This is an interesting thread to have dragged from the Urban 75 basement archive store. Interesting to see what everyone was predicting back in 2008 compared to what has happened. The predicted "final thrashings" of the SWP have indeed turned out to be VERY prolonged- but then those of the WRP were long and embarassing too. Can anyone really doubt that the SWP is now in its "death-rattle stage " though - even if that is likely to be a painful stage of expulsion-wracked madness and delusion, many more years long ?
Equally interesting to see the utterly mistaken illusions those all-knowing critics of all things Socialist, Marxist or Trotskyist, like the 39th Step, had in the"unstoppable" political growth model of the BNP back in those ancient 2008 days, before the BNP also spectacularly splintered and crashed to earth, as the demands of the post 2008 Crisis showed that "community-focussed bigotry and petty nationalism lite" politics also wasn't sufficient to break the current mould of UK politics - not yet anyway:
eg, The 39th Step's predictive wisdom in Dec 2008:
"The revo left groups will survive , preserved in the aspic of 1917/1968 ,albeit smaller and more and more pushed to the margins even further from the working class. The SWP isn't going to collapse and disappear allowing some imagined non Bolshevik tradition to flourish. In that sense the SWP isn't the problem its the failure of the non Bolshevik left to actually put its time and effort into a pro working class project, a sort of left wing BNP".
Maybe deleting " left wing BNP" and citing "Syriza" as a potentially useful new model for the radical Left would make the above quote stack up more believably today. (There is of course no genuine, progressive, "left wing version of the BNP" in any meaningful sense. The "Left wing" version of a fascist or neo fascist party is simply a form of radical , nominally "anti-capitalist" "Strasserism" , ie, building an opportunist political movement on the capitalist- ideology-soaked bigotry of some sections of the poor White Working Class segment of the wider Working Class . Such a movement, divorced from specifically internationalist Socialist politics, is always reactionery). Can't see people like 39th Step doing that particular "reality update" though - as it would require taking on board radical socialist politics again as the core of any such new mass movement.
