Yes, this is the argument that clinches it for me. Our side have been so badly fractured by the past 30 years of overwhelming defeats that we are not in a condition to see any left organisation go down the plughole without serious consequences. The ability of working people to organise and take back the offensive has to be re-remembered, and i see socialist organisation as being essential to such a process.
That said Resistance MP3, for much of that long 30 year dark night, the swp has either been offering various false dawns , ie, 'the upturn is just around the corner' - 'being held back by a supine semi corrupt TU leadership' (at least the party were half right on that!), and/or denying self evident truths - ie, 'the very low level of class struggle is not as catastrophic as it appears', despite all the evidence of a veritable collapse in days 'lost' to industrial action and strikes. It is good to learn that those days of denial are now gone ( "Sadly there is little discussion of that, probably because there is little of that happening").
Maybe, if the swp survives this fuck up, there will be some adjustment towards a new realism which properly recognises the nature and the scale and consequences of the neoliberal assault ?
i do agree with you
on the weather BTW, but it is awful cold today.
I just want to be honest in clear, ideologically I am SWP through and through. All their stuff, their writings, lectures etc make sense of the worlds social history,,,,,, for me. But I have no idea whether "the days of denial are now gone" for the SWP, because I haven't been a member for over a decade.
That mistakes were made in assessments, is undeniable. But I don't think the positivism of the SWP was strategically that erroneous. You talk about the need for realism, but to what end? Tony Cliff has been massively criticised on here for his downturn theory of the 1980s, are you saying the SWP should have continued with that?
My attraction to the SWP, after its initial making sense of the world, was its pragmatism. That you have to start from the point that the revolutionary left are never going to agree. You're never going to win a united front of the revolutionary left. You have to start from, it's not only okay to disagree with the revolutionary left, it's good for the revolutionary left to disagree, have different strategies. [This recognition forces you not to ignore the rest of the revolutionary left, but to not dwell upon the division, and concentrate on the force for change. This is not arrogance of sectarianism IMO, its pragmatism.]
The role of any revolutionary left organising, should be to try to change the world. The only people that can do this, is the working class. And so the role of any revolutionary organisation, is to pull as many working-class people into self organisation as possible. The ideology of the working class may be mainly "capitalist workers" or "manufactured consent", but ideas change in struggle. And so the SWP's promotion MASS struggle as the be all and end all, seems legitimate to me.
If you ever in a campaign in a downturn, and see mass involvement is absolutely essential, you cannot really start from, "oh well, let's have a campaign, it realistically has no chance of achieving anything, but let's try anyway" because people just will not get involved on that basis. But if you are in a downturn, and don't realistically have a chance of winning, what's the point of 'lying' to people?
One, you can never say you never have a chance of winning. Social history is far too chaotic. Social revolutions came without forewarning. Victories can come from the unlikeliest of circumstances.
But even if you have no chance of winning, you do have a chance of winning individuals to the class struggle. To building revolutionary organisations. To making the left bigger and stronger in the downturns, so that in the upturns you can have more influence.
This is why I liked the SWP publications. The paper starts from the positivism, the review starts to give you the bigger picture, the ISJ books and lectures etc start to put that positivism into historical perspective. If it didn't do this, how could most of the people I know have been in the party for 20, 30, 40, 50 years?
I forget the phrase SWP members always use about positivism, but I don't think positivism is necessarily a bad thing.
Wheather, tell me about it.
I'm paralysed from the neck down, so having the right clothes on to be able to go outside AND cool enoug to be inside where people have the heating on 23° is impossible. And getting the clothes on and off a right struggle. I put on my Facebook recently "sat on the coastal road, drinking in the last few drops of summer, like a man facing the Gobi desert of a British winter". A bit melodramatic, and mixed metaphor I know, but it captures the spirit. From the Freedom of this summer, to the lockdown I now face for several months, is not nice. Oh well, it's warm in front of the computer.
