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Weekly Worker 554 Thursday November 25 2004

Mutiny stirs against east London potentates

In the run-up to the SWP's November 27-28 conference, more critical voices are being raised over the nature of the internal regime. But, reports Mark Fischer, these are couched in terms that accept the basic premises of SWP 'wisdom' and are therefore incapable of getting to grips with the problem

Several contributions in the second Pre-conference bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party talk of the need for democratisation of the organisation. While these are welcome as far as they go, the critics actually have a tendency to retrospectively excuse this sect’s monstrously bureaucratic regime as somehow necessary for survival in the 1980s. Thus, despite themselves, they are giving a gift to those elements of the leadership wedded to a semi-Stalinist understanding of ‘party discipline’.

In a characteristically narrow-minded contribution, Socialist Worker editor Chris Bambery offers us some real jaw-droppers. On the need for “more debate” in the paper, he writes: “We need not be scared of different or dissenting voices. Debate is at the heart of the movement” (p6 - all quotes from Pre-conference bulletin 2004 No2, unless otherwise stated). Warming to his ‘democratic’ theme, he says that “SWP members don’t operate according to instructions shouted down to them from east London. We operate in unison because we agree on shared ideas, strategies and tactics.” And how would this east London potentate know this? Because, as Tony Cliff claimed, the paper is published every week and “If we got it wrong our readers and the SWP membership would mutiny.”

If the Bulletin consisted exclusively of this bilge it would be frankly unreadable. After all, how can Socialist Worker readers and SWP members rebel? Apart from ceasing to be readers or members, there are no democratic internal channels within which minorities can organise to become a majority. Socialist Worker only carries pinched, safely naive and suitably rightwing letters. Certainly no serious minority viewpoints get a platform. As to the SWP, it forbids its own members to form permanent factions. Members have to toe the line in public and certainly cannot develop their criticisms openly, in front of the public.

Thankfully, there are some voices who seem to be questioning the SWP’s bureaucratic centralism, albeit tentatively and with extreme caution.

Time to change

Take the contribution of comrades Martin Pitt (Hammersmith SWP) and Anne Kenefeck (Acton), ‘Building the party in the upturn’ (p16). In stark contrast to the official optimism of the apparatchiks and myopic loyalists, they bluntly state that “It is clear that the state of the party on the ground is poor” and that there is a “major problem of local inactivity”.

How is this to be explained? By the lingering of an organisational “formula” that was “absolutely crucial to ensure our survival” over “the last 25 years”. (Actually the comrades’ periodisation of the useful life of this “formula” is confused. In one place, they state that it has “worked well for us” for the last quarter of a century. Elsewhere in the same contribution, they bemoan the fact that it remained unaltered “throughout the 90s”, despite the fact that by the middle of that decade it was “already presenting real obstacles to party-building”). So what were the main features of this cunning survival strategy?
“Firstly, the party had to be ‘reined in’, bound tightly together and strictly disciplined, with decision-making concentrated at the centre. Secondly, any hint of division, any whisper of criticism, had to be dealt with decisively to ensure homogeneity. This extreme tension between the various levels of the party, between the CC and the full-timers, and between the full-timers and membership, came to characterise this formula for the downturn and, in the circumstances, there was no other way to behave.”
Unavoidable though it allegedly was, they list the “undesirable consequences” that flowed from this supposedly correct decision of the organisation to slip on a bureaucratic straightjacket for the ‘downturn’:

• “Vigorous debate became rare”.
• “Criticism of the leadership came to feel like (and probably was) an act of betrayal”.
• “A rosy glow was put on the most meagre of successes”.
• “Within the party, ‘pecking orders’ emerged and … ordinary members were seen as ‘foot soldiers’, while those from whom the orders flowed were raised to the heights.”

All of this had to be “tolerated” because the organisation was fighting for “nothing less than the very existence of the authentic Marxist tradition”. And, apparently, it was “extremely successful”. Organisationally, the SWP was cohered - it even grew - while around it once mighty rivals crashed and burned.

However, the comrades continue, the problem was that throughout the 1990s and the “political thaw” since, “the whole panoply remained - both the formula of high tension” (or, to put it more plainly, a semi-hysterical apparatus prone to screaming that even the mildest criticism of itself was “betrayal”) and “the list of undesirable tendencies” outlined above. By the mid-1990s, they tell us, these old ways were “presenting real obstacles to party-building”.

Thus, we saw “enthusiastic and valuable new recruits … being bullied out of the party by well-meaning but dour comrades determined to crush reformism”. Local initiatives were stymied by “the worst aspects of the pecking order”. Today, the upturn offers the tantalising prospect of the organisation reaching out to engage “literally millions”. Yet the resilience of the “old mode and manner of operation” is acting to negate the party’s potential and is actually “exacerbating the already low levels of recruitment, paper sales, activity and morale”.

Indeed, the extent of the problem is revealed by the membership figures (these comrades seem privy to information that others ask for in vain - see the plaintive call from Nick Bird in Bulletin No1 - “How many members do we have? How many papers do we sell?” Weekly Worker November 11). During the 1980s ‘downturn’, they say, the total actually supposedly grew to 9,000 registered members (real activists would have been far lower, of course). Today - because of the continued misplaced adherence to the old methods of work - that figure has been halved, with “possibly only 20% … in any way active and many of these are demoralised because, although they see the upturn, they do not see any gains on the ground. As a result whole areas and districts, let alone branches, seem to have gone to sleep or died.”

These old, rigidly bureaucratic methods of work must now be seen as what they are - an anachronism in this new, fluid period - and be “consciously broken with”. This change has become “extremely urgent”, given the dire state of affairs in the party. The “extreme tension, the distrust of debate, the subordination of party-building to exclusively campaign work, the pecking orders, rosy glow and dour manner all have to go”. Unless this happens, “an historic opportunity to wallop Labourism could be lost”.

The same comrades wrote about the “clash of the old and the new” in the pre-conference bulletin of 1997 and - as our readers will remember - also in the pre-conference discussion last year, where they complained of the “posturing” and “deference to status” endemic in the group, a supine culture that bred “passivity”. “Activity”, they wrote, amounts to little more than “snapping to attention in the face of authority” and then “sinking back” into languor (Weekly Worker November 6 2003).

The general thrust of the duo’s criticisms are echoed in the contribution from Scarborough branch (p18). Again, the comrades feel the need to tell readers that the “general perspectives and analysis of the SWP over the last few years has largely been borne out”. But now “internal life needs to adapt and become more vibrant”. What is needed is “an atmosphere where political and tactical debates are had openly, where criticism is seen as essential” - a crucial development if the SWP is going to be successful in not only sharpening up its own politics, but in “attracting wider, diverse, radicalised layers of people into the party”. The problem is that many of these types still see the SWP - “like it or not” - as “too top-down and with a political culture too closed to allow their ability to express themselves and learn”. Security is not an issue here, the comrades correctly state. Apart from the normal precautions a left political group habitually takes, “we seek to organise openly - debates and disagreement are necessary”.

Now, we can speculate on the real opinions of people like Martin Pitt, Anne Kenefeck and their rather more circumspect Scarborough comrades. After all, it is clear that raising criticisms in the SWP is, as John Molyneux puts it, “a highly disagreeable experience with little prospect of success” (Weekly Worker November 18). Perhaps comrades feel the need to hedge their criticisms with a loyalty statement to the effect that these anti-democratic measures were once needed, but are now outmoded by wider political developments.

If that is true, these dissenting comrades are profoundly mistaken and are actually propagating positively dangerous ideas in the movement. Effectively they are alibying the shameful regime of bureaucratic diktat that has been imposed for decades on thousands of sincere revolutionary militants in the name of ‘democratic centralism’, driving many to demoralisation and resignation and discrediting the very notion of Marxist organisation amongst wide swathes of advanced workers. Democracy in the SWP is not an uncontroversial afterthought that can be tacked on to the latest leadership organisational innovation. If these comrades are sincere, they must make a far more basic challenge to the historical shibboleths that inform the disreputable practice of today’s SWP.

Downturn, upturn

First, on the question of the 1980s ‘downturn’ that apparently excused the foul regime of censorship and witch-hunt in the organisation.

In truth, the rot set in much earlier. The group began to impose a creeping bureaucratic centralism on itself when - under its founder-leader, Tony Cliff - it made a late-1960s political lurch from its caricature version of ‘Luxemburgism’ to a caricature of ‘Leninism’. The autocratic regime produced by this precipitated a series of splits and expulsions in the early to mid-1970s (many of the smaller political sects that litter today’s left originate in this period of the SWP’s ideological cleansing).

Paradoxically, the source of this lay not in some over-jealous concern for political precision or clarity, but in the organisation’s general disdain for the very notion of a revolutionary programme. SWP leaders, Cliff included, routinely boasted of their freedom from programmatic constraints. This left the group open to profound political disorientation. During ‘normal’ periods, it plied a mundane version of left trade union politics and made abstract propaganda about the shiny socialist future. But unexpected lulls or violent storms produced impressionistic bouts of pessimism or spasms of ultra-leftism. The SWP had no programmatic ballast.

Thus, in the midst of the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 - a strategic clash of class against class - the SWP peddled pessimism and actively worked against generalising this epic struggle to other sections of the class. Remember, this year-long strike threw up miners’ hit squads, mass pickets, semi-insurrectionary battles in some pit villages, a nationwide network of support groups, the Women Against Pit Closures movement, massive international solidarity from the workers of the world, distinct ‘wobbles’ in the Thatcher regime, etc. Yet, grotesquely, it was dubbed by Chris Harman as an “extreme example of what we in the SWP call the downturn”!

Cliff had decreed that the whole period throughout the 1980s was one of retreat. Thus, even as the miners gallantly battled with the Tory government and the semi-militarised police outside power stations and in the pit villages, the SWP proclaimed that the period was more reminiscent of 1927 than 1925 - ie, agitation to generalise the miners’ strike by fusing it with the dockers, the railways, the Liverpool council and countless other such disputes was completely misplaced. Disgracefully for a supposed ‘combat organisation’ of the class, the SWP had declared the strike lost even as the miners were actually fighting.

This stripe of irresponsible defeatism, along with a deep-seated prejudice against programme, led Cliff to write that Trotsky’s Transitional programme was only relevant when there was “a situation of general crisis, of capitalism in deep slump”, and that many of the programme’s proposals - eg, workers’ defence squads - “did not fit a non-revolutionary situation” (T Cliff Trotsky: the darker the night, the brighter the star London 1993, p300). Of course, the miners of nine years before - not having the benefit of Tony Cliff’s erudite interpretation of the detail of Trotsky’s thought - had spontaneously created their own embryonic workers’ defence squads in the course of their bitter dispute. How careless of them …
Then everything was turned upside down. In late 1992, when the NUM was forlornly looking towards Tory MPs and the shire county set to save Britain’s remaining deep coal mining industry from Heseltine’s savage decimation, SWP megaphones began to blare the semi-anarchist slogan, ‘TUC, off your knees - call the general strike’ (to the initial incredulity of the rest of the left, who recalled the SWP’s disgraceful defeatism during the Great Strike).

Now, for Marxists the call for a general strike is accompanied by agitation - a critical dialogue with the masses - about the need for such measures as workers’ defence squads. In 1992 of course the SWP did no such thing. Its newly found radicalism was purely verbal and intensely self-centred. For example, Cliff wildly suggested that if the SWP had 20,000 or 30,000 members the mass demonstration in London in support of the miners would have been rerouted, parliament stormed and the government would fall. Mad stuff.

The years that followed saw Cliff rationalise his flip from extreme pessimism by taking a bumpy intellectual route back to Trotsky’s 1938 version of programme (not Lenin’s). Despite working class confidence and self-activity being at an all-time low ebb and revolutionary consciousness almost non-existent, Cliff decided that pursuit of even the most minimal demands was all that was needed to lay low the class enemy.

Cliff appeared to be suggesting that we were entering a period of imminent revolution: “Capitalism in the advanced countries,” he wrote, “is no longer expanding and so the words of the 1938 Transitional programme that ‘there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and raising the masses’ living standards’ fits reality again” (T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, pp81-2).

This sort of apocalyptic overstatement of the impasse of capitalism was misplaced in the 1930s: in the social and economic circumstances of the late 20th century, it appeared positively loony. Gerry Healy’s foam-flecked Workers Revolutionary Party of yesteryear could have sued for copyright … had not history already consigned that clinically insane sect to the grave in a myriad of fragments a few years before.
On May 1 1997 the SWP enthusiastically voted Labour and in the months following Blair’s parliamentary landslide its press carried silly articles suggesting the existence of a crisis of expectations that would soon see workers go onto the offensive. No explosion came. The Labour-induced crisis of expectations was clearly something that affected the left, not wider society, and within the SWP it produced an acute crisis of perspectives.

Blair’s delabourisation of Labour undermined traditional auto-Labourism (‘Vote Labour, but build a fighting socialist alternative’). At the same time the absence of any serious mass movement from below forced the programmeless SWP theoreticians and propagandists to make the most absurd and hyperbolic claims to bolster its increasingly zany perspectives. Lindsey German, for example, insisted in early 1999 that Blairism was characterised by crisis “in every major area of government policy”.

Therefore, even a relatively large sectional strike would pose the question of power: “It is increasingly obvious that even one major national strike or an all-out strike in one city would lead to a rapid crisis of Blairism and Labourism, as society polarised along class lines” (International Socialism No82, spring 1999, p35).

Of course, the yawning gap between SWP perspectives and reality continues to this day, manifest concretely in the overblown estimations of the Respect ‘breakthrough’. The obvious point to make about all of this is that the leadership appears inherently incapable of correctly elaborating a winning strategy for advanced workers in any particular period. In fact, its perspectives are subordinate to the aggrandisement of the SWP as a sect - not, as the central committee contribution to Bulletin No2 states, “the needs of the movement and the class” (p3).

But the more profound lesson to draw for those comrades calling for democracy to be introduced into the organisation is that these opportunist political zig-zags require an undemocratic regime that will ensure that leaders are not held to account for the palpable failure of the last set of perspectives. The membership has no programmatic standard to measure them against. That leadership itself is guided by a method shaped by intense impressionism and an appetite for quick organisational successes. This disastrous approach is articulated in its crudest form by Ben Drake of York SWP, when he writes that, “However correct a position, without a real live campaign it means nowt. Usually better to start with the campaign and write the policy to fit” (p19.) A politically sophisticated, independently minded membership would be a positive liability to the central committee and it has expended considerable effort to ensure that such an inconvenient layer has not developed.

This is what comrade John Molyneux points to (a little obliquely) when he writes the following: “Put it this way: just because the current general line of the party is correct does it matter if there are weaknesses in its democracy? Yes, because tomorrow the line, or aspects of it, may not be right and will need a flourishing democracy to correct it.

“I believe we paid a heavy price for the weakness of our internal democracy in the 90s and after [but not in the 1980s, comrade? - MF]. In this period, we persisted in the organisational tactic of splitting branches, which was based, in my opinion, on an exaggerated over-optimistic perspective, long after there was considerable evidence it wasn’t working. And this contributed significantly to our substantial loss of membership in these years [not to mention the potentially disastrous disorientation the SWP induced in any elements of our class that might have been paying it attention, of course - MF] … the climate was such that the difficulties and the membership loss were not even admitted” (Weekly Worker November 18).

Criticism

Having accepted the thoroughly false premise that the 1980s were indeed a ‘downturn’, comrades Pitt and Kenefeck expressly justify the repressive regime imposed on their comrades as a necessary evil. Foolishly, they write that criticism of the leadership during this decade or so “probably was” an “act of betrayal” (p16). This idea is, of course, totally at variance with what comrade Molyneux calls “the norm in the history of the socialist movement” (ibid).

For instance, for the bulk of their pre-1917 history, the Bolsheviks worked under extreme pressure from the tsarist regime. Arrest, imprisonment, torture, exile and death were often the fate awaiting Russian revolutionaries. In these conditions sometimes the formal aspects of democracy could not function properly. Eg, the organisation’s centre had to operate in exile, would appoint agents to operate as organisers in Russia and conferences and congresses were usually held in secret and abroad. Yet the substantive element of party democracy - the ongoing, open criticism of perspectives and the contention of different ideas was never suspended.

Take the aftermath of the failure of the 1905 revolution. Looking back on the period of reaction (1907-10) precipitated by this defeat, Lenin wrote in 1920: “Tsarism was victorious. All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counterrevolutionary sentiments” (VI Lenin CW Vol 31, pp216-7).

Indeed, Zinoviev subsequently wrote that during “this hard period” of reaction “the party as such did not exist” - it had “disintegrated into tiny individual circles” (G Zinoviev History of the Bolshevik Party p165).
I would venture to suggest that this was a rather tougher period than the one we faced - along with our SWP comrades - in the Britain of the 1980s. Yet what was the practice of Russian revolutionaries? Did they impose a gagging order on themselves? Did they attempt to take the external censorial regime of triumphant tsarism and replicate it in their own ranks?

In fact, the party saw sharp political battles during this period - carried out openly, in front of advanced non-party workers - and these political battles were instrumental in forging Bolshevism as the world historic revolutionary trend it became. Nor were they simply conducted against the other elements of the party, such as the Mensheviks, but within the Bolshevik faction itself. Prominent here was the struggle against the left liquidationism associated with such leading Bolshevik figures as Bogdanov, a struggle that produced Lenin’s tome Materialism and empirico-criticism. The separation - when it came - was thus not the result of “an organisational manoeuvre, but was the conclusion of a thoroughgoing ideological dispute in which counterposed perspectives were openly laid out” (P Le Blanc Lenin and the revolutionary party, New York 1990, p155).

And the purpose of this openness - even under the most trying and difficult of conditions for political work in general, let us recall - was the need of the class itself for political clarity. It would “show the workers clearly, directly and definitely two ways out … for the tactics of preserving (in storage cans) the revolutionary words of 1905-06 instead of applying the revolutionary method to a new, different situation …” (VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p406).

And yet our SWP dissidents tell us that the conditions of 1980s Britain demanded that, within the SWP, “any hint of division, any whisper of criticism, had to be dealt with decisively to ensure homogeneity” (Martin Pitt and Anne Kenefeck, p16).

Claptrap, comrades. If you want democracy in your organisation, you are going to have to make a rather more serious stab at identifying where the SWP’s bureaucratism came from in the first place.

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