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SWP: Mother of all splits looms?

belboid said:
Any chance of an answer to this from Groucho or Rmp3??
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I would not have favoured the expulsion of Trotsky by Stalin but interestingly I would have supported the expulsion of Stalin by Trotsky had that been a possibility (I guess you would not have?). Likewise I did not favour the expulsion of Militant from the LP, but I did support the idea of revolutionaries leaving Labour to build an open revolutionary party.
 
Groucho said:
Originally Posted by Hocus Eye (text in black) and responded to by ResistanceMP3 in red. My comments are added in drak blue and in invisible ink.
Although this whole thread is about a supposedly massive split in the SWP and Resistancemp3 refers repeatedly to factions on the Central Committee, I don't think that there is any kind of faction-led conspiracy against John Rees. that's what I have been trying to say in all my post's Although there has been a faction fight on the cc in which John Rees was in the minority and which was defeated at conference.

What I think happened is that with the failure of the Respect campaign that the CC picked up on the views within the party that the substitution of an invented left wing parliamentary party to replace the old Labour party was a waste of time energy and money. well that is certainly how I felt. I have used the word substitutionism myself.This is entirely wrong. The majority of the party do not see the Respect initiative as essentially incorrect despite its failure. It was the correct thing to try. It failed largely due to an attempt by Galloway and others to move the project to the right which was resisted by the SWP. However, there was insuffient clarity within the SWP about the aims of the initiative because the level of debate until the split was insuffient. Eventially there would have been a reckoning between reform and revolution and therefore a likely split. In the meantime there would be battles. Although the split came earlier and on a terrain not of our choosing many comrades were not prepared for the eventuality because there had not been sufficient theoretical clarity.

Creating a parliamentary party out of the opposition to the war was meant to enable recruitment from that party to the SWP itself. < sorry, this is wrong. Are you aware of trotsky's analogy of the revolutionary party little cog, engaging with the bigger cog the organised working class. It has to do with the takeover of the Labour Party by New Labour. To some extent in the days of 'Old' Labour there were links between some members Labour Party branches and SWP branches and the paper was sold to Labour party members. This was a source of new members for the SWP as the Labour Party was seen to disappoint when in power. RMP3 is right that the Respect initiative was not simply or mainly about recruitment to the SWP. There was a genuine commitment to establishing a broad based electoral coalition of the left to challenge the hegemony of the LP over worling class politics. The SWP would still favour such a coalition were it possible (it isn't currently)

Once 'Old' Labour was killed off by the new masters at Millbank the SWP had no connections or influence upon people working in Parliamentary politics or in Local Councils where most grassroots politics used to take place. A similar thing was happening in Trade Unions. One sphere of activity of the SWP was on Trades Councils. As union membership declined, Trades Councils also reduced in size and influence.so this was an opportunity for SW to recreate a vehicle for working class organization, and for revolutionaries to be at the centre of that basically reformist organisation. ******<This was how the project was sold to the members SW. It was not short term recruitmentdrive. ********* Respect was more complex than a basically reformist organisation. It was an organisation around a set of policies and demands around which reformists and revolutionaries could agree. (A 'centrist' organisation.) These demands could not in fact be won via Parliamentary or council reforms but would necessitate a militant fight that would eventially pose the question of reform or revolution. Revolutionaries would fight for leadership of the movement that emerged.

I can quite understand how the SWP senior management - sorry CC became concerned and saw the numbers of people supporting first of all 'anti-capitalism' and secondly the anti-war movement as the potential recruits. The whole Respect adventure followed from this. Galloway was an appealing and coherent speaker against the war and it is understandable that he seemed to be a useful ally. Sadly the SWP had very little experience of fighting elections and just using mass leafleting with very verbose and complex leaflets made less impact than they hoped. mostly trueish They came very late to the idea of canvassing and in relying on Muslim family connections to deliver mass votes in Muslim wards did not work for them as well as it had for the Labour Party of the past.not realy true imo

So my guess is that the CC eventually having realised that Respect - especially after it split was not a worthwhile use of resources. true I think that the majority members of the CC made a policy decision in a back room somewhere and worked out that the only way to quickly dispose of Respect which it could not even sell to its own SWP members, was to remove John Rees from his influence on the CC.why did they need to do thatIt is true that Respect post split is/was not capable of developing into a challenge to New Labour. There was a debate over use of resources on the electoral front in which Rees was wrong to imagine that there was still mileage in Left List/Left Alternative at present

They rightly concluded that it would not be necessary to remove Lindsey German as she would doubtless go of her own volition. I don't know whether they thought that Chris Nineham would leave.

I don't think that there are now any 'factions'. The official 'slate' was voted in because the rival one by Lindsey was withdrawn.

As for why the conference was billed as the Democracy Conference, this will be because it was the event where the Democracy Committee was created. What that will produce is yet to be seen.I don't believe the dubbing of conference as the 'democracy conference' - this isn't an official label btw, rests on the establishment of the Democracy commission. See my earlier post.
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i agree with your additions, and yes substitutionism was my position rather than the genral position.
 
belboid said:
aah, so the fact that the SWP is the largest remaining trot organisation is proof that it has got things right over the last forty years? Is that it? Sorry, but that's a rubbish argument.
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no it's a invitation to pose an alternative that would be applicable to our circumstances.
 
ResistanceMP3 said:
Doesn't have to be a democratic centralist organisation, how would you organize democratically?
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You want tips?

You already have the best democracy money can buy ready to face the challenges of today (copyright groucho) You've got a comssion and everything.

Tip. drop democratic centralism, any reading of it.
 
Nigel Irritable said:
The above is, with all due respect, incoherent.

The SWP's position is precisely that having minorities represented on leading bodies will in all likelihood lead to those bodies being paralysed by factionalism or obstruction by the minority. Further and just as significantly, the SWP's position is precisely that organised minorities shouldn't be able to exist at all in the party outside of a ludicrously circumscribed "pre-conference period". I'm not misrepresenting anything here and if you disagree with the SWP view on this you should make yourself clear.

You seem to think that "unity in action" requires ending the "freedom of discussion" after a couple of months. You have a brief debate, in which people opposed to the existing leadership are hamstrung by the short time allotted. Then you have a vote, and then the losing side shuts up for a year. That was not how the Bolsheviks understood democratic centralism. They would have a discussion and a vote and then carry out the majority decision, but it would never have occurred to them that this meant that the minority weren't entitled to keep organising for their views and keep arguing for them, even as they worked to implement the majority line. This didn't stop them from growing on a much greater scale than the SWP have managed and, for that matter, it didn't stop them from playing a rather significant role in a Revolution.

The SWP's version of democratic centralism - the version where there is no "freedom of discussion" for three quarters of the year - is unique to it. It is very different from the approach used both by other Trotskyist organisations today and by the Bolsheviks, the model it is allegedly based on and justified by reference to.

In a later post you argue that it has somehow been uniquely successful, I can see on the sole evidence that the SWP is, not even by very much, currently the largest far left organisation in Britain. This is bizarre on every level. If we were having this debate in 1975 would you telling me that Healy's approach to internal debate was clearly the best? If the Socialist Party overtakes the SWP again, will you be telling me that I'm right? How about here in Ireland, where the Socialist Party is larger, is it correct to allow minorities to organise here, but not in England?
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there is no point me repeating what groucho has already said about the length of time factions who organize to oppose the way the party is organizing/working, but I see your point. I seem to remember the structures in the Bolshevik party changing according to circumstances in which they found themselves, didn't they? Perhaps as butchers alludes to, this is an artefact of a long since passed a set of circumstances. So in answer, I don't know the answer to your question. I would have to listen to both sets of arguments. Perhaps there should be a democracy commision.
 
Given that everyone else outside the trot left is organised on different lines from DC, i think the onus is on you. You defend your view, of why this is the right way to do things.
 
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