SWP crisis: the political cost of self-delusion
Posted on Thursday 18 December, 2008
Filed Under Socialist Workers' Party
THE reality-based wing of the socialist left does not occupy a political territory that is keenly contested these days; truth to tell, adherents are distinctly a minority tendency, and it gets a little bit lonely out here sometimes.
So it should be encouraging to see leading figures inside the Socialist Workers’ Party attempting to reintroduce the ever-elusive real world dimension that has been absent from its overall political outlook for several decades now.
Documents reportedly not properly submitted via the SWP national centre are now freely doing the rounds of cyberspace, in a manner that would previously have invited expulsion, and presumably still might. But after reading them, the impression remains that participants just don’t get the big picture yet.
Lack of party democracy is widely identified as a problem, and a few possible remedies proposed. Yet even so, the contributors remain in denial about the extent of the democratic deficit. And while several writers even speak of ‘crisis’, none of them have the courage openly to identify its roots, which can of course be summarised in one single word.
Respect was, from the get-go, an unprincipled lash-up designed to mobilise a Mosque-directed communalist block vote behind a guy who exposes even Arthur Scargill as an amateur in the ego-tripping Stalinist stakes, and culminated in the spectacle of an SWP-member councillor defecting to the Tories, surely a minor political first. Of course Respect came unstuck; that much was written into its DNA, as some of us were saying right from day one.
Yet a meaningful explanation of how the SWP ended up in cutting local government-level deals with openly bourgeois and reactionary forces needs to go deeper still, and examine the theoretical disorientation that has overtaken the largest far left grouping in the UK in recent decades.
First we had a ‘downturn’ analysis of a period that featured the most important upsurge in British class struggle since 1926; then the ludicrous ‘1930s in slow motion’ perspective of the 1990s, a decade that did not see fascism come to power in even one country anywhere; on top of that, there was the ‘new imperialism’ thesis, selectively advanced to justify alliances with people who hold the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as good coin.
Throw in a complete failure to analyse important structural changes in capitalism during the globalisation period, and you have a recipe for political failure. If the SWP is to become the serious political force it self-importantly believes it already is, it will need to undertake an extensive rethink. But the current debate hardly amounts to that.
Neil Davidson – despite an irritating penchant for extracting precedents seemingly at random from all over the historical shop, as if the experience of building a Farmer-Labor Party in Illinois in the 1920s had much relevance to what the far left should be doing in Britain today – at least tackles the question of the erosion of class consciousness since the Thatcher era head on.
But even he feels obliged to start his contribution with a couple of thousand words of overweening self-aggrandisement, painting the past efforts of the IS tradition as central factors in post-war British political history.
Nobody doubts that the Anti-Nazi League did much to draw the youth of the punk rock generation towards the organised left. But it did not derail the rise of the National Front; ironically, it was Thatcher’s de facto decision to co-opt the fascist vote in the wake of her ‘alien culture’ speech that we have to thank for that.
Davidson also bigs up the Stop the War Coalition, an initiative that had no effect whatsoever on the policies against which it campaigned. Funnily enough, you can still watch the YouTube clips of John Rees – of whom more below – boasting that StWC brought down Blair.
The self-delusion involved here is palpable. Somebody needs to break it to the guy – gently, of course – that Blair stayed on for four years after the invasion of Iraq, and then left at a time determined primarily by the factional dynamics of New Labourism.
Nevertheless, let’s just note here Davidson’s conclusions about day-to-day life inside his organisation. Try to memorise some of it to quote back the next time somebody on a demo asks you to join the SWP:
Why would activists looking for a party to take them beyond trade unionism, single-issue or community campaigning subject themselves to an internal regime which is less democratic than those to which they already belong? …
We constantly invoke the democratic freedoms of the Bolshevik Party, but actually have fewer democratic rights than its members did under conditions of autocracy, quasi-feudal barbarism and repression.
The aforementioned Mr Rees is clearly unhappy about his almost certain removal from the SWP central committee at next month’s conference, and sets out his stall in another document available here. In runs to 8,000 words, but is almost a politics-free zone.
Rees cannot bring himself to admit that he fouled up numerous assignments, and is now rightly being punished for it. Probably he is being scapegoated, but tough titty. That’s what happens to serial incompetents in this life, in amateur dramatics societies as much as revolutionary parties. Three strikes and you’re out.
There follows a long rant in which he bangs on about which central committee member said what to whom and when, which is largely incomprehensible to outsiders. But this is the frightening picture he paints of internal life inside the democratic centralist SWP, in words sufficiently damning to make further comment superfluous:
Preconference aggregates involved perhaps a sixth of the membership. It is unlikely that total branch attendance is any greater on average [so active membership is probably about 1,000 people, then - DO]. There is a division in the membership and the active membership is in crisis.
The apparatus of the party has increased its weight in relation to the membership. The
full-timers now often substitute for an active membership rather than being given a
strategy to develop an active membership.
This has, in the recent debate, created a bullying and intimidatory atmosphere where the apparatus of the party plays a far larger role in the internal debate than it has done in the past when the membership was more active and party structures better attended.
The recruitment crisis has also become a financial crisis as the membership cannot sustain the apparatus inherited from a previous era.
Fact: simply by stopping the revolving door from spinning, there is no reason why the SWP could not build a party of 20,000 or more, roughly the size of the 1970s Communist Party and probably with broadly equivalent labour movement weight.
If it dropped some of the more obviously whackjob theoretical points and got a due sense of modesty and proportion from somewhere, it could even provide an attractive option for serious Marxists. But what are the odds of that happening?
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19 Responses to “SWP crisis: the political cost of self-delusion”
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The SWP is not democratic centralist. It’s centralist.
Just to show their grasp of reality:
(Neil Davidson)” One response to this proposal may be concern that our internal discussions may find their way into the websites and publications of the sectarian left, once rightly described by George Lichtheim as “tiny ferocious creatures devouring each other in a drop of water”.
Poor Neil! I have resolved to help the SWP out by refusing to eat any enraged Trot until Xmas Day.
That’s a decent enough analysis Dave, but that first paragraph comes across as painfully arrogant, painting you as ploughing your own lonely furrow for reason on the left among a bunch of crazed irrationalists.
If the rest of the left have allowed the SWP to make too much of the running in the past decade or two (including in things like Stop the War) then we have to ask ourselves questions about our own levels of organisation and engagement (or lack of it).
“If the rest of the left have allowed the SWP to make too much of the running in the past decade or two (including in things like Stop the War) then we have to ask ourselves questions about our own levels of organisation and engagement (or lack of it) . . . “
Or maybe in recent years it’s been more of a case of the SWP being more adept at carve ups and bogus broad campaigns?
Like any of the other 57 varieties of ‘generals without armies’ don’t have the same MO.
” Nobody doubts that the Anti-Nazi League did much to draw the youth of the punk rock generation towards the organised left. ”
I do! I seriously doubt that. Have you got any figures to support that? Figures for membership of the ‘organised left’ year by year, for instance, showing a huge increase during the active life of the ANL? Of course you haven’t. I suspect that this amounts to the few thousand people that showed up to the ANL organised festival/concert that is supposed to have saved the UK from a nazi coup. The ANL marked, rather, the organised left’s move away from class politics – the last gasp of which was the ‘right to work’ campaign – to trendy identity politics. The ANL’s main achievement was to enable Tories and assorted reactionaries and middle-class rich kid student lefties to pretend they were ok, cool, nice people because they were ‘against the nazis’( i.e working class oiks). And things haven’t changed much.
none of them have the courage openly to identify its roots, which can of course be summarised in one single word.
Authoritarianism?
Substitutionism?
Hierarchy?
Leninism?
Boredom?
sharp post, Dave
I’ll bet that SWPers come on site spluttering in defense, or will they take up a vow of silence to avoid having to address these issues and their own failures?
I haven’t got time to give Dave a reality check of his own but just to pick apart one issue. Why does he not think that we witnessed a downturn in the class strugle fom the late 70′s onwards.
The analysis was not that strikes or other forms of class struggle would not take place but tha we were moving from a period were such struggles were offensive and often successful to period in which they would be defensive and possibly lost.
Of course strikes like the Miners strike or Wapping could have been won if the TUC had organised serious solidarity, but that was alway unlikely and rank and file organisation on its own was unable to meet the task.
Rather that this period undermining the SWP analysis the decline in trade union combativity and its impact on the class struggle was underestimated.
As for these “Mosque dominated communalist” the main beneficary of the Respect split in East London has been Councillors defecting to Dave’s own New Labour Party. Of course we can see how successful left wingers in the Labour Party have been over the last couple of decades, it must be due to their greater grasp of reality that has resulted in a trap rather than revolving door.
Davidson also bigs up the Stop the War Coalition, an initiative that had no effect whatsoever on the policies against which it campaigned. Funnily enough, you can still watch the YouTube clips of John Rees – of whom more below – boasting that StWC brought down Blair.
The self-delusion involved here is palpable. Somebody needs to break it to the guy – gently, of course – that Blair stayed on for four years after the invasion of Iraq, and then left at a time determined primarily by the factional dynamics of New Labourism.
I agree up to a point, but I think you’re being overly pessimistic. The anti-war movement — if not exactly the Stop The War Coalition — helped create an anti-war feeling in the country at large which itself fed into and shaped the factional dynamics of New Labourism. So I don’t quite agree that it had no effect whatsoever on the policies against which it campaigned. The war went ahead but I think the British ruling class would have been emboldened to go much further if not for the unpopularity of the war.
I’m no SWPer, but David Osler’s use of rhetoric here is really quite revealing – particularly all this stuff about the SWP not living in reality, needing to become more modest and so on. I’ve read DO make similar jibes at the far left before on here – for instance, characterising Southpaw Punch as a lottery-playing fantasist, in contrast to his alleged hard-nosed poker-playing pragmatism.
Yet there is no reasoning whatsoever given by Osler for why he places over-ambition on the side of the revolutionaries and moderate ambition on the side of the social democratic reformists such as himself. After all, the suggestion that we might address the evils of capitalism through mere reform could itself be just as easily characterised as over-ambitious. Isn’t that the intended meaning of that slogan from 1968: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible!’?
So, of course, Osler’s critique of the far left is classic straw-man stuff. That much is obvious. But what is more interesting is to ask why he persists in writing these critiques which only the least informed of his readers could actually take seriously. The answer to this is, I suspect, that he wants to recast revolutionary enthusiasm as childish hysteria – presumably so that all these SWPers will “grow-up” and adapt to the adult universe of reality (i.e. social democratic reformism). But the error here is, again, quite simple. It arises from a mistaken understanding of the relationship between possibility and enthusiasm. The more possible a reform is, the less enthusiastic people will get about it. And, on the other hand, the more impossible and incredible change appears, the more enthusiastic people will be.
I don’t know about all this stuff about Rees – but I think people need to know what’s going on in the background here when David Osler writes these things.
I think I broadly agree with Toodle Noodle.
It is very easy to take this piss out of the pretensions of the far left. (Easy, but something that should be done on a regular basis.)
I suspect many ex far-leftists have sought some kind of political accommodation to left-reformism, I know I did when I joined Labour.
I can trace back my (re-)disillusion with Labour to 1992 and Kinnock’s foolish behaviour. Already then you could see a concerted attack on the political rights of members and their subsequent demotion to mere helpers at election time.
That was 1992, Dave. You have joined Labour at a time when it has waged wars of aggression and produced economic programmes even Thatcher would not have dared. You joined Labour at a time when the left in the Party has never been weaker and shows no sign of regrowth or influence. Did you think you could help to re-build it?
Motes and beams.
Dave I think I have been unfair to you. I didn’t read your article properly.
I still don’t understand why you joined NuLab. There are more satisfying hobbies.
I agree with the criticisms, in the main, made about Dave’s approach in recklessly claiming common sense is on his side whilst also agreeing with some of his criticisms of the SWP.
But let us also consider what it is that he, and the like minded, offer as an alternative to us ‘high stakes gamblers’ as he like to portray us.
At the time of the McDonought campaign to be leader of the LP, supported enthusiastically by Dave, I pointed out that McD was indistinguishable from Meacher and well right of an 80s Benn.
So if Dave and his comrades took over the LP (which is extremely unlikely – to put it very lightly) I think the best we would get may be like Labour 74-79; a few reforms like they did e.g. Race Relations Act , rent fixing, price controls (Note to young people, up to the early 80s the council would have an officer who would determine a maximum private rent a landlord could charge and some basics e.g. milk had a maximum price set that shops could charge! Halcyon days.) along with lots of right wing stuff e.g. the pay freeze (but with little price freeze).
Dave’s offering is the prospect of tossing coins for pennies; but there’s no point playing politics unless it’s for a big wad.
I think there’s a lack of distinction between what Dave does and his criticism.
He could be absolutely right about the last 30 years of the British left or even wrong, but his criticisms of the SWP stand on their own merits, they are independent of his conduct.
Their political criticisms and if they are valid they are valid that is irrespective of whether or not Dave has or has not done something.
The validity of a criticism relates to the facts that it looks at, not whether the individual writing it is a genius, a college professor or a bloke on a bus.
If the criticism or arguments tally with the facts and are logical and reasoned then the criticism can be correct, irrespective of the individual’s personal status, authority or conduct.
Put another way, if some political leader with a faultless personal history and absolutely correct political lines argues a pile of bollocks, it is still a pile of bollocks, whatever the leader’s position or authority.
To suggest otherwise is the appeal to authority fallacy.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html
The Rees text focusses on lack of of recruitment as a problem. It occurs to me, reading this after the affaire Madoff, that the SWP in the later 70s turned itself into a sort of political Ponzi scheme. As long as it was recruiting a flow of new members, the defects of the overblown apparatus and effective ban on factions and horizontal communication, etc, would not become visible to members (the scheme appears to produce outstanding returns on capital). Once the recruitment flow stops, it becomes apparent that there is no *real* base (no real investments) and there is a crisis.
This then drives the ‘turns’: the SWP has to be wherever it is possible to keep recruiting youth on the basis that the SWP are the ‘best activists’. Respect is only an extreme (failed) variant.
The project is counterposed to actually arguing about politics (as one must to build real bases either in the unions or electorally) or recognising that the SWP is one of the bigger groups, not something on a larger scale altogether than the other groups. Hence the extraordinary irrealism of the discourse of the current SWP documents about the SWP’s relative weight.
(Note to young people, up to the early 80s the council would have an officer who would determine a maximum private rent a landlord could charge and some basics e.g. milk had a maximum price set that shops could charge! Halcyon days.)
Note to people thinking of emigrating: in most of Germany there are similar laws on house/flat rents. (though milk, butter, bread etc. have a “minimum” price, i.e. products cannot be sold under the price it costs for the shop to buy them – “loss leaders” are illegal; and rightly too, I think).
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