LENIN'S TOMB: The crisis in the SWP, part II

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The crisis in the SWP, part II posted by Richard Seymour

I arrived at a crowded Hammersmith pub, late, on 4th January. The area reserved for the Democratic Opposition meeting was teeming, and rowdy.

Since I had joined the faction, the CC had responded to it by denouncing it for being 'inward-looking', and for lacking any clear politics. This was easy for them to say when they knew the faction, out of respect for confidentiality, had to be very circumspect about the reasons for its existence. They knew that most members wouldn't understand what it was about, until the discussion happened at conference. As regards the main concrete point of reference of the faction, the expulsion of four members, the leadership said it would seek the backing of conference for the expulsions. This suggested a weakness in itself. In addition to all this, a second faction had been formed, the Democratic Centralism Faction (DCF), which existed primarily to stave off a deadly conflict. It asserted a principled solidarity with the CC's defence of democratic centralism, raised no fundamental issues with the party's democracy, but owned up to some concerns about the Disputes Committee, and warned that it would do no one any good if the CC rallied a majority to 'smash' the radicals of the Democratic Opposition (DO).

There was also a small number of people who wanted to split as soon as possible. A well-known, charming and rather boyish comrade sat in a pub explaining to several of us where the organisation was headed. He was convinced that the party couldn't be saved, and didn't deserve to be. He thought that there was likely to be a mass exodus of members and that the radical minority should leave now, and hold up a neon sign pointing to a new organisation. It was clear he thought that Counterfire and ISG had something to offer. Pleasant and insightful as he was, most of us thought his strategy wouldn't work, and we had no particular desire to go chasing after the two groups that had just split from the party. If the critique of the leadership was partly that it was undemocratic, the leaders of those split-away organisations hardly had clean hands. We made a point of opposing and attacking that strategy wherever we could.

Finally, the CC split had become open. Two of the dissenting four had seemingly recanted their support for the expulsions. For this and possibly other reasons, they were dropped from the CC slate. The other two CC dissidents said that they wouldn't want to serve on the new central committee if conference voted for the new slate. So, the faction had actually started to do its job; it had helped prise open the divisions in the CC and activate its brewing crisis.

At the meeting, then, were many well-known party hacks, a large DCF contingent, and dozens of DO supporters. The hacks had mainly turned up to declare their befuddlement that anyone would set up a faction, and bemoan the 'lack of trust'. A younger member professed what sounds like genuine confusion about what the faction was for. He said it sounded like "hysteria and bollocks"; the CC supporters smirked. I was constantly irate, tutting and rolling my eyes. A nervous looking full-timer, known to be sympathetic to the CC dissidents, spoke to say that "whatever happens, comrades, after conference we must draw a line under this, there's too much important stuff coming." Even then, he was pissing in the wind.

An older member, who had seen the days of the old International Socialists before it became the SWP, recounted that expulsions weren't always this summary. Back in the Seventies, a member who, it had been discovered, was probably a SAVAK spy, was, far from being expelled immediately, given a fair hearing and thorough investigation - and was then expelled. A student member recounted how the bullies had treated young members in her branch. A CC member, flapping her hands in a characteristic gesture, rose to explain how shocked - shocked - she was that these four members of the party had engaged in these secret Facebook discussions, "because I think loads of members would have loved to have taken part in those arguments". Really? You really wanted those members to tell anyone who would listen that the CC of which you are a member has been involved in the cover-up of serious allegations of sexual abuse in the party?

I was supposed to give a short speech, summarising the key themes and making some broad strategic points. I had written the following notes:

1) The CC want to legitimise the expulsions by winning majority support for them at conference. I think this is a sign that they know they're exposed and many people are concerned by it. But I just want to say this - even if they win that vote at conference that is not the end of the matter for us.

2) We should utterly disregard the accusations of being inward-looking. There is no firewall between internal organisation and politics beyond the organisation. Such a claim is profoundly at odds with historical materialism. Democracy in the party is a political issue. For example, one of the few gains for the party in recent years has been the recruitment of a large number of students. This is what we should expect, because students were the first to get shafted by the coalition government, and the first to fight back. It was their revolt that gave confidence to trade unionists to start fighting for a mass strike. So why should it suddenly be that these very same comrades are now all too often under attack in the party, being bullied, taunted with the stigma of 'autonomism' and 'creeping feminism'? How could this party be ready to destroy one of our few significant gains? It is because there is a fundamental problem with party democracy, a fundamental problem with party culture, and a manifest problem of party corruption. And the student members were among the first to see that, and to be ready to fight it. That's why party democracy is a political issue.

But while I'm at it, let me just mention my view that the CC is in no position to lecture about broader strategies and tactics. I think they're in a state of denial. Their first IB contribution claimed the government was struggling to get austerity passed - it isn't. It's being expedited by all three parliamentary parties, and to an extent the trade union bureaucracy. They think they have a strategy for building a rank-and-file fightback, and extol UTR to the heavens for its role in this. Let us not be churlish. UTR has some accomplishments, but a well-attended meeting in central London and 160 trade union branch affiliations is not the beginning of a rank-and-file recovery. There is no rank-and-file movement. And we have to ask why 2012 was such a bad year for the working class, why our strategy yielded so little, and why in general despite over a decade of radicalisation - so says the CC - the party hasn't really grown. The CC don't have the answers to those questions. Democracy is a precondition of having a proper debate about this, and facing political reality.

3) In order to concretise our position in this fight, we have to advance some positive demands beyond opposing the expulsions and rejecting the findings of the Disputes C ommittee. It will enable us to be heard more audibly, giving definition to our queries about party democracy and culture. I suggest three things: a) issues affect us all year round, they merit party discussion all year round - we need regular intra-party communications, whether in the form of IBs or something else; b) issues and perspectives are apt to suddenly cause divisions at any point and their duration isn't fixed by an annual calendar. We should get rid of the ridiculous ban on factions; c) I don't know about you, but I'm long past the point where I could say, 'at least the slate system works'. Forget if you like the destabilising splits led by prominent CC members over recent years, the fact that after prolonged and bitter faction fights on the CC that were concealed from the members, we have seen dozens of members walking out behind a defeated faction. But just in this conference alone, we have an official slate that two of its proposed members don't want to be on! If it wins, they say they'll resign. Why? Because the CC is divided. Because the idea that the slate system secures unity, cohesion and accountability is a joke. Because there isn't an argument for the damned thing that doesn't proffer a bleak satire of the state of the organisation as it now exists. It's time to try something new.

4) There is inevitably a lot of rethinking prompted by moments like this. And just as inevitably, there's a backlash against this rethinking, as a departure from consecrated orthodoxy. I think it's quite natural in many ways that radicalised students would be among those doing the rethinking, while seasoned full-timers would be its bitterest opponents. But not only do we have a right to debate and discuss these issues - it is an absolute necessity to engage in the debates *as they are happening today*. Whether the issue is feminism or something else, the discussion cannot be shut down by directing people to conclusions reached in thirty year old polemics. And nor can it be managed by talking reverentially about 'our tradition' - a living tradition is open-ended, developing, susceptible to adaptation. Only dead traditions are closed to development.

5) The CC's response to us, from the incredibly crude expulsions to the statement put out yesterday, and all the slightly desperate editorialising appended to our faction statements, indicates that they think they can deal with us by 'smashing' the opposition. They triumphantly circulate their list of signatories. But we shouldn't be impressed by this. They didn't expect two dissenting factions; they didn't even expect one. The dynamism has been entirely on our side thus far. The crisis is theirs. But this doesn't mean we should be bullish or over-confident. Rather, whatever happens at conference tomorrow - and we may not win the votes we're focusing on - we have to be ready to dig in for the long haul. We have to be ready to fight. Don't think if we don't win tomorrow, it's all over - it isn't. And the CC should know that about us.

That wouldn't have been a five minute speech, admittedly. In the end, I spoke from the floor and made the second and fourth points.

Not long after I spoke, a young member from Leeds told the CC's loyalists, in effect, to STFU and GTFO. When a CC member protested, he told her to "shut up". This wasn't, tactically, the wisest thing to say. The point was the entirely legitimate one that the loyalists had taken up enough time and now the faction wished to caucus. In fact, the loyalists had been increasingly taking the piss by interrupting speakers and not going through the chair. Still, the comrade chose to tell them to STFU and GTFO. The astonished gasps and looks of affront were a gift. We caucused.

The fact is, I didn't really need to have made my speech. I wasn't saying anything that people didn't know. The students, it turned out, were miles ahead of me and every other presuming old git. Their speeches were crisp, politically lucid, tactically sharp. They fully understood the responsibility they were undertaking. Contrary to what some might have feared, they had no desire to fly off in ultra-left directions, or simply resign the party if they didn't win overnight. They were digging in for a long fight. The CC were not, or not quite. They seemed to think that after a close thing at conference, they would return to normality. The opposition would be crushed. Branches would be told to shut up the heretics. The full-time apparatus would be expunged of doubters. The party's publications would extol unity, unity, glorious outward-looking unity. And peace would be restored. From all appearances, they genuinely did not expect what was coming.