Where is the SWP going?

By Murray Smith

CONTENTS

The Socialist Workers Party is the largest far-left organisation in Britain. The international current of which it is the centre, the International Socialist Tendency, one of several Trotskyist or post-Trotskyist internationals, is present in more than twenty countries. The SWP and the IST represent a force that has to be taken into account when considering the processes of recomposition and regroupment taking place on the left internationally, particularly in Europe, and how they evolve can make a positive or negative contribution to those processes.

In 1999 the SWP started coming out of a long period of relative isolation and sectarianism in relation to other political forces, a period in which there had been little dialogue or common activity with other organisations on the left. It had concentrated, quite successfully in its own terms, on building the organisation through propaganda and through conducting its own campaigns (usually via a variety of front organisations). However, in the last two or three years, important changes have taken place. The SWP themselves say that this really began with the Balkan War of 1999, in which they saw the possibility of building a united front against NATO's war on Serbia. They apparently seriously considered but ultimately rejected the idea of a united socialist list in London for the European elections in 1999.

But the change really became visible to outsiders when they made the turn towards building the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales. This began with their decision to participate in the Socialist Alliance campaign for the London elections in May 2000. The new orientation was subsequently generalised, and the SWP quickly became the backbone of the Socialist Alliance nationally, which stood about 100 candidates in the 2001 general election. In Scotland, the logical consequence was the collective entry of the members of the SWP into the SSP in May 2001. On an international level, the SWP has participated since December 2000 in the European anti-capitalist conferences and has engaged in discussions with other organisations.

Parallel to this opening up to work with other political forces, after the demonstrations in Seattle in November 1999, the SWP and the IST made a sharp turn to the movement against capitalist globalisation, to which they had previously attached little importance.

Turning point

Overall, their analysis is that we are at a turning point, that the situation is improving internationally and in Britain. They cite a rise in industrial struggle, the development of the "anti-capitalist movement" and a weakening of the links between the working class and the reformist parties. Writing in Socialist Worker in the run-up to the 2001 general election, John Rees notes that "the break-up of Labour's base is at a very early stage, but it's happening", that "the success of the Socialist Alliances is part of a wider recovery in the movement. The rise of anti-capitalism is another sign. And the embryonic revival of industrial struggle (. . .) is a third indicator".1 The same themes are developed at much greater length in an article by Rees in the SWP's theoretical journal.2 This is an analysis with which we can be in broad agreement.

The revival of industrial struggle both in Britain and internationally is incontestable, and certainly much less embryonic than it was a year ago. The Labour Party we will come back to later. Concerning Rees' second indicator, the SWP invariably and somewhat illogically call the movement against capitalist globalisation "the anti-capitalist movement", a definition which might tend to gloss over the extremely heterogeneous character of the movement and the presence of significant reformist currents within it. However, in numerous articles they recognise this reality and indeed stress the need for revolutionary Marxists to conduct a struggle against these currents, so what might at first appear to be a difference over the nature of the movement does not really seem to be one.

Origins of the SWP

The roots of the SWP, as of a number of other organisations, lie in the crisis that affected the Fourth International after the second world war. Founded by Trotsky in 1938, the international organisation found itself after 1945 faced with a world not only substantially different from that of the 1930s but also significantly at variance with some of Trotsky's prognoses, and without his authority to help it through. The attempts to come to terms with the situation led to many serious mistakes and sharp disagreements, not only over questions of conjunctural analysis, but over the whole analysis of the post-1945 world order and in particular of Stalinism, which led to a series of splits. Its British section broke up in 1949-50, and the international itself suffered a major split in 1952-53. By the early 1980s, there were half a dozen internationals. Two of them, the IST and the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI), of which Militant was the main section, were built as extensions of the British parent organisation.

The origins of the SWP go back to 1950. A group crystallised around Tony Cliff, whose main specificity was to argue that what existed in the Soviet Union was a form of capitalism, state capitalism, which did not deserve even critical support from socialists. They created the Socialist Review Group, which remained small throughout the 1950s. They started to grow, slowly at first, out of the early stages of the youth radicalisation of the 1960s—cnd [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], the Young Socialists, etc.—and made bigger gains out of the much broader radicalisation after 1968. The group went from tens in the 1950s to hundreds in the 1960s to thousands in the 1970s (it passed the 1000 mark in 1968). It was at that time called International Socialism (IS). It abandoned entry in the Labour Party from 1966 and in 1968 changed the name of its paper from Labour Worker to Socialist Worker. Having recruited many students in the late 1960s, by the early 1970s it had a significant presence in the unions. In 1973, IS had about 3000 members, nearly half of them manual workers. They organised, by union and by industry, rank and file groups which were initially broader than simply caucuses of IS members and sympathisers. In 1973 the combined circulation of their rank and file papers was 30,000.3 In the mid-1970s the publication Women's Voice was attracting and organising women from outside the ranks of IS; the organisation Flame played the same role for blacks and Asians.

The mid-1970s clearly represent a turning point. Up until this time, IS had had quite an open and undogmatic image, with a reputation for tolerating different views. In 1968 they went on a drive to unite the revolutionary left, aimed in particular at Militant and the IMG [International Marxist Group]. The only group which responded was Workers' Fight (precursor of Socialist Organiser and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty), which was a thorn in the side of the IS leadership until it was expelled in 1971. Although this expulsion did not meet with much opposition within IS, it was a precursor of further and more sweeping purges. In 1968 Cliff had convinced his organisation, up until then frankly libertarian, to accept democratic centralism. Over a period of several years, a sectarian political line developed hand in hand with an increasingly authoritarian regime. IS's relatively democratic regime was replaced by a highly centralised one, and anyone capable of standing up to Cliff was expelled or isolated and driven out.4

A number of oppositions developed. The main one was the "IS Opposition", which included significant elements of the old leadership, people like Jim Higgins, John Palmer and Granville Williams. About 250 members linked to this opposition were expelled or left. In the ensuing period, the SWP took on the sectarian face that it maintained for more than twenty years. One after the other, the rank and file groups were closed down, as were Women's Voice and Flame. Cliff developed a theory of the downturn in the class struggle to justify this sectarian line. The organisation settled down to twenty years of "building the revolutionary party", marked by jumping from one campaign to the next and hostility towards the rest of the left. Non-participation in elections was elevated almost to the level of a principle.

IS became the Socialist Workers Party in 1977. The SWP fell into what the IS tradition had previously tended to avoid, the idea that it was the revolutionary party or at least its nucleus. It was of course far from the only organisation to do so. The USFI [United Secretariat of the Fourth International], the CWI, the LIT [Workers International League], the Lambertists and others have all at some point seen themselves in this way, each with its own characteristic view of the world, ideas and methods; some still do. For those organisations that have survived into the twenty-first century, breaking from this conception is a precondition for playing a positive role in the rebuilding of the international workers' movement.Â

The 1989-91 earthquake

The events of 1989-91, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a seismic change in world politics and international relations. The world of 1945 was no more. The changes ushered in were to have an impact on the workers' movement, including its revolutionary wing, including the Trotskyist movement, though this was far from clear to everyone at the time. It was not hard to see that the collapse of the Soviet Union would deal a severe blow to the already weakened Communist parties. But the parallel metamorphosis of social democracy into a direct agency of the ruling class, accelerated though not initiated by the events of 1989-1991, was equally important, though much less obvious.

For those who had considered the Soviet Union to be socialist, its collapse was of course a catastrophe, leading to widespread demoralisation. Most of the Trotskyist movement had considered it to be a degenerated workers' state in which the working class needed to retake power from the bureaucracy by a political revolution. Once it had become clear that the tendencies towards political revolution had failed and that capitalism was being restored, the effect was also fairly devastating. Amidst the general disorientation, the SWP emerged relatively unperturbed. This was summed up in the famous remark by leading SWP member Chris Harman, that what had happened represented simply a step sideways (from one form of capitalism to another), a strange way indeed to sum up a process which has led to economic and social regression on a scale with few recent historical precedents.

Faced with a new world situation, the CWI suffered a major split, the FI went into a serious crisis, the LIT splintered, while the SWP carried on as if nothing much had happened, claiming the collapse of the Soviet Union was a vindication of its own theory. But of course something had happened. Insulated from the immediate effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union by their analysis of it as state capitalist, they could not remain insulated from the resulting profound changes taking place in the world and in the working-class movement. The new world situation, the development of globalisation and the rise of the anti-globalisation movement, and the crisis of decomposition/recomposition of the workers' movement eventually produced effects on the SWP.

Cliff's troika

Cliff's starting point, like Ted Grant's, was the inability of the FI leadership to understand the post-1945 world situation. He developed three theories, which he called the "troika". He comes back to this in a most interesting 1999 pamphlet, Trotskyism after Trotsky. The three theories were: state capitalism, to explain the strengthening rather than the collapse of the Soviet Union; the permanent arms economy, to explain the postwar boom; and deflected permanent revolution, to explain why, in a number of Third World countries, the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, which according to the theory of the permanent revolution could only be carried out under the leadership of the working class, which would then move on to the socialist phase, had in fact been carried out by non-proletarian forces—the result, according to Cliff, being state capitalist regimes in China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere.

It is worthwhile looking at the conclusions of Cliff's pamphlet. After some interesting reflections on the history of the workers' movement and why the Fourth International never became a mass force, he comes back to his troika. He defends its continuing relevance in order to understand recent history and also because the ideas he aimed to combat through these theories are still around. But he says: today state capitalism in Russia no longer exists, and furthermore the collapse of Stalinism removes the greatest obstacle to the growth of revolutionary Marxism, of Trotskyism; since capitalism is in crisis, the theory of the permanent arms economy is no longer immediately necessary to explain the postwar boom; and since what he calls the state capitalist road to economic growth in the Third World is no longer possible, classical permanent revolution is back on the agenda, giving the example of Indonesia.

What Cliff seems to be saying here is that the theoretical bases that distinguished the IS-SWP from the rest of the left are no longer operative in the way they were. From there it is only a small step to questioning the idea that those theories should serve as the basis for the separate organisational existence of the SWP and therefore rethinking the SWP's relationship with other Marxist currents. An optimistic reading of the present situation would be that at least part of their leadership is in the process of taking that small step.

Crossing the desert?

SWP leaders now explain that for twenty to twenty-five years they had fallen back on a propagandist "building the party" line which they admit had overheads in terms of fostering sectarian/conservative attitudes which now have to be broken from. They justify this by the fact that the period was very difficult, that the working class suffered a whole series of defeats. That is indisputable; nevertheless, in the course of this period, many battles took place. The SWP were certainly present in the struggles on the industrial front, although in the initial stages of the miners' strike of 1984-85 they had a disastrously sectarian attitude towards Arthur Scargill. But big political battles also took place in the Labour Party, from which they were absent. The struggle at Liverpool took place. They got the whole question of the poll tax disastrously wrong in Scotland. Consequently, they were absent from (or counterposing, in a sectarian fashion, their own initiatives to the subsequent campaigns against water privatisation, the Criminal Justice Bill, etc., which preceded the formation of the SSA [Scottish Socialist Alliance] and SSP, from which they also stood aside and indeed sharply criticised.

To say that the period from 1976 onwards in Britain was globally marked by defeats does not mean there was nothing else to do but build the party on a propagandistic basis and in opposition to other forces on the left. It was not just a question of difficult objective circumstances, but of political choices which could have been different. So when Alex Callinicos says that "their (the ISM/SSP's) prominence is in part a consequence of our past mistakes—in particular the opening we gave to Militant through our failure to intervene in the anti-Poll Tax movement in Scotland",5 he is telling only half the story. The role Militant played in the poll tax movement happened not just because the SWP gave it an opening but because Militant first of all made a correct analysis of the significance of the poll tax and then of the tactics needed to defeat it, and subsequently built and led the mass non-payment campaign.

The SWP has taken account of the appearance of new parties or alliances that do not fit into the classical reformist or revolutionary categories and that have a capacity to develop. This is not least because they are confronted with such a party on their own doorstep in the form of the SSP. They are also aware of the success of such parties as the PRC [Italian Party of Communist Refoundation] and the Portuguese Left Bloc. And they are of course directly involved in both the SSP and the PRC.

However, it is one thing to be in those parties, another to have a real understanding that in the present period it is this type of party that is necessary and not the timeless revolutionary party. This helps to explain a number of things. First of all, the tendency to downplay the example of the SSP.6 Secondly, the way in which the comrades of the SW platform obviously have some difficulty in acting as just one component of the SSP and sometimes give the impression of seeing themselves as the revolutionary faction of the party.

This is something which becomes even clearer when you look at the situation of the SWP in England (and also, for example, of their sister organisation in Australia) in relation to the Socialist Alliance. What is the Socialist Alliance, what purpose does it serve? The SWP obviously has considerable difficulty with this, as indeed did the Socialist Party. John Rees describes it as a special kind of united front. Now that requires some explanation.

The united front

The united front in the beginning was, of course, a tactic of the Communist International, aiming to achieve unity in action around precise objectives between revolutionary and reformist parties with the double objective of strengthening the fighting capacity of the workers' movement and letting workers see in action the difference between the two. The term has since been widened and can reasonably be used to describe any broad front around a particular issue involving substantial but politically diverse forces: for example, the coalitions and campaigns at the time of the Vietnam war, the anti-globalisation mobilisations and the recent anti-war mobilisations. These involve forces which are revolutionary, reformist or whatever, but which agree on a particular point or points. The SWP systematically uses the term to describe not just broad fronts with a specific objective but also such semi-permanent campaigns as the Anti-Nazi League and Globalise Resistance. Although in principle open to anyone, these are in fact fronts for the SWP, which tends to activate them or put them on the back burner in line with its own priorities. It has, of course, no monopoly over this method. To take only one example, the CWI used Youth Against Racism in Europe in much the same way. More recently, International Socialist Resistance is clearly the CWI's front in the anti-globalisation movement.

The Socialist Alliance is not a united front in any commonly accepted sense of the term; it is a transitional political form on the road to a party which may or may not come into existence. As Alan Thornett recently pointed out in a reply to Alex Callinicos, "The SA is a political organisation with an extensive political platform covering the full range of political issues. It does not just mobilise in elections, but also in the trade unions and on a range of campaigning issues."7 But that is not how the SWP sees it, and since the SWP is the main political force in the Alliance, how it sees it is of considerable importance.

As indicated above, the SWP's reorientation is based on their appreciation of three factors: anti-capitalism, rising working-class militancy and the weakening of reformism. But the weight that you give to each of these three factors is not without consequences for your orientation. The principal manifestation of the movement against capitalist globalisation in the advanced capitalist countries is the emergence of a layer of radicalised youth who can be won to socialist politics and to Marxism. (It also involves, in some countries at least, a remobilisation of more experienced trade unionists and intellectuals.) If you take into account only the rise of anti-capitalism and the rising curve of industrial militancy and its reflection in the unions, you can still come to the conclusion that the main task remains to build the SWP as the revolutionary party. Not in the same routine propagandist way as for the last twenty years, perhaps. Taking advantage of new opportunities certainly, working with other forces, getting involved in all sorts of campaigns and movements, as the SWP are currently doing, overcoming conservative/sectarian reflexes in their own ranks to do so. But at the end of the day, the task is still to build the revolutionary party = the SWP. No doubt at least a part of the SWP thinks that is all there is to it. But the fact of having broken from the routine of the old way of functioning and being involved in broader movements will be leading others to question long-held assumptions. The tension between the old and the new in the context of a rapidly evolving international situation may explain some of the SWP's oscillations and what are, to say the least, different emphases by leading members,8 as well as a series of crises and splits in the IST.

On an international level, it is no accident that so far the main thrust of the SWP's line on regroupment at present consists of overtures to the USFI via the LCR [Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire]. But that only opens the way to the idea that the SWP might not in itself be the revolutionary party, to the recognition that it is possible to regroup with other revolutionaries, especially on an international level. Such a regroupment is not in itself a bad thing and can indeed play an extremely positive role, so long as it is seen as a step towards broader regroupment and not as an alternative to it. The recomposition of the workers' movement and the creation of new parties is much broader than the question of revolutionary regroupment, which is only one facet of it.

It is of course possible to be involved in this process without fully understanding every aspect of it. The USFI has, to say the least, an extremely cautious approach to the bourgeoisification of social democracy, which it has still not fully recognised. But it actively participates in the building of new parties in Europe and elsewhere. The CWI, on the other hand, had in the beginning a better understanding of the transformation of the traditional workers' parties and the need for new parties, but in practice it stands aside from the real process of building such parties.

The crisis of the workers' movement

From the point of view of the rebuilding of the workers' movement, it is the third element cited by the SWP, the weakening of reformism, that is actually the most important. It is the collapse of Stalinism and the bourgeoisification of social democracy that make the building of new parties both possible and necessary and open the way in the medium term to them becoming mass parties. Callinicos deals with this when he says, "Major upheavals in the class struggle and the break by substantial sections of workers with reformism are necessary conditions for any attempt to create an international revolutionary organisation".9 He explains that both these elements were present when the Communist International was formed in 1919, neither of them when the Fourth International was formed in 1938, at best the first but not the second in 1968.

Actually, in the post-1968 period, there were both major upheavals in the class struggle and a political radicalisation that affected first students and youth and then certain advanced layers of the working class. That is what made it possible for a series of far-left organisations to recruit substantially from youth and then to recruit a layer of workers. That was the case at least in those countries where the youth and student radicalisation was either followed by or coincided with an upsurge in working-class struggles (Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece). What did not take place in the post-1968 period was mass working-class disaffection from the traditional reformist parties, which on the contrary were reinforced. That is why none of the European far-left organisations were able to give birth to even small mass parties.

Today we have a developing political radicalisation, expressed not only through the anti-globalisation movement but through growing rejection of free-market ideology in the working class and even sections of the middle classes. We also have a rising curve of workers' struggles. These are international trends, of which Britain is not the most advanced example. Nevertheless, the direction in which things are moving is clear, in terms of the anti-globalisation movement and in particular the anti-war movement, and of developments in workplaces and in the unions.

However, let's return to Callinicos' second condition, which is crucial. In fact, what is happening today is not so much "a break by substantial sections of workers with reformism" as the abandonment of the working class and of any pretence to defend it by what the SWP and others still call the reformist parties, although these parties have long since passed from the stage of "reformism without reforms" to neo-liberal counter-reforms. What happened initially was not so much a break of leftward-moving workers with reformism as a break of rightward-moving reformism with the working class. But this, in turn, is creating the conditions for workers subsequently to move leftward. That particular combination of circumstances makes it possible to build parties which are perhaps less "revolutionary" than the traditional far-left groups but which are capable of attracting workers abandoned by reformism and of winning them to radical, socialist, class-struggle politics because the basis for stable reformist politics is eroding. This possibility is obviously enhanced by the present evolution of the class struggle, more favourable than in the 1980s or early 1990s.

The SWP seems to counterpose revolutionary parties, by which it means organisations like itself, to the new parties which are developing.10 This is a false dichotomy. The new regroupments and parties that are appearing represent a moment in the evolution of a growing layer of the working class and youth. They are not chemically pure revolutionary parties, but they are capable of evolving (not necessarily in a linear fashion, perhaps involving splits and realignments). The most spectacular example is perhaps the recent evolution of the Italian PRC. The idea that at any given moment living revolutionary parties contain all sorts of currents, tendencies and trends, not all of them revolutionary, some ultra-left, is hardly new. It was true for the Bolshevik Party and for the parties of the early Communist International. We have to approach the building of new parties with a willingness to work with diverse forces and the patience to let clarification come about through debate on common experience.

It is quite sterile to approach the tasks of the present period armed with a norm of what a revolutionary party should be which is in fact just a bigger version of the existing far-left organisations. These organisations developed under particular conditions in the postwar period and some of them acquired a certain political weight after 1968. They were characterised by a high degree of homogeneity, not only over the broad lines of a revolutionary program but also over the particular shibboleth or shibboleths of each organisation, over tactics and methods of organisation, and were held together by a hierarchical structure usually presided over by an authoritarian leader. Such organisations may have been an inevitable result of decades of domination by Stalinism and social democracy, when revolutionary Marxism was marginalised in the workers' movement. They are not what is needed today. The mass revolutionary parties of the future will not be the SWP or the LCR or Lutte Ouvrière or the Socialist Party writ large. They will be open, pluralist and non-hierarchical.

The possibility of building new parties and the international process of socialist regroupment are not simply products of the present more favourable conjuncture or of the rise of the anti-capitalist movement. Alex Callinicos is therefore quite wrong to say that "the starting point for any consideration of regroupment on the revolutionary left is the changed situation created by Seattle and the rise of the anti-capitalist movement".11 The starting point for any consideration of regroupment on the revolutionary left is the broader process of recomposition of the workers' movement. The starting point is the qualitative change in the traditional workers' parties, which opens up possibilities for new workers' parties based on socialist, class-struggle politics, and which is itself a product of the evolution of capitalism since the 1970s. The conditions for regroupment and for new parties have been germinating for ten or fifteen years. It's just a question of when different political forces understood it. Scottish Militant Labour [SML] started to understand it in the mid-1990s, which is why it took the initiative to form the SSA in 1996 and the SSP in 1998. The SWP did not understand it at all then and does not fully understand it now. Nevertheless, with whatever limits, it has shown itself capable of recognising new realities and new possibilities, sufficiently so to commit itself to the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales, to come into the SSP in Scotland and to participate in the European anti-capitalist conferences.

John Rees goes a considerable way to understanding what is happening. He writes: "In many ways working-class reformist consciousness has remained remarkably consistent since the 1970s. But mainstream reformism can no longer deliver these aspirations."12 Talking about former Labour activists, he continues: "A minority have begun to search for a new political home. As they do so, even though they start out from traditional reformist consciousness, the fact that the traditional organisational receptacle for this consciousness is no longer adequate forces them to begin to draw more left-wing conclusions." A little further on, he affirms, "This process of recomposition is more advanced than many on the left realise, but it still affects a minority in the labour movement".13

The changes in the relationship of the working class to the Labour Party explain why the SSP is a party that corresponds to the challenges of the present period and why, for example, the SWP in England and the LCR in France, in their present form, are not, just as SML in its pre-SSP form, was not. What these organisations are capable of (in principle, but there is no guarantee that they will be in practice) is to make, because of what they represent in their respective countries, a decisive contribution to the creation of such parties, which would also involve them changing themselves, divesting themselves of outmoded ideological and organisational conceptions. It is not a question of them abandoning what makes them revolutionary organisations, but of getting rid of what stops them acting most effectively in the present situation.

Would we therefore consider the SSP a model, as Callinicos says it is not? Yes and no. No, because you obviously can't just apply what is done in one country to another; all parties are in part moulded by their national context and by the traditions of the workers' movement in their country. (For example, you will not get in other countries the kind of debate we have been having here on trade union links with the Labour Party, because that type of link is a specifically British phenomenon.) But most definitely yes in the sense that the SSP is the type of party that needs to be built today, rather than the old far-left model.

The SWP do not have a clear understanding of this crucial aspect of the tasks of Marxists today. They are trying to grapple with the reality of the SSP and the Socialist Alliance and developments in other countries. But they are trying to do so using concepts that are inadequate. First of all, they maintain the definition of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers' party, with the tactical conclusions that flow from that in terms of voting, lobbying Labour Party conferences, etc. In his article in International Socialism, John Rees warns: "But error creeps in at the point where this rhetoric [about ‘Tory Blair'] crosses over into a serious contention that the Labour Party has fundamentally changed its nature".14 Well, sometimes it is better to be prudent than triumphalist in relation to such developments. But Rees also correctly points out that, for a wide layer of activists in the labour movement, "the Labour Party is either directly encountered as the agency against which they are campaigning or in a broader sense opposed to their goals", an entirely accurate statement. And when you take what Rees himself has to say about the activists who are now ready to work with the revolutionary left, when you add the decline in electoral support for the Labour Party (yes, many workers still vote Labour, but more and more don't) and above all what is happening in the unions, the process isn't actually at such an early stage as that. It may still involve a minority, but it is a growing minority. The point of course is not to speculate on how rapid the process is but for socialists to be as well placed as possible to take advantage of the situation. And we are better placed in Scotland than in England not just because the SSP is much stronger and a factor in national politics but also because we are clearer about the fundamental change in the nature of the Labour Party.

Although the SWP define the Socialist Alliance as a form of united front, calling the SSP a united front is probably pushing the use of the concept beyond the limit, so it becomes a centrist party,15 although I don't think they have really thought this through, and in a sense the SSP is being defined as a centrist party by default, for want of a more precise definition. We should define a party concretely, by the role it plays in relation to the fundamental classes in society and to the state. A centrist party is a party that oscillates between reformism and revolutionary politics. Is that what the SSP does? The reality is that the SSP is conducting propaganda and agitation in the working class, taking up all the issues that confront the working class on a national and international level and presenting a socialist alternative. No doubt the party still has weaknesses, but there is no sign of oscillation or of subordination to any other political force.

The SSP was not formed to correspond to anyone's textbook definition of what a revolutionary party is, but to act in a given situation in a given country and to take the fight for socialism forward. Of course, we should not let ourselves be unduly preoccupied by questions of terminology. But in both cases the use by the SWP of these terms (centrist party, united front of a special kind) serves to mask the originality of the SSP and indeed the Socialist Alliance. And it can influence how they as revolutionaries orient to these formations. To the extent that they approach the SSP and the SA in the spirit of being the revolutionary component of the united front or the revolutionary faction within a centrist party, then they will have difficulty functioning in a constructive way within those formations. If they understand the specific character of the SSP, then they will be much more likely to do as the ISM does, which is to build the party while developing the influence of Marxism within it, but not to act as a party within the party. And they will be more likely to help the Socialist Alliance develop towards a party.

If the Socialist Alliance [SA] in England is going to develop towards a party, at whatever speed, it is crucial for it not to be conceived of as simply an electoral alliance, but for it to take up campaigning activity. However, in the case of the biggest campaign of the recent period, against the war in Afghanistan, it was the SWP itself which led it. This is consistent with the SWP conception of united fronts, the (real) united front in this case being the Stop the War Coalition. There was no role for the SA which was seen as essentially an electoral front and a receptacle for disillusioned Labour supporters. Similarly, the SA is not supposed to campaign on globalisation, which is the role of Globalise Resistance. In fact, the schema is rather like a spider's web, with the SWP at the centre and around it a series of united fronts on particular issues or aimed at particular audiences, the SA being only one of these, albeit of a special kind. If the SA was seen as a pre-party formation, then it would take up campaigning on all sorts of issues and the SWP would function within it more and more as a current, easily the dominant one. This is clearly a step that the SWP is not yet ready to take. But their comrades in Scotland are already de facto in the situation of being such a current. And in England, the SWP's preconceived schemas are likely increasingly to run up against the developing reality of the Socialist Alliance.

There are no guarantees as to the future evolution of of the SWP. There is already on the left in England the example of the Socialist Party, which also in the mid-1990s tried to deal with the new international situation and the recomposition of the workers' movement, initiated the Socialist Alliances and engaged in dialogue with other forces. The result was that the leadership panicked at the consequences of opening up the organisation in this way and retreated to the bunker, at the price of a weakened organisation in England and several splits internationally. It would be a tragedy if the SWP were to go down the same road. At present there is no reason to think it will. But if it is to continue to play a key role in rebuilding the left it will have to question some of its assumptions and deepen its analysis, on the Labour Party and above all on what kind of parties we need to build in the coming period and on the role of revolutionary Marxists within them.

Notes

1. John Rees, "What's at stake?" Socialist Worker, June 2, 2001.

2. John Rees, "Anti-capitalism, reformism and socialism", International Socialism, No. 90, Spring 2001.

3. These figures are from an article by Jim Higgins included in a symposium on the "IS-SWP Tradition" published by Workers' Liberty magazine between February 1995 and March 1996. Higgins was a member of IS from 1959 until his expulsion in 1975, and was national secretary from 1971 to 1973.

4. This is brought out sharply in an article by Steve Jefferys ("How the SWP narrowed into a sect") in the Workers' Liberty symposium (note 3). Jefferys was one of IS's main leaders after 1968 and their industrial organiser in the 1970s.

5. Alex Callinicos, "Regroupment", letter to the sections of the IST, May 17, 2001.

6. For example, in the letter mentioned in note 5, Callinicos writes, "The SSP is a special case rather than a general model. It is very important to be clear about this, since what is happening in Scotland is being closely watched internationally." This is a recurring theme in his articles.

7. Alan Thornett, "The Socialist Alliance—a united front of a new type?", Socialist Outlook, Summer 2002.

8. We should be wary of engaging in a kind of Kremlinology as to which SWP leader thinks what about the new orientation. However, the contrast between the contributions of Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos in the debate with Alain Krivine on the future of the revolutionary left at Marxism 2001 was too striking to ignore.

9. Alex Callinicos, "Notes on Regroupment", April 2, 2001, sent out with the letter to the IST cited in note 5.

10. See the remarks in the article "Regroupment, realignment and the revolutionary left", in reply to points made in my article "The LCR and the question of a workers' party". Both in IST Discussion Bulletin No 1, July 2002.

11. Callinicos, "Notes on Regroupment".

12. John Rees, International Socialism, No. 90.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Alex Callinicos, "Regroupment", see note 5.

[Murray Smith is an international officer of the Scottish Socialist Party [SSP] and a leader of the International Socialist Movement [ISM], a Marxist current within it. This article is taken from issue 8 of Frontline, the magazine of the ISM.]

Scottish Socialist Party left unity SWP (Britain) IST LCR Murray Smith

Guest post: On the historical experiences of IS and SWP with factions

December 29, 2011 at 10:25 pm (Uncategorized)

http://splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/guest-post-on-the-his…

Note: The following essay has been submitted by an SWP member who would prefer to remain anonymous, and is intended to shed some historical light on questions of current interest.

In his essay On Party Democracy John Molyneux correctly remarked that the formation of factions in democratic centralist parties and organisations like ours is part and parcel of our tradition. He also made clear that he is uncertain as to whether they are an appropriate part of party democracy today. This essay argues that in most conceivable circumstances they are not only conceivable as an important mechanism by which the party can function democratically but are a necessary part of that democracy. Although it must also be clear that in arguing for the right to form factions we are not arguing that comrades ought to form them as it is also clear from examining the record that they often come with a cost. We need then to examine the record and indicate ways and means by which factions can enhance party democracy and any damage they might cause can be limited. Such an enterprise must also indicate the rights and duties of both the membership and the central leadership of the party with regard to its democratic functioning.

There can be no doubt that we have entered a new period of class struggles that offers our party the chance to build deeper roots within the working classes. That the comrades are determined to make the best of opportunities presented to them cannot be doubted. Similarly there is a renewed determination within our party to develop our understanding of the world, through the deepening of Marxism as a critical theory, and thereby enable our class to exchange capitalist ‘reality’ for communist utopia. But there is considerable questioning within the organisation as to what this means especially in light of what is seen by many comrades as a top down approach on the part of the leadership.

The question then arises as to what party democrats need to do in order to reform the group. This is not an easy question to answer but the preferred option of the leadership to deepen the education of members, while a positive step forward, will not suffice in the least. Certainly it is important for comrades to have an understanding of the history and traditions of our movement. In fact it is vital that such knowledge, at least at a basic level, is in the possession of every comrade but far more important is the ability to think like a Marxist that is to say to think critically. And perhaps it is true that education programmes will help enable comrades to learn to think in this manner especially in conjunction with events like the annual Marxism school. But even if every single comrade in the group becomes an expert in Marxian theory and revolutionary history this will not change anything other than the verbosity of contributions at meetings.

The problem in the SWP is not to be located in specific organisational structures, although these may or may not be appropriate for the period we are passing through, but was correctly identified by Harman as a problem of the party’s culture. The top down approach that characterised the group for many long years, especially during the period when John Rees seemed to be first among equals, is only one aspect of this culture if the most obvious one. More importantly it also coloured and continues to colour the manner by way of which the groups militants relate to allies on the left. If a certain degree of sectism was a product of the Downturn years then such attitudes need to be jettisoned in the changed and far more positive circumstances of today.

It is however all too easy to blame individual leaders for the poor culture long prevalent in the group. Events since the departure of John Rees have however shown that not even he can be held to be the sole cause of the rot which set in long before he was elevated to the CC. Rather than seek to discover which individuals are responsible for the groups damaged culture we need to ask what were the objective factors, far more powerful than the role of individuals after all, which shaped that culture. The answer that it was the Downturn simply will not suffice albeit it is correct in essence. We need to take a short look at the group’s history.

When it was founded in 1950 the then Socialist Review Group was a tiny organisation which worked within the Labour Party, Trades Unions and later through the NCLC. For ten years it experienced very little growth but was able to maintain a public press of a remarkably high standard indicating the high level of Marxist culture within the group. But this high level of Marxist culture also indicates that the group was surrounded by and immersed in the labour movement of the day which was deformed in many ways by Stalinism but was far larger and more active than anything any but the oldest members of the SWP have ever known. Having to defend their oft heretical views against a reformism that still had adherents numbering tens of thousands, a left reformism deformed by Stalinism and last and least against various orthodox (sic) Trotskyist sects meant that members of the SRG simply had to know their stuff.

The slow growth of the group between 1958 and 1968 saw many of the same conditions working on comrades of what was by now IS. Given the internecine conflicts in the Young Socialists the necessity of being able to hold ones own in debate was even more important than previously as things began to heat up slowly in industry. In fact it was the industrial orientation of IS that marked it out as being different from other entrist groups and enabled it to begin to recruit cadre drawn from heavy industry and engineering. As much as for comrades in the YS it was vital that comrades in industry knew their stuff given the importance of the CPGB and the rising, if very sectional, shop stewards movement.

1968 saw IS move to a Democratic Centralist form of organisation and that year saw a multitude of factions appear and, once they were of the opinion that they were no longer beneficial to IS, dissolve. With one exception but I’ll return to that later. It would appear that functioning with a veritable plethora of factions did not inhibit the growth of IS and indeed might possibly have aided that growth. It is certainly the case that they helped to crystallise debate within IS in a fashion that was usually, if not always, positive. IS was to continue with the same liberal regime until December 1971 with no discernable problems arising from the right to form factions. Although as nobody saw fit to form a faction that is hardly surprising.

However there was a ‘faction’ working within IS from 1968 to late 1971 but its character was not that of a faction but rather that of a parasitic sect. This was, as is well known, the Matgamna group which operated under the name of the Trotskyist Tendency (sic) while in IS. Details of its politics and exploits can be found here, here and here as, in the last document linked to, can be found an explanation as to the fundamental character of a faction. Unlike earlier factions the Trotskyist tendency did inhibit the proper functioning of IS at a time of great opportunities. As evidence against the possibility of factions being a positive feature of party life the experience with the Matgamna sect must be heavily discounted.

The leadership of IS appears to have been badly burnt by their experience with Matgamna and from this point on limits were set on the formation of factions. This was contrary to both the previous practice of the revolutionary movement, the practice of IS itself and the declared principles of the leadership. On this see Towards A Revolutionary Party in which Duncan Hallas declared that:

“Such a party cannot possibly be created except on a thoroughly democratic basis; unless, in its internal life, vigorous controversy is the rule and various tendencies and shades of opinion are represented, a socialist party cannot rise above the level of a sect. Internal democracy is not an optional extra. It is fundamental to the relationship between party members and those amongst whom they work.”

Sadly these words would be forgotten by all concerned between 1971 and 1975 at which point the leadership itself split into warring tendencies. In the years between the leadership of IS operated a liberal regime but the rule that factions could only function during the pre-Conference period was rigidly enforced as was demonstrated in the case of the Left Faction, forerunners of today’s Workers Power and Permanent Revolution grouplets, which had to dissolve itself after Conference only to reform exactly one year later. One might argue that as the comrades concerned continued to discuss amongst themselves and clearly had a commonality of ideas that their faction never really dissolved. It follows then that the rule forbidding factions outside the pre-Conference period was clearly a dead letter and unenforceable as such. And to be fair to the LF comrades they did obey the rules of IS.

Other factions within IS were not as honest as the LF as can be seen in the example of the Right Opposition (they only described themselves as the Revolutionary Opposition in a document produced after the expulsion of their leaders). Like many others in the IS of the early 1970s this grouping was entranced by the writings of Trotsky, many then appearing in English for the first time, and believed that they were original and fresh thinkers. As such they were happy to set out their wares in long and frequent contributions to the Internal Bulletins then produced on a monthly basis. Obviously operating as a more or less coherent group it was also well known that they met and took political counsel from a non-member of the group – an obvious breach of discipline. Worse, branches containing supporters of the Right Opposition became little more than talking shops and failed to intervene in struggles or recruit. Clearly this was exactly the kind of faction, declared or not being beside the point, that no leadership can tolerate and their leading elements were rightly expelled. As a sequel to this episode the erstwhile Right Opposition immediately disintegrated into three distinct tendencies with almost nothing in common, a tale told by John Sullivan in his essay on The Discussion Group.

What needs to be pointed out about both of the tendencies mentioned above is that they were treated with kid gloves by the leadership. In the case of the RO they were granted the right to publish a long series of tedious documents in the internal bulletins and members of the leadership devoted many pages to refuting their crap. If anything the LF were treated even better with their leading spokesmen contributing at least one article to the ISJ. Such leniency was, without any doubt, the correct course to follow given that many of the concerns expressed by the LF and RO were to some degree of concern to wider sections of IS. For example it is clear from reading the IBs of the period and talking with comrades then active that many comrades, otherwise unsympathetic to either the LF or RO, were sympathetic to the idea of IS developing a fully fledged programme based on the idea of transitional demands. Something that IS, as a whole, did commit to but never completed with the result that this is still an open question in the IS Tradition today. See for example Alex Callinicos in his The Politics of Austerity.

Between 1968 and 1975 IS had operated on the basis of a set of perspectives and a primary orientation towards the shop stewards movement that had been developed in the earlier period and was further elaborated as events demanded. The entire organisation was united behind these politics, with the exception of the Matgamna sect and later the RO, which meant that when the established leadership within its own ranks developed serious differences a major crisis erupted. Details of the political nature of that dispute need not concern us here, comrades who wish for more information are urged to read Ian Birchall’s recent biography of Tony Cliff and Jim Higgins’ little book More Years for the Locust, what is of importance is how the dispute was handled within the group.

What is most striking is that the dispute, initially confined to the Executive Committee, found no reflection in the then regular Internal Bulletins and that even active London based comrades often knew nothing of the dispute. When Duncan Hallas saw fit to initiate an opposition to the emerging majority around Tony Cliff it came as a shock to most of the organisation. Or rather it would have done had not Hallas already switched sides in the dispute only to emerge as the major polemicist for the majority against the newly formed IS Opposition. Ordered, as the constitution of the group dictated, to disband after the 1975 IS Conference the ISO refused and found its leading figures expelled in short order. A bitter factional struggle had turned into a lack of tolerance that cost the group a section of its leadership, a number of intellectuals and a layer of established trades unionists. The damage was deep and severe.

The IS Opposition was the last substantial faction within IS, although the following year saw the appearance of Fred, the Faction for Revolutionary Democracy which echoed the views of the ISO, albeit internal debate remained healthy, through the medium of the Internal Bulletin, for some years. But even this would die down after Steve Jefferys left the party at roughly the same time as various elements nostalgic for a then inappropriate rank and fileism. For those interested in sectarian exotica it was at this time that the Revolutionary Democratic Group appeared, billing itself as an external faction of the SWP despite having next to nothing in common with the IS Tradition. Sad to say though its bulletins were widely distributed at Marxism and other party events they were sometimes the only way, this was before the internet, comrades had of learning of some developments in the organisation.

What can be observed from the above narrative is not the simply linear development of a small Marxist propaganda group and its entry into crisis when its leadership fell out. Rather we need to understand that the development and degeneration of IS involved a shifting series of relationships within the working classes. In the first instance we can observe the development of a body of theory by a small group of revolutionaries who would become the leadership of IS throughout the glory years of 1968-1975. But at all times this developing group was informed by its relationship to the class as a whole as mediated by the growing organisation itself. We can also identify a growing cadre seeking to relate to the most advanced sections of the class and, in a functional sense, to the theory that informed their activity as embodied in the organisations leadership.

The development of factional and tendency strains within a revolutionary organisation cannot but reflect the tensions between various layers within the class and the efforts of revolutionaries to relate to them. This is more easily observable and truer of mass based organisations than it is of small propaganda groups with a limited ability to undertake direct agitational work. For example it is easy to observe the growth of a bureaucratic syndicalist current in the Russian Workers’ State as reflected in the misnamed Workers Opposition of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). And again in the small revolutionary movement in Britain it is clear that the tiny Socialist Labour Party, for which see Ray Challinor’s The Origin of British Bolshevism, reflected the revolutionary syndicalist mood of the shop stewards in Glasgow and Sheffield immediately after the First Imperialist World War.

Similar tensions also had and continue to have an echo in IS and the SWP. It is the task of the leadership to ensure that such tensions do not disrupt the revolutionary organisation enabling positive developments to be generalized while limiting the influence of negative developments. This will normally be done through the process of education and polemic but the apparatus of the group will also be used by any leadership to nurture this development. Or so one might hope, but Marxist wisdom is not and cannot be confined to even the most far-sighted Central Committee and the possibility arises that comrades will have insights and arguments that the CC cannot recognise. Or comrades will simply disagree with the CC position. In such circumstances, reflecting very often the influence of the different experiences of the comrades, the question arises as to how the group as a whole can reach agreement on the course of action to be followed by the entire group.

It is at this point that a healthy party culture and democratic forms become vital for the development of the group. For example if the revolutionary organisation has a number of comrades in senior trades union positions, who seem under pressure from their cohorts to sell a bad deal to the union members, it is vital that these comrades are supervised and disciplined by party fractions in the relevant unions and by their local party branch. In this scenario it is the task of the leading committees of the party, the NC and CC, to ensure that the fraction and branch do in fact carry out their tasks of supervision and discipline. We have seen, within the last few years, to our cost what happens when these duties of supervision and discipline cannot function due to the disbandment of the relevant party organisations. To its credit the current leadership has acted to ensure that such disasters cannot be repeated.

The branches and fractions can however only act to supervise and discipline members who belong to them and are not able to deal with groups or layers of comrades, who being subject to various pressures, seek to express more or less common opinions on various aspects of the group’s activity. In fact should such a tendency develop then the current structures of the party and the comrades holding responsible positions in those structures, (we are thinking here of the branch, district and fraction committees along with the NC and CC) cannot but regard any tendency holding views that differ from theirs as an obstacle to the functioning of the group.

Such an attitude on the part of a leadership is entirely understandable because the law of factions is that they are an obstacle to the carrying through of an agreed upon political line. And yet, from time to time, they are the only way the membership or a part of the leadership has of correcting a political line that is wrong or in part wrong. Or at least is perceived by a section of the party as being wrong. We may take an example from the history of the Bolsheviks to illustrate this. In our first case the Left Communist faction, associated with comrades such as Bukharin, opposed the line put forward by Lenin going to so far as to accuse him of betraying the word revolution (!) operated publicly, they even published a daily paper of their own, and at the same time implemented the line they fought to change. The point here is that both sides in the debate remained loyal to the party programme and their understanding of Democratic Centralism.

The episode related above illustrates that even at the very point of crisis the Bolsheviks were a democratic party willing to make concessions to dissident tendencies within their ranks. There was moreover no question as to the right of such dissidents to organise themselves as a formal faction and fight to change the line of the party as a whole. Even if such an internal party struggle inhibited the functioning of the party in the midst of a crisis situation. Yet the disruption to the party was minimized by the very existence of the Left Communist faction precisely because it enabled the debate in the party’s ranks to be carried out in the appropriate channels and thereby minimized disruption.

In all of the episodes related above, whether they be episodes from the history of IS/SWP or from the history of Bolshevism, it is clear that the various factions, including that of the leadership, have to a greater or lesser degree reflected pressures and influences arising from different sections of the working class or other classes. Politics then must be put in command and the membership of the party must decide the organisation’s political line and have the right to correct it if that becomes necessary. Which has not been the case within the SWP in the years following the transformation of IS into the SWP. What has developed is an organisation that knows one permanent faction and denies the rights of the membership to struggle to change either that leadership or its political line.

The above can be seen all too clearly in the manner by which the organisation was led during the period when John Rees was a leading member. At this point I should note that the personality of Rees is of no importance as the entire leadership followed and argued for a political line which I assume was authored by Rees and his closest allies. What cannot be denied is that at the time of the turn to building Respect, ludicrously described as a United Front sui generis, many comrades had serious doubts which led to them abstaining from joining or building that formation in any way. But the leadership commanded that such was the political line to be followed and not one comrade challenged them publicly although a lot of grumbling took place in pubs the length and breadth of the country. Whether or not the Respect line was wrong was it not a disgrace that not one comrade felt able to challenge the leadership on it?

Was it any surprise then that when the party changed course, due to the entirely predictable betrayal of its erstwhile ally George Galloway, that not only were a small number of comrades lost to the sub-reformism of Respect (Galloway) but a line that had obviously failed was continued in the form of the Left Alternative. And worse, was it a surprise that differences within the leadership remained opaque, concealed from the membership to the point that it took some considerable time before the ranks of the party were aware that the Rees minority had considerable differences with the majority of the CC. Although even when the Rees minority briefly surfaced as a formally constituted faction – there is no question they had functioned as such for much longer – there was little on the face of it to differentiate their politics from that of the CC majority.

Many comrades have argued that Rees stood for Rees and nothing else. This is a nonsense that demonizes the man and prevents a proper discussion of the political issues at stake. And the political issues are not to be confined to the group’s political line but also concern organizational questions too including the question of internal democracy. For revolutionists questions of organisation are of the utmost political importance whether it be when to form workers councils or internal democracy within the revolutionary party. Which is why the Democracy Commission was such a damp squib as it began a discussion and just as swiftly ended it before any answers had been arrived at and separated question of democracy and politics in a typically Zinovievite manner. A manner John Rees might have been proud of in fact.

So inconclusive was the Democracy Commission and so little did it change as to the groups internal functioning that the resignation of a faction around Chris Bambery was a shock only in the sense that it had not already happened. What disappointed many comrades was that he had been allowed to pursue his factional activities under cover of his responsibility as a member of the CC for the party in Scotland. And this despite a leadership that had placed a renewed stress on the need for active functioning branches and was arguing for the need for systematic cadre education in order to raise the cultural level of the party.

But an abstract knowledge of Marxism and labour history will not remedy the problems the party faces. Though it will help equip comrades for the struggle and must be encouraged. It cannot remedy our problems because many of them relate to the decline in class consciousness throughout far wider layers of the working class as a result of the Downturn. In this context we can note that when the SRG was formed in 1950 many workers had illusions that the Labour Party would bring about socialism, the unions had emerged from the war with new millions of members and the Stalinist party too counted its supporters in the tens of thousands. There was then a fierce contest within the working class for the allegiance of both its vanguard and the class as a whole. The result was a class that in its mass had achieved a considerable consciousness of itself as a class even if it lacked the awareness of the measures that needed to be taken to move towards socialism. Similarly during the upturn of the early 1970s our comrades had to compete in a field in which the Labour Left, the declining but still powerful CPGB and vaguer syndicalist ideas were far more influential than the ideas of revolutionary socialism. Class consciousness in the class as a whole and particularly within its advanced sections was in comparison to today at an historical high. All of this had a profound influence on both the theories produced by SRG/IS and on the democratic forms the organisation adopted.

The reverse is also true with regard to the Downturn and its effects on the SWP. Chris Harman initiated a discussion in the ISJ, in his essay Crisis of the European Revolutionary Left, as to the crisis of the revolutionary left in Europe. Although he did not suggest the SWP was unaffected he implicitly contrasted the collapse of many groups to the relative success of the SWP in maintaining both its toehold in the working class and its membership base. He was correct and prescient enough to identify a trend nearer its beginning than its end and that crisis was deepened by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, wrongly identified by so many as forms of socialism, and the neo-liberal offensive. What he did not, could not, identify was the effects an enforced isolation from the working class would have on the SWP itself. And indeed had the group been able to maintain to a greater degree its contacts with the class given the low level of struggle it is by no means impossible that it would not have been more susceptible to that crisis that destroyed so many other once promising groups. On the reverse side of the coin I suspect that a healthier party regime would have made it easier to hold the line without relapsing into sectism.

This writer is of the opinion that the party culture and forms of internal democracy within IS from 1971 to 1976 were generally of a positive nature. There were though a number of problems that are relevant to today. There can be no doubt that in general the internal culture of IS was healthy but there was a political distance between the leadership and most of the membership that deepened after 1971. This was expressed in a tendency on the part of the leadership towards impatience with the membership, with the result that rather than argue for a change in tactical orientation by the group, they fell into the trap of instructing the members to make whatever turn it was that was felt to be needed at the time. Comrades, particularly those who formed themselves into factions, who displayed reluctance to make any given turn became barriers to be removed. A feature of party life that many would argue is still firmly in place today.

In part the distance, in terms of decision making, that opened up between the leadership of professional revolutionaries at the centre and the membership spread throughout the country was a result of structures that only inadequately articulated the decision making process within the group. This was often expressed in the failure of the National Committee to be a real decision making body between the conferences of the group. It is striking that even today similar concerns are expressed with regard to the relationship between the NC and the CC. It is my contention that this arises as both are elected directly by the conference but the larger body has no right of supervision over the smaller CC which therefore is able to monopolise political direction of the party.

Another negative feature of party life is the total lack of a space in which criticisms of the political line of the organisation can be raised internally. Rather than being able to articulate their views in a regularly published Internal Bulletin comrades are often reduced to grumbling in corners after branch meetings with the result that they become seen as conservative elements or worse. Indeed the raising of questions at branch meetings is often frowned on by a section of the comrades who would appear to see any kind of questioning as disloyalty to the organisation and its politics. This attitude is as much a result of the training comrades have received and can be painlessly changed for the better.

What then needs to be done to make our party more democratic in order that it can more sensitively respond to an ever changing class struggle and make it more attractive to a rising generation repelled by mainstream politics parties, especially those of the left, which are not democratically controlled by their members? Most importantly we need to discuss the nature of the problems that many comrades are raising and in this way change the internal culture of the party into one that is tolerant and inclusive of those who question. There has never been a better time for such an enterprise given that the spirit of democracy has swept the globe in 2011 and not far beneath the surface has been the spectre of workers democracy waiting only to be made explicit and here in Britain that is exactly the process that N30 began. It is our task to seek to become of the developing forces that seek to progress beyond bourgeois society and we are best able to do so if we too possess an organisation that is democratically centralized and eschews commandism.

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