An organisation with integrity

[The following piece was published today by Exchange magazine]

The main motion for discussion at the SWP conference in December will say, “Conference recognises … That all the comrades involved in the DC hearings sought to apply our politics in a principled way at all times and tried honestly to do the best they could in the circumstances. All DC hearings have been conducted with integrity”. That last word, integrity, is the important one.

I don’t want to make familiar points going back over what happened at that DC hearing; or whether it is possible to transform an investigation from scandalous to principled merely through a conference vote. Here, I want to ask: what does the left need to do, if we are ever going to have again a reputation for integrity?

The word “integrity” means at least two different things. In a first sense, it just means being principled and living by what you believe.

For a very long time, in so far as the SWP has thought about “principles”, we have assumed that they could be subordinated to the interests of the party, which stood in our understanding as a proxy for the class, which stood for all of humanity. “Anarchists”, we have explained, may see a revolutionary group as the harbringer of a new society, but “Marxists” don’t agree with them: it is not possible to wash off what Marx once called “the muck of ages” (i.e. oppression and its effects on both oppressor and oppressor) merely by wanting to be better, without a social revolution. But in the last year we have found that we are being judged, not for the formal content of our ideas but the mismatch between our ideas and what we have done.

A socialist party cannot pretend to be the growing embryo of a potential future society. But behaving repeatedly in an unprincipled manner is enough to kill any organisation and especially one which aspires to carry the dreams of millions.

One way to reorient the left is through adopting detailed codes which formulate basic rules as to what behaviour so obviously “crosses the line” that it is incompatible with membership of a socialist group. This winter, for example, the International Socialist Organisation (which was for many years until 2003 the SWP’s American affiliate) is preparing for its own annual conference. One of the documents being circulated by its leadership is a Code of Conduct for the ISO’s members.

The Code commits them to conducting debate rigorously, but with civility and respect. Members are made accountable for actions that bring serious harm to other members or to the organization. Discrimination and harassment are prohibited. All sexual encounters must be consensual, whether with another ISO member or not.

Elsewhere, in the main body of the ISO’s rules, the group prohibits members from making false statements to obtain membership or engaging in financial improprieties, or acting as a strike-breaker, a provocateur, or an informer

I like the document and I support the ideas behind it but I won’t pretend that it, alone, could cure the problem. For one thing, the behaviours prohibited by it seem to have been selected quite arbitrary. I accept I wouldn’t want to be in a party with a police informer or an agent provocateur, or indeed a former informer. How about a police officer? (I assume not) Or a prison officer? Or a serving soldier? Someone who owns their own business? What if the business has a left-wing content? In the SWP, we tried to prohibit for a time our members having jobs in the union bureaucracy or even on 100% facility time. Unfortunately our former National Secretary had a number of friends in these positions, so we maintained the rule, but applied it arbitrarily. In some cases, through the party’s ignorance of what its members were up to; we didn’t apply it at all. Should we have kept the comrade who serves in the bureaucracy, as a very senior manager (i.e. with a power to hire and fire), and who has an OBE for his services to trade unionism? Does it make a difference that he is one of the kindest and most genuine people you will ever meet, as well as a committed revolutionary?

It is quite obvious, after the Delta rape scandal, that any left-wing organisation with any survival instinct will respond better than the SWP has done to complaints of rape. But any Code isn’t made useful by its ability to recognise last year’s errors, you want it to guide you through next year’s crises, whatever they may be.

The definitions of discrimination in ISO’s document mirror American law, but US law is relatively underdeveloped compared to various international counterparts. European law (and therefore even UK law) prohibits a much wider set of behaviours directed against wider sets of disadvantaged groups. This isn’t to praise UK law, by the way, which is itself the product of certain kind of social compromises and has all sorts of limitations, but only to say that any list will always be incomplete. The trick is to work out what the principles are behind our prohibition of certain behaviours, and to hope that those principles will guide you right even in unfamiliar situations.

Integrity has a second meaning; consistency. We in the SWP often say that women’s liberation is “integral” to our politics, if this is going to be more than hot air, it would have to mean that every aspect of our socialism was shaped by our commitment to ending women’s oppression: that we could not think about trade unions, universities, anti-fascism or anything else without thinking about women’s oppression.

One story about the old SWP illustrates nicely what integrity can mean. The revolutionary journalist Paul Foot had been educated at Shrewsbury public school, and his friends there, including Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Christopher Booker later worked with him on the magazine Private Eye. Unlike them, Foot was a socialist, joining the SWP’s predecessor, the International Socialists, in 1961 after leaving Oxford and remaining with IS/SWP until his death in 2004. A few years before he died he suffered a heart attack and was recovering in hospital, mute and seriously unwell. Friends from Private Eye visited him, and, as lay in bed, said that they had raised enough money for him to swap his NHS bed for one in a private hospital. Unable to speak, Foot lifted his fingers at them in a V-sign. Ill as he may have been, he was the same Paul Foot he had always been.

How do parties show integrity? Socialist Alternative, the largest IS group in Australia, published five years ago an Anti-Sexism Manifesto, setting out how to enable women to take part in a group as equals with men.

The pamphlet describes, in ways which any socialist should recognise, how men can dominate in social relationships, how women still tend to do the majority of housework and certainly childcare (even in socialist relationships). It notes the persistence of old, stereotypical ideas about how men will be the ones who work and women the ones who do most of the caring. It accepts that there is a limit to how far sexism can be overcome under capitalism, but makes a comparison with workers’ subordination: “Socialists do not passively accept that workers will always submit to their bosses’ authority, or that they will automatically adopt racist or other divisive ideas … We fight these ideas vigorously when we can. And so it is with sexism.”

Much of the pamphlet is about consent, and why socialist men should never chivvy a woman for sex, get her drunk in order to sleep with her, pretend that a “No”was playful rather than serious, etc. “No means no at any time”, its author writes. It talks in practical ways about what is wrong with men controlling women. Socialist Alternative encourage their members to practice safe sex, and to see this as something which is the man’s primary responsibility. Last of all, the authors of the pamphlet insist that no-one should use the group as a pick-up joint.

Some of the ideas in their pamphlet are things which people on the left have done intuitively for years. Even in the SWP, we don’t normally ask men to speak at Marxism on women’s oppression. Generally, we do try to have a number of women either speaking, or at least chairing, our national events. And any comrade who has been in the SWP more than a few years will remember a time when we tried much harder to challenge sexism than we do now. In the past, for example, we did try to provide childcare to enable parents to attend our meetings. The problem is that all these things we do, or did, feel partial. We never explain properly why we do them. They are not followed through in our campaigns or our publications.

A theme of the SWP opposition has been that if we want people to believe that we actually have a theory which makes women’s liberation “essential” to our project, then we need to demonstrate that our internal practice matches up to the way we like to present ourselves to the world. You can’t say one thing and do another …

[the piece continues here, at page 18]

On being, or not being, a finger-wagging Jaberwocky

One, two! One, two! and through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

I used to have a fantasy that when all my comrades in the SWP eventually grew up, they would be likely a typical Jewish family. They (we!) would spend our Decembers raging against each other with an intensity that outsiders would find incomprehensible. And then, suddenly, and utterly, we would make up. And no-one would be cross with each other any more.

Well, the SWP grew up, or certainly the average age of its members is about double what it used to be. And far from promoting a mature sensibility and tolerance, I find that the teachers are more teacherish, the dogma is more dogmatic, and the supreme authority is nastier and behaves more than ever like an aristocrat who finds himself in a job that was never meant for him.

Over the past twelve months, I have seen my comrades in the faction attacked, spat at by supporters of the CC, and bullied out of the branches where they had been active. I have seen behaviour so unpleasant that if members of the Conservatives or UKIP had been its victims I would be outraged on their behalf.

And because I am not a woman I have been spared the worst of it. I have not been raped nor sexually harassed. Nor have I been told by my supposed comrades that it would be really inconvenient and difficult to chose between my account of what happened to me and a man’s. I have not had to endure the “bourgeois morality” lecture in which it is patiently explained that women should wait their turn and not expect revolutionaries to take rape seriously. Nor have I had to endure Martin Smith’s favourite chat up line, which revolved by a coincidence around the very same phrase: “the only reason you won’t sleep with me is because you are swayed by” (wait for it) “bourgeois morality”.

And yet, even now …

I think of the SWP of Dave Widgery, and of the Anti-Nazi League.

I recall the immense pleasure I got on finding old copies of the (pre-1979) International Socialism Journal, how sharp the writing always was and how precise the politics.

I think back to the SWP which I joined in which men were argued with to take women’s oppression seriously.

I remember the students of my own generation who joined the SWP in large numbers, and fought as SWP members against the abolition of student grants, and against a homophobic minister, and always, always, against injustice.

I think back to the argumentative, iconoclastic spirit of the party in the early 1990s when I joined.

I recall how every branch seemed to have at least a couple of “cadre”, independent-minded comrades, who argued for socialist politics in their branch and were slow to persuade of the merits of the leadership’s get-rich-quick schemes.

I remember when I was invited onto the editorial board of Socialist Review, 15 years ago, and the pride in my step as I literally skipped back home because I was so happy and desperate to tell my partner the good news

I remember Welling, and Prague,  the enthusiasm with which the party leadership grasped the breakthrough at Seattle. (I also recall the intense, sectarian stupidity with which they then imposed a split on the ISO, using Seattle as their excuse).

I notice the way in which despite the closing down of Women’s Voice, despite the lack of a decent women’s perspective thereafter, despite the way in which comrades were warned by Cliff and Harman off the divisive subjects of rape and sexual harasssment – despite all of that, so many SWP membes turned out to have the right instincts

I remember the very same comrades who have acted recently as Martin Smith’s personal shield, when they didn’t answer strangers’ commonplace greetings (“How are you?”) with the words, “I am a loyalist” but when they had a democratic notion of what socialism involved, and were kind and supportive to new members of the group

There are so many people now in their 40s who I recall when they were better, bolder, more questioning people. I remember when they were revolutionaries. And in solidarity to the people they once were; I say to them: even now, it is not too late to turn back

I will not be purely nostalgic. Even in the last year I have seen some comrades trying to comprehend where “the other side” is coming from. At every whisper of a hint of a turn, I have been encouraging. And because there is so little time between now and our last conference, I will try to continue in that spirit for a few weeks longer.

When people move, I don’t care what they did before. I will be forgiving – so long as they move.

Indeed, I would invite any wavering readers to do just that. I find that it is simply more pleasant when you can live your politics openly. It is better when you don’t have to make excuses for other people, and when you can live, or at least try to live, what you believe.

I see people who have joined the faction relax, because for the first time in a year they can live the politics they thought they stood for, and I have watched the pressure fall from their shoulders as they are again true to themselves.

And – to my erstwhile comrades among the self-declared “CC Ultras” of Idoom, I say: you should try it too.

from “Why do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts” (1972)

“Sexual love is the movement that breaks the rules; an uprising of the senses that abolishes propriety. Time alters. A gasp lasts an hour, a night separates into heaps of minutes, a conversation from bar to bed to bus stop and has it been a fortnight or a day? Objects floor you with sudden meanings; a weed becomes a flower beside a canal that is an ocean. A shell swells with feelings. Touches echo, nerves misbehave, hands ricochet. Eyes kindle and melt in a world of constantly altering surfaces. Love offers a glimpse of the most intimate communication that we have experienced. Everything that’s said about love is true, except the happy ending.

To love in capitalism has an especially bitter intensity. It is to repossess feelings to which we have come foreign. Emotions without rules or prices or power attached to them. In love’s bed, mutual subjectivity allows absolute altruism. The precious is given without price, the delight lies in delighting another. We recover that which we have been taught to withhold or avoid or simply have shaken out of us by parents and teachers and each other. It is a state of revolution against the discoloured flatness which is ‘normal’, sleep-work-play life. Lovers win a short parole permission to trail after the ditch-flowers, to stare through the swirls of harbour water to the stone and become entranced by the dart and hover of storm clouds. Sexual love cannot be hoarded, accumulated or displayed. Neither moth nor rust can corrupt it.

In general, the individualism so avidly developed in us by the capitalist system is for external application. We are persuaded to distrust our emotions when they conflict, as they usually do, with competitive success. If we are going to ‘get somewhere’ and ‘make something of ourselves’, education not experience should be our guide. The adverts school us, the slogans batter us down. Get without giving. take what you can. Look after No. 1. ‘The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being’, wrote Marx. But even the bourgeoisie flounders on love which it is obliged to honour however much it loathes its expression. For love is a zone of subjectivity which also has official approval, a precarious holiday where feelings and finance are supposed to rule. Love allows you, briefly, to return to what was once yourself…

It is not hard to see why such an unruly state of mind has to be strictly rationed and kept controlled with greeting cards, marriage licenses and marzipan cakes. It is unpredictable, disorderly and bad for industrial relations. It’s too simple and too difficult and doesn’t consume enough. For the effective growth of commerce, it should only occur once in life, its emotions must be surrounded with regulations, icing sugar and lace, made as well-behaved as possible. It would be easier of it didn’t exist, this love, and for many it never does. But it has proved quite impossible to remove the gnaw or eradicate the itch. So it has been turned into something quite different, a mouldy, consoling sort of emotion which, for men, is made palatable by bouts of ‘sexy’ sexuality which must be purchased of forced rather than discovered. Sex itself must be turned into work, with its own rules and games. It is forced back into the black sack of marriage, a contract to feel in a matter whose very essence lies in its voluntary nature.

It is not just a case of love ‘withering under constraint’, as Blake, one of the first rebels against the laws of trade, marriage and scholarship, put it. Love is buried by love’s forms and sexual love becomes an acted insincerity …

The echoing sense and unbreaked subjectivity are made silly and impossible to sustain, for such love needs leisure and more space than five football fields. That kind of love becomes, in practice, a privilege for the rich. The rest of us are left to read about the affairs of ballet dancers and the loves of princesses. Ordinary love is locked up in its own company, given guards called Jealousy and Fidelity, taken out in public once a month, and stifled to death beneath the TV and the nappies. The underside of love surfaces and passion now wants its penalties. A once equal love capsizes and itself becomes the subject of the division of labour. The man is the human being who has to be kept fuelled and sustained, fit to do his stuff in the outside world. As time passes, it is mysteriously the man who comes to determine the terms of the emotional bargain. It’s the woman who fits it, placates, anticipates, mollifies, sacrifices and then becomes bitter and made lonely by what love has become. The labour of love becomes just another labour.

Love can quickly become a species of tyranny, a word offered and withheld like a dog’s biscuit. A word that turns suddenly into a slap, a trap, a threat. ‘Do you love your mummy?’ means reward me for your dependence. ‘Mother knifed baby to prove she loved it’, says a local paper. Love becomes involuntary, a system of emotional green Stamps, promised, stored and exchanged. The platitude that love is close to pain becomes cruelly true, the intensity of violence replaces the gentleness of love. Not just broken alcoholic men but the smarty young executives find violence sexy when the fun has gone out of love.

Violence is the occupational disease of a wife. Men beat their spouses regularly who would never harm their dog. But the slow death of love is a different sort of pain, full of guilt and dread and exhaustion. Love becomes an oath or a pang or a regret; the grease in the spoon, the hook in the tune. Women are less keen to forget that is why they are called sentimental. But mulling over memories while contriving to be lovely-to-come-home-to is apt to produce a mawkish and sickly romanticism, no use to anyone. The evidence of loveless marriage lies concealed and unrecorded doorstep grumbles and corner shop intimacies and smoothed-over-rows in public bars, to be kept from the outside world if it can be…

How the economic set-up of the family mutilates the emotions of love and the unequal relations of the sexes turns a particular pair of lovers into sparring partners are not the most important crimes of a system which can starve whole continents and destroy and make ugly entire cities. But it is one of the saddest. Feelings which have regulated life itself are relegated to a mere memory. A glimpse of something which has become a taunt. Once mixed up with marriage and corrupted with cash, love is bent into a certain shape which no longer fits feelings. People are sorted into twos and marched up to the wedding cake while relatives make bitter jokes behind their backs and hire purchase agents lick their pencils. The family is a convenient self-financing unit of competitive consumption and indoctrination, the original sweatshop where production and repair and reproduction are carried out by an unsafe, unpaid and under-appreciated women workforce. For the state it is cheap at the price. How much easier than spending on good public transport or comprehensive group care for young children or community centres and restaurants which provided much better and cheaper food and entertainment than the commercial outfits if everyone does it at home one by one. Exhaustingly, inefficiently, expensively. And then sits in front of the TV to watch still more invented happy families serving out their Shreddies. The family provides certain certainties and keeps us all well wadded with stupidities. If it is breaking down, that is the occasion for rejoicing not dismay. We need to start finding alternatives and demanding the facilities to make them work, not trying to force the broken pieces back together again.”

by Dave Widgery (previously unpublished)

The People’s Assembly: an auto-critique

The People’s Assembly (PA) is still 13 weeks away, but many aspects of how it will work are already clear. A very large number of national organisations have given the call for the Assembly their support. Nine national unions have already signed up (http://union-news.co.uk/2013/03/unions-signal-mass-resistance-to-austerity-by-backing-peoples-assembly/): good. The chief sponsor of the People’s Assembly is the Coalition of Resistance (CoR), on which something like around 100 different left-wing parties, campaigns etc, are represented. Most if not all of these, we can assume, will sponsor the PA. We can anticipate that there will be speaking roles reserved for individuals who have played prominent parts in the various hospital campaigns, and in the protests against the bedroom tax. Size matters; we are facing a government which is co-ordinating austerity measures in every area of the public sector, social benefits, private employment, health, housing, education, etc. It would be churlish not to welcome an initiative on a grand scale.

The PA will announce “action”, in other words a national demonstration, timed presumably to coincide with the return of students in the autumn. It will coincide with an international anti-austerity conference. It will announce the formation of further Coalition of Resistance groups / People’s Assemblies, which are to be set up in every area. So far, so reasonable. Among those in the audience of the PA there will be many hundreds of people who are not activists, or who have not have had a means of being active for several years. It is possible that some of them will become permanently involved in the movement, and, if so, this is to be heartily welcomed. But for those of us who have been part of the movement for more than a few months, there is a method here, and one that we know only too well.

It was John Rees of Stop the War (StW), Counterfire (CF) and CoR who led off the discussion of how the PA would work at the recent CoR National Council. (http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/2013/02/minutes-of-coalition-of-resistance-national-council-sunday-10-february-2013/). We can imagine, without needing to be conspiratorial, that the plan for a People’s Assembly was first discussed round “that” Clapton Square dining room table, with Lindsey German. Lindsey will have been on the phone to Chris Nineham, then Clare Solomon, James Meadway and Sam Fairbarn, and only much later will the plan have been visited upon the world.

Like Terminator VI (“I’ll be back … back … back”), this is of course a sequel. The first People’s Assembly to be held at Westminster Central Hall was the Stop the War Coalition People’s Assembly against war in Iraq on 15 March 2003. This too was planned by John and Lindsey and then agreed with Chris. This too had various international speakers and spin-off events. This too was intended to be a “meme” (in the Dawkins sense: a unit of cultural transmission, a unit of imitation and replication), to be copied by local assemblies of the parent organisation.

Above all, People’s Assembly I was a talking shop: with dozens of speakers making essentially the same points in lengthy succession. The choice of the venue determines the method: Westminster City Hall is a huge public forum seating 2500 people. There are not 50 separate halls there capable of hosting 50 separate conversations all then feeding back to a single, main event. The “conversation” has to be orchestrated, pre-scripted, and controlled. PA I, like PA II, announced further actions (a concert that evening, protests on 18 March, a demo on 19 March and further “spontaneous protests” five days later). PA II takes place (sadly) in a quieter context, and we can imagine that the action plans will be shorter. Moreover, experience teaches that even the action plans will be “memed” in advance. Tony Cliff used to joke that the first New Left had both theory (reading Edward Thompson) and practice (hearing Thompson speak). The CoR / StW / PA generations has its counterpart. Theory is hearing John and Lindsey address an indoor gathering. Practice is hearing John and Lindsey speak at the end of a long outdoor march.

There are more problems here though than mere repetition. If the various anti-cuts campaigns are to cohere into a national movement capable of bringing down the government (an ambition I anticipate we will hear from PA II, as grand ambitions are needed to keep the troops busy), key to this will be protests of a scale to make the country feel ungovernable, and to achieve that there will need to be a generation of movement activists with a shared political understanding. Don’t get me wrong, by “understanding” I don’t necessarily mean a shared, developed ideology. I just mean an idea, the simpler the better (“No Poll Tax” / “Peace, Bread, Land”).

Behind PA II there is an unstated analysis of how this generation will be formed. And it is based on reasoning that is – ultimately – bleak and unrewarding:

1. Revolutionaries should be organised in parties characterised by a very top-down vertical leadership
2. The leadership establishes its right to lead through forming “perspectives”, i.e. general analyses of the balance of forces within global capitalism which join up the international, the national and the local, finding in each the key point at which capitalism is weakest. By definition, these can only be formulated by a tiny number of talented individuals with time on their hands. Initiative within the parties, it follows, can come only from above
3. The sole, real purpose of the parties are to provide a succession of talented individuals, “cadre”, who can be recruited by the party’s leadership into the regional leadership of front organisations, where they can win individuals to the perspective of the party’s leaders
4. The shelf-life of cadre is narrow: they should be used, exhausted, and new cadre recruited in their place
5. We are in an age where (for reasons which are never properly explained) front organisations are the primary way in which the political left should present itself to the public
6. Front organisations give a practical expression to the assessment by the leadership of the revolutionary party of the point at which capitalism is weakest
7. Front organisations are composed of revolutionaries, who create them as alliances of left organisations with individuals to their right. As long as these individuals are helpful to the revolutionary party they should be courted with the same determination that a lover woos his or her fiancé (should the individuals lose their usefulness, the courting stops abruptly)
8. It is absolutely crucial to the method that the revolutionaries are homogeneous – having different revolutionary groups genuinely represented in the leadership of the front would deprive the main revolutionary party of its hegemony over the movement, lead to arguments over tactics, and diminish the opportunities for revolutionaries to hegemonise the people who join the front
9. It is also crucial to the method that the front brings together more left-wing groups with more right-wing individuals (never groups or parties); an alliance of a revolutionary party and a reformist party would be dominated by the latter, depriving the main revolutionary party of its hegemony over the movement
10. This is a plan for rapid movement when times are propitious. There is no plan B to deal with (for example) if capitalism has no weak spot at a particular time or if the revolutjonary party (for any reason) has difficulty in finding enough allies or members to sustain a front.

I have not drawn up this list maliciously: everyone who was there and is still capable of looking back at the period honestly will admit that the first incarnation of Respect was wrecked by mistakes by each of its key leaders, a declining window of opportunity as the anti-war movement (its motive force) declined, political differences between its constituents (“a united front of a special kind”), and the inability of John and Lindsey’s method to deal with periods of retreat.

If you take just the last sentence of number 7 in the list above; this actually happened. When you read George Galloway’s description of the last days of Respect (‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/pages/politics/GallowayRespect.html) some of the most moving passages are those where he describes the seemingly-inexplicable shift in John and Lindsey’s behaviour, from wooing him and other leaders of Respect, to ignoring them. He focussed on the treatment of Salma Yacoob:

“There is a custom of anathematisation in the organisation which is deeply unhealthy and has been the ruin of many a left-wing group before us. This began with Salma Yaqoob, once one of our star turns, promoted on virtually every platform, and who is responsible for some of the greatest election victories (and near misses) during our era. “

“Now she has been airbrushed from our history at just the time when she is becoming a regular feature on the national media and her impact on the politics of Britain’s second city has never been higher. “

“There appears to be no plan to rescue her from this perdition, indeed every sign that her internal exile is a fixture. This is intolerable and must end now. Whatever personal differences may exist between leading members the rest of us cannot allow Respect to be hobbled in this way. We are not over-endowed with national figures. “

The key text explaining the Rees-German method is a small book by John Rees, ‘Strategy and Tactics: How the left can organise to transform society’ (available for only £4 from Amazon and from the Counterfire website). Rees’ Little White Book explains how with proper leadership a political party can use the movement to start a revolution. It distils the StW experience into various lessons, which he suggests can be applied generally. A surprisingly large number of the lessons set out at 1-10 above (but admittedly not all of them) find their way into Rees’ book.

Just to take number 4 in my list above, the deliberate destruction of the human personnel that form the rank and file of the revolutionary party. Rees writes:

“The cadre of the organisation gives it stability, durability, and effectiveness in the struggle. But this can also give rise to problems especially when the conditions of struggle change quickly”.

There is then a quote from Trotsky before Rees continues:

“This highlights an important point: cadre only remain cadre if they continue to relate correctly to the turning points in the struggle. If they do not, in spite of their accumulated knowledge and experience, they turn from an asset into a liability.”

After another Trotsky quote he continues:

“Especially at such times, new members of the organisation may much more accurately understand what it necessary for the party to act effectively.”

I focus on these examples, because common to them is an idea that at the heart of revolutionary politics is a “churn”, under which the leadership constantly appoints new people to work with it, as allies in the united front, and as followers in the party. It is far from pleasant to be on the receiving end of the purges.

A few further problems occur to me:

This method I have just described is expressly very “Leninist” in that strange Zinovievite way that the British left does. The last two sentences of John’s pamphlet are a quote from Lukacs writing in defence of Leninism: “Leninism represents a hithero unprecedented degree of concrete, unschematic, unmechanistic, purely praxis-oriented thought. To preserve this is the task of the Leninist.”

This notion of defending Leninism from history, from the present, from all of us outside the leadership who risk corrupting it, is made doubly odd by the seemingly very open public, democratic politics of CoR / CF, which constantly emphasises new, participatory media-friendly ways of doing things. Like in all capitalist advertising; you are invited to “see” one thing; what you get is something else.

This kind of top-down, personalised leadership requires a very high degree of trust between the leadership of the party and both its allies in the movement and its followers in the organisation. Top-down leadership of the left can just about work when the person who asks for your loyalty is someone with a very high degree of personal incorruptibility, or someone who has made a political, theoretical or practical contribution which earns your trust. Without that trust, both the party and the front are constantly no more than a mistake away from disaster.

I haven’t pointed out here how these politics will shape the People’s Assembly on the day, beyond observing that the speeches will be in succession, and that their content will significantly overlap. But it seems safe to me to predict that every effort will be made to repeat certain core messages – in terms of particular, pre-sanctioned activities, which will be repeatedly plugged from the top table. This is what happened in StW, and, going back to those CoR minutes, you can seem the same mentality (once memorably satirised by the anarchists as “Monopolise Resistance”). This contribution, for example, gave me a pre-emptive chill:

“There was an appeal for people not to organise alternatives, but to organise for the PAAA to be inclusive, reflecting the diversity of the movement.”

I know what this means in practice: finding a line of least resistance, which is acceptable to the least dynamic within an alliance, whoever that may be, and closing down anything else with a spark of originality about it.

In this article, I am not going to say very much about which forces within the unions CoR plans to work with. Thinking away from CoR for a moment, I spent Saturday at a meeting of the Blacklist Support Group (BSG), where the word “rank and file” was used repeatedly, and in a way that chimed with the group’s authentic politics. There were two General Secretaries at the BSG, but they were repeatedly challenged and had at times to fight for their audience. They had to go to the rank and file, for fear of being isolated. There was nothing cosy about the BSG meeting; the atmosphere was very different from the top-table love-in I expect of PA II.

Now if you look carefully, you will find plenty of people today in CoR, CF, StW etc who will tell you that John and Lindsey have changed, that despite the similarities between the present method of organising (PA II) and things that were done 10 years ago (PA I) all is much better beneath the surface. I am hearing this not just from the usual faces, but from people whose good judgment I trust. My own party, the SWP, plans to support the People’s Assembly, and I am not disagreeing. If people are to join – it is a process – they should join, but with their eyes open.

What I am really criticising here is a method, a way of doing politics. Yes, I have focussed on one or two individuals, but no-one who is active on the left and has been active for several years, should be under any illusions that my applies only to Counterfire, or John or Lindsey, or the People’s Assembly.

The left is awash with acronyms; far too few of them are based on a principled, active unity. Far too often, they are supposed to fill a need where there is no need at all. This is a self-criticism.

How many national “Stop the Cuts” movements do we have now anyway: PA, CoR, UtR, NSSN, do Right to Work or the People’s Charter still exist? How has the left been strengthened as we have “grown” from 2 to 3, 4 or 5 of them? Do any of them work to strengthen the self-activity of the majority of people?

My real criticism is of the “front” method; and of the assumptions behind it. The revival of the left on a sustainable basis will depend on working out which – if any – of those 10 dubious assumptions I set out above are worth retaining.

(Originally published, with thread, here).

The missing letter

“We have read with mounting horror the press coverage of the crisis in the SWP, including the coverage in your newspaper. It has been the most painful reading for us because while we could quibble about this or that detail, we know that your essential criticisms are true. Sometimes in life, you can do no better than to hold up your hands and apologise. This is one of those occasions.”

“It is true that several women have forward with complaints of rape or sexual harassment by leading members of our party, and that we investigated them, and it is true that afterwards, when they describe their experiences, the complainants said they felt they had been let down badly. We did not adopt those procedures with the intention of covering up sexual abuse, but it has since become obvious, as we have listened to the criticisms of our disputes procedures, that our procedures were simply and utterly unfit for the tasks we gave them.”

“There has been an intense period of discussion within our party about what we should do. For a long time, we thought that if we tried hard enough to pretend that there was no problem, it would go away. It has not. We now realise that this stain will not be removed unless the party undergoes a serious, and systematic, period of reform. For this reason we have decided to:”

“Apologise to the women who put in complaints. We have written to all of them inviting them to resubmit their complaints to a fresh investigation. We have approached individuals outside the SWP, from the women’s movement, the trade unions, and others with practical expertise in investigating serious sexual complaints. I am proud to say that nine independent figures, of high authority within the movement, have agreed to participate in a fresh panel of inquiry. Its sole remit will be to establish whether there was conduct inappropriate of a socialist party. If the panel finds that there was misconduct, we will accept that decision. I am glad to be able to confirm that on receiving guarantees as to the independent of this process, the principal complainants have all agreed to come forward as witness to it.”

“Suspend from membership of the party all individuals subject to serious, sexual complaints. We are not prejudging the outcome of the new investigation, but we recognise that there is no confidence in our old procedures, and it is not appropriate for a situation to continue where those accused of serious misconduct can use their positions within the organisation to lobby for their own positions.”

“Release those members of the organisation from full-time roles who have been exhausted by the experience of defending the indefensible.”

“Elect a new Central Committee, Disputes Committee and National Committee. They will be individually elected by a secret, postal ballot of all members.”

“Begin a discussion within and outside the organisation as to what it was about our procedures that enabled us to continue on such a destructive path for so long. We have begun discussions with individuals in the movement (Liz Davies, Mike Marqusee, Kevin Ovenden, Rob Hoveman, Nick Wrack and Salma Yacoob) who were formerly members of the organisation or our close allies, and whose treatment we now acknowledge echoes our treatment of the recent complainants. We will restore to full membership the “Facebook Four” and anyone who has left the Socialist Workers Party in the past 12 months but now wishes to rejoin.”

“Begin a second discussion within and outside the organisation as to how we can learn from the contemporary women’s movements. It has become obvious in recent weeks that when we refer to the party’s history of fighting women’s oppression, the proudest moments we can point to now all belong to the relatively distant past. For ten years and more, our best activity has been limited to responding positively to initiatives begun by others. We will be co-odinating open, public discussions with activists from SlutWalk, the F Word, Abortion Rights UK, the women’s organisations of the trade union and student movements, to establish bases for joint work with these campaigns on a far greater scale than we have done.”

“Make the party transparent by publishing in future a public note of all meetings of all our elected committees, including our National Committee and Central Committee. The transcripts of the proceedings of our old Disputes Committee will be published, as will transcripts of the independent panel of inquiry.”

“Finally, I am grateful to you newspaper for its giving us the space to put our version of events. One of the obstacles which the far left has to surmount is the common belief that socialists have no interest in engaging with the millions of people who share some of our beliefs but are outside our ranks. I hope your readers can now see for themselves that this is untrue. We want a dialogue with people who are not our members. We are champions of democracy, openness and honesty. We do not merely say that these are our politics, we try to live them in everything we do. Where we fail to match the standards we have set ourselves, we are confident enough in ourselves to admit that we were wrong. Thanks you for giving us a chance to put our own house in order.”

(Originally published, with thread, here).