SWP expulsions and squabbles

[Nigel Irritable]

I wonder who came up with the Marxism speakers open letter thing? As in, did one of them suggest it, or are they responding to a request from Oppositionists?

 

[butchersapron]

The canada thing suggest Kellog as he had written well early on this.

 

[butchersapron]

Kevin Murphy, Banaji and people like that are big big hits.

 

[J Ed]

It's just a Laurie Penny-style attempt to ground my argument in "someone I once met".

Look at it this way. I need a good kitchen knife. Once I've accepted that it needs to be sharp and the right size for me, why do I then need to agonize over exactly which brand to get? Why should all the knife sellers try to say that the other knives will actually turn in my hand and cut me? Although that analogy is probably true for joining the AWL, tbh.

Apart from the whole Middle-East thing why does everyone hate the AWL?

 

[butchersapron]

Hatherly for the kids.

 

[TremulousTetra]

no this is about a rape allegation and how the swp dealt with it not kronstadt

a topic of which I have no knowledge, having no involvement with the SWP for over 10 years. Already explained all this. see 3078. "Dammed if I do, dammed if I don't."

However, that topic has been used to make broader statements about Leninism et cetera .nowhere in the guidelines does it say I cannot question those statements.

 

[imposs1904]

Apart from the whole Middle-East thing why does everyone hate the AWL?

sean's poetry

 

[frogwoman]

a topic of which I have no knowledge, having no involvement with the SWP for over 10 years. Already explained all this. see 3078. "Dammed if I do, dammed if I don't."

However, that topic has been used to make broader statements about Leninism et cetera .nowhere in the guidelines does it say I cannot question those statements.

but this is nothing to do with kronstadt (altho some are making the link between organisational structures of the bolshevik party in 1921 and organisations which claim to be inspired by bolsheviks today) this is something tht has happened NOW, a crime has allegedly been committed, and that is what the thread is about. you dont seem to have a clue about what the thread is about except that the swp is getting a slagging

 

[sihhi]

Kevin Murphy, Banaji and people like that are big big hits.

Owen Jones won't be at Marxism 2013

 

[butchersapron]

sean's poetry

There's always a sly flash in there, that he is the one in control - i find it scary.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Snowball, late of this parish under a different name and much missed for his particularly unflinching dedication to whatever wheeze the CC were pushing this week, weighs in with a review of Seymour's book on Hitchens. He's much vexed by the drag of petty bourgeois individualism on certain SWP academics.

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/book-review-unhitched-by-richard-seymour.html

 

[butchersapron]

Owen Jones won't be at Marxism 2013

I wonder if they really are inviting people already, or he just got a bit excited. Fair play to him if they are.

 

[Oisin123]

Which everybody knows is stage managed - it's usually the case that the person making the appeal went round his or her mates/people from their region to get them to club their money together so they can make a big, impressive donation that will hopefully shame others into coughing up a bit more. Everyone knows it but at a certain level everyone still falls for it

Oh! You've just reminded me of a horrible experience. I was at the Militant summer camp in Ireland one year and they did this appeal. 'Does anyone in the audience pledge £100... anyone £50 ...' etc. It took forever, with rounds of applause for the bigger donations. I found out later they were mostly just I.O.U.s and effectively the repledging of subs. The whole system was really to encourage suckers like me to reach for a note instead of chucking some coins in the tin.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Apart from the whole Middle-East thing why does everyone hate the AWL?

Making themselves obnoxious to others on the left has been a central part of their political strategy for decades.

 

[butchersapron]

Snowball, late of this parish under a different name and much missed for his particularly unflinching dedication to whatever wheeze the CC were pushing this week, weighs in with a review of Seymour's book on Hitchens. He's much vexed by the drag of petty bourgeois individualism on certain SWP academics.

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/book-review-unhitched-by-richard-seymour.html

" this little book" he does't have the firepower to say this.

edit: good lord:

and there are some nice quotes from the likes of William Hazlitt and Isaac Deutscher on the situation post the French and Russian revolutions respectively, as former hopes were dashed by the rise of the likes of Napoleon and Stalin.

 

[imposs1904]

Owen Jones won't be at Marxism 2013

FFS, whoever's organising Recruitathon this year. Their timing for sending out invites is fucking awful. Two facepalms at least.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I was at the Militant summer camp in Ireland one year and they did this appeal.

We've long since ditched that style of appeal over here. They work, but they are a bit too in your face.

What were you doing at a Militant summer camp, by the way?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

" this little book" he does't have the firepower to say this.

Indeed he does not. It's like watching a kid wearing her mother's heels.

 

[butchersapron]

Actually that is really too depressing, someone whose went to uni at 18 and hasn't yet left arguing against seymour on basis of what would he know/he would say that.

 

[The39thStep]

Snowball, late of this parish under a different name and much missed for his particularly unflinching dedication to whatever wheeze the CC were pushing this week, weighs in with a review of Seymour's book on Hitchens. He's much vexed by the drag of petty bourgeois individualism on certain SWP academics.

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/book-review-unhitched-by-richard-seymour.html

Decca Aitkenhead ( mentioned in that review) used to work behind the bar in the Red Lion in Withington, Manchester. Never ever voiced her opinion on anything with any punter but obviously feels free to do so now when no one can answer back.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

FFS, whoever's organising Recruitathon this year. Their timing for sending out invites is fucking awful. Two facepalms at least.

Total insanity on the part of whoever is calling the shots on that. But imagine being the poor junior fulltimer who actually has to ring these people up.

 

[J Ed]

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/book-review-unhitched-by-richard-seymour.html

As a member of the SWP, buying this book is probably an expellable offence', I joked to the genial old guy behind the counter in Housman's bookshop in London the other day as I handed over money forUnhitched by Richard Seymour - the proprieter of the Lenin's Tomb blog, which seems to be currently devoted to trying to drum up both sales of Unhitched and supporters of the 'SWP Opposition'. The Housmans assistant didn't get the joke, which served for me as a timely reminder that for probably about 99% of the Left in Britain, 'Lenin's Tomb' means, well, the Lenin's Tomb

 

[The39thStep]

Apart from the whole Middle-East thing why does everyone hate the AWL?

smug liberal types

 

[sihhi]

Snowball, late of this parish under a different name and much missed for his particularly unflinching dedication to whatever wheeze the CC were pushing this week, weighs in with a review of Seymour's book on Hitchens. He's much vexed by the drag of petty bourgeois individualism on certain SWP academics.

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/book-review-unhitched-by-richard-seymour.html

I love how Lenin is the most important and outstanding revolutionary Marxist thinker after Marx.

It would be farcical now if Richard Seymour, who founded a blog called 'Lenin's Tomb' precisely to rightly provoke those with essentially petty-bourgeois and individualist prejudices against the most important and outstanding revolutionary Marxist thinker after Marx himself - ever ended up himself succumbing to the kind of hostile pressures he once so detested and still warns us against so eloquently and effectively inUnhitched.

Where is Engels? Third presumably. Trotsky number four and Cliff number five.

 

[The39thStep]

I wonder if they really are inviting people already, or he just got a bit excited. Fair play to him if they are.

Bad for his image more than any principles

 

[imposs1904]

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/book-review-unhitched-by-richard-seymour.html

"genial old guy"

ffs, has Max mellowed? That's more of a shock than the current crisis within the SWP.

 

[butchersapron]

Bad for his image more than any principles

I reckon they might coincide this time. That said, if he's not been invited and just wanted to jump on...

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I love how Lenin is the most important and outstanding revolutionary Marxist thinker after Marx.

Who would you expect, remembering who you are reading?

 

[William of Walworth]

Decca Aitkenhead ( mentioned in that review) used to work behind the bar in the Red Lion in Withington, Manchester. Never ever voiced her opinion on anything with any punter but obviously feels free to do so now when no one can answer back.

Not voicing opinions is reasonable enough in anyone working in or running a pub IMO ... I've had enough of the opposite from behind pub bars over the years to do without it ...

Suspect I'm missing some of your point though

 

[sihhi]

This is just weird from John Molyneux on that blog:

http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/john-molyneux-on-marxism-and-party.html

The main example of this is the international surge of more or less uncritical enthusiasm for Syriza in Greece, from the moment it became clear that it had a chance of winning a parliamentary majority. Other examples include the relative success of the Front de Gauche in France (compared to the avowedly revolutionary NPA), the Left Bloc in Portugal, Die Linke in Germany, the high poll results for the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark and the yearning often expressed for such a party in Britain (unformed because the people who could form it refuse to break with the Labour Party).

Of course the emergence and progress of such broad parties of the radical left is welcome in that it is a symptom and expression of the working class moving to the left, but those who counterpose such parties to the building of revolutionary parties and hail them as the main way forward are ignoring the tragic history of left reformist governments, most notably Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity in Chile in 1970-73, which ended in Pinochet’s brutal military coup, and the Popular Front government of Spain in 1936 which succumbed to Franco and fascism, as well as the historical experience of left reformism as a whole (Menshevism in Russia, Kautskyism in Germany, the Socialist Party in Italy in 1918-21 and many other examples. The fundamental weakness of left reformism, as Lenin emphasized in The State and Revolution, is its fudging of the need to smash the capitalist state as opposed to taking it over. As a consequence left reformist governments are either captured by the capitalist state or destroyed by it.

The necessity of an independent organization of revolutionaries – the hallmark of Bolshevism and much discussed in this book – to secure the victory of the revolution was hard won. Great revolutionaries such as Luxemburg and Trotsky fully grasped it only on the basis of the experience of both the First World War and the Russian Revolution. In the case of Luxemburg it is arguable that she paid with her life for not realizing it earlier; for Trotsky it was the main lesson of the success in October 1917 and the failure of the revolution in Germany in 1923. He wrote in The Lessons of October in 1924:

Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer. That is the principal lesson of the past decade…We have paid far too dearly for this conclusion -- with regard to the role and importance of a party in a proletarian revolution -- to renounce it so lightly or even to minimize its significance.

Clearly I subscribed to this view when I wrote this book. The question is have any of the numerous changes and developments of the intervening years served to invalidate this conclusion today. In my view absolutely not and, regardless of the prevailing ‘mood’ or sentiment, I believe that it will be confirmed in the struggles that lie ahead. Therefore, given the immense crisis facing humanity, it is essential that the difficult task of building mass revolutionary workers parties be persisted with.

John Molyneux, 22 January, 2013

Rosa Luxemburg might have been killed because she wasn't in a proper party.

I assume John Molyneux pro-Delta and anti-Opposition.