I used to love selling Socialist Worker! It used to feel good to be a part of the SWP. How times have changed.
Some real highpoints were the principled stand in defence of asylum seekers that the party fought hard on - this was around 1996 - 2000, when I was a relatively 'active' member. Then the anti-capitalist movement kind of exploded, the culmination (personally speaking) was Genoa, 2000. I was 28 at the time, and it was an incredible time politically. It really felt like revolution was on the agenda.
Then 9/11 came along. And the world changed forever.
But the roots of the crisis in the SWP go much deeper, and now the Owl of Minerva has taken wing, we have the luxury to contemplate on that. Tragically, the SWP have never really bothered to nurture a thinking, independent, intellectually robust membership. Maybe this was partly due to the alliance of national secretary Chris Bambery's Calvinism (in the ascendant in the 80s/90s) and Cliff's bubbling optimism, understandably together this alliance was undisputed throughout much of the 1980s. In hindsight however, we can see how the Cliff/Bambery alliance sowed the seeds of the current implosion of the SWP. 'The Elect' could get on with the important business of 'thinking' while the rank and file could get on with the doing.
Bambery's latest incarnation, the IST in Scotland, is tub thumping about the so-called 'morally bankrupt' bankers. Not sure exactly which part of Das Capital that analysis can be found - certainly not Volume 3. Maybe Bambery never read that far.
I joined the SWP in 1986, during the Wapping dispute, and while the Great Miner's Strike was still uppermost in people's minds, and quite understandably, the emphasis was always on 'activity.' I am sure a lot of us thought the revolution would be, essentially, quite a simple affair. I for one genuinely believed it was just a lack of will and effort on our part that would cause the revolution to go off course or fail to become incubated.
But at least, even then, back in 1986, the party had a bit of a drive at 'educating' the membership - a half-arsed attempt was made to get the 'comrades' to comprehend what was meant by 'a critique of political economy' but it was a bit like the blind leading the blind. Everything boiled down to getting people to swallow the one insight of Marx's of the 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall' - as if Capital was literally built around this (it wasn't).
This dove-tailed nicely with the whole trotskyist analysis that the only barrier to revolution was the putting in place of 'the right proletarian leadership.' Once the cowardly and craven trade union bureaucrats were swept aside, then the decent and principled leaderhip of the revolutionary party could take over the reins, and so usher in the era of socialism. If you look at the approach the SWP and most of the trotskyist left have to the critique of political economy, this analysis fits. Essentially, in the broadest outline, Trotskyism is Stalinism. Hence, I have to say, despite the fond memories and respect I have for some people in the SWP, its demise, like the collapse of the Berlin wall, is something to be celebrated...
Nothing about Marx's critique of the fetish of commodities is mentioned by the SWP, not really. It is given a bit of an airing every now and then by some PhD student in an obscure journal, but then to be fair this is a critique that is only really coming into its own in recent years, what with the renaissance in Hegelian marxism that is currently underway elsewhere - i.e., outside ofthe bloody SWP! Don't forget - Alex Callincos cut his teeth on Althusser. Callinicos hates Hegel! He will never broach that subject, although people like Esther Leslie occasionally get to pen an article, and the journal Historical Materialism is the place academics can wank off about esoteric stuff like that.
