Life after the SWP?

[chilango]

Perhaps the last SWP thread?

Following on from this thread, it seems clear that the SWP is in its final thrashings around and if it survives it will be as a much more marginal group on the left.

This does raise a few questions, some of interest to the wider Left, others of a more trainspotting nature.

Will the rump turn into a deluded cult like the WRP, or hang on to a vestige of its tradition and try to reflect a little as to its future role like the SP, or simply dissolve and move on a la the IMG?

Given the SWP will no longer be able to dominate campaigns, protests etc as it did throughout the 90s and first half of this decade, will another group step on up into the void? ...or will DIY, grassroots organising blossom like a thousand flowers? or will protests, demos etc. fade away a little too?

Is it time for all the little rump Trot groups to give up the ghost, dissolve themselves and use their energies, experience and talent to try and create something more relevent, a "new" way of trying to create a better world? or is this throwing the bay out with the bathwater and when the recession really kicks in we'll see a resurgence in socialist ideas as organised by the SP or Respect or PR or whoever?

Does the death of organised Leninism in the UK hearld a new 68 just around the corner with a new New Left about to burst onto the scene, or is it all a busted flush?

 

[treelover]

A good question, undoubtedly the undoubted organisational skills and energy of the SWP cadres will mean smaller demos, events in the short term, indeed this is already happening as the SWP declines. I do wonder if libertarian sociailism, an idea whose time has surely come(though imo, not the same as DIY, RTS, etc) can step into the breach. I would hope a rediscovery of the UK non marxist/trotskyist, etc radical roots develops: The Diggers, The Chartists, (some) Radicals, The Luddites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalism_(historical)

James Maxton, Glasgow rent strikes, Post War Squatters Movement, even the impulse for the creation of the Welfare State and some marxist traditions now largely ignored by the left: such as the National Unempoyed Workers Movement in the 1930's. and less of the 'lessons of 1917', etc.

oh, and a massive decrease in identity politics.

 

[Das Uberdog]

Wow, the Chartists, Radicals and Luddites - "Radical"!

Let the Arts & Crafts movement of Yore lead us unto a New Age. I mean Olde Age.

 

[Bakunin]

Wow, the Chartists, Radicals and Luddites - "Radical"!

Let the Arts & Crafts movement of Yore lead us unto a New Age. I mean Olde Age.

I think you'll find the Chartists, for example, did things considerably more radical than Swappies ever have or are likely to, especially as the SWP seems to be on a (well deserved) slide into political meltdown at the moment.

To give one example, they actually stormed Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth and burned some of the Navy's ships. Which is rather more impressive than toddling about selling papers, methinks.

 

[butchersapron]

Forward to 1917 once more comrades!

 

[Bakunin]

Forward to 1917 once more comrades!

What, again?

 

[Das Uberdog]

I think you'll find that the prevalence of an actual social movement in a given period of time allows non-radical groups to do radical things which, given differing circumstances, would be entirely out of the question.

For fricks' sake - Jack Sodding Straw did more radical things in the 70s than the far left can do today - not because he was interested in achieving socialism.

lol - what do you think would happen if the SWP tried to storm the dockyards and burn down Her Majesty's ships, you moron? Fucking Revoluti-ooooon!?

Stupid anarchoids.

 

[Bakunin]

I think you'll find that the prevalence of an actual social movement in a given period of time allows non-radical groups to do radical things which, given differing circumstances, would be entirely out of the question.

For fricks' sake - Jack Sodding Straw did more radical things in the 70s than the far left can do today - not because he was interested in achieving socialism.

lol - what do you think would happen if the SWP tried to storm the dockyards and burn down Her Majesty's ships, you moron? Fucking Revoluti-ooooon!?

Stupid anarchoids.

Um, yeah, I wasn't actually suggesting that the SWP pop down to Devonport and set fire to one of the many nuclear subs that are there or anything. You do realise that, don't you? Although I would probably die with sheer mirth at watching the Central Committee attempting some actual direct action for once instead of sitting on the sidelines and smearing the practice as 'elitist.'

I was using it as an example, conversely, of what you define as a non radical group doing infinitely more than the supposedly radical (and probably soon to disintegrate) party of which you are a member.

 

[audiotech]

I think you'll find the Chartists, for example, did things considerably more radical than Swappies ever have or are likely to, especially as the SWP seems to be on a (well deserved) slide into political meltdown at the moment.

To give one example, they actually stormed Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth and burned some of the Navy's ships. Which is rather more impressive than toddling about selling papers, methinks.

That would have been 'physical force' Chartism. Not very sucessful then and certainly wouldn't be now.

As for other radical achievements? There were none as the Charter was rejected and the movement died. The Chartists also didn't include women's suffrage in their demands either, which was a bit of a disappointment, to women in particular, who had played a large part in Chartist activities.

 

[imposs1904]

That would have been 'physical force' Chartism. Not very sucessful then and certainly wouldn't be now.

As for other radical achievements? There were none as the Charter was rejected and the movement died. The Chartists also didn't include women's suffrage in their demands either, which was a bit of a disappointment, to women in particular, who had played a large part in Chartist activities.

Here, have another.

 

[audiotech]

Here, have another.

Bollocks again.

 

[liampreston]

Come on, there has to be another campaign for a new workers party SOMEWHERE.....

 

[audiotech]

Well what do you know.

The first pre-conference bulletin this year, over three decades later, says we have 6,155 registered members and 2,000 ‘unregistered members’,

It gets better.

Expressed in percentage terms (an increase of between 50% and 100%)

We have greater forces than the rest of the British revolutionary or even radical left added together, as indeed we did in 1977.

http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=3179

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Well what do you know.

Yep, the bombast and dishonest self-regard in that article is pretty amusing alright. Presumably it had to go in to sweeten the pill, given that the rest of the article puts the boot pretty thoroughly into both the party regime and the leadership's understanding of the united front.

The membership part is interesting when you put it alongside the statement in the Rees document that only about a sixth of the paper membership go to aggregates or branch meetings. That would mean about a 1,000 out of a paper membership of 6,000. Or numbers not all that dissimilar to the ones claimed by the WRP in the mid-1980s and the numbers who actually showed up to their meetings when the row leading to the split broke out.

 

[Udo Erasmus]

I am faintly astonished to see that some comrades on this thread don't know shit about the Chartists. Read some EP Thompson and get an education. SWP supporters rubbishing them could even read Paul Foot's last book on the vote.

Das Uberdog could take on board this comment of Leon Trotsky who had a higher opinion of the Chartists than he:

"All the fundamental problems of the class movement of the proletariat—the inter-relation between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity, the role of universal suffrage, trade unions, the significance of the general strike and its relation to armed insurrection—were not only crystallised out of the progress of the Chartist mass movement but found out their principled answer.”


The Chartists were the first independent working class movement in Britain, the left wing were almost certainly revolutionaries. For example, just down the road from where I live they attempted an armed insurrection, the aim of which was to set up a radical republic in S.Wales with the aim of spearheading an insurgency across Britain:

Thompson has a great passage where he describes a plan to blow up the cabinet and call for armed insurrection. One of the signals for the insurrection is that a piece of paper is torn in half, the first half is posted through people's doors. When they receive the second half they are to go for it.

The first half has "Demo" scrawled on it.
The second half "cracy"!

Incidentally, Marx and Engels had links with the Chartist movement (towards the end), and most of the activists in Britain who joined the First International in the 1860s saw themselves as standing in the Chartist tradition.

 

[Taxamo Welf]

if you go to the british library you can see a chartists cudgle recovered from one of their london demo's - big fucking bat basically

 

[imposs1904]

The membership part is interesting when you put it alongside the statement in the Rees document that only about a sixth of the paper membership go to aggregates or branch meetings. That would mean about a 1,000 out of a paper membership of 6,000.

If it's the case that only 1/6 of the membership is actually going to branch meetings or aggregates then can people seriously say that the SWP is truly a Leninist organisation?

Genuine question.

 

[audiotech]

I am faintly astonished to see that some comrades on this thread don't know shit about the Chartists. Read some EP Thompson and get an education.

I did and read many books on the subject.

It was indeed the first independent working class movement, but the Chartists didn't succeed in winning any of the six points laid down in the Charter, so it's aims were not achieved. You cannot get away from that fact.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

If it's the case that only 1/6 of the membership is actually going to branch meetings or aggregates then can people seriously say that the SWP is truly a Leninist organisation?

Genuine question.

I think that if Rees was wrong about the numbers at the aggregates etc, we'd have heard a pretty strong denial by now. He is in a position to know and his opponents are too.

To be clear, he said that a sixth of the membership were at the pre-conference aggregates. That would presumably mean somewhere in or around a thousand people. He also said that similar numbers attend branch meetings. Now, taking the most optimistic approach to this (from an SWP point of view) we can assume that this isn't meant as a figure for the number of people who ever attend a branch meeting but instead is the number of people who attend a particular week's meetings. It's not clear that's what he meant, but let's take it that way for the sake of argument.

That would put the SWP's active or semi-active membership at somewhere between 1,000 and perhaps 2,000.

The term "Leninist" is to put it mildly a contested one and it's far from clear that some of the things that word is used to mean have very much to do with the views of Lenin himself. But if we are to take one of the more common interpretations of the term as it applies to organisational matters, a party in which all members are presumed to be active in the party's structures and wider activities, then no, the SWP as it appears in this document wouldn't fit the bill.

 

[belboid]

It was indeed the first independent working class movement, but the Chartists didn't succeed in winning any of the six points laid down in the Charter, so it's aims were not achieved. You cannot get away from that fact.

Well, five of its six aims were eventually achieved, in part thanks to the ongoing efforts of organisations that came out of the Chartists.

It seems odd that the SWP seemingly don't rate the chartists, they did in my day, but these things change so rapidly. Actually learning a bit of history might do them some good, or they'll likely repeat the kind of guff DU comes out with. Again, and again, and again.

 

[mk12]

I did and read many books on the subject.

It was indeed the first independent working class movement, but the Chartists didn't succeed in winning any of the six points laid down in the Charter, so it's aims were not achieved. You cannot get away from that fact.

The Bolsheviks didn't achieve their aims. But you and Das Uberdog aren't quite as dismissive of their history as you are about the Chartists, are you?

 

[imposs1904]

The Bolsheviks didn't achieve their aims. But you and Das Uberdog aren't quite as dismissive of their history as you are about the Chartists, are you?

Ouch. Direct hit.

Want another box, mc?

 

[audiotech]

Well, five of its six aims were eventually achieved, in part thanks to the ongoing efforts of organisations that came out of the Chartists.

Yes, like the trade unions etc. I'm not disputing that.

 

[audiotech]

The Bolsheviks didn't achieve their aims. But you and Das Uberdog aren't quite as dismissive of their history as you are about the Chartists, are you?

We got paid MP's, the trade unions and the ballot thanks to the Chartists, god bless 'em.

Ironically, most of the things you and your ilk now despise.

 

[mk12]

I think we have a lot to thank them for, including the list you provided.

 

[audiotech]

I think we have a lot to thank them for, including the list you provided.

The Guardian?

 

[HackneyE9]

I'd put What's Going On?, Mark Steele's account of losing his wife and leaving the SWP, on any Swoppie's Xmas list.

Good read.

Digested summary: "When I joined the SWP, I was 17 and about five years younger than everyone else there. When I left the SWP, I was 45 and about five years younger than everyone else there."

 

[Taxamo Welf]

If it's the case that only 1/6 of the membership is actually going to branch meetings or aggregates then can people seriously say that the SWP is truly a Leninist organisation?

Genuine question.

i like the way you think - and i'm an anarchist

(the swp is not a proper vangaurdist group, its a fudge between The Party and the 'mass organsiation' - hence the oft cited 'clueless SWP member just said to me...' situation.)

 

[Fisher_Gate]

... Jack Sodding Straw did more radical things in the 70s than the far left can do today ....

Oh no he didn't. (well it is the panto season).

What's your source for this, because like most of your musings there ain't a shred of truth in it?

 

[chilango]

A thread about the future already descends into bickering about the past.

*shrugs*

So what will happen next then folks?