SWP expulsions and squabbles

[sihhi]

a lot of the people who go to strip clubs really do seem like the scum of the earth.

Here's a tip: they start probably tolerable maybe a bit iffy, but get worse reaching the level you describe.

 

[Fedayn]

(emphasis mine)

I've long suspected that you've been posting from a parallel universe, this just confirms it. It's obviously a completely inverted universe where the SWP doesn't have an appallingly undemocratic culture and malleable political principles AND Dermot Connolly actually has social skills.

I shall now call it bizzaro-world.

Funny how when folk leave the CWI how often we find out from people still in the CWI that those who left are are lacking personal skills.....

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

A Lucas Plan would be ideal, but I can't be vehemently against anyone who justs want to see the places shut down, the poles used as anything else - bannisters, gates, abstract art - and those sites being given back to the community male and female - young and old alike.

I know where you're coming from but the needs of the workers must have equal weight to those of the community in my opinion.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Funny how when folk leave the CWI how often we find out from people still in the CWI that those who left are are lacking personal skills.....

A bit like when ex-SWP members are said to lack political understanding?

 

[TremulousTetra]

the fact of the matter is this. The SWP clearly stated their position. Of all people, of all people you would think students would read. There was no proof, absolutely none of a Machiavellian tactic to let the SWSS students believe a load of bollocks. there is nothing in their actions that the SWP cannot explain from a different perspective from the one Norman gave.

 

[Fedayn]

A bit like when ex-SWP members are said to lack political understanding?

Probably very similar.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Funny how when folk leave the CWI how often we find out from people still in the CWI that those who left are are lacking personal skills.....

Have you ever met Dermot?

I've never heard of anyone suddenly recast as a charmless oaf when they leave. I have heard the occasional zealot badmouth someone unfairly in retrospect, but that would generally be about politics.

 

[TremulousTetra]

It is hard fact. I don't need statements - statements only give you the SWP in theory, and I've been clear from the start that they're against ID politics in theory. We can't judge their actions by what they say can we? So statements are irrelevant. They won't tell you anything. Instead, to judge the SWP in practice, we must look at what they do in practice. I therefore present to you as evidence: Respect and UAF.

ok explain how Respect and the UAF [ also, is to UAF distinct in your eyes from the ANL Mark one and two)prove this;

It definitely is/was identity politics - you only had to listen to the justifications to know that. This is where some of the problems with their student membership comes from IMO (although BB is exaggerating it like the worst kind of hack it is true that SWSS is full of identity politics crap). Their politics in theory (against ID politics) just doesn't fit with their politics in practice. So for a long time it suited them for younger members not to understand their theoretical tradition. And now the CC are using this - something of their own creation - as a stick to beat people who don't like botched rape investigations with.

 

[sihhi]

I know where you're coming from but the needs of the workers must have equal weight to those of the community in my opinion.

In which case hiring at other workplaces must be increased. I mean if the 'community' was able to exert pressure to defend and increase jobs locally then 'my strip club right or wrong' would soon disappear. If the 'community' is simply a religious backlash movement saying no more strip club, no more wages, no training, no jobs, crocodile tears - then yes something is wrong.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

In which case hiring at other workplaces must be increased. I mean if the 'community' was able to exert pressure to defend and increase jobs locally then 'my strip club right or wrong' would soon disappear. If the 'community' is simply a religious backlash movement saying no more strip club, no more wages, no training, no jobs, crocodile tears - then yes something is wrong.

Unfortunately the 2nd option is the more common isn't it?

Though I do remember a campaign in Haringey years ago which combined both sets of demands...

 

[sihhi]

it was mostly ther Feminist Fightback lot, wasnt it? A right mixture, but with some decent socfems in it. Or they were till the AWL started digging their claws in...

Are the AWL big in Sheffield at least within the left/progressive groups?

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Are the AWL big in Sheffield at least within the left/progressive groups?

They do have a small but active presence

 

[Fedayn]

Have you ever met Dermot?

I have yes, a fair few times, never had a problem or found him difficult.

I've never heard of anyone suddenly recast as a charmless oaf when they leave. I have heard the occasional zealot badmouth someone unfairly in retrospect, but that would generally be about politics.

I joined in 1987, i've heard it a fair few times since.

 

[TremulousTetra]

Grrrrr, so are you saying people like, hate to name names, Colin Barker know that what they say about identity politics, doesn't fit with their actions in Respect and the UAF?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I have yes, a fair few times, never had a problem or found him difficult.

I suspect you haven't had enough dealings with him yet. Give it some time.

 

[sihhi]

Unfortunately the 2nd option is the more common isn't it?

Though I do remember a campaign in Haringey years ago which combined both sets of demands...

Not very well based on how many jobs are being lost now.

In Hornsey Crouch End later there was an existing nightclub trying to turn adult that was blocked.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

I suspect you haven't had enough dealings with him yet. Give it some time.

Sounds like something someone would say about someone they had a slow falling out with to be fair

 

[TremulousTetra]

It definitely is/was identity politics - you only had to listen to the justifications to know that. This is where some of the problems with their student membership comes from IMO (although BB is exaggerating it like the worst kind of hack it is true that SWSS is full of identity politics crap). Their politics in theory (against ID politics) just doesn't fit with their politics in practice. So for a long time it suited them for younger members not to understand their theoretical tradition. And now the CC are using this - something of their own creation - as a stick to beat people who don't like botched rape investigations with.

so why did it suit the CC for their own members not to understand their politics?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Sounds like something someone would say about someone they had a slow falling out with to be fair

I didn't have a falling out with him, because that would entail liking him in the first place. I had and have respect for him. He's very sharp. But that's an entirely different issue to my opinion of him as a person.

 

[belboid]

Meanwhile, the CPGB/WW in its desperation to have a go at the Socialist Party failed to notice that the SP's rather peripheral connection to an allegation of domestic violence in the RMT had already been severed.

http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/16319

Just read that CPGB article. You'd have thought they'd update it to clarify the point they admit they're unclear on!

But, the best bit, was when I read that Taafe still gets to say 'sects on the outskirts of the labour movement'

 

[sihhi]

They do have a small but active presence

Are they still with Labour or not - it's hard to tell these days.

From 2010:

AWL are one step ahead of them. Of 20 people at the South Yorks LRC meeting the other day, 8 were from them! I dont know who to feel more sorry for

 

[belboid]

Are the AWL big in Sheffield at least within the left/progressive groups?

They do have a small but active presence

small and very irritatingly active, fuckers get everywhere. Cant be more than...eight? Tops. But they keep themselves bloody busy.

edit: maybe a couple more than eight then, given that quote from me above...

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Just read that CPGB article. You'd have thought they'd update it to clarify the point they admit they're unclear on!

But, the best bit, was when I read that Taafe still gets to say 'sects on the outskirts of the labour movement'

AWL are a suburb, the SWP a commuter town, and the anarchists are an illegal shanty town under the main flyover out of the movement.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

small and very irritatingly active, fuckers get everywhere. Cant be more than...eight? Tops. But they keep themselves bloody busy.

In Newcastle there is one of them, but he does enough for ten people (nice bloke as well as it happens).

 

[belboid]

AWL are a suburb

Broomhall...

 

[J Ed]

In Newcastle there is one of them, but he does enough for ten people (nice bloke as well as it happens).

Do they give them base or something? It would explain a lot...

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Do they give them base or something? It would explain a lot...

I would believe it

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Just read that CPGB article. You'd have thought they'd update it to clarify the point they admit they're unclear on!

Facts have always been secondary to sectarian point scoring in the Weekly Worker.

But, the best bit, was when I read that Taafe still gets to say 'sects on the outskirts of the labour movement'

Well, he still got to say it 16 years ago. That's quite possibly the last published use of that famous catchphrase. Certainly, by the time I was in London I never once saw it or heard it except when people were making self-parodying jokes.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

I had sects on the outskirts of Romford once

 

[ayatollah]

You are right. As someone pointed out to me the other day, both factions involved in the SWP dispute are claiming impeccable Leninist credentials! I was an easily impressionable youth in the 1980s, and with the benefit of hindsight now, I can see that the 'theoretical brilliance' of the SWP was really cribbed from an incredibly limited tunnel vision of what Marxian ideas were - essentially Tony Cliff's volumes on Lenin plus a boilerplate critique of political economy, fashioned in the first instance by Kidron, then polished up in the later years by Harman. There was never an attempt to borrow down into the philosophical underpinning of the ideas in any meaningful way. This hysterical obsession with 'activism' and 'building the party' has partly lead to where the SWP finds itself today: a sinking ship without a rudder.

If there is to be a renaissance of Marxian ideas, it has much more to gain from the Luxemburgist tradition of the IS, when ideas could be more wide ranging and not what followed after Cliff's putsch in the mid 1970s. But the concept of tolerance and pluralism is seen as a weakness in SWP la la land.

I think you make some very pertinent points here , Sean Delaney. Although I obviously read Cliff's "Lenin" books at the time like a true believer, Its only been really whilst reading some of the better stuff put up, or re-put up on the blogosphere, criticising/reevaluating Cliffs role and legacy, that I've quite grasped just how much Cliff obviously thought he was directly "channelling" Lenin. So just as Cliff always claimed that, though a solid bourgeois in origin, Lenin could somehow tap into the entire working class mindset from moment to moment (!) he, Cliff, thought he could pull off this spooky trick too ! and so we got constant IS/ SWP bonkers tactical turns, driven purely by Cliff's whims, prejudices, and mental state. Sad, sad, stuff - but only really possible in a grouplet so tiny and unimbedded in the working class that it could always really be said to have been run from Cliff's front parlour in his lifetime (once he'd killed off the 70's Rank & File Movement and all those Bolshie independent minded shop stewards that is).Presumeably now the ENTIRE SWP will in future be able to fit into Prof Alex Callinicos' no doubt palatial front parlour !