Weekly Worker 617 Thursday March 23 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Martin Smith and his telephone expulsion

As the latest case shows, any member who dares to question the Socialist Workers' Party’s political trajectory faces expulsion by telephone. Martin Smith’s regime is a disgrace and discredits the left in general, writes SW Kenning

We know enough about the thoroughly corrupt mindset of SWP apparatchiks to take a guess at how they will react to our exposure of the regime run by national organiser Martin Smith. Without any formal charges being laid, with no evidence being presented and no witnesses being called, without a formal hearing of any kind, he expelled comrade X - by telephone.

Comrade X was an active SWP member of three years standing, and is, of course, the latest in a long line of members who have been treated in a completely arbitrary, completely inhuman fashion. Incidentally the comrade asks to remain anonymous - a letter of appeal has been sent to the SWP central committee.

SWP apparatchiks will be outraged, but not by the way comrade Smith behaved. No, what will infuriate them is the fact that the Weekly Worker has openly reported it. They will froth at the messenger, not the message. In fact, comrade Smith’s outrageous contempt for basic democratic norms ought to be the concern of the entire workers’ movement, not simply the caste of SWP mandarins who believe that in their confessional sect they can do as whim dictates.

The SWP’s crassly undemocratic regime has a polluting impact on the culture of our wider movement. Given its relative numerical importance, these crimes taint us all, especially as other groups appear so coy about exposing and condemning them - perhaps revealing something about the nature of their own internal regimes, of course.

We express our outrage at the way Labour Party goons treated Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old Jewish escapee from the Nazis, who shouted “nonsense” as Jack Straw was speaking last September. But our commitment to democracy and free speech is put into serious doubt when the left, especially the SWP, treats its own dissenting voices in a way that is far worse. Tony Blair publicly apologised to Walter Wolfgang. Will Martin Smith do the same to comrade X? If the past is anything to go by, the answer is sadly obvious.

Besides reporting the expulsion of comrade X, we remind readers of two other examples of the SWP brand of ‘democracy’: the expulsion of the ‘permanent oppositionist’ Chris Jones, and the more recent case of Matt Kidd.

As he clearly implies in our interview, comrade Kidd’s brush with Martin Smith (who is to John Rees what Lavrenty Beria was to Joseph Stalin) not only left him personally wary about further involvement with the revolutionary left: it also acted to confirm many of the suspicions about the ‘democratic’ credentials of the left held by people around him.

This is ironic. The comrade’s original intention when he went onto the Urban 75 e-discussion board was, as he wrote, “to prove to people on [this list] that the SWP was in fact democratic, and I hoped this would change some ex-members’ minds” (see Weekly Worker January 26).

Now those of us with a more jaundiced eye may view this as a little naive, but it reveals that the SWP tops, just as they did with comrade X, have no compunction about doing over even loyal members who start to display worrying proclivities to critical or independent thought.

Outside the rarefied heights of the central committee, this means that a campaign is consciously waged to create an apolitical membership.

On one level, Martin Smith comes over as slightly deranged in his dealings with the young and inexperienced comrade Kidd. He took Matt to task for mentioning comrades’ names - but in a forum where these very same people had been previously mentioned by other SWPers. Clearly, what the SWP’s national organiser actually objected to was that these people were now being referenced in the context of a controversy that had broken out in the SWP conference. The fact that there might be a stirring of some sort of political life inside the organisation had been leaked, in other words.

This drive to depoliticise also explains comrade Smith’s seemingly loopy prohibition against members of one SWP borough phoning up members of another - something he blurted out in his terse telephone conversation with comrade X.

Given that SWPers should only be relating to each other as paper-selling droids, the sole communications the SWP leadership deem legitimate are those concerning technical arrangements around paper sales or meetings. Thus, phoning a comrade outside your immediate geographical area smacks of having something to talk about other than who’s bringing the pasting table to what street corner, at what time. It might - heaven forefend - imply the comrades are in contact because of a shared political outlook. And SWPers are seemingly banned from having those.

Chris Jones’s only crime at the time of his expulsion appears to be the simple fact that his critique of the crass economism of the SWP’s core politics took him into a similar political ‘space’ as the recently departed Revolutionary Democratic Group (which he later joined).

Judging by Chris Jones’s experience, it seems comrade X can expect little justice from the appeals process. It is disgraceful, but true, that he would probably get fairer treatment from a bourgeois court than he can expect at the hands of his SWP comrades.

As comrade X illustrates with the example of Chris Nineham, it seems common amongst a layer of the SWP bureaucracy to use ‘Weekly Worker’ and ‘CPGB’ as swear words in response to any political criticism from the left of the organisation. Fair enough. If these comrades really want to use us as a metaphor for adherence to working class principle on questions such as opposition to all immigration controls, that is their call.

There are figures within the SWP who have positioned themselves as internal critics on questions of party democracy. If their criticisms are to mean anything, actions like this latest crude policing measure against comrade X should be seen as a gauntlet thrown down to them.

For example, John Molyneux. This leading comrade has been - in SWP terms - highly critical in recent times of the unhealthy, stifling  culture that prevails in the organisation. According to the comrade, expressing “open disagreement [is] a highly disagreeable experience with little prospect of success” and complaining of the various measures which “deter dissent” (see Weekly Worker November 18 2004).

Unless those like comrade Molyneux protest when comrades such as Matt Kidd or comrade X fall foul of the SWP’s draconian regime, their claims to be committed to democracy will be seen as just hot air.

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