SWP expulsions and squabbles

[audiotech]

You did say....

Doesn't surprise me that you're confused. Conflating psychological mumbo-jumbo with class. How does that work?

 

[brogdale]

Doesn't surprise me that you're confused. Conflating psychological mumbo-jumbo with class. How does that work?

Is that you saying it was a joke?

 

[barney_pig]

SK was it?

Yes

 

[Nigel Irritable]

So there are 67 branches on this list: http://www.swp.org.uk/meetingsandevents and we can assume a lot of branches haven't got their act together to advertise their next meeting. Shall we go for 100 branches in total? Ball park figure, for easy maths and probably an overestimate, which is the right direction to err in for assessing the question of a recall. This means the opposition needs 20. It's very hard to assess the significance of 6 at this stage. If that's 6 after lots of branches have discussed the question, then it's poor. My guess is, however, that as the loyalist line is 'carry on regardless', they won't have had the discussion in the vast majority of branches and thus the opposition are in fact off to a reasonable start.

If any of the 6 are SWSS branches, that's a probably a weakness, although I'm not sure of the relationship between SWSS and the SWP proper these days. I say this because I think the centre will be rule that SWSS branches don't count for this purpose. Morally, they would be wrong in doing so, but I don't think the constitution says anything about SWSS branches, which might provide an excuse.

I would tend to expect the CC to interpret each and every rule in a manner that's as unfavourable to the opposition as they can arrange. So we'll likely see defunct branches counted for these purposes and probably not SWSS branches.

 

[bolshiebhoy]

does that include swss branches?

no

 

[SpineyNorman]

Doesn't surprise me that you're confused. Conflating psychological mumbo-jumbo with class. How does that work?

Got to say that didn't make too much sense to me either. Of course the way we see things is heavily influenced by our class background but in my experience people of all classes can be victims of both naive optimism and debilitating pessimism. The forms that optimism and pessimism take (eg. to make a generalisation m/c students seem to be very optimistic about the ability of mankind to emancipate itself without the need for messy things like structural change) to vary across the classes but their existence is universal.

Personally I'm a left wing working class pessimist - I'm especially pessimistic when it comes to liberal structures - I think if we try and sustain them it will kill us all. I also have grave doubts about our capacity to transform those structures into something better but I don't think that's any reason not to try.

To rob a phrase from a famous Italian shortarse, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Doesn't surprise me that you're confused. Conflating psychological mumbo-jumbo with class. How does that work?

OK, now I have no idea what you're talking about and I suspect neither do you.

 

[SLK]

They're full of people who were radical for ten minutes in their youth, it would be a whole different kettle of fish trying to start a new career after decades as a leading member of a tiny political party.

Nicolai Gentchev was in the SWP for years, worked for them - now edits or produces Question Time (and was a financial journalist before that).
Seth Harman, so of Chris, earns a fuckload in IT.

Fair enough, bolshie is slightly wrong - loads of ex-full timers or even CCers become teachers - but they're materially better off than the CC of the SWP. The professor used to donate more than 90% of his salary to the SWP (that may have changed; I don't know).

 

[Nigel Irritable]

no

Interesting.

 

[discokermit]

Seth Harman

i really disliked this cunt when i was a member.

 

[The39thStep]

i really disliked this cunt when i was a member.

He turned up as a full timer in Manchester. Utterly dire.

 

[SLK]

No I think your right. Also while I may have had rose tinted specs at the time I don't feel the current CC has as much quality on it as it did 10 years ago and I think most of the membership knows it. With Cliff, Harman, Rees and German gone there is really only Callinicos left who has much intellectual authority (if that's a viable concept) as it did previously.

Said the same thing to bolshiebhoy the other day.

 

[bolshiebhoy]

i really disliked this cunt when i was a member.

Meet your brother. I fell off a table once laughing with someone who is now an ultra loyalist on the current debacle at how awful a creature he was. ironically comrade delta walked past and asked what we were so amused about and we couldnt tell him cause we we laughing so much and we knew he'd have to agree with us which would have made him feel awkward. Loathsome creature.

 

[bolshiebhoy]

Said the same thing to bolshiebhoy the other day.

Yes and I agreed. but you know what it's a a shit political argument we're all making. at some stage a new generation has to overtake the original LSE IS crew.

 

[SLK]

Meet your brother. I fell off a table once laughing with someone who is now an ultra loyalist on the current debacle at how awful a creature he was. ironically comrade delta walked past and asked what we were so amused about and we couldnt tell him cause we we laughing so much and we knew he'd have to agree with us which would have made him feel awkward. Loathsome creature.

Did you fall of a table with KM, or someone else?

Also on Seth Harman, I hated him because he just didn't appear human. I know lots of SWP members didn't appear human to the outside world, but he didn't to us! No personality. Also when I was 18, I got into a relationship (that started on a night I was flyposting with bolshiebhoy) with my district organiser, who was his ex. Oh, it goes on. Anyway.

 

[SLK]

Yes and I agreed. but you know what it's a a shit political argument we're all making. at some stage a new generation has to overtake the original LSE IS crew.

I laughed.

 

[SLK]

He turned up as a full timer in Manchester. Utterly dire.

Yes; the person I refer to met him as she was a student at Manchester University before later being a full-timer in London.

 

[bolshiebhoy]

Did you fall of a table with KM, or someone else?

Also on Seth Harman, I hated him because he just didn't appear human. I know lots of SWP members didn't appear human to the outside world, but he didn't to us! No personality. Also when I was 18, I got into a relationship (that started on a night I was flyposting with bolshiebhoy) with my district organiser, who was his ex. Oh, it goes on. Anyway.

No someone close to KM but not him. See I was so worried about the quality of our fly posting I didn't sense the imminent shenanigans going on. But then I never quite understood the sexual dynamics of the party, probably why I married a Tory.

 

[SLK]

No someone close to KM but not him. See I was so worried about the quality of our fly posting I didn't sense the imminent shenanigans going on. But then I never quite understood the sexual dynamics of the party, probably why I married a Tory.

Except you asked me the very next day why I went the wrong way on the Central Line!!

 

[discokermit]

a member of the national committee told me to stub out a fag on the back of seth harman's neck in the middle of a meeting, for a laugh, due to him talking such shit. i didn't but looking back i wish i had.

 

[SLK]

I don't think the national committee existed in my day. I remember being at NUS conference and about to speak and Seth Harman is telling SWSS delegates about our strategy - we're asleep - and after 15 minutes Pat Stack cuts in and says "this means..." and nails it in 2 minutes. Without exaggeration, Seth thinks HE nailed it given his attitude after a few drinks.

 

[The39thStep]

I was on the national committee in the 80s!

 

[redsquirrel]

then i apologise for that vile slur. must have you mixed up with someone else

There's an idiot called Kippa who is, still, a LibDem turd.

 

[JimW]

It's the SWSS role that really takes the cake, however you slice it. Argh.

 

[Random]

Promise you always Will Tell the truth to the class, though

 

[Fozzie Bear]

This is quite readable from Ben Watson/AMM: http://www.unkant.com/2013/01/ben-watson-where-did-swp-go-wrong.html

But still stuck with the whole let's fix it and do the SWP properly vibe.

Also this from Richard Seymour and others: http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/

 

[butchersapron]

This is quite readable from Ben Watson/AMM: http://www.unkant.com/2013/01/ben-watson-where-did-swp-go-wrong.html

But still stuck with the whole let's fix it and do the SWP properly vibe.

Also this from Richard Seymour and others: http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/

Odd piece - wrong on a number of factual things - the NF didn't win elections and the bits about Dunayevskaya are well off base - she was by all accounts as bureaucratic and domineering as Cliff or others, and as for "Back in the day, Cliff said he’s do the economics, Raya Dunayevskaya could do the philosophy" the economics that Cliff based his state capitalism on came direct from Dunayevskaya's economic work! The tone, for something that's supposed to have been (along with revolutionary history!) a key centre of spiraling anti-CC activity is pretty...well nothing, it's just a gossipy ramble ( i like gossipy rambles though) - as is their silence over the last 3 or 4 weeks. Years of attacks then when other people attack...not very much. Maybe that's a tactical thing, but that in itself would be some sort of capitulation wouldn't it?

 

[ska invita]

This is quite readable from Ben Watson/AMM: http://www.unkant.com/2013/01/ben-watson-where-did-swp-go-wrong.html

nonetheless an entertaining read
All culture is bourgeois!” she told me “The working-class only have politics.”

 

[SpineyNorman]

Do those who were around at the time think he's right about the reasons why the squads were expelled? (He says the CC was protecting itself against rival charismatic leaders) I'd always thought it was more about 'respectability' - that they were seen to be putting off the kind of people the SWP was starting to try and recruit.

 

[sihhi]

This is quite readable from Ben Watson/AMM: http://www.unkant.com/2013/01/ben-watson-where-did-swp-go-wrong.html

I agree with you it's readable but

Since reading an article in Rosetta Brooks’ ZG magazine in 1983, I was an avid reader of Pat Califia, the radical S&M lesbian from San Francisco. In 1989, I bought her book Macho Sluts. It included a badge with the title on it. When I wore it to a SWP branch meeting, I was told to take it off because 'sluts' was an abusive word for women. I tried to explain that wearing such a badge on a leather jacket when you were attending punk gigs was about psychic and sexual liberation, but I lost the argument. Many of criticisms of the SWP in the press at the minute ('misogyny', 'use feminist as a word of abuse', 'male-dominated', etc) fail to tell the full story, which is that, in politics, ideologies can become their own opposites. ....
Likewise, Lindsey German and Sheila McGregor brought a brand of 'feminism' into the party which was the opposite of Sheila Rowbotham’s. It was moralistic and oppressive. It fostered authority rather than subverting it. It demanded an eternal vigilance about 'sexism' on the part of male comrades which actually enforced a humourless respectability. It wasn’t liberation, it was a front on hypocrisy. Manipulative humbug. It had no inkling of a radical sexual politics, and could tell you nothing about your dreams and urges. If you talked about sex in this context it was 'sexist'. It droned on about 'farzends and farzends of working-class wimmin' in strangely-unlocatable 'working-class' accents, but it didn’t actually allow the oppressed to speak. We were being lectured.

It's so rambly, I don't actually get its point about sexual politics. The SWP never - not Cliff nor MacGregor nor German nor anyone - referred to women as wimmin.
I also suspect the idea that 'if you talked about sex in this context it was 'sexist'' is a massive exaggeration/lie.

I'd say Rowbotham's politics is more oppressive, by the early 90s it is celebrating the achievements of Olga Maitland as a woman in politics.