Weekly Worker 633 Thursday July 13 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Fringe success

Tina Becker reports on 'The Marxism Fringe'

Summer Offensive 2006 Heads down We have broken the £10,000 barrier in this, the sixth week of our annual fundraising drive. I now have in hand £10,156 after an extra £2,069 came in from comrades. Particular thanks go to EB for her £250, CR for knocking £400 off his target, £250 from our comrade MM, JB’s £130 and £100 from TG. Also, well done to comrades who staffed stalls at Marxism, raising over £250. At roughly this point in last year’s campaign we actually had over £10,120 in and I was then making slightly squeaky noises to the effect that the campaign needed “urgent attention” over the following seven days. Again this year, I recommend that comrades get their heads down sharpish to make sure that the coming week sees the pace of the SO increase dramatically. Hopefully, I will come across a tad less ‘squeaky’ this year, however. Not only have we a relatively large number of reliable comrades with significant amounts still outstanding - people we are confident will stump up the cash - but there are also a number of projects that we are confident will yield results. We try to use the two months of the Summer Offensive to review the party’s work in the various business enterprises it runs and - if we can - to up their profile and make them more bountiful ‘cash cows’. Not always with runaway success in previous years, it must be said, but 2006 look like being a good one. Well done to all comrades involved in this important area of Party work. (....full article). Click here to download a standing order form - regular income is particular important in order to plan ahead. Even £5/month can help! Send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX Donate online:

The Marxism Fringe, hosted by the CPGB, is becoming quite a tradition. In this, its fifth year, just under 100 participants attended the five sessions we put on each afternoon - the best turnout so far. The theme of the fringe quickly turned out to be the need for openness and democracy in the workers’ movement - in clear contrast to the sect mentality and bureaucracy that reigns in the SWP.

However, our fringe events suffered somewhat from the fact that Marxism only really took off on Friday and fizzled out on Sunday night. A ‘victim’ of this late start was radical anthropologist Chris Knight, who opened proceedings on Thursday with an engaging talk on ‘Primitive communism and the SWP’. A real shame that only a dozen or so people were able to make it to this session, as Chris and his comrade Camilla Power touched on one of the most crucial subjects for revolutionaries: what makes us human. It is a subject that the SWP refuses to debate seriously.

On Friday, Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, gave his view on why the SWP still insists on describing the USSR as “state capitalist”. Judging by the poorly attended talk at Marxism on the subject, this is currently not a theoretical question of major importance to the organisation - but in the 1980s it was one of the defining characteristics of this sect and dissent with this ‘theory’ would probably still be considered grounds for expulsion.

Comrade Ticktin said that SWP adherence to this concept shows “theoretical laziness”, as clearly in the USSR there was neither competition nor money in any real sense. He was joined by CPGB members in his call for a ruthless examination of how the system worked, how it imploded and what we could learn from the experience in our fight to build a communist future.

The best attended meeting with over 40 participants was a discussion on ‘Bureaucratic centralism and the SWP’ on Saturday afternoon, in which Mike Macnair (CPGB) was joined on the platform by Simon Wells, a recently expelled SWP member. Comrade Wells explained how he was thrown out of the party for a number of spurious reasons (see Weekly Worker July 6), including “bringing the party into disrepute” after publishing a factual report of a Respect meeting on his internet blog.

Comrade Macnair outlined in his contribution the reasons why the SWP and other sects suffer from this bureaucratic centralism and stressed the need for a party that allows for real debate and factions to be formed. He was challenged by comrade Ticktin, who warned that the existence of factions might tend to produce splits. Other comrades disputed Mike’s theory that the leaders of political parties, sects or unions inevitably become members of the “petty bourgeoisie”, because the information and power they hold are a “form of private property in the means of production”.

On Sunday, Yassamine Mather (Critique editorial board) explained the need for genuine working class internationalism, in particular when it comes to the question of Iran. She criticised the SWP and its front, Action Iran, for being one-sided and promoting a view of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.

A similar theme was explored by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell in our final fringe meeting on Monday. He criticised the SWP for dropping the fight for the rights of gays and lesbians so as not to offend its muslim allies - the SWP gave in to George Galloway’s demand to omit gay rights from its general election manifesto in 2005.

As opposed to the main event, the fringe has become established as the place where open debate and controversy amongst the left is not seen as something embarrassing, but a vital tool in the fight for working class rule. If you missed it, be sure to come to Communist University (August 12-19, south London), where there will be a lot more of the same.

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