We here at ‘Shiraz’ really don’t want to intrude into private grief, especially when so many thin-skinned comrades like Johnny Game-boy and Dickie “intellekshull” Seymour might get upset (and they’re upset so easily, the poor dears)…but…

…It seems that the crisis in the SWP is going from bad to worse. But we at Shiraz wouldn’t agree with the CPGB in giving support to the Rees faction (not unless we really hated him and wanted to fuck him up once and for all): no, our position is REVOLUTIONARY DEFEATISM.

Poor John Rees is being blamed for the SWP’s humilation at the hands of Galloway and his coterie of small businessmen and Islamo-fascists. But -surely – Smith and Callinicos went along with that at the time? And denounced those of us who used the word “communalism”?

A classic case of “revolutionary defeatism”: that means we hope that  both sides inflict maximum damage opon each other.

Scenes from the battle for the SWP, with John ‘Basil’ Rees (in real life an expert swordsman) playing Sir Guy of Gisbourne (not the Sheriff of Nottingham, as is widely believed). Martin Smith as The Man In The Iron Mask.

Comment at end

24th November, 2009

‘KILLING OFF’ PRESIDENT BLAIR?

WAS IT MERKEL, SARKOZY, CHILCOT OR BRIERLEY?

Hugh Muir at The Guardian has this to add to the “why did they go cold on Tony” post mortem.

Excerpt: ”So a miserable few days for Tony Blair but a slightly better time perhaps for Peter Brierley, the father of Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, who died during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Blair, as we know, was scuppered in his attempt to become the EU president. Peter Brierley, we learn, can take some of the credit for that. Or depending on your view, some of the blame. For when he snubbed Blair at the Guildhall memorial event in October, his words to the former PM – “I’m not shaking your hand, you’ve got blood on it” – struck a chord with anti-war types here, but if anything they had a greater impact in Paris. According to senior government sources there, Nicolas Sarkozy told his staff the EU couldn’t risk having a man as president who might be confronted with similar angry scenes. Three weeks later, on 28 October, Sarkozy – who initially supported the Blair candidacy – met Angela Merkel for dinner, where they agreed that it couldn’t possibly be Blair. Both framed a variety of public arguments that undermined Blair’s chances (we need a centre-right figure; Britain is not in the eurozone), but the genesis of Sarkozy’s about-turn was that “blood on your hands” confrontation. “If that’s the result, I’m pleased,” Brierley told us yesterday. Words can be the most devastating weapon of all.’

Without hearing from Sarkozy himself or from Merkel, and we have heard officially from neither on Iraq’s importance, it is hard to be sure if this mattered one bit.

Into the mix, if one is still looking to shift the blame from the Franco/German mutual support axis, was the then upcoming Iraq Inquiry at which Blair was set to give evidence, and still is.  None of this was news, and the second of these was more likely to cause concern in real politik than the first. But, if any of this Iraq business played into the decision, there is another more likely scenario.

SIR JOHN CHILCOT’S ANNOUNCEMENT

No-one could be seen to blame Sir John’s unfortunately-timed announcement less than a week prior to the EU presidency decision that Mr Blair would be appearing in January/February for the withdrawal of support from Blair.  Poor Sir John was under enough attack as it is. I DO question why he could not have waited a few more days, but perhaps there was good reason.

But on the other hand, no-one will criticise a poor bereaved father for giving vent to his feelings, even though a volunteer army’s volunteers all know the risks. Useful, if one has already quietly decided, but wants to pretend one hasn’t.

VOLUNTEER SOLDIERS ARE NOT SENT “TO BE KILLED”.  THEY ALL KNOW THE RISKS

Perhaps it is time we DID criticise those who complain so bitterly about their personal losses on the field of battle. No politician, in contrast to what Radio 4’s John Humphries recently said, actually sends soldiers “to die” in foreign wars. The soldiers volunteer to FIGHT for the cause, and in most cases return proudly to tell the tale.

So is all of this mention of the bereaved father no more than a convenient excuse? Quite possibly.

Just supposing for the sake of argument the “blood on your hands ” accusation DID matter. WHY should it matter?

Such charges have been made repeatedly for years to Blair and to other leaders who took their countries into Iraq. It is true that France and Germany did not go along with the other 22 of the 25 EU members who also supported America in the Iraq invasion. Oh, you hadn’t realise it wasn’t just Britain and America?  Odd that. (See here.)  But it is also true that had Merkel or Sarkozy been in office in 2003 they might well have supported the USA, since their relationship to America was not the same as the Left-leaning parties which were in power in their countries in March 2003.

Whilst not dismissing it completely, I am sceptical about this story. Surely, if that had been clearly the case, Mr Blair would NOT have allowed his name to be mooted so loudly, first as the favourite and then as the challenger to Van Rompuy?

THE WHOLE THING SMELLS

It actually smells to me. It smells of Sarkozy gallantly taking some of the blame from Merkel’s shoulders. After all they are in this together. It will be seen as the failure of BOTH of them for failing to back Blair when Europe starts to flounder and sink under nonentities like Van Rompuy and the Other One.

The mention of two other names, one being Mandelson, being thrown into the hat at the last minute for EU Commissioner adds heat if not light. The Other One, who got the job, was the THIRD CHOICE! Why would Miliband withdraw from his possible post as High Commisioner and why would Mandelson look to throw his name in at the end, when it had only become clear in the last two days that Blair was out of the picture?  In my opinion Miliband withdrew because it had become clear that HIS presence in the game was being used to stop Blair who would clearly outshine and possibly even outrank Merkel and Sarkozy. Miliband’s name being bandied about was possibly a straw man all the time, providing an excuse for others to position themselves by insisting that the High Commissioner should be from the Left but the President from the Right. In reality either would have been interchangeable. And Miliband still had his eyes on future leadership of the party post-Brown.  Few would have wanted him to risk defeat at the EU level thus lowering his chances of taking over from Brown.

As for Mandelson, despite his being a canny operator, he did not see which way the wind was blowing against Blair until a day or so before the vote. If he had, he would have been in there pronto as  a candidate post-Miliband. Blair was still clearly being talked up by SOME,  setting him up nicely for a fall.

There is much we may never know as to the whys, by whom, and wherefores.

One thing we can be sure of is that New Labour was outwitted this time, for whatever reason, and mainly by Merkel and Sarkozy.

BRIERLEY SUPPORTS A GROUP WHICH WANTS OUR SOLDIERS DEFEATED

Peter Brierley, the bereaved father who supports the Socialist Workers  – an extreme left-wing group whose leaders suggest ‘defeating’ our troops so that they cannot win in foreign battles -  may be presently basking in the adoration of the braindead Left. They see him as the victor in the “death” of  a political giant.

From Socialist Worker, March 2003:

Socialists have done and continue to do all in our power to build the movement to prevent war and to stop war when it starts. But if war starts the very worst outcome would be a quick victory for the US and Britain.

The best response to war would be protests across the globe which make it impossible for Bush and Blair to continue. But while war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces.

That may be unlikely, given the overwhelming military superiority they enjoy. But it would be the best outcome in military terms. It would make it more likely that Blair would not survive, and Bush would be in trouble too.

It would limit the ability of the US and its allies to impose suffering, war and death on an even bigger scale. Socialists have a long tradition to draw on in taking this stance. When the First World War started many who had spoken against war in the run-up to it fell into line behind their national governments when it started.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY. It is such as these.

Words CAN be the most devastating weapon of all, and in the wrong hands they can backfire, Mr Brierley.

If such as Bierley, a politicised  ‘pygmy’ (I’m sorry, we all grieve at some times in our lives, but we must also be tough enough to take being told what we are) thinks he has scored a famous victory, perhaps he is right.  If so, he has also killed off, until it can be resuscitated, Britain’s place in Europe and Europe’s place in the heart of Brits. Thank you, Mr Brierley.

Tony Blair is not dead politically and will return.  Europe’s recovery may take longer – far longer.

RELATED

• Breaking NEWS: Blair not snubbed by 178 Iraq Soldiers’ Families
• Oliver Kamm exposes “blood on hands” Blair accuser &  allies

Following her vote, on the Communication Workers Union’s postal executive committee, for the acceptance of the interim agreement and the halting of the postal strikes, it became clearer than ever that the Socialist Workers Party had to do something about Jane Loftus’s repeated breaches of collective discipline in that organisation. It has been widely reported that the SWP asked her to choose between keeping her union position or making a self-criticism of her recent vote for the interim agreement. Given this choice she opted to resign from the SWP. It is good that the SWP leadership decided to take action over this. Unfortunately there has been no mention of this on the SWP’s own website so far – if it was left to them postal workers would be left uninformed of this development.

The following article was written by a Milton Keynes Communists member for the Weekly Worker before it was revealed that Jane Loftus had resigned.

Bring Loftus to account

Dave Isaacson condemns leading SWP members who continually undermine and sabotage attempts to forge rank and file organisation

There was one significant omission in Jim Moody’s article on the sell-out of the postal strike by the Communication Workers Union leadership, which allowed CWU president Jane Loftus to come out of it looking rather good, when actually she has been an utter disgrace (‘Militants condemn sell-out’, November 12).

Loftus, a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party and therefore supposedly a revolutionary, is also a member of the CWU’s postal executive committee (PEC), which voted unanimously on November 5 to accept the interim agreement and call off the strikes, just as the strength of the postal workers was starting to be realised. This goes completely against the position of Loftus’s organisation. Socialist Worker has rightly stated that “Leaders of the postal workers’ union were wrong to suspend strikes at Royal Mail last week … There was no reason for the union to sign up to the agreement. The proposed escalation of strike action – that would have seen two 24-hour strikes in close succession last week – had widespread support within the union” (November 14).

Another Socialist Worker article by Cambridge CWU rep Paul Turnbull calls on postal workers to “restart the strikes immediately”. Yet neither questions why Jane Loftus did not vote against this sell-out – indeed her name is not mentioned at all. Activists in the SWP and militants in the CWU need to ask what is going on here. The SWP’s newspaper, Socialist Worker, is arguing one thing, while their highest placed member in the CWU is doing the exact opposite. Like other socialists all over the country, SWP activists put massive amounts of time and energy into supporting the postal workers and their strike. No wonder Socialist Worker might not want them to know that their own comrade on the CWU leadership colluded in undermining that hard work.

Many would expect better from a member of the SWP, but this kind of behaviour is not an aberration. Back in 2007 Loftus failed to speak out against the rotten deal which ended that dispute. The only PEC members who openly campaigned against the 2007 sell-out were Dave Warren and Phil Brown. Loftus also colluded with the bureaucracy by keeping their secrets and withholding vital information from the membership during closed-door negotiations with management. The SWP failed to use this information to warn strikers of the impending sell-out and call on workers to organise independently of the bureaucracy. Again, back in 2003-04 Loftus voted for the Major Change agreement, a management package that involved job cuts.

Loftus is certainly not alone, however. Her actions are reminiscent of those of Martin John and Sue Bond in the Public and Commercial Services union. Similarly, these were the SWP’s leading comrades in a union with a left general secretary (Mark Serwotka) and leadership (dominated by the Socialist Party in England and Wales). The SWP has consistently downplayed (or kept silent about) any criticisms it may have of left union leaders such as these in order to try and draw them into supporting various SWP ‘united fronts’. In the process the SWPers closest to them in the trade unions clearly bought into the ‘awkward squad’ hype and are in thrall to these bureaucrats.

There are plenty of perks to the job and other social pressures which weigh upon those who enter the upper echelons of the union structures. A revolutionary party should be constantly on guard and fighting against the effects of these pressures on its militants, yet the actions of the SWP leadership often do just the opposite of that. Their desire to get close to and win the approval of ‘left’ union leaders creates a culture of diplomatic silence and conciliationism, while what is necessary for accountability within the unions is open debate and rank and file independence from the bureaucracy.

As members of the PCS national executive committee Martin John and Sue Bond had failed to support SWP policy within the union on a number of occasions, and then in 2005 they knowingly went against SWP directions and policy to vote with Serwotka and SPEW for a scandalous pension deal which sold away the rights of new entrants. Only after regular exposures of their actions (not least in the reports of CPGB member Lee Rock in the Weekly Worker), and growing complaints from other SWP members, was the leadership forced to take action against these renegades.

Initially Socialist Worker ignored the actions of its members on the PCS NEC, while condemning the deal as a betrayal of future generations of workers – sound familiar? Even after disciplinary action was begun Sue Bond got off very lightly with a letter of apology in which she stated: “I do regret the position our vote left comrades in, and the significant implications for the left in other public sector unions. I can certainly assure comrades that I have no intention of breaking party discipline in the future” (Weekly Worker November 17 2005). Martin John flounced out of the SWP the day before he was due to face a meeting of the SWP fraction within PCS. It was not until four weeks after the pensions deal was voted on that news of all this made it into Socialist Worker.

However, it is not just a few individual SWP members succumbing to the pressures of the bureaucracy. The SWP itself has consistently failed to use its positions of influence within unions to build genuine rank and file movements which are independent of the union bureaucracy. The SWP-sponsored occasional publication, Post Worker, does not openly take on the likes of general secretary Billy Hayes and his deputy Dave Ward when they act against the interests of their members. Rather, it regularly gives over significant space for them to promote themselves. It might as well be an official union publication.

SWP members may well wonder about the priorities of their leadership, when Alex Snowden – a Reesite Left Platform supporter – has been expelled for “factionalism” (during the pre-conference period when temporary factions are allowed), yet Jane Loftus seems to have got off scot-free for a blatant act of treachery. Comrades in the SWP need to ensure that Jane Loftus is held to account and faces disciplinary action. She must be called before a fraction meeting of SWP comrades in the CWU and made to explain her actions. She must either recant and campaign openly against the acceptance of the interim agreement in line with SWP policy, or it is she who should face expulsion. Beyond this, major questions have to be asked about whether she can continue to be the SWP’s leading representative within the CWU, given her track record. And all of this must be done openly with full reports in Socialist Worker.

I have been told that CWU executive members can only subsequently campaign against majority decisions if they immediately registered their dissent. If this is the case, then Loftus must be made to step down from the PEC in order to campaign within the CWU accordingly.

Prior to this latest sell-out, Socialist Worker quite correctly asked the question, “How do we fight when union leaders waver?” Matthew Cookson wrote: “The best way to take the struggle forward is to organise workers on a rank-and-file level. A strong organisation of this nature could support the officials as long as they were representing the union members, but could act independently the moment their leaders began to look for some way to settle their dispute unfavourably” (October 31).

Yes, but the actions of leading SWP members continually undermine and sabotage attempts at forging such rank and file organisation. Comrades in the SWP need to think much more deeply about the role their organisation plays within the unions. They must be free to use Socialist Worker as a tool to explore why it is their leading representatives in the unions end up acting against the interests of the working class.

Birmingham UK, November 21 1974:

Thirty five years ago tonight,  two bombs exploded inside busy pubs in the centre of Birmingham, killing 21 people and injuring another 182. It was a traumatic moment - we in mainland Britain had not experienced such an attack upon civilians since the Second World War. There never was any serious doubt that the Provisional IRA were responsible, though to this day they have failed to admit to it.

An additional six people can be added to the tally of victims: the innocent men who were jailed for 16 years for a crime they didn’t commit.

I was living in Birmingham at the time, a young student member of the International Socialists. The bombings made a major and permanent impression upon me, but I’ll come to that later. First, I’ll deal with what happened within the working class in Birmingham, then with the response on the left.

There was a massive and vicious backlash against all Irish people in Birmingham.  Anyone of Irish extraction or with any known Irish connection, was immediately put into fear for their very lives. A worker who was known to have played the pipes at an IRA funeral was strung up at Rover Solihull (he lived, but only by luck). Johnny Bryant, a member of ‘Workers Fight’ (forerunner of the AWL) was chased from his job at Lucas, never able to return. In shops, offices and factories throughout Birmingham, people of Irish extraction or with Irish names were in fear for their very lives. A massive march took place from the Longbridge car plant to the City Centre. Socialist activists at Longbridge had to make a quick decision as to how to react. The Communist Party who dominated the Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards Committee simply went to ground. The International Socialists, who had a few shop stewards and supporters in the plant, decided to join the march in order to argue against any anti-Irish backlash and to prevent the National Front taking the lead. They were surely right to do so. Immediately after the march, IS students (including myself) joined Frank and others in leafletting the city centre against any backlash.

To the best of my knowledge, no-one actually died as a result of the backlash in Birmingham, but that was purely a matter of luck. The atmosphere was murderous and Irish people, and those of Irish extraction, were living in real fear for their lives.

The left was in a state of shock, just like everyone else. The Communist Party and their Irish-in-Britain front, the ‘Connolly Association’, simply waited for things to blow over. The IS, which had shop stewards in major factories like Longbridge and Lucas, was in political disarray, though individual IS militants (noteably Frank Henderson at Longbridge), often played principled and even heroic roles. As stated above, Frank and the other IS shop stewards and activists at Longbridge joined the protest march and argued against the anti-Irish backlash. IS members with Irish names simply went into hiding – and who can blame them?

But despite the brave and principled role of IS industrial militants like Frank, the organisation as a whole was disorientated and incoherent. No-one knew what the “line” was – whether we continued to give “critical but unconditional” support to the Provos or not. The following week’s Socialist Worker didn’t help: the headline was “STOP THE BOMBINGS – troops out now”, which didn’t really clarify matters. Was “STOP THE BOMBINGS” a demand on the Provos? Were we suggesting that the bombings were, in reality, a just and/or inevitable consequence of the presence of the troops? What the hell were we saying?

About a week after the bombings IS held an emergency meeting for all Birmingham members in the upstairs room of a city centre pub. Duncan Hallas did the lead-off, and quoted extensively from the Official IRA paper, denouncing the bombings. Inevitably, several comrades responded by asking why, therefore, we supported the Provos, instead of the Officials, whose ‘line’ on individual terrorism seemed much closer to ours. My recollection is that Hallas didn’t really have an answer to that, and the meeting ended in a sullen and resentful atmosphere of dissatisfaction.  We all knew that Hallas had been talking bollocks, but we didn’t know what the answer was. The reaction of many IS industrial militants was that it was best to steer clear of any involvment with “difficult” issues like Ireland, and to stick to ”pure” industrial work.

For myself, the bombing was a sort of political coming of age. It taught me that the IS was incoherent and unprincipled on the question of Ireland, and nationalism more generally. It taught me that international issues cannot be divorced from industrial work. Most importantly, it taught me that politics is not a game or a pass-time: working class people had died and we had to have something to say. Ultimately, it taught me that simplistic “anti-imperialism” that costs working class lives is no way forward. It helped me to grow up politically – but at a terrible price.

PS: an untold story: The role of the firefighters and cabbies.

Fire engine driver Alan Hill was on duty at Birmingham Highgate station that night, and was called to the scene of the first bomb, at the Mulberry Bush pub. He told Birmingham historian Carl Chinn (in today’s Birmingham Mail) the following:

“There was now complete gridlock in the city. The only option I had was to do a reverse run down the full length of Corporation Street against the one way traffic pouring out of the city centre. It was totally against brigade policy but I really had no alternative.

“When I reached the bottom of Corporation Street, I turned left into New Street.

“Talk about out of  the frying pan into the fire. Seconds before, another bomb had expolded at the Tavern in the Town basement pub in New Street..

“The street was a scene of utter devastation.

“We sent a radio message to Fire Control explaining the position and requesting another four fire engines and forty ambulances to assist us. There was only the four of us. There were around 150 casualties. Many were trapped inside the dark basement.

“The officer in charge of the fire engine, John Frayne, who at the age of 28 was the oldest member of the crew realised it would be  ages before assistance arrived.

“John explained our position to the crowd and asked for volunteers. Twelve brave men stepped forward to assist us.

“The other two firemen, Nigel Brown and Martin Checkley, were already down in the basement.

“Although I had requested 40 ambulances I realised we would be lucky to get any. It was a case of first come first served and I knew the firemen at the Mulberry Bush had already requested every available ambulance in the city. My stomach sank to my fire boots.

“With every alarm bell in the street ringing, it was difficult to hear yourself think, but about 12 minutes into the incident someone behind me was clearly shouting ‘Alan.’ I turned around.  It was George Kyte.

“George was a taxi owner driver who lived in Corisande Road, Selly Oak. I knew George well I had worked with him in the past as his night driver.

“With typical understatement George said ‘I know you’re busy. I am on a rank in Stephenson Place. A couple have asked me to take them to hospital. Can I do that and will you need their details?’

“I could have kissed him.

“I told George, ‘Get on your radio. Make an emergency call. I need every available cab in the city here at this address now URGENT.’ Within seconds the message was sent via the TOA radio system.

“Access into New Street had been blocked by a cordon set up in St Martins Circus so the street was claer of passing traffic. Within a matter of moments the glow of an orange taxi sign became clearly visible in the darkness at the end of the street. It looked like a stretch limo. It turned out to be 25 black cabs nose to tail moving slowly towards us.

“It was the start of the ’scoop and run’ method. As many casualties and carers as possible were packed into each cab and taken immediately to the Accident and General hospitals. Almost 100 casualties were removed from the scene outside the Tavern on the first taxi run.

“Other cabs appeared on the scene soon afterwards and were joined by cabs returning from the first run. Even two ‘black and white’ cars that shared the TOA radio scheme turned up.

“Considering that there would have been no more than 50 black cabs working the entire city at that time of a Thursday night, the reponse was overwhelming… without any shadow of a doubt there would have been far more fatalities that night from trauma and blood loss had the taxi drivers not responded in such a magnificent and selfless manner.” 

It’s fairly well-known on the left that the British SWP is presently in a state of turmoil. Former head honcho John Rees is masterminding a pro-’Respect’ faction (misnamed the “Left Faction”!), one of their leading trade unionists, Jane Loftus (CWU Exec member) has walked out rather than follow Party discipline within the union, and now their Tyneside branch has issued a public denunciation of  one of their own members:

‘[we were] very concerned to see firstly the bureaucratic heavy-handed approach taken by Regional Secretary Dave Harker towards the Youth Fight for Jobs Campaign; this resulted in a number of activists wishing to be taken off the network list…. We were even more concerned when Tony Dowling Tyneside Secretary mirrored that bureaucratic approach with regards to an event organised by the IWW in conjunction with the National Union of Mineworkers. To discover that Tony an SWP member refused to circulate details of the event on the grounds that he regarded the IWW as ‘political’ shocked our members’.

The incident giving rise to this attack sounds to be fairly trivial. But it’s an extraordinary development for a supposedly “democratic centralist” organisation and surely symptomatic of a major – and possibly terminal – internal crisis.

More about the Tyneside SWP row here.

h/t: Ed W

Behavior
The program must be manually installed.

The program reports false or exaggerated system security threats on the computer.

Fake names:

• LdPinch V
• Advanced Stealth Email Redirector 6.2
• VMalum AWS
• CNNIC Update U
• Bancos DMD
• Win32.Grams.I
• Zlob AN
• SillyDl BCL
• CPush
• Win32/Wadnock
• Best search
• Win32/Nuqel.E
• Edge Tech
• DisableKey
• Emogen.B
• MoonLight.V
• Autorun.AOL
• Sinowal.VXR
• Antivirus360
• BankerFox.A
• P2PShared.U
• BitTera.C
• Azero.B
• Sality.AN
• WinWebSecurity2008
• Downloader.JS.Small.fi
• PSW.Win32.OnLineGames.sxa
• Downloader_Win32_Agent.nmi
• Downloader.Win32.Braidupdate.c
• Downloader.JS.Agent.sg
• GameThief.Win32.OnLineGames.tnys
• PSW.Win32.OnLineGames.rlh
• Downloader.Win32.Delf.cgx
• Backdoor.Win32.Small.x

The user is then prompted to pay for a full license of the application in order to remove the threats.

Installation
When the program is executed, it creates the following file:
%Windir%\sysguard.exe

Next, the program creates the following registry entry so that it executes whenever Windows starts:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\”sysguard” = “%Windir%\sysguard.exe”

It also creates the following registry subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AvScan

To add to the obits mentioned here, one from Splintered Sunrise.

Added: In the new Socialist Review: Chris Harman looks back at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the continued relevence of the theory of state capitalism.

Below the fold, Harman’s writings at the Marxist Internet Archive, via Entdinglichung:

** Osagyefo Pensant (1964)
** Nobly Wrong (1964)
** Sociological Strivings (1965)
** Stalin’s Great Shadow (1965)
** Tribune of the People (Part 1) (1965)
** Working Classes (1965)
** Return to Utopia (1965)
** Irish Problems (1965)
** The Restoration (1966)
** Tribune of the People (Part 2) – The Wasted Years (1966)
** Looking Glasses (1966)
** Categorically Thinking (1966)
** Australian Mirrors (1966)
** Liberal Evasions (1966)
** Join and Collapse (1966)
** Italian Theory (1967)
** Mud Cannot Split (1967)
** Russia – How the Revolution was Lost (1967)
** Marxist Morals? (1967)
** Paper Radicals (1967)
** Success and Failure (1967)
** Gramsci (1967)
** Vietnam (1968)
** Party and Class (1968)
** Czechoslovakia (1969)
** Ruling Ideas (1969)
** The Inconsistencies of Ernest Mandel (1969)
** Their Election and Us (1970)
** Prospects for the Seventies – The Stalinist States (1970)
** Students (1970)
** The Pilkingtons Strike (1970)
** Capitalism Eastern Style (1970)
** Tory Government Policy (1970)
** Cuba – The End of a Road? (1970)
** [Industrial Relations Bill] (editorial) (1971)
** Bother on the Baltic (1971)
** Two Offensives (1971)
** The Years of Revolt (1971)
** The General Strike (1971)
** The Common Market (1971)
** Hue and Cry (1971)
** Two Marx’s or One? (1971)
** Bounced Czech (1971)
** Antonio Gramsci (1972)
** Hungary – Failure of Economic Reform (1972)
** Reply to M. Brinton on the Bolsheviks & Workers’ Control (1972)
** Russia in Crisis? (1973)
** US Arms for Chile’s Generals (1973)
** Let History Judge (1973)
** The Politics of Soviet Agriculture (1973)
** British Steel in Crisis (1973)
** Middle East (1973)
** Phase 3 – Fire Down Below (1973)
** In Brief (1973)
** The Axe (1973)
** Romania’s Ceausescu (1973)
** The Spanish Civil War (1973)
** Capitalism in Crisis (1973)
** Danger Tory Crisis (1974)
** The New Labour Government (1974)
** [Labour Government] (1974)
** Students (1974)
** Scottish Nationalism (1974)
** An Alienated Man (1974)
** [After Phase 3] (1974)
** Fists Against Fascists (1974)
** Portugal (1974)
** Northern Ireland – Background to the Crisis (1974)
** A New Election (1974)
** The New Labour Government (1974)
** Ireland and the British Crisis (1974)
** Portugal – The First Six Months (1974)
** The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture (1974)
** Marxist Economics and the World Today (1975)
** Note of Qualification (1975)
** Portugal (1975)
** Portugal – The Latest Phase (1975)
** Poland – Crisis of State Capitalism (Part 1) (1976)
** Poland – Crisis of State Capitalism (Part 2) (1977)
** One Small Mistake (1977)
** The Politics of Spain (1977)

Dave Isaacson condemns leading SWP members who continually undermine and sabotage attempts to forge rank and file organisation

There was one significant omission in Jim Moody’s article on the sell-out of the postal strike by the Communication Workers Union leadership, which allowed CWU president Jane Loftus to come out of it looking rather good, when actually she has been an utter disgrace (‘Militants condemn sell-out’, November 12).

Loftus, a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party and therefore supposedly a revolutionary, is also a member of the CWU’s postal executive committee (PEC), which voted unanimously on November 5 to accept the interim agreement and call off the strikes, just as the strength of the postal workers was starting to be realised. This goes completely against the position of Loftus’s organisation. Socialist Worker has rightly stated that “Leaders of the postal workers’ union were wrong to suspend strikes at Royal Mail last week … There was no reason for the union to sign up to the agreement. The proposed escalation of strike action – that would have seen two 24-hour strikes in close succession last week – had widespread support within the union” (November 14).

Another Socialist Worker article by Cambridge CWU rep Paul Turnbull calls on postal workers to “restart the strikes immediately”. Yet neither questions why Jane Loftus did not vote against this sell-out – indeed her name is not mentioned at all. Activists in the SWP and militants in the CWU need to ask what is going on here. The SWP’s newspaper, Socialist Worker, is arguing one thing, while their highest placed member in the CWU is doing the exact opposite. Like other socialists all over the country, SWP activists put massive amounts of time and energy into supporting the postal workers and their strike. No wonder Socialist Worker might not want them to know that their own comrade on the CWU leadership colluded in undermining that hard work.

Many would expect better from a member of the SWP, but this kind of behaviour is not an aberration. Back in 2007 Loftus failed to speak out against the rotten deal which ended that dispute. The only PEC members who openly campaigned against the 2007 sell-out were Dave Warren and Phil Brown. Loftus also colluded with the bureaucracy by keeping their secrets and withholding vital information from the membership during closed-door negotiations with management. The SWP failed to use this information to warn strikers of the impending sell-out and call on workers to organise independently of the bureaucracy. Again, back in 2003-04 Loftus voted for the Major Change agreement, a management package that involved job cuts.

Loftus is certainly not alone, however. Her actions are reminiscent of those of Martin John and Sue Bond in the Public and Commercial Services union. Similarly, these were the SWP’s leading comrades in a union with a left general secretary (Mark Serwotka) and leadership (dominated by the Socialist Party in England and Wales). The SWP has consistently downplayed (or kept silent about) any criticisms it may have of left union leaders such as these in order to try and draw them into supporting various SWP ‘united fronts’. In the process the SWPers closest to them in the trade unions clearly bought into the ‘awkward squad’ hype and are in thrall to these bureaucrats.

There are plenty of perks to the job and other social pressures which weigh upon those who enter the upper echelons of the union structures. A revolutionary party should be constantly on guard and fighting against the effects of these pressures on its militants, yet the actions of the SWP leadership often do just the opposite of that. Their desire to get close to and win the approval of ‘left’ union leaders creates a culture of diplomatic silence and conciliationism, while what is necessary for accountability within the unions is open debate and rank and file independence from the bureaucracy.

As members of the PCS national executive committee Martin John and Sue Bond had failed to support SWP policy within the union on a number of occasions, and then in 2005 they knowingly went against SWP directions and policy to vote with Serwotka and SPEW for a scandalous pension deal which sold away the rights of new entrants. Only after regular exposures of their actions (not least in the reports of CPGB member Lee Rock in the Weekly Worker), and growing complaints from other SWP members, was the leadership forced to take action against these renegades.

Initially Socialist Worker ignored the actions of its members on the PCS NEC, while condemning the deal as a betrayal of future generations of workers – sound familiar? Even after disciplinary action was begun Sue Bond got off very lightly with a letter of apology in which she stated: “I do regret the position our vote left comrades in, and the significant implications for the left in other public sector unions. I can certainly assure comrades that I have no intention of breaking party discipline in the future” (Weekly Worker November 17 2005). Martin John flounced out of the SWP the day before he was due to face a meeting of the SWP fraction within PCS. It was not until four weeks after the pensions deal was voted on that news of all this made it into Socialist Worker.

However, it is not just a few individual SWP members succumbing to the pressures of the bureaucracy. The SWP itself has consistently failed to use its positions of influence within unions to build genuine rank and file movements which are independent of the union bureaucracy. The SWP-sponsored occasional publication, Post Worker, does not openly take on the likes of general secretary Billy Hayes and his deputy Dave Ward when they act against the interests of their members. Rather, it regularly gives over significant space for them to promote themselves. It might as well be an official union publication.

SWP members may well wonder about the priorities of their leadership, when Alex Snowden – a Reesite Left Platform supporter – has been expelled for “factionalism” (during the pre-conference period when temporary factions are allowed), yet Jane Loftus seems to have got off scot-free for a blatant act of treachery. Comrades in the SWP need to ensure that Jane Loftus is held to account and faces disciplinary action. She must be called before a fraction meeting of SWP comrades in the CWU and made to explain her actions. She must either recant and campaign openly against the acceptance of the interim agreement in line with SWP policy, or it is she who should face expulsion. Beyond this, major questions have to be asked about whether she can continue to be the SWP’s leading representative within the CWU, given her track record. And all of this must be done openly with full reports in Socialist Worker.

I have been told that CWU executive members can only subsequently campaign against majority decisions if they immediately registered their dissent. If this is the case, then Loftus must be made to step down from the PEC in order to campaign within the CWU accordingly.

Prior to this latest sell-out, Socialist Worker quite correctly asked the question, “How do we fight when union leaders waver?” Matthew Cookson wrote: “The best way to take the struggle forward is to organise workers on a rank-and-file level. A strong organisation of this nature could support the officials as long as they were representing the union members, but could act independently the moment their leaders began to look for some way to settle their dispute unfavourably” (October 31).

Yes, but the actions of leading SWP members continually undermine and sabotage attempts at forging such rank and file organisation. Comrades in the SWP need to think much more deeply about the role their organisation plays within the unions. They must be free to use Socialist Worker as a tool to explore why it is their leading representatives in the unions end up acting against the interests of the working class.

Review: Stalin’s Nemesis. The Exile, and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Bertrand M. Patenaude. Faber & Faber. 2009. Trotsky A Biography. Robert Service. Macmillan. 2009.

“Estimations of Trotsky tend to shade into explanations for his political downfall.” So comments Bertrand Patenaude. How should the man be considered? Why should we be interested in his defeat? Rigid, lacking sound political instincts, the overweening “flaw” in his haughty personality, – all judgements of Stalin’s Nemesis – Trotsky offered brilliant justification of the Russian Revolution, and mordant criticisms of Soviet rule under Stalin. To Robert Service Trotsky was “an exceptional human being and a complex one”. He was a major actor in a central drama of the 20^th century, whose “ideas, including those about Russian history, had a lasting impact”. Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis is a solid, if not particularly friendly, account of Trotsky’s life following his expulsion from the Soviet Union. It frequently expands to encompass the longer course of his vocation, from inspiring mass leader to marginalised founder of the Fourth International. But to get the full flavour of a study that puts the emphasis on how the one-time Commissar’s personality, imprinted with a “definite ideology”, shaped his career, from a leading player in the October capture of power, to exile, and victim of Stalin’s brutal revenge one needs to read Robert Service’s biography. With all the faults, and these flow in abundance, of such a method. Not that would have expected a sympathetic portrait. In Stalin (2004) Service compared Trotsky’s use of violence to Stalin’s and stated that he alone of the leading Bolsheviks approached the Georgian “in bloodthirstiness”. Or indeed a rounded grasp of Communist ideology and history. In his Comrades (2007) Service asserted that by the end of the 19^th century Marxism had become “an infallible set of doctrines and political substitute for religion.” And that Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ “new type of state” based on “one-party, one-ideology” with no respect for “law, constitution and popular consent” that had spread to “mutate like a virus”, infecting the body of Fascism, and Nazism. It remains around, apparentl, to taint “the Islamist plans of Osama Bin Laden” and the Taliban.

Each book then offers not just narrative but assessments of Trotsky. That is, to the history of Communism and the Soviet Union. Patenaude’s story is largely centred on life in his Mexican homes in Coyoacán. Wider historical description and judgements about Trotsky tend to flow from this location. Despite its dismissive conclusion about the “dogma of Marxism” and Trotsky’s faith in the “glorious Soviet future” (did Patenaude mislay his style guide?) the book is gripping and illuminating. Aware of his previous writings, one expects less, and gets a lot less, from Service. In an ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist review David North (here) has rigorously unravelled the string of howlers that litter the book – apparently produced by a serious historian – from names, dates of people’s death, (including that of Natalia, Trotsky’s wife) to graver errors. The claim that this is the “first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist” may, nevertheless, be true. It is less than sure that Service’s efforts, to offer a “more searching approach” than previous biographies, such as Isaac Deutscher’s celebrated Trilogy, or the painstakingly documented publications of Pierre Broué, not to mention his subject’s own “self-serving and misleading” accounts, offer more than acres of darkness about Trotsky.

Mexico, after years of wandering in exile, initially internal, in Kazakhstan, to outside the USSR in Turkey, France, to Norway, was Trotsky’s final home. The axe had fallen. He was now, for the Soviet state, officially a “counter-revolutionary” who had formed an illegal anti-Soviet party. No state appeared comfortable with receiving this dangerous revolutionary. But, from 1937 up till his murder in 1941, he found a guarded welcome from the Mexican President Cárdenas, a supporter of the Spanish republic and protector of countless loyalist refugees. The agrarian reformer had yielded to lobbying from the celebrated muralist, and self-styled Trotskyist, Diego Rivera, and out of a sense that it was the “proper thing to do” had accepted the Russian revolutionary. The artist housed him in Coyoacán, in his casa azul (blue house), “filled with plants and flowers, pre-Columbian sculptures” and “a fruit bearing orange tree” in the patio. With talent Patenaude describes the enveloping clouds around Trotsky’s stay. Life in the Blue House, where he had an affair with Rivera’s wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (riven in many minds by Julie Taymor’s dashing bio-film), was not without drama. Sketches of Trotsky’s intimate relationship with his wife, Natalia, his pastimes, fishing, hunting, cacti collecting, and fraught diners, enliven the human side of – to anyone immersed in the drier side of Trotskyist literature – of the Old Man. There are snapshots of an earlier existence, from his role as the Bolshevik Army leader, the bitter struggles with Stalin following Lenin’s death in 1923, to his eventual hounding out of the Party.

That past was brought back quickly. In the growing Stalinist terror, Moscow ideologues attacked Trotsky the ‘counter-revolutionary’. Near-by the Mexican Communist Party launched violent campaigns against his presence. From the start Trotsky and his entourage were under siege. Unfortunately, not only real threats weighed on them. There were petty rows. “Life in the Trotsky household was marked by frequent periods of tension and petty strife which at times had the effect of undermining Trotsky’s security.” Which, by the time they had moved from the Blue House to the Avenida Viena (a result of the liaison with Frida) had become a full-time task. This was not always well carried out, despite efforts to recruit reliable guards, install alarm systems, and watch towers. Those out to crush him got closer and closer to Trotsky’s immediate circle. They imprisoned and executed members of his family, and assassinated important Trotskyist activists on the streets of Europe. This campaign spread to whole political movements. In Spain the 1937, a Stalinist-instigated a suppression of, at the height of the Civil War, the ‘Trotskyist’ POUM (an independent anti-Stalinist Marxist group. that Trotsky’s own dozen strong band of Spanish followers had been told to reject as ‘centrist’) was undertaken on the grounds of their ‘services’ for “European and Asiatic fascism”. Amid the repression their leader, the Catalan Andreu Nin was abducted from prison, tortured and murdered by a GPU-led squad. By the start of 1940 the henchmen of the Soviet Union’s GPU were operating with the purpose of eliminating Trotsky in his New World redoubt. The infiltration by Stalinist agents, first Bob Harte, then, the sadly well known, under various names, Mercador (Ramón, Raymond), Jacques Mornard, who wormed his way into the Coyoacán refuge, by the cruel seduction of the trusted Sylvia Ageloff, is outlined with all its tortuous mendacity.

Wider politics played the major part of Trotsky’s life in exile. The Marxist revolutionary had not come to Mexico to abandon the fight against Stalinism; he wished to confront it with all possible means. Apart from holding the reins of the nascent Fourth International – in preparation since Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and founded officially in 1938 – Trotsky wrote prolifically on international affairs. He offered  criticisms on a global scale of Communist policies. In the Bulletin of the Opposition, and countless articles for the international left (and bourgeois) press he showed the truth about the “privileged caste” that made up the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’, and the ‘gravedigger’ of the Russian Revolution, Stalin. Trotsky tried to organise resistance on a world-scale. Trotsky was still engaged in a biography of Stalin up to Mercador’s lethal assault.

Patenaude describes a central episode in this unequal combat: the Dewy Commission, (1937). This was set up to challenge the Soviet charge that Trotsky was behind untold plots ‘uncovered’ during the Great Terror, and prosecuted during the Moscow trials. The 78-year-old American educationalist and pragmatist philosopher, John Dewy, who headed the public tribunal, declared that the injustice of this ‘legal’ process ranked with the Dreyfus affair and that of Sacco and Vanceti. This Commission, an Inquiry into such claims, visited his Central American location. It took testimonies from many sources, was not without its difficult moments for Trotsky. Here his record as a leading Bolshevik came into play. How could the former People’s Commissar (as Service asserts much more frequently) demand the rights of democratic justice when his own actions in power had betrayed them? Stalin’s Nemesis suggests that Trotsky was forced into a corner over his defence of his action in suppressing the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion – his role as “the bloody Field Marshall Trotsky”. It might have been relevant here to read what Victor Serge had to say on the subject, that if, as Trotsky alleged (high-handedly) the revolt was led by men different to those who once rose in support of the October Revolution, that whether the Party that crushed them was also the same. Or was it not too already suffering from “bureaucratic befoulment”? Did in fact there have to be some kind of re-assessment, as Serge suggested, of the early years of Bolshevik power. To begin with the introduction of the Cheka (forerunner of the GPU and other state security organs) and the suppression of overt opposition to the Party? That, the “central Committee”, by condemning in 1918 the right to apply the death penalty “without hearing the accused who could not defend themselves” an “Inquisitional procedure forgotten by European civilisation.” *

If the Moscow trials, the Commission concluded, were a frame-up (a view, to our astonishment today, not shared by many on the left), this leaves unresolved the difficulties, moral and political, these particular issues raise. Patenaude outlines the American educator’s 1938 exchange with Trotsky on ethics. The Dialectical Materialist claimed that the class struggle was the ultimate basis of all morals. That under Lenin the Party had followed the ‘laws’ of social development and revolution in crushing its enemies. That, “the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of power of man over man.” In contrast Stalin used unrestrained terror to serve the authority of bureaucratic rule. Thus, he concluded, end had a ‘dialectical’ relation to means. Stalin’s goal needed repression, Lenin and Trotsky’s…. Dewey asked in reply if these ‘laws’ had testable proof, and what ‘means’ precisely were ruled out to achieve a world where people were free. One might conclude that how to maintain some kind of human decency regardless of the political circumstances remains unresolved. Dewey to an extent shared with Trotsky the premise that morality was not fixed but (as the American later wrote) based on “growth, improvement and progress”. He foresaw its future in a wider democratic process rather than formal political association – social development towards ending the rule of a minority over others in short. This leaves open what kind of political action gave an opportunity for Stalin to rise to power, and the lack of clarity about Trotsky’s defence of early Bolshevik methods of compulsion. In what sense, viewed today, can we say that they were in line with the promise of future human liberation? This end has yet to come.

What then of the politician, the Marxist, the revolutionary leader? Patenaude cites Max Eastman’s opinion that Trotsky “lacked the gift for personal friendship”. He had no real friends, but “followers and subalterns”. Their Morals and Ours wanted to end power over people; his political action was based on instrumental authority. That he saw “individuals as servants to an aim and an idea rather than personalities in their own right.” Eastman was well-placed to know: he fell out with Trotsky over his casual treatment well before he broke with the left and began a steady drift rightwards. But how far does this get us? Trotsky no doubt considered himself equally as a tool – of History (as Edmund Wilson described his self-image in To The Finland Station). In this fashion we was an actor in pre-written script. British intelligence agent (and financier of anti-Bolshevik forces), Bruce Lockhart, said of Trotsky during the Revolution “he strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it.” But from this, to try, as Robert Service does, to align the course of Trotsky’s political career around his personal qualities, from “alienating others” to “will to dominate”, is less than savoury. Not that we can blithely reduce his arguments, as Tariq Ali so characteristically does, to the thesis that “Trotsky was a cold blooded and ruthless murderer” whose crimes merit exposure (Guardian Review. 31.10.09). Some of hard judgements are far from baseless (even Ali, given to hero-worshiping, admits the Bolsheviks decided to “hold onto power whatever the cost”). But that if there is one thing that marks out Service’s Trotsky it is a relentless wish to bring the role of the individual in History forward. Trotsky: A Biography constantly runs the risk of replacing critical historical determinism by a critique of one individual’s personality. However, Trotsky’s perception of himself as part of a broader movement of events was not wholly misjudged. His fate was laid out as much by history as by the workings of his character. His “greater propensity for commands than for discussion”, his “extremely violent” practice, (for the sake of argument, conceded without countervailing traits) only flourished in conditions where people and institutions obeyed. Where in fact violence had become entrenched – by causes far beyond the Will of a “high order” Intellect. Whose origins are beyond the character defects of one revolutionary leader.

Trotsky: A Biography is, then, dominated by the working out of an inner destiny. Yet, in Stalin Service had noted, “Neither Lenin nor Stalin was a wholly free agent. They were constrained by the nature of the regime which they had created.” This is even truer of Trotsky. His inability sustain his position owed less to a general lack of political abilities to an absence of the very specific skills – mixing loud loyalty with low cunning, a capacity to reassure the apparatus and build a coterie around him – that were needed to win power in the emerging bureaucratic state. It is pretty obvious that organising a kaleidoscope of alliances, from the left to the United Opposition, on a platform of challenging the growth and power of this army of functionaries, was not going to make much head-way inside the very Party that swelled in symbiosis with the bureaucracy. Trotsky disdained to make appeals outside this circle. Then, the real issues are deeper. Why did he help build the administration only to attempt its transformation? Did he, even given his handicaps as a politician, offer anything other than a variant on the “model” of the one-party one-ideology state? Was Trotsky, for all his later criticisms of the Stalinist system, too wrapped in a set of near-identical assumptions about Capitalism and building Socialism, to offer a realistic different form of Communism? In sum, did he leave behind anything of value to the present world?

Service is in little doubt about the central responsibility Trotsky had in forming the Soviet regime.  To begin with, Trotsky’s life was marked out by a dictatorial personality-become-dictatorial politics. Living life on his own terms, the young Trotsky became father to the man; “intensely self-righteous” his ideology propelled him into enforcing a closed political system, his version of Marxism as a guide to creating a Communist society. The means? He rejected individual terrorism, only to support “mass terror realised by the revolutionary class” – which brooked no opposition to the “proletarian dictatorship” that would construct socialism. In this respect, “the Bolshevik regime was flawed from its inception”. Trotsky may have beguine as a supporter of workers’ liberation but “As soon as he had power, he eagerly suppressed popular aspirations by violence.” Next, Trotsky’s own inability to offer a convincing alternative, in democratic and economic terms, to Stalin’s version of a totalitarian state, was through-going. He had an inability to think outside of the Party, “the Party in the final analysis is always right because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental tasks”. Such fundamental ‘partyism’ Service calls “the frame of communist authoritarianism”. Trotsky had differences over policies with Stalin (and he claimed that some of them, promoting socialisation and land collectivisation, were adopted, albeit in a ‘deformed’ way during the period of the first Five Year Plans). Nevertheless, Trotsky’s strategy, for a whole decade, was to capture that party. When this failed he wanted to build a new one. But Trotsky’s own version of ‘workers’ democracy’ resembled the Bolsheviks’ own proto-totalitarian machine – the forging of that “sole historical instrument for the proletariat.” Finally, the failure of Trotsky’s prophetic Marxism was complete. Instead of an inevitable revolt to restore workers’ power. When there was (in the Transitional Programme’s words) the “downfall of the Bonapartist clique and the Thermidorian bureaucracy” there was no socialist take-over to take over the bureaucracy and create a new ‘superstructure’ over the ‘socialist’ foundations of the economy. Capitalism was restarted in the Soviet Union, and its satellites. Collective property ended up in the hands of a new state protected bourgeoisie.

Much of the argument of Stalin’s Nemesis resembles the Bellman’s in The Hunting of the Snark (“What I tell you three times is true”). Trotsky was bad, bad and bad. But what remains? For all this constant battering on one-theme Service still raises important problems (from the nature of political Marxism to the development of capitalism). We have, Trotsky, the  brilliant, World Actor, which first brought him to prominence, but whose inability to relate to others, and to act as an ordinary politician (making allies, cutting deals)  isolated him, while his know-all imperiousness and indifference to others, helped doom what little chance he had of forming a new International during his exile. Thus, Trotsky “did not suffer fools gladly: indeed he did not suffer them at all.” One supposes that this is not an attribute that recommends itself to anyone on a dispassionate jury selecting Commissars with the power of life and death over others. Though it seems a good qualification for many positions, from entrepreneurs, CEOs, political spin-doctors and indeed British government figures, all with at least (in theory) more constraints than Trotsky had around him during his years in power. Is this in any case a fair character assessment, if not exactly psychometrics? Service is not alone is describing a Trotsky that always saw the wood, the human mass, and never the individual human tree. That, Trotsky was barely a Politician at all. He never even began to present a challenge to Stalin, during his Soviet years. Or that afterwards in the vainglorious attempt to form a Fourth International as an alternative to Stalinist Communism and the reformist (and ‘centrist’ left-wing) socialist and social democratic parties, Trotsky overreached himself. He was left with, when all seemed lost, as Patenaude states, only faith in a better future.

But this leads us further. To the ‘dictatorial-political’ strain in Trotsky’s ideology and person. That is, Trotsky’s ingrained support for repression. Service justly brings forward Terrorism and Communism (1920). This is a key text (my edition is published tellingly by Gerry Healy’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party). Trotsky polemicises against the German Second International Marxist Kautsky, who defended a conventional form of democratic socialist government based on free elections and civil liberties. In high Jacobin mode Trotsky argued that not only the needs of the hour called for the severest form of revolutionary dictatorship, but that ruthless repression of political enemies, and compulsion in all spheres of life, from labour armies, to swift punishment for any disobedience to Soviet Rule, were inevitable features of any transition to a socialist society. Service intercalates the reality behind such sentences. The Bolsheviks had indeed “Shot innocent hostages. They had stripped large social groups of their civil rights. They had glorified terrorist ideas and gloried in their application” That this is, if anything, an underestimation of Trotsky’s totalitarianism, can be seen from these oft-quoted words, “..The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. i.e., the most ruthless form of the state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.” (Terrorism and Communism. 1975)

 Nobody who supported these ideas, or even briefly entertained them, is much of an exmaple for the left. Even if the target, Kautsky’s conventional defence of progress through reform made little difference to the ruin and chaos of Europe in this period.

But how did Trotsky come to this view? This is not clearly explained. There is no serious reference to previous writings supporting such a comprehensive use of force over politics, and the prime motor of the economy, even if one can detect traces of it in earlier braggadocio and toying with the imagery of the French Revolution. For most of its existence, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was, for Marxists, in so far as it was used sparingly, hardly at all by Marx himself. It referred to a period when the working class imposes its rule as a class, not a party, and there is no doubt room for great ambiguity in the term. Hal Draper has argued that the phrase was taken over to gain, and transform, a large part of the contemporary radical left, that is those influenced and organised in the Blanquist tradition. This modelled itself on France in 1789 and truly wished for a sharp short period of outright forceful rule by a revolutionary minority to set the people free. By contrast Marx, he states, emphasised another side of ‘dictatorship in this sense (that is, in the 19^th century where the phrase was coined). For him it signified an emergency period of ‘rule’, turned into administration by the working class majority – that is, democracy, hence “nothing more and nothing less than ‘rule of the proletariat – the “conquest of political power, by the working class, the establishment of a workers’ state in the immediate post revolutionary period.” (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin. 1987). Draper argued that the problem with Lenin, and equally with Trotsky, was that they were unable to see the workers’ state in these democratic terms. That Trotsky in the above work went “farthest in advocating the workers; democracy in state affairs”. As a result throughout Trotsky’s life, Draper observes, there was confusion, a separating between ”the concept ‘workers’ state (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) from the question of working-class control from below (‘rule’).” (Hal Draper. Op cit.) Which leaves open the nature of what Draper calls the influence of the “environment”, the political atmosphere, that allowed/encouraged Trotsky to deform Marx. This fierce rhetoric, if it did not come from a close understanding of Marx, could not just be the product of the Russian left’s internal development.

It is history, not just Marxist classics, that supplies some of the answer. In the early Soviet Union Lenin’s initial programme of placing the workers in charge of all levels of the state – a plan to ensure its eventual ‘withering away’ as its functions were devolved to society – were overwhelmed by the needs of the Civil War. If, that is, it was ever seriously contemplated not much of it remained – from Taylorist One-Man Management in the factories, to state rule by decree. Soviet power, that is, the Bolsheviks; hold on the administration, had, Trotskyists still argue, to be defended at all costs. The Generals of the White Armies were open about their desire to crush their Bolshevik enemies. They smashed anything that stood in their way, they would have re-imposed autocratic rule over the corpses of the workers, the Jews, and the left. That in these conditions, “The question as to who will rule the country, i.e. the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.” (Terrorism and Communism) Can this be faulted? Some may say that a fight for life and death would be better pursued with a democratically mobilised country behind a left government and the Soviets. But then hindsight is not much of guide to historical explanation.

The issue here, though, is not only that Trotsky (according to his democratic critics) was wrong, preparing the way for a lamp that burnt right through the Russian people’s lives, but that “bloody Field Marshall” was also a personality which was moulded by long wars that had drenched the land on blood. That a soil which threw up so many similar types needs as much explaining as the individual, the theory, and the state machine that gave it free reign. That regardless of the contribution of the latter (which we will return to), the fields of slaughter in Europe and Russia were created not by Communist theory, or the Soviets, but by imperial clashes. That Trotsky’s militarism was largely their product not Marx’s, or even one strand within Russian Social Democracy (Trotsky’s own position in-between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks for much of his career would seem to make his views the result of many different influences) and that it is the height of a biographer’s vanity to imagine that he can judge the Man without looking deeply into the conditions in which he throve.

How is this? Service refers to Trotsky’s early championing of the terrifyingly brutal short stories of Isaac Babel. Trotsky showed his “eye for excellence” by picking them out. Lionel Trilling described The Red Cavalry based on the author’s experience of fighting with Cossack irregular troops in Poland, as about “violence of the most extreme kind”, “written in a kind of lyric joy” (Penguin 2007). In this it mirrors a substantial part of early 20^th century writing, early futurism, and given depth and realism in post Great War literature. A parellel is in the novels of the ultra-nationalist Freikörps supporter, Ernst Jünger, which was infected with descriptions of this “rush” of violence. In Britain we remember better anti-war memories, poetry and works such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But amongst accounts of the horrors of armed conflict, of the steady attrition of life, and daily deprivations of the trenches, and, naturally, of the Russian Civil War, we can see that not just characters in novels revelled in brutality, an ultra-modernist longing for a new world cleansed by violence, or a reactionary need to water the native earth with the blood of foreigners. A brutal cast of mind was widely spread in real life.

If Trotsky had his share of this, then it should be recognised that it was less his inner character that drove him than the forces of History he, after all, felt obliged to follow. Service’s ancient Greek drama, in which the path traced out by one’s inherent personal qualities is given, shows its limits here. The breakdown of ‘civilisation’ and its barbaric replacement profoundly shaped the politics and public personalities of the inter-war period. The resulting culture of ‘hardness’ contributed, as is more than well-known, to the ultimate cult of violence, the demarcation of Friend and Enemy on racial grounds in the Nazi State. Stalin had his own violent background, as a near-gangster, described in Montefoire’s Young Stalin (2007). This ingrained his predisposition to revenge any slight, and gave a taste for the liquidation of enemies. Trotsky, by contrast, had had time, when that régime’s nature became apparent, to show at least some self-reflection on the error of letting violence prevail over politics – a great deal of time during his Mexican exile. Is this the result? The Fourth International’s (FI) Transitional Programme (1938) calls for a state run by the people through Soviets in which “all political currents of the proletariat can struggle for leadership of the soviets on the basis of the widest democracy.” Without defining what are the workers’ political currents, and what are not, this is not enough of a self-criticism. But a far cry from hurling anathemas at all but One current. And, if he did not recognise this change, Trotsky never got the hang of recognising that kind of turn.

Another layer of Trotsky: A Biography lies in the lengthy history of the FI’s founder’s political struggle and his policies. It would be wearying to delve too deeply here. There is much material that may be found wanting. Trotskyists (such as Pierre Broué) have claimed that the Trotsky and the opposition did offer an alternative political structure (workers’ democracy inside the Party), and a programme for administrative reform toward a democratic socialist economy. The crucial issue though is organisational. Trotsky soon retreated from War Communism. Rule by force, and the militarisation of labour was never extended to his planned subordination of Trade Unions to production. Lenin’s death left him the lurch. By 1923 he began to regroup and react to the growing power of Stalin and the emerging bureaucratic monolith. In that year’s The New Course he began to identify a new bureaucratic stratum – a distinction with Lenin’s conception of lingering influence of Imperial office practice. Against this Trotsky agitated for the right of the party masses to engage in ideological debate. This was largely justified on the grounds that the direct expression of differing opinions – from the base – would help root out bureaucracy. With echoes of his much earlier critique of Leninism Trotsky asked,

“If factions are not wanted, there must not be any permanent groupings; if permanent groupings are not wanted, temporary grouping must be avoided; finally, in order that there be no temporary groupings, there must be no differences of opinion, for wherever there are two opinion, people inevitably group together.”

This was published; the gates barring all criticism had not closed yet. But it met strong resistance. Against this line of reasoning Stalin was able to make capital out of Trotsky’s acquiescence in the 10^th Bolshevik Party (R.C.P (B)) Conference’s secret decision to suppress all factionalising (1921). From there Stalin called Trotsky’s calls for vibrant inner-party discussion during the 13^th Conference (1924) “unrestrained agitation for democracy” an “absolute and a fetish” which “is unleashing petty-bourgeois elemental forces.” It was in vain that Trotsky protested that he was opposed to factions, that he believed that (as previously cited) “in the last analysis the Party is always right.” Stalin was in a position to go full throttle. Leninism, he asserted, was built as a “monolithic organisation, hewed from a single block, possessing a single will and in its work uniting all shades of thought into a single current of practical activities.” As Stalin gradually consolidated his power this version of Democratic Centralism won out, and the unitary Will found no place for Trotsky’s opinions.

Without exaggerating Trotsky’s chances – trapped, as he was, in a political web partly of his own making, which paralysed his freedom of action – this issue, of democracy, is the crucial one. Hal Draper grasped the nettle. Either Trotsky recognised freedom for factionalism inside a Communist organisation – which he was never to do – or he too would end up confronting the need to suppress “differences of opinion”. Nor can differences be confined inside a single party. Political history is the history of factionalising, from groupings, tendencies, cliques, fractions, factions, to sects. The Greek word, ‘stasis’, that is the attempt to upset the existing order, the urge to overthrow the powers that be, ‘sedition’, is the spring behind their existence. It is a universal political phenomenon (insofar as politics – disputing and agreeing – are human qualities), as much as production itself. Before the Russian Revolution Georges Sorel, who preferred anti-party syndicalism, was fond of referring to socialist parties that tended to smoother differences in bureaucratic oligarchies and engage in parliamentary office-seeking and jobbery. To some the turn of Bolshevism-in-power into Stalinism indicates an even worse fate. One major factor in party bureaucratisation (apart from the wider social hierarchy they often mirror) is a ban on factionalism – or (as in the more modern period) a gutting out of inner-party democracy to prevent differing currents’ voices having any effect on their policy. The Bolsheviks were long accused of tendencies in this direction (not least by Trotsky himself). This was false, though one should not idealise the freedom to criticise that existed in an atmosphere of heated clashes and the threat of expulsions inside Lenin’s party. Stalin, as we have seen, raised such a move to a point of principle. Trotsky attempted to halt the dynamic. That he did so only is a very half-heartened way, and completely endorsed the Communist monopoly of power, is clear. But from there to allege that Trotsky’s initial attempts to at least raise some degree of opposition to bureaucratic rule, at a terrible cost to his own political career, that he, in Service’s opinion had “laid several foundation stones for the erection of Stalin’s political, social and even cultural edifice” is presumptuous. It should not be forgotten that by 1923 he was doing his utmost to assemble the blocks in a very different way.

Trotsky, therefore, remains ambiguous. His later writings, displayed in the limpid prose of The History of the Russian Revolution (1932 – 3) the brilliant analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), which analysed Soviet bureaucracy in terms of administering shortages, should not dazzle us into ignoring that they were flawed. Claims that the revolution had left a fundamentally healthy socialist form of property – hence economy were deeply problematic. Service is right to note Trotsky’s inability to see any plausible way that the October Revolution could be ‘righted’ to correspond to this enduring ground. Perhaps more significantly this perspective skewed his judgement, anxious for the socialist productive forces to expand, Trotsky considered their growth over-rode many other considerations. His enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, largely founded on this perspective, in the years before his assassination, right up to the invasion of Finland, and the Partition of Poland, shows serious errors of judgement. Perry Anderson has claimed that far from ‘de-generating’ the dynamic of Stalinism reached out further and produced a “generation” of new Stalinist states, not only through force of Russian arms, but in Asia, by indigenous revolutionary combat (Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin. 1978). That this, against Anderson, was not a sign of a “transition beyond capitalism” can be seen in the present-day Chinese regime.

Was Trotsky a major Marxist theorist? He wrote and spoke in sweeping generalisations, with illustrations rather than conceptual analysis and thoroughly researched references peppering his paragraphs. In contrast to Lenin, his views were not presented through dense texts designed for an activist to chew over but by lyrical prose that aims to seduce a general audience. The histories move us, and the fate of the Russian Revolution is explained in a way that leaves its imprint, without necessarily satisfying our curiosity about those he disagreed with (all are given fairly short shrift), or taxing our minds too much. Amongst his theories the ‘law of combined development’ (called in Trotskyist circles “the Law of Combined and Uneven Development’), summaries some perhaps useful ideas. It is far from law-like – claims about the different rates of development across the world, and the potential for ‘leaps’ from forms of manufacturing to modern industrialisation, from autocratic regimes to democracies are heaped together with (Trotsky’s version of) socialism. This discovery’s presence is sometimes still glimpsed in academic leftist discourse about international development – uneven apparently, but ‘combined’ with global trends.

One has the impression that Trotsky wrote rather like some supercilious British leftist orator who imagines he has cleverly shown his enemies up as fools and knaves and expects the audience to nod in agreement. Is a fluent and appealing rendering of a speaking style everything? Lenin’s own production sharpens one’s critical senses despite often-wooden phraseology (one imagines the original Russian is not much different in that respect). But they compel because the founder of the Soviet State’s core works are very concrete analysis of specific political conjunctures – leading up to the 1918 Revolution, and the problems it faced afterwards. All that he produced was grounded on weighty studies about the development of capitalism in Russia, its politics and flashes of insight into the operations of the world system – imperialism. One who is opposed to the Bolsheviks’ Dictatorship of the Proletariat through a democratic centralist party, and any aspect of their policies, is always aware of these, rather than anyone else’s, (that is, Trotsky onwards) premises. When Lenin discussed philosophy in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism he went to the sources, even if he dosed his writing with heavy-handed polemic. This was no exception, when Lenin polemicised he read and grappled with his opponents’ arguments. His notes on Hegel demonstrate a remarkable effort under the hardest circumstances to think something new. Trotsky was different. Marxism was largely a settled matter for him. He replied to American critics of Dialectics by regurgitating the homilies of early Dia-Mat and showed few signs of grasping what the contrary opinion was about. As for conjunctural writings, Trotsky on Germany (the rise of Hitler) and France (during the Popular Front) never capture Lenin’s zest for detail. Their telegraphed message, that the workers’ parties should unite – against the merging Nazi threat – or to break from the mildly reformist and strongly respectable Parti Radical can be seen now, as rather thin. The latter – while in accord with rising French workers’ occupations, failed to anticipate that the fall of the Popular Front government (which relied on their co-operation) would not result in the rise of a powerful left party eager for Trotsky’s advice on how to form Committees of Action that would reflect the will of the “struggling masses”. Naturally the Popular Front collapsed – Trotsky was not there to help the left.

If these are well-known cases of Trotsky’s apparent foresight, even more contentious were efforts to roll out comment on a wider range of world political issues, from Britain to China. They stretch even the admirers’ capacity to defer to Trotsky’s authority. Trotsky’s role as Global sage became a major cause (or perhaps, symptom) of his failure to win converts from existing left-wing groups to the banner of the Fourth International. So, opining on Spain (not a country he was in any way really familiar with), Trotsky attacked one of the few independent European Marxist groups with any social weight, the POUM. His writings, which criticised the party for its willingness to engage in support for the Republican government, are a disgraceful farrago of wishful thinking and spite. It is not to their honour that Trotskyists today continue to try to snaffle some glory for having ‘defended’ the POUM, or lay claim to its desperate struggle – as Ken Loach attempted in the film, Land and Freedom. ** As for the predictions, sometimes Trotsky was acute (in foreseeing, like many others) a war between the USSR and Nazi Germany, other times, embarrassing, like his feeling that that the second World War would result in genuine Continent-wide workers’ revolutions. Régis Debray once described Trotsky as an expert on everything under the sun, and a few things more besides. This is fair comment.

It is sometimes said that Trotsky tried to ride the waves of history, buoyed up in an epoch of revolutions that had their own inner currents. Trotsky’s constant refrain that capitalism was in decline, that the world would soon see another crisis that would give birth to a new wave of radical Marxist-led revolutions, and that the miniscule Fourth international (the embodiment of historical truth) would play a major role in these uprisings, tend to confirm this. They are both quaint (his longing for the Sublime when we would all be geniuses) and misleadingly vague (the end of ‘power’). Yet there continues to be grandeur in his stand. If we can be harsh with our criticisms of him it is not to diminish the immense courage that he showed in raising the banner of opposition to Stalin. His ideas were not, by a long shot, completely misguided. He did fight, tooth and nail, against the burgeoning bureaucratic state – if on a basis which has its flaws, (but then what would not have been faultless given its origins inside the Communist Party?). He was hated enough by Stalin to be murdered. Patenaude notes that in 1961 Brezhnev gave his killer (released from gaol in 1960) the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal for, “heroism and bravery’ and ‘carrying out a special task’.

What of Trotsky’s legacy? Patenaude never musters the effort needed to go far into this question. He  contents himself with the solemn comment that the Marxist revolutionary died a “prisoner of the myth of October as a workers’ revolution.” Service at least tries to draw some balance-sheet. It does not ignore the most signification aspect – the destiny of his political following, as well as his place in the public imagination of the wider left. As he put it in Comrades, Trotsky was, around 1968, hauled onto the “pedestal of esteem” by students and young people. This has, he claims, faded. In Stalin’s Nemesis, he observes that Trotskyists have never been “much larger than groupuscles”, who “never came close to taking power anywhere”. That Trotsky was to become little more than a “comfort blanket for revolutionaries who did not mind that they were not making a revolution” These remarks may those who think the Russian Revolution’s myth is all that Trotsky’s politics represented, both as a legend himself, and the bearer of its mythology, he would seem for Patenaude and Service to have been tried, and, for all his better qualities, found severely wanting. It would be fruitless to protest that the real problems with Trotsky are political, and, apart from the assessment of his life and fatal decease, we should perhaps pay more than passing attention to what they indicate to present-day left political life.

What then of the Trotskyist movement? It is far more influential than Service credits – its impact continues throughout the left, notably in France, but also in Britain where Trotskyists had a hey-day in the 1970s Labour Party. More recently those with a Trotskyist background were elected to the Scottish Parliament (before descending into fractious dispute). Trotskyism has offered a political induction for countless individuals, including the former Prime Minister of France, Lionel Jospin, prominent Labour MPs, and even Ministers. In many counties Trotskyists is a significant presence in trade unions. Trotskyist groups have provided and still offer a range of different ideas on politics, a full galaxy of opinions on nearly every weighty issue. What then of their faults? Many of these can be traced back to Trotsky. Trotsky’s effort to build a new International involved him in constant attacks on all other independent anti-Stalinist groups – without exception. He could not have equal allies – the American SWP was tolerated for its ready obedience. When that dried up within sections of the New York party, his wrath was immense, showering his critics with abuse. The ability to tolerate contradiction was not the Dialectician’s forte. Like Trotsky many have not yet, despite the recognition of multi-party democracy by the Fourth International in 1977 not entirely agreed on the nature of democracy’s importance to socialism. This position is not universally accepted. Some from the Trotskyist tradition remain wedded to Trotsky’s hostility to factionalism, as the long list of expulsion and splits from the British Socialist Workers Party indicate all too clearly. Others are even more backward looking, basing themselves entirely on Trotsky’s words. But his or her judgements alone are unlikely to convince anyone who does not share this belief in a grace radiating from his life. Their time has passed, and we do not have to turn our backs every time we act to look at the works and deeds of Trotsky, Lenin or Stalin, to decide what we should do today. When we do – at some point we on the left have to have some guidance in the history that has shaped us – we will find matters of interest and reflection in writings such as Patenaude’s, the fruit of some honest toil in the archives – but precious little Enlightenment in any of Service’s words.

++++++++++++++++++++

** Victor Serge. Once More Kronstadt. 1938. In a full dossier of the affair, headed by Trotsky’s explanation. The Konstadt Rebellion in the Soviet Union 1921. Education for Socialists. 1973. The context was post-civil war worker unrest, notably in adjoining Petrograd (Petersburg), and demands for a lifting of the repression of civil rights. Trotsky claimed that the sailors demanded, “privileges”, that were out for privileged food rations, that the insurrection’s victory would “bring nothing but a victory of the counter-revolution” and that their ideas were “deeply reactionary”. They “reflected the hostility of the backward peasantry tot he worker, the conceit of the soldier of sailor in relation to the ‘civilian’ Petersburg, the hatred of the petty bourgeois for revolutionary discipline.” Later Alfred Rosmer, the French syndicalist, Communist and then left oppositionist, who was deeply involved with the early Soviet republic, offered a variant of this scarecrow of an argument. He cast aspersions on the political forces that flocked around the mutineers. Whatever the ‘tragic’ nature of the crushing of Kronstadt, the Communists afterwards took measures to assuage the causes of the defiance (rend of food requisition, dampening down peasant dissatisfaction, better bread rations and elements of small scale enterprise in urban areas). In any case, the uprising itself had rallied all the enemies of Bolshevism, “Que des éléments contre-révolutionnaires aient cherché à profiter de la situation, c’était normal; leur role était d’exciter les mécontentements, d’envenimer les griefs, de tirer vers eux le mouvement. D’où sortit le mot d’ordre des “ soviets sans bolchéviks ” ? il n’est pas aisé de le préciser, mais il était si commode pour rallier tout le monde, tous les adversaires du régime, en particulier les socialistes-révolutionnaires, les cadets, les menchéviks, empressés à prendre une revanche, qu’il est permis de supposer que ce sont eux qui en eurent l’idée, et la propagande qu’ils firent sur cette revendication pouvait toucher les marins et les soldats, la plupart jeunes recrues venant des campagnes, troublés déjà par les plaintes acrimonieuses que leur apportaient les lettres de leurs familles, irritées par la brutale réquisition.” Moscow sous Lénine. 1953. John Rees reiterates this, in a much more unsavory way, including repeating Trotsky’s charges that the mutiny was led by people who “not really” proletarians In Defence of October. International Socialism, 52. 1991. This reminds one of Stalinist claims about the workers’ uprising in Berlin 1953 that they were ‘not really; workers but US agents in disguise. The historical debate continues. But the main point is that the Bolsheviks were unwilling to allow any of these forces, from the left to the centre any political expression whatsoever. So “’c’était normal” that they flocked to support the Kronstadt revolt. As for the rebels themselves, most accounts state that their demands were for freedom of workers’ parties (Pages 113 – 114. Ian D.Thatcher. Trotsky. 2003). Even if the slogan about soviets without Bolsheviks were true, what was so wrong with wanting to get rid of one party from elected bodies – democracies do it all the time? The question was how could this be achieved democratically – a mechanism Lenin and Trotsky’s version of the dictatorship of the proletariat excluded at all costs.

** For the real (‘centrist’ not Trotskysist) campaign to help the POUM see, Marceau Pivert. L’affaire du P.O.U.M. (1938) SIA (organe hebdomadaire de Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste1).

Two Recent Books on Trotsky

“Respect’s leadership is absolutely determined that the influence of the ultra-left will remain marginal. There is no place for the kind of political sectarianism that is indifferent to a Tory victory or bitterly hostile to cooperation with the Green Party. Such views, often articulated by politically irrelevant grouplets of the far left, are an obstacle to the growth of a radical party of the left.” (more)

Ger Francis – leading Respect Light (Birmingham, Nationally).

No place for obstacles, eh

Indeed.

Comrade Ger (Geeeer to his friends) further states that,

“I fully expect the new National Council, on which the more sectarian voices are a shrinking minority, to drive through this perspective more forcefully in the coming year.” (here)

Sectarian voices be warned.

Ger’s background? SWP cadre.

You know I could have guessed that.

Was Red, is now Green?

The scales should be falling from some people’s eyes this morning.

The leadership of Respect (Renewal) announced yesterday ever closer ties with the Green Party (in England and Wales). Reports on their Annual Conference (yesterday)  have yet to appear on their Web page (here).

Derek Wall posts (here) this comment from a Green Party observer,

‘Overall all speakers were very very positive towards the Green Party, George Galloway, Salma Yaqoob, Ger Francis and a number of other members made a very big deal of supporting the Green Party in various different ways and how we work mutually as two different parties.I think it is important to note that George Galloway called for people to vote for Peter Tatchell if they are able too and gave a stong endorsement of Peters politics, so fair play to George. They were obviously very positive about our decision to stand down for Salma but also talked often about Salmas support for us in the Euros and used it as an example about the right way to go about left unity. There was a lot of talk from George and others that Respect should not look to small far left cults for coalitions but to organisations like the ourselves.”

Tendance Coatesy has expressed the view for some time now that Respect (Renewal) has been looking for an exit strategy. In a link-up with the Green Party. Goodbye small cult SWP – hallo big cult Green Party.

Unkind people might suggest that Socialist Unity’s battle over Peter Tatchell owed something to the reluctance of Andy Newman to join in this move to the politics of Recycling Loft Insulation. That Comrade Newman has seen sense in hitching his waggon to the project of European left parties might seem to support this speculation.

Socialist Unity still bears the SWP imprint. It calls this Conference (Rally) a ‘big success’. But it has yet to comment on what went on. The Green Party are no doubt so overwhelmed with joy at George Galloway’s support that there is still no official response.  

We await these statements. We really do.

Added: apparently the Green left account is ‘third hand’ (Socialist Unity).  What will be the first hand report?  The breath bates.

Sometimes, all you can do is make yourself plain:

“John, I’m willing to debate you here, anywhere else you choose, in person or electronically, on the subject of third campism OR ANYTHING ELSE YOU CARE TO MENTION…OK? I’m sure I’ve made that offer to you before. “Run a mile” from debate”? Name the time, place and subject, pal…

“(Preferably in person  and in public- JD).”

…in response to the below:

November 13, 2009 at 5:38 pm · Edit

Jim Denham said,

November 13, 2009 at 8:45 pm · Edit

Gameboy (aka “Johng”) writes :

“You have not for instance registered that the article written by Denham starts off with a bold-faced lie”: John, I presume that is a reference to this:

“in Cairo – presumably continuing the SWP’s sucking up to the clerical fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that you are factually correct that Harman was in Cairo for a meeting of socialists and *not* the Muslim Brotherhood…OK…

1/ Note the word I used: “presumably”;

2/ Do you deny that the vast majority of SWP jaunts to Cairo in recent years have been at the behest of the Muslim Brotherhood?

3/ Assuming that you do not deny #2 (above): what’s so unreasonable about speculating that Harman’s visit was “presumably” to continue the SWP’s “sucking up” to the Brotherhood – a force that Tony Cliff himself once characterised as “clerical fascist”?

I haven’t read the Harman article that Gameboy refers to, but I’d be interested to know whether it is regarded now by SWP’ers as representing a definitive break with the Socialist Review/IS “third camp” tradition now that the SWP has become a third worldist outfit. If so, I think the SWP owes it to the left as a whole to mark this departure from its own tradition rather more clearly.

Gameboy: “In any case here is the opportunity. The AWL are wierd. Constant demands for real political discussion. But as soon as you move away from a discussion which is apolitical they run a mile.”

John, I’m willing to debate you here, anywhere else you choose, in person or electronically, on the subject of third campism OR ANYTHING ELSE YOU CARE TO MENTION…OK? I’m sure I’ve made that offer to you before. “Run a mile” from debate”? Name the time, place and subject, pal!

(Preferably in person  and in public- JD)

European Trotskyists respond to the anniversary of World War II: An interesting feature on the World Socialist Website, with contributions from Françoise Thull, Barbara Slaughter, Julie Hyland, and David North.

Obituaries for Chris Harman: Michael Rosen, Andrew Coates, Jim Denham, Histomatist. Histomatist rounds up other obituaries from SWPers, but these are the most interesting to my mind. Histomatist contrasts Harman’s erudition to his low status among academo-Marxists, a very important point, as the Marxism of the ivory tower becomes ever more divorced from Marxism as a movement. Coates suprised me by positioning Harman as important in the libertarian heritage of the IS within the SWP, which can be contrasted to Denham’s portrayal of Harman the greatest betrayer of the IS’s third campism. (Added: another from The Commune.)

In the tradition of Marceau Pivert and Tom Paine: Andrew Coates on laïcité.

Misusing the word Stalinism: Tory fool Graham Warner.

note by David Black: The Nature of the Stalinist Parties – a document of several thousand words – was published in the internal discussion bulletin of the Socialist Review Group in May 1951, with five sections:

1 The Importance of the Nature of the Stalinist Parties for our Movement

2 The Classical Trotskyist Position

3 The Stalinist International as the Instrument of the State-Capitalist Bureaucracy

4 The Social Composition Of The Stalinist Parties

5 Political Conclusions

Hillman concluded that the SRG could make no impact on the membership of the Stalinist British Communist Party, which he sought to show was becoming increasingly petit-bourgeois. Therefore, he argued, the SRG should concentrate on building in the Labour Party. In practical terms, as Ian Birchall has suggested, Hillman was more in tune with Shachtmanite ‘Third Campism’ than James/Boggs/Dunayevskaya. The ‘immovability’ of the CP membership proved to be a temporary phenomenon; but it was only shaken up by world events (especially Hungary) rather than pressure from the Far Left. As regards Dunayevskaya, I should point out that her later analysis (from 1953 onwards) was markedly different to that of ‘State-Capitalism and the World Revolution’ (1950). The latter, in my view, while important, was wrong on a lot of things (such as the national question), and inadequate on others (especially philosophy).

The following text consists of the introduction, plus two extracts: one from section 1 and one from section 3.

Introduction

The Secretariat of our Party has commissioned me to write an International Discussion Bulletin which will attempt to re-evaluate our attitude to the Stalinist Parties in the light of our analysis of the Russian regime as a totalitarian state-capitalist structure. It is important that all members of the party realise that the character of the three internal Bulletins that are being written is quite different from that of the Bulletins issued in the old movement. For a start, the RCP had both a fixed analysis of Russia and a series of perspectives that flowed from such an evaluation fully worked out. In the second place, the RCP carried over uncritically the whole body of Trotsky’s analyses and perspectives and “laid” it on the membership. The tendency which we are trying to build has emphatically rejected both the Fourth International’s semi-Stalinist analysis of Russia **and** the leadership cult which was at least partly responsible for the crack-up of the RCP inside the Labour Party. This particular Bulletin does not represent the fixed viewpoint of any particular person or grouping but rather it is written as a provisional statement of the viewpoint of the writer, a statement that will no doubt be modified in the ensuing discussion on the subject.

SECTION 1 – EXTRACT

Our own recent experience with the mushroom-like growth of the WIL[Workers International League] and the RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party] (1941-49) as a result of the war-time fusing of the Stalinist and right-wing bureaucracies in the labour movement and the consequent polarisation of the anti-war forces around the ILP and the Fourth International could hardly have been more revealing. The crystallisation of a Trotskyist tendency inside the Labour Party today has been shown to be the only feasible and durable form of growth that can be envisaged in this present period. The Labour Party offers opportunities for left-wing polarisation moving in our direction which two decades of trailing behind the CP had failed to produce. The Stalinist rank and file is not indoctrinated with Marxism nor is any conscientious attempt made to theoretically equip the members of the organisation. The CP leadership smothers any independent development of its rank and file by teaching its members to accept loyally the decisions arrived at by the Politbureau (i.e. ultimately with the Politbureau of the CPSU):

“whatever the policy of the Soviet Union it is always in the interests of its people and the working people of every other country in the world” (Harry Pollitt, ‘Looking Ahead’ p42)

The CP rank and file is trained to regard the loyal super-activist who asks no questions as the best and most militant comrade. The policy of involving the rank and file in continual demonstrations, Daily Worker sales, the collection of signatures for the “Peace Petition” is quite deliberate. It diverts the Stalinist militant from theoretical matters by separating the functions of the Politbureau, Central Committee and District Committes in descending orders of importance. The party organisation decides, develops and works out the theory, the perspectives and applications of the particular ruling, and the rank and file carries out the decisions unquestioningly with the maximum expenditure of energy. On such a basis, in such a totalitarian atmosphere it is *impossible* to break the stranglehold of the centipede grip of the CP organisation on its members, except by the mass mobilisation of the proletariat on a mass basis under the roof of the mass parties of the working class. The free, independent and spontaneous development of the revolutionary current within the Labour Party can alone smash the Stalinist movement.

The Johnson-Forest [James- Dunayevskaya] document, “State-Capitalism and the World Revolution” (published in August 1950) accurately describes the situation we are faced with, as a consequence of the contemporary unfolding of the Stalinist movement as a movement aspiring to world domination.

“The Stalinists are not class collaborationists, fools, cowards, idiots, men with ‘supple pines’, but conscious aspirants for world power. They are deadly enemies of private property capitalism. They aim to seize the power and take the place of the bourgeoisie. When they support a war or do not; support the bourgeoisie or do not support, they know exactly what they are doing. The bourgeoisie also knows. In fact, everyone, including most of the workers, knows this except orthodox Trotskyism.

But the Stalinists are not proletarian revolutionists. They aim to set up power by help, direct or indirect, of the Red Army and the protection of Russia and the Russian state. That is the reason they follow the foreign policy of the Kremlin – it is clear naked self-interest.”

SECTION 3 – EXTRACT

He who controls the state machine controls the economy. The Party machine which is now evolving today is no longer the blind instrument of economic classes in society. The party machine constitutes a model of the type of the changing society it subsists in, or is rooted in. The Labour party, for instance, reflects, by and large, the capitalist relations in a bourgeois democracy. This is true, whether the Labour Party is actually yielding state power or is in ‘opposition’ to His Majesty’s Government. Similarly, the Stalinist parties reflect not merely by and large, but *absolutely* the state capitalist relations within the USSR, as expressed in the construction and make-up of the Stalinised Bolshevik party. A careful study of the Stalinist Party in the USSR reveals the totalitarian political nature of its edifice and the complete identity of form and nature that can be established between the Big Brother party and the satellite parties in both Eastern Europe and outside.

It is perhaps opportune at this point to refer to the two great theoretical works produced by the Johnson-Forest tendency in the SWP, “The Invading Socialist Society” (1947) and “State-Capitalism and the World Revolution” (1950). Here for the first time in the history of the Trotskyist movement, a serious departure for re-orientation of the Fourth International has been indicated. It is no exaggeration to say that comrades Johnson-Forest’s last work, “State-Capitalism and the World Revolution”, is of a theoretical level at least the equal of Trotsky’s last works and a logical and fruitful development of them. The works on the state-capitalism thesis that have been written so far have become obsolete since. Comrades Johnson-Forest have succeeded in correlating the *political structure* of the Stalinist parties with the economic foundations of State-capitalism, and have thus rendered an invaluable service to the elucidation of new tactics and strategies flowing from our defeatist position in espect of the USSR. It is essential that the Johnson-Forest document be studied in conjunction with this particular section as some of the conceptions to be developed may strike the reader as rather startling.

Today’s feature archive is YIVO. Founded in 1925 in Vilna as the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO was the national research institute and archive of Yiddishland. Salvaged from the ruins of European Jewry in 1940, YIVO was re-founded in New York, where it now as an excellent archival collection, and some cool digital collections.

Here are some of the extraordinary materials you will find. Click on the objects to see them in their contexts.

When these streets heard Yiddish:

Bek, a Yiddish translation of The Call of the Wild by Jack London, published by the Kultur Lige (Jewish Workers Cultural Association) in Kiev, 1925.

Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists of Warsaw membership card of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991)

An appeal to vote for the Bund in the municipal elections (Vilna, date unknown)

May Day demonstration jointly organized by the Jewish Socialist Bund and Poalei-Zion Left (Warsaw, 1936).

Poster for the socialist organization Zionist Tseirei Zion: “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel!” (Vilna, date unknown).

“Join the Tsukunft” recruitment poster for the Bundist youth organization (Warsaw, 1936).

The Bundist song, Di Shvue (“The Oath”)… penned in 1902 by S. An-ski (Shlomo Zanvil Rapoport), the Russian Jewish writer. This Yiddish song, whose melody source also is unknown, exhorts Jews to unite, and to commit themselves body and soul to the defeat of the Russian Tsar and of capitalism… [The partisan song Zog nit keyn mol ]

In Love and In Struggle: The Musical Legacy Of The Labor Bund:

Arbeter-froyen (Working Women) (965kb)

Text: David Edelshtat (1866-1892)
Sung by Adrienne Cooper

Edelshtadt’s Arbeter-froyen addresses women in its protest of the hardships of factory work. The song sounds a call to oppressed women workers to join the labor movement in its fight for justice and equality. Published in the New York newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) in 1891, it was also sung by striking workers in Russia and Poland.

Yugnt-himen (Youth Anthem) (766kb)

Text: Szmerke Kaczerginski (1908-1954)
Music: Basya Rubin (n.d.)~
h Children’s Chorus, The New Yiddish Chorale, and the Workmen’s Circle Chorus

Vilna poet and partisan Szmerke Kaczerginski wrote this stirring march song for the youth movement in the Vilna ghetto. Many of the young people who took part in the ghetto’s active resistance movement later also became combatants in the partisan units that fought the Nazis in the forests.

Here and Now: The Vision of the Jewish Labor Bund in Interwar Poland:

Members of the Tsukunft Self-Defense Group carry the Socialist flag on May Day, Warsaw. 1930s.

Kalman Reisen, socialist and Yiddishist:

Chicago 1912 – Outdoor portrait of the Jewish Socialist Self-Education Club — Includes Abraham Reisen

“Jewish Woman‚ Vote for the Women’s Slate, Slate Number 3.”

***

From the archive of struggle no.38:

Tendance Coatesy:

* Chris Harman: extracts from “Party and Class” (1969), “The  Prophet and the Proletariat” (1994), “Spontaneity, Strategy, Politics” (2004) – makes the interesting case that Harman’s political legacy is the libertarian streak in the IS/SWP tradition, the element that is worth valuing and preserving. Chris Harman died last week. RIP.

World Socialist Website:

* Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter: “Overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy! Build workers’ councils in East Germany!”, October 18, 1989 (Parts I, II, III).

International Communist League:

*Socialist Workers League: “War Is Here—What Now?” (September 1939)

The rest are via Entdinglichung, with some annotation.

Archive.org:

* Leon Trotsky: The Bolsheviki and world peace (1918). [For an authoritative text version of this, as The War and the International, go to MIA. The introduction is by Lincoln Steffens, a muckracking journalist associated with the Progressive Party who became a Communist fellow traveller after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919 with the Swede Karl Kilbom. I believe he later embraced Mussolini. This book, published by a mainstream American publisher, shows the extent to which Trotsky was considered a great hero of the revolution world-wide; he was the object of cult-like reverence, a figure of great romance in the West.]

* Bertram Wolfe: Marx and America (1934). [Wolfe was a founder-member of the CPUSA and active in the Comintern. He was close to the majority faction of the CPUSA around CE Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, who fought against the Foster-Cannon faction, a leftist minority. By 1934, however, he was an oppositionist, part of Lovestone's Independent Communist Labor League in America and the Communist Party Opposition internationally. Wolfe was the Lovestonite's chief theorist, and argued for "American exceptionalism". In this erudite pamphlet, he makes the argument by drawing on Marx's scattered writings about the US, showing that America posed a special case for the communist movement.]

* International Communist Opposition (ICO): International Class Struggle, Spring 1937. [The ICO, often known as the "Right" Opposition, initially had a pretty robust organisation. Zinoviev, a "Rightist", had been the chair of the Comintern from its founding until 1926, but Nikolai Bukharin, the chair until the end of the Second Period in 1928, was the real leader after Lenin's death. Bukharin was the intellectual hero of most of the ICO leadership, and it was Bukharin's fall from grace under Stalin that prompted the break of the ICO from the mainstream. ICO leaders were therefore already well networked internationally, and able to hit the ground running organisationally, in contrast to the much slower moving "Left" Opposition. However, the ICO tended to lack a mass base in the labour movement, although there were some exceptions to this (the Lovestone-Wolfe group had a strong base in the Yiddish sections of the ILGWU; Steffens' erstwhile friend Kilbom's Communist Party of Sweden was pretty big; in Spain the BOC (one of the POUM's predecessors, was important). This, along with the right-ward drift of many of their key thinkers, was probably the main reason they atrophied by WWII.

This is the ICO's American journal, vol. 1, no.3, and it includes a fraternally critical letter to the POUM from the bureau of the ICO; a piece on the CIO by George F Miles, the Lovestonites' labour expert; "D. Swift" on proletarian novels, particularly contemptuous of James T Farrell; an account of the German CPO's underground existence under Hitler; a critical account of Leon Blum's Popular Front in France; and a cruel attack on Jean Juares as a prototype of the Popular Front policy. No. 1 and No. 2 are also on-line at archive.org, but I haven't looked at them yet.]

* Leon Trotsky on labor party: stenographic report of discussion held in 1938 with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (1968). [A long introduction by Fred Meuhler and Tim Wohlforth draws on Engels and Lenin to argue for an American Labor Party. Then a transcript of Trotsky's conversation in Mexico with James Cannon, Max Shachtman and Vincent Dunne. By 1938, the Right Opposition were in decline globally, and the Left Opposition was on the rise. However, it is interesting that the American SWP, which was led precisely by James Cannon, Lovestone and Wolfe's rival in the early CPUSA, had come around to a version of the "American exceptionalism" thesis, and were now calling for an American Labor Party.]

La Bataille Socialiste:

* Andreu Nin: Carta al Partido socialista (1937)
* Protestation devant les libertaires du présent et du futur sur les capitulations de 1937 (1937)
* Henri Chazé: Pannekoek et les Conseils ouvriers (1962)
* Henri Chazé: La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne (1970)
* Geroge Shaw/The Hobgoblin: Chris Pallis dit Maurice Brinton (1923–2005) (2005)
* Louis Bouët: Impressions d’un délégué (1936)
* Pierre Stambul: Retour sur le sionisme et la question juive (2005)

Marxist Internet Archive (Reg Groves/Labour Monthly):

** Reg Groves: Chartism And The Present Day: The Illusion Of Reformism (1929)
** Reg Groves: The Class Leadership Of Chartism (1929)
** Reg Groves: The Brighton Labour Party Conference (1929)
** Reg Groves: The Up-To-Date Fabian: A History of Socialism (1931)

LibCom:

* The KAPD’s report on the third congress of the Communist International (1921)
* Program of the AAUD (1920)
* Henriette Roland-Holst: The Communist Left and the resolutions of the second congress of the Communist International (1921)
* Resolution of the conference of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (1920)
* Aufheben: 1914-2001: A people’s history of Argentina (2003)
* Kamunist Kranti: Questions for alternatives (2003)

Workers’ Liberty:

* Sean Matgamna: How the dockers forged solidarity, and how they lost it (1995)

Espace contre ciment:

* Walter Benjamin: Kapitalismus als Religion – Fragment (1921)
* Rosa Luxemburg: Arrêt et progrès du marxisme (1903)
* Korsch/Mattick/Pannekoek/Rühle/Wagner: La contre-révolution bureaucratique (1973)
* Lewis Mumford: Mythos der Maschine – Kultur, Technik und Macht (1978, Auszug)
* Iring Fetscher: Aus dem Geist der Gerechtigkeit – Wiedergelesen: Gustav Landauers „Aufruf zum Sozialismus“ von 1911 (1977)
* Georges Henein: Prestige de la terreur (1945)
* Hans Manfred Bock: Bibliographischer Versuch zur Geschichte des Anarchismus und Anarcho-Syndikalismus in Deutschland (1973)

Contested Till Death.

Chris Harman, a leading figure for decades in the SWP (more here), died last night (here).

There will be many obituaries. This is a critical-political one. That is, like the SWP, we do not feel a need to wrap and hide underneath sentiment fundamental  political disgreements. Tendance Coatesy comes from a very different political tradition, of Continental Marxist unorthodoxy. For us, anti-Stalinists and anti-anti-Communists,  the SWP’s main defining feature, its ’state capitalist’ theory, is of little interest. That is, the line against Stalinism has already been drawn, and there are better historical and theoretical explanations of the fate of the Soviet Union around. Perhaps more significant to our political activity has been the SWP’s political theory and practice. The organisation changed from an originally open Marxist grouping into the fractured, intolerant, opportunist mess we see today. We can see in Harman’s writings, noted for their lucidity and seriousness,  both sides of the SWP.

I wish therefore to make some comments on Harman’s political legacy.  It is far richer and more positive than today’s SWP party-structure would suggest. But not exactly without faults. These are some aspects,

Many of Harman’s political ideas, formed in the early International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP), has originally a libertarian cast. That is, their version of Marxism was based on socialism being introduced through a party which was  part of the self-organisation of the working class. Against what Trotsky called ’subsitutionism’, and taking something of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the importance of spontaneous democratic ferment, they were set out in the pamphlet below,

Party and Class (1969) (Here) Harman concluded that,

“The need is still to build an organisation of revolutionary Marxists that will subject their situation and that of the class as a whole to scientific scrutiny, will ruthlessly criticise their own mistakes, and will, while engaging in the everyday struggles of the mass of workers, attempt to increase their independent self-activity by unremittingly opposing their ideological and practical subservience to the old society. A reaction against the identification of class and party elite made by both Social Democracy and Stalinism is very healthy. It should not, however, prevent a clear-sighted perspective of what we have to do to overcome their legacy.”

No doubt most people on the left remember more clearly the turn to Lenin in the 1970s, and the founding of the SWP on more inflexible democratic centralist grounds. The present-day regime of the Party stems from this period. It  as a time of expulsions, rules about limited factional rights (if at all), and the entrenchment of a quasi-eternal Central Committee. It should not be forgotten that the SWP was not alone in its ‘Bolshevisation’ – the IMG and most of the SWPs splinters (with the notable exception of the working class opposition – that left for ever-  based in the Midlands) were also seized with this delusion.  There is a massive literature on this. On this time it’s often said that Jim Higgin’s More Years for the Locust (here) is the best critical account and explanation.

This bureaucratic orthodoxy-in-perpetual-activism, did not prevent Harman from retaining a critical spirit.

Example, The  Prophet and the Proletariat (here)

The book contains a balanced analysis of Islamism - very different to the one promoted during the SWP’s time in respect (or the relativist views of present-day Islamophiles). Not that it’s without problems. Its conclusion is worth citing in full. Not the least because in its death notice the SWP for reasons not alien to its continuing attempts to trawl in Islamist waters claims that it said that (here),

One of Chris Harman’s articles ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ was written to help prevent the marginalisation of the Arab left before the rising tide of political Islam. The article attacked claims that political Islam represented a form of fascism and sought to explain its rise in terms of the failure of the nationalist left; the appeal that a return to pure Islam had for a middle class intelligentsia who suffered from the insults imposed on them by the empire; and the ability of such groups to garner support from sections of the urban poor.

Harman indeed engaged in some superficial class analysis of Islamism (neglecting its strong bourgeois roots and pro-mercantile and state bureaucratic capitalist direction). But his main focus was unrelentingly critical of Islamic groups and the reactionary nature of their politics. What it actually written is that,

“It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically reactionary and “fascist” or as automatically “anti-imperialist” and “progressive”. Radical Islamism, with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century Arabia, is, in fact, a “utopia” emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class. As with any “petty bourgeois utopia” [128], its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation. It is this which leads inevitably to splits between a radical, terrorist wing of Islamism on the one hand, and a reformist wing on the others. It is also this which leads some of the radicals to switch from using arms to try to bring about a society without “oppressors” to using them to impose “Islamic” forms of behaviour on individuals.”

Precisely. Opposing the imposition of ‘Islamic norms of behaviour’ is the dividing line between socialists and reactionary ‘anti-imperialists’, and multi-cultural relativists. Such Islamophile riff-raff has recently been libelling gay campaigners like Peter Tatchell for defending universalism against religious norms.

It would have been interesting to know Harman’s views on this.

“… socialists cannot support the state against the Islamists. Those who do so, on the grounds that the Islamists threaten secular values, merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray the left as part of an “infidel”, “secularist” conspiracy of the “oppressors” against the most impoverished sections of society. They repeat the mistakes made by the left in Algeria and Egypt when they praised regimes that were doing nothing for the mass of people as “progressive’ – mistakes that enabled the Islamists to grow. And they forget that any support the state gives to secularist values is only contingent: when it suits it, it will do a deal with the more conservative of the Islamists to impose bits of the shariah – especially the bits which inflict harsh punishment on people – in return for ditching the radicals with their belief in challenging oppression. This is what happened in Pakistan under Zia and the Sudan under Nimeiry, and it is apparently what the Clinton adminstration has been advising the Algerian generals to do.

But socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes “Islamic” forms. It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.”

The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system – or often to the first followed by the second.”

Naturally one would say that Islamist movements are in theory and in practice demonstrably reactionary. Nor the central importance of secularism for socialists. As an explanation it lacks the central role in Islamism of the pious national bourgeoisie. Nor the irreconcilable principle of democratic Marxists that one would never align with such groups.  But at least Harman did not exalt Islamists as automatically on the ‘right side’ of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Unfortunately the third aspect of Harman’s SWP’s work (below) shows just how far they had gone down the road of treating social movements as fodder for recruitment. After the 1970s the SWP, stuck in a permanent round of recruitment through moving campaigns, period purges of anyone awkward, and ‘get rich quick’ schemes. That is winning central positions in perceived rising trends of political unrest. Their ‘united front’ strategy meant co-operation with anyone who seemed to be going in the direction of opposing the existing political system. Or at least who had a vaguely radical sound.

This example explains how the Party saw the one-time important ‘anti-Globalisation’ wave.

Spontaneity, Strategy, Politics 2004. (here)

“ In other words, a visible revolutionary organisation is a necessity, not an optional extra. Its members need to take part in the wider struggles and operate through party groups in localities and workplaces. They have to organise people around them through regular paper sales and draw them to meetings. And the discussion cannot just be about immediate tactics, but has to raise the question of transforming society in its totality, of revolution, not reform. Only in this way can we move towards fulfilling the full potential of the last five years—towards overthrowing this system and creating a better one.”

In fact in Britain the ‘anti-gloablisation’ movement was a heteroclite mixture of well-meaning NGOs, other left groups, individuals (Ken Livingstone onwards), fading magazines like Red Pepper,  and trade unions searching for new blood and inspired by anti-globalisation unrest in other countries which and genuine impact. It equally involved cranks of a variety of  stripes (Greens, animal rights nutters, onwards), all wrapped in an unwieldy Social Forum network, run in the interests of grandstanding various large egos. The SWP failed to get many recruits from this pool and turned to other fishing grounds. What Marxism, in the sense of basing politics on the self-activity of the masses, remained was soon channelled into the ever-turning priorities of sustaining the organisation. We might say that the SWP’s version of Leninism resembled a business plan, constantly drawing up not SWOTs (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) but OTs – Opportunities and Threats. Harman either instigated or, at the very least, connived, in this development. That is, under a lot of guff about the Party as the People’s Tribune.

The Respect Party was the culmination of this approach, aligning right up with the extreme-right-wing Islamists of the East London Mosque.  Of which it is hardly necessary to add further comment.

In conclusion, for all these remarks, Harman had a lot to offer. His original standpoint was not far from genuine democratic Marxism. That he, and the SWP, evolved into the hysterical dead-end we see today, requires more explanation than can be put into a few pages. One might feel that it’s a shame Harman bound himself to the SWP political project so thoroughly. That intense committment would have been better spent elsewhere. But, then, that is not a matter for us to choose.

The sudden passing of Chris Harman (in Cairo – presumably continuing the SWP’s sucking up to the clerical fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood), means that there is now no one left who has personal recollection of the IS/Socialist Review tradition of third campism. Harman, of course, played a leading role in betraying that tradition. The most appropriate memorial to this supple-spined apparatchik must be this, from 2007:

Dear comrade Harman,
I know you of old and hope, or would like to believe, that you still hold to the basic socialist ideas which you and I shared in the past.

See also: Open Letter to an IS Leader, August 2004: From the “IS Tradition” to Respect; and more on Respect.

I wrote you a first open letter in June 2004 (Solidarity 3/54) urging you to register that the Respect turn was a betrayal of all that was good about the political tradition you used to hold to.

The rift between your organisation, the SWP, and George Galloway should say a great deal to you, as to me, about the nature of the alliance which the SWP and Galloway have had for the last five years. Stop and think for a moment about the astonishing degradation of your organisation.

What have you now fallen out about? Has your SWP Central Committee belatedly understood that your association with Galloway is demeaning and befouling? Do you now find yourselves suddenly realising what you have got into, with the shock of someone who wakes up to the realisation that he has been sleep-walked into a disease-ridden stream of sewage? Have you suddenly realised whom you’ve been holding hands with?

With a man who was for a decade the ally in Britain for the fascistic Ba’thist dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Who has publicly admitted to promiscuously taking money for his political activities from a wide range of Arab and Islamic governments, from successive Pakistani administrations through the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia. Of whom the parliamentary inquiry report in July this year said “it is reasonable to presume that what the documents [published in the Daily Telegraph in 2003] say is true” and “that some of his activities in support of the Iraqi regime may have been financed through an oil-related mechanism”?

No, none of that is news to you. You have known all that about Galloway at least as well as we did, possibly better. Why have the SWP and Galloway suddenly fallen out, then?

It seems that Galloway wants to go deeper into the ethnic-sectarian politics that have given its peculiar political flavour and odour to Respect, and that the SWP has not entirely abandoned concerns to influence the labour movement.

Galloway has objected to the concentration of Respect resources on the Organising for Fighting Unions initiative and on having a presence on the Pride march.

Your SWP colleague John Rees retorts that “the constant adaptation to what are referred to as ‘community leaders’ in Tower Hamlets is lowering the level of politics and making us vulnerable to the attacks and pressures brought on us by New Labour. It is alienating us not only from the white working class but also from the more radical sections of the Bengali community, both secular and Muslim, who feel that Respect is becoming the party of a narrow and conservative trend in the area”. Why has it taken him – or you – four years to realise that?

Galloway, it seems, also objects to Respect being heavily controlled by the SWP machine. He claims that the SWP in Respect has behaved as we saw you behave in the Socialist Alliance and in other fields where your organisation operates. I don’t have independent knowledge of the internal affairs of Respect; but I do know that SWP machine control – for example, steamrollering Respect conference to reject motions in favour of secularism which only a few years ago would have been uncontentious in any left-wing meeting – has on all the big issues served Galloway’s politics, not the socialist ideas which you came into politics with.

Think about it. The leaders of the SWP have made enormous ideological and political concessions to Galloway and the communalist and sectarian forces who make up Galloway’s “constituency”, in and around Respect.

You have, as John Rees now points out, four years late, allied with Muslim “community leaders”, businessmen who have little in common with socialism.

You have appealed for votes on the basis that Respect’s candidates are the best “fighters for Muslims”.

You have supported the forces of bigotry and social regression, in demanding the suppression of the Danish cartoons of September 2005, which became the target of Islamic clerical-fascist muscle-flexing as not so long ago certain images of Jesus Christ were targeted by Christian bigots (remember the court case in 1977, when Gay News was found guilty of blasphemy?).

Your SWP Central Committee colleague Alex Callinicos, whose ability to write “Marxist” rationalisations of almost anything you must know well by now and perhaps privately despise, has retrospectively repudiated the the SWP’s earlier, better self, for having supported Salman Rushdie against the Islamist bigots who wanted to shed his blood for writing with “disrespect” of Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses (Socialist Worker, 11 February 2006).

But then, under your own editorship, Socialist Worker tried to excuse the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women (1 October 2001)!

Last Sunday, 7 October, you gave the official endorsement of Respect to the “Al Quds day” demonstration called by Islamists in London to continue a tradition inaugurated by Ayatollah Khomeiny in 1979 and sponsored by the Iranian government since then.

Your press has limited itself to the mildest criticisms of the Ahmedinejad regime in Iran, and enthusiastically welcomed the coup by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. You have marched with the slogan “We are all Hezbollah”.

You had your student members join the Federation of Student Islamic Societies in walking out in protest when an Iraqi socialist feminist addressed the National Union of Students conference.

In the unions, your members have lined up again and again with officials who are left-wing in words but not in action, in the cause of trying to entice them into Respect or at least onto the platforms of Stop the War, Unite Against Fascism, and similar.

The SWP has done all this in tandem with Galloway – only to get slapped and rebuked by him, now that Respect has lost momentum and gone into unmistakable decline.

Galloway may well be angling to get the rump Communist Party of Britain into Respect, to give him more solid backing for his Stalinistic politics; his next step after that could be to dump the SWP altogether, leaving him with the Respect name and the CPB’s assets such as the Morning Star. And yet the SWP is still in retreat.

The entire Respect episode was, is, and, if it continues, will be a sordid political manoeuvre in which the SWP leaders, with the casual indifference of a dog raising his hind leg against a lamp-post, has (to put it in basic English, so you will understand me) pissed on secularism, on international working-class solidarity, on liberalism in the good sense (opposition to religious bigotry and defence of civil, social, and intellectual freedom), and most of all, perhaps, on rational socialist politics.

This whole foul chapter of political adventurism grew, first in the heads of the SWP leaders, out of the anti-war movement – out of your desire on any terms to turn that movement into solid ongoing “assets” for your organisation. In pursuit of that goal, the SWP pumped up the Muslim Association of Britain (British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood: prior to the SWP’s sponsorship, a small and frail group), and had an MAB leader running as a Respect candidate although he openly avowed that “his religion” taught him that there “would always be rich and poor”.

Now you are less concerned, perhaps, with conciliating Galloway and his allies. Why? Because you know that with Britain’s progressive withdrawal from Iraq, the rump “anti-war movement” is winding to its end? Because you want to try to cash in some of your “winnings”, and make a tactical retreat from the “excesses” of “Islamicising” over the last five years?

You must realise that the SWP has gained very little in terms of what matters to you most – recruits, “building the SWP”. You know that inside Respect, it hasn’t been the SWP winning over Muslim youth drawn in by Galloway, but Galloway winning over former SWP organisers, members, and sympathisers. Even inside the SWP, the SWP Central Committee’s efforts to put up a firm front against Galloway at first elicited opposition from members “soft” on Galloway, more internal opposition than the SWP has seen for many years.

From where AWL stands it looks as if the SWP has had only a derisorily small level of recruitment of young (or any) people of Muslim background, and that a large segment of the SWP and SWP periphery are bewildered and demoralised.

Even in narrow terms of SWP “gate receipts”, the whole exercise has been a grotesque series of ideological and political self-betrayals and self-disavowals which have produced none of the political blood-money you thought to gain.

But you can claim “revolutionary virtue” for opposing the Iraq war? None of the things the SWP has done in the last four years, which can all be summed up in the one word “Respect”, were a necessary part of opposing the war. AWL opposed the war – but we have also bitterly opposed most of what the SWP and its allies have done since the invasion of Iraq.

To oppose the war and to fight Blair and Bush, it was not necessary to turn yourselves into “reactionary anti-imperialists”, the “anti-imperialist” equivalent of the “reactionary socialists” whom Marx and Engels denounced in the Communist Manifesto.

It was not necessary – indeed, it was discrediting, counter-productive, self-destructive – to back the sectarian, clerical-fascist “resistance” in Iraq, who are the mortal enemies of the renascent labour movement there, of all civil liberties, and of all women in the Iraqi state.

It was not necessary to ally with Galloway, or with the MAB. It was not necessary, it was self-disabling, to develop the fantasy that large numbers of Muslims, as they are, without changing except in being roused as Muslims by opposition to the war in Iraq, could be won – to what? – by solidarising with them on their own political terrain and mimicking their politics and their “Islamism”.

And what have you got from it? Nothing. Whatever happens now, the legacy of this episode in your organisation’s history will remain one of immense political confusion and inevitably, leave an additional residue of cynicism.

For decades your organisation has followed the procedure of tailoring your “Marxism” to its organisational needs and desires. Your organisation’s “Marxism” was and is “apparatus Marxism” – not Marxism which guides your organisation, but “Marxism” which rationalises from what the SWP’s leaders think will bring recruits and organisational advantage. A scandalous public example of what is usually done inside closed rooms and in the heads of SWP leaders was the “change of line” – twenty years after – on the Salman Rushdie affair.

Galloway did not cause any of what you have done. He bears no responsibility for the SWP, only for his own foul record and his own shameless self. Even so, Galloway is one of the prime symbols and embodiments of what the SWP has become – what you have let it become.

If you force a division in the SWP Central Committee and a break with Galloway – or, even more so, if the SWP rank and file were to push you into doing that – then that would be a possible start (no more, but a possible start) to a self-cleaning and self-regeneration by the SWP.

At least, that is what it would be if the SWP membership call you all to account – those who initiated this chapter in the SWP’s history, and those in the leadership who weakly and short-sightedly went along with it. If they let none of you smoothly slide away from the resultant mess, throwing self-serving rationalisations and alibis over your shoulders.

If you won’t fight to defend the principles of socialism, secularism, and rational politics – if you won’t break with Galloway now, and honestly criticise and analyse the last four or five years – then what good are you as leaders, or as members, of a socialist organisation?

If you won’t do it, SWP members should fight to make you do it. True, they have few democratic mechanisms to challenge the Central Committee. But they are not helpless.

They can talk to other members who are unhappy with the foul political and moral morass into which the SWP has been led. They can organise with them, secretly if they need to (they probably would). They can read the criticisms of SWP policy produced over the years by other socialists. They can break through the barrier of misrepresentation, demonisation, and slander which the members of the SWP Central Committee, including you, have erected to stop them even talking to people like ourselves.

Even if the conflict with Galloway comes to a break, what confidence for the future can SWP members have in those responsible for the last four years, including you, comrade Harman? The central SWP leaders today are people bred and raised to “leadership” by the SWP machine which you and others helped Tony Cliff build. Your typical methods have been political demagogy, bureaucratic and manipulative organisational practices, eternal willingness to shed principles for perceived short-term advantage, and refusal to allow the SWP rank and file any real freedom of discussion or control over the leaders.

Even if, or when, a break comes with Galloway, the SWP will not simply revert to what it was five or ten years ago. Unless the break comes by the SWP openly renouncing Galloway and its own whole record for the last five years – rather than by Galloway, at his own chosen time, discarding the “Trotskyists” for whom he has never troubled to conceal his contempt – the downward political spiral will continue. At best it will only be reversed partially and temporarily.

Comrade Harman, the revolutionary politics which you spent most of your life working for are still worth fighting for! In the SWP they will have to be fought for against the leaders and their “theoreticians”, such as you. Comrades of the SWP, the socialist ideas which the SWP claims to represent are worth fighting for! Break with Galloway!

Sean Matgamna

Chris Harman, a leading figure for decades in the SWP (more here), died last night.

There will be many obituaries. TC come from a very different political tradition, of Continental Marxist unorthodoxy. For us, anti-Stalinists and anti-anti-Communists,  the SWP’s main defining feature, its ’state capitalist’ theory, is of little interest. That is, the line against Stalinism has already been drawn, and there are better historical and theoretical explanations of the fate of the Soviet Union around. Perhaps more significant to our political activity has been the SWP’s political theory and practice.

I wish therefore to make some comments on Harman’s political legacy.  It is far richer and more positive than today’s SWP party-structure would suggest. These are some aspects,

Many of Harman’s political ideas, formed in the early International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP), has originally a libertarian cast. That is, their version of Marxism was based on socialism being introduced through a party which was  part of the self-organisation of the working class. Against what Trotsky called ’subsitutionism’, and taking something of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the importance of spontaneous democratic ferment, they were set out in the pamphlet below,

 Party and Class (1969) (Here) Harman concluded that,

“The need is still to build an organisation of revolutionary Marxists that will subject their situation and that of the class as a whole to scientific scrutiny, will ruthlessly criticise their own mistakes, and will, while engaging in the everyday struggles of the mass of workers, attempt to increase their independent self-activity by unremittingly opposing their ideological and practical subservience to the old society. A reaction against the identification of class and party elite made by both Social Democracy and Stalinism is very healthy. It should not, however, prevent a clear-sighted perspective of what we have to do to overcome their legacy.”

No doubt most people on the left remember more clearly the turn to Lenin in the 1970s, and the founding of the SWP on more inflexible democratic centralist grounds. The present-day regime of the Party stems from this period. It  as a time of expulsions, rules about limited factional rights (if at all), and the entrenchment of a quasi-eternal central Committee. There is a massive literature on this. From this it’s often said that Jim Higgin’s More Years for the Locust is the best critical explanation of what happened.

This bureacratic orthodoxy-in-perpetual-activism, did not prevent Harman from retaining a critical spirit.

Example, The  Prophet and the Proletariat (here)

The book contains a balanced analysis of Islamism - very different to the one promoted during the SWP’s time in respect (or the relativist views of present-day Islamophiles). Its conclusion is worth citing in full.

“It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically reactionary and “fascist” or as automatically “anti-imperialist” and “progressive”. Radical Islamism, with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century Arabia, is, in fact, a “utopia” emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class. As with any “petty bourgeois utopia” [128], its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation. It is this which leads inevitably to splits between a radical, terrorist wing of Islamism on the one hand, and a reformist wing on the others. It is also this which leads some of the radicals to switch from using arms to try to bring about a society without “oppressors” to using them to impose “Islamic” forms of behaviour on individuals.”

Socialists cannot regard petty bourgeois utopians as our prime enemies. They are not responsible for the system of international capitalism, the subjection of thousands of millions of people to the blind drive to accumulate, the pillaging of whole continents by the banks, or the machinations that have produced a succession of horrific wars since the proclamation of the “new world order”. They were not responsible for the horrors of the first Gulf War, which began with an attempt by Saddam Hussein to do a favour for the US and the Gulf sheikdoms, and ended with direct US intervention on Iraq’s side. They were not to blame for the carnage in Lebanon, where the Falangist onslaught, the Syrian intervention against the left and the Israeli invasion created the conditions which bred militant Shiism. They were not to blame for the second Gulf War, with the “precision bombing” of Baghdad hospitals and the slaughter of 80,000 people as they fled from Kuwait to Basra. Poverty, misery, persecution, suppression of human rights, would exist in countries like Egypt and Algeria even if the Islamists disappeared tomorrow.

For these reasons socialists cannot support the state against the Islamists. Those who do so, on the grounds that the Islamists threaten secular values, merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray the left as part of an “infidel”, “secularist” conspiracy of the “oppressors” against the most impoverished sections of society. They repeat the mistakes made by the left in Algeria and Egypt when they praised regimes that were doing nothing for the mass of people as “progressive’ – mistakes that enabled the Islamists to grow. And they forget that any support the state gives to secularist values is only contingent: when it suits it, it will do a deal with the more conservative of the Islamists to impose bits of the shariah – especially the bits which inflict harsh punishment on people – in return for ditching the radicals with their belief in challenging oppression. This is what happened in Pakistan under Zia and the Sudan under Nimeiry, and it is apparently what the Clinton adminstration has been advising the Algerian generals to do.

But socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes “Islamic” forms. It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.”

The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system – or often to the first followed by the second.”

Naturally one would say that Islamist movements are in practice demonstrably reactionary. Nor the central importance of secularism for socialists. As an explanation it lacks the central role in Islamicsm of the pious national bourgeoisie.  But at least Harman did not exalt Islamists as automatically on the ‘right side’ of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Unfortunately the third aspect of Harman’s SWP’s work (below) shows just how far they had gone down the road of treating social movements as fodder for recruitment. After the 1970s the SWP, stuck in a permanent round of recruitment through moving campaigns, period purges of anyone awkward, and ‘get rich quick’ schemes. That is winning central positions in perceived rising trends of political unrest. Their ‘united front’ strategy meant co-operation with anyone who seemed to be going in the direction of the existing political system.

This example explains how the Party saw the one-time important ‘anti-Globalisation’ wave.

Spontaneity, Strategy, Politics 2004.

“ In other words, a visible revolutionary organisation is a necessity, not an optional extra. Its members need to take part in the wider struggles and operate through party groups in localities and workplaces. They have to organise people around them through regular paper sales and draw them to meetings. And the discussion cannot just be about immediate tactics, but has to raise the question of transforming society in its totality, of revolution, not reform. Only in this way can we move towards fulfilling the full potential of the last five years—towards overthrowing this system and creating a better one.”

In fact in Britain the ‘anti-gloablisation’ movement was a heteroclite mixture of well-meaning NGOs, other left groups, individuals (Ken Livingstone onwards), fading magazines like Red Pepper,  and trade unions searching for new blood and inspired by anti-globalisation unrest in other countries which and genuine successes. It equally involved cranks of a variety of  stripes (Greens, animal rights nutters, onwards), all wrapped in an unwieldy Social Forum network, run in the interests of grandstanding various large egos. The SWP failed to get many recruits from this pool and turned to other fishing grounds.

The Respect Party was the culmination of this approach, aligning right up with the extreme-right-wing Islamists of the East London Mosque.  Of which it is hardly necessary to add further comment.

In conclusion, for all these remarks, Harman had a lot to offer. His original standpoint was not far from genuine democratic Marxism. That he, and the SWP, evolved into the hysterical dead-end we see today, requries more explanation than can be put into a few pages. In sum, it’s a shame he bound himself to the SWP political project so thoroughly. That intense committment would have been better spent elsewhere. But, then, that is not a matter for us to choose.

One of my Trademark very long reports:

I’ve been walking around with a beatific smile on my face this week, as I keep thinking how delighted I am that the Sheffield ‘Town Takeover’ went so well.

Though I should write a quick note, before it entirely fades from my failing memory, to record what went on for those, who couldn’t be there, or the obsessively interested.

Basically Town Takeovers are a series of events taking place around the country organised by the National Union of Students, aimed at starting a debate around how Higher Education is funded, and making sure the general public are aware of the injustices and inequalities inherent in the current funding system of tuition fees, and the danger to students, Universities, and indeed society posed by suggestions of increasing tuition fees.
Holding events in towns around the country (although last time I checked London, Birmingham, Sheffield et al seemed to be cities…) also provides a good opportunity to hold MPs and would be MPs from all parties to account, and demanding to know their views on tuition fees. This is particularly important with a general election hoving into view, and the leadership of the main parties staying as weirdly silent as the P in pterodactyl on this issue.

In Sheffield, where the ‘Town Takeover’ was being organised jointed by Sheffield Students Union and Hallam Union, we decided it would be beneficial to particularly focus on how students and graduates are suffering from debt, which allowed us to have a nifty ‘In the Red’ theme. The event also gave us the chance to showcase some of the good things students do for Sheffield, after weeks of bad publicity for students, over what I’ll politely call ‘War Memorial Gate’.

The day started for me when I woke up with a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach, they I always associate with exams. I was worried that the event would turn out to be a hideous, humiliating disaster.
However, I resolved to try my best to prevent a smouldering disaster, and set off on a mad shopping spree, buying red cakes (Thank you post-Halloween reductions!), red sweets, red face paint, red hairspray, and a bag of I love Sheffield badges [Which later vanished – come on own up, who took them?].

Weighed down with my red shopping I quickly went home and changed into all the red clothes I could find – a hideous red jumper was donned, as was a women’s red coat borrowed from my friend Simon. I put on some red flares, which probably hadn’t been worn in public since c.1975. Unfortunately they were comically too long, and dragged along the wet ground. After a bit of walking on tiptoe I hit on the solution, and tucked the ends into my red-socks, golfer style. It looked as if I were singlehandedly trying to get ‘spats’ back in fashion. Somebody did comment that I looked like I’d stepped out of P.G.Wodehouse, but surely the idea that I’d ever be mistaken for an upper class twit is ridiculous…

I also found an old cherry red ‘Wes for Pres’ T-shirt leftover from Wes Streeting’s election as NUS President, which I pulled on, although I did notice that I’ve got too Wes T-shirts (from different elections) and both have the labels ripped out. I may be on the edge of uncovering a massive scandal. Why was this? Were they made by a particularly unethical company? Or worse by the same supplier used by the OIs?

After getting not a few odd glances in street, I arrived at the Union about 12, to help load placards and other protest paraphernalia into cars, and do a hasty bit of last minute promotion.
With the concourse full of students milling around, we thought it would be a good idea to stick I sign up in the Officers’ er Offices which overlooks it, to promote the event.

After hastily printing out some giant letters on A4 paper, Grace Crook and I started putting them in the windows – spelling the highly informative ‘4PM PEACE GARDENS STREET PARTY’, however we found our plan hampered by the fact that the windows already had giant posters depicting the Union Officers’ faces in them. Undaunted we began to take them down.
I swear when I took the poster of Martin Bailey down a cheer went up from the concourse, similar to the cheer when that Statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled.

Amy Sutherland’s office was locked but I managed to track down a key, and get it, which lead to the slightly awkward situation of Amy returning to find me in her office in the act of ripping down a poster of her.
Having put the sign in the window, we were then infuriated by the fact that none of the students walking past ever seemed to look up. I banged on the window trying to ignite a flicker of interest, while Amy commented mournfully ‘To be honest you could wave all day up here and no-body will ever notice you…’
Having done our best to plug the event to passing students, the Sabbs then headed down to Hallam, leaving me in charge of leading people down to the Town Hall where our protest, or ‘Street Party’ as we’d cleverly marketed it was to take place.

I’d sent out messages to various people saying we’d meet on the Concourse at 3pm. Predictably enough, 3 o’clock arrived and I waited, and waited, and waited.
Nobody turned up. Literally nobody. This wasn’t good. As someone who’s not the best at time keeping myself I decided I should wait until half past 3 before giving up.
I saw various people I know but no-one was particularly eager to go. Ben my former housemate wasn’t interested ‘Unlike you Joe, I actually do my work, so I need to do that tonight…’, and the Chair of the University Tories, was even more dismissive; ‘I’m not attending something organised by that Communist organisation! (NUS) Besides I’ve only got one red item of clothing – which is a tie – and even that’s burgundy!’

Eventually however, a friend of a friend did appear who wanted to come. I was delighted and he instantly became my new hero. We set off down to the Town Hall, with me still feeling pretty sick, as I’d hoped for rather more than one student to turn up.

Arriving at the Town Hall we found a hive of activity as the Sheffield and Hallam Officers bustled around with various protest props such as a string of debt with giant £50 notes which we strung up outside the Town Hall, to demonstrate the ridiculous amount of debt your ‘average’ student will get in from doing a degree, boards full of photos of students showing the amount of debt they’re in (not that we’ve ever used that idea before…), a giant sign reading ‘SAVE OUR STUDENTS’, various bill boards detailing all the positive things students do, a huge clump of coloured balloons which would have delighted me circa 15 years ago, and the placards made by Education Committee – including the one I made, which was derided by Neil Mackenzie as ‘Quite hilarious pathetic’.

Various familiar faces from NUS arrived. Aaron Porter strode up rather incongruously clutching a megaphone. Shane Chowen turned up full of enthusiasm despite knowing next to nothing about HE. Ed Marsh bravely donned a bizarre costume to help the cause. Most people I spoke to assumed it was a dog, although I think it looked most like some sort of Jewish Kangaroo. Anyway, Ed danced about gamely and gave sheets out to confused children, nobly humiliating himself in the name of a fairer HE funding system.

However, despite the abundance of placards, free stuff, and a giant Marshian kangaroo, there was still one tiny problem. As the event was scheduled to start I looked up to see Vic Langer bearing down on me, with an urgent query ‘Joe…where are the people?’

It was a good question. My stomach sank as I feared the Cassandra-like churnings of my stomach that morning had been right. This was going to be a poorly attended disaster.

Then suddenly there was a flash of red in the distance. I ignored it, assuming I was hallucinating, like a drowning man who sees a mirage in the desert. But when I glanced in that direction again it was still there, and was growing bigger. Soon a merry band of people dressed in eye-wateringly bright red were upon us, drawn from the ranks of Education Committee, other Union committees, and even some ordinary students. Our numbers had now swelled to about a hundred people and one kangaroo, which I thought was impressive given that darkness was descending and it was now absolutely freezing!

A few passersby had been politely taking our flyers, and expressing vague interest, but now a small crowd actually gathered to watch because the cheer leaders arrived! They put up the Arctic temperatures with only pom-poms for protection, and performed various death defying fetes such as throwing one of their number up in the air and catching them moments before they splatted on the pavement. Was it bad that I thought as Aaron and I watched in horror, ‘If they drop her at least we’ll certainly get on the news.’?
As it was, we did get on the news without the need for grotesque physical injuries, as various reporters did show up, and waited patiently to interview people and take photos. We had coverage in the Sheffield Star, Sheffield Telegraph, BBC Sheffield, and the Forge Press.

We took various photos with our Sheffield and Hallam foam hands, SAVE OUR STUDENTS signs, balls and chains of debt (I had tried to buy some handcuffs of the sort used by kids playing policemen for this, but in the end we used some link chain so I got tired of the odd looks I got from going into toy shops and asking ‘Er…Do you sell handcuffs? And if so would they fit adults?)

However, there was one aspect of the event which could safely be called a disaster – our giant globe. The giant globe is owned by Leeds Student Union, and has to be seen to be believed. Towering above even Paul Tobin, the giant inflatable globe, bearing some slogan like ‘World Class Funding for World Class Universities’ can be rolled along, and is a cast-iron guaranteed crowd puller.
I remember in a meeting when somebody asked why we needed a giant globe, I stared at them in amazement; ‘It’s a GIANT GLOBE, why would we not need it?!’ Anyway, after much cajoling Danni Beckett heroically drove to Leeds to collect it last week, and various Sabbs and students wrestled valiantly all through the morning to get it blown up and ready. However, as it was being rolled up from Hallam Union to the Town Hall, already attracting interested spectators – disaster struck!

‘Was it punctured?’ I hear you gasp, ‘Deflate?’, ‘Roll away?’, ‘Stolen by an opportunistic Bond villain?’ I’m afraid it was worse than that – it was stopped by a ‘City Centre Ambassador.’

For those of you lucky enough not to have encountered them, the Sheffield Ambassadors are basically a feral gang of blue-coated busy bodies of the sort who couldn’t progress in the Neighbourhood Watch, so need another avenue to pursue their dreams of self importance. They now roam the city centre proffering unwanted advice and generally making a nuisance of themselves. So as our globe was being wheeled along the street, bringing joy to the people of Sheffield, an ‘Ambassador’ suddenly popped up like an unwanted zit on a young girl’s face. Displaying a conspicuous lack of the sort of diplomatic skills Ambassadors should require she demanded we take the globe down. When asked why, she replied with thinly disguised glee that it was a matter of public safety. When we expressed polite scepticism towards someone who clearly contained more hot air than the globe, we were told to show more respect, as somebody had died in Sheffield as a result of an inflatable balloon before.

Now, I don’t wish to make light of the very serious issue of giant balloon-related deaths, but I will just say, nobody I spoke to, including the Leader of the Council, seemed to have any knowledge of this alleged tragedy. Sadly however the ‘’’’Ambassador’’’’ was insistent, so being good, law abiding students, we tragically had to deflate our globe. I think the people of Sheffield ought to know that we tried to bring them a giant globe, but were thwarted by the kill-joy, puritanical City Council. Please take this into account at the next elections – Sheffield City Council are against the Earth.

As Neil Mackenzie commented it was also ironic that the Ambassadors had a problem with a lovely inflatable globe, but not with the cheerleaders throwing each other into the earth with only concrete to break their fall.

But we made the best of a bad job, ending the protest with Aaron Porter making a stirring speech, like Olivier before Agincourt. We cheered Aaron, we booed the foul spectres of fee-demanding Vice Chancellors and the CBI, and we shouted some of Susan Nash’s chants (with their poor rhyme schemes) before breaking up, and in time honoured tradition with anything that relates to NUS, heading to the pub, before the Panel Debate later that evening.

One we’d finally found the pub we were looking for, we all had a nice drink together, warmed by alcohol and by our burning hatred of City Centre Ambassadors. Sadly my chief memory of this social occasion was accidentally getting some salt from a crisp in a cut on my hand. The pain was excruciating! I got the cut while removing a giant poster of Kate Rickard so I might consider suing the Union.

I then headed down to the station to collect President of the NUS, Wes Streeting, whom I assume had spent the afternoon in London, or perhaps more likely been on a very slow connecting train. There was a big football match kicking off in Sheffield later that evening, which meant that my lurid red clothing drew some cutting comments from discerning fashion critics amongst the Newcastle fans arriving.

When it got to 6.58, with the debate scheduled for 7, and there was no sign of Wes’ train, my stomach began to give of it’s ‘It’ll be a disaster!’ rumblings again, when Wes, beaming like the Teletubbies’ sun, came rushing down the main staircase.

We rushed through the dark streets of Sheffield, arriving at City Hall, where the debate was taking place to a gratifying round of applause. (I’m going to assume most of it was for me.)

The debate itself between Wes, Paul Blomfield, the Labour Candidate for Sheffield Central, Paul Scriven, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Sheffield Central and leader of the globe deflating Council, and Spencer Pitfield, the Conservative candidate for Penistone and Stocksbridge, went rather well in my biased Pollyanna opinion. Unlike this week’s Question Time, I wasn’t bored and was interested to hear everything the panellists had to say.

Wes began in true Dickensian style by telling us a tale of two cities, or rather of the social divisions between rich and poor in one city – Sheffield, and the effect this has on widening participation in higher education. He highlighted various depressing statistics about the differences in standards of living in the prosperous Parliamentary constituency of ‘Sheffield Hallam’, and in ‘Sheffield Hillsborough’, one of the poorest constituencies in the country. He also show-cased some even more worrying statistics about the differences between the cities two Universities, with Sheffield Central admitting many more privately educated students than Sheffield Hallam, and many fewer students from C2, D and E social groups. (‘Which used to be called the ‘working classes’, but apparently referring to people as numbers is less offensive…’)

This theme has also been taken up by Hillsborough MP David Blunkett, this week who’s commissioned a report on the inequalities between Hillsborough and Hallam, and, always one for a good headline, has suggested Hallam be detached from Sheffield for the City’s own good.
Wes also set out how he believed morally that Higher Education should be free, but given how unlikely it is that any parties are going to be progressive enough to offer this, NUS is advocating [what is basically] a graduate tax, which would be paid by graduates in proportion to what they earn after benefitting from Higher Education.

Spencer Pitfield the Conservative candidate talked about his parties stance on Higher Education, including David Willet’s recent welcome speech, in which he said the case hasn’t been made by Universities for charging £3000 worth of fees yet, let along lifting the cap and raising them.

However this did lead Paul Blomfield to point out that the Conservatives have been sending out rather mixed messages on this, with Mr. Willets previously hinting that fees would certainly rise under a conservative government. Dr. Pitfield then claimed this was one of the areas where the Conservative Party was willing to listen and had changed.

Dr. Pitfield also promised a Conservative government would take students views into account and wanted to ‘get NUS round the table’ when discussing Higher Education Funding. This seemed particularly topical with the Governments Review of Tuition Fees and Higher Education Funding finally being announced on Monday, so I asked a question later, on how precisely students could get involved with the debate, when the Government seems to give rather more weight to the views of Vice-Chancellors and the CBI et al at present. Dr. Pitfield gave an answer, which won’t be popular with some in the student moment, saying it was best for students to put direct action out of their minds, as you ‘don’t need to let it get to that stage’ if you ensure ‘NUS representatives are represented and listened by the Government’, and added that of course NUS should be represented on the Fees Review Board.

Paul Blomfield agreed, and quick as a flash the chair, Aaron Dimbleby, asked if he’d follow this up by writing to Lord Mandelson. Paul said he would.

Paul Blomfield himself said he campaigned within the Labour Party against tuition fees, and declared unequivocally that he would ‘Not vote to raise fees’. He also backed NUS’s proposals for a graduate tax, and taked about the need for a national bursary system. He praised Labour’s record on funding Higher Education, and widening participation significantly.

Paul Scriven then pointed out that Paul Blomfield was voicing his own opinions rather than what his party believes.

Mr. Scriven then set out the Liberal Democrats policy of believing in free education and an end to tuition fees. When asked why Nick Clegg had recently talked about dropping the pledge, he insisted that the party agreed with providing free education there was just a question of ‘whether we can do it in one parliament or two’.
He also spoke about his own background and how ‘I began life in a poor family, and after working as a road digger, achieved everything I have due to going back to Higher Education.’ (This section made me think of Little Shop of Horrors ‘Oh, I began life as an orphan, a child of the streets, here on Skid Row…’ – but that’s probably just me.)
He disagreed with NUS’s proposed graduate tax as ‘you’d be paying it off for the rest of your life’. (Which as the NUS blueprint actually suggests it would be paid in instalments over 25 years after graduating, raises the worrying prediction that we’ll all die at around 46.) He also attacked Labour’s target of getting 50% of young people into Higher Education; ‘Where’s that come from. It’s a random figure.’ Wes then pointed out that although they attack the 50% target, the Liberal Democrats are the only main party that won’t commit to funding extra University places. However the Liberal Democrats clearly have the most progressive policy of the three main parties on fees (not that that’s saying much!).

There followed various questions and contributions from the floor, apart from my own about how students could get involved, there were questions to Paul Scriven from people none too happy at Nick Clegg’s seemingly weak commitment to his own party’s policy, and his neglect at not mentioning student support or bursaries.

The debate was then evened up by one man who said ‘I’m 25. My early childhood was blighted by the Thatcher Government, and now I’m in over £20 000 of debt, due to going to University under a Labour Government. I just wonder if the parties are proud of what they’ve done with our education system?’ This drew a sympathetic round of applause.

Spencer Pitfield responded with the curiously cryptic and off-message comment that ‘I know you didn’t like the last Conservative government, and I listen to what people say about the last Conservative government, but the fact is we haven’t had a Conservative Government now for 12 years.’ But then I don’t suppose he’ll win many votes in Yorkshire by praising Thatcher.

Everyone was then attacked by a gentleman from the SWP for not calling for Free Education, and in Wes’ case being a scab for not supporting the University and College Union in industrial action. Aaron Dimbleby eventually quietened him, saying that next time there was a debate he’d invite him to give a speech. Wes then responded saying ‘What I actually said when asked about the prospect of industrial action was that ‘Students need industrial action like a hole in the head’ which is true. I remember the lecturers’ strike in 2006 which caused massive disruption to marking, teaching, and students’ education. I’ll look after my own members first, which is what any Union should do.’ He also laid out how he’d like free education, and believed in it, but he thought calling for it was unrealistic in the current political climate, and would just lead to NUS being sidelined in the debate. This drew applause from most of the audience, whether because the audience contained natural Streeting-sympathisers, or because the SWP et al have become largely irrelevant in the student movement, I’ll leave to others to judge.

Another question was whether Scottish MPs should be allowed to vote on bills with have to do with students in England, which is a very good question, although I did sympathise with Aaron murmuring ‘Can we not get into the West Lothian question…’

Of course there was a lot more said than what I’ve recorded here, which I’ll leave out for reasons of space. Suffice to say I found it a generally interesting debate, and I was sorry when it was wrapped up.

A group of us hung around for a while, chatting and taking advantage of the free wine (appropriately red), and asking the assembled questions important questions, such as ‘Do you remember anyone being killed in Sheffield by an inflatable balloon?’

Some of us, showing shameful disloyalty went down to the Hallam Union bar where we continued the evening in style, and I may have made a fool of myself by having a tad too much to drink. I think a low-point was reached when Aaron and I arrived in Dempsey’s in the early hours of the morning to fine we made up about 50% of the people in there, and – if I remember rightly – while I struggled to sit up straight, Aaron checked Ednet on his Blackberry.

But despite the messy end, and the loss of our globe (let it go Joe…) I think the event was a great success at mobilising students, and keeping the issue of Higher Education funding and fees in the public mind.

Robert Service on Trotsky again: Service was on the weekend’s The Forum on the BBC World Service. The Service bit starts at 27 minutes. I don’t like Service’s analysis, although he is partly right. Service is right about Trotsky’s personality: cold, prim, glacial, disdainful, arrogant, self-centred. But Service basically says Trotsky and Stalin are “blood brothers”, that Trotsky was as ruthless as Stalin, who in turn was as much a “man of ideas” as Trotsky. This is surely not right, despite Trotsky’s faults. However, Service is right that Trotsky would have suppressed the peasants to achieve industrialisation, less brutally than Stalin but nonetheless harshly.

One interesting point Service makes is that other Russian exiles were making similar analyses of Soviet Russia, and have been forgotten. (He doesn’t name names, but Victor Serge, Ante Ciliga, Boris Souvarine, Voline, the exiled Mensheviks André Liebich writes about in From the Other Shore, and so on.) Service suggests that it was because Trotsky was a great writer and subsequently a great martyr that he became so important. I think this is true, but the third factor, both Trotsky’s strength and his flaw, his hubris perhaps, was that he was a great factionalist, with a sense of himself as a leader of a movement, something that was untrue of the other, more modest key figures of the anti-Stalinist left. Anyway, I still prefer Hitchens’ version. Lots more here.

***

Heroes: Josef Frantisek. Marek Edelman, Steve Cohen and Mercedes Sosa. John Saville. Bongani Mkhungo.

Villains: Nat Hentoff.

George Orwell: His lessons for combating antisemitism today.

Histories: The Communist Party in the French resistance. New York elections: from honourable Jewish socialists to odious Marxoid cults. The end of the left’s Cuba romance? The state of Bund historiography [pdf]. The Labour Party and the Battle of Cable Street.

Book reviews: Platypus on Communist Chicago. Colin Waugh’s Plebs. Geoffrey Foote on Paul Flewers’ New Civilisation. Andrew Coates on Flewers and two other books on Communism.

Interviews: Nick Cohen in Black Flag.

The Kaminski affair: Bob has a good round-up (scroll to “Strange alliances”).

Marxist theory: Louis Proyect on John Molyneux on party democracy. Playtpus on Karl Korsch. David Black (Hobgoblin London) on philosophy and revolution.

Un-Marxist theory: Irving Howe “Class and sociology” 1957, plus replies by Lewis Coser and Dennis Wrong.

If sharks were people: From Brecht’s Tales from the Calendar.

Consumerism: Buy Zapatatista coffee! And buy the new edition of Zapata of Mexico. And buy The Workers’ Next Step. And The Insurrectionists by Bill Fishman.

Today in Tehran, courageous students and other protestors defied a warning by the clerical fascist government not to disrupt Iran’s traditional annual demonstartion against the “Great Satan”, America.

The pro-democracy and freedom protestors ignored threats of arrest from the clerical fascists and mingled among pro-fascist forces before breaking out with cries of  “death to the dictator!”

The protestors were smaller in number than in the days following the rigged election last May that handed victory to Ahmadinejad, but the fact that it happened at all is a testimony to the strength and courage of  anti-fascist students and trade unionists,  given how many of them still languish in jail.

The left should be in no doubt about where we stand on this – with the anti-fascist protestors.

So it’s simply a fucking disgrace that SWP blogger and “left” anti-semite Lennie “Seymour” Tombstone continues to host pro-regime apologist (if not agent) “Yoshie”. Let the miserable  Seymour know what you think about him providing a platform to this reactionary scum.

James Turley sees SWP politics reduced to ultra-shrill self-parody

It has been a busy week for the Socialist Workers Party – the largest and most visible far-left group in Britain today. Its members and periphery formed the biggest part of Saturday’s demo against the Afghanistan war, as well as the bulk of Thursday’s shrill protest at the appearance of the bumbling British National Party leader Nick Griffin before a hostile Question time audience.

All this against the background of the ‘pre-conference discussion period’ – that is, the three months every year when the SWP membership is allowed to discuss things other than how many leaflets are needed for Saturday’s Stop the War stall. This is the second year running that the usually dull autumn exchanges have halfway merited the name ‘discussion’ – and both times the name at the core of the disputes is that of John Rees, the erstwhile prima inter pares on the SWP central committee who was ousted last year.

On the ‘anti-fascism’ front, there have been no perceptible public changes in the stance of the SWP – no news, in this case, being bad news. The big ‘event’ this week is, obviously, the Question time episode, to which Griffin had been controversially invited following his election as an MEP. The show itself was a high point in terms of audience figures; the same cannot be said for the turnout for the hysterical protest outside BBC television centre, staged by Unite Against Fascism, which is staffed by the SWP.

It falls to the never-knowingly-perceptive party organ, Socialist Worker, to solve the contradiction posed by almost every concrete activity the SWP today undertakes – that is, directing endless opprobrium at the sheer awfulness of the current state of affairs, while simultaneously talking up its own influence on events.

True to form, Esme Choonara writes a report this week entitled ‘Nick Griffin’s BBC appearance sparks angry protest’ (Socialist Worker October 31). That contradiction is visible from the off: “Thousands of anti-fascists laid siege to the BBC’s studios in London on Thursday of last week as fascist British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin was handed an unprecedented publicity coup on Question time.” Apart from the fact that there were probably only a thousand or so anti-fascists, they failed in their objective of stopping the broadcast. Later on we are told that “anti-fascists came very close to breaking through and were only held back by security gates and lines of police”. To which one can only respond: what other obstacles are there to breaking into a building that were successfully overcome by these intrepid demonstrators to justify it even being mentioned? The gruelling walk to the police lines from White City tube station?

Unfortunately, the heroic failure of UAF to stop the QT circus bodes ill for the British and indeed European masses. Griffin has cultivated links with various organisations in Europe, with a view to forming a “new Europe-wide Nazi group”. “Outrageously, the BBC hid behind claims of ‘impartiality’ to hand a Nazi organisation a platform to peddle racist and homophobic lies” – which seems rather compatible with the dictionary definition of ‘impartial’ – unlike, say, the absence of any far-left forces on the platform. Whether or not the BNP is fascist, meanwhile, it is certainly ‘peddling lies’ to call it ‘Nazi’ (even in the 1980s, it was the rump National Front which identified more closely with Nazism). But the BBC would not have to face this particular moral dilemma, even if a left electoral success forced it to invite, say, Weyman Bennett onto Question time, as SWP members take the trouble to no-platform themselves by refusing to debate the likes of Griffin face to face.

All this is much of a muchness with the SWP-style ‘anti-fascism’ we have gotten rather used to – an insistence on labelling anyone to the right of the Tory Party (barring, for some reason, the UK Independence Party) Nazi and nothing less; an implicit contempt for the masses who will apparently be won instantly to Griffin’s programme if he appears on TV; a pseudo-politics based entirely on moral distance from ideological degenerates who simply cannot be touched; and a millenarian view of the consequences of budging on this (gas chambers all the way down).

Yet, to believe a motion put before the October 10 SWP party council (the delegate body which meets a couple of times between annual conferences), the central committee is on the verge of abandoning all this. This critical motion is reproduced in the first SWP Pre-conference Bulletin (known as the Internal Bulletin or IB) over an extensive list of names, including those of Rees, his partner and close collaborator Lindsey German, and long-time ally Chris Nineham. It is obviously enough the work of Rees’s newly formed Left Platform faction, which has been officially recognised for the duration of the pre-conference discussion period. The motion frets: “At the last two national committee meetings of the SWP a majority of the CC who spoke argued that the SWP should be prepared in the future to debate with members of the BNP in the media after Nick Griffin appears on Question time on October 22, thus abandoning the ‘no platform’ position.” Not only that, but a majority of the NC had spoken in favour of this heresy.

On the contrary, “the election of two BNP MEPs and the change in policy by the BBC does not mark a significant enough shift in the balance of forces between the left and the BNP to justify abandoning ‘no platform’.” Here is a curious logic indeed – it is fine for the SWP to abandon ‘no platform’ once the establishment does.

“The principle at stake here,” the comrades argue, “is that the BNP should not be regarded as a legitimate bourgeois party.” But why should this be treated as a “principle”? In times of severe social crisis the bourgeoisie can turn to fascism to retrench its rule – thus instantly rendering the fascists ‘legitimate bourgeois politicians’. In fact leading establishment figures could switch to the fascists or attempt to transform what the SWP currently regards as ‘legitimate bourgeois parties’ into fascist organisations. To insist on a hard and fast distinction here is to introduce one where none really exists – social democracy differs vastly from fascism, but both are expressions of rule considered “legitimate” by the bourgeoisie at different times.

This motion was overwhelmingly defeated at party council, which approved a rival motion from the CC. However, the latter motion did not contradict Rees’s at all in terms of substance, reiterating that SWP members in UAF “will refuse to appear on a panel with Nick Griffin”. The SWP “will redouble our efforts to win the case for no platform for the BNP in the media and build the UAF campaign of protests and pickets to challenge the BBC’s decision”. Nonetheless, we cannot but note that there is wriggle-room in the approved motion, which concentrates on the narrow issue of the BBC, and leaves open the question of whether the SWP may later embark upon a wrenching turn.

John Molyneux

The ‘smoking gun’ for Rees and co was a rather innocuous letter from ‘loyal oppositionist’ John Molyneux published in Socialist Worker - very sensibly headlined ‘“No platform” must not be a fetish’ (June 13). “Yes,” argues comrade Molyneux, “we should campaign against the BBC and other broadcasters giving the Nazi British National Party (BNP) airtime. But when it is clear they are going to appear anyway it is to our advantage that they are confronted by anti-fascists.” An impermissible sell-out for the Reesites – and for the successful party council motion.

IB No1 – alongside such riveting items as ‘Nurturing the roots in Kings Lynn’ – contains a number of items related directly or peripherally to the anti-BNP crusade. One proposes a “change of strategy”, which turns out to be reviving the SWP’s old Anti-Nazi League as a hard faction within UAF – Occam’s razor is never knowingly applied by SWP cadre when it comes to front organisations.

‘Holding the line on “no platform”’ (authored by four London comrades identified as Dean, Paul, Julie and Jim) parallels the Rees party council motion. It is highly confused. For example, it states that “BNP support contains a strong irrational element”, and so “argument is a less effective weapon against fascism than force”. The “Nazis” cannot be defeated in rational debate because they are “deceptive liars, distorting and exploiting the real issues …” As everyone knows, the poor, ignorant masses are always taken in by irrational lies and are never persuaded by lucid argument exposing those lies for what they are.

The comrades warn that agreeing to debate with Griffin on national TV or radio would “undermine” ‘no platform’ locally: “Why shouldn’t our student union host a debate with the BNP? Martin Smith/Weyman Bennett appears on TV with them.” But then, just a few paragraphs later, they write: “Locally, though, we do have significant positions that may involve tactical decisions about whether to appear on platforms with the BNP, when they also have prominent roles as councillors, in tenants associations, etc. To refuse in such circumstances might amount to sacrificing a key role in a campaign for the sake of holding a line on the BNP that could be detrimental to the wider campaign.” Exactly.

This contradiction demonstrates that there are those in the ranks of the SWP who are not completely stupid. Some are actually showing signs of trying to think. There may be a time when the principle of ‘no platform’ might have to be reconsidered, they say: if, for example, “the BNP has achieved a level of legitimacy comparable to the French or Italian fascists. We would then have to re-evaluate our stance in the light of a different balance of forces.”

But not quite yet … at least nationally. The comrades attempt to rebuff a point made by comrade Molyneux in his Socialist Worker letter. He pointed out that Antonio Gramsci had been prepared to debate with Benito Mussolini in the Italian parliament. The comrades respond: “There is no comparison with the position Gramsci found himself in under Mussolini in the 1920s and the political landscape of Britain in 2009. The working class is not defeated and our comrades are not being assassinated by fascist hit squads.”

So now that the BNP is not a serious threat to the workers’ movement, being in the same room as a member is a mortal sin; but when it becomes one, it’s time to start debating? Such, apparently, is the logical consequence of defending an idiotic policy.

The wooden spoon for the whole bulletin, however, undoubtedly goes to one Ben from south London, who relates at length his experience building yet another SWP front – Defend Council Housing – from scratch in his area. It is for the most part a tale of patient, low-level activism come good, although one wishes always for a little more political ambition from such cadres to marry to their masochistic desire for grunt-work.

One anecdote stands out, however – one of the first people interested in his campaign turned out to be “on the leaked membership list of the BNP”. When he discovered this (“it pays to Google everyone who approaches you in these campaigns,” writes Ben in a footnote – “If I hadn’t found out about his membership until later, it could’ve become a damaging issue for the DCH group”), he pinned him down and “popped the question”: “… he was candid with me. He said he had been a member previously, and agreed with them on everything except the racism.” Naturally, of course, he was immediately excommunicated from the campaign. A final footnote reveals that he was later elected chair of the local tenants’ association.

In the 1930s and 40s, the ‘official’ Communist Party had to confront the far more threatening presence of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They often did fight the fascists in the streets, most famously at Cable Street; yet where the CPGB was strong, it was able to perform exactly the kind of community activism to which Defend Council Housing aspires (and the BNP has been so adept at using in recent years). Party activists would make an effort to draw BUF supporters into communist-led rent strikes – not a few tore up their BUF cards on the spot.

Conversely, Ben in south London effectively cut himself off from a seemingly talented and well rooted community activist on the basis that he had once been a member of a nowadays very diffuse-at-the-edges far-right organisation. The SWP’s pathological aversion to engaging with the BNP’s supporters – never mind for a moment properly hardened fascists – not only reduces its politics to ultra-shrill self-parody, not only entirely disarms it before the bourgeoisie, but even serves to sabotage the low-level activism among ‘real people’ it so venerates.

Comrades should learn the lessons – denying the far right a platform is a tactic, which may be appropriate under certain circumstances. In other circumstances, as the comrades are starting to realise, debating with the BNP might be more effective. The SWP should drop this “fetish” once and for all.

SWP Meeting

Leeds: Harehills and Chapeltown Branch
Where: Tasty’s, 138 Roundhay Road (upstairs)
When: Wed 11/11/09, 7pm