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SWP expulsions and squabbles

bolshiebhoy said:
You beat me to it! Actually I know at least one left ISNer who will be disappointed by this, many saw PT as one of their significant heavyweights. It also makes it even less likely that the recently departed will manage to salvage something recognisable.

But yes every time this happens over the next few months it'll cement the relationship between the left of the faction and us (middle ground) loyalists ever so slightly more than it was previously.
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typical rat behaviour, tying those closer to you as the left, snd thus those who oppose your rape cult as the right.
 
absolute batshit comment on Dave Renton's blog linked to above

Carl on 17/12/2013 at 11:20 pm said:
You seem to still be under some serious misapprehensions about the SWP, as if it were shall we say a ‘degenerated’ workers party that lost it’s way. It never was a party that represented the working class. Of the many anti-worker positions the SWP has taken over the years. Many of which occurred during the period the elder comrades you mentioned were in the party. Calling for the suppression of workers in Northern Ireland by British troops in 1967, supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran/Iraq war in 1987, advising workers not to strike during the war, up to the present day of calling for Egyptian workers to vote for Mursi. Not to even mention the consistent support for the labour party (without illusions of course). The party did not change! It has always been a despicable party of state capitalism masquerading as a revolutionary one.

But members leave because two women were possibly or probably raped? This shows where the priorities of the SWP membership are. Not concerned about issues effecting our entire class but with comparably petty occurrences between two members.

I was recently talking to a worker who had been telling me that the Labour party had been the workers party, harking back to the good old days when ‘real’ socialists were in the party. “You know people like Clement Attlee and the like.” You remind me a bit of that guy. Upset that his party had been lost, however, there was nothing of value to be lost in the first place and very little ever changed.

Although there are certainly positives in your blog. I wholeheartedly agree with two of your observations.

“I was genuinely perplexed by the way in my fellow sellers would shout what sounded to me like reformist slogans “stop the war”, “beat the Tories”. Weren’t we supposed to be revolutionaries?”

Absolutely, the main problem with the SWP is that it has always acted as a reformist party. By all means participate in protests, hold marches, occupations while they hold little chance of having any effect they do at least instill a confidence in people. But always call for “the abolition of the wages system” rather than “a fair days work for a fair days pay” (value,price and profit).

The second point is leadership and democratic centralism. Socialism is about people taking over the means of production and running society for themselves democratically. How will people ever be able to accomplish that if they are treated like children, reliant on being told what to think and how to act by a tiny minority, exactly the problem we suffer from right now. This is not just true of the SWP but many parties dating back to the Bolsheviks and even others before that. As a comrade of mine says “if you rely on some bugger to lead you to the promised land, some other bugger will lead you straight back out again”

Both of these failings are part of Lenin and Trotsky’s so called ‘improvements’ upon Marxism. It’s time to get back to the base texts and leave these so called ‘improvements’ to the dustbin of history along with all the other failed attempts. Time to learn from the past mistakes and move on. That’s the only way we’ll all get to where we want to go.
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Obviously a member of one of those loonytunes 4 man sects mentioned earlier in this thread.
 
But members leave because two women were possibly or probably raped? This shows where the priorities of the SWP membership are. Not concerned about issues effecting our entire class but with comparably petty occurrences between two members.
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he didn't actually say that did he - oh wait :facepalm:
 
Spanky Longhorn said:
I did wonder due to the references to democracy and abolition of the wages system, but would they start off with Northern Ireland as an example?
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That's just a long list of things he's obviously very used to trotting out to show the SWP are 'wrong' ( and he actually gets his facts wrong) rather than anything deeper i think.
 
Andy Reid, PCS NEC member resigned from the SWP.

They've gone from 4 NEC members to 2. After the next round of elections they'll be down to 1.
 
Looks like they are now only a force in the NUT and UCU as far the unions are concerned. A bit odd that their union loyalists clustered there, while in the PCS, Unite and Unison they mostly went opposition. (I don't think they had anything of note outside those five unions to start with)

Fluke? Determined by whoever the couple of leading figures in a fraction happen to be? A sociological thing?
 
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They've kept the majority of their cadre in Unison that I can see. I know there was one bloke who went off and joined the ISN in the previous mass exodus after the March conference. Of course to say they've kept most of what they've got isn't saying a great deal. The bureaucracy has rolled them up like wet cardboard over the last few years of witch-hunting. That's taken a much bigger toll on them down through the years than Delta-gate.

Unite on the other hand has been an utter disaster for them. By the end of this they will have lost all their NEC members and all their senior experienced cadre bar one. They'll be reduced down to a tiny handful. The problems in their Unite caucus go back a fair bit. If you'll recall their caucus split in 2011 (I think) over whether to support Jerry Hicks and as a consequence leave United Left for Grassroots Left. My understanding is that their senior members were less than pleased with this decision. Going further back I think many of the resigners were unhappy with the invasion of ACAS during the BA talks. I think there has been tension there for a long time and Delta has brought it all to a head.

PCS has also been a disaster for different reasons. You've had a perfect storm of the fall out from Delta on the one hand and a cack-handed attempted power grab by them for the Left Unity NEC slate on the other. The latter completely backfired and left them totally isolated. They'll still keep most of their members in PCS for now though.

My own personal theory as to why they've kept it together in the NUT and UCU is that in both cases they are part of the leadership. I suspect people are more wary of crossing them in those unions so the impact of Delta-gate probably isn't as severe. Also the most rabid and vile IDOOMers are to be found in the UCU (SV) and the NUT (NG, JE). I suspect there may be an element of Stockholm syndrome effecting some of their more normal members in those caucuses.
 
leyton96 said:
They've kept the majority of their cadre in Unison that I can see. I know there was one bloke who went off and joined the ISN in the previous mass exodus after the March conference. Of course to say they've kept most of what they've got isn't saying a great deal. The bureaucracy has rolled them up like wet cardboard over the last few years of witch-hunting. That's taken a much bigger toll on them down through the years than Delta-gate.

Unite on the other hand has been an utter disaster for them. By the end of this they will have lost all their NEC members and all their senior experienced cadre bar one. They'll be reduced down to a tiny handful. The problems in their Unite caucus go back a fair bit. If you'll recall their caucus split in 2011 (I think) over whether to support Jerry Hicks and as a consequence leave United Left for Grassroots Left. My understanding is that their senior members were less than pleased with this decision. Going further back I think many of the resigners were unhappy with the invasion of ACAS during the BA talks. I think there has been tension there for a long time and Delta has brought it all to a head.

PCS has also been a disaster for different reasons. You've had a perfect storm of the fall out from Delta on the one hand and a cack-handed attempted power grab by them for the Left Unity NEC slate on the other. The latter completely backfired and left them totally isolated. They'll still keep most of their members in PCS for now though.

My own personal theory as to why they've kept it together in the NUT and UCU is that in both cases they are part of the leadership. I suspect people are more wary of crossing them in those unions so the impact of Delta-gate probably isn't as severe. Also the most rabid and vile IDOOMers are to be found in the UCU (SV) and the NUT (NG, JE). I suspect there may be an element of Stockholm syndrome effecting some of their more normal members in those caucuses.
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SV (& his amenuenses) notwithstanding, the hardcore IDOOMers in UCU are actually in a minority. Rather trepidatiously (as a notorious renegade) I ventured along to the recent UCU Left conference expecting a shitstorm of hackish vitriol, but was actually pleasantly surprised by the entirely comradely reception I received from the vast majority of SWP people there. There's a very wide spectrum in UCU ranging from the worst headbangers through critical loyalists (such as Mark Campbell, an erstwhile star & a thoroughly decent bloke who got carved out of SWP conference for not toeing the line obediently enough), through middle-of-the-roaders deeply pained by their experience of the last year, through soft oppositionists who might stay around for a bit, through serious & principled oppositionists who have either left post-December conference or will do soon, through sceptical ISNers like myself, right through to born again ISN feminists & LU enthusiasts who now hate the party with venom & will never even speak to them again. In other words, a pretty representative range of all the various positions & by no means a lost cause.
 
Vladtheimpaler Interesting. You are right about Mark Campbell, always struck me as a decent type.

Nigel Irritable I think they have a little bit in the CWU and the FBU in London that has been unaffected by Delta-gate. I think we're talking a handful in both cases.

GMB I know nothing about.

I don't think they have more than 1 or 2 members in the RMT but they are largely invisible within the activist layer of the union. They do have one retired member who is very well known and does identify as SWP but she is so eccentric it's almost like she isn't a member at all. It's hard to explain, you'd have to meet her to understand. :)

USDAW they've got nothing that I know of.

They do seem to have a close relationship with the leaders of the BFAWU thanks to the graft they put in around the Hovis strike.
 
Charlie Hore resigns after 40 years in IS/SWP. Good letter:

Dear Charlie,
It is with great sadness that I write to tell you of my resignation from the SWP. February next year will mark 40 years since I joined the International Socialists, but after last weekend's conference I can no longer in good conscience remain a member.
The past year has been the worst year I have spent in the SWP, and I think the worst year in the SWP's history. Over 500 people have already left, including the vast majority of our students; Marxism was a shadow of its former self, with numbers badly down and almost no outside speakers; the Unite the Resistance conference was half the size of last year's; and in the unions and movements, it's almost impossible to find anyone who thinks that we did the right thing.
Even our successes have been tainted – the Tower Hamlets demonstration against the EDL was great, but we initially failed to offer solidarity to the almost 300 people arrested by the police, and the reaction to the 'Sisters Against the EDL' initiative seemed driven by pure sectarianism.
Over the last year I have fought to get the SWP to change its position on the two complaints against the former national secretary, and I am proud to have done so alongside so many other comrades. We started off convinced of the SWP's principled positions on women's oppression and women's liberation, and determined that those principles had to apply to every member, no matter how important. Like many others, I have been appalled by the leadership's managerialist approach to the crisis, putting party pride above principle, and by the culture of deference to the leadership that has determined the response of too many comrades.
I'm aware that both of those elements have been around for some time, but I always believed before in the SWP's capacity to learn from and transcend its mistakes. I no longer do so, and I think that an organisation that cannot learn from criticism, and willfully ignores it, is an organisation that will calcify and become sectarian.

I have spent my adult life in the SWP, and I don't regret it for one minute. We have done great things – with the Anti-Nazi League (twice), during the miners' strike, and with Stop the War, among many other things. I have learn a huge amount from comrades I have worked with over the decades, and I am particularly grateful for the opportunities given to develop and extend my writing. Many close friends and comrades I greatly respect will stay in the SWP, and I wish them all well. After a year's debate, conference's decisions on the internal crisis are clear and unambiguous – I cannot defend them, or take any pride in my membership, and so it's for the best that I leave.

I intend to remain an active revolutionary socialist, and I look forward to working with SWP members and other socialists in the struggles, campaigns and movements to come, and to creatively applying the principles of international socialism in whatever new formation emerges from this crisis.

Yours, Charlie Hore
 
After 508 pages of this stuff I feel no closer to understanding the minds of the SWP leadership. The sensible course of action - some sort of damage limitation strategy involving apologies and quasi-independent investigation (eg the sort of thing most political parties do all the time to kick difficult issues into the long grass) - seems so fucking obvious it seems just impossibly masochistic that events have unfolded as they have. Deranged. It's strange world where giving any ground to opposition is deemed worse than trashing your reputation so comprehensively your ability to achieve anything at all is at stake. And it's this complete utter disregard for how this all looks to the outside world - including 'the class' - that really has me perplexed.
 
lazythursday said:
After 508 pages of this stuff I feel no closer to understanding the minds of the SWP leadership. The sensible course of action - some sort of damage limitation strategy involving apologies and quasi-independent investigation (eg the sort of thing most political parties do all the time to kick difficult issues into the long grass) - seems so fucking obvious it seems just impossibly masochistic that events have unfolded as they have. Deranged. It's strange world where giving any ground to opposition is deemed worse than trashing your reputation so comprehensively your ability to achieve anything at all is at stake. And it's this complete utter disregard for how this all looks to the outside world - including 'the class' - that really has me perplexed.
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It is indeed extremely weird, but by no means a unique phenomenon. Try reading some of the classic social psychological literature on cognitive dissonance as cults unravel. The first & most famous example (& a pretty good read) is Leon Festinger's 'When Prophecy Fails', in which he reports how a hard core of members of a 1950s American UFO cult actually became more rabidly committed to their belief system when the spaceships failed to land at the appointed time & the saner members departed in droves.
 
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