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SWP expulsions and squabbles

mutley said:
Complete bollocks frankly. The reason people like me (idooper, signed the latest statement against the suspensions, still getting grief off loyalists) stay is that even now, even with the SWP going to hell and back, I look at the rest of the movement and too often I see talking shops, self indulgent wank and (to coin a phrase) petit-bourgeois bollocks. You want something actually done, the SWP is probably still the best port of call. Simplistic, yeah, but that's my gut feeling.
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I'd also add, mutley, that my friends who have left the party have found the departure a liberation, to say the least. Less Paul on the road to Damascus than exiting Plato's cave. Genuinely exciting; questioning old dogmas; inquisitive about new ideas; rethinking fundamentals; renewed sense of freedom and agency; furtherance of energy and passion.

Clearly I have a small sample here so I can't make broader claims. And I imagine the nitty-gritty of debating ISN protocols and staffing issues is likely to deaden passions pretty quickly, so I don't know in particular what the prospects for ISNers are. However, I do have prima facie evidence that life in the swamp can be pretty invigorating.
 
Course it is, as was the Beyond the Fragments in its time and indeed the whole Bennite thing before it became an exercise in passing left reformist motions at Labour conferences. There is nothing exciting about standing against the Syriza loving, centrist wave. It does as you say almost require a religious orthodox zeal to resist the general rush to 'new' thinking which as John Molyneux rightly keeps pointing out...isn't. Standing against a tide is difficult and unpopular and somewhat lonely. it's also, despite the Birchall/Stack evocation of the Cliffite past as one long revisionist search for 'dynamic' ideas, something that the IS has always had to do at particular periods. The growth of Bennism was one of those. This latest bubble of intersectional/Owen Jones love ins is the latest. The IS has always managed to develop Marxist ideas but develop them, not ditch them for trendy academic alternatives, be that zizek or Vogel. The prof vs Seymour is the best example. Much of the profs early stuff is as eclectic as you like, some of it worse than Seymour up to now has been. But by being in an organisation rooted in boring old core Marxist ideas, by having the intellectual discipline of cc meetings and Marxism meetings where fellow Marxists challenged his ideas and forced him to relate them back to the tradition the prof has managed to cohere into not the worst Marxist intellectual this country has known. Whereas Seymour....well.
 
bolshiebhoy said:
Course it is, as was the Beyond the Fragments in its time and indeed the whole Bennite thing before it became an exercise in passing left reformist motions at Labour conferences. There is nothing exciting about standing against the Syriza loving, centrist wave. It does as you say almost require a religious orthodox zeal to resist the general rush to 'new' thinking which as John Molyneux rightly keeps pointing out...isn't. Standing against a tide is difficult and unpopular and somewhat lonely. it's also, despite the Birchall/Stack evocation of the Cliffite past as one long revisionist search for 'dynamic' ideas, something that the IS has always had to do at particular periods. The growth of Bennism was one of those. This latest bubble of intersectional/Owen Jones love ins is the latest. The IS has always managed to develop Marxist ideas but develop them, not ditch them for trendy academic alternatives, be that zizek or Vogel. The prof vs Seymour is the best example. Much of the profs early stuff is as eclectic as you like, some of it worse than Seymour up to now has been. But by being in an organisation rooted in boring old core Marxist ideas, by having the intellectual discipline of cc meetings and Marxism meetings where fellow Marxists challenged his ideas and forced him to relate them back to the tradition the prof has managed to cohere into not the worst Marxist intellectual this country has known. Whereas Seymour....well.
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I enjoy the rectitude of your reply, BB, though naturally I'm not in agreement! :) A few thoughts:

You do injustice to the oppositions positions by trying to throw them in with intersectionalism and Owen Jones; this just seems like a mischaracterization. Further, the SWP has never been shy about hopping on to the labourist or reformist bandwagon when it suits. Just look at the feting of the "awkward squad" union leaders a few years back and the party's close support for the Labour left. It seemed to be only when Jones ditched Marxism, that the Prof turned sour towards him, no?

No love lost for Seymour here. My point is that the Prof is still eclectic when he wants to be, and engages with all the trendy academic alternatives, whereas such thinkers never feature on the a la carte theory menu permitted to party foot-soldiers.

Regarding new ideas, well, how very undialectical of you :p You seem to argue that there is a sort of Kondratiev wave in Leftist ideas, and now we're back with Beyond the Fragments. Or is it as Molyneux says: there's nothing new under the sun and in any case we've already slew all the dragons so don't worry and keep the faith. Surely as a Marxist you know the world continues to develop in complex, contradictory and internally-related ways. Developments in culture, communication, and ideas are an important part of these changes, as of course Gramsci would emphasize. Here your evocation of "standing against the tide" is an apt analogy. Lonely, yes, but also -- as King Cnut would have told CC loyalists -- ultimately futile.

Also, I wonder why you seem almost to relish the ascetic dimension of the hard vanguardist road? The "religious orthodox zeal", the "intellectual discipline", standing "difficult and unpopular and somewhat lonely" being rooted in "boring old core Marxist ideas" etc. It does sound pretty unpleasant to me, especially since it is response to my description of the liberatory moment I've witnessed in my friends. I'm not taking the piss, just genuinely interested why you think holding the line in the face of all this -- in this context, i.e. a now marginal sect that once produced some material of worth but that is now decreasing in numbers exponentially -- is worth it? And to what end?
 
benedict said:
I'd also add, mutley, that my friends who have left the party have found the departure a liberation, to say the least. Less Paul on the road to Damascus than exiting Plato's cave. Genuinely exciting; questioning old dogmas; inquisitive about new ideas; rethinking fundamentals; renewed sense of freedom and agency; furtherance of energy and passion.

Clearly I have a small sample here so I can't make broader claims. And I imagine the nitty-gritty of debating ISN protocols and staffing issues is likely to deaden passions pretty quickly, so I don't know in particular what the prospects for ISNers are. However, I do have prima facie evidence that life in the swamp can be pretty invigorating.
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Very much agree with you there Benedict. I left 2 years ago immediately after the standing ovation Conference of 2011, and I have to say that I have found the political world outside the SWP to be just as invigorating as your friends have found it.

I take fellow activists as I find them now, and do not make assumptions about their integrity just because they are in a different grouping. I am ashamed to say that I used to do exactly that when I was in the SWP. That siege mentality made sense at the time, and I recognize the sneering tone of Apology Boy's post on "the swamp" for the isolationist "my party, right or wrong" nonsense that has left them in this sad state.
 
That's a great sociology-in-miniature of the swp, benedict! And the kernel of truth in Mutley's claims is that swp members are at the forefront of so much action in part because so many of them are zealots. In terms of putting in the hard activist yards there's no better operator than those who know they'll get their reward in heaven (or after the revolution) and are motivated mainly by unshakable emotional commitment to the party hierarchy. But interestingly the swp will rarely accept historical materialism analysis of itself.

For those preferring a less deferential method of organising for liberation, it does pose some tricky questions about how to keep people together through all the hard and boring work of class struggle, when things aren't kicking off that well. Certainly the dependence of my local left on the swp (and sp) is considerable. But on that subject, and the old Beyond the Fragments spectre, time and time I've found that the people holding together union branches or community campaigns against the odds are in the BtF mould...either ex participants or taking up similar ideas. And often perceptive critics of the further left. So I think it's a bit of a myth that they didn't amount to anything, not anything with the brand presence of a busy trotskyist micro-party no, but as set of networks and perspectives yes.

ps if Vogel's ever been an intellectual fashion she certainly isn't now!!
 
bolshiebhoy said:
... But by having the intellectual discipline of cc meetings ...
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You are such a slave to the idea that the SWP CC is the intellectual centre of your political life that you imagine their meetings to be some kind of hothouse for theoretical advance and rigour. If only we had the recordings over the years ... I think you'd be disillusioned. I suspect most of their arguments are of the 'which district should make the placards for the next demo' sort. And as for the current CC, I think the transcript run like this:

Chair: "Item 13. Martin Smith's resignation. What's our line on this?"

... glum silence ...
 
oskarsdrum said:
That's a great sociology-in-miniature of the swp, benedict! And the kernel of truth in Mutley's claims is that swp members are at the forefront of so much action in part because so many of them are zealots. In terms of putting in the hard activist yards there's no better operator than those who know they'll get their reward in heaven (or after the revolution) and are motivated mainly by unshakable emotional commitment to the party hierarchy. But interestingly the swp will rarely accept historical materialism analysis of itself.

For those preferring a less deferential method of organising for liberation, it does pose some tricky questions about how to keep people together through all the hard and boring work of class struggle, when things aren't kicking off that well. Certainly the dependence of my local left on the swp (and sp) is considerable. But on that subject, and the old Beyond the Fragments spectre, time and time I've found that the people holding together union branches or community campaigns against the odds are in the BtF mould...either ex participants or taking up similar ideas. And often perceptive critics of the further left. So I think it's a bit of a myth that they didn't amount to anything, not anything with the brand presence of a busy trotskyist micro-party no, but as set of networks and perspectives yes.

ps if Vogel's ever been an intellectual fashion she certainly isn't now!!
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the thing is, other people who are dynamic, passionate, good organisers, etc but who want integrity in politics and maybe work more horizontally are put off getting involved in projects precisely because of SWP involvement
 
benedict said:
It seems to me that it has to be less about principles per se and more about commitment to existing networks of relationships as well as deep-seated psychological hurdles including time and energy devoted to the party creating resistance to departure; cognitive dissonance when confronted with the new reality after years of swallowing party perspectives and stick-bends; discomfort at the thought of life outside the security of highly-structured and programmatic party life etc.

The party has a line on everything that's provided in a straightforward way; there are few ambiguities; competing views can be easily dismissed with keywords "autonomism", "reformism", "squaddism", "substitutionism" that avoid engagement with real-world complexities; intellectual labour is largely devolved to key party thinkers who reiterate and quote from within the narrow canon of the "IS tradition", itself very selectively reproduced to exclude now out-of-favor writers; activity is promoted over above all, further minimizing the need to engage in questioning.

I can imagine it's really hard to leave the comfort of all that to... what? The complexities of life in the swamp. Very disorienting indeed, I would think, especially if you've devoted years to the party.
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The thing about this observation is that it is by definition rejected by those who are still in.
 
Duncan put it best why there's no substitute for having comrades (as opposed to people you once met on a blog) to bounce your ideas off and refine them: "The whole vast apparatus of mass communications, educational institutions and the rest have, as one of their principal functions, what sociologists call “socialisation” and what the old Wobblies called head-fixing. The assumptions convenient to the ruling class are the daily diet of all of us. Individuals, whether bus drivers or lecturers in aesthetics, can resist the conditioning process to a point. Only a collective can develop a systematic alternative worldview, can overcome to some degree the alienation of manual and mental work that imposes on everyone, on workers and intellectuals alike, a partial and fragmented view of reality. What Rosa Luxemburg called “the fusion of science and the workers” is unthinkable outside a revolutionary party."

Now there's a whole theoretical framework to explain that, about alienation and commodity fetishism and the rest but the overexcited escapees seem to have forgotten that materialist argument. They tell themselves that because reformist ideas are so weak in our society they can't possibly be influenced by them. Duncan wouldn't have been so rude but that's just bollox.
 
bolshiebhoy said:
Duncan put it best why there's no substitute for having comrades (as opposed to people you once met on a blog) to bounce your ideas off and refine them: "The whole vast apparatus of mass communications, educational institutions and the rest have, as one of their principal functions, what sociologists call “socialisation” and what the old Wobblies called head-fixing. The assumptions convenient to the ruling class are the daily diet of all of us. Individuals, whether bus drivers or lecturers in aesthetics, can resist the conditioning process to a point. Only a collective can develop a systematic alternative worldview, can overcome to some degree the alienation of manual and mental work that imposes on everyone, on workers and intellectuals alike, a partial and fragmented view of reality. What Rosa Luxemburg called “the fusion of science and the workers” is unthinkable outside a revolutionary party."

Now there's a whole theoretical framework to explain that, about alienation and commodity fetishism and the rest but the overexcited escapees seem to have forgotten that materialist argument. They tell themselves that because reformist ideas are so weak in our society they can't possibly be influenced by them. Duncan wouldn't have been so rude but that's just bollox.
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Still working hard defending the remains of your party Apology Boy ?

I'll take my chances with being influenced by reformist ideas in the outside world, rather than acceding to the ones prevalent within the SWP which tried to demonise two young women who dared to report sexual harassment and assault.
 
Hmm.....yes, it's all a bit tricky out there trying to discuss politics seriously (not just to proselytise) with people who don't share a near-identical set of hallowed IS tradition assumptions. So lets stick to the old branch, conference, Marxism routine and not worry about all the sectarians and lily-livered reformists who hoodwink the working class out of its rightful inheritance. Unfortunately, the disasters caused by such an attitude will always catch up with the grouping in question as critical friends become traitors and idiocy proliferates alarmingly....after many years of bestowing upon militants the dubious benefits of "punching above its weight" on the left, of course.

In fact it doesn't seem too materialist to me to claim "the revolutionary party" as innately possessed of some ability to escape ideology in a way no other collective can manage. Likewise this fixation upon the moment of revolutionary rupture for which no working class base is currently close to existing. Still: if any aspect of this "science" is testable then the notion that a Leninist party necessarily won't operate by alienated capitalist logics or imperatives has been as comprehensively disproved as it's possible to achieve in social science.
 
bolshiebhoy said:
Duncan put it best why there's no substitute for having comrades (as opposed to people you once met on a blog) to bounce your ideas off and refine them: "The whole vast apparatus of mass communications, educational institutions and the rest have, as one of their principal functions, what sociologists call “socialisation” and what the old Wobblies called head-fixing. The assumptions convenient to the ruling class are the daily diet of all of us. Individuals, whether bus drivers or lecturers in aesthetics, can resist the conditioning process to a point. Only a collective can develop a systematic alternative worldview, can overcome to some degree the alienation of manual and mental work that imposes on everyone, on workers and intellectuals alike, a partial and fragmented view of reality. What Rosa Luxemburg called “the fusion of science and the workers” is unthinkable outside a revolutionary party."

Now there's a whole theoretical framework to explain that, about alienation and commodity fetishism and the rest but the overexcited escapees seem to have forgotten that materialist argument. They tell themselves that because reformist ideas are so weak in our society they can't possibly be influenced by them. Duncan wouldn't have been so rude but that's just bollox.
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The thing is, BB, is that while I agree with the gist of your comment here, the preconditions for this kind of synergy are precisely what's missing within the SWP. Not just any collective could produce such conditions. Yeovil Rotary Club couldn't. Nor could any self-described revolutionary group do so. The SPGB can't. So why do you believe the SWP can?

The Luxemberg quote is interesting in light of your earlier comment about sticking to the line through the storms of popular opinion and the changing world. Where is the science in a praxis that admits of no major revisions in the face of mountainous evidence of theoretical and practical failure?!
 
Benedict said:
Where is the science in a praxis that admits of no major revisions in the face of mountainous evidence of theoretical and practical failure?!
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The dialectical reality underlying such epiphenomena can't be divulged on deadbeat blogs.
 
bolshiebhoy said:
Duncan put it best why there's no substitute for having comrades (as opposed to people you once met on a blog) to bounce your ideas off and refine them: "The whole vast apparatus of mass communications, educational institutions and the rest have, as one of their principal functions, what sociologists call “socialisation” and what the old Wobblies called head-fixing. The assumptions convenient to the ruling class are the daily diet of all of us. Individuals, whether bus drivers or lecturers in aesthetics, can resist the conditioning process to a point. Only a collective can develop a systematic alternative worldview, can overcome to some degree the alienation of manual and mental work that imposes on everyone, on workers and intellectuals alike, a partial and fragmented view of reality. What Rosa Luxemburg called “the fusion of science and the workers” is unthinkable outside a revolutionary party."

Now there's a whole theoretical framework to explain that, about alienation and commodity fetishism and the rest but the overexcited escapees seem to have forgotten that materialist argument. They tell themselves that because reformist ideas are so weak in our society they can't possibly be influenced by them. Duncan wouldn't have been so rude but that's just bollox.
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how is your membership of the labour party affecting you?
 
On a different note Lindsey German has written a robust reply to the ISO's Sharon Smith and canadian Abi Bakan who attacked her and Cliff for their 'marxist anti-feminism'. Really glad she's done this.

http://networkedblogs.com/NufVA

I watched the video of Smith and Bakan at the ISO's Socialism 2013 with increasing anger as the minutes wore on and there was no analysis of Cliff or German's actual arguments and no alternative analysis proposed. Instead the two of them just played with words and threw in some lovely gibes about which actresses Cliff fancied. Rancid stuff and good for German for defending the tradition. The other side of the debate on this feminist issue are vapid to the point of totally empty and in the case of the ISO seem to be prepared to say the most stupid things about Cliff in particular (Shawki's talk on the IS was equally guilty of this which is all the worse considering who sent Shawki to the US in the first place).

Good on you Lyndsey. Liked the question 'would we label ourselves Marxist anti-reformists'? No we wouldn't.
 
oskarsdrum said:
The dialectical reality underlying such epiphenomena can't be divulged on deadbeat blogs.
Click to expand...

FlatEarth.jpg
 
benedict said:
I agree too that the most committed ground-level activists in various campaigns are frequently SWP members.
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The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the impact of swappies arriving to lead a protest / campaign, in that they inevitably fuck off a lot of other people involved, or sympathetic to the campaign, either deliberately or just through their actions and way they go about things until most just can't be arsed to be involved any more.

That and deliberately excluding those they don't agree with politically from the campaign, and refusing to in any way collaborate or support any organisation you're not involved with.

So I'm sure to swp grass roots it does feel like the SWP members always end up being the lynchpins of every organisation the SWP get involved with, from the outside though the assessment of the SWPs contribution is rather different - ie that it's almost pointless even trying to do anything constructive as either the SWP will join and fuck it up, or they'll jump on that bandwagon, set up a counter group, refuse to work with you, suck the life out of the campaign, set up an invite only coalition that excludes the other group that was working on the issue, and use that to run high profile 'united front' public protests still excluding the groups the SWP don't like, then conspire with the police to have those you don't like arrested when they try to join your protest.

And in doing so they'll also ensure that the campaign itself will fail to actually achieve anything, as achieving a specific aim plays second fiddle to using this bandwagon to promote the SWP and its real purpose of building towards the eventual revolution, and as far as I can tell, the SWP don't actually believe they ought to be thinking about actually winning any individual campaign as long as they're seen to be involved at a high profile level they're happy enough.

See for example...http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/05/509876.html



ps butchersapron, since you asked a while back... this post is probably the best explanation I can get to as to how come I ended up largely giving up on that side of politics / protest / campaigning, and ending up going for a minimal effort amount of support for what I hoped to be the least bad option from the main political parties at election time (obviously that also backfired). That and police infiltration, frustration with the way that a small number of black blockers could turn the entire local population against us via a short rampage of property destruction, and erm well a few other things... kinda made me evaluate the rationale behind dedicating months of my life to a campaign.

pps sorry benedict, bit unfair to use your quote as the basis for this rant.
 
free spirit said:
pps sorry benedict, bit unfair to use your quote as the basis for this rant.
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No worries. Totally agree that this dynamic plays out too, though I think it's a varied picture. Where I've had first-hand experience a few individual long-time SWP stalwarts have actually seemed to me to be pretty solid at holding local campaigns together, without the party wrecking-ball tactics. This is a small sample though and certainly the national picture shows time and again how destructive their approach has been.
 
discokermit said:
ugh. look at you now. if there are any straws in the clutchable vicinity, they should now consider themselves clutched.
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I like your one liners disco, they can be quite funny but sometimes they miss important contradictions in the situation.

So actually no she does the necessary "I'm appalled as anyone else at the SWP handling of the delta stuff" but then makes quite a sweet defence of Cliff. She doesn't have to given her current involvements and arguably is hurting herself thereby so no I'll repeat good on her!

Given Counterfire's evolution and especially the orientation on the movements (and the fact that she has people in her org who call themselves feminists even while she doesn't) the temptation must be huge to say yeah you know what that little mysoginist leninist Gluckstein led us all astray but now I see the light. But she doesn't she defends the theory and practice of the IS/SWP on womens liberation and quite rightly points out the failure of the Smith/Bakan attack to pose an actual alternative analysis.
 
benedict said:
The thing is, BB, is that while I agree with the gist of your comment here, the preconditions for this kind of synergy are precisely what's missing within the SWP. Not just any collective could produce such conditions. Yeovil Rotary Club couldn't. Nor could any self-described revolutionary group do so. The SPGB can't. So why do you believe the SWP can?

The Luxemberg quote is interesting in light of your earlier comment about sticking to the line through the storms of popular opinion and the changing world. Where is the science in a praxis that admits of no major revisions in the face of mountainous evidence of theoretical and practical failure?!
Click to expand...
You have a lovely turn of phrase benedict even if I don't agree with you, Yeovil Rotary Club indeed :)

The science hasn't exactly been spilling out in the book load over recent years no but I can't see the attraction of the eclectic alternatives either. There's clearly a dearth of original Marxist thinkers in the tradition at the moment but I remain convinced the answer isn't to be found in the Seymour approach. And this will sound quite harsh as I'm friendly with some of the internal oppo but I honestly can't see them providing the alternative intelectual leadership they so want to. Stack and Birchall are hugely imprtant moral figures to have on your side (who would dare be nasty to uncle Pat or Ian?!) but they're neither of them a Harman or Callinicos imho. There's no doubting the raw inteligence of a Bergfeld but I can't help feeling that whereas the folk like Cliff who developed the ideas did so after having totally embraced them the tendency in this opposition is to try and stick bits on to the existing body of ideas without properly making them your own. Cliff developed the theory of state cap after a long hard attempt at opposing it!
 
bolshiebhoy said:
On a different note Lindsey German has written a robust reply to the ISO's Sharon Smith and canadian Abi Bakan who attacked her and Cliff for their 'marxist anti-feminism'. Really glad she's done this.

http://networkedblogs.com/NufVA

I watched the video of Smith and Bakan at the ISO's Socialism 2013 with increasing anger as the minutes wore on and there was no analysis of Cliff or German's actual arguments and no alternative analysis proposed. Instead the two of them just played with words and threw in some lovely gibes about which actresses Cliff fancied. Rancid stuff and good for German for defending the tradition. The other side of the debate on this feminist issue are vapid to the point of totally empty and in the case of the ISO seem to be prepared to say the most stupid things about Cliff in particular (Shawki's talk on the IS was equally guilty of this which is all the worse considering who sent Shawki to the US in the first place).

Good on you Lyndsey. Liked the question 'would we label ourselves Marxist anti-reformists'? No we wouldn't.
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which actresses did Cliff fancy? I always had the hots for Lauren Bacall and mid period Charlotte Rampling
 
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