SWP expulsions and squabbles

[frogwoman]

Surely that is a problem. No-one could be as good in 50 years of Taffe being there? There has to have been some very talented people in the SP in that time, and it can't be right having someone as the leadership for all that time.

I didnt say i agreed with it its just that that might be one of the reasons why he hasn't been replaced yet.

 

[emanymton]

Do they?
And what happens to them if they do?

Look, speaking as someone who has been in the SWP and as someone who has a job. The two things are completely and utterly different.

 

[One_Stop_Shop]

That UAF Facebook page is now just a ding dong of people posting stuff up and it getting deleted. Latest is:

so, first there were concerns over celebrating galloway's support and failing to criticise him. then uaf went one better and continued to hail a suspected rapist as a leading figure of the organisation. the fascinating thing is, there are a number of individuals who have not been accused of rape, who are anti fascist who would no doubt speak in his place. i can't see any reason for him speaking and the subsequent conscious 'martin smith was well received' unless it was a direct demonstration to support him.

now watch as uaf's reputation plummets, and the rest of the left get a bad misogynist name.

you cannot fight fascism with sexism or classism. simple.

 

[frogwoman]

there are people in trot organisations who seem to think that not selling papers etc is a crime against the party but what are they going to do if you don't sell any papers? you pay their wages after all. expel you?

 

[Kidda]

there are people in trot organisations who seem to think that not selling papers etc is a crime against the party but what are they going to do if you don't sell any papers? you pay their wages after all. expel you?

I really can't get my head round intelligent people who come to a realisation that capitalism is fucking them over; who then go on to give further control of their lives over to spotty Lenin wannabes who degrade them by making them sell shit papers, full of irrelevant crap to people who will just use it to line their cats litter tray.

Then when something big happens to shake their political core they hold on to these arseholes like rats refusing to leave a sinking ship.

There was a choice comment made by some Swappie on the minutes of their little conference, where she basically said that if the disputes muppets had found Delta guilty she wouldn't just have called for his removal from the CC but from the party as a whole. Like that was a justified and well thought out response.

So i hope the next time someone gets kicked out of the party for paper sales being down they realise they are most probably on par with rape in the eyes of their glorious leaders.

 

[brogdale]

Look, speaking as someone who has been in the SWP and as someone who has a job. The two things are completely and utterly different.

Yes they are different, but that's how analogies work.
The point being the similar level of powerlessness experienced by 'ordinary' members of the SWP and workers in capitalist businesses.

 

[emanymton]

Yes they are different, but that's how analogies work.
The point being the similar level of powerlessness experienced by 'ordinary' members of the SWP and workers in capitalist businesses.

No there isn't your talking bollocks.

 

[brogdale]

No there isn't your talking bollocks.

Care to explain?

 

[brogdale]

brogdale's arguments seem to be based in a common anarchist misunderstanding; that for most socialists the organisations one builds to further their political aims aren't a microcosm of the society we wish to see in the future,

for the SWP (and most other socialist orgs) their self-defined role is to influence working class organisations (such as Soviets) not to be those organisations.

So the SWP believe that a centralised, professional vanguard of non-proletarian revolutionaries are the essential pre-requisite of a post revolutionary socialist society of democratic, decentralised proletarian control.

No leap of faith needed, then?

 

[SpineyNorman]

Do they?
And what happens to them if they do?

Show trial, followed by a lifetime down the saltmines.

 

[SpineyNorman]

someone gets kicked out of the party for paper sales being down

That's never actually happened has it?

 

[SpineyNorman]

Care to explain?

He's right - I get that you don't want to back down on this but you're talking utter shite. And you didn't present it as an analogy - you claimed the two were 'no different'.

 

[DotCommunist]

I really can't get my head round intelligent people who come to a realisation that capitalism is fucking them over; who then go on to give further control of their lives over to spotty Lenin wannabes who degrade them by making them sell shit papers, full of irrelevant crap to people who will just use it to line their cats litter tray.

pretty sure you voted liberal democunt so log/own eye

 

[brogdale]

Show trial, followed by a lifetime down the saltmines.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Yes they are different, but that's how analogies work.
The point being the similar level of powerlessness experienced by 'ordinary' members of the SWP and workers in capitalist businesses.

1) it wasn't an analogy - you said they were 'no different'

2) there really isn't a similar level of 'powerlessness'. How often have you been able to vote for your boss? (assuming you don't work for some vegan coop, which is a distinct possibility I guess). Can you leave your job without serious financial consequences? And, again, the CC really doesn't have much control at all over what happens at branch level.

 

[frogwoman]

So the SWP believe that a centralised, professional vanguard of non-proletarian revolutionaries are the essential pre-requisite of a post revolutionary socialist society of democratic, decentralised proletarian control.

No leap of faith needed, then?

Who says they are non proletarian

 

[SpineyNorman]

The SWP, in theory at least, believe that the vanguard has to be proletarian. Just ask RMP3 - the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class etc.

 

[emanymton]

Care to explain?

Other than my experience of being in the SWP (which you never have been) and of having a job (what work do you do?)?

Others already have but I will add one thing, motivation. Everything I did when in the SWP I did because I believed it to be the right thing to do. I didn't go wandering around street in the middle of freezing cold nights sticking up posters because it was fun, or because i felt compiled to do it, but because I believed in promoting a cause. Quick tip when going fly posting use hot walter in the paste bucket rather than cold. I go to work because I need to eat and pay my rent, end of.

The fact that you cannot see the differences leeds me to suspect that you really don't get the nature of labour under capitalism or the position the working class finds itself in.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Which is why, I assume, I once had a student SWP member tell me that Calinicos was working class because he sells his labour to the university he works for lol

 

[frogwoman]

Which is why, I assume, I once had a student SWP member tell me that Calinicos was working class because he sells his labour to the university he works for lol

Well technically he is but that's ignoring investments, inheritances etc ...

 

[emanymton]

Which is why, I assume, I once had a student SWP member tell me that Calinicos was working class because he sells his labour to the university he works for lol

I think Calinicos himself would say he occupies a contradictory class position.

 

[SpineyNorman]

What, like the fact he's a descendent of Lord Acton?

But I also think that to be proletarian there has to be a certain degree of alienation, lack of control over the labour process etc.

 

[emanymton]

I think Calinicos himself would say he occupies a contradictory class position.

Here you go

even though such employees work for the self-expansion of capital and even though they have lost the legal status of being self-employed, they can still be viewed as occupying residual islands of petty-bourgeois relations of production within the capitalist mode of production. In their immediate work environment, they maintain the work-process of the independent artisan while still being employed by capital as wage-labourers. They control how they do the work, and have at least some control over what they produce. A good example of this is a researcher in a laboratory or a professor in an elite university.58 Wright emphasised that those in contradictory class locations are a comparatively small group:

 

[SpineyNorman]

The distinction between formal and real domination of capital innit

 

[Kidda]

pretty sure you voted liberal democunt so log/own eye

errm, no i didn't.

 

[DotCommunist]

errm, no i didn't.

then i apologise for that vile slur. must have you mixed up with someone else

 

[emanymton]

Anyway ... back on topic.

Who was it suggested any split from the SWP wold call itself, international socialism?

Lenin's Tomb

New Blog

P.S. Is anyone else having problems reading comments on LT or is it just my computer being shit?

 

[dennisr]

The more usual path is to be politically active in your youth, get fed up with it for one reason or another, and then drift around aimlessly for the rest of your days while occasionally paying lip-service to those youthful ideals.

Or drifting aimlessly for the rest of your days making the occasional cynical comment about how 'hopelessit all is' - copywrite LETTSA

 

[barney_pig]

After I left the party I remember discussing many of these points with an old friend who had left before me but was still ostensibly loyal to the party. Why wouldn't he fully make the break? To do so he explained would mean that all he had struggled for, had sacrificed for ( and though he had a phd. He and his family lived in the most precarious fashion, scratching an existence working less than 5 hours a week- hough later he got a job on the underground) would have been for nothing.
In the red party we had a discussion about the conservative nature of the revolutionary bureaucracy. Even though there is an enormous differential materially between the potential earnings of the brightest kids from clever schools who become the leaders of such groups. In particular we discussed the position of Sean matgamma, a full time revolutionary for over 40 years.
the tiny group of the awl, whilst generally despised by other trots, presents a fairly open face to the wider movement, and by all accounts is a fairly open internal structure, and yet SM has remained at the summit of that group without challenge since the 1970s. The awl doesn't have the financial resources of the SWP, and SM apparently lives a frugal existence, and yet his life is greatly different and privileged compared with the mass of awl members, let alone working class people. He is free to write and speak about what impassions him, to travel and mix with others who share his views and treat him with a certain deference. Inside his small world he can live a life free from alienation. Even a minor questioning of this situation, which depends upon the voluntary contributions, both financial and physical, of the party rank & file, has the potential to threaten the whole edifice.

 

[mk12]

The SWP, in theory at least, believe that the vanguard has to be proletarian. Just ask RMP3 - the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class etc.

Time to kick Callinicos off the CC then.

EDIT: I see you mentioned the Prof