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SWP expulsions and squabbles

butchersapron said:
The argument in a nutshell is that the leninism, the bolshevism that all western trot groups adopted was the post-1917 Leninism, that due to the situation necessarily had to develop centralising authoritarian structures in order to survive etc and that in the period before this the RSDLP was an a more democratic body that allowed internal argument and dissent, was characterised by open election and recall etc - all true, the pre-1917 bit i mean.

Critics then pointed to What is To be Done from 1902 to say that later authoritarianism was there all along - Lih's very influential book attempted to take an axe that idea and suggests that WITBD was itself an example of that open debate that bolshevism was centred on. There's been a debate over the last what decade or so over this - hence all this current stuff about real leninism (and regroupment this time with no mistakes!) The gaping hole of course, is what use is an open democratic body before the revolution if once the situation it says must and will come it becomes post-1917 leninism due to the demands of the situation? They can never square that circle, because they have to defend the actions of the post revolution bolsheviks up to 1928.

Don't really think there's any idealisation of the SDP behemoth as such just more a comparison with the modern day bolsheviks forms of organisation - i think it's based more on naivety as to how the SDP and its leaders actually worked than argument for an SDP type party.
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I mostly agree with that. But I wonder, is there less chance of an open democratic body turning into a disciplined party at the time of the revolution, than there is an introverted out of touch sect turning into a useful revolutionary vehicle attractive to a broad spectrum of the WC at said time? I doubt it, I think it’s more as Owen put it: “Being in a sect can be oddly cosy, reassuringly and stuffily familiar – to the point where any voices outside it are no longer heard at all.”​
 
kavenism said:
I mostly agree with that. But I wonder, is there less chance of an open democratic body turning into a disciplined party at the time of the revolution, than there is an introverted out of touch sect turning into a useful revolutionary vehicle attractive to a broad spectrum of the WC at said time? I doubt it, I think it’s more as Owen put it: “Being in a sect can be oddly cosy, reassuringly and stuffily familiar – to the point where any voices outside it are no longer heard at all.”
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Like the Manson Family.

Anyway, we're all autonomists now aren't we?
 
butchersapron said:
Like the Manson Family.

Anyway, we're all autonomists now aren't we?
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I don't see the ending making much sense either.

But a party and a sect are not the same thing. Historian Gareth Stedman-Jones wrote of the SWP's great-grandfathers, the perpetually splitting Marxist sects of late Victorian Britain, that it was not their sectarianism that got them ignored by the mass of the people. On the contrary, the fact that workers were not radicalised turned the far left organisations into self-contained sects, whose impotence was sublimated into aimless doctrinal righteousness. The question is, when political circumstances change, can a sect change into a party? Being in a sect can be oddly cosy, reassuringly and stuffily familiar – to the point where any voices outside it are no longer heard at all.
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We should be more doctrinally wrong to change into a party in these new political circumstances ?/?
 
Santiagotalk said:
The formation of a faction is constitutional. Expulsions would be a mistake.
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Didn't someone back in the thread take a look and found that the banning of factions was more of a SWP urban myth, than supported in the constitution? Maybe the opposition have found this too, and are prepared to take this loophole all the way to Mexico?
 
sihhi said:
But a party and a sect are not the same thing. Historian Gareth Stedman-Jones wrote of the SWP's great-grandfathers, the perpetually splitting Marxist sects of late Victorian Britain, that it was not their sectarianism that got them ignored by the mass of the people. On the contrary, the fact that workers were not radicalised turned the far left organisations into self-contained sects, whose impotence was sublimated into aimless doctrinal righteousness. The question is, when political circumstances change, can a sect change into a party? Being in a sect can be oddly cosy, reassuringly and stuffily familiar – to the point where any voices outside it are no longer heard at all.
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Is that Hatherley's bad history or Stedman-Jones's? If you consider the SDF the first Marxist 'sect' in British politics, they only had one split in the Victorian era. Not bad for 17 years.
 
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