Interesting that Nigel I doesn't seem to have the slightest interest in actually engaging with any of the deabtes that a larger organisation than his own are having. They are judged by whether they provide him with a bit of entertainment from what I can work out. Quite disappoining really.
Well, Mutley, quite a lot of organisations are larger than mine. I might be in the biggest left group in Ireland, but we're still pretty small in the greater scheme of things and are in a country with a tenth of the population that Britain has. But being larger than us doesn't necessarily mean that a group has anything much of interest to say.
As it happens, I think that there were some fairly sensible points made about the use of the internet in some of the later articles. I also think that the debate about student work has a few interesting elements, primarily that the Glasgow students seem to be arguing for an approach much more like that taken by Socialist Students as against the Another Education is Possible approach of the national office.
The rest of it though? Well it's pretty poor stuff for the most part. The "building better paper sales in South Kent" articles really are the sort of thing that could drive a life-long teetotaller to drink, while the main centre piece debate is woefully limited. I do think that there are actual political differences between the LP and the CC, but they are both within the fairly narrow band of SWP practice over the last three decades.
Both sides are exaggerating the possibilities open to a group following their particular orientation - with the CC seriously overstating the growth in industrial militancy and the LP overstating the potential to (a) rebuild the anti-war movement and (b) build some kind of "political" united front on economic issues. This is where a collective obsession with "bending the stick" (otherwise known as "deliberately overstating your case") get you, I suppose.
One LP contributor does manage to hit on the incoherence of the SWP's industrial approach, relying on a "rank and filist" theory while not actually trying to build rank and file networks, but draws the wrong conclusions - pushing for the implementation of the theoretical approach as opposed to trying to redevelop their theoretical understanding to fit concrete circumstances.
The debate about internal democracy is similarly limited, consisting mostly of justified complaints of victimisation coming from people who were themselves the most enthusiastic proponents of this kind of structure and leadership. So you get an argument that everything is fine about the internal democray of the SWP except that the current CC are a shower of bastards. Only two contributions actually try to develop that element of the discussion beyond the strutural status-quo. One is a truly moronic argument for getting rid of the terribly limited factional rights which currently exist.
The other one is found in the piece by the suspended student, where he points out that the SWP's approach to "factionalism" simply can't work in the era of instant communications. People emailing their mates about particular party goings on or setting up websites is going to happen and is technically against the rules on factionalism, so what happens is that the same type of behaviour is accepted if done by leadership loyalists and punished harshly if done by critical elements. It's worth noting though that this argument isn't taken up by even the wider LP however, presumably because being seen to argue for more faction rights would (a) allow the CC to portray them as disloyal factionalists and (b) because their leaders are just as supportive of the undemocratic struture as the current CC, it's just that they want to be at the handle end of the sword rather than the pointy end.
There's also a lot of self-aggrandising nonsense about the importance of the SWP and the great things the SWP has been key to, but that's par for the course. I'm sure that most SWP members just automatically blot that stuff out, just as the rest of us do.
I'd go into it in more detail, but I'm not really sure that there's much point. The whole debate is just so
limited.
