects of the Respect split – not just the dodgy cheque – is necessary if the same mistakes are not to be repeated.
Karen Elliot on said:
#48: “doesn’t it reveal a deep rooted ‘not in front of the kids’ mentality?”
Horza – it does indeed, and the issue is connected to the wider questions of party democracy that SWP members now need to consider. Personally I think the same mentality which leads members to defer to the CC (and CC members to demand deference) also leads them to avoid discussing party issues in public, and it is all based on a peculiar theory of party and class.
I don’t see Callinicos’s document as the answer to the problems but it looks to have been written in good faith, and it accepts that the problems are real, which is a good place to start. The members will have to continue to apply pressure, but I think that they can afford to start by taking Alex at his word and demanding that the CC majority follow through by accepting the removal of German. If they do so it will establish that they mean business and will also send the message that the membership require that the leadership are held to account.
Of course, SWP members can take the opportunity to judge German when they read her inevitable contribution to the IB. My guess is that it will demonstrate once and for all that she, like Rees, has learned nothing from the past few years and intends to continue to fight for the same perspective using the same methods that brought us here in the first place. In that case the party’s response should be to demand that she be removed from the CC. To leave her hanging in there once you have admitted that there is a serious problem to be dealt with, and once it is obvious how deeply she is implicated in creating that problem, would be to announce to the world that, really, only minor and ineffectual tinkerings are on offer. At the moment I think the signs are that Alex and the CC majority are more serious than that, but there is an easy way to find out… namely to call on them to remove German too.
redbedhead on said:
Clive – I have no doubt that many of the problems you elucidate are true. However, you have given a tendential, one-sided account. For instance, you don’t mention the rather important fact that after the NC truce meeting, wherein it was agreed that a national organizer would be found, those opposed to the SWP went behind the scenes to recruit Nick Wrack to the role, knowing full well that Nick was in political opposition to the SWP’s perspective. This could only be seen as an attempt to split the party and as a factional maneuver. If it weren’t, then a process of open and fraternal negotiation, involving the SWP’s representatives on the NC, would have taken place to find a mutually agreeable candidate.
chjh on said:
#77 Clive – I’m sorry you found my take on it depressing – maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I don’t think that “everyone’s out to get us” (why would I bother here if I thought that?) I did – and still do – think that Andy and Liam latched on to GG’s letter because they saw it as a way of reducing the SWP’s power/influence in Respect. I read Andy’s reply at #63 as essentially confirming that.
I’m asking a very specific question here, though. If GG’s letter was simply about some mild suggestions for improvement, what interest would it have held for people who weren’t Respect members?
Nas on said:
redbedhead: the proposal for Wrack to be organiser was made AT the 29 September meeting. Sorry. You need to listen to those who know.
Jenkins on said:
#79 If even anything you said was remotely true it still wouldn’t excuse the SWP’s apolitical methods of organising a bureaucratic wrecking exercise. If you thought the project was no longer worth the candle why didn’t the SWP just say so and organise a principled division explaining their reasons and preparing their members for such. Even on the basis of your own narrative the SWP capitulated to a witch hunt with out a political fight leaving valuable comrades behind as collateral damage.
external bulletin on said:
The minutes of the Respect National Council of 29 Sept 2007 confirm what Nas is saying, and could’ve been found by anyone who wanted the facts.
“In the course of this discussion there was another proposal by George Galloway that Nick Wrack be asked to fill the place as an interim National Organiser subject to review. Victoria Brittain made this same proposal with the understanding that she had not spoken to either George Galloway or Nick Wrack about this before the meeting. Nick responded that he would need time to think about it and consult others. Ger Francis said he and Alan Thornett would withdraw their proposal in favour of this third proposal and said they would accept Lindsey’s proposal with amendments.”
Trotsky's Witness In Scotland on said:
#39 Blind Monkey Test
If one had called for an anti-war demo in Feb 2003would 2m have turned up?
Having burecratically controlled STWC the SWP tail ended union bureacrats, had illusions in a Labour rebellion in parliament and failed to link up with the most miltant part of the movement without arguing for the type of tactics that could have stopped the invasion. They played a large part in demoralising the movemnet after the invasion started.
gobsmacked on said:
#79 The proposal for Nick Wrack to be the national organiser for a limited period (a matter of a few weeks) alongside John Rees was not only made publicly and for the first time at the 29th Sep[tember meeting by George Galloway, it was made as an act of conciliation in a conciliatory meeting. Galloway’s assumption was that proposing an SWP member to be the organiser alongside Rees would sugar the pill. But not for the deeply paranoid/self-serving fantasies of the SWP Central Committee and its “leader” John Rees. For them, and for redbedhead a thousand and more miles away, Galloway’s proposal was a cynical manouevre to split the SWP. Seems to me it was the CC’s reaction which ultimately did the latter, no help from George.
As for Charlie’s sophistry about the real meaning of George’s letter, this is really not worthy of an intelligent revolutionary. Galloway’s letter was motivated by two by-elections, one of which was a disaster, the second of which was a near disaster, plus the discovery in mid-August that the OFFU cheque had been solicited and cashed against his wishes thus putting his parliamentary position further in jeopardy. Remember he was suspended from parliament at the time after a genuine witch-hunt against him by the parliamentary authorities, the government, the security services and the press. Rees’s secret action was therefore reckless in the extreme. Even so George did not put this into print for fear of making a difficult situation worse. It was Callinicos who publicised the cheque in a sneering attack on Galloway in front of 250 London SWP members on 7th September.
There was never an issue about the influence of the SWP. There was only an issue about the way Rees was running Respect (because it was he who ran it as a sort of dictatorship where no other member of the CC was welcome to intervene unless they were a cipher for Rees like Nineham). So please Charlie, a tad more contrition from you and other good people in the SWP would be both fully justified and very welcome.
KrisS on said:
Since those on each side are clearly not going to change their minds on this stuff, is there another way of avoiding continuing the repetition of this argument for another year?
Nas on said:
Charlie – Callinicos describes Rees’s unaccountable behaviour as “scandalous”. Maybe others thought similarly before.
Nas on said:
KrisS – part of the answer to your question is what the SWP decides at its conference.
BarryKade on said:
re # 87 by gobsmacked:
Yes, I broadly agree – that the split was not the inevitable result of Galloways letter etc. Yes, the split was in alarge partyprecipitated by the SWP using its force of numbers to fight off what Rees managed to portray as an attack on itself.
Using force of numbers via ‘packing’ a conference was always going to drive the non-SWP minority away from what was still a fragile coalition, and split and wreck the venture.
HOWEVER – Respect was always going to throw up problems – Electoralism is not an easy terrain – and the alliance with petty-bourgeois radical local Muslim leaders – while good and necessary – was also always going to be problematic. So the SWP faced real problems – not just some paranoid imaginings … or Rees deceptive manoeuvres.
However, a skilled Marxist leadership – once having committed itself to the trajectory of building Respect – should have been able to negotiate around these difficulties. ‘Going nuclear’ was not an edifying example of skilled Marxist leadership!
KrisS on said:
There’s a decision the SWP could make which would stop you wanting to argue about the split in Respect? Short of agreeing with you, of course.
Anonymous on said:
“Since those on each side are clearly not going to change their minds on this stuff, is there another way of avoiding continuing the repetition of this argument for another year?”
No. That is the purpose of this blog. Except of course to bash the “undemocratic” nature of SWP. Oops, er, ok maybe democratic but nevertheless they don’t have the bold revolutionary program as our heroes gobsmacked, reality, catwoman, witness, and external nutjob.
huot on said:
If the blog owners are genuine socialists, we would see more posts about stories of poverty, social injustice and hardships facing working people in Britain and around the world, instead of endless articles that discuss Lenin, the Soviet Union and Cuba.
People who believe in a communist revolution of a soviet totalitarian style are living on cloud koo-koo land.
Jenkins on said:
89. Not a decision, an admission: there was no witch-hunt of the SWP or socialists in Respect. You can keep your analysis of the worth or otherwise of the project and your political assessment of the inadequacy or otherwise of the current participants.
Phil on said:
If GG’s letter was simply about some mild suggestions for improvement, what interest would it have held for people who weren’t Respect members?
I thought at the time that Galloway’s letter was constructive and studiously apolitical – ‘mild suggestions for improvement’, indeed – and that it had the potential to be highly explosive within the SWP. On one hand, I think rebalancing RESPECT so as to limit the SWP’s influence over it was a very good idea, and that it should have been seen as a very good idea by anyone committed to building RESPECT. On the other, I suspected that the idea of limiting the influence of the SWP over RESPECT would be anathema to at least some of the SWP leadership, who would rather disengage from RESPECT than carry on with it on those terms. (I was half right; as it turned out, they’d rather smash RESPECT than carry on with it on those terms.)
As for why anyone outside RESPECT should be interested, give us some credit. RESPECT was – and to a lesser extent still is – one of the two or three most hopeful contemporary developments in the left-of-Labour electoral space in Britain. The SWP was, and is, the most significant British revolutionary socialist group. The relationship between the two had big problems, some of which I think Galloway’s letter correctly identified. Resolving those problems amicably would have been a huge advance for the organised Left. What actually happened was a sizeable setback, only slightly mitigated by the quality of the debate now going on within the SWP and the continuing survival of RESPECT.
Jenkins on said:
Huot: there’s a gap in the market for neo-liberal blogs at the moment. Go start one.
PhilW on said:
I want to comment on those who claim that Liam and Andy just got involved in Respect again at the time of Galloway’s letter in order to bash the SWP. I think it is rather that they supported the Respect project in principle, but were pissed off at the SWP’s control-freakery. When the GG’s letter came out, it was clearly a challenge to this control, not seen as a prelude to “driving the SWP out of Respect”. Others also tried to get re-involved at this time, seeing this as a possible break in the log-jam that had had Respect just rubber-stamping the decisions of SWP caucuses. It doesn’t mean they wanted the SWP out: they merely wanted it to alter its behaviour and attitude to Respect. It is utter sectarianism to see the split as anything other than a severe setback.
BarryKade on said:
Well KrisS (# 92) – there are several ways to move on:
One is for the SWP to resolve its strategic dilemma about the balance of united front work in relation to stand-alone SWP building. Does the movement need a new broad left alliance (or ‘permanent general united front of the left’)? Or not?
We now need to take new initiatives around the capitalist crisis and recession. Will the SWP be going it alone, with mainly propagandism and a party building? Will we all once again work together in limited and specific united fronts? (Or a general and permanent one?) Or will some of us build action campaigns anyway – without waiting for the SWP?
But whatever happens – the aftermath of the debacle of the SWP’s split from Respect is going to haunt it for a while, I’m afraid. This is because it will obviously cast its shadow over any future proposals for unity – because people learn from experience.
Another way of saying this is we will need to start a long process of rebuilding trust on the left. The SWP will have to work to regain trust and respect. But that has already started. Now that this debate and flowering of democracy has broken out in its ranks – with many admissions of the mistakes it made around Respect etc being made – now I feel much less angry towards the SWP. They are beginning to look more honest and down to earth again. So this does make it easy to move on and work together.
karl stewart on said:
Hi Kris,don’t you find the “he-said-she-said” stuff on this thread a bit boring? Why not take a look at the “recession and trade unions” thread?
Are you coming along to the January RMT-organised conference on working-class political representation?
And have you bought my xmas present yet?
non-partisan on said:
The problem is KrisS, that over the past year little by little ‘events’ have shown the Rees witchunt narrative as false. from the defections to Nulab and Tory, from the left/right split, the collapse of the real Respect/LL/LA, the dodgy cheque, etc. The real world including the SWP considering Rees’s behaviour ‘scandalous’ and ‘incompetent’ is inexorably moving to show that what happened last year was not a witchunt, but Rees with backing of the SWP CC (at the time) using GG’s letter as an excuse to ‘walk away from Respect’
The only thing left is for someone in the SWP to break from the nonense that ‘we were right to defend Rees against Galloway’- it must happen soon, surely with all this honesty, truth telling, and mea culpa about?
Anyway as long as either the real world or SwP comrades confirm the basis of the split in respect without acknowledging its cause, you can’t blame people for saying;
look we told you so! Don’t you believe us now?
KrisS on said:
1) Yeah, I do, I was just asking if there was a way around it
2) I’ve had a look, it’s a bit slow though. That’s the problem with this place – it’s SWP-bashing threads that get all the interest
3) No, I’ll be at conference
4) I thought we weren’t doing presents?
non-partisan on said:
I am suprised though that the revelation, that UNISON pulled thier finiances out of the LMHR carnival, because the organisers insisted on giving a prime spot to L German has recieved more comment. The LL endagering the carnival or its finiances out of desperation to get an audeience for L German.
This really is scandalous, and indefensible
karl stewart on said:
Kris,
“SWP-bashing indeed, well they are “revisionists” aren’t they? Or is it “stalinists?” Personally, I just find these internal documents unbelievably dull and lacking in any kind of inspiration. But hopefully something positive will come out of the debate, maybe your lot willdecide to back the workers party idea?
Anyway, what conference will you be at on the same day as the working-class representation one?
(And just checking that our pact was still on, fine with me)
frenetic on said:
‘As for why anyone outside RESPECT should be interested, give us some credit. RESPECT was – and to a lesser extent still is – one of the two or three most hopeful contemporary developments in the left-of-Labour electoral space in Britain. The SWP was, and is, the most significant British revolutionary socialist group. The relationship between the two had big problems, some of which I think Galloway’s letter correctly identified. Resolving those problems amicably would have been a huge advance for the organised Left. What actually happened was a sizeable setback, only slightly mitigated by the quality of the debate now going on within the SWP and the continuing survival of RESPECT.’
That really depends on what sort of ‘left’ that you want, some of us who may like to see an entirely new social formation (and i believe there are lots) won’t grieve to much if they went down the pan, some may even celebrate. without all the 19th C baggage, the text dwelling, the quasi-religious belief in ‘the party’ and ‘dead Russians, the back stabbing, the obsession with hierarchy, the hijacking of campaigns, etc, the navel gazing,
frenetic on said:
er, should say this,
That really depends on what sort of ‘left’ that you want: some of us who may like to see an entirely new social formation (and i believe there are lots) without all the 19th C baggage, the text dwelling, the quasi-religious belief in ‘the party’ and ‘dead Russians, the back stabbing, the navel gazing, the obsession with hierarchy, the hijacking of campaigns, etc, ,won’t grieve to much if they went down the pan, some may even celebrate.
Nas on said:
KrisS: do you think that German is right in claiming that white socialists were necessary to keep the non-white councillors on the right path?
Alex Naysmith on said:
For me, the major disappointment with the SWP was not its leadership, but its cadre. The leadership is only as good as its cadre.
As Clive mentioned earlier, the imaginary ‘which hunt’ was truly the most damaging. I found it astonishing that the vast majority of SWP members lapped it up, some even claimed to have ‘suffered’ from the witch hunt. It is also true that a lot of SWP members were encouraged to believe that the Tower Hamlet Muslim members of RESPECT were ‘communalist’. The ‘communalist’ accusation was so insidious that even Richard Seymour stepped away from it.
I could no longer associate myself with comrades with such obvious inadequacies. The current spotlight on the SWP’s CC is all very revealing, but what of the cadre? What does this whole sorry mess say about them?
gobsmacked on said:
#99 The Unison decision over the LMHR carnival certainly needs more attention. This was kept secret at the time. But the fact that the SWP were determined to use the LMHR platform cynically to promote German’s candidacy was certainly no secret. It was not only obvious but many complained about it at the time.
As for German’s reference to the importance of the socialists who were (or rather were not) elected being white, words once again fail me. She combines this with the repeat of the communalist smears against anti-imperialist and radicalised Muslims who were drawn to Respect. I don’t see why anyone would now want her to remain as “Convenor” of Stop the War now she has shown her true colours as a nasty mean-minded sectarian who flirts with Islamophobia and worse. Perhaps Andy would be kind enough to post her contribution so everyone can see how revealingly awful it is.
Ray on said:
“The problem is KrisS, that over the past year little by little ‘events’ have shown the Rees witchunt narrative as false.”
So how do you explain the rightward drift of Renewal? The attacks on the StWC, UAF and LMHR not to mention the attacks on SWP involvement in the unions by leading members of RR here on SU. How do you square your assessment with Galloway’s uncritical support for Livingstone just when the left of Labour project had the opportunity to grow or his support for New Labour in Scotland at the expense of socialists?
If you are claiming that the cause of the split in Respect was down to one person rather than differences in political strategy then there is no hope for you or your organisation. You will never understand this issue from a political perspective and will repeat the same mistakes ad nauseam.
The SWP isn’t prepared to do this which is why we are having the debate while you lot are cloistering yourselves in your anti-SWP ivory tower. But there will come a time when the political contradictions in your united front will come home to roost again. And when that happens, as it surely must, you won’t have the SWP to use as your scapegoat. Which brings to mind the old saying, s/he who laughs last, laughs longest.
KrisS on said:
Karl
It’s hard to say anything without coming over as arrogant. There seem to be a number of people who spend quite a bit of time standing outside the SWP and worrying about what goes on inside. I’m not sure it’s helpful for me to speculate on their motivations, though. It seems there have always been those people, though.
I wouldn’t hold out much hope of our throwing ourselves into your workers’ party idea at this stage. Be interesting to see what comes out of this RMT-called meeting though.
I find the internal debate lively and interesting, I’m afraid.
gobsmacked on said:
#107 Sad and hopeless sectarian that you are, you provide not one shred of evidence that George Galloway or Respect have moved to the right. George’s support for Labour against the Tories and Livingstone against Johnson are entirely part of the broader left tradition. Martin Smith reiterated as much in his debate recently with Hannah Sell at the Socialist Party’s weekend event. Once again poor, sad, deluded Ray your bitterness clouds your understanding of the line.
Ray on said:
“I am suprised though that the revelation, that UNISON pulled thier finiances out of the LMHR carnival, because the organisers insisted on giving a prime spot to L German has recieved more comment. The LL endagering the carnival or its finiances out of desperation to get an audeience for L German.
This really is scandalous, and indefensible”
You and gobsmacked should work as a double act. What’s scandalous and indefensible is Renewal organising a counter rally to the carnival for Livingstone’s election campaign.
You both need to be very careful about bringing up past events so you can vent your mock outrage because the rest of the left have been watching Renewal and that little sectarian stunt didn’t do you any favours.
Nas on said:
Ray – dear boy:
1) UAF – “attacked”, as you mawkishly put it, by Callinicos in pointing out the the tiny mobilisation post the GLA elections (that would be the one you defended to the hilt).
2) Livingstone: not uncritical by Galloway, at all. But… and here’s a dizzy thing… it’s Bro Smith who took the SP to task for not recognising the class differences between the Tories and Labour. Go scream revisionist at him, sunshine Ray.
3) StWC – overly fond of notables. That’s what Lindz says the CC majority are slagging off the pet United Front for. Go, Ray, go… go sink your teeth into the CC majority for being such swine.
As for laughing last – oh Ray, I do not think that the branches of the SWP will reverberate to the sound of laughteer for some time, do you?
Nas on said:
Ah raybot @111: who on the “rest of the left” is aggrieved that CND, the CPB, MAB, Bruce Kent and others organised a meeting(counter? what third period planet are you on sunshine?) in support of Ken Livingstone at in the final hour of the LMHR carnival against (ostensbily) the BNP?
Your attitude will sink the SWP, if it’s allowed to dominate.
Ray on said:
“#107 Sad and hopeless sectarian that you are, you provide not one shred of evidence that George Galloway or Respect have moved to the right. George’s support for Labour against the Tories and Livingstone against Johnson are entirely part of the broader left tradition. Martin Smith reiterated as much in his debate recently with Hannah Sell at the Socialist Party’s weekend event. Once again poor, sad, deluded Ray your bitterness clouds your understanding of the line.”
Care to tell us Martins exact words? So you think a vote for New Labour in Scotland against socialists standing in the election is a move to the left do you? You think building Respect as a left opposition to Labour and then not standing for mayor in the election is a move to the left? You believe that calling a counter rally on the day of the LMHR carnival is a move to the left? Do you believe the attacks on StWC, UAF and LMHR by leading members of Renewal on SU is a move to the left?
You really have embraced the Orwell concept of doublespeak combined with the Stalinist strategy of hurling insults. I suggest you go back and look at the evidence rather than following the Renewal leaderships line.
Ray on said:
Nas, I’m not your “dear” nor am I your “boy” so cut the insults and have the debate. Otherwise it sounds as if you’re threatened by views opposing your own.
Nas on said:
Ray – wipe yourself down with a wet flannel. What do you think of the CC majority attacks on the blessed united fronts? Did SWP members not vote for Livingstone in London? I’m shocked – it was the party line, wasn’t it?
Clive Searle on said:
Charlie,
I’m sorry if I mis-interpreted your post but it did seem rather paranoid. My point is that GG’s letter to the NC should have been treated in the same way as any other proposal to the NC – based on the actual content.
What other people thought about it was irrelevant. I’m sure the CPGB loved it because they could bang on about ‘popular fronts’, the AWL loved it because they could bang on about Galloway. No matter. What was important was how the SWP responded. And they responded with both dishonesty (Rees and EGL’s document) or paranoia (stop the witch-hunt).
There was every opportunity to to find as compromise. There was every opportunity to take GG’s opening shot as an chance to re-invigorate Respect. Sadly that opportunity was lost – not for political reasons but because the SWP CC felt it better to defend John Rees (you’re either with us or agianst us) than to admit to mistakes – of which the OFFU cheque was but one amongst many.
But there was no reason to blow the whole thing up – least of all because the SWP had made some very positive contributions towards building Respect and had they accepted that there needed to be some changes their stock would have risen within the organisation rather than being diminished.
Perhaps here I should make my own position clear. I do not wish the SWP to disappear. They are the largest left group in Britain and their dimise does none on the left any benefit. I left the SWP because I went to work abroad in the mid-1990s and when I returned I could not reconcile the new ‘1930s in slow motion’ perspective with reality. I chose not to rejoin an organisation that I felt had got it’s perspectives so wrong.
But the move outwards towards the SA was a turning point for me. Indeed while I thought the move over to Respect was badly handled I went along with it because I felt it was the right thing to do. While I thought that ‘abolish the branches’ wheeze was madness, I hoped that this would mean more members taking SA, then Respect, work more consistently.
Many SWP members whom I worked with for over 20 years in Manchester – first as a member, then District Organiser, then in the Socialist Alliance and Respect, I hold in great esteem. What destroyed our relationship was not that they suddenly felt I was ‘moving right’ (obviously I accepted they thought this as I was no longer a member) but that, out of the blue, I was accused of being a ‘witch-hunter of socialists’ – bracketed with Eric Hammond, Neil Kinnock and the apparatchiks of UNISON.
I’m not sure that you can understand quite how offensive that was – but more importantly, how people who until the end of September 2007 had considered me a friend and comrade, could now no longer look me in the eye or even speak to me in public. Because they thought, despite my protestations, that I was out to ‘witch-hunt’.
Why? Because John Rees, with the backing of the SWP CC, had fastened onto the most cynical strategy of declaring that I was part of a ‘witch-hunt of socialists’ – and SWP members who I thought knew better went along with it.
So here we are. The SWP are about the sack John Rees – something we never demanded, asked for or even imagined.
And your former allies don’t trust you because you’ve accused us of an untruth that cuts to the quick – both personally and pilitcally.
There is a way back from this. Any significant development on the Left in the next few years should, in my opinion, include the SWP. But for that to work lessons need to be learnt and changes made.
One of the most worrying ideas that seems to be surfacing in these documents is that the split in Respect was almost ineveitable bacuse only GG ( and not wider forces) broke from Labour and therefore Respect was unbalanced.
Now the idea that having several former Labour MPs and trade union leaders within a new organisation would make it easier for the ‘revolutionaries’ within such a formation is laughable. If you have to invent a ‘right-wing’ in order to defend your own positions what on earth would you do when there really was one – with, in the case of trade union leaders, a mass membership to account to.
Political parties are formations are made up of individuals – each with their own opinions and nuances. Unless the SWP begins to moderate the idea that only they have the correct understanding of the world while everyone else is, in John Molyneux’s patronising words ‘politically mistaken’ then any future left developments that involve the SWP will risk the fate of respect. There’s no need for that to happen but a little more honesty is needed before trust can be rebuilt.
karl stewart on said:
Kris, though I certainly support it, the “workers party idea” is not “my idea.”
It’s an idea supported by many and hopefully by the SWP too in the future.
As for those on this thread who take an ongoing interest in the “who’s in and who’s out” of the SWP, perhaps they are former members who feel bitter at their treatment by the SWP former regime.
I’ve never been in SWP as you know, but I can appreciate how the fetishisation of “discipline” that the various “democratic-centralist” organisations practice can so easiy degenerate into bullying and abuse.
I’m glad you’re finding the internal debate interesting and I hope something positive comes out of it.
(Sorry, but it still all looks a bit dull from here)
non-partisan on said:
Ray, I can’t work out wether you really believe the stuff you come out with? it just sounds so desperate…
The problem is KrisS, that over the past year little by little ‘events’ have shown the Rees witchunt narrative as false.”
*So how do you explain the rightward drift of Renewal? (you ask) (a bit like a when did you stop beating your wife question)
I see, there must have been a witchunt! why? because RR ‘is drifting right’- how else do you explain this..
I am not in RR, but even if it had moved to the right this doesn’t prove there was a witchunt- obvious- yes? no?
*The attacks on the StWC, UAF and LMHR not to mention the attacks on SWP involvement in the unions by leading members of RR here on SU.
Funny how disagreements, and arguements are ‘attacks’ sounds so much more sinister don’t you think? so much more witchunty..
god help you and your revolutionary politics if you are so pained by disagreement..
*How do you square your assessment with Galloway’s uncritical support for Livingstone,
my assesment was that a wtchunt was not supported by the evidence, even your own CC members now acept JR was incompent and acted scandalously’ why is ok for them to point this out, but witchunting if anyone else does?
GG gave critical support to Livingstone, there was No RR ‘lime’ people were free to campaign along the lines they felt the need to..
*just when the left of Labour project had the opportunity to grow or his support for New Labour in Scotland at the expense of socialists?
Just when SWP blew up RESPECT, how about that for harming the opportunity to grow of left of labour?-
*If you are claiming that the cause of the split in Respect was down to one person rather than differences in political strategy then there is no hope for you or your organisation.
No, I am saying the SWP, and CC backed REES when he was challenged in respect. Any one of your esteemed leaders could have spoken out then, not like AC a year later. There were all kinds of differences in Respect between all kinds of people, but only one party tried to destroy it because its leadership was questioned about incompetency.
MUch better to claim you were witchunted, than admit your leaders couldnt organise a piss up in a brewery-
Who was right ray?
JR and AC a year ago?
JR today?
AC today?
JR and AC today?
Or those who said JR was incompetent, and challenged him for being so?
*You will never understand this issue from a political perspective and will repeat the same mistakes ad nauseam. (I know you wrote this, but suggest you re-read it)
The SWP is debating these questions now, because ‘the truth will out’, there is no garauntee how the discussions in the SWP will be resolved, but Ray, it is clear that not even asll your own members believe the stuff you come out with.
repeat.I am not in RR, wich means you cant just attack galloway instead of responding to the points.
* Which brings to mind the old saying, s/he who laughs last, laughs longest. (as long as they are still around to laugh)
bill j on said:
PR response to Chris Harman
http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2488
Danny on said:
Andy notes ‘After a particulrly ludicrous attempt to intmidate me into line… I resigned from the SWP, and the result was a whispering campign against me, including a number of outright lies’.
Yes thats my experience too.
Neil Davidson says ‘Many, perhaps most, of our ex-members constitute a pool of individual socialists with politics identical to those of the party, whose talents are not only lost to us, but who very likely add to the general suspicion of our motives and activities by recounting the experiences that led to their departure.’
That is the heart of this debate for me. Does anyone on any side of this debate with an aspiration for socialist unity have an idea of what we can do about it?
KrisS on said:
Karl – Indeed you’ve not been in the SWP. And I don’t accept the way you say that because others in other organisations who have talked about democratic centralism have engaged in bullying and abuse, therefore that happens in the SWP.
Nas on said:
Ray – stop the affectation and do what you claim you want others to do: deal with the political arguments. StW: top tables stuffed with notables, yes or no?
Andy Newman on said:
#82 Charlie;
” I did – and still do – think that Andy and Liam latched on to GG’s letter because they saw it as a way of reducing the SWP’s power/influence in Respect. I read Andy’s reply at #63 as essentially confirming that.”
In the real world politics involves working with people who disagree with you. I disagree with the SWP about many things, and in particular with the bureaucratic and undemocratic way they have conducted themselves in the Socialist Alliance and Respect.
There seems to be a sense of entitlement in Chjh’s view here, as if outside the SWP there should only be grateful masses responding to the SWP’s lead but who are currently not yet members, becasue we haven’t yet seen the light.
in reality, politics is a lot tougher than that, and a lot of activists have well developed political views that they are seriously attached to.
All that happened is that some of us with different political views from the SWP sought to reduce the politicall infleunce of your organisation in Respect (and society at large) in favour of political ideas that we are more sympathetc with, by means of open political debate and democracy.
That is not a withchhunt, that is not “hating the SWP”, that is you having to come to terms with the fact that the rest of us who don’t agree with you are not a porblem to be managed away by bureaucratic manouvres, but we are political people in our own right that have oor own ideas, and we are just as committed to our ideas as you are to yours.
end of an era on said:
Danny at #124
I’m not sure anyone outside of the SWP can actually do anything about it – we just have to hope that the SWP membership wake up and smell the political coffee rather than revert to the Madness of King Ray or the partial truths and continued lies coming out in these recent discussion documents.
The big problem is that over years members become complicit in the mistakes of the CC – because no one opposed them at the time. It’s all the harder to admit to mistakes if that means opening a can of worms that imply you were involved in fucking things up right and proper. Better just say how good Stop the war was and let the big names fight it out over the corpse of Rees.
There’s no chance of the recent significant ex-SWP members joining en mass. Some can’t cos they were expelled – Jer F, Nick W, Kevin O, etc. or left in disgust, Richard S, Jerry H, Jo B, Kay P, etc. and wouldn’t be allowed to rejoin. You just have to hope that this process, once started, allows some to actually go one step further than simply saying “it was Rees wot dun it” and begin to see the systematic failings rather than the individual, Reesian mistakes.
Andy Newman on said:
#124
Incidently, on the question of my resigning from the SWP.
I never had any response at all from them to my resignation e-mail.
But my wife was also a semi-active member, and they just stopped sending her party notes or any SWP mailings or contacting her as soon as I resigned. They didn’t bother to contact her on her own account and ask whether she wanted to be a member still.
Henry on said:
The demise of the SWP into a squabbling wreck is surley a reflection of their defective political approach. A party that has zig-zagged from ultra-leftism to meek reformism and back again is surley so bewildering to its members as to result in this spitefull and possibly terminal fallout.
The thing is, the democracy of the SWP organisation is not one of its strong points but maybe this battle may force it to be more inclusive. And who knows, maybe the resulting SWP Renewal will act in a more principled, inclusive and fraternal manner towards other socialist organisations.
Liam on said:
#43 chjh “disdain for the SWP” had nothing to do with it. The Tower Hamlets branch had become an adjunct of the local SWP branch even down to the Bookmarx stall at the back of the room during meetings. Every decision about the life of the branch had been decided in advance by a caucus of SWP members who would vote as a group on everything. At the last conference before my resignation more than 50% of conference delegates were SWP members. I left because because it was politically pointless to remain in the branch since I had no particular reason to join the SWP and I found it more productive to watch TV than take part in a phony democracy.
It’s hardly surprising that a large section of the membership got fed up with that way of working.
If the one thing that emerges from this internal debate is an understanding that numerically dominating organisations is the best way to stifle them then it might be worthwhile.
Andy Newman on said:
Thanks to Bill J at #123
It certainly helps to put things in perspective that however bad the SWP can be, at least they are not as bad as the fantasists and hobbyists in the laughably named “Permanent Revolution”
Rosa Lichtenstein on said:
Ah, I see my posts are being deleted. Harry’s Place trolls can post here, but not a comrade, is that it?
BatterseaPowerStation on said:
I don’t think it’s an accident that Alex’s piece appears in the ‘last word,’ edition of the published pre-conference papers. Alex has always delivered the, ‘synthesis’ in these types of internal Party arguments (leaving the earlier steps; the thesis, antithesis to others = which is nice work if you can get it).
I think, in the main, the document’s a triumph of form over content. I’ve never seen such a personally directed attack, in such depth, on an individual’s ‘style’, or demeanor in an SWP publication (although, I’m reminded of some of the papers delivered after the, “Right to Work” experience and the individuals who played leading roles in it). Don’t get me wrong, I know the drill when there’s a falling out, it’s just surprising to see it in print.
But in concentrating on the features of Rees’ personality that some of us remember vividly, Alex has fallen into a fairly tight corner. “Recklessness,” is a word that’s often used in the piece. Creating, “atmospheres”, that prohibit debate and discussion were talents Rees seems to have an endless supply of, along with a recently discovered proclivity for, “inflation, distortion and innuendo.”
Rees has been on the CC for thirteen years!
Most of the documents portray the current crisis as having only emerged in the past year or so (it’s becoming increasingly common to see it referred to now as, “the Respect crisis”). There is unanimity, it seems, on the need to break with Galloway. There is rather less time spent on the reasons and personalities behind it’s inception.
Are we to believe that John Rees was able to pull of a triumph of the will? All on his tod? That the furious activism of StW precluded thorough discussion (if the latter, it begs a fairly serious set of related questions) and the whole team were, sans Rees, in some sense caught off-guard?
No one will buy that. But everyone seems to be clear that the Left’s ‘power couple’ (didn’t Galloway once compare them, ludicrously, to the Webbs?) rarely acted/conspired without each others full approval. It’s not impossible to put together the dynamics of the group (Bambery: the ‘tough’ fixer, Nineham: I have no idea, Alex: fairly enthusiastic cover while the sails are full, Harman: Lots of ‘private’ uncertainties, Smith: A sense of the reality of the mess at least).
Alex fails to convince when responding to Rees’ prods. There are too many ‘delays’, ‘forgettings’ and scenes where only those with elbows on the bar will ever know. I think it would have been a more powerful document had it simply said; we were asleep at the switch, we fscked it up, sack the minority (which must, as Karen points out, must include the key cultural architect of all that’s wrong with SWP: Lyndsey German).
It may be overly subjective, but just removing those two will have a marked impact on life within and without.
I just want to add my vote in favour of the argument that says a post-January SWP that’s simply removed one individual and set up a committee to review “democracy” is not going to improve much at all, and certainly won’t put the Party into a position where it can begin to build (itself or campaigns).
prianikoff on said:
Compare and Contrast:-
http://marxist.com/pdf/imt_manifesto_on_crisis.pdf
http://peoplebeforeprofit.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/charter-oct-20081.pdf
inf4mation on said:
#63
Andy thinks the RESPECT project had the potential to be more successful in recruiting ordinary revolutionary leftist if they were not subjected to the SWP’s “bureaucratic manouverings” and tactical support for “packed meetings”.
Others have suggested the lack of attraction in Respect for revolutionaries may be down to the key figure in the Respect leadership actively propagandising on behalf of Gordon Brown’s pro-wage cutting, pro-privatising, pro-environmental destruction, pro-war New Labour Party.
On balance (and in terms of this sites left meta-jokestering policy) Andy has probably pitched the argument just about right.
Great stuff.
Danny on said:
#128 & #129
The thing is that we can all argue about strategy etc and even have heated debates about the mistakes and motivations of groups like the SWP, but if we don’t at least aspire to socialist unity why are we even talking to each other here?
I am personally still disgusted at the way the SWP treated me in Scotland, and continued to smear me when I moved to Liverpool until myself and fellow activists put them in their place. Reading Andy’s point they seem to have a formula for it.
Treating fellow human beings, never mind comrades, as ‘gangrene’ as I was called means they will never be anythng more than a charicture of what they are supposed to be against. All the tactical and strategic mistakes follow from that I think.
I know people like Neil Davidson personally and am glad to see in writing statements like this. I try to treat SWP members as individuals these days as I can see they have not been a coherent force for some time.
If some re-alignment comes from this internal debate, I would welcome some sort of acknowledgement and apology from the SWP for their past behaviour towards us. It would at least help us work together as socialists in the future.
prianikoff on said:
Hugh Kerr’s contributions here yesterday (#47,#78) made me look up the history of the struggle against the “Housing Finance Act”in the 70’s.
This was as important a working class issue as the Miners Strikes and 3 day week at the time and to some extent a forerunner of the Poll Tax Campaign.
Heath’s government tried to force councils to increase rents and provoked widespread opposition, not only from council tenants, but also rebel Labour councillors.
Clay Cross in Derbyshire, home of the Skinner Bros, was the most famous example.
Hugh was very active in this campaign on behalf of IS, but a few years later was expelled from the organisation along with the Birmingham engineers, Jim Higgins and the ISO. Later Hugh became a Left Labour MEP, before being expelled from the LP along with Ken Coates. He has subsequently become Tommy Sheridan’s Press Officer.
I found an old article from the Socialist Register by Leslie Sklair, with this interesting passage which is still relevant to debates about socialist unity versus sectarianism!
“A key factor in both the Tower Hill Unfair Rents Action Group
(THURAG) and in the D(S)TRPA was the involvement of the International
Socialists, in person in Tower Hill and rather more distantly in
Dudley.
The acknowledged and popular spokesman of THURAG, Tony Boyle, had joined IS as a result of his experiences in a local industrial dispute. His own political contacts, especially with militants in the Merseyside labour movement, were to prove invaluable for the tenant struggle, although, as we shall see, he and Tower Hill could not bridge the gulf between the promises people offered as representatives and what they could deliver as delegates.
It would be quite wrong to imply that through Boyle, IS organised the rent strike in Kirkby, for there were active members of the Communist Party, the Labour Party, and no party prominent in the leadership of THURAG: indeed Boyle and Maurice Lee, a member of the CP (who worked together very closely and effectively) were to
some extent mavericks who were being threatened with disciplinary
action from their respective political groups for their semi-autonomous
activities on Tower Hill.
It is probable that the solidarity achieved by the tenants was in no small measure due to the fact that Boyle, Lee and others in the leadership consistently put the interests of the tenants before the interests of the IS, CP, or any other organisation.”
In full:-
http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1975_Sklair.pdf
prianikoff on said:
This video (part 6/6) covers Tony Boyle and the
history of the
Kirby Rent Strike
Andy Wilson / KE on said:
#135: Dearest comrade BatterSEA-AH… you are right, of course, about the history of the SWP in the decade-long run-up to Respect which shaped the SWP’s involvement and led to its inevitable collapse. Yes, there is a collective responsibility, but how useful would it be right now to lop off the senior leadership or put them through some sort of show trial and make them sing for their supper (attractive though the thought might be)? Logically you could insist that those most responsible for permitting that state of affairs to develop are precisely those with the longest service on the CC, ie. Alex & Harman. But do you really imagine holding them to account on the same basis as the CC minority? Consider that even on purely factional grounds it would be a disaster as it muddies the water as to who carries the fundamental responsibility (namely, as you know full well, Rees and German.) Alex and Harman’s sins are those of omission rather than commission: that is a major distinction right now, and important to make as it points firmly toward the real problem.
I think there is much in Alex’s document which, in its own quiet way, amounts to an admission that the picture is as you say. The reality is that before Cliff’s death he, with Lindsey’s prompting, indulged in a campaign of king making, grooming Rees as a successor (how the blood chills when watching that youTube video of Cliff defending Rees as the ‘conductor’ of the SWP – arrrggghhhhhh!) – that is what set the train in motion. I remember back in the 90’s when we were invited to speculate about what might happen once Cliff was gone, we argued that German would establish something of a death grip on the party apparatus, as Alex and Harman had no means to prevent her, and that this would lead to trouble. Well, that’s what has now happened, and a fair reading of Alex’s document could see in it an admission of that or something close to that (he names no names when he talks about the general situation, as opposed to specifi crimes wrt Respect & OFFU.)
Now that may be a little generous, but given the novelty of the situation I think it reasonable that people take Alex up on his offer and test whether the old CC members are prepared do what is necessary. I don’t imagine for a moment that they should be left to do it themselves, as their positions (and assumptions) dictate that they’ll want to be allowed to quietly reconfigure the SWP behind the scenes, whereas it’s clear that the opposition(s) around Neil Davidson et al need to keep up the pressure for more systematic reform in order to push Callinicos and the rest forward (which is why the ‘democracy commission’ business is so important – it is a means whereby the members might be allowed to continue organising and arguing long after the conference period has ended, so that they don’t simply return to ‘business as usual’ once the votes have been cast.)
The demand to remove German from the CC along with Rees is necessary so as to challenge the CC majority to deliver on what they say by removing someone who remains so obviously committed to the bullshit politics and organisational norms they claim to want to break with. At the time the idea occurred to me I thought it might be suitably controversial, but having read German’s piece in the IB I think that there is no longer any possible justification for her remaining in place unless you really are a die hard supporter of their approach… in which case, who cares what you think? While I can understand that some younger members who support the Rees platform need to be won to better politics, the leaders of the faction have no excuse. Bembery has already performed his mea culpa and is retreating at speed. Rees and German remain intransigent – why would anyone with a sense of honour want to keep either of them hanging around?
BatterseaPowerStation on said:
Andy (@ 141), I see where you’re going/what you’re getting at. I just wrote out my first “impressions,” on AC’s piece. As to what to do with it; well show trials would be nice (KIDDING!), I think you’re right about the possibilities that are available once you have BOTH Harman and Callinicos putting lines in the sand. Cdes. in the SWP should use the opportunity before it all settles back into myth.
And, in the interest of disclosure, I haven’t a clue as to what a new CC might look like (it would, as you’ve already mentioned, have to include Harman and Callinicos). I suffer from distance and weather. You have the benefit of both local knowledge and deep opprobrium!
When we next meet in L’Isle des Cheins you can bring me up to speed.
chjh on said:
Clive – from #120 Yes, re-reading it I can how I came across as paranoid. I do accept that most of our critics weren’t motivated by hatred of the SWP – some were, however, and it would have helped if more sensible critics had drawn a distinction between them.
The problem with treating GG’s letter as an honest proposal which could be taken at face value is in part illustrated by Phil at #97, Andy at #127 and Liam at #132 . People who were outside Respect – in large part because of their perception of the SWP’s role inside Respect – wanted to use Galloway’s letter to reduce the SWP’s influence in Respect. And, yes, that’s a perfectly valid point of view to hold. But it shouldn’t be surprising – or offensive – that SWP members didn’t agree with that point of view, and didn’t want to see it prevail.
The other reason that GG’s letter couldn’t simply be taken at face value was they way it fitted in to what was going on in Tower Hamlets. That’s where the idea of the ‘witchhunt’ came from, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to apply that term to some of what went on in Tower Hamlets.
I absolutely get that it was offensive to apply that term to everyone who was backing GG, and I personally never did. Awful things were said on both sides – as someone once said, no-one behaves well in a split. My sense on the Manchester demo and since is that some of that venom has is draining away.
The point of my original post was simply to explain why SWP members reacted as we did to GG’s letter and later developments, and to argue that part of the responsibility for what happened lies with those who wanted to use the letter as a stick to beat the SWP with. It does, after all, take two to tango.
Phil on said:
it shouldn’t be surprising – or offensive – that SWP members didn’t agree with that point of view, and didn’t want to see it prevail.
I think it’s more disappointing than offensive. I gather that SR are currently having an intense debate, not about whether to put limits on their influence within RESPECT, but about how to do it. I’m genuinely sorry that so few SWP members were prepared to consider that limiting the weight of the SWP within RESPECT might be a good idea.
Adamski on said:
Both the JM and AC document have articulated why building a united front around the recession a la Stop the War Coalition or Unite against Fascism would be impossible.
The slogan of “a united front from below” is rejected however. And a united front from above is deemed impossible. The resolution of the is contradiction is surely some intermediate national formation that would be loose and would help support the building of local anti-capitalist networks that would be relatively autonomous and shaped by local forces, but able to be feel supported by some sort of national network. Such a network would, of course in its local branches, have to avoid the pitfall of falling down the sink of a left wing talking shop and be firmly orientated on practical tasks from whence left unity could organically arise.
AC advocates a “wait & see”, “build the party” approach that is unsatisfactory, though his contention that a strong rank and file network of trade union militants would be helpful is absolutely correct.
He writes:
“Though John attacks the idea of the Charter as a petition, his own conception of it seems to be as a series of big rallies. He lists some of the speakers at these meetings – Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Larry Elliot, Paul Mason, Sally Hunt, Tony Kearns, and Caroline Lucas. This is impressive enough, but MPs and journalists can’t deliver action, and the trade-union officials have shown no sign of doing so.”
It’s correct that MPs and journalists can’t deliver action, but in the absence of the neccesary forces currently emerging to plug the gap, speakers who can draw a crowd & a Charter might prove a useful tool in building local networks. For example, if Tony Benn and Paul Mason were to speak in my locale (maybe with a Greek activist on the platform), I’m sure that many rank and file trade unionists, left labour, anti-capitalists might show up to hear what they say. We might meet again after for a more practical working group.
There is also a problem that members of far left organisations might have trouble organising action and local joint work under their own banner, but being part of a national network with well-known names on board might be helpful to giving these local activists credibility when getting in contact with non-revolutionary forces.
For example, when I was involved in organising a demonstration at the local building of British Gas it was helpful in attracting support to be able to call it under the banner of supporters of a document signed by several high profile people.
To give another example locally when we were doing some work around job cuts, it was quite useful in getting media coverage and raising our profile that Tony Benn sent a message of support:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/12/05/tony-benn-joins-battle-for-jobs-91466-22408960/
Obviously the aim would ultimately be local networks to take off, so that they didn’t need this kind of support from the top, but became identified as the local focus for resistance. But feeling part of some kind of national network with more co-ordination would be helpful. Hopefully, as resistance takes off, we would be able to have national assembly’s where activists shared experiences and co-ordinated. It is clear that these national structures would have to be far looser than StWC or UAF
At the moment one can feel that one is building local resistance in isolation from a wider process. For example, when we launched the anti-war movement, I had an awareness that in every area of Britain, a similar process was going on & a national network was being created.
Sorry if this is rambling – I am hungover.
Hugh Kerr on said:
Priankoff thanks for reminding me of the Tenants struggle, indeed I was the co-author (with John Phillips) of the best selling pamphlet IS or I suspect the SWP ever produced it was called “Not a Penny on the Rent” it sold quarter of a million copies and helped to develop a mass movement of tenants on rent strike aagainst the Housing Finance Act which had at its height over half a million tenants on rent strike.I was based in Harlow where we had formed the IS branch out of a rent strike where the leaders of the tenants movement all joined IS.When I suggested to IS nationally that we should take a lead in this struggle I well remember it being opposed by our industrial organiser Roger Rosewell (later to become a rabid right ringer!) who said derisevly “how many of your members are council tenants”? when I said “all of them” this shut him up.IS did play a big influence in the Tenants movement at that time not least because Labour Councils were implementing the rent rises and therefore labour members were somewhat inactive with notable exceptions such as Clay Cross.Is did recruit a lot of members through this as it did through the Rank and File movements and Womens Voice (and that is another story which needs telling) but when Cliff decided to bend the stick and declare the party with its full time 6 member Central Committee all of these went out the window.Now they are attempting to learn the lessons too late I fear.
Adamski on said:
#146 I was recently discussing with a veteran Labour councillor in S.Wales the non-implementation struggle of Bedwas and Machen Council that he was involved in (and also Ron Davies) around this, wasn’t as impressive and generalised as the more famous Clay Cross resistance, but was the only other local council that refused to implement the Act.
PhilW on said:
144.
“I’m genuinely sorry that so few SWP members were prepared to consider that limiting the weight of the SWP within RESPECT might be a good idea.”
It wasn’t always like that: when I first joined the Socialist Alliance, the SWP members around me generally argued that it would be a dead duck in the long term if the organised left groups remained a majority in it. I had lots of arguments with experienced independent socialists, wary of the the left groups, and particularly the SWP, having been pissed off by their manoeuvres in campaigns over the years: “they are changing” I argued “and they’ll change further and more rapidly, the more independent socialists get involved”. They didn’t (with some justification) and they didn’t (with no justification).
prianikoff on said:
#146 Thanks Hugh.
The HFA campaign was a very important working class struggle.
Your pamphlet was well received and we organised quite a big meeting at the time.
It also showed the divisions that would emerge between right and left in the LP very clearly.
Rosewell basically had a syndicalist mentality rooted in a different era. Hence he couldn’t see the relevance of struggles outside of traditional shop-floor unionism.
He strutted around the centre in a three piece suite imagining he was running the Corleone compound. Really the worst example of a full-timer you could imagine.
The alarm bells over him should have been ringing much earlier!
ll on said:
jeez now Roger Rosewell is being dragged up, why not the Pilkintons Glass dispute. Why not “The SWP are outside the movement because they are not in the labour party” ahh thats no longer a runner.
Well lets share with some of those sticking the boot the pasts of their glorious leaders/parties
1. The SP, formerly The Militant: coppers knarks on the poll tax demo, supported the Falklands war, homophobic…Derek Hatton
2. Galloway: attacked the poll tax rioters, sexist, BB , suckered up to Saddam Hussein and had xmas with his friend Tariq Aziz.
SO if we are to bring in Mr Rosewall then lets have it all out in the open. With Galloway I think alarm bells and ringing doesn’t do him justice.
ll on said:
Of course Prianikioff has been perfect and has never made any mistake in their entire life (of Brian).
ll on said:
#148
Phil, what you wanted was the SWP to go out and build the alliance, knock on doors,produce leaflets, build meetings, fund the project and then shut the fuck up!!
Sorry we didn’t do that for you and I am sure you will go from stregth to strength without those awful SWP. Respect has really gone forward, Andy says Respect is on the verge of collapse and has hardly any presence. The big campaign by Respect over woolies appears to have produced 2 stalls in the whole of the UK… Very impressive. An internal regime in which Galloway is king, says what the fuck he likes and everyone obeys, such a backing new labour in by elections. A nat exec member who wants to sack local govt workers in Haringay and is frankly sexist towards single women. The prospects for Renewal are dim. Andy knows this and is sharpening the axe for the ISR. I have to confess the experience of this site has made me look forward to the next election. The fact that Galloway has no chance of winning and Respect will dissappear is staring to fill me with a warm glow.
Happy new year.;..
prianikoff on said:
“Everyone makes mistakes, only fools never learn from them”
Anonymous on said:
ll, please shut up. You’re really not doing the SWP any favours here.
PhilW on said:
#152: “#148 Phil, what you wanted was the SWP to go out and build the alliance, knock on doors,produce leaflets, build meetings, fund the project and then shut the fuck up!!”
In a sense, yes. I argued that they should close down SW and put its resources into a weekly SA paper, bring all of their members into the SA – (although it is now clear that it is not certain what a “member” is, especially when only 10% were able to sign the loyalty oath) – but at the same time not use their numerical superiority to squash other political views in the Alliance. That really would have been a United Front of a Special Kind, if you must insist on calling it a united front.
Success wouldn’t have been guaranteed, for one thing the SWP had thirty years of pissing of lots of good socialists to overcome, but then what we got was failure anyhow and the current implosion of the SWP. The alternative was never tried, but the SWP’s line has been tried and found wanting. As Engels said “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”.
Possibly, the New Anticapitalist Party in France will try out something similar to the alternative I suggest here and in post 148.
chjh on said:
PhilW – well, there’s honest. I can’t think why the average SWP member wouldn’t jump at such a great offer. Maybe you never explained it to us properly?
external bulletin on said:
But it is a legitimate political argument to want to reduce one organisation’s influence.
If the bosses did it, if the union machinery did it, if the state did it, you’d expect to fight back as hard as you can. You could even say it’s a witch-hunt.
But it’s two different parts of an organisation. Why not just have the political argument about it?
What if, for example, one side thinks that the SWP’s political control of the organisation was stunting its growth, and that if the SWP had less influence, the organisation might grow more? Isn’t that a legitimate political debate to have? They might be wrong, but it’s not a witch-hunt, and it’s not an attack.
As I said to you elsewhere – it’s a political position, and the SWP should’ve fought it politically.
As it happens, I don’t even think that’s what it was about. I think it was about the style of leadership of the SWP, not the SWP’s politics. And even Alex is saying the same thing that Galloway was saying – John was reckless and unaccountable.
Remember, he’d stopped speaking to Salma, had almost no contact with Kevin Ovenden or Rob Hoveman and was trying acting without discussing things with the National Council.
As an example of this style of leadership, witness Lindsey German’s document, where she casually mentions that the SWP CC had decided that the Left Alternative shouldn’t have placards in the Manchester anti-war demo – no consultation with its allies in the LA, just a decision, which the LA was expected to implement, and which Lindsey says upset those same allies.
It’s legitimate to complain about such behaviour and try to reduce it. Don’t you think? I don’t say it’s right – it’s legitimate. It’s a debate. It’s a difference of position. It’s what socialists do – seek to convince others.
But the SWP wouldn’t have the debate. It wouldn’t even accept any legitimacy of the other side.
Remember, this is all about “Galloway” – but why did 18 of the old NC support him and what he said? Why did Linda Smith (called a ballot rigger by Rees) and Salma write to the Respect NC saying there was a real problem?
And why are those facts not mentioned now? Why is it all “Galloway”?
Answer: Because the SWP CC is still not interested in an honest debate, it is still giving misinformation to its members and it’ll still do whatever it takes to keep its own position.
A bit of honesty would’ve stopped the split from happening.
swp member on said:
‘the SWP CC is still not interested in an honest debate, it is still giving misinformation to its members and it’ll still do whatever it takes to keep its own position.
A bit of honesty would’ve stopped the split from happening.’
I think people here ought to get their heads round the fact that most (the overwhelming majority) of the swp aren’t interested in a debate about the detail of the split, even if it is clear (eg from Callinicos’s article) that there were big problems in the way Rees manged to pull the cc, then the party as a whole, behind it, into a ‘for us or against us’ logic.
I think the main reason for that is that the shifts in galloways position towards labour, the ongoing debate between the isg and galloway/yaqoob/newman etc show that there would have been a split anyway, it was just a matter of when and how. That’s not to say we can’t draw our own conclusions about methods of decision making, which is why what Molyneux has called a ‘democratic upsurge’ is taking place in the swp. But the implications of that inra-swp debate are about the future, not the past.
We ain’t gonna want to rejoin Respect, it’s time has gone, and the end will be at the mext election I’m afraid.
Some discussion of how the Left can respond more effectively to the recession would be interesting, and there are swp ib articles on that too but hey..
swp member on said:
That’s ‘intra-swp debate’
Nas on said:
SWP member – I’ve been waiting for that one to come up.
1) shift towards Labour and rightwards? Well, the SWP called for a vote for Livingstone in the London elections. Additionally, Martin Smith in debate with Hannah Sell at the Socialist Party’s event said that Labour had not become a completely capitalist party and that it was necessary to relate to it as a bourgeois workers’ party. At the next general election the SWP will not be involved in any electoral intervention (outside maybe Michael Lavalette and on or two others) in England. It will, in the vast majority of England, have a vote Labour line. In areas like Tower Hamlets and South Birmigham it will probably formally call for a Respect vote, but it will do nothing to encourage a left vote anywhere and its members will likely spend most of the time spitting the names Yaqoob, Galloway and Miah in barely attended branch meetings.
As for subsequent developments casting a retrospective light on what was really going on, I’m afraid that method doesn’t prove what you think it might. The defection of your councillors to Labour and the Tories(!) casts fresh light on the left/right divide claims of last year, does it not? But I don’t think you’re prepared to look at the ugly picture that’s revealed.
The problem with this whole line of argument is that it leads to a paralysing dogma. We were right and there’s absolutely no evidence you can present that will demonstrate otherwise. Result – WRPland. Now I don’t think at all that that is where the SWP will end up. I think in a couple of years time there will be a sotto voce “well, we all know we got it wrong at the time of the Respect split”. That’s what happened over the poll tax, but it took about a decade and a half. The longer it takes this time, the worse it will be when the ideology finally has to be brought into line with reality.
2) It was going to happen sooner or later – the people who brought you this gem are those who went along with Rees. Additionally, sooner or later so, hey, let’s chose sooner and on an entirely false political basis. Then we try to sweep aside the damage done to ourselves and to the idea of a left of Labour alternative by saying it was inevitable it would end up that way. Do you really think that this kind of apologia is going to endear others on the left to working with you in constructing any kind of radical left challenge to Labour?
As for the timing – it wrecked any chance of German being elected to the London Assembly. Her document recognises that. She says it was important for her to stand for the GLA after the split because otherwise Galloway would have had a “free run” and his election would have put the SWP in a weakened position. You are stuck with a terrible sectarian logic even as you move against its principal architects – Rees and German.
3) The important thing is a democratic upsurge in our party. As for what we learn about the way we treat our allies, well, we can be as contemptuous of them as we like, because they are not in our party and they are reformists who are just itching to betray us. Sectarian logic.
4) We’re talking about the recession and how to respond. Yeah, unlike everyone else on the left of the Labour movement. How successful those responses are, well that’s another matter. Top-down fronts (there’s no united about it, their just fronts in the derogartory sense) like the charter just not going to do it.
anticapitalista on said:
Nas, get off the keyboard and get your butt down to your local Woolies and get names on the petition
Nas on said:
Oh anti-capitalista! Nice to hear from you. What do you think of German’s justification for standing for the GLA (as distinct from mayor), y’know, the stop Galloway line? Probably right up your street.
And, ahem, is this really a supporter of the SWP making fun of collecting petitions on the High Street? If you were here Smith would have you strung up in Rees’s entrails from Callinicos’s ivory tower, or some other permutation of the principals.
Phil on said:
people here ought to get their heads round the fact that most (the overwhelming majority) of the swp aren’t interested in a debate about the detail of the split
That’s a damn shame for the SWP, because it leaves the party facing two ways at once – ditch Rees for pulling the party the wrong way, but back Rees’s idiotically destructive tactics to the hilt. What’s that leave the overwhelming majority of the SWP saying about Rees – that it’s just as well he was such a bad leader of RESPECT, because otherwise it might have risked being a success?
anticapitalista on said:
#157 I said in another thread that I’m not prepared to discuss internal SWP documents.
I’ll wait until after conference.
No, I’m not making fun of collecting petitions. I do it all the time. What about you? Shouldn’t you be out there collecting signatures as well? Or are you just a keyboard activist?
Andy Newman on said:
#158 “That’s a damn shame for the SWP”
Indeed, becasue what the SWP desperately need is to appreciate the degree to which their repuatioon with the rest of the left, and in the wider trade union movement, has been very seriously damaged.
swp member on said:
Can’t see the connection between what I wrote and the responses (I must be in the grip of a paralysing dogma). I didn’t say we were ‘right about everything’ or that we should back Rees ‘to the hilt’…
Jenkins on said:
No pre-conference discussion for you then auntie-c just waiting for the tablets of stone?
Nas on said:
Of such false dichotomies – either collect signatures or keyboard activism – is so much of the barren culture of the far left made. Speaking of false dichotomies – that’s what Galloway accused the Rees regime in Respect of creating, wasn’t it?
Here’s a syllogism for you, my Greek (based) friend:
1) Galloway complains of “false dichotomies”.
2) Callinicos complains of taking “localised disagreements” and inflating them into “systematic differences”.
3) Therefore: Galloway is a right wing witch-hunter who must be resisted and Rees’s armour propre protected at all costs; and Callinicos is a principled revolutionary who must be supported in the long overdue purge of Rees.
Quite simple really – it does of course rely on a novel construction of the law on the excluded middle: the desperate hope that there is precious little betwen the ears of anyone who is told this horseshit.
Nas on said:
SWP member: Well – others in your party are seeing this. And more will. I just hope you don’t have to go through many years, a la the poll tax, publically defending positions which in private everyone agreed were wrong.
anticapitalista on said:
#162 There is no point discussing it here with people who have already made their minds up about the SWP and the SWPcc.
I won’t convince you and you won’t convince me.
Plus I’m not in the UK.
#163 So get out there and collect some signatures, Nas!
It is much better. You know you get to talk to people who actually want to listen and discuss what you have to say, you get fresh air, and if you’re really lucky a Woolies worker will give you a free bag of pick n’ mix.
Happy Holidays to all that have them.
Jenkins on said:
`Quite simple really – it does of course rely on a novel construction of the law on the excluded middle: the desperate hope that there is precious little betwen the ears of anyone who is told this horseshit.’
Now that’s the good shit. A real keeper.
Now come on `swp member’, life is short. what you gonna bring to the party?
Nas on said:
“Plus I’m not in the UK” – anticap, dear boy! You could have saved yourself an awful lot of embarrassment (remember the Ahmed Hussain affair, cringeworty, wasn’t it?) if you had come to this realisation, say, in September of last year.
swp member on said:
‘Now come on `swp member’, life is short. what you gonna bring to the party?’
Well I’ve already argued that Respect will die after the next election, noone disagreed with me.
Jenkins on said:
`Well I’ve already argued that Respect will die after the next election, noone disagreed with me.’
Oh dear, I had hopes for you.
Phil on said:
I didn’t say we were ‘right about everything’ or that we should back Rees ‘to the hilt’
Nor did I suggest that you did. I said that the party leadership appears to be backing Rees’s idiotically destructive tactics in RESPECT to the hilt, at the same time as disowning Rees.
swp member on said:
‘Oh dear, I had hopes for you.’
Should I be worried about this..?
Jenkins on said:
No, we should.
jimban on said:
Happy Xmas.
A new year of struggle and solidarity………and RR being further down the road to Andy’s prediction of collapse. Oh happy days.
swp member on said:
So taking 169, 171 and 172 together, you (collective) should worry about the fact that you (individual) had hopes for me?
The force is strong with this one…
Jenkins on said:
No, we should worry that you and jubjub there are making it your life work to ensure that one of Britain’s foremost anti-imperialist MPs is not re-elected.
Ray on said:
It’s nearly xmas, the mistletoe is out and everyone’s gearing up for a bit of a rest but the Gallowayites are still flogging a dead horse and I’m not just talking about the split. I don’t suppose the SWP will be getting a card from Andy but at least we have Galloway’s letter to show us the way. Merry xmas!
Ray on said:
“No, we should worry that you and jubjub there are making it your life work to ensure that one of Britain’s foremost anti-imperialist MPs is not re-elected.”
Yes, it has nothing to do with him pandering to New Labour or his sad record of self promotion, does it?
Jenkins on said:
No, it has everything to do with the fact that Respect is stepping on your bureaucratic toes.
swp member on said:
‘No, we should worry that you and jubjub there are making it your life work to ensure that one of Britain’s foremost anti-imperialist MPs is not re-elected.’
I am? Fuck me thanks mate, i was wondering what it was all about. There was me, going to work, selling the odd paper, looking after the little ‘uns, and all the time i should have been hundreds of miles away stopping george galloway from getting reelected. Right well I’ll put me house on the market straight away, and I’ll be off to the east end to get stuck into some skulduggery.
Ming you if that’s my lifes work, and he doesn’t get reelected, what do i do then? I mean the decades after 2010 kind of stretch away into the distrance. Any suggestions? Overthrow Chavez? Poison Livingstone’s newt collection? What?
Jenkins on said:
Tell your grandchildren.
Ray on said:
“No, it has everything to do with the fact that Respect is stepping on your bureaucratic toes.”
You mean the Ray bureaucracy that huge top heavy superstructure that prevents Respect from beating the Tories in their heartland of Mile End? The writings on the wall Jenkins and it’s all of your own organisations making.
swp member on said:
Right its now clear that everyone else is out in the pub enjoying christmas eve, and to avoid confirming the fact that this sad git isn’t I’m off, you can argue with ray all night if you like.
Merry fucking Christmas. Even to revisionists. But not David T.
Jenkins on said:
Top heavy you ain’t broheme and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop Respect but what can you do to save the SWP?
TH Respect Survivor on said:
Ray,
What do you make of Lindsey German pandering to Islamophobia in the gay press in the run up to the Mayoral election: Where she made serious (false) allegations about George Galloway and the Muslims who support and vote for him?
And what’s this business about “white socialists”? People of my ethnic extraction (bangladeshi) not good enough?
external bulletin on said:
“A new year of struggle and solidarity………and RR being further down the road to Andy’s prediction of collapse. Oh happy days.”
So, ll/jimban/etc openly being happy about any possibility of Respect collapsing.
Remember when people like Ray and Alex Callinicos spoke of how Respect members wanted the end of the SWP, and how scandalous it was?
Well, we have ll’s (thankfully deleted) post essentially calling for a witch-hunt of George Galloway by asking for people to come forward with “evidence” against him, and now the same person is talking of “happy days” at the thought of a collapsing Respect.
If you keep this up, Martin Smith might offer you your job back.
Do any of the SWP members here think there’s any issue with one of their most internet-prolific members wanting the collapse of Respect? When answering, please do bear in mind that your leadership went round the country claiming that Galloway and his supporters really did want to see the end of the SWP. Such sentiments were used to whip up the “witch hunt” saga.
I don’t expect people to take responsibility for LL. But… well, actually, all the SWP members and supporters who demanded, for example, that Respect members condemn the fake attacks on Oli Rahman, who tried to make us denounce anyone who called for the SWP’s removal from Respect, who basically made it the collective responsibility of everyone in Respect to put a stop to anyone criticising the SWP in these terms – you probably need to understand why a lot of us are bitter that people like “ll” continue to type the damaging shit they’ve been typing for over a year and yet somehow, while it’s everyone in Respect’s fault if someone has views to the right of them, we’re told that each SWP member acts entirely independently and therefore doesn’t have to answer for any other SWP member.
johng on said:
He’s not the most internet prolific member as far as I’M concerned. I’d very much like to know who it is.
Ray on said:
“you can argue with ray all night if you like.”
Cheers mate!
@185 blah, blah, blah…haven’t you got anything fun to do on xmas eve? I’m out for a bevy, have fun and don’t stand too close to that mistletoe or someone might crack that uptight expression of yours.
TH Respect Survivor on said:
Ray, to you this might be a laugh and nothing serious. But to a gay, Asian, Muslim, Respect and the SWP is serious stuff. I have to walk the street not just worrying about whether someone’s gonna take a pop at me becasue I’m brown, but also because I’m Muslim as well as gay. If you don’t have anything to say then don’t. I’m sure Andy and all the other people who post on here would be glad to be rid of you. From reading your comments, it is obvious that you are stuck in a fog, living a deluded life, where the CC is your god and you do their bidding. You have no idea what life is really like. Certainly not my life, or the hundreds of people who live in my council estate, or the thousands upon thousands who live in hundreds of other estates like it.
Let me assure you of one thing, if you really gave a damn about the working class, you would be in or at least support Respect. For some of “us” (to echo LIndsey German’s sentiments) Respect is the answer, and don’t you fucking dare set a purity test for me. Or anyone for that matter. Who are you to set a purity test, when you are willing to defend the langauge of Lindsey German?
darren redstar on said:
if Respect is the answer then it must have been a fucking stupid question
herbal stuff on said:
It’s great to see a substantial post from Nas (no.155), who usually reserves his interventions on this site to short, smarmy quips that offer no political insight. Nas’ post no.155 finally offers us what he actually thinks and anyone who knows anything about his conclusions recognizes how ill-informed he is as the other yapping sectarians on this site.
I think anticapitalista hit a nerve with our friend Nas. Anyone, and I mean anyone who spends so much time on this site and comments so regularly is most likely a totally inactive, ineffective and isolated self-described socialist, Marxist, leftist, etc.
This whole site is a joke, and its content, as one poster has said, a meta-joke. This website is not a serious attempt to broker real discussion and debate on the left. It is a trash gossip column for lefties. One can only conclude that it is is fuelled by a deep bitter, sectarianism and a capitulation to the bourgeois desire of internet “fame” in some marginal section of cyberspace.
Whatever one thinks of the SWP’s pros and cons, it is completely clear that the authors and tag-a-longs are simply incapable of understanding anything about any organization that is oriented on actually intervening in politics in order to change it. It would do these people good to limit themselves to 30 minutes of computer a day and put their efforts into actually trying to build something, change something.
TH Respect Survivor on said:
@ 189. Yeah, well you try saying that to the groups of Asian lads who hang around on my estate – who would be more then willing to campaign and vote for Galloway, but not for you or your likes – why, because you have no credibility with them- nor with me. Credibility has to be built and if that way is to campaign together on issues that we can agree on – anti-racism, anti-war, anti-privitization etc, then that’s the way it should be. Don’t sit there waiting for “the oppressed” to come to you. Cos they won’t; they’ll walk right on by and you’ll miss the fucking revolution.
It might be easy for you in Reading, but for some of “us”, who have to live with racist, homophobic and islamophbic abuse, day in, day out, it isn’t.
The fact that out of the 12 links on your blog, one of them is to H***y’s Pl**e tells me most of what I need to know about you.
TH Respect Survivor on said:
@ 189. Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to have a read of your blog: Any Muslim, working class or not, wouldn’t want anything to do with you but then there really arn’t that many of you to do anything with.
How many defections led to your pretty little Red Party’s disbanding? One, I heard…
This is apprently what you aspire to be, as written in your unfounding/disbanding/regrouping statement:
“…a mass workers party…without the short tempered sectarian bitchiness thatcharacterises the traditional left…”
Does this non-sectarianess not strech to calling people names such as “arch trot toff t**t” (with the last word being rather sexist).
Also, you don’t even attempt to veil you islamophobic rhetoric. So fuck off.
Plonker on said:
189 If you are the answer then there’s no fucking hope or even a point.
Andy Newman on said:
#190
“This whole site is a joke, and its content, as one poster has said, a meta-joke.”
I have no idea what a meta-joke is. I wish i was as clever as you.
lola on said:
“Let me assure you of one thing, if you really gave a damn about the working class, you would be in or at least support Respect. ”
This seems a bit sectarian from Respect. What this seems to imply is only about 300 people in England give a damn about the working class!
lola on said:
“fake attacks on Oli Rahman” External bulletin
If this is true that it was made up by Oli Rahman then could some evidence be given.I think to make this sort of statement is very dangerous. So some proof would be useful.
herbal stuff on said:
Andy, I wish you would actually respond.
auto on said:
So herbal comes here to tell others they shouldn’t spend time here. Are you on the central committee of a Leninist group, spliffy?
lola on said:
Andy
Do you think it is a good idea to have remarks that Oli Rahman lied to the public and the police on your website. I would have thought this would leave you open. Unless I am mistaken Oli has not retracted his account of intimidation etc. It seems External Bulletin is saying he was wasting police time which is of course a criminal offence. Just a point which needs to be addressed by yourself when you have a minute.
herbal stuff on said:
It doesn’t take a central committee member (or an SWP member, I should add) to come to the conclusion that this site is a joke. I’m proof of this.
herbal stuff on said:
By which I mean I’m neither a member of any CC or the SWP.
Of course, this is all beside the point, right? Why don’t you respond to what I actually said? Can anyone muster any defence of this website as a positive contribution in any sense to the left in Britain (or anywhere else), let alone the working-class?
lola on said:
Herbal
I think this site provides an invaluable service to insominacs who hate the SWP. There must be a better treatment for this syndrome but as yet none has been found to work effectively.
Darren on said:
herbal,
what’s a “meta-joke”?
anticapitalista on said:
Its the bit you get after the pre-joke
Darren on said:
ok
*shuffles away none-the-wiser*
auto on said:
#199 You don’t have to worry. Oliur has not been talking about the “attacks” for some time time now. He certainly hasn’t been implying he was attacked by political opponents. Oh no. He laughs the whole thing off. I don’t think Andy has anything to worry about. Oh my – you guys really were suckered weren’t you. Merry Xmas.
herbal stuff on said:
meta-joke: riffing on the same type of joke again and again. Like a comedian who can’t do anything but knock-knock jokes to the point where it becomes endlessly self-referential, circular (and stale and predictable). In this website’s case, the endless and obsessive anti-SWP sectarianism has become a meta-joke.
But we don’t need to complicate what this site is. More so than a “meta-joke”, it’s a joke, period.
Tony Greenstein on said:
Well the debate over Callincos’s article has been marginally better than that over German’s. There hasn’t been the same diversions over whether ‘white socialists’ means ‘SWP socialists’ or just socialists.
So let’s first put this into some kind of perspective. The SWP is the largest socialist formation by far in Britain. It has, for all its sins, had a continued existence for 40 years, including the old IS. It has also adapted to Thatcherism and New Labour, but most of all to the disappearance of the traditional concentrations of working class strength in major injustries, by moving rightwards. Not an incorrect tactic in itself, but the way it has been carried forward has been little short of disastrous.
WW is quite correct to talk about the ‘mother of all splits’ regardless of whether the SWP crisis manifests itself in a split or not (which is highly likely). The eruption of this debate in the SWP is going to have consequences that will not end with the SWP Conference on January 11th. Putting the genie back in the bottle is never an easy task. However none of the major factions, for want of a better word, are addressing some of the major flaws in the way the SWP operate.
The SWP have managed to hold their own organisation together, just, at the expense of building a far larger far-left, i.e. a socialist organisation committed to the overthrow of capitalism. They have done this by becoming a rigidly sectarian party or sect. Virtually every campaign they’ve ever been involved in they have sought to take over and treat as a recruiting pool. Of course one expects a socialist organisation to try and recruit people to its ideas, but not at the expense of the campaign or movement.
Contrary to what all factions have said, the Stop the War Coalition is today little more than a shell organisation which can barely mobilise 10,000 on a national demonstration. The debacle over HOPI was a glaring example of what their sectarianism means in practice. The destruction of the Socialist Alliance, in order to create Respect, meant the destruction of the first signs of the formation of a new socialist formation in Britain, at a time when New Labour had left a large vacuum to its left.
Likewise there is no accounting for the political mistakes in Respect. Respect was clearly an unprincipled political initiative seeking to appeal to one particular community, Muslims, as a result of the war and anti-Muslim racism. It sought to do that on the basis of, yes, communalism. An attempt to co-opt the traditional leaders of the Muslim community into providing electoral support for SWP candidates (tr. ‘white’ socialists. It was a policy that all of the CC signed up to – Callinicos and Harman. Yet even here the SWP didn’t change their basic method of intervention, i.e. a popular front dominated by the SWP organisationally. The clash with Galloway was inevitable and of course it manifested itself not in political differences, which were manufactured post-hoc, but in issues of democracy in which the SWP came off second best.
The point I’m making is that the key question here is one of democracy and of course the SWP’s internal organisation and lack of democracy was reflected in its operations in the movement. Because the SWP has cut itself off from the wider movement, other than in an opportunistic attempt to sign up left figures like Benn, Serwotka etc. to its popular front (or if people prefer united front) activities, it also has nowhere to go.
And this is the remarkable feature of the present debate. Rees, German and the right-wing want to continue as before, drawing no lessons from Respect worthy of the name. Callinicos and co. recognise what a disaster Respect/LA have been but also have no alternative and therein lies the dilemma.
There are, of course, profound questions as to the nature of a Marxist or revolutionary party operating in conditions of western capitalism where manufacturing has been exported to the third world. Is it even feasible to talk about building a revolutionary party in the West given that there seems no agent of such change? That for me is why the SSP, despite all that happened, remains a viable model if the right lessons are drawn.
What was most noticeable about the post-Seattle anti-capitalist phase that Callinicos talks about is how unsuccessful it was. The anarchists were antagonistic to the SWP from the start because of their prior record. Globalise Resistance had virtually no impact, organised nothing of consequence and lost all its independent members when the SWP showed its true colours. Clearly Chris Nineham’s loyalty to Rees and German speaks volumes about the lessons he draws.
I could mention UAF, which is deemed to be a success story (‘there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all’). The SWP have consistently sought to maintain a flag waving, stage managed, anti-fascist adjunct which has no life of its own. It has eschewed the tactic of militant anti-fascism in favour of broad ‘anti-Nazi’ propaganda. Meanwhile the BNP has sunk roots as the abysmal Wayne Bennett continues to proclaim their demise.
What will be most interesting about the outcome of the present debate in the SWP is firstly whether there are serious moves towards democratising the SWP – because without that there is no hope of preventing further fiascos.
Secondly whether there is a serious evaluation of the ‘united front’ tactic and in particular the incompatibility of building left formations whilst at the same time maintaining a separate party (and the SP is as guilty of this). Only in the SSP did the SWP knuckle under, to some extent, and accept the need to build the wider party. These are just some of the questions that people need to be asking rather than engaging in fruitless backbiting.
Incidentally apropos Roger Rosewell: I was in the Liverpool branch of the International Socialists back in 1972/3 and from which I was expelled. Rosewell was brought up from London to effect this but he also helped lead the total rent strike in Kirkby, which is an outlying town from Liverpool. The leader of the tenants federation, who had joined IS, was jailed and I can remember marching through this dismal town of endless housing estates in a wholly working class demonstration with people singing Lennon’s Power to the People!! Rosewell in fact intervened at large tenants meetings in favour of the total rent strike tactic, so clearly he had learnt something on his way north. Of course he was almost certainly a state agent even then, hence his usefulness to the IS leadership when it came to expelling dissidents. Incidentally John Bloxham of the AWL, but then IS, abstained on my expulsion because I’d voted against the organisation in a public meeting.
I should add that although Rees and German represent the right-wing of the SWP, eager to get into bed with the CPB and union bureaucrats when it suits them, it shouldn’t be thought that their erstwhile opponents are any better. It is Martin Smith who has championed Gilad Atzmon in the SWP.
The SWP’s democratic explosion, because that is what it is, should be the signal for others on the Left to begin to make an analysis themselves of what this means for the prospects of a united far left. It is a pity that instead people seem to be mainly concerned with point scoring.
Tony Greenstein
Mike on said:
Tony you have clearly taken some time to consider the views you express in this post and thats to your credit. Although you fail to make a singgle point not already made by other controversialists which does tend to making your contribution redundant I must say. But you do make one point that is worthy of consideration.
“There are, of course, profound questions as to the nature of a Marxist or revolutionary party operating in conditions of western capitalism where manufacturing has been exported to the third world. Is it even feasible to talk about building a revolutionary party in the West given that there seems no agent of such change?”
Now there are two points in the above quote that interest me. First is it true that the proletariat is no longer a force for social change in Britain and, I guess, by extension in the other advanced capitalist states? Well frankly I disagree profoundly on this poi0t and hold that my class does still have the capacity to lead a social revolution. That said there have obviously been massive changes in the composition of the class and far fewer workers are employed in manufacturing although manufacturing as a sector of the economies of the advanced countries has declined less than is popularly thought.
Secondly if all we, as socialists, can do is beg for crumbs from the bosses table and cheer lead for so called Third World national liberation forces why bother calling oneself a socialist? Why not simply join the fucking Greens or Liberal Democrats? There, my friend, is the rotten heart of your politics that means you are incapable of constructively particpating in the renewal of revolutionary socialism in this country.
That you see fit to recont, yet again, your personal experience in IS also exhibits your extreme personalism and typically petty bourgeois egoism.
bill j on said:
I’m afraid Mike you rather reveal the rotten heart of your own politics if the most you think the working class of the “third world” can achieve is “so called Third world national liberation forces”.
Russia in 1917 was somewhat less well developed than India today.
Jenkins on said:
Mike, you are right about manufacturing, Britain is still the sixth biggest manufacturer in the world and large swathes of the working class are discovering what it is like to go from being marginal beneficiaries of imperialism to being on the front line of its attacks.
There is nothing wrong with recounting personal experiences and only a petty bourgeois would insist that they be repressed in the interests of `the party’ but you generally go to far with your analyses anyway rendering what might be correct into something wrong.
Ger Francis on said:
According to Tony Greenstein it is now ‘communalism’ to make an appeal to a community bearing the burnt of racism and state repression.
That has to be one of the most idiotic comments I have yet seen on this site. Congratulations.
Our entire orientation on the Muslim community has been premised on the need to marginalise the appeal of religious sectarians to a besieged community by forging solidarity between it and other communities. In short, to undercut religious sectarians with principled anti-racism.
That was the driver behind our anti-war work before RESPECT. It defined our response after 7/7. And it forms the core of Salma’s entire political perspective. It is why during the recent Springfield ward election we produced a RESPECT leaflet targeting Irish voters highlighting the comparisons between the racist backlash Muslims were experiencing today and what the Irish were experiencing in the aftermath of the pub bombings in the 1970’s. It is a factor in why last Friday we handed out leaflets outside Mosques condemning Brown’s stance on Pakistan because if we know none of the other parties would and if we did not, it would leave a vacuum that those with ugly sectarian politics would try fill. And good job we did because the only others to have anything to say on the topic were HT. Like many of the ultra-lefts who pontificate on this site, Greenstein displays the usual ignorance and prejudice about the work people like me are actually engaged in.
As for Respect wanting ‘to co-opt the traditional leaders of the Muslim community into providing electoral support for SWP candidates’. What is your evidence for that statement? In Birmingham, for example, who are the ‘traditional leaders’ you claim we have been pandering to? Substantiate your argument. Stop repeating Harry’s Place type smears. And to save yourself any embarrassment, try avoid falling into all this racist crap about dumb Muslims doing what they are told to by Imams at Mosques. For the record, I am not aware of a single Mosque in Birmingham which has ever instructed it followers to vote RESPECT and indeed it is very rare generally for Imams to act in such an overt party political way.
The so-called ‘traditional leaders’ (and please define what exactly you mean by this term) are the most conservative lawyer, the ones most tied into the Labour machine, and the ones we get the least support from.
Jenkins on said:
It is a shame that the WW people have been almost as active at least politically in Operation Wreckspect as Rees German and the SWP CC majority demonstrating the pure formalism of their `anti-sectarianism’.
Mike on said:
Post #210. But I do not Bill and suggested nothing of the kind. Do please read more carefully.
Nadolig llawen.
Mike on said:
Post #211.
The problem is Tony insists on recounting his decades old experiences in IS every time he mentions the SWP as if said events were of world historic importance!
Halshall on said:
To get back to the point of this thread; I’m sure AC did know at some point before he went public that the split in Respect last year dates from Sept 30, the day of the SWP NC, when JR publicly ripped up the agreement reached with the other side in Respect the day before.
Of course it was done by twisting the truth, and with the apparent complicity of at least some of the CC, even if AC at the time was not aware of the fact that agreement to prevent the split had been reached.
Tony Greenstein on said:
Mike says that ‘if all we, as socialists, can do is beg for crumbs from the bosses table and cheer lead for so called Third World national liberation forces why bother calling oneself a socialist? Why not simply join the fucking Greens or Liberal Democrats? There, my friend, is the rotten heart of your politics that means you are incapable of constructively particpating in the renewal of revolutionary socialism in this country.’
Well that’s one perspective. A gross caricature and also displays an inability to understand anything except the most formalistic of debating points:
i. If indeed I do believe that begging for crumbs from the bosses is the most we can achieve then fair enough. I don’t.
ii. I’m not aware that supporting the oppressed in the third world such as the Palestinians or defending the Cuban revolution against US imperialism, or indeed Venezuela is mere cheer leading.
iii. I wasn’t aware that Mike as at the heart of the reconstruction of revolutonary socialism in this country.
I was raising more profound points which revolutionary socialists like Mike continue to avoid. Marx saw the working class as an agent of revolutionary change. Why? Not because they were more oppressed than any other class in history but because capitalism was capable of being overthrown and a socialist society achieved and because the working class, because of its concentration in factories and mills, could achieve a political consciousness that would enable them to do that.
There is, obviously, a working class in this country, but today it is atomised. Its general level of political consciousness is at an abysmally low level and the reason for that has material foundations. The days of the struggles of the mineworkers, dockers, shipyard workers has gone. What has taken their place? Council workers can barely strike for one day, likewise civil servants, yet these are the most militant workers. In short there has been a change in the organic composition of the working class which results in a level of political consciousness which is barely social democratic let alone revolutionary. That is one reason the SWP has veered to the right. Is it possible to overcome this? I’m not optimistic. It is over 150 years since Marx began foretelling the overthrow of capitalism yet it has survived, even economic crises like today. And yet today the working class isn’t even a major actor on the stage. If Mike and others were to address these questions, the raising of political consciousness without which no advances can be made then that would in itself be an achievement.
I raised my own personal experiences for political reasons. E.g. to point out that the said Roger Rosewell had engaged in the most militant campaign over the 1972 Housing Finance Act. That he was also a state apparatchik with whom I had personal and political experiences because the personal can, doesn’t have to, have political consequences.
As for Ger and Respect. I spoke at one of the last Socialist Alliance National Councils when the Respect Project was about to take off. Rees had spoken on the great opportunities ahead and had drawn the comparison with the Jewish community in the 1930s. I noted that the CP, for all its faults, hadn’t approached the rabbis and establishment figures whereas Respect did target Imams and community leaders. That is self-evident. It happened in Preston where the first electoral victory in a Council by Michael Lavallete occurred (under the SA banner) and people may remember the Imam speaking at the last SA Conference. The same approach to community leaders took place in the East End of London and others have described in more detail the different networks of clans and families that have to be tapped into. I’m not saying that work over racism, such as an approach to the Irish community hasn’t occurred, but I’m in no doubt that e.g. the victory of Galloway was achieved in large measure because of the harvesting of votes through the good offices of certain Bengali leaders.
Respect was not a socialist project and didn’t claim to be so, hence why it attracted a layer of small businessmen in these communities who saw Respect as the key to office. That was one of the obstacles the SWP couldn’t surmount when it wanted its own cadre elected and was, as Lindsay German makes clear, one of the main reasons the SWP found a pretext to try and split Respect.
TH Respect Survivor on said:
Who exactly make up this “layer of small businessmen” Tony? Or are you just regurgitating shit from the SWP?
Andy Newman on said:
#208
Tony this is nonsense: “has also adapted to Thatcherism and New Labour, but most of all to the disappearance of the traditional concentrations of working class strength in major injustries, by moving rightwards”
The SW manifestly responded to the rise of Thatchersim in the 1980s by turning leftwards.
Ger Francis on said:
In reply to Tony Greenstein:
1. Compare and contrast the manifesto’s of the Socialist Alliance and RESPECT and you will find very little difference in their core platforms which are essentially left wing social democracy, resolute anti-imperialism and anti-racism.
2. It is ultra-left to adopt a position that just because someone is an Iman, socialists should have nothing to do with them. Just apply that method to Latin America where some of the most progressive social movements are embedded in religious communities. It is inconcevible that socialists in those countries would be able to seriously engage on that terrain if they adopted the attitude of Tony Greenstein towards religious leaders.
3. There is not a single shred of evidence to suggest that Michael Lavellette’s politics have been compromised by a good political relationship he developed with a mosque through his anti-war work. Indeed, if you want to win political hegemony inside religious communities it is impossible to do so by not attempting to construct such relationships.
4. As I said before, the ‘establishment figures’ tend to go with the establishment to access power, not small left wing parties who have none. The appeal of RESPECT to a very small number of so-called ‘small businessmen’ (largely poor shopkeepers in my experience) was in reaction to racism and not as a means to advance class interests.
5. There is nothing wrong about approaching ‘community leaders’ or anyone else for that matter to win them to your ideas. What is wrong is if you make compromises on your core beliefs to accommodate them. There is no evidence that RESPECT have ever done this.
6. Is it the case the some of our votes have been ‘harvested’ by supporters who show that support by getting their extended family and clan networks to vote for us? Of course. The entire politlcal terrain upon which politics in inner cities with large South Asian communities is contested is corrupted, primarily by the use of the system of postal vote on demand. But unlike the Labour party, we are trying to end that system. Rather than extending working class franchise, it acts to limit it. Rather than RESPECT gain overall under postal voting on demand, we are its biggest losers. In Birmingham our voter support is highest among Muslim women and young people, the exact groups most likely to be denied their right to a secret ballot under the postal vote system. There is no doubt in our minds that Salma Yaqoob would have been elected MP seat in 2005 if all those who wanted to vote for her, were entitled to do so in private, free from pressure from family relatives and political hacks. The people who benefit most from this system are those with oldest ties of patronage and that’s Labour party and their cronies. That’s the reason why in Birmingham Roger Godsiff MP, the person who beat Salma last time, is so hostile to scrapping the postal vote. He knows it is a surefire way to bank votes he otherwise would not get.
The image Tony Greenstien paints of our work is a reactionary one, when the truth is the very opposite. In so doing he is reduced to echoing smears about us from the likes of Harry’s Place to his shame.
Mike on said:
Replies to TG interspersed in the text below.
“i. If indeed I do believe that begging for crumbs from the bosses is the most we can achieve then fair enough. I don’t.”
But you do reject the idea that the working classes in this country have a potentially revolutionary nature. All that is left then is begging for crumbs and given that your practical work is doing exactly that… Then I must concude that your believes about yourself are far less important than your actions as a ‘social worker’.
“ii. I’m not aware that supporting the oppressed in the third world such as the Palestinians or defending the Cuban revolution against US imperialism, or indeed Venezuela is mere cheer leading.
Can it be other than cheerleading if you reject the possibility of the proletariat in the imperialist countries can deliver material aid as a result of their actions?
“iii. I wasn’t aware that Mike as at the heart of the reconstruction of revolutonary socialism in this country.”
On the periphery dear boy but one does ones best doncha know.
“I was raising more profound points which revolutionary socialists like Mike continue to avoid. Marx saw the working class as an agent of revolutionary change. Why? Not because they were more oppressed than any other class in history but because capitalism was capable of being overthrown and a socialist society achieved and because the working class, because of its concentration in factories and mills, could achieve a political consciousness that would enable them to do that.”
All true but besides the point. There was in his day virtually no industrial proletariat in London for example. Moreover the remaining industrial proletariat in the advanced countries is more, not less, powerful in its potential than ver before. It is their lack of consciousness that is key and that is a politcal question not dependent on their numbers.
“There is, obviously, a working class in this country, but today it is atomised.”
Twas ever thus. See above.
“I’m not optimistic.”
What a shock to learn this.
“I raised my own personal experiences for political reasons. E.g. to point out that the said Roger Rosewell had engaged in the most militant campaign over the 1972 Housing Finance Act. That he was also a state apparatchik with whom I had personal and political experiences because the personal can, doesn’t have to, have political consequences.”
Rosewell is a bum but there is no evidence that he was a state asset.
MeganM on said:
217. Tony Greenstein writes…” Respect was not a socialist project and didn’t claim to be so, hence why it attracted a layer of small businessmen in these communities who saw Respect as the key to office”.
Difficult to easily reconcile his remarks with the fact that Respect stood for ” Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, Trade Unionism”- I think most would see these as part of any “socialist project”.
Game vs. Seymour on said:
Game fighting Lenny over at Splinty. splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com
bill j on said:
I remember the speeches as the founding conference quite well. Lindsey German was absolutely explicit. Respect was not a socialist project. And the problem with the Socialist Alliance, was that it was “too socialist”.
OK so people in Respect wanted to ditch socialism, that’s their perogative, but please don’t pretend it wasn’t the case.
Davy Carlin {Belfast} on said:
I to had left the SWP {Belfast several years ago – and readings of my time {and leaving} can be read {for those interested} through-out above link. To me the lack of democracy, the control nature and ‘chastising’ of activists from full time organisers {which I found patronising} and much more throughout {can be read}.
Indeed from a few people {counted on one hand} in a room, we had moved the Belfast SWP to 4 branches, now there is not even a visible sign of any SWP activity {so not sure if now there is even a Real active branch} in Belfast in Very recent months. This is a shame as at its height much important work was done.
Yet I had found many of the points raised throughout these recent debates similar to my self – and more can be read in a forthcoming publication {for the record of the once Belfast SWP – and hopefully for lessons learnt}
Indeed I have moved on from the SWP but activism remains, but nevertheless it is good to see at last some real attempt of debate, albeit that it may be that this is more out of necessity and survival than of anything else.
But still good to see
Irish Mark P on said:
Well then, the conference was this weekend just past wasn’t it? What happened?
Irish Mark P on said:
To sort of answer my question, a couple of people (one anonymous person who claims to be in the SWP and one person who is not in the SWP) on other forums are claiming that all of Rees, German and Nineham were voted off the Central Committee.
This seems a bit unlikely to me, but it is possible I suppose and it’s the only “information” publicly available at the moment.
penis enlargement on said:
Thenk you very much