SWP expulsions and squabbles

[bolshiebhoy]

NI you're talking shite. read the cover statement from the person who shared the ISO bulletins. These fuckers are out for blood and they see the current leadership as infected by the germ of cliff. Have you a) read or watched any of the embarrassingly self critiques of the current ISO leadership or b) argued with any of the frankly much worse than the ISN idiots cause they live in the heart of beast arseholes who define sexual/racial politics of the ISO those days?

 

[bolshiebhoy]

This story only ends one way. and it ain't connected to your CWI silliness. One thing is for sure 50 years from now we'll still be arguing about cliffs Marxist interpretation of feminism. We won't be doing that re ted grant.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

NI you're talking shite. read the cover statement from the person who shared the ISO bulletins

The bulletins are on the blog of someone who is completely anti identity politics. And the person who leaked the documents was an actual Cliffite presumably before these rows.

No significant number of people are going to give the ISO shit about Cliffism

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Have you been at the sauce by the way?

 

[bolshiebhoy]

Did you read what they said about the iso leadership? I did when I was completely sober.

 

[bolshiebhoy]

"Conversely, Renewal raises the legitimate point of the lingering legacy of Tony Cliff’s brand of Trotskyism in the ISO’s current leadership. Practically all its leading figures were mentored and trained by high-ranking members of the now-discredited British SWP, and before the “Deltagate” coverup scandal first broke it appeared the ISO was about to achieve rapprochement with its co-thinkers across the pond"

 

[bolshiebhoy]

Have you been at the sauce by the way?

Yes of course (it was a Friday ffs!) but you're still wrong on these people and what they are about. Surprised you're so naive in some ways despite your very technical but sometimes very apolitical sectarian obsessions.

 

[J Ed]

This story only ends one way. and it ain't connected to your CWI silliness. One thing is for sure 50 years from now we'll still be arguing about cliffs Marxist interpretation of feminism. We won't be doing that re ted grant.

In 50 years no one in the SWP will be alive.

 

[SpineyNorman]

One thing is for sure 50 years from now we'll still be arguing about cliffs Marxist interpretation of feminism.

lol

 

[manny-p]

In 50 years no one in the SWP will be alive.

insh'allah

 

[Nigel Irritable]

NI you're talking shite. read the cover statement from the person who shared the ISO bulletins. These fuckers are out for blood and they see the current leadership as infected by the germ of cliff. Have you a) read or watched any of the embarrassingly self critiques of the current ISO leadership or b) argued with any of the frankly much worse than the ISN idiots cause they live in the heart of beast arseholes who define sexual/racial politics of the ISO those days?

This story only ends one way. and it ain't connected to your CWI silliness. One thing is for sure 50 years from now we'll still be arguing about cliffs Marxist interpretation of feminism. We won't be doing that re ted grant.

You are getting incoherent.

The person who put the statements on his blog is a Trotskyist of some persuasion and is more hostile to identity politics than the SWP is. What he thinks of "Cliffism" is entirely irrelevant to the ISO's interactions with the "ankle biters" influenced by identity politics. The only people exposed to both Tony Cliff-Thought and the current brand of US identity politics are actually in the ISO already because nobody else reads Cliff.

I've already said that the ISO leadership's abandonment of IST orthodoxy on identity politics will lead to a certain amount of flailing about as exactly how much is up for grabs is decided. That they are doing so while many of their members are in or recently out of university activist circles, and thus surrounded by this stuff, means that there will be a strong pull to go further than the leadership initially intended.

Nobody will be reading Cliff or Grant on feminism in fifty years, and rightly not as Grant (probably thankfully) never wrote anything of substance on the subject and Cliff laboured mightily to produce a turd of a book.

As for your bizarre remark about "how this ends" and "CWI silliness", I'm not sure that even you are clear on what you were trying to say. The unravelling of Cliffism as a political force has little to do with the CWI either way.

 

[Ross Wolfe]

UPDATE:
53 previously-unreleased secret documents from the International Socialist Organization's 2011, 2012, and 2013 Conventions also posted

You can find them all in downloadable PDF format by clicking here.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

UPDATE:
53 previously-unreleased secret documents from the International Socialist Organization's 2011, 2012, and 2013 Conventions also posted

You can find them all in downloadable PDF format by clicking here.

Way too much to actually read properly, but there is some interesting stuff there. For instance, the first one I randomly clicked on reveals that the ISO began to revise its SWP-derived theory of women's oppression before rather than after the SWP crisis first exploded.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Way too much to actually read properly, but there is some interesting stuff there. For instance, the first one I randomly clicked on reveals that the ISO began to revise its SWP-derived theory of women's oppression before rather than after the SWP crisis first exploded.

Must be dull and long winded if even you aren't a big enough train spotter to go through it all!

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

we were all thinking it

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I'm willing to own up to a bit of nerdery, but there must be more than a thousand pages between them all!

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

We will still be discussing it in 50 years lol

 

[leyton96]

NI you're talking shite. read the cover statement from the person who shared the ISO bulletins. These fuckers are out for blood and they see the current leadership as infected by the germ of cliff. Have you a) read or watched any of the embarrassingly self critiques of the current ISO leadership or b) argued with any of the frankly much worse than the ISN idiots cause they live in the heart of beast arseholes who define sexual/racial politics of the ISO those days?

Christ you're fucking tedious. Why can't you just bore random strangers in pubs like normal drunks?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

A less tendentious and mendacious report than usual from the AWL, assessing the SWP's recent trade union day school:

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/02/08/swp-industrial-strategy-five-three-quarter-truths

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

A less tendentious and mendacious report than usual from the AWL, assessing the SWP's recent trade union day school:

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/02/08/swp-industrial-strategy-five-three-quarter-truths

Surprisingly good article I would say with some reasonable criticisms of the Swaps.

 

[SpackleFrog]

This story only ends one way. and it ain't connected to your CWI silliness. One thing is for sure 50 years from now we'll still be arguing about cliffs Marxist interpretation of feminism. We won't be doing that re ted grant.

Your worldview is worthy of a psychiatric research team. In your mind, you really think Cliff is some kind of world renowned theoretical leader who will one day be revered by all as a sort of Jesus-like figure, don't you?

 

[emanymton]

Surprisingly good article I would say with some reasonable criticisms of the Swaps.

I suspect this is not true though

University lecturers (the SWP's main "industrial base" these days, I think) may be hit by performance management, and yet the gap (in pay, security, conditions, pensions) between them and the cleaners in their universities may grow.

I would be willing to bet the gap has closed in all 4 cases.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

I suspect this is not true though
I would be willing to bet the gap has closed in all 4 cases.

I would be willing to bet it hasn't in any meaningful way.

But let's not play into the tories and Martin Thomas's game of dividing them like this.

 

[BK Double Stack]

The ISO (biggest left group over here) has become quite pessimistic and hasn't grown in recent years in the US. Meanwhile, the CWI here has grown rapidly, and Kshama has a higher profile than anyone in the ISO has ever come close to. And this is a big factor in their (low-level) crisis. The ISO opposition is based in my area, and they're on their way out. Some really smart people in the opposition but quite cynical. I think the ISO will have bigger problems in coming years due to being pessimistic at a time that big struggles and steps fwd in consciousness are taking place. I think it might be an over-reaction to the auto-optimism of having been trained by SWP.

 

[SpackleFrog]

The ISO (biggest left group over here) has become quite pessimistic and hasn't grown in recent years in the US. Meanwhile, the CWI here has grown rapidly, and Kshama has a higher profile than anyone in the ISO has ever come close to. And this is a big factor in their (low-level) crisis. The ISO opposition is based in my area, and they're on their way out. Some really smart people in the opposition but quite cynical. I think the ISO will have bigger problems in coming years due to being pessimistic at a time that big struggles and steps fwd in consciousness are taking place. I think it might be an over-reaction to the auto-optimism of having been trained by SWP.

That's an interesting idea; something you see a lot in people who leave the SWP in Britain too I think. It makes a lot of sense; years of being force fed constant over-optimism and exaggeration leads people to be very suspicious. "There's never been a better time to be a socialist" seems to have been replaced by "Everything about the movement is terrible" by some in the ISN.

 

[Mustn't grumble]

Don't know if he ever went to an event of the Socialist Review Group, IS, or SWP, but Stuart Hall died today.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10/stuart-hall

 

[Mustn't grumble]

. . . I think the ISO will have bigger problems in coming years due to being pessimistic at a time that big struggles and steps fwd in consciousness are taking place.

Especially for those of us outside North Amerika, how has this pessimism expressed itself in the ISO's practice & its words, including how it outlines the immediate future, its prognosis & perspective?

Thanx.

 

[butchersapron]

Don't know if he ever went to an event of the Socialist Review Group, IS, or SWP, but Stuart Hall died today.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10/stuart-hall

Thread here mate.

 

[BK Double Stack]

Grumble: You can read their perspectives doc which is more about the setbacks in Egypt than it is about US gov't shutdown, shallow base of Dems, socialist getting 93,000 votes, the huge battles coming to increase the minimum wage...The ISO can be different from area to area, but the pessimism has played out in two ways in practice: 1. Retreating into the existing activists and focusing on coalitions with them or 2. sectarian propagandism of the paper-selling routines without a connection to a broader strategy. I think the first option is more popular, but the second option isn't entirely discouraged.

 

[Mustn't grumble]

. . . their perspectives doc which is more about the setbacks in Egypt than it is about US gov't shutdown, shallow base of Dems, socialist getting 93,000 votes, the huge battles coming to increase the minimum wage . . . the pessimism has played out in two ways in practice: 1. Retreating into the existing activists and focusing on coalitions with them or 2. sectarian propagandism of the paper-selling routines without a connection to a broader strategy. I think the first option is more popular, but the second option isn't entirely discouraged.

In just a few sentences perhaps, what's the outline of an approach that can achieve far more in the coming few years?

Aren't existing coalitions a means to expand work beyond that of a group of, what, 300? The group shouldn't have interests apart from the class as a whole & oppressed groups, no?