The other thing that happened in the 90s was that then-National Secretary of the SWP Chris Bambery started splitting the branches. The logic was impeccable, if the 90s were like the 1930s in slow motion, then we must organize like the Communist Parties did in the 1930s (in slow motion?). Of course the CPs were mass parties with deep roots inside the working classes of their countries. And nobody asked if maybe the CP model of organizing after the parties were fully subordinate to Stalin’s Moscow might not be more than a bit problematic. But, in either case, making branches tiny made them more reliant upon the full-timers for material support and made members even more isolated from each other. This tendency was deepened when branches were dissolved in their entirety at the beginning of the new decade in order to “break” the conservatism of the membership and push them into the movements. Now the only organized, active element within the party was the apparatus. The leadership had, in a Brechtian turn, dissolved an unworthy membership.
As I said, no one can escape history, not even Tony Cliff. Cliff understood that the 80s had made the party conservative and that it needed to be shaken up. But the effects of conservatism were not experienced solely by the membership and were, arguably, felt more acutely by the party machine. That distortionn explains why the cure for conservatism was directed solely at the membership. It was they who were the problem. The Party by now was the machine, what was needed was a better membership. Of course, we now see precisely what that means. And there’s no use pretending that this was a process that was resisted all along the line by the membership. Certainly there were individuals who were unlucky enough to attrack the tender mercies of the full-timers and the CC. I remember John Rees gleefully telling us how he had expelled some workers who were contemptuous of him. But the majority of old time cadre were committed to the IS tradition and to the party. They internalized this degeneration and outlook, having long since lost any memory of a different kind of organization in a different kind of context. It’s a bit like the Stockholm Syndrome or the way in which the oppressed internalize their own oppression
