The Socialist Workers Party’s special conference looms ever closer. Though there are still a few aggregates to take place as I write, most of the delegate votes are in, and on any reasonable count victory is certain for the central committee on March 10 – unless god himself intervenes and strikes down 400 of their delegates with cholera (or, worse still, common sense).

The approach from the CC is uneven. In many districts, aggregates have been approached aggressively; those comrades in the In Defence of Our Party faction (IDOP) have faced a barrage of hysterical abuse. ‘Dirty tricks’, such as sabotaging the caucuses of the faction by anonymously cancelling room bookings (exemplifying the very high level of politics we have come to expect from the SWP leadership), have been in force. Meetings have been packed in order to prevent, where possible, any IDOP members from attending conference at all.

Elsewhere, however, a different tack has been tried. Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s top ‘red professor’ and de facto leader, put on a scarcely believable conciliatory act at the West/North West London aggregate. “We are listening,” he declared. There were “legitimate concerns” about the disputes commission’s handling of the rape charge against ‘comrade Delta’, and its future shape. The comrade even mooted a “wider debate” on democratic centralism.

All of which is a marked change of tone from that which we have seen so far – which has consisted primarily of the leadership, its lackeys and deluded loyalists repeating the same nonsense over and over again, giving not an inch to their foes. Literally not an inch – because, no matter what IDOP comrades (and the more radical Democratic Renewal platform around Richard Seymour and China Miéville) said or wrote, the same mantra came back in reply, in spite of its increasing implausibility. It had three mutually incompatible premises: there is no SWP crisis; people do not care about the SWP crisis out there in ‘the real world’; they only care about the SWP crisis in the ‘real world’ because of the ‘disgraceful’ behaviour of the oppositionists.

Carrot and cudgel

Looking at other aggregate reports, it seems most SWP opposition comrades, outside the sacred circle of west London, are still being clobbered over the head with this nonsense. The anecdotes do not make for pretty reading: one comrade reduced to tears after the meeting, others stared down sociopathically by Michael Bradley. Alex Callinicos may have played down his aggression simply because accusing Pat Stack – the nominated opposition speaker – of treachery would not have gone down well with the SWP general audience.

All the same, the proffering of measly concessions in one district maybe significant. It will not make a difference to the result at conference; but the SWP leadership is not so short-termist as to look only a week into the future. It knows that it stands to lose a lot of people over this.

Making such tokenistic concessions, of course, can have only one serious purpose. The CC wants to split the opposition. While there are many in IDOP whom Callinicos and co would like to keep on board, there are a good few who they will be glad to see the back of for good – chief among them comrades Seymour and Miéville. The CC wishes to split the opposition along its natural fault-line, between the ‘soft’ IDOP majority and the hardcore DR platform. To the soft oppositionalists, Callinicos offers the nakedly implausible idea that they will be generously “listened to” – but also the implication that there is a future for them under the ancien régime, that they will not be turned into ‘non-people’ and frozen out of SWP life as a result of their ‘disloyalty’. A quite dishonest implication – but the most dangerous lies are not those you tell, but those that people tell themselves.

It is – by the granite-faced standards of the leadership’s conduct so far – a bold gambit. It inevitably begs the question of the opposition’s response. It is clear that the writing on the wall is perfectly legible to the IDOP comrades. Already, after the first round of aggregates, sessions were being added to their final pre-conference national meeting to discuss how to “continue to fight” after the fateful day itself – the unspoken assumption being that March 10 will deliver the staged punishment beating for which it has been designed.¹

So what is plan B, comrades? Unfortunately, it seems so far that there isn’t much of one at all. “Over the coming week, leading up to the special conference, we will be circulating a few articles written by faction members about how they see life in the party in coming months and how they believe the party can overcome its current difficulties,” promises one circular; but all that has emerged since is an unsigned piece under the heading ‘Where next?’ – which does not stoop to actually proposing any particular line of march. Rather, it serves as a wry trailer for their discussion on the subject on Saturday.

In lieu of anything else, we are left with that vague commitment to “continue to fight”, which falls hopelessly between two stools. On the one hand, it would easily count as evidence of ‘permanent factionalism’ – a worse crime in the Alex Callinicos schema than mass murder; he and his cronies are certainly most unlikely to let a fight “continue” under their noses.

On the other hand, that is no reason not to fight – but the general approach of the IDOP majority so far has been premised on winning over ‘wavering elements’ by being terribly reasonable. We may assume that this is how they hope to “continue to fight”, in which case it is as hopelessly inadequate a strategy for after this Sunday as it has been so far. The leadership has a whole apparatus of full-timers, which has long substituted for the initiative of rank-and-file comrades almost completely. The well-worn channels of the SWP’s chain of command will inevitably be the best mobilisers of passive members, many of whom have been corralled into blocking opposition members from going to conference.

So the comrades lack plausible cover going forward, and equally lack – thus far – the kind of militant strategy that could sustain a fight in the face of the bureaucratic clampdown that awaits all those not satisfied by what DR comrades rather drily call “the conference of a special type”. Yet they have at least one more chance to rectify this – they can change tack, radically, at their pre-conference meeting.

Filing in

One pictures the comrades filing into the meeting room – some dejected, despairing at the autocannibalistic course taken by the organisation to which they have dedicated countless hours; others frustrated; still others dreading the humiliation to come the next day; and a final group, which one hopes against hope will be the largest, who still have some fight in them. It is the latter who will have to galvanise the troops, and they will need a serious plan to do so.

To keep the fight alive, IDOP will have to play to its advantages. Its main advantage, to put it bluntly, has always been numbers – and increasingly so, as the faction membership topped 500. In this context, as in so many others, solidarity is crucial – and it is obvious who is in direst need of it just now. Richard Seymour and China Miéville are transparently being set up for expulsion, and the hope will be, no doubt, that the other hard-core troublemakers will follow them away.

Taking Callinicos’s bait, then, is suicide – at least if the IDOP majority are sincere in their desire to “continue to fight”. It would mean – at best – acceding to a six-month ceasefire, during which time any remaining damage to the apparat would be repaired, and any remaining momentum for the opposition steamrollered by a renewed bout of characteristic SWP hyper-activism. This stitched-up, sick parody of a conference will then truly be where it all ended – the last moment of the last fight for the soul of the SWP.

Instead, the comrades should up the stakes – and close ranks around those threatened with expulsions. If Seymour is expelled, everyone from Pat Stack to Rob Owen should say, with one voice, then we all walk. If the SWP leadership is genuinely concerned about losing 500 members overnight (perhaps, even in their recent paranoid delirium, Callinicos and Charlie Kimber genuinely are), then they will blink. Frankly, they will be out of ideas.

If they do not, then they will quite simply kill their organisation – but in a sense they have already dealt the mortal blow, by determining that the grip of Alex Callinicos and his closest allies to the reins of power in the SWP is more important than the political authority of their organisation in wider society. The whole world knows, now, how they run things; how intolerant they are of the slightest challenge to their power; how pitifully small the SWP Potemkin village is compared to its ludicrous claims of 7,000-plus members. The two possible responses to this situation are a visible and genuine attempt to radically overhaul the organisation (the task of the opposition); or a further retreat into the self-delusion of the Potemkin village.

This latter is the truth of the Callinicos-Kimber promise that ‘great things can be done, if we only get over these internal squabbles’. The SWP crisis is a distraction from building up the resistance to the Tories and the far right, and so on, and so forth – so we had better get back to building Unite the Resistance and Unite Against Fascism!

This will be a tempting lure to many in the SWP opposition. The truth, however, is the reverse: Unite the Resistance is a distraction from fighting the Tories. It is not the next Stop the War Coalition, or the next rank-and-file experiment in the great ‘IS tradition’. It is a stillborn front, in a long line of stillborn fronts, which exists more or less exclusively to boost the SWP’s self-image. UAF is not stillborn, but its politics will never stamp out ‘the Nazis’, who will spring back precisely as long as capitalism survives. The fervent activity dedicated to this work – along with countless other minor SWP campaigns – is in reality inward-lookingbut just not smart enough to realise it. These campaigns certainly make zero difference in that much-vaunted ‘real world’ I hear so much about.

Filing out

Alternatively, if the SWP really does take a good long look at itself, and embarks on a serious round of self-criticism, the human resources are there – the talent and the energy – to really make a difference. It can only do so if the parish council of this Potemkin village is purged.

The raw material for making this happen are the same comrades we met earlier, filing into a meeting room. Let us now imagine them filing out – of the conference itself, in lieu of a serious commitment to seriously fight the sham results it has produced. Where do they go now? Some will stay in the SWP, in spite of everything, and become cynical. Some will leave, and be attracted to the many varieties of watered-down broad-leftism on offer, or anarchism, or some other ideology which represents more abrupt a dead end than the IS tradition itself.

A decent slice, regrettably, will be disillusioned to the point of overt and irreconcilable hostility to the left – and, where they do not take this attitude out of the movement altogether, will reappear as witch-hunters in the unions and the Labour Party (there are simply too many examples of this ‘switcheroo’, hailing from the SWP and elsewhere, for its likelihood to be understated here).

The leadership looks certain to win the day on Sunday – but it won the day at the national committee meeting a month ago, and we all know how that turned out. There is still time to fight – to save the SWP, and its members, from the different political oblivions that threaten them. Let us hope the opposition finds enough strength to do so.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.org.uk

Notes

1. www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/caucus-documents-and-idoop-update.

Callinicos: dreadful history

The March 3 ‘Revolt’ day school in London, organised by the Socialist Worker Student Society, was conceived of as a ‘mini-Marxism’ to sign up new activists sympathetic to SWSS and to provide new comrades with an understanding of the ‘International Socialist/Socialist Workers Party tradition’. Following on from another event in Manchester a week earlier, the school was an opportunity for leading SWP comrades to provide the usual openings on introductory questions (‘Why the working class?’; ‘What is exploitation?’) as well as on contemporary political themes. However, this event was not, and was never going to be, ‘business as usual’.

After all, as this paper has reported, SWP students have been at the sharp end of the ongoing factional battles. Many of the more spurious and underhand central committee tactics in the recent period have been directly aimed at SWSS groups, at least a dozen of which have spoken out against the ham-fisted handling of the rape allegations against ‘comrade Delta’.

At the 11th hour, for example, leading SWSS member and dissident Jamie Woodcock was summarily removed as a candidate for the National Union of Students national executive committee elections. For similar reasons, Shereen Prasad’s nomination to the NUS NEC was also withdrawn late in the day. At an important time of local student union elections and campaigning, there has been talk of the national student office effectively breaking off all contact with local groups. Complaints have also been made about the organisation of the ‘Revolt’ school itself, with off-message student speakers suddenly replaced by CC loyalists.

For me, the ‘Revolt’ event itself underlined how the SWP really will take a big hit if it loses the core of its student cadre. ‘Revolt’ obviously suffered from the breakdown in relations between SWSS and the parent body on a number of levels. Firstly, the event was small, with no more than 90 attending. Considering that both SWSS and the SWP place greater emphasis on the numbers they mobilise than on political clarity and education, this is not insignificant. It is hard to tell whether the low turnout was due to disgruntled SWSS members boycotting the event, a breakdown in the student office or simply the general fate of SWSS in the present period.

Secondly, it was badly organised. SWSS events often see orchestrated interventions from the floor – usually to hammer home the ‘line’ or to draw out the speaker on a particular issue that the leadership wants to emphasise. As it was, though, the opening speeches were often met with a rather embarrassing silence. This ensured that the discussion from the floor was dominated by me (apart from two International Bolshevik Tendency members, I was the sole non-SWSS member/supporter present, as far as I could tell) and this or that full-timer/longstanding SWP member that also happened to be in the audience.

Greece and Syriza

The first session was on ‘Crisis, perspectives and revolution’, with three panel speakers. While there was much talk about the crisis, there was unfortunately very little about perspectives or revolution. Interestingly, the student speaker was Shereen Prasad, the comrade whose NUS candidature had been blocked. She gave a well-delivered, if slightly one-sided and optimistic talk about the prospects for resistance, stressing that it was now incumbent upon SWSS to build student-worker networks, so that “when the attacks come you can respond”. Correctly, she also stressed the need to fight in the NUS. Her comment that “this is why we have stood strong candidates for NUS elections” drew some ironic laughter from a group of student comrades in the audience, but unfortunately none of them got up to argue against the manoeuvres to which SWSS had recently been subjected. A shame.

For a comrade of such obvious talent, CC member Esme Choonara really did talk a lot of nonsense. From the ‘Millbank moment’ through to the November 30 2011 strikes, etc, everything was going forward and it was all so simple. There was no real assessment of revolutionary perspectives – simply an attempt to pep up new recruits. Nor was there any attempt to deal with the current weakness of our movement generally – for her it is this “vicious, rotten government” that is “weak”. One wonders how long a government has to last before it is not weak.

The most interesting opening was given by Petros, a Greek SWP member and councillor for Antarsya, the ‘anti-capitalist’ electoral coalition. He described some of the devastating effects of austerity in Greece, and reminded comrades of the enormous levels of struggle there of late, with around 30 general strikes reflecting the deep anger in society. In terms of going forward, he rightly stressed the need to look to our own strength, not ‘above’ to the capitalist state. We should be building workers’ control and self-defence organisations against the far-right Golden Dawn, fighting for laws that would ban sackings, cancel the debt and nationalise the banks. Significantly, he took some time to criticise the left-reformist grouping, Syriza.

In terms of the SWP leadership’s ‘message’, coming down hard on Syriza was a common theme throughout the day. This is no surprise, given that the prominent SWP oppositionist, Richard Seymour, has written favourably about this very successful left-reformist grouping.¹ As far as they go, the SWP leadership’s criticisms are reasonable: the hopes that so many revolutionaries are placing in Syriza are sowing enormous illusions. But what perspectives in Greece, then? Could a Greek left government ‘go it alone’ in the face of capital flight? And what about the tiny matter of Greece’s relationship to the EU? When discussion was opened up to the floor, I raised some of these questions on ‘perspectives’.

Comrade Petros’s response made clear that his critique of Syriza did not simply concern its illusions in forming a capitalist government in Greece, but also that it had, so he claimed, made clear that it was no longer willing to discuss pulling out of the EU and the euro: it was going to stay in. So it became clear that his ‘anti-capitalist’ programme for Greece (in the SWP world there is no such thing as a Marxist programme) involved withdrawing from the EU and leaving the euro, taking on the banks and so on. Greece is “not a big country, but it is not small – it is part of the euro”, he stressed. So, while it might not be a question of socialist revolution in Greece today, we can’t act simply on the assumption that there will not be “world revolution tomorrow”. So that’s settled, then …

Responding to my question about left parties and elections on these shores, comrade Choonara was desperately uninspired and uninspiring: unity of the left is not about “gathering together for warmth”. There are lots of ways you can unite the left, she said. It is “breadth” that unites people. Cue a list of several front organisations like Unite Against Fascism, at whose annual conference the day before Owen Jones and Ken Livingstone had spoken, for example. This breadth unites, and then the strategic questions arise when people move into struggle and feel an expression of their power. But how are we going to exercise our power? After all, while the SWP is now currently keen on clamping down on “reformist illusions” in Syriza, it is worth noting that, when it comes to its electoral political practice, it has done nothing but spread reformist illusions at the ballot box: Respect, Left Alternative, Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and so on. Has the CC now come to the conclusion that revolutionaries should stand for parliament on a revolutionary platform, then? No, the answer is more self-styled SWP ‘united fronts’, ie, uncritically tailing the forces of … reformism.

The next session I attended was ‘Is capitalism becoming less democratic?’ The most notable aspect was how little the speaker had to say about how to advance the cause of democracy in the here and now. I asked him about the kind of democratic demands that should be championed by our movement today, in order to win what Marx and Engels called “the battle of democracy”. What could we learn from theprogrammes of classical Marxism, which foregrounded the struggle for democracy, the republic, the armed people, annual elections, etc? This prompted Jo Caldwell, one of the newly elected members of the SWP CC, to roll out the hoary old ‘Peace, land and bread’ myth of the Bolsheviks in April 1917. What they mobilised the masses around, you see, were these three very simple demands, which in and of themselves were “not very revolutionary”, but in the actual context of a system that could not deliver them, became so.

If I had a pound for every time I have heard this nonsense, then theWeekly Worker would probably be a daily … Yet, given the lack of discussion from the floor, I was able to respond to her, saying that these were simply slogans, behind which stood the Bolshevik politicalprogramme and strategy, something that had been painstakingly developed and updated since 1903, with demands such as the arming of the people, the distribution of land to the peasants, the republic, etc, etc. Comrade Caldwell left the room and so was unable to come back on this.

In summing up, however, the speaker noted how the SWP was flexible, with different demands at different times. For example, it called for “Troops out now” in 2003, and “We won’t pay for their crisis” in 2008. Yet, once again, these are slogans. Slogans can, and will, vary at different times – even on a daily basis, when it comes to particular struggles. Yet slogans cannot substitute for programme, for strategy. Indeed, the former have to flow from, and be informed by, the latter, openly showing people what we stand for and how it links to our aims to bring about the rule of the working class majority.

Stalinist caricatures

The session that everybody was particularly relishing, of course, was Alex Callinicos’s presentation on ‘The politics of Leninism’. The advice of the student organiser who urged, “It would be good if everybody didn’tgo to Alex’s session” – ie, at the expense of the others running at the same time – was not heeded: I would say that around 80%-90% of those at the school were crammed into this session.

Comrade Callinicos spoke in a composed and clear manner. There was to be no talk of “lynch mobs” and so on. It was a “dogmatic mistake”, he argued, to see Leninism as a general theory. For him there were many Lenins: the one who supposedly wanted a party of full-timers in What is to be done? and another who then completely changed his mind on this in 1905, for example.² This was just one of several historical inaccuracies given in his talk, but it was nothing compared to what was to come.

Despite the comrade asserting that he was out to argue against the “Stalinist caricature” of the vanguard party, he did a fairly admirable job of repeating the usual Stalinist origin myths and fairy tales from Uncle Joe’s infamous Short course (1939). He contrasted “those like Karl Kautsky”, who believed in a party of the whole class, like Syriza (!),³with Lenin’s concept of a vanguard party. You see, for those like Kautsky (and presumably Marx and Engels in the early 1880s, then?), the vision was one of “broad parties” that reflected the class as a whole, leading to a lack of distinction between “party and class”.⁴ This is unforgivably poor history. Unlike Syriza, the Second International was built on the basis of Marxist programmes. Of necessity, the Erfurt programme of 1891 and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party programme of 1903 were not ‘broad’. They excluded anarchists, ‘state’ socialists, ‘socialists of the chair’, syndicalists – not to mention other ideas present in the “class as a whole”.

Mentioning the question of the elections to the duma parliament, comrade Callinicos stressed the tactical flexibility of Lenin’s approach, which could entail quite sharp turns and varying approaches in attempting to influence, and win, the majority. These rapid shifts, according to comrade Callinicos, did not make Lenin an opportunist, because he had “central Marxist principles” and a “fundamental confidence” in them. No doubt Lenin was confident. Yet again, the question of where those firm principles were crystallised – ie, in the party’s programme - is a complete blind spot for the comrade. Presumably they simply existed in Lenin’s head and party members held him accountable in this way?

In 1917, when the Bolsheviks suddenly became a “mass party” and took power, they had to have public debates – “of necessity”, as Callinicos put it. Precisely because he sees so many chops and changes in the Bolshevik’s strategy, he cannot see the obvious connection between theopen and public approach to party debate in its publications, right from the small groups around Iskra, through to the mass party of 1905, and beyond to the heights of state power.

For Callinicos, there are three stages in the democratic-centralist process: discussion (albeit, unlike with Bolshevism, restricted to internal channels); majority decision (with no public articulation of where the majority and the minority in the party could be found); and then full implementation of the decision (without the possibility of publicly accounting for and criticising it afterwards). The idea that there could be a serious and open debate in the pages of Socialist Worker, as in publications like Iskra or Pravda, is pure anathema to Callinicos. Yet, as one critical SWSS member, Amy, put it from the floor, “Different decisions require different levels of debate.” You can’t just rely on the “blind faith” of activists in the party, but actually need to “win them politically”. She added: “We shouldn’t be afraid of having discussions on democratic centralism.” Quite right.

I highlighted some of comrade Callinicos’s absurd historical claims, such as his equation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany or the RSDLP and Syriza. I also questioned his mechanical understanding of how decisions are made and carried out. What if the decision made was wrong? How would Lenin have argued for a second revolution in April 1917 if he was a member of the SWP? Did he wait until autumn for the ‘pre-conference period’ of three months and agitate behind closed doors? No, there were public debates and discussions, conflicting articles in the party press and so on. At best, I said, the SWP’s ‘Bolshevism’ was based on post-1921 practice, where the party banned factions under the extreme pressure of the civil war and profound economic dislocation. Limiting factions to internal debates for three months per year was a de facto ban on factions altogether. This was not historical point-scoring, I added, but absolutely crucial to political strategy today: the SWP will never become a revolutionary party that can lead millions if this is its approach.

Following this, a SWSS member also raised the question of 1921 and the ban on factions. Did those conditions really apply to Britain in 2013? Was it really the case that the SWP was about to be massacred by White generals? He also made some very good criticisms of the SWP’s fetishisation of the slate system for the election of the CC and alluded to several Stalinoid features of SWP organisation.

CC member Judith Orr won the prize for being the only speaker to roll out the phrase so beloved of bureaucratic centralists: “We are not a debating society.” Neither is the SWP “a co-op” – “we want to lead”. As if the kind of sharp and rigorous clash of ideas associated with Bolshevism preclude leading many millions of people to change the world, a politically sophisticated class that is aware of all political developments in the party and beyond, and thus able to liberate itself, not be manipulated into power by the ‘clear line’ secretly formulated and then injected into the masses by Socialist Worker each week.

Moreover, genuine leadership requires the constant questioning, testing and correction of the party line from its membership and the class more generally. Take a recent SWP slogan as an example: what about the leadership’s call for “All out, stay out” during the public sector strikes of 2011? Is it anti-Bolshevik to perhaps publicly criticise this slogan after it had become apparent that the strikers actually were keener to go to the pub for a few pints than to storm the barricades and initiate an insurrectionary general strike to ‘kick out the Tories’?

Surely a discussion on such a question, and the attendant issues it raises for Marxist political strategy more generally, would be educational for the hard-working activists who had gone out and agitated for it (only to see it fail), for the trade unionists, shop stewards and pickets coming into contact with Marxist ideas and – last but not least – for the SWP ‘leadership’ that issued such nonsense in the first place? Instead it has just been buried and repressed, like an embarrassing childhood memory. Yet winning communism needs the truth, which is best achieved in the conditions of open, frank and fraternal debate.

Permanent faction

Responding to me and the SWSS comrade who raised the question of the civil war, Callinicos made an interesting point: while it might be legitimate to discuss whether we should organise like the Bolsheviks in 1921 today, the difference between the Bolsheviks in 1921 and the SWP today was that the latter does allow factions, although only for three months per year. Although he did not say so, these factions must – again unlike Bolshevism – keep their business within the party at all costs.

Reiterating a point by comrade Orr, he asserted that the existence of permanent factions tended to make comrades judge political issues not on their merits, but through factional spectacles. The Bolsheviks were not characterised by permanent factions, he claimed, but there were constant realignments and shifting factional alliances, whereby figures like Nikolai Bukharin might be with Lenin at certain times and against him at other times. This is, of course, true. Factional lines – as well as decisions on whether certain positions were outside the remit of the party’s programme, warranting expulsion – constantly changed. Politics is an art, not a science.

Yet what created the necessary trust for revolutionary unity to be forged and reforged was precisely the democratic culture of Bolshevism, where there were public disagreements in the party press on a whole range of issues. In the SWP this culture is lacking because those mechanisms are simply absent. More importantly, there is a permanent faction in the SWP. It is one that undeniably judges political issues in factional terms, especially now: it is the leadership faction, with its control of the party press and its appointment of full-timers and organisers. (In this regard, the SWP’s democratic credentials come a shabby second even to those of the Stalinist ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain – no mean feat.)

The session was interesting. It hinted at the kind of debate that shouldbe the norm in our movement. Had there been more time allocated, with comrade Callinicos and others able to respond on several occasions, then it would have helped to clarify matters even more. Nonetheless, this was the first time that I had seen Alex Callinicos challenged in a direct way by members of his own organisation, which is surely a welcome development. Moreover, while many SWSS members may have looked on, slightly embarrassed, when I was in full flow against their leader, others later thanked me for speaking out.

After all, those questioning comrade Callinicos’s approach certainly have the weight of history on their side. Surely the elementary facts are clear, not least as we have shown over 30 years of publishing: the ‘politics of Leninism’, as defended by Callinicos and others, essentially boils down to a sect caricature. Only the naive new recruit or the self-delusional hack can dispute that the Bolshevik Party before 1921 was consistently characterised by open debate and public political struggle in the party press, meetings and so on.

Most intelligent leftwingers now at least recognise that fundamental disjuncture between the SWP and Bolshevism. The bigger question that those of us committed to a mass, revolutionary Marxist party now have to confront is how to break the false dichotomy that knows nothing other than a (caricatured) ‘permanent minority’ sect outlook passed off as ‘Bolshevism’, on the one hand, and a (caricatured) ‘broad party’ version of the Second International on the other. Both are dead-ends.

Although the SWP version of Bolshevik history overlaps with Stalin’s on several points, it would be wrong to call the SWP a ‘Stalinist’ organisation outright. Rejecting the need for any kind of programme, it is a peculiar bureaucratic hybrid of pseudo-Stalinism and anarchism, with a small, bureaucratically organised permanent minority seeking to influence and control broader fronts and ‘movements’.

This explains the emphasis on 1968 and (on a more ridiculous level) the organisation waiting around for the next ‘Millbank moment’ in student politics.

Student fightback

The final session I attended, on the role students can play in the class struggle, was significant if only for the fact that it was the exact oppositeof the Callinicos session, with only about 10 people present. Given that this was a student event, one would perhaps have expected more. However, the session was led off by none other than comrade Caldwell, interestingly introduced as an SWP “student organiser” rather than CC member. One possible explanation for the small attendance is that there was a boycott by students expressing solidarity with those ousted by the CC.

If this is true, then the decision to stay away, and not actively intervene in the arguments, reflects some of the limitations of the current SWP opposition more generally. The lack of fight – or lack of sense of ‘revolt’, if you will – is perhaps a result of the dominant political culture in SWSS. In normal times, SWSS ‘politics’ consists of a very brief discussion about the “weak” government, etc, before moving onto the ‘real business’ of who is going to give out the leaflets, run the stall and so on.

So we should perhaps not expect dissident students to get up and directly challenge their leaders straight away: in such a tradition, raising critical questions is often tantamount to treachery. Nonetheless, more experienced members like comrades Woodcock and Mark Bergfeld (the former student organiser and CC member, who was not even present at the Callinicos talk, for example) should surely be taking a lead in stepping up and arguing back at all possible forums.

All of the problems faced by the SWP at the present time were on display at this event: its short-termism, its programmophobia, its bureaucratism and its aversion to the serious and fraternal exchange of ideas necessary for us to move forward. In short: its continuing malaise is inexorably bound up with its lack of Bolshevik perspectives and its dogmatic reliance on rotten methods.

Notes

1. See P Demarty, ‘Seymour in Greece’ Weekly Worker January 24 for some background to this discussion.

2. For a solid refutation of this approach, see LT Lih, ‘Lenin disputed’Historical Materialism No18, pp108-74.

3. In this, comrade Callinicos sings from the same hymn sheet as the Spartacist League. With a fairness and even-handedness typical of the Sparts, they rather desperately try to pass me off as a member of the Syriza fan club, simply because I have argued that the left has a distorted understanding of the Second International, and therefore Bolshevism. See: http://spartacist.org/english/esp/63/neo-kautskyites.html.

4. The title, of course, of Chris Harman’s famous essay, available online at www.marxists.de/party/harman/partyclass.htm. Quite what all the fuss is about regarding this essay, particularly in light of modern research, is somewhat beyond me.

The capitalist system is based on relations of class exploitation, a system in which the means of creating wealth are owned by a minority and function purely to produce profit. This system is tied up and relies upon other forms of oppression. In its current form it requires the oppression of women, as it requires imperialism and racism; these play key economic and ideological roles in the continuation of the capitalist mode of production. There is nothing intrinsic in the profit-driven logic of capitalism that gears it to satisfying human need and ensuring ecological sustainability; instead it denies human need and plunders nature. Communists call for capitalism to be overthrown by the working class majority (everyone who has nothing to sell but their own labour power) and replaced with a democratic and classless society. The brutal dictatorship of the bureaucracy that existed in the USSR has nothing to do with communism. ‘Communism’ as a term needs to reclaimed and the idea that any attempt to abolish the class system will result in disaster rejected. We are currently in the midst of one of the most severe economic crises since world war two and austerity measures, attacking the living standards of millions and eliminating the last vestiges of the welfare state, have been used across Europe in order to make the masses pay the consequences. This crisis was not caused by the irresponsible behaviour of banks or governments but by contradictions in capitalism itself that mean the only permanent solution to capitalist crisis is to overthrow the capitalist class and their state system.

Communists and education

Our universities are becoming more and more geared towards providing capitalists with trained workers and research. Marketisation and increased employer provision have put higher education increasingly at the service of profit. The government are keen to push for a closer and closer relationship between businesses and universities, allowing unrestricted employer provision.

Teaching and research have been commodified, restricting access and requiring increased standardisation (leading to an increased emphasis on assessments and exams).  The tuition fees system remakes the student as an indebted, passive consumer of intellectual property. It is not enough to demand free education and a return to what existed before, education has always served business interests (in a less direct way) and even when grants existed, universities were spaces reserved for a tiny minority of the population. The changes within higher education today can only be understood through an analysis of capitalist development and the power of capital within society. The fight around education must be one that raises the question of who should own and control the means of producing knowledge.

Communists are for democratic universities run by students and education workers, where those who are involved with the processes of teaching and learning decide what is taught. Universities should be spaces that are open to public use, that encourage people to develop their interests and abilities and within which there is total academic freedom, nurturing subversive and critical perspectives.

Educate! Agitate! Organise!

I am for the unity of the revolutionary student left in order to patiently build a student movement that seeks to go beyond capitalism. Calling for demonstrations and strikes to resist tuition fees, course cuts and corporate influence is not enough, we need to propose an alternative to the government, the state and the economic system. For this we need to educate ourselves, organise around those ideas and fight for them on campus and in society. If you are for a democratic alternative to capitalism, then I urge you to vote communist in the UWSU elections and, whatever the result, join the fight for communism.

Communists demand:

• Abolish tuition fees! For a living grant of at least 300 pounds/week
• Unite the student and workers’ movement across the European Union to fight capitalist austerity
• Opposition to all British imperialism’s military interventions, occupations and sanctions. For international working class solidarity against war and repression
• For genuine democracy in society: for annual parliaments and representatives on a workers’ wage, for proportional representation. Abolish the House of Lords
• Stop criminalising youth: legalise all drugs! For free abortion on demand, provision of non-moralistic sexual education and counselling services for the youth, protect the rights of individuals to enter into any consensual sexual relationships of their choice

There have been several times during the Socialist Workers Party’s ongoing crisis when it looked, for all the world, like it would be over soon.

It looked, first of all, like the clockwork-regular griping of more sensible voices in the pre-conference internal bulletins would amount, as nearly always, to nothing substantial – but then the central committee made the fateful decision to expel four comrades for discussing internal politics, including the bungled rape allegation against ‘comrade Delta’, during a private Facebook chat.

It looked like the factions that resulted from that act would simply be defeated at conference – but the disputes committee debacle saw all hell break loose and, for what must be the first time in decades, an openfactional struggle of admirable panache and ferocity. The meeting of the national committee a month ago was supposed to draw a line under the battle, but succeeded only in multiplying the numbers opposed to the leadership, and producing another faction.

The next candidate for ‘resolving’ the crisis is the upcoming special conference. Given the endless surprises throughout this whole story, it is hardly beyond the bounds of possibility that the CC will once again fail to ‘restore order’. There is still time for the opposition factions – the ‘moderates’ of In Defence of Our Party, and the ‘radicals’ of Democratic Renewal – to turn things around. Yet it is less likely this time, and the leadership has reason to be cautiously confident that its campaign of smears, intimidation and bureaucratic manoeuvres will finally bear bitter fruit.

Dirty tricks

Why such pessimism? After all, the opposition is now larger than it has ever been – over 500 members at the last count, getting on for half of the SWP’s active membership (as opposed to the nakedly stupid official figures). It claims the allegiance of unimpeachable Cliffites, such as Ian Birchall and Colin Barker.

Yet – as I argued last week¹ - IDOP has adopted exactly the wrong strategy. Its fundamental aim, in the words of leading light Rob Owen, is to “maintain party unity” and avert a split; as such, it seeks a reasonable compromise between the opposition and the leadership, so that a line can really be drawn under the matter, with the humble acknowledgement of mistakes on ‘both sides’, allowing the SWP to ‘move forward’.

To this end, various olive branches have been offered to the leadership. Most importantly, there has been a collective decision to work exclusively through the existing structures of the SWP, and thus suspend open criticism of the leadership and exposure of its grubbier activities.

This commits IDOP to fighting on the CC’s turf. It is an understandable mistake, because much of the IDOP majority talks almost as if this is not a fight at all; and also because many of its most active comrades have cut their teeth leading SWP ‘interventions’ in the world at large, through its ‘united fronts’ (emphasis on the word ‘front’). As such, its recommendations to faction activists have the character of the way in which the SWP at large recruits to itself – providing a ‘crib sheet’ for ring-rounds to activists.²

Yet they are under no illusions as to the sort of thing their opponents are up to. The CC is desperately keen to make the March 10 special conference a rout. Aggregates – the regional meetings of the SWP which elect delegates – look to be rigged by all means short of literally stuffing ballot boxes. IDOP reports that aggregates so far have seen CC supporters packing meetings and insisting on sending no opposition delegates at all to the conference. “In the Home Counties and Leicester,” IDOP points out, “CC supporters prevented any IDOP members being elected – even using inactive and non-subs-paying members to block key party activists from going to conference.” Similar stories abound in Hackney, Glasgow and elsewhere.

The CC has also encouraged, as Party Notes puts it without a hint of self-awareness, “debate [on] the issues at conference” by awarding its supporters a minimum of 45 minutes of speaking time, and an opposition speaker – should any be lucky enough to be called – just six minutes. No wonder district after district is being steamrollered by the bureaucracy. “It seems [CC supporters] don’t have the confidence to argue their case politically without the advantage of 45 minutes for one side against six for the other,” the IDOP document drily notes.

The comrades even drop dark hints of active sabotage: “At yesterday’s faction meeting in Manchester … comrades on arriving found that the room booking had mysteriously vanished. The room for tonight’s Leeds faction meeting had also been cancelled by someone else.”

Self-censorship

Given how little time the comrades are being given to speak within aggregates, it is all the more stupid to suspend public criticism. Unfortunately, as a platform within IDOP, Democratic Renewal – including Richard Seymour, China Miéville and others – has acceded to this edict, and suspended its International Socialism blog. Even the four expelled comrades – who recently had their expulsions ratified by the infamous disputes committee, although they will generously be allowed to reapply for membership in 18-24 months time – are keeping quiet, barring some disappointed but stoical complaints on (what else?) Facebook. This is particularly odd, seeing as they are obviously not under any kind of discipline.

Perhaps they genuinely expect to be allowed back into the SWP in two years time; but that really depends. After all, if the CC is defeated and ousted – if there is a revolution in the SWP – then they could be back in the fold within a month. If, on the other hand, the CC successfully clamps down, then all manner of unsavoury outcomes are possible. Perhaps, in two years, the SWP will have shrivelled to a state where no right-thinking person would apply to rejoin; perhaps it will have disappeared altogether; perhaps it will have some other existence. One thing is absolutely certain: it is very unlikely that Paris Thompson, Tim Nelson, Adam Marks and Charlotte Bence will ever again be SWP members while Alex Callinicos and the rest of the current CC faction hold the whip.

The suspension of public criticism, of course, does not have anyimmediate practical effect for the rest of us. At the Weekly Worker, we are receiving (from the most unlikely sources) ‘updates’ from both IDOP and the CC on an almost daily basis at the moment – the SWP is a leaky boat at the best of times, and all the more so now that it is obviously holed beneath the waterline. The same is no doubt true of various others outside the SWP: Andy Newman, the sub-Stalinist blogger, clearly has his sources, and so does the International Socialist Organisation in America, which has publicly opposed the SWP leadership. Even the Irish SWP has passed a resolution condemning its British comrades’ handling of the Delta case.

The difference is this. In this situation, all the old leadership accusations ‘still work’. The opposition can still be smeared as taking a lead from ‘outside the party’, and in cahoots with the SWP’s enemies. But when the IS blog was on the warpath, the most devastating material was being published by people who openly affirmed their loyalty to the SWP project. The opposition was able to take ownership of the struggle; it was able to go on the offensive. That we have gotten to this point proves that it was a successful tactic.

But now the opposition – by accepting in principle the ‘keep it internal’ dictum of the CC – can no longer defend itself from such slurs. The paradoxical result is that the dispute, far from thereby being limited to the SWP, inevitably is routed through all kinds of ‘external’ channels. The ‘open struggle’ will continue as long as there are people prepared to leak every document as soon as it arrives; the opposition has merely made the absurd decision not to take control of when and how its own input goes public.

More provocations

Meanwhile, the general attitude of the CC loyalists becomes ever more unpleasant.

On the sillier end of the scale, there are attempts by more simple-minded CC supporters to lend weight to the innumerable comparisons of the current SWP crisis and the explosion of Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, by spouting the sort of paranoid gibberish that Healy made his trademark. Simon Assaf has been particularly busy in this regard, accusing all and sundry of being state agents on Twitter.

More serious than the gibberings of a moron like Assaf – and in some ways more bizarre – is the re-entry of the SWP’s students into this affair. A rather Delphic conference motion, proposed by one ‘Anna G’ (presumably Gluckstein) and seconded by ‘Alan W’, has been agreed by the Tottenham branch and is now circulating widely within the organisation. It is titled – again, with no intended irony – ‘Taking the long view’.

“There is a huge fear amongst our comrades that if we are too hard in holding the positions democratically won at our conference, branches and elected national committee we will lose many of the young student members of our organisation,” states the motion. “None of us want that to happen. However … we cannot hold on to members at a political price which will fundamentally damage our ability to organise.” On the bright side, “new students arrive at colleges every year. If we raise the level of politics to fit the present situation, the SWP can recruit and develop layers of Marxist students successfully.”³

An IDOP statement makes the obvious point – this motion “lays the ground for a justification for forcing a split between the students and the party, while justifying taking disciplinary measures against students who remain in the organisation post-conference”.⁴ As the CC’s most idiotic hack, Weyman Bennett, asked in an earlier phase of the crisis, “Who cares if we lose 30 students?” The numbers are probably closer to 300, but, still, who cares? That appears to be the view of Anna G.

It is undeniable that the Socialist Worker Student Society has been most restive in the post-conference period. Mark Bergfeld, student organiser, resigned from the CC last month, and two SWSS candidates for NUS positions have had their candidacies effectively canned by the SWP student office.

Worse, according to IDOP, “The student office has almost dissolved itself post-conference. Many SWSS groups are no longer being contacted by the student office. No reason has been provided for this.” No reason is necessary, of course, since various SWSS branches effectively signed their own excommunications by openly criticising the SWP leadership. The Kimber-Callinicos clique is evidently prepared, if necessary, to lose whole swathes of SWSS, if that is what it takes to crush the SWP opposition.

More evidence – if it were needed – that the leadership is preparing a split. ‘Party unity’ is to be on its terms or none at all. Oppositionists will be expected to recant, to defend in public whatever asinine, self-justifying line comes out of the special conference, humiliating themselves before their comrades, colleagues and the class; they will not be trusted with any serious party roles, and internally ostracised. Their lives will be made unpleasant, in the expectation that they will leave. If they do not leave, and they step out of line, they will be expelled. This is what employment law calls ‘constructive dismissal’ – but the SWP is not bound by the strictures of ‘bourgeois legality’.

It should be clear, then, what defeat means for IDOP. In fact it seems to be ‘managing expectations’ already: “There will also be a national faction caucus and meeting on Saturday March 9,” the faction writes. “As well as preparing for conference, the caucus will discuss how we can hold comrades in the party afterwards and continue to fight for a stronger SWP after the faction dissolves at the end of conference” (our emphasis).

Is this an admission of defeat? It is to be hoped that things are otherwise. Yet there is a patently obvious way to “continue to fight for a stronger SWP” after conference in the event of a defeat - do not dissolve the faction. A faction that is to reappear in – what? – six months when the next pre-conference period begins to “continue to fight” is a permanent faction, comrades. Alex Callinicos will correctly point that out. Seymour, Miéville and co will celebrate the fact, because they understand that the ban on permanent factions is a stupidity (if they have not been expelled). Under the SWP constitution – that bureaucrat’s charter – it is impossible to rebel by half-measures.

But before thinking about how to continue the fight, it would be better to stop playing rope-a-dope and land a few punches now. The comrades’ own reports make it abundantly clear – the forthcoming special conference is a stitch-up that would make Vladimir Putin proud. The last posting on the IS blog carries the title: “When is a conference not a conference?” How right they have been proven; and, if they must cease publication, then no more poignant last word could have taken its place.

IDOP comrades should give it another read; or, better still, they should open their eyes and ears. How many aggregates have to be packed, how many pseudo-members have to be cajoled into being voting fodder, how many calumnies and insults have to be thrown around, before the comrades accept this inevitable conclusion and denounce these sham proceedings?

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.org.uk

Notes

1. ‘Lynch mobs and lèse-majesté’, February 21.

2. http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/caucus-documents-and-IDOP-update.

3. http://sovietgoonboy.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/another-brick-in-the-wall.

4. http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/expel-the-students.

The year of dreaming dangerously attempts to “locate the events of 2011 in the totality of the global situation, to show how they relate to the central antagonism of contemporary capitalism” (p1). Slavoj Žižek attempts to do this by addressing the rise of rightwing populism; the Arab spring; Occupy Wall Street; the London riots; and the prospects of emancipatory struggle today.

The book begins with a survey of contemporary capitalism and the prevailing trends in its development, of which three are identified as characterising our present system: “the long-term trend of shifting from profit to rent … rent based on privatised ‘common knowledge’ and rent based on natural resources”; the “stronger structural role of unemployment”; and the rise of a “salaried bourgeoisie” (p8). The “salaried bourgeoisie” described by Žižek does not constitute a class in any Marxist sense: it is used to describe sections of the managerial class, civil servants, doctors, journalists and all those who earn a “surplus wage” and supposedly have more free time.

Of course, this categorisation is useless in understanding the class struggles of ‘post-industrial’ societies, since it includes sections of different classes with antagonistic interests. As for the “stronger structural role of unemployment”, in reality this refers to the greater prominence of what Karl Marx called the “reserve army of labour” and is a vindication of Marx’s predictions regarding the consequences of the intensifying organic composition of capital, whereby human labour is replaced more and more in productive processes by machines (this also accounts for the increasing role of rent Žižek refers to).

Žižek criticises Marx for his alleged historicism in relation to the prospects of social revolution, referring specifically to a passage fromPreface to a contribution to the critique of political economy:

At certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production … Then begins an era of social revolution … No social order is ever destroyed before the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.¹

Here Marx – allegedly at his “historicist worst” – is said to have missed the fact that:

… capitalism thrives because it avoids its fetters by escaping into the future. This is also why one has to drop the ‘wisely’ optimistic notion that mankind “inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”: today we face problems for which no clear solutions are guaranteed by the logic of evolution (p8).

However, Marx’s point was that the question of social revolution is posed only when the productive forces have been developed to the extent required for the social transformation and a ‘gravedigger’ class has been formed with sufficient strength to challenge for power. The argument was not that “clear solutions” to the world’s problems will reveal themselves to us, irrespective of consciousness and politics. Marx fully understood how capitalism is constantly engaged in a process of creative destruction – ever expanding, circumventing barriers to its growth that confront it, but crucially never being able to resolve its internal contradictions. He argued:

[capital] constantly revolutionises … tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces … its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.²

Žižek’s argument seems to be born out of a pessimistic attitude towards the current political situation rather than a serious assessment of today’s socio-economic conditions. Marx’s argument holds true today: the proletariat exists (under whatever name) and it is still capable of overthrowing capital and running society.

The rise of rightwing populism in Europe and North America has accelerated in response to both the ‘war on terror’ and the crisis of capitalism. It is worth noting that populist movements that wish to win support amongst large sections of workers often take up the protectionist economic policies that social democratic parties abandoned in the 1980s-90s (Le Pen’s Front National being a good example). Other populist forces, such as the UK Independence Party and the US Tea Party movement, are distinctly petty bourgeois and so combine nationalism with rabidly ‘neoliberal’ politics. Whilst these politics are a real expression of petty bourgeois class interests, the populist parties of the west that enjoy support from large sections of the working class are a post-welfarist phenomenon.

Žižek rejects the idea that this is simply a result of “ideological manipulation” (p31) and, of course, whilst the mechanisms of ideological control have been greatly developed, the decline in the power of working class institutions and working class politics is the central cause of the rise of nationalist, ethno-cultural identity politics. What has occurred (most obviously in the US) is an opposition between, on the one side, rightwing populists as self-proclaimed representatives of the decent, hard-working majority and, on the other, the ‘decadent, hedonistic, permissive, liberal elite’ that is ‘betraying the nation’. This is part of a “culture war” that in fact is a “class war in a displaced mode” (p31).

Riots and uprising

In discussing the London riots, Žižek argues the liberal left identified only the “objective conditions for the riots” (p58) – poor relations with the police, unemployment, poverty, etc – while leaving the specific “subjective” reasons behind unaccounted for. An explanation offered is that the rioting was a result of a contradiction between the demands of consumerist ideology and the material circumstances of those who took part. However, it goes without saying that the motivations of the rioters would have varied considerably (animosity towards the police was certainly a genuine factor) and that ultimately the answer as to why the existing discontent expressed itself as it did lies in the absence of any emancipatory project capable of galvanising people and a left capable of leading a real fight. For Žižek the lack of any coherent ideological framework to which individuals can relate effectively with the world and conduct struggle created a “consumerist carnival of destruction” (p60).

He contends: “The radical emancipatory potential of Islam is no fiction” (p65) and cites some of the great historical revolts of the oppressed that found their expression in religious movements. It is in this light that he sees the Arab spring. What Žižek overlooks is that it is the social forces supporting the revolts that harbour “emancipatory potential”, not the ideas of Islam. This is demonstrated by the fact that, while these ideas have sometimes been mobilised as part of emancipatory struggles, they have more frequently been utilised for reactionary purposes. The decline of socialism in the Arab world has meant that resistance to imperialism, dictatorship and the tyranny of domestic oligarchs has tended to take the form of fundamentalist Islam.

Žižek comments on the role of the Taliban in the class conflicts of the Swat Valley in Pakistan in reference to a New York Times article from 2009 that claimed the insurgency had brought about a class revolt in order to gain support of the landless farmers; and rightly points out that “the distinction between the ‘true’ agenda and instrumental manipulation is externally imposed on the Taliban: as if the landless farmers themselves do not experience their plight in ‘fundamentalist religious’ terms” (p72). However, the ‘true’ class character of such movements can be judged objectively – not by looking at the discourse of struggle, but by observing the class interests they serve. Islamist groups (of various kinds) have developed great momentum since the beginning of the Arab spring and have gained governmental office in Tunisia (in a coalition) and Egypt; they have been in control of areas of Syria and Libya. However, whilst civil war and foreign intervention have stifled the revolutions in Syria and Libya for the time being, the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo is facing serious pressure from the masses.

Žižek sees the Middle East as ready to erupt again and expects more uprisings. However, the dire economic conditions make it increasingly likely that the discontent among the oppressed will create forces which will raise the banner of social justice. The question then is whether it will be the “new secular left” (p75) and the labour movement or the ultra-conservative religious groups that will organise and lead the struggle. What is worrying is that it is the clearly the religious reactionaries who are in the ascendancy for now.

2011 was a year in which numerous ‘horizontal’ movements, from Oakland to Madrid, entered the political stage. Žižek is, initially, frank about the weaknesses of these movements, pointing out that they have now died down and that their desire to be ‘apolitical’ means they risk becoming coopted into a reformist project or appropriated by forces of reaction. He points out that an “honest fascist” could agree with almost all of the demands of the ‘indignados’ (p79). For him “It is here that we encounter the fatal weakness of the current protests. They express an authentic rage that remains unable to transform itself into even a minimal positive programme for social change” (p78). Then there is, of course, the issue of the organisational forms of these protests – forms that are clearly inadequate for the tasks of social revolution. Žižek stresses the need for revolutionary movements to create new forms of organisation and discipline.

Bizarrely, he then proceeds to claim that nonetheless “what should be resisted at this stage is any hasty translation of the energy of the protests into a set of concrete demands”, which calls on the movements to advance a “minimal positive programme” (p78) – the lack of which was just a few pages earlier described as the biggest weakness of those movements. The author goes on to say that the key “insights” of Occupy are that it identifies that it is the economic system itself that needs to be addressed; and that a new kind of democracy is needed to cope with developments in global capitalism (p87). Whether these were really the insights of Occupy is highly debateable, but for Žižek they point towards radical conclusions: “Is there a name for this reinvented democracy beyond the multi-party representational system? There is indeed: the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p88). What is missing is any indication of how exactly we get from protest to power.

The book arrives at the point where the crucial question is raised: what must revolutionaries do now? The events of 2011 are meant to be “fragments of a utopian future that lies dormant in the present” (p128). He continues: “What is needed, then, is a delicate balance between reading the signs from the (hypothetical communist) future and maintaining the radical openness of that future” (pp128-29). There are comparisons then between a communist in our times analysing events and a Christian waiting for god to perform miracles. But, while communists are acting as political monks, Žižek adds that well placed, “moderate” demands can affect dramatic systemic change (p134). What he advocates in practical terms seems to be half economism and half withdrawal to a position of political spectator.

The principal drawback of The year of dreaming dangerously lies in the absence of any practical proposal. Although it may be pointed out that this was not the author’s goal in writing the book, much of this absence seems to stem from Žižek’s pessimism - the desire to go ‘beyond’ Marx actually leads to a regression. However, the book includes some interesting interpretations of 2011 and, as usual, there is a lot to discuss in what Žižek writes.

For example, he states that the anti-European Union rhetoric of much of the far left is illusory and utopian, in that it calls for an impossible return to a post-war-style welfarist settlement; instead he correctly insists that the left must avoid the trappings of nationalism and aim to build anotherEurope.

Notes

1. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.

2. K Marx Grundrisse:www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.htm.

China Miéville: Open rebellion

The Socialist Workers Party has been waiting a long time for a revolutionary situation. On some occasions, as with the fatuous ‘All out, stay out’ slogan it advanced to striking public sector workers last winter, it has tried, with dismal results, to force one – or delude itself into thinking there is one. Now, it has got one. But there is only one catch – it is not Britain that has been plunged into such a crisis, but the SWP itself.

I am only half being ironic here. Lenin famously defined a revolutionary situation as one in which the rulers cannot rule in the old way, and the oppressed will not be ruled in the old way. While the outcome of this brouhaha cannot be foretold, there is no denying that Britain’s largest (for now) revolutionary organisation is in chaos. The leadership is defensive and rudderless; and, for once, there is open and militant rebellion against them.

It is not hard to see why. The last week has been utterly calamitous for the SWP’s ruling clique. The release, on Andy Newman’s blog, of the now infamous transcript of the disputes committee report and debate at conference was already bad enough. An appalling misstep such as this absurd investigation into rape charges might have been manageable, had the whole thing been kept out of public view. Now, every SWPer from Aberdeen to Cornwall knows what went on – and so do all the people they have to work with in trade unions, on campuses and in other left groups.

Yet it was the Weekly Worker’s publication of Tom Walker’s resignation letter which exploded the situation. Two days later, the story merited a full page in The Independent, an entry on Laurie Penny’s New Statesman blog, and even the mockery of the Daily Mail. While comrade Walker effectively urged others to follow his example and resign, his article seems to have had the opposite effect (the best proof that it was the wrong advice). SWPers now feel emboldened to come out openly and criticise the leadership, daring Charlie Kimber, Alex Callinicos and their creatures on the central committee to expel them.

Penny’s article quoted the novelist China Miéville, for a start. “The way [the] allegations were dealt with … was appalling. It’s a terrible problem of democracy, accountability and internal culture that such a situation can occur, as is the fact that those arguing against the official line in a fashion deemed unacceptable to those in charge could be expelled for ‘secret factionalism’.” He also pointed out that “many of us have for years been openly fighting for a change in the culture and structures of the organisation to address exactly this kind of democratic deficit”.¹ Not as openly as this, comrade …

Tomb of the infuriated

Compared to Richard Seymour, the man with whom he has previously teamed up as a democratic dissident, Miéville is positively bashful over this whole affair. Comrade Seymour – who runs the prominentLenin’s Tomb blog, and now writes for The Guardian - followed up on Laurie Penny’s piece with an absolutely scathing run-down of ‘the story so far’, of the incompetent and shameful attempt at a cover-up and efforts to bully people back into line.

“[The CC] tell members to get on with focusing on ‘the real world’,” he writes. “In the real world, this is a scandal. And we, those who fought on this, told them it would be. We warned them that it would not just be a few sectarian blogs attacking us. We warned them that after we had rightly criticised George Galloway over his absurd remarks about rape, and after a year of stories about sexual abuse, and after more than a year of feminist revival, this was a suicidal posture, not just a disgusting, sickening one.”

He concludes with a call for resistance a great deal more convincing, in its own restricted sphere, than any of the canned rhetoric in the last decade of Socialist Worker: “The future of the party is at stake, and they are on the wrong side of that fight. You, as members, have to fight for your political existence. Don’t simply drift away, don’t simply bury your face in your palms, and don’t simply cling to the delusional belief that the argument was settled at conference. You must fight now.”²

The CC’s response, meanwhile, was pitiful; initially a strictly internal publication, its comment to members was quickly and inevitably leaked to Harry’s Place, and eventually – and grudgingly – put up on the SWP’s own website.³ “We took allegations against a leading member of the party very seriously,” Charlie Kimber pleads; “far from being a cover-up, this sort of open discussion [of the DC report at conference] shows that our procedures and elected bodies are accountable to our membership,” he insists.

In short, it was a repackaged version of the same bullshit that the CC has pushed throughout this affair. Seymour certainly was not fooled; if anything, his reply made his opening salvo look restrained:

“I urge people to stay, and to fight. But one hardly blames those who have had enough of the Kafkaesque nightmare, enough of listening to people spout demented gibberish in meetings and aggregates, enough of hearing the same lies repeated, enough of wildly tenuous historical analogies, enough of cheap Realpolitik passed off as wisdom. How many times can you hear, ‘Well, I was at a paper sale this morning, and no-one mentioned it’, before you start thinking of having people sectioned?”⁴

Others have now followed the comrades’ lead, and made public their own opposition to the CC. Nathan Akehurst posted a somewhat milder criticism on his blog⁵; Emma Rock and Ian Llewellyn added their thoughts to Lenin’s Tomb, which has now been thrown open as a platform for dissident SWP members. A new blog has turned up, under the banner of the ‘SWP Opposition’,⁶ with an open letter to SWP comrades, which we republish here, demanding a “focus on the political implications and challenges ahead for our party and more widely for the movement and our class”. Others have been sounding off, openly and anonymously, on Facebook, on comment threads and wherever else they feel confident to do so.

Non-leadership

The remarkable thing, of course, is that they do feel confident to do so. Barely a month ago, the notion that the internet would be full of SWPers demanding a recall conference and the sacking of the entire central committee – many under their own names – looked pretty fanciful. Yet here we are. And underlying this fact is that ‘the rulers cannot go on in the old way’.

For the first time in decades, the initiative in the SWP has not been with the CC; they have surrendered it spectacularly, wildly underestimating the significance of the knife-edge vote on the DC report, the 11th-hour split in their own ranks and the level of anger that exists over this affair. Having spent years ensuring that an open rebellion could simply never happen, they are utterly at sea now that it has.

They are in something of an impossible position. Comrades Seymour and Miéville are the best exemplars of it; they are both assets to the SWP, with public profiles that lend it some credibility among broader layers of progressive-minded people. Given their notability, and given that this scandal has now reached the bourgeois media, the leadership clique shrinks from expelling them. But because these two get away with it, all opponents in the SWP are emboldened to speak up.

The gravity of the situation should not be overstated. This ‘revolutionary’ crisis is a moment, which still needs to be seized by the opposition. The possibility very much exists for the CC to regain the initiative; it cannot be expected to keep piling mistake upon disaster upon calamity.

There is also an element of ‘confirmation bias’ of which we should be wary – an SWP member calling for the blood of Charlie Kimber is much more noticeable than one who has, indeed, been cowed into submission. Still, there are certainly a great many more in opposition than are visibly complaining on the blogs, with entire branches dominated by people who want the CC out.

The demands that have been thrown up in the course of the rebellion are generally positive – and, more encouragingly, they are marked by an absolutely correct sense that this is the moment that a fight can be won.

The great unifying demand is to recall conference, which appears everywhere; it goes without saying that simply petitioning the CC to call one will not get too far, given that a central purpose of such a conference for many delegates would be to turf it out en masse. Within (broadly) the SWP’s constitution, oppositionists ought to fight for the national committee to call one (though it appears to be packed with loyalists). They are fighting in the branches for a motion to recall conference – for which they would need 20% of branches to sign up. That could be a stepping stone to a full conference. The NC, of course, has up to now never been more than a way for branch delegates to be cajoled into rubber-stamping the latest inane CCdiktats - but then, the Paris Commune was merely a mundane bourgeois local authority before 1871.

These are technical questions. The fact that they have been linked – by comrades Seymour, Rock, Miéville, and countless anonymous commenters – to the question of the party regime as a whole is positive and necessary. Seymour suggests “creating more pluralistic party structures, ending the ban on factions outside of conference season and rethinking the way elections take place”; and indeed he and Miéville have repeatedly called for year-round discussion bulletins and other democratic reforms.

The sentiment is present elsewhere, although often in more diffuse forms. Emma Rock: “All party forums should be more than just talking shops and should have real teeth to implement new ideas. Likewise ideology and the development of our political position should not be left to a handful of theorists, but should be engaged in by every comrade in every branch. We should become a true hub for the development of new ideas, and not be left lagging behind groups such as UK Uncut or Occupy.”⁷

We will leave aside the last phrase, and simply point out that, surely,any revolutionary organisation should seek to arm its militants with theory, to become a ‘hub of ideas’, that its forums should not be talking shops. The SWP has increasingly had the opposite character, however, and simply a correct diagnosis of this problem is an advance.

Root and branch

The gaping hole in all this is political criticism of the SWP’s direction. The dissidents have all set themselves up as ‘defenders of the IS tradition’ against a leadership which has somehow perverted it. This is ultimately wrong-headed. That tradition is thoroughly implicated in all aspects of this disaster, and will have to be dealt with to avoid a repeat – even if the rebellion is successful on its own terms.

A pertinent demonstration is the ‘women’s question’, which is mostdirectly posed by the form the crisis has taken. Most participants – leadership and opposition – have taken pains to stress the ‘proud tradition’ of the SWP in fighting women’s oppression. In fact, it is anything but, as Dave Isaacson makes clear elsewhere in this paper; the SWP’s history on this question is a series of flip-flops, according to the political exigencies of the leadership in particular contexts.

Yet this is exactly the approach you would expect on the basis of Tony Cliff’s reading of Lenin – the leader with the ‘good nose’, who could sniff the air and reorient the party overnight; the leader unafraid to ‘bend the stick’ to keep his troops on the straight and narrow, to make wrenching theoretical turns. This conception of political leadership results necessarily in wild political reverses; but, more to the point, it leads to unaccountable leadership.

The major form this has taken is the alternate accommodation to and anathematisation of feminism. The emergence of the IS and then the SWP as a significant force on the revolutionary left is coterminous with the emergence of second-wave feminism, which (thanks as much to the heady political context as anything internal to it) frequently took on a left tilt, and attempted to articulate itself as socialist in some way.

Yet this is, in a sense, perverse. The Communist manifesto itself calls for women’s liberation. International women’s day started out as a movement of working class women against feminism, and it was the workers movement which made it an international phenomenon (that movement has now been colonised – and that is the word – by feminism). The history of our movement is peppered with women (and men) who have made radical, even at times wildly utopian, proposals for ending women’s oppression and exploitation, explicitly tying it into the socialist project as an integral and inseparable part, and equallydecrying feminism every step of the way. If this tradition had not been buried, second-wave feminism would have been dead on arrival.

What intervened was, broadly, Stalinism – the retreat from women’s liberation by the Soviet regime in the late 1920s and onwards; the accommodation by Stalinist parties in the west to trade union sectionalism, and corresponding development of a sexist internal culture and philistine political attitude to women. Similar maladies afflicted many of the Trotskyist groups – including, until the launch ofWomen’s Voice, the IS/SWP.

‘Feminism’ today does not mean the same thing as it did when Zetkin, Kollontai and the others were attacking it. But the fact that many SWP members are happy to self-describe as ‘feminist’ is ultimately a function of the failure of the IS tradition to live up to its billing. This tradition, after all, is the armour that supposedly protected the SWP from all the depredations of Stalinism, uniquely on the far left. Yet its utter confusion on the question of feminism is a direct result of itsfailure to do so. The thoroughly and obviously Stalinist handling of the recent furore is another index of that failure, and it is hardly a novelty, as generations of ex-SWPers will readily attest.

The present crisis in the SWP is, in fact, a result of the secular decay of its political tradition. Very well; we are all, in this period of reaction, products of decades of entropy. This paper derives from a rebellion against ‘official communism’. There is no reason the SWP could not buck the trend – but the obstacles do not end at the current CC: they include the political tradition and method they claim, with some justice, to defend. A revolution in the SWP, like any revolution, will have to involve more than a change of personnel.

Notes

1. www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/01/what-does-swps-way-dealing-sex-assault-allegations-tell-us-about-left.

2. www.leninology.com/2013/01/crisis-in-swp.html.

3. www.swp.org.uk/14/01/2013/response-attacks-swp.

4. www.leninology.com/2013/01/a-reply-to-central-committee.html.

5. http://nathan-akehurst.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/notes-on-swp-crisis.html.

6. http://swpopposition.blogspot.co.uk.

7 www.leninology.com/2013/01/guest-post-on-crisis.html.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were triumphant - not least because of open faction fights

Judging the crisis at present ripping through the Socialist Workers Party, our writers have has quite rightly stressed that thetrigger that set the whole thing off was the scandal surrounding its former national secretary, Martin Smith.

Yet we have also pointed out that the underlying reasons for the current crisis can and should be located elsewhere – firstly in the Stalinoid organisational norms and rotten practices that the SWP leadership shamefacedly pursues in the name of ‘Leninism’; and secondly in the organisation’s lack of serious and workable perspectives more generally. Either these perspectives begin and end with an extremely narrow sect outlook of simply recruiting, at an extremely low political level, another thousand or so ‘members’ per year, or they border on the unhinged: anybody remember the ‘All out, stay out’ call for the unions’ general strike demanded by the SWP in 2011?

Nonetheless, the SWP is hardly unique on the British, or indeed the international, Marxist left, when it comes to lack of internal democracy or to its inability to offer any kind of viable strategy for moving beyond our current petty divisions and frontist fakery. General-strikism, behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and an almost exclusive reliance on spontaneity abound. Unfortunately, this reflects a common understanding of revolution amongst the left premised on a small, tightly-knit group that skilfully, almost imperceptibly, manipulates the working class towards the socialist dawn – a million miles away from the project of Marxism, with its emphasis on majoritarianism, consciousness, democracy and the mass party.

As such it is worth taking a look at some of the far-left responses to the current factional war being fought in the SWP as a way of assessing where we are currently at, as well as the prospects for revolutionary regroupment posed by this welcome rebellion within Britain’s largest leftwing group. Some of our more philistine readers might dismiss such things as ‘sectarianism’, ‘navel-gazing’ or ‘old left’ methods of conducting politics. Yet this mindset ironically reveals how much they have in common with those like Charlie Kimber, Alex Callinicos and Martin Smith, who dismiss other organisations and their ideas as nothing but “vultures” bent on poaching members from “the party”.

No. Reports of SWPers up and down the country becoming more open to engagement and discussion with those outside their ranks is good news indeed and must be encouraged. Far from seeing others as enemies, it should be the absolute norm for comrades to exchange ideas, write polemics and letters in each other’s newspapers (or to establish publications where such exchanges can take place) and generally behave as thinking and critical communists. This would facilitate the development of strategic ideas, the struggle against stale sect perspectives, and help to confront the burning question of our times: organising our forces into a viable partyist project solidly based on the politics of Marxism.

Calling the kettle black

The unsigned response by the small British Trotskyist group, Workers Power, is well written, and has the rare merit of openly calling on the SWP opposition to stay in and organise.¹ Instead of responding with a narrow, ‘all join us’ approach, the article calls for “an emergency conference to restore the basic norms of democratic centralism”, arguing that without the right to form factions and tendencies or to openly and democratically elect the leadership, that leadership is “not accountable to the members”, which can lead to a culture of “leadership impunity”. “Outside periods of severe repression,” it continues, “there are no good reasons for limiting these safeguards.” All fair enough, so far.

However, WP to this day stubbornly sticks to the bureaucratic-centralist notion that factions and tendencies can only exist internally- ie, they must never go public outside the group. So the comrades write that the scandal around comrade Smith “immediately led to an enormous explosion of anger and disagreement and left members with no alternative but to take up the issues outside the party” (emphasis added). In other words, given internal democracy and factional rights, comrades are normally expected not to raise criticisms of disagreements outside the group. But if the minority cannot appeal to the working class on a question they consider vital, what choice do they have but to split off? In the conflicted and sectarian world of modern British Trotskyism, the reasoning usually offered for restricting dissent to internal channels is that sects like Workers Power are merely small ‘fighting propaganda groups’, whose capacity to organise would be weakened and its message obscured if they were to permit anything other than a single public line on all main questions. For them the masses have no right to know about differences or even conflicting nuances and shades of opinion. That would only confuse the poor things.

Indeed, while I in no way countenance the recent apolitical walkout from Workers Power led by comrades Simon Hardy and Luke Cooper (nor, as we shall see, their liquidationist political conclusions!), the above description of the brewing dissent in the SWP could equally apply to WP less than a year ago, when the organisation developed varying ideas on the question of ‘broad parties’.

Not that we could read about these arguments in the pages ofWorkers Power, of course. That would be tantamount to ‘centrism’. Instead there were rumours, and finally the proclamation of yet another split and yet another new group. Another stunning leap forward for our class. Thus, while the WP comrades are right to mainly focus on the question of organisation and the SWP’s regime, the fact is that their criticisms smack of a certain hypocrisy, of “Trots calling the kettle black”, as it were. However it is dressed up, restricting the articulation of public dissent is a form of bureaucratic centralism too. While in WP this does not take the form of the kind of bullying and intimidation associated with your average SWP hack, the fact remains that such a modus operandi runs counter to the experience of the healthiest aspects of Bolshevik culture. From the early days and small numbers around the post-Iskra “propaganda group” to the heights of mass influence from 1905 onwards, the Workers Power way of approaching political dissent and discussion would have been anathema to the Bolsheviks.

Workers Power is not alone, however. Take Counterfire, the Eurocommunist-esque rightist split from the SWP that came out of the misnamed Left Platform in 2010. Its response to the SWP crisis has dramatically missed the point by doing nothing else than simply foregrounding Lindsey German’s ‘Feminism – a 21st century manifesto’ (yawn). Maybe some people upset with the SWP will leave and join Counterfire!

Yet any rigorous analysis of the SWP’s bureaucratic centralism from the likes of comrades German, John Rees, Chris Nineham and Chris Bambery would necessarily have to be openly self-critical too. It was they who, until a few years ago, actually presided over and helped to develop that horrid regime. And their ‘Bolshevism’ cannot countenance the public articulation of dissent either. As comrade Rees puts it in his 2010 pamphlet on strategy, analysing the world and deciding on the next step “inevitably requires internal discussion and argument inside an organisation”.²

The reader will appreciate that this is not just a case of making some rather cheap (and easy) points against the pseudo-Bolshevism of those like Workers Power and comrade Rees. The point is that unless we break with such a sterile approach then our ability to move beyond the sect is severely hampered. This approach engenders an endless cycle of splits and divisions – often for frivolous reasons. It blurs lines of political disagreement instead of sharpening them and thusmiseducates both the organisation’s membership and the working class more generally.

It is not that there are no big divisions or fundamental questions that need to be addressed on the left. Quite the opposite. Yet preventing minority views from finding public expression simply breeds further splintering and overall fragmentation. Of course, while the open expression of differences is no guarantee against splits, and while not all splits are unprincipled or manifestations of regression, what certainly will guarantee them is if comrades in a minority are effectively banned from fighting to win a wider public to their side.

AWL and partyism

To its credit, the response offered by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, authored by Edward Maltby and Martin Thomas,³ delivers some solid blows against this widespread conception of Bolshevism.

As they put it, “The question of party democracy isn’t just a technical question of the best way to conduct a discussion … ideas can only be dealt with and improved rationally through full, open debate. Artificial displays of unanimity clarify nothing.”

For them, the SWP has “drifted into a concept in which a revolutionary organisation is valued mainly as a machine and measured by its ability to count recruits and issue slogans which ‘fit the mood’, not by its contribution to enlightenment, education and clarification in the labour movement”. They rightly deem the system of temporary factions to be an effective “ban on debate”. It is a “Stalinist distortion”.

This is, of course, correct. But the roots of the problems in the Bolshevik Party’s self-conception go back a little further than Stalin: to Zinoviev’s thesis on the party at the 2nd Congress of Comintern in 1920 and – most crucially in terms of this discussion – to the 1921 ban on factions within the Bolshevik Party, as Russia was desperately holding out and hoping for the German revolution.⁴ (As an aside, this is often why modern-day Trotskyists can often invoke Trotsky’s writings from the late 1920s and 1930s to justify their emphasis oninternal democracy today: Trotsky uncritically took the theses of Comintern’s first four congresses as the basis for his later factional struggles against the Stalinist monolith. This is also true of thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács.)

However, what is quite clearly lacking from the AWL article, as well as in a subsequent piece,⁵ is any kind of strategy with which the SWP opposition could fight for a healthier left with revolutionary partyistperspectives. Again, few surprises here. Time and time again the AWL has proven itself to be lacking the necessary programmatic perspective and outlook to struggle for the kind of Marxist party we need. Instead, this organisation is characterised by trade-unionism, so-called ‘united front’ work, student ‘fees and cuts’ activism, the fight for a “workers’ [Labour] government” and – lest we forget – the regularly recurring disease of social imperialism. As loudly as SWP and AWL activists might shout at each other over all sorts of issues, they certainly have one thing in common: ‘programmophobia’: that is, the failure to even see the need for a Marxist programme around which our forces can cohere.

Moreover, the question of the programme is hardly unrelated to discussions over left organisation and democracy. As the experience of the RSDLP shows us, membership is based on the acceptance of(not agreement with) the party’s programme, and the leadership must be accountable to that programme as well.

Odds and sods

Perhaps because it is constantly seeking to be the latest new thing in British politics, the Anti-Capitalist Initiative has not yet directly commented on the SWP crisis. However, over the Christmas period, one of its leading members, former Workers Power editor Simon Hardy, published a two-part series on ‘The forgotten legacies of Bolshevism on revolutionary organisation’.⁶ Doubtless based on material written in his internal arguments within WP from last year, the article offers some further historical examples of open factional struggle within Bolshevik history.

Yet Hardy’s critique of WP’s conception of the ‘vanguard party’ is extremely disappointing. He summarises his argument as follows: “The Bolsheviks should be situated within a tradition of building broad parties that allowed for a plurality of tendencies, and saw themselves as a tendency seeking to fuse a revolutionary-democratic and communist politics with the militant leaders of the working class struggle” (emphasis added). Neatly enough, this understanding of ‘broad-party’ fits in with comrade Hardy’s project today. Yet this overlooks the very obvious point that the RSDLP – like its model, the German SPD – was a Marxist party united around a Marxistprogramme. This programmatic approach thus repeatedly saw theexclusion of those who rejected the programme, not least many of the “convinced individual anarchists, syndicalists, left reformists and perhaps even those who do not accept the class struggle” that comrade Hardy and Cooper are seeking to cobble together into a single organisation.⁷

Stuart King, whose organisation, Permanent Revolution, has now been effectively disbanded to work in the ACI, argues along similar lines. Despite quite correctly pointing out that “no-one should rejoice at the problems in the SWP” because “an implosion of the biggest far-left organisation in Britain in the absence of any alternative will weaken everyone struggling against austerity and capitalism”, comrade King has staggeringly little to say about the way forward for SWP oppositionists. Take, for instance, the section of his article headed ‘Overcoming the crisis of the left’, something we must all aspire to. What advice does our comrade have for those fighting for democracy and strategic clarity in the SWP? How does he seek to address the big questions of programme, organisation, leadership and theory that result from our class’s strategic defeat in the 20th century, a defeat that has scattered our forces to the four winds? Simple. Don’t you know there are some people in the Anti-Capitalist Initiative who are looking to “do things differently” and to organise “new” forces around the so-called anti-capitalist movement (by which he means largely phantom allies in what the comrades conceive as some kind of mass movement: Occupy, UK Uncut, etc). The ACI wants a “new way forward”, “overcoming the sectarianism and divisions of the past” to build a “non-sectarian revolutionary left”.⁸ If the “new way forward” will proceed unencumbered by a revolutionary party then it is hardly surprising that comrade King has no advice in relation to members of groups whose ostensible aim is the construction of such a party. In this sense, the approach of his former comrades in WP is much better.

At least he is not as forthright in calling for the opposition to walk as is Pham Binh, an American blogger who used to a member of the International Socialist Organisation. The comrade claims that “Tom Walker, who wrote a powerful and searching resignation letter, is much more advanced in his thinking than the SWP’s critical stalwarts.” Accordingly, SWP leading dissident Richard Seymour’s “exhortation to SWP members to fight is right in spirit, but mistaken strategically. ‘Leninism’ is a rigged game to begin with, and the reality is that the majority of the SWP is behind the leadership, the CC holds all the cards, and the opposition’s power has peaked, as demoralisation, resignations, and expulsions take their toll.”⁹ Unfortunately for comrade Pham Binh, the “more advanced” comrade Walker was explicit in saying that he does not have answers for the left to move forward.¹⁰ One wonders where SWP oppositionists comrades are supposed to go, or how walking is going to advance the cause of revolutionary organisation?

Finally, if only to point out some of the pseudo-anarchist side-effects that the profligacy of stultifying bureaucratic centralism can throw up on the left, it is briefly worth mentioning Barry Biddulph’s reply to Simon Hardy on Bolshevism, which was published on the Communewebsite.¹¹ For comrade Biddulph, bureaucratic centralism and Lenin were simply two peas in the same pod from 1904 (!) onwards. Not only does this let the SWP leadership off the hook somewhat: it also does a staggering disservice to any serious historical approach to Bolshevism. Comrade Biddulph merely takes all the hoary old myths of Trotskyism on the “vanguard party” (the elite that ‘worried about the workers’, the alleged formation of the single-faction Bolshevik ‘party’ in 1912, the so-called ‘deBolshevised’ Bolshevik party in April 1917, when it supposedly ditched the minimum-maximum programme, etc) and inserts ‘minus’ signs where most of our Trotskyist comrades have ‘plus’ signs. The fact that the article is illustrated by a flattering image of Rosa Luxemburg does nothing to strengthen comrade Biddulph’s argument.

His is a cruder form of the anti-partyist spontaneity of the far left more generally: the strategic way forward supposedly lies solely in strikes, workers’ committees, factory bulletins, occupations, demonstrations, etc. That the party is built on theory and programme ‘from the top down’ is, for these comrades, pure Bonapartist elitism etc. For Marxists it is ABC.

Significant silence

Whatever their merits or shortcomings, at least one can say that the above comrades felt obliged to comment, however tangentially, on developments in the SWP. Thus far this is not the case for two of the SWP’s larger competitors on the British left: ie, the Socialist Party in England and Wales, and the Communist Party of Britain.

Perhaps a certain sense of Schadenfreude currently prevails as they watch one of their most influential opponents tear themselves to pieces as they get on with ‘building the party’. After all, the Morning Star’s CPB in particular is steeped in the bizarrely Manichean world view that consists of their group and the mass organisations on the one hand, and nothing but ‘sects’ on the other.

Indeed, given that the historical roots of those like Robert Griffiths can be traced back to the (Stalinised) reading of Lenin’s What is to be done? and tracts like Stalin’s Fundamentals of Leninism and theShort course, it is hardly to be expected that the CPB would seek to lecture the SWP on democracy, internal or otherwise. (That said, it is obvious that the old ‘official’ CPGB certainly had a healthier democratic culture than the SWP today, what with elected district secretaries and such things!)

The Socialist Party’s Peter Taaffe is hardly a champion of Bolshevik democracy either. In his (pretty dire) defence of the Militant’s lack of democracy in 1996, he takes the line of Counterfire and Workers Power by wheeling out the usual nonsense that allowing open factions could lead to his group becoming nothing more than a “debating club”.¹² (We note that the split in the Militant used the pages of that famed Marxist daily, The Guardian, to argue out its differences!)

Yet he and others in the SPEW office might look upon developments within the SWP with a certain apprehension. A rank-and-file rebellion in the SWP will hopefully lead to similar developments across the left more generally. It might serve to embolden those SPEW comrades who, say, might have concerns about the group’s fawning attitude towards the trade union bureaucracy, and how this manifests itself in that group’s deadly dull weekly publication, The Socialist. Here’s hoping …

Marxist unity

So what is to be done? Genuine partisans of our class can agree with the following sentiments expressed in the Workers Power article discussed above: “Against the background of the deepest capitalist crisis in generations, the abject failure of the established organisations and leaders of the working class movement to lead any effective defence of the class, the self-imposed crisis of the SWP could yet have a positive outcome – if its members use it to reorient their organisation and engage with other revolutionaries to build a party worthy of the name. We sincerely hope they can – for the sake of the entire left, in Britain and internationally.”

Struggle decides. After all, as we see from the formation of communist parties in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, such as our very own CPGB in 1920, revolutionary unity does not come through stitch-ups by bureaucratic elites. It comes through political struggle and the empowerment of the rank and file within our movement – in the left, in the trade unions, in the Labour Party – against all bans, proscriptions and gagging orders, whether carried out by a local SWP full-timer, a trade union bureaucrat or a Labour leader. Of course, the current struggle beginning in the SWP does not take place against the backdrop of 1917 and the drive to revolutionary communist unity. Yet in objective terms, at least, these are no ordinary times either. Much is at stake.

And in the process of the struggle against bureaucracy in our movement, ideas become sharper. Activists become more politicised and frozen canon can quickly melt in the heat of battle. That is why the fight for democracy and change within the largest leftwing organisation in Britain is one for the workers’ movement as a whole, one in which all partisans of our class must engage. If we refuse to foreground the question of transforming the left from top to bottom then we will not get anywhere. We cannot unite the class without uniting the best amongst ourselves.

We need a political and cultural revolution. Realignment on the basis of a revolutionary programme is necessary, desirable and increasingly urgent. It is the will that is currently lacking. This will must be forced on the current misleadership of the left.

The ‘broad party’ approach is a dead end. Eduard Bernstein does not point towards working class rule. We need a Marxist party with a Marxist minimum-maximum programme (minimum for working class rule; maximum for communism), embodying the idea that the working class can and must take political power. The fundamentals of this programme must be: working class independence; no strategic alliances with the bourgeoisie; democracy in the state and in our own movement; and internationalism.

Notes

1. www.workerspower.co.uk/2013/01/swp-rape-and-democracy-crisis-what-now.

2. Emphasis added. Cited in B Lewis, ‘John Rees: illusion of being a master of strategy’ Weekly Worker December 2 2010. Rather unfortunately for the logic of his argument, comrade Rees cites the April 1917 debates as an example of such a healthy internal culture. But both Marcel Liebman and Paul Le Blanc pointed to the publicnature of these disputes long before comrade Rees picked up his pen to write his offering on the way forward for the left today.

3. E Maltby and M Thomas, ‘Politics without oxygen’:www.workersliberty.org/swpdemocracy.

4. For an extensive discussion of the implications of these developments, see M Macnair Revolutionary strategy London 2008, chapter 6, ‘University in diversity’.

5. ‘SWP: the case isn’t closed’ Solidarity January 16:www.workersliberty.org/system/files/270.pdf.

6. Part 1: http://anticapitalists.org/2012/12/28/building-a-revolutionary-organisation-i; part 2:http://anticapitalists.org/2013/01/01/forgotten-legacies-part-ii-the-problem-of-monopoly-in-the-sphere-of-politics.

7. Reported at www.workerspower.co.uk/2012/07/anticapitalist-initiative-not-fit-for-purpose.

8. S King, ‘Sex, lies and audiotape’:www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/3430.

9. www.thenorthstar.info/?p=4691.

10. See T Walker, ‘Why I am resigning’ Weekly Worker January 10.

11. B Biddulph, ‘The forgotten criticism of Bolshevism’:http://thecommune.co.uk/2013/01/13/the-forgotten-criticism-of-bolshevism.

12. P Taaffe, ‘On democratic centralism’:www.marxist.net/namechange/nameframe.htm.

Wikipedia wars

Readers may be amused to find that the crisis in the SWP is echoing in the text of the SWP’s Wikipedia page. Now, as a repository of common knowledge publicly accessible to all with an internet connection, the contents of the Wiki page of a group, company or organisation, and how this is written, is of great importance in terms of public image management or the provision of a fair and impartial account of history, depending on one’s view.

Given the highly contentious nature of the present crisis in the SWP, combined with the organisation’s structural dislike of critical reminders of past events, one could imagine how sensitive the Wikipedia page could become for any bureaucrats unhappy with their past follies and betrayals of the membership, as they see them pop up there on the web for all to read.

It may just be a coincidence, but the SWP page has seen an absolutely frantic increase in editorial activity, with more alterations made in the first two weeks of January than in the whole of the last six months of 2012! Could there be a connection with the present crisis?

One item that has been tussled over is the brief mention that the CPGB gets in all this, with its support for the Democratic Opposition within the SWP getting a nod. However, the wording here has clearly been seen as somewhat sensitive. On the one hand, edits have been made, perhaps, to insinuate that the CPGB is pulling the strings of dissent within the SWP, with the Democratic Opposition having to offer a denial of the connection (simply getting someone to deny something so inherently daft is a classic from the dark arts of media relations).

Since then, edits have been made to ensure a scrupulously neutral and clear wording, to the effect that the Democratic Opposition formed itself, leading the CPGB to offer its support ex post facto, with no sinister implications. Needless to say, there would be very little mileage in the SWP bureaucracy attempting to imply that any of the dissenters are puppets of the CPGB. No-one would believe that. Does the SWP bureaucracy need a more convincing villain?

This could all just be coincidence and entirely innocent, but it shows nonetheless that open sources of information and its free flow can be the enemy of the bureaucrat, as we have seen from the SWP central committee’s negative attitude to the internet as a whole and to the rights of the organisation’s members to communicate, share ideas and organise with each other. If it were not coincidence, I do not think anyone would be surprised.

Michael Copestake
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Firstly I must say that I do not think that the massive crisis currently taking hold of the Socialist Workers Party – while clearly triggered by allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of the group’s erstwhile national secretary, Martin Smith (aka comrade Delta), and their catastrophically bungled and downright dishonest handling by the bureaucratic apparatus – is at root about these issues. Fundamentally it is about the failure of the SWP’s perspectives and the inability of the rank-and-file membership to do anything to correct them under the bureaucratic-centralist regime.

Firstly I must say that I do not think that the massive crisis currently taking hold of the Socialist Workers Party – while clearly triggered by allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of the group’s erstwhile national secretary, Martin Smith (aka comrade Delta), and their catastrophically bungled and downright dishonest handling by the bureaucratic apparatus – is at root about these issues. Fundamentally it is about the failure of the SWP’s perspectives and the inability of the rank-and-file membership to do anything to correct them under the bureaucratic-centralist regime.

While SWP members doubtlessly do much good work as individuals, their group’s perspectives and mode of operation have meant that as an organisation they have done little more than service themselves and their apparatus. As a revolutionary organisation the SWP is not fit for purpose. Many things could have triggered a crisis such as the one before us now. The Respect debacle came close, but in spite of their complicity the rest of the CC were able to use the role of John Rees et al to shield themselves from the worst of members’ anger.

On this occasion the removal of Martin Smith as national secretary and getting him to step down from the CC (while allowing him to retain other positions of responsibility and leadership) was quite rightly not sufficient to quell rebellion. The particular form that the crisis has taken has brought numerous questions relating to women’s oppression and democracy to the fore. The whole fiasco reeks all the more of hypocrisy by virtue of the fact that, while the actions of the SWP’s disputes committee made a mockery of the seriousness of the rape allegations, over the same period the SWP had been calling for Julian Assange to face rape charges in Sweden. So when – in response to the details of their crisis featuring in the press and all over the internet – Charlie Kimber, the SWP’s national secretary, issues a statement on behalf of the CC stating that “our party has a proud tradition of fighting for women’s liberation, as is shown, for example, by our consistent campaigning over the decades to defend abortion, and by our criticism of George Galloway for his remarks about the Julian Assange rape accusations”,¹ we cannot take this claim at face value.

What is the real record of the SWP when it comes to fighting for women’s liberation? By examining such questions we hope to gain positive lessons, not just for those in and around the SWP, who will now be asking many searching questions of their organisation’s history, but by all of us on the left. After all, it is certainly not just the SWP which has a less than pristine record in this area.

Respect and abortion

It is worth starting with recent history – indeed, the very examples Kimber uses (abortion and ‘standing up to Galloway’) – before delving further back into the past. It seems that barely a sentence can be issued by an SWP hack without some distortion of the truth. It must be said from the outset that it is insufficient to “defend abortion” – as Kimber claims the SWP has been doing – as at present women in the UK do not have the right to choose an abortion as they see fit. Abortion rights need not only defending, but extending too. Women must be free to opt to terminate a pregnancy without needing the say-so of doctors (who we know can let their personal prejudices affect decisions), and that this right must be available to the woman as early as possible and as late as necessary.

The SWP’s record concerning abortion over recent years certainly falls short of consistent. When in 2004-05 we witnessed a rise in activity and press attention given to anti-abortionists, members of the CPGB argued that the left needed to take this threat seriously. Other activists recognised a need for something to be done too and moves to set up a new campaign were made. However, as CPGB member Anne Mc Shane reported at the time, “At a meeting held on September 16 2004 to discuss the launch of a new pro-choice initiative, Candy Udwin told us ‘on behalf of’ the SWP that ‘it would be extremely difficult to encroach on existing rights’ and that there was no reason for a new campaign to be set up. For them it was a non-issue.”²

Of course, this all took place when the SWP was championing the Respect project and did not want its own action to embarrass its partners, such as Respect’s anti-abortionist figurehead, George Galloway, and the Muslim Association of Britain and other Muslim leaders. For insisting that principles around women’s and LGBT rights must be upheld clearly in Respect propaganda, CPGB members were slandered as ‘Islamophobes’ (in much the same way as SWP oppositionists are today labelled ‘autonomists’ and ‘feminists’) – as if individual Muslims could not be won to accept principles such as a woman’s right to choose, a notion which is frankly based upon Islamophobic prejudices itself.

I personally remember SWP members sitting dumbstruck and powerless to object when George Galloway slammed abortion as an “abomination” at a Respect rally at Leeds University. Even the deliberately vague position Respect as an organisation held in relation to “a woman’s right to choose” was too much for Galloway, and the SWP all too willingly conceded more ground. The issue was made a matter of conscience, so that, regardless of any policy Respect had, George could – as Respect’s sole representative in Parliament – do and say as he pleased. The CPGB’s motion calling for accountability of representatives at the 2005 Respect conference was dutifully voted down by SWP comrades.

John Rees summed the SWP’s methodology up very well in his closing speech at Respect’s launch convention in 2004. He said: “We fought for the declaration and voted against the things we believed in, because, while the people here are important, they are not as important as the millions out there. We are reaching to the people locked out of politics. We voted for what they want.”³ As if the job of Marxists is to hold a mirror up to society rather than seek to revolutionise it.

Let us not dwell on Respect any longer though. While it illustrates clearly the bankruptcy of Kimber’s claims to consistency in defence of abortion and resolve in standing up to Galloway’s reactionary positions regarding women, it is for many SWP members a period viewed as an aberration. A temporary blip amongst an otherwise wholesome history. Yet, while it is a particularly noxious example, it is actually part of a pattern of opportunism going back much further.

Women’s Voice

This is not to say that SWP members have not done some excellent work campaigning for women’s rights and on numerous other questions – they have. I know this both from my own time in the SWP and from working closely with SWP members since then. All but the most blinkered of sectarians will acknowledge this. The organisation is composed overwhelmingly of sincere revolutionary socialists and if it simply disintegrates as a result of this crisis then the whole left and working class movement will be the weaker for it.

Yet the best way to ensure that is the end result would be for SWP comrades to quell their criticisms and ignore the reality which is staring them in the face. The opposite approach is needed. We must open up the entire history of the SWP, and the rest of left of which it is a part, to a rigorous and searching interrogation. Only then can we achieve the clarity we require to move on to something better. This is not “navel-gazing”, as SWP hacks would have you believe, but a long-overdue health check.

The most notorious aspect of the SWP’s history with a strong bearing on the group’s track record regarding women’s liberation is the period from 1972, in which it ran the Women’s Voice publication/organisation until its closure in 1982. It was the decision to terminate Women’s Voice, combined with the subsequent articles produced over the next few years by way of theorising the SWP’s position on women’s oppression, which has left its mark on the SWP ever since – it is still evident in the way CC loyalists are conducting themselves today.

Tom Walker notes in his resignation statement that “‘feminism’ is used effectively as a swear word by the leadership’s supporters”.⁴ He goes on to explain that “this seems to be a legacy of a sharp political argument conducted decades ago against radical feminism and its separatist methods of organisation, but unfortunately it is being used today against young, militant anti-sexists coming into the party. In fact it is deployed against anyone who seems too concerned about issues of gender.” From my own experience in the SWP I can concur that the same arguments that were used to argue for the closure of Women’s Voice are recapitulated many years after the actual event.

So what actually happened back then in the 1970s and early 1980s? Not having been a participant, and recognising that all the accounts I have heard or read from participants have been heavily partial, it is not easy to see through the factional fog. However, it seems likely that the basic facts that Ian Birchall – a member of the SWP and its International Socialists forerunners – relates, in his history of the IS/SWP up until 1979, give a brief but fairly accurate impression of the development of Women’s Voice up until Tony Cliff moved to have it closed down. This pamphlet was published before that, and its account was soon deemed to be off-message.

Birchall explains that “IS can be criticised for the fact that in the early 1970s the organisation as a whole failed to recognise the importance of the rise of the women’s liberation movement, and to make a serious enough intervention in it. IS women were, of course, involved from the beginning … However, the work tended to be left to the small group of women who took the initiative, with little guidance or encouragement from the central leadership of the organisation.”⁵

However, by 1975 those around the Women’s Voice publication, signified their growing importance with a rally of 600 in Manchester and the appointment within IS of a full-time women’s organiser, Sheila McGregor. By 1978 the SWP decided to constitute Women’s Voice as an organisation in its own right, with local branches, etc. A rally of 1,000 women was held in Sheffield. By the end of Birchall’s account, which ends in 1979, it all seemed to be going so well, but it really was not long before the shit hit the fan.

Some within Women’s Voice wanted greater independence from the SWP. Feminist ideas must have had a strong influence. In his autobiography Cliff claims: “I always opposed both … Women’s Voiceand also the black workers’ paper, Flame”; and: “Sadly, although I was in the leadership of the SWP, I was never allowed to be involved in the activity of Women’s Voice.”⁶ I do not know how true this is, but it seems that Cliff was opportunistic enough to tolerate Women’s Voiceas a means to bring potential recruits closer to the SWP until it became significant enough to be a threat, or a viable entity in its own right. Then, Cliff came out in opposition to the group. Significantly he won over the leading women activists, Sheila McGregor and Lindsey German. The latter led the assault in what by all accounts was a bitter fight. Women’s Voice was shut down, as was Flame and the SWP Gay Group. Many members were lost through both expulsions and resignations. But for Cliff this price was certainly worth paying.

A more detailed appreciation of the history of Women’s Voice, and indeed other aspects of the SWP’s work regarding women’s oppression, is beyond the scope of this short article, but some basic conclusions can be drawn. It is important that Marxists intervene in and build movements for women’s liberation, but such work must be carried out with the politics of Marxism, not feminism – which at the end of the day offers a sectional outlook. The project of Marxism is for universal emancipation and this necessarily entails women’s liberation, just as surely as the birth of class society required the oppression of women. Marx’s simple claim, that “the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race”,⁷ is key. The struggle for communism can only be won by the action of the working class.

Defeating sexism

Consistency in upholding principles is not something the SWP is famed for. In this article we have not even touched upon other examples, such as the apologetics displayed towards the Iranian regime in the Stop the War Coalition – hardly a high point for defenders of women’s rights within the SWP. The group has always emphasised the importance of giving workers the confidence to be militant (irrespective of how this is achieved) over and above seeking to develop a conscious fight for a clear socialist programme.

It is precisely this absence of a political programme – something Tony Cliff prided himself in – which has ensured that the history of the SWP, more than any other far-left group, has been a history of zigzags. Flipping from one opportunist get-rich-quick scheme to another, with occasional bouts of sectarian isolation. Cliff believed he had a nose for judging when the moment was right to bend the stick and felt a political programme would have held him back from doing so. Frankly, if there were no other arguments for the adoption of a programme, then this would be sufficient. It is vastly more difficult to hold a wayward leadership to account without a programme to act as a guide to your organisation’s practice. SWP rebels should remember this, as they begin to grapple with the question, ‘What next?’

Sexism and patriarchy constitute barriers to working class unity – and thus socialist revolution – which must be fought. To do so effectively we need to understand how these features manifest themselves within the working class. One of the unfortunate theoretical dogmas which the SWP adopted in developing justifications for the closure ofWomen’s Voice was the insistence that working class men do not benefit from women’s oppression. Lindsey German wrote: “I would argue … that not only do men not benefit from women’s work in the family (rather the capitalist system as a whole benefits), but also that it is not true that men and capital are conspiring to stop women having access to economic production.”⁸ This has dovetailed with the overwhelmingly economistic approach that the SWP has taken to women’s oppression, focusing mainly on questions of equal pay, rights at work, etc. An insufficient approach, of course. All manifestations of women’s oppression need to be challenged, including sexism within the working class – or the revolutionary party for that matter – if workers are to be united in a conscious fight for communism.

Of course, in the sense that women’s oppression acts as a barrier to communism – universal emancipation – then it does not benefit anyone. However, to leave it at that would simply be foolish. In the world as it existed in 1981 (and today) clearly men did gain benefits as individuals, as opposed to a being part of a class, from the inferior position of women. Women on average still do the bulk of housework and childcare, while men still get better pay and access to work. “The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat,” wrote Engels in hisOrigins of the family, private property and the state.⁹ It is not sufficient to seek equality within the family, however. What is required is the complete abolition of the patriarchal family as a privatised sphere of domestic labour.

As for the denial of women’s access to economic production, while there is certainly no conspiracy by all men to achieve such a thing, generations of craft unions did just this and it was not until World War II when women were finally admitted to the Amalgamated Engineering Union. This situation has undoubtedly improved, but sexism still plays a part in the unions and elsewhere in the working class movement. By denying that it has a material basis we do ourselves no favours.

Acceptance of this fact should not, however, lead us to doubt the bankruptcy of separatism. Women’s emancipation is not a question for women alone, but for the whole working class. While autonomous socialist organisations for women and other groups can play some role, the absolute priority must be the winning of unity in action of working class women and men. Without this we will never reverse what Engels famously dubbed the “world-historic defeat of the female sex”.¹⁰

Notes

1. Socialist Worker January 14.

2. ‘Respect silent on abortion onslaught’ Weekly Worker March 17 2005

3. ‘Socialism: the final shibboleth’ Weekly Worker January 29 2004.

4. ‘Why I am resigning’ Weekly Worker January 10.

5.https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/otherdox/smp/smp3.html.

6. T Cliff A world to win London 2000, p146.

7. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm.

8. L German, ‘Theories of patriarchy’ International SocialismDecember 1981.

9. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm.

10. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02c.htm.

Rosa Luxemburg: freedom for pro-imperialist views in a workers’ party?

As I became politicised, in particular within Linksjugend, the youth organisation of Die Linke, I came across these militant nationalistic and pro-war activists at an early stage. I first had personal experience of BAK Shalom members at the federal conference of the Linksjugend last year in Berlin. BAK Shalom is a faction which describes itself as “a working group against anti-Semitism [sic], anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and regressive anti-capitalism within the Linksjugend”. Its political work focuses mainly on supporting Israel’s apartheid politics and action against the “Muslim threat”, and denouncing every criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Their justification for this unconditional solidarity with Israel is in line with those who claim that Germans, with their Nazi heritage, have a special responsibility for the safety of all Jewish people around the world and that this can only be achieved through a strong Israel. (Personally, I fight against every form of anti-Semitism just as strongly as I oppose anti-Muslim racism, sexism, homophobia and all other types of discrimination, as is absolutely natural for every leftwing person.) Their allegations of anti-Semitism have not only been totally untruthful, but have severely damaged the left and led to a big smear campaign against Die Linke within the German mainstream media, whilst giving the bourgeois parties further material for denunciation.

At the federal congress in Berlin, the left within the Linksjugend called on BAK Shalom to withdraw support for the ‘Stop the bomb’ campaign or else face exclusion from the youth organisation. It was pointed out that a campaign which is supported by people like Henryk Broder, a journalist who works for various Springer papers and is well known for his anti-Muslim vitriol, can hardly be progressive. That part of the motion calling on BAK Shalom to withdraw was accepted after a debate where the tension between the left and the ‘anti-Germans’ was very noticeable. Delegates from the eastern German Länder in particular were quite supportive of BAK Shalom – members from eastern Germany are more likely to support coalitions with bourgeois parties and to abandon essential left principles in general.

However, when it came to the second part of the motion, many were very reluctant to vote for the exclusion of BAK Shalom should they refuse to comply with the decision of the congress. At first I could not understand this contradiction, but then a comrade explained to me that this might be because of a false understanding of left pluralism within the Linksjugend, which is often mistakenly justified by Rosa Luxemburg’s statement that “freedom is always the freedom of dissenters”. But what did she actually mean by it? Was it really in her interest to defend nationalistic, bellicose and bourgeois forces within the left? I do not think so.

Rosa Luxemburg provides a glowing example of how fight for left ideals, for which she finally paid with her life. Using her for pseudo-left purposes can only soil her memory and political legacy, but this is what the ‘anti-Germans’ continuously do.