‘Linksruck hatte immer etwas von einem leninistischen Pfadfinderbund. Das war Ahmed und mir bei aller Arbeiterorientierung auch immer klar, wir fanden es eh’ total geil – und unser Revolutionslehrer Tony Cliff förderte diese Einstellung nach Kräften. Ich höre Cliff noch am Telefon krähen: »Forget all the normal people. You have to go for the mad ones, find crazy people, crazy people is what you need!« (Vergeßt all die normalen Leute! Ihr müßt die Verrückten finden. Verrückte Leute sind das, was ihr braucht!«)’

Loose translation: Linksruck always had something of the Leninist boy scouts about it. Ahmed [Shawki, a British ex-pat Linksruck cadre] and I were always clear about that, despite our orientation to the workers, and found that really cool. Our revolutionary teacher Tony Cliff forcefully supported this attitude. I can still hear Cliff on the telephone crowing: ‘Forget all the normal people. You have to go for the mad ones, find crazy people, crazy people are what you need!’

‘Nuff said.

[Hat tip: I hate my neighbours]

Let's consider this portrayal of the recent takeover of Mogadishu by the Union of Islamic Courts, published in the latest Socialist Worker:

'For the first time for many years there is a sense of relief and hope among many people in Somalia,' we are told in the opening sentence, which pretty much sets the tone of the entire article. There is not one single word of critique, not one indication that this development is anything other than entirely positive.

True, it is incontestable that the UIC have considerable popular support. The SWP attributes this to what it sees as the organisation's quasi-social democratic politics. The UIC are depicted essentially as armed reformists, delivering pavement politics through the barrel of an AK-47:

'Key to the success of the UIC was the fact that it was already an established and accepted presence in local communities, with a demonstrated social welfare policy.

'Apart from bringing security to areas under its control, through its own militia and justice system, it had also set up farms, schools, water points, health clinics and orphanages.

'Although the UIC did not initially have strong popular support, there was a feeling that it upheld moral standards and discipline, and had a unifying and familiar ideology in Islam ...'

Read that again. Slowly. Upholding moral standards and discipline, eh? Sound chaps. Most rightwing Tories would approve. But is it truly the job of revolutionary socialists to cheerlead for such moral standards as forcing women to wear the veil and the amputation of the limbs of thieves?

It's also open to question whether or not the UIC are capable of mounting a challenge to the clan system, as the SWP maintains. All but one of the Islamic Courts are associated with one single clan, the Hawiye.

And class analysis is nowhere to be seen. What is the movement's social basis? In the interests of which classes does it operate? We are not told. An astonishing omission on the part of what still claims to be a Marxist publication.

Ultimately, the definitive evaluation of what the UIC represents, from a socialist perspective, will have to wait until it has been in power for some period of time. Let's just see what the future brings, although I have to say the portents don't look too promising.

But even as a preliminary assessment, the SWP's position is at the very least imbalanced. The article's final sentence explains why any sense of perspective has been lost:

'There is no doubt imperialism has suffered a blow.'

And that's all anyone needs to know.

In a nutshell, the SWO have gone ga-ga for Chavez, hailing political developments in Venezuela as 'the most important leap forward for the workers' cause since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution' and adding: 'The masses in Venezuela are behind a genuine revolutionary project in a way that has not occurred in the last 90 years.'

Accordingly, they upbraid the SWP for not getting sufficiently worked up about it all, and use this as a pretext to slam a proposal from IST supremo Alex Callinicos - pictured - for a Cominform-style body involving some - but crucially not all - sections of the tendency:

It is within the context of the deepening revolution in Venezuela that Socialist Worker-New Zealand responds to Alex Callinicos's proposal to create an IST "Coordination". Alex defines such a Coordination as consisting of "selected organisations" whose leaderships would consult and meet between annual IST gatherings "to deal with initiatives, problems, etc".

Socialist Worker-New Zealand has two substantive concerns with this Coordination proposal. First, it is not intimately linked to the global political situation, and in particular to how the IST needs to engage with the mass revolutionary process in Venezuela. Instead, the proposal is couched in terms of the IST's own internal processes.

Socialist Worker-New Zealand believes the unfolding Venezuelan revolution, if it continues to move in the direction it's currently going, will reshape the socialist and labour movements in every country on every continent, just as the unfolding Bolshevik revolution did from 1917-24. Therefore, rather than looking inwards, the IST needs to be focused outwards towards the most advanced revolutionary upsurge in 90 years and the global socialist regroupments it will inevitably set into motion.

At present, there seem to be real differences between IST affiliates over the nature of what is happening in Venezuela. At one end of the IST spectrum, Socialist Worker-New Zealand see Chavez & Co as being at the centre of the most important "revolution in the revolution" since the Bolsheviks proclaimed "All power to the Soviets" in 1917 Russia. At the other end of the IST spectrum, the Venezuelan revolution was a "non-topic" in the official discussion bulletins of the British Socialist Workers Party in the lead-up to their national conference in January 2007.

So how do we form an IST Coordination when the IST appears to lack real political coordination over the key strategic issue of Venezuela's revolution? If we were to do it just on the basis of IST tactical organisation, any such IST Coordination would be a sham from the outset ...

We all have a lot to learn from the world historic events in Venezuela. We cannot assume that any one Marxist group has readymade answers to everything. Any IST Coordination, therefore, must be based on facilitating this global debate among all Marxist groups, most of them outside the IST, in tandem with fusing the IST into a strategic engagement with the PSUV's leaders.

It's a global debate about the Venezuelan revolution that the IST needs to start coordinating, and that requires democratic input from all IST affiliates around the world.

Why can't every IST affiliate have one representative on the IST Coordination? With modern communications technology, face-to-face meetings in London can be replaced by extremely cheap "virtual" meetings that link all continents. The material basis already exists for an all-in IST Coordination that interacts on a global scale as frequently as needed. The real question is whether the IST has the political consensus and the political will to bring it about.

Granted, the SWO are an odd bunch, starting life as the official Third International Communist Party in New Zealand before going through pro-China and pro-Albania phases. Then the initiated contact with the Cliffites in London over the heads of the official franchise holders, who were subsequently forced into a shotgun marriage. Now the dominant component would seem to be reverting to type.

Any kind of criticism of all-knowing London inside the IST is hardly encouraged, as several expelled groups know to their cost. So the likelihood is that either the SWO will be kicked out in short order, or is it consciously heading for Splitsville, Tennessee, of its own accord.

And the sad thing is, the International Marxist Tendency - not to be confused with the International Socialist Tendency, of course - has already pretty much got the gig as licensed Trot bag carriers for Hugo, so it won't even do them much good.

For the record, personally I am broadly critically supportive towards what is happening in Venezuela. As a concrete alternative to neoliberalism, it sets an important example across the third world. But let's not make the mistake of painting left nationalist populism red. Socialism from below this ain't.

[Hat tip: Socialist Unity Blog]

Read details of the expulsions of Nick Wrack, Rob Hoveman and Kevin Ovenden - three prominent SWPers who have made it plain that their primary loyalty is now to Respect rather than the self-styled revolutionary party - here.

It is now clear that Respect is heading towards a messy split, at the latest by the time of its conference next month, and perhaps before. So what happens to the SWP's 'united front of a special kind' after the departure of the main ostensibly revolutionary Marxist element?

Several activists I have a great deal of time for - Andy Newman, Mark Perryman and Liam Mac Uaid, to name just a few - are presumably hoping that Respect can now reconstitute itself as a genuinely broad-based democratic left alternative to the Labour Party. Comrades, I think you are tragically wrong.

If the SWP ups sticks, the Islamist pole in Respect will become absolutely dominant. And make no mistake, the Islamist pole in Respect is not made up of essentially naive Muslim proletarians, radicalised by the war in Iraq and open to socialist positions.

Its leading layer - men such as Abjol Miah and Anas Altikriti - are conscious political Islamists, aligned with reactionary currents mortally opposed to everything socialism from below stands for. And these are the guys that deliver the votes to Galloway.

Of course the basis of Respect's popular appeal is essentially communalist, as the SWP tops now openly proclaim. But no more and no less communalist than it was when Respect was first launched four years ago.

The job of providing 'left ' organisational cover now falls to the International Socialist Group, a current of which I was a member in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at one stage working full-time as a journalist for its paper. Suffice to say, I have never felt further from its political line.

I guess Galloway's eyes are on what he regards as the prize of the winning the Communist Party of Britain. But whatever the value of the CPB's role in the unions, the adhesion of the UK's chief Stalinist tendency is only likely to add to the toxicity of the broth.

What now for the SWP? Its most likely next move - after the loss of several hundred members at a minimum - is a return to the splendid 'building the party' isolationism of 25 years ago. After the brutal way it fucked over the Socialist Alliance, no one else on the far left will want to work with it anyway. Those scars will take years to heal.

In short, nothing good will come of this split. Just when I didn't think it was possible, the already hopeless position of the British far left suddently got more hopeless still.

The need for an organised expression of libertarian Marxist politics in this country has never been more pressing.

Democratic centralism in Britain has always operated on a hammer and anvil culture; the three men expelled from the Socialist Workers’ Party this weekend are only the latest victims.

The number of serious socialists in Britain kicked out of small political parties they have loyally devoted themselves to building - simply for their temerity of disagreeing with the dominant line - must surely number tens of thousands since the model was first introduced into this country.

It is difficult to think of any voluntary organisation in all of civil society under the sway of a leadership more secretive and with less democratic legitimacy than that of the SWP.

Many party members do not even know the names of those who sit on the body, far less get any say in the matter. Even the United Grand Lodge of England publishes a list of its top brass these days.

It is one thing to submit to the ‘party discipline’ of an elected leadership with a proven track record of actual leadership in the class struggle and/or as serious Marxist thinkers. It is quite another to have to obey the every whim of this particular crop of fourth-rate British Lenin wannabes.

In any case, to function properly, a democratic centralist party also needs a specific mass, giving it a size sufficient to be able to generalise from the experiences of the class, not just the one or two pockets were a given current may have some degree of implantation.

The treatment of Wrack, Hoveman and Ovenden underlines once again that democratic centralism is not an appropriate model for socialist organisation in the current period. It’s not as if we are working under illegality or something, is it?

Respect itself is not based on democratic centralist, of course. But it still bears obvious traces of the modus operandi. It was hatched in secret, its internal democracy is purely formal in nature, and since its inception it has had no broad support in the labour movement, even from the awkward squad or the Labour left.

It’s difficult to conceive of anything that could fairly be described as a step backwards from the Socialist Alliance. But Respect has proved that, and more.

This is how the central committee is justifying the expulsions of Rob Hoveman, Kevin Ovenden and Nick Wrack to the wider membership in this week’s ‘Party Notes’ bulletin:

Party discipline

Last weekend 3 SWP members - Rob Hoveman, Kevin Ovenden and Nick Wrack were expelled from the SWP.

Kevin and Rob

Kevin and Rob are SWP members working for George Galloway. However, recently this situation has become increasingly difficult. The party leadership has come to believe that it was impossible to have two comrades working for someone who has openly attacked the SWP in recent months. This was a position several leading members of the SWP articulated at the recent Party Council. Also over the last year there have been a number of meetings between the CC and Rob and Kevin.

Two members of the CC met with Kevin and Rob last week, they were asked to resign their posts in George Galloway’s office. Kevin and Rob have subsequently written to the CC refusing to stop working for George Galloway despite the party’s concerns.

Nick

The recent Respect NC voted to create a new position of National Officer. The SWP believed that the post was created to undermine Respect National Secretary John Rees. However, after some changes to the way the post was defined, the SWP agreed to setting up of the post. George Galloway then suggested that Nick did the job. Nick said he would seek various people’s opinions.

Expelling comrades is not something the CC does lightly, but in all three cases we felt we had no choice.

Hat tip: Weekly Worker website

Respect national secretary John Rees, on the other hand, is not only not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy. He likes fighting in the playground. A lot.

Since the start of the bust-up in the coalition, the George Galloway faction has persistently shown willingness to compromise. By contrast, Rees - also a leading figure in the Socialist Workers' Party, of course - has purposely ramped up the differences, while asking the rest of the left to believe that big boy Georgie done it and ran away.

Rees' latest move has been to orchestrate a breakaway of four councillors from the Respect group on Tower Hamlets council, made up of two SWP members and two close fellow-travellers. He even pitched up at the press conference that announced the split to proclaim his support for the rebels, a move surely unprecedented for the secretary of what is supposed to be a serious political party.

Yesterday the East London Advertiser, the local newspaper in Tower Hamlets, reported that Gang of Four are in discussions with the local Liberal Democrats over a possible formal coalition. Read the story here.

This, for revolutionary socialists, would clearly constitute what is known in Trotspeak as 'crossing class lines'. The Lib Dems are, after all, an openly bourgeois party.

The first blogger to post on the Advertiser revelations was Andy at Socialist Unity. Reaction from SWPers in the comments box was comparable to what Lenin reportedly felt on reading that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits in 1914. This is just shit-stirring by the local rag, they insisted.

But over 24 hours later, there still has been no formal denial. What's more, I've had an email from an extremely well-placed source in Tower Hamlets politics - and I do mean extremely well-placed - assuring me that the lash-up talks are happening. The informant, I should stress, is not in Respect and thus not a partisan of either side.

Meanwhile, the SWP's online petition against the 'witch-hunt' in Respect has secured only 1,000 signatures, surely confirming to all but the dimmest loyalist that the smallest mass party in the world's boast of having 6,000 members is wildly OTT.

Remember, also, that only 55 members turned up at an all-Scotland aggregate to discuss the Respect situation. Let's charitable and say that half the membership could not make it to the most important meeting of the year.

Well, Scotland has 10% of the UK population, and if anything, Scottish comrades usually make up a rather higher proportion than that of serious leftwing organisations. Again, this points to a real SWP membership of only around 1,000.

Worse still from the point of view of international supremo Alex Callinicos, surely the poshest posh boy on the entire British left, the New Zealand section of the Pomintern is showing worrying signs of independent life.

Even if it is notoriously the flakiest grouplet in the entire International Socialist Tendency, this time its position on what the mothership has been up to is very well argued.

If the central committee is lucky, the events of the last few weeks will cost the SWP hundreds of members, who will either decamp to Team Galloway or drop out of politics. These are numbers that an organisation currently the smallest it has been in 40 years can ill afford to lose. But what if the CC isn't lucky? In that case, implosion may well beckon.

Readers of middling years and above may well remember the last time a Trot sect crashed and burned, namely the disintegration of the Workers' Revolutionary Party in 1985. It all began with accusations of sexual misconduct against long-time guru Gerry Healy, who promptly got the boot.

The picture above shows the front page of the WRP daily paper following the expulsion, spelling out its stance on what it clearly considered the most important issue facing the British working class in the year of the miners' strike.

This is the kind of thing that a stable concern can generally survive. For instance, those huckstering 'churches' founded by dodgy televangelists in the US continue to extract money from those who can least afford it, even after the men of the cloth are caught out rogering the female faithful sexually as well as financially.

But when contradictions accumulate internally inside a political tendency, a crisis can unleash them all at once. It develops a dynamic of its own. That's what happened to the WRP; it had reconstituted into nine breakaway groups last time I could be bothered to count.

The risk now is that the SWP could follow suit. Remember, even with 1,000 members, it is the only British far left group which needs a four-figure print run for membership cards. It's demise would weaken what is left of the left in many towns, and should not be welcomed. If it happens, the stupidity of John Rees will be heavily to blame.

I've just had a second email from a source with an intimate knowledge of the ins and out of Tower Hamlets politics, containing further information about talks between the SWP-sponsored Continuity Respect group on Tower Hamlets council and the local Liberal Democrats. Like all journos, I like nothing more than a good tip-off, so many thanks to my informant.

Anyway, I'm told that the Lib Dems are disappointed that the Gang of Four seem so determined to hang on to the Respect name. Deep Throat adds that everybody's favourite centre party are more than up for a deal:

I can only think of a couple of occasions were the LD's and Respect voted differently on an issue ... A coalition for them would be pragmatic politics for both sides, and the Lib Dems are - it has to be said - masters of coalition deal-making.

Yeah, sounds like what we know about 'em, especially at local level. But I wonder if either Clegg or Huhne would approve of their East End co-thinkers jumping into bed with the Cliffites?

This just in from an SWPer with serious working class implantation, who tells me that the SWP actually did not want the Tower Hamlets Gang of Four councillors to resign the whip:

I’ve no reason to believe it was orchestrated ... SWP “Leninist discipline” is such that the two councillors who joined the SWP could not be instructed. I suspect that Rees has just been trying to make the best of it.

Meanwhile, still no denial of the East London Advertiser claim that the rebels are talking to the Lib Dems ...

Respect’s 2007 financial statement – filed with the electoral commission - revealed that the ‘unity coalition’ returned a cheque for $10,000 from a Dubai construction company as an impermissible donation.

Little more was heard of the story since. But the new edition of the East London Advertiser takes up the tale. According to the local rag for Tower Hamlets, the donor company is owned by one of Britain's biggest private finance initiative contractors, headed by Tory life peer who was a senior policy adviser to the John Major government.

I guess that rather points to an attempted set-up, and Galloway was savvy enough to rumble it. But look who took the bait:

Khansaheb Civil Engineering, a Dubai-based subsidiary of Interserve plc private finance experts, sent the cheque on January 7, according to the [Electoral Commission].

Interserve currently manages a number of PFI-backed schools and hospitals in the UK. The boss is 55-year-old Lord Blackwell, head of Major's policy unit from 1995 to 1997, who was made a life peer when the Tories lost office.

In a week when Socialist Worker – quite rightly – slates New Labour for accepting business donations via conduits, in order to conceal the real source of its financial support, the idea that an individual donation to a de facto SWP project can legitimately come in the shape of a corporate cheque does strike me as a bit rich.

[Hat tip: email informant]

The latest edition of the Socialist Workers’ Party bulletin Party Notes includes what must be history’s only recorded instance of a Central Committee climbdown.

It relates to the story of an illegal foreign donation from Dubai-based Khansaheb Civil Engineering to Respect the Unity Coalition, which at the instigation of national secretary John Rees, subsequently found its way into the coffers of Organising for Fighting Unions, an SWP front organisation.

It later emerged that the donor is a subsidiary of a group owned by one of Britain's biggest private finance initiative contractors, headed by a Tory life peer who was a senior policy adviser to the John Major government. The backstory’s here, if you are not up to speed.

Just to underline how serious this cock-up is, the item is even headed ‘an apology’:

An apology

Last week the East End [sic] Advertiser published an article raising serious allegations about a donation made to OFFU.

”The Central Committee is very concerned to hear that a donation to Organizing For Fighting Unions has links, even if tenuous, to companies involved in privatization and PFI schemes in the UK. Although the money was taken in good faith, from an individual with a proven record of supporting anti-war and pro-Palestinian causes, the coming to light of these links with big business means that we believe it is inappropriate that OFFU should have received these funds. Should the OFFU officers decide to return the donation, we will work with them to help raise the money.”

I’m sure the comrades want this to have the widest possible labour movement circulation. Not.

I’m also sent the following correspondence between Respect national secretary John Rees and OFFU chair Mick Gavan:

12 December 2007

Respect national secretary.

Incidentally, can a political donation drawn on a company account be an individual donation? Does anyone know how electoral law stands on this issue?

[Hat tip: email informant]

Naturally, I invited SPP to outline his thoughts on the future of the Left List as a political formation, and here they are. For the record, I think his arguments are weak in the extreme. But, hey, who am I to judge? The comments box is all yours, kids.

The Left List ran abysmally in recent elections. Laugh at anyone who says otherwise, because lies deserve such and self deception destroys.

I don’t know why there isn’t a ‘natural’ (5%?) left of Labour vote. A vote doubtless that’d be without links to the miniscule Left; maybe voters who think a WRP is some sort of sandwich (one with lots of nuts, maybe)?

There are reasons why the Lost List was lapped even by the other losers. Our vote wasn’t fated by an unfathomable caprice of the gods. But no-one knows what these reasons are. The best guesses I’ve seen don’t stand up. There really are known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

So what would improve the odds for the Left List? A Frappuccino option? Lots of contrasting flavours topped with froth. The Socialist Alliance attracted the last of the Labour lefts and kept all sated with concoctions of fluff. But it went down like a cup of cold sick with voters.

Maybe raw steak politics instead of the Asda Value mince of the Left List? The WRP stood on the full programme in the 80s. They got tenderised with a mallet by voters.

When you’re stuck up a creek without a paddle, it’s cowardly to wait for rescue that may not come. You should construct your own oar. But that’s a lot better than zigzagging about SWP style from a fake map reference and fooling yourself that the Plain of Plenty is just over the horizon.

I don’t know the way to improve our form although the SWP appear to be doping our own horse. But I do know what a winner looks like and how it would feel. My experience (related below) tells me that it’s essential that we bet the house.

Once the bright lights of Manchester beckoned to me and school friends. The travel there wasn’t easy but it was worth it, we saw bands bozos now write books about.

But best of all, the city had what we thought so much about at our boys school (no, not the men only dives near the coach station, although the rough street trade there then was a lot more interesting than the Gay Theme Park with abundant faghags that is today’s ‘Village’).

Manchester had women. And with spiky or new romantic hair, rather than the blonde bubble perms of Bramhall.

Our lack of early success made all but Joe and I give up on the big city trips. Getting back included a four mile trek from the nightbus terminus.

My friends thought the church disco in Cheadle Hulme a safer bet. Their dads could pick them up. Martin even met a clean scrubbed young lady, with shiny braces, and who was active in the Christian Union. After a year, he managed to get her top two buttons undone.

Martin thought he succeeded - that glimpse of the nape of her neck was better than nowt, surely? But he’d failed; he forgot that the ten bottom buttons remained welded shut.

Joe and I persevered in the city. The first time Sandrine spoke to me I was so surprised that I looked behind to see the person I presumed she must be addressing. She’d been a model and had swimwear catwalk photos to prove it (although, sure, they may just have been college events). And she was French.

I remember wondering just how far my pocket money could stretch when she suggested a weekend in London. Would she settle for a tent and hitching? I was way, way out of my depth and things didn’t last long.

But the point is that by taking that high stakes Manchester gamble, I’d not just done better than Martin, I’d succeeded where he’d failed. There are no half scores.

And so with Labour (and Respect Renewal, etc). Lost reds may join thinking they’ll change them; maybe get them to show a bit more knee. But Labour will change them instead (or spit them out) and they’ll end up as the political equivalent of the clap-happy Christian that Martin became.

‘But isn’t a few reforms (or a bra strap lifted) worth all the compromise’, they may insist? Does being the left wing of imperialism make you part of the solution, or part of the problem? Labour Party members are akin to collaborators and the elected ones are a form of war criminal.

I remain a high stakes gambler. We could yet win big. It’s just a shame that I don’t know where to see a band or how to read a form book anymore (and the only models within feasible reach are probably some Dinky toys in my dad’s loft). Sticking a pin in the runners, I still find the Left List the current best (i.e. the least worst) bet. That’s where I’m putting my money, for now.

Although I still think the French or the Fijians or the Finns or just some other fighting foreigners may yet appear, galloping over the horizon, to rescue us all.

My second favourite feature was the ‘Teach Yourself Marxism’ column, penned by John Molyneux, pictured left. I strongly admired his ability to condense complex Marxist ideas in an accessible manner, in articles that exemplified serious socialist writing for a readership beyond a purely cadre audience.

TYM is no longer accorded space in the pages of Britain’s main Trot weekly. There are many reasons why that could be so. Molyneux - a longstanding Socialist Workers’ Party member, of course - is known to have tabled internal criticism of the SWP leadership in recent years. That may of course simply be unfelicitous coincidence, although one suspects otherwise.

Whatever the case, most of the Portsmouth-based academic's offerings now seem to appear only in the publications of the South Korean affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency, and are available in the UK solely on a sporadically updated blog. In his most recent post, John asks ‘is democratic centralism undemocratic?’

At first sight, the question appears somewhat on a par with asking ‘does Kate Moss like cocaine?’ My own experience suggests democratic centralism will never constitute an appropriate model for the type of broad socialist regroupment that has any realistic chance of proving workable.

Come to that, I’m not particularly convinced it represents an appropriate model for a revolutionary party in a bourgeois democracy such as Britain in 2008, either. It is one thing to submit to the ’discipline’ - and that’s the word that is habitually used - of an elected leadership with a proven track record in the class struggle and/or as intellectuals. It is quite another to kow-tow to the current crop of British Lenin wannabes, who have made a hash of every project they have touched for over a decade.

But that’s just me. Molyneux’s post advances the standard far left justification for emulating the Bolshevism of 106 years ago. Democratic centralism, he maintains, is simply the form of organisation that combines maximised democratic debate and policy making with united action by all party members. Far from being anti-democratic, it is really the most democratic method by which the revolutionary left can go about its business, and would be essential in a revolutionary situation.

The money paragraph, for me at any rate, was this one: Be that as it may, the critics will say, we are not in a revolutionary situation, and the trouble with democratic centralism is that it too easily manipulated by bad leaders in the hear [sic] and now. In fact anti-democratic manipulation is always possible, whatever the formal constitution of a party, but democratic centralism makes it more difficult not easier. This is because it disciplines not only the rank and file of the party but also the leaders.

Does democratic centralism - to which the SWP adheres, of course - really discipline leaders? Compare and contrast the following extracts from a document Molyneux put forward in support of his campaign for a seat on the central committee in 2006:

In the course of the last 15 years or so there has hardly been a single significant challenge to the line of the CC [Central Committee] on any major issue, nor till now has there been a contested election to the CC. This is not a normal state of affairs in the history of the socialist movement (just check out the history of the Bolsheviks, the Trotskyist movement under Trotsky or, indeed of the IS/SWP in the 60s, 70s and 80s). Nor in my view is it healthy. We need more debate and we need an atmosphere and culture that facilitates that debate …

I believe the party would be healthier and stronger if there was more involvement of the membership and the NC [National Committee] in decision-making. Obviously we are a combat party that often has to respond to events quickly and decisively, but equally there are a range of issues and decisions that could be put to the NC and branches for their input.

At the moment there is too strong a tendency to decide everything at the top and then simply to get the NC, branches and conference to endorse it.

That's the reality of an organisational schema we are asked to believe makes anti-democratic practices 'more difficult, not easier'. As described, it seems horribly reminiscent of mid-1990s New Labour control freakery minus the ubiquitous Vodaphone pagers.

Molyneux was not elected. The irony is - to judge from his most recent blog post - that the very democratic centralism John so avidly touts has reduced the public pronouncements of a thoughtful, articulate Marxist to the level of an intellectually dishonest I-speak-your-weight machine.

What is more, because DC carries with it a gagging order on public criticism of what sounds like a horrendous internal party regime, John cannot even debate this matter openly in front of the rest of the left. In politics, it's not just Labour backbenchers that are compelled to stay on message at all times.

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 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?

SEVENTY years ago this very year, the Socialist Workers Party – the American grouping of that title, of course, and not its entirely unrelated present day British namesake – saw the outbreak of a short but bitter internal polemic.

Within a matter of months, matters reached a conclusion that could have been foreseen long before. At the April 1940 SWP convention, the dissidents were expelled en bloc after refusing to vote on a motion pledging each member to abide by conference decisions. Such, sadly, is the almost inevitable fate of those who dare challenge entrenched leaderships in small democratic centralist outfits with just a few thousand members.

Leon Trotsky, who surveyed the events in El Norte from his exile in Coyoacan, was in no doubt about the class composition of the contending factions, and intervened directly through several contributions to SWP internal bulletins. His most famous article in this connection was called ‘A petty-bourgeois opposition in the Socialist Workers Party’.

The Old Man obviously did not like the cut the minority tendancy’s jib, and made his distain for its class character utterly plain. Why, some of its members may even have associated with anti-party elements:

It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency.

Like any petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal “independence” at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility toward it; and finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationships for party discipline.

This, of course, was the 1930s. Interestingly enough, some groups on the British left have described the current period as ‘the 1930s in slow motion’. Fortunately, we are within months of the decade ending, with world war three not obviously on the imperialist agenda. But hey, there are still several months to go before the prediction can conclusively be discounted.

Ever since 1939, the SWP faction fight been regarded within the Trotskyist movement as paradigmatic example of how these things are handled on the far left. The only real question is, who will be the hammer, and who will be the anvil?

Irrespective of the arguments at hand – centrally, how the SWP should react to German aggression - Trotsky knew from the start which forces would prevail:

If we subtract everything accidental, personal and episodical, if we reduce the present groupings in struggle to their fundamental political types, then indubitably the struggle of [minority leader] comrade Abern against [majority leader] comrade Cannon has been the most consistent. In this struggle Abern represents a propagandistic group, petty-bourgeois in its social composition, united by old personal ties and having almost the character of a family. Cannon represents the proletarian party in process of formation. The historical right in this struggle – independent of what errors and mistakes might have been made – rests wholly on the side of Cannon.

Some 70 years on, the relevance of all this may not be apparent to many younger comrades, most of whom have not experienced what happens when Trot groups go into full-on self-destruct mode. But, y’know, they do say that no past political battle is ever entirely devoid of lessons for current practice. Trotsky’s excellent article - which deserves a wide readership in this new century of ours - can be read in full here.