The SWP is easily the biggest group on the revolutionary left. But at the “debate of the decade” between Tony Benn and Paul Foot a sizeable section of the audience was clearly more attracted to the sort of non-party notions preached by the Beyond the Fragments people. How do you evaluate such currents?
How many were attracted in a positive sense is a question, but there is no doubt that Beyond the Fragments has become a focus for “apartyist” and indeed anti-party sentiment.
Perhaps focus is not quite the right won. it implies something too definite, too clear. In fact there are at least three different strands or tendencies that, for the moment, rally behind or at any rate use the Beyond the Fragments banner.
There is the specifically feminist current which thinks primarily in terms of sex rather than class. They are, for the most part, highly educated, highly articulate, petty-bourgeois women who are in a relatively privileged economic situation with respect to the vast majority of working class women and also with respect to the majority of working class men as well.
Unlike the so-called “radical-feminists” they have some insight into the realities of class society, but they have a foot in each camp – the camp of the female half of the educated “professional” class (represented very well in The Guardian’s women’s page) and the very different camp of the strikers at Chix or Grunwick.
Some of them can perhaps be won to revolutionary politics; the majority cannot. Like the corresponding men, their “rebellion” is limited, constricted, by their class situation. Individuals can transcend this; social layers cannot.
Then there is a quasi-libertarian trend which provides most of the substantial arguments for Beyond the Fragments.
There is nothing peculiarly feminist about them. Most of the arguments they use were put long ago by either Proudhon or Bakunin against Marx himself. They are the arguments of the (male dominated) nineteenth century anti-Marxist left. Nowadays these arguments are called “anti-Leninist” although most of them were advanced before Lenin was born. Their social basis was, and is, petty bourgeois.
“Have these gentlemen (and ladies too – DH) ever seen a revolution?” asked Engels over a century ago, “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will on the other by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all ...” There is really nothing that can be added to this – from a revolutionary point of view.
However, the most important component of the “apartyist” current rallying Beyond the Fragments belongs to neither of these two trends. This majority component is what Paul Foot calls the NANA – non-aligned, non-activists.
Amongst the children of 1968 and their successors there are many, a great many, who have made the transition from radicalised student to “lefty” – or not so very lefty – polytechnic lecturer, civil servant or whatever) Some have broken completely with their past but many seek to reconcile the revolutionary aspiration of their youth with their present growing income, comfort and conservatism.
The solution? Formal leftism (and often “academic Marxism”) combined with a sharp, even venomous, hostility to any serious revolutionary organisation – which means, above all, the SWP.
The future of the Beyond the Fragments current? Insofar as it is a question of building a serious tendency – and a conference is being called for this purpose – we can say with complete confidence that it will come to nothing. It will come to nothing precisely because of the divergent trends within it, the majority NANA trend being organically and violently opposed to any revolutionary organisational commitment, however libertarian’, and this trend has a real social basis, it is not merely a difference of views. Many, if not most, of these people will end up supporting the Labour Party.
But as an unorganised political current Beyond the Fragments will survive its organisational collapse. It will survive for a long time because it is one of the more important forms of “left” hostility to the revolutionary party and therefore has its uses for various reformist tendencies, left and not so left.
