Yesterday a number of Portsmouth comrades who left the SWP over the past nine months met to discuss how we plan to organise in 2014. There were 10 people in the room while another 4 sent apologies. By unanimous vote we agreed to form the Portsmouth Socialist Network.
None of us have followed identical political trajectories over the past year. Some of us had left in March (a few joining the ISN), some had left over the course of the summer after participating in the Fault Lines blog, others stayed inside the SWP until December. Yet all of us remain revolutionaries. All of us remain committed to the idea of socialism from below. It is crystal clear that we need to be working together as a single group.
Constituting ourselves in this way enables us to invite people to something we put on, it means we can approach other groups and propose joint activity, it means we can go to picket lines and offer our collective solidarity. It doesn’t preclude people having membership of, for instance, the ISN or ACI, and it would allow us at some point in the future to affiliate to a new *national*organisation if we so wished.
We are all agreed that the formation of a new revolutionary organisation must be the central, strategic long-term goal. What that organisation should look like is another matter entirely. We will all, no doubt, have drawn a variety of organisational conclusions from our time within the SWP, and it would be surprising if we were to all agree on what a new organisation should look like. To which I say, “Good!” For too long we have been part of a party that treats the questioning of organisational form with a mixture of contempt and distrust. Let’s debate the options, experiment, learn from what works and what doesn’t.
But. At some stage *all* of the people who have left the SWP in the past twelve months (and, indeed, those who left earlier) need to sit in the same room and discuss in an honest and comradely way what we are going to do. There is something in the region of 700 people in search of a new political home. A political landscape that looks like an explosion of Scrabble tiles is unlikely to appeal to them or anyone else for that matter. The opportunity to forge something new is the one thing we can salvage from this miserable period but without a degree of unity and trust amongst those who have left we run the risk of many hundreds of activists drifting away from revolutionary socialism altogether.
