Tuesday 14 May 2013

A letter to those who are passionate


 This is a guest post by Senex

In so many ways you are right. Things are far worse than they were in March. Habits of lying, which were once occasional, have become general. “Delta has been removed from the payroll”. No he hasn’t; he works full-time in a job funded, controlled, and set up for him by our leadership. “A commission is investigating the disputes procedures.” A commission has indeed been chosen, but every one of its members had signed the CC statement. Not one of them believed in January that our disputes procedures required reform. Why should we expect them in May or July to do anything other than provide the old system with their fresh support?

The bullying has been every bit as bad as it ever was. Dissident comrades have been spat at in pubs by members of the party loyal to the CC. Other dissidents, waiting for the CC to decide their complaints against loyalists who treated them abysmally during the recent faction fight, might as well wait till hell itself freezes over. “An amnesty has been declared; the DC will not investigate any complaints against any comrades subject to complaints between the two conferences.” But there is an exception to the general amnesty: if the accusation is that you spoke against the leadership, then you should expect disciplinary action to be taken. For some, it has already been taken. This supposed amnesty turns out to be for one side only.

When it comes to the urgent crises of the present, the rise of an old racism in new clothes, the party’s publications have nothing to say. There is a reason for the paper’s vacuity; its sole focus is on preparing an ageing, narrow cadre for the next stage of their faction fight against us. This is the revolution comrades; composite 1 rather than composite 2, public sector strikes without any ideas as to how they might be different from the last, unsuccessful round of public sector strikes, and in the faint, long-distant future (whisper it quietly), the possibility that we rather than the Socialist Party might provide the next General Secretary of one of the teaching unions.

The SWP represents a small packet of historical potential, the genius of a few insights, the memory of some extraordinary people. Its credit is almost exhausted. Give it a few more months like the last two and the residue will be gone. “The party crisis is silent”, a supporter of the leadership announces. Another comrade, of five decades standing, whispers at the back of the room: “it is the silence of the grave.”

You are right to be passionate. And yet ... history is full of examples of people who by acting too soon jeopardised the very campaigns which meant the most to them. We think of Rosa Luxemburg as a lifelong champion of spontaneous action. Her last, fatal campaign was a failed attempt to stop her young comrades launching an insurrection too soon. Wouldn’t Trotsky have done better to put off his plans for military conscription, tested them on a few friends, rather than rush to publishing a programme which for a decade afterwards the Stalinists were able to throw back at him: “you’re against military labour discipline? It was your idea!” There is of course no need to be grandiose; we do not have 150 Trotskys, nor 100 Luxemburgs (and nor are they a disciplined army of 500 Lenins). Any activist after more than a few months’ campaigning will have seen for themselves the difference between an idea that was right but the timing was wrong, and one whose moment had come.

One vice of the opposition, from its inception, has been our shared failure to address the consequences of the difference between its student members and those who work. The former inhabit a different universe, politics happens more quickly. Other people’s mistakes haunt you faster. The need to justify your positions is more urgent. If what you say in one part of your activity is demonstrably contradicted by your activity in the rest of your life, you have an audience. At meetings, or when you sell the paper, people know. They point out the contradiction to you.

For comrades who work, it is different. A few years activism in your union and you will have built up a certain credit. The legacy of what you’ve got right previously protects you against other people’s errors. You may absolutely well know that this has been the biggest political crisis of your entire life, and the leadership has been unequivocally on the wrong side. The thought must be there; if they could get something this simple, so badly wrong, how could you trust them not to be this bad again in any other crisis? But one moment’s conviction leads inexorably to a second of caution. The temptation is always to withdraw back to what you know best.

Student timescales encourage talk of resolving a crisis before the autumn; few people in work face the same urgency. The pressure will be to delay as long as is possible. You have to recall what ten years of crisis leadership has done to the age-profile of the organisation: after the students, the next silvers of comrades are in their early 30s, and then around 40. The real numbers of SWP members do not kick in until you get to the 1980s generation in their early 50s. People who have been in an organisation for almost all their adult lives will not rush to leave.

Even on the campuses, we should not exaggerate the difficulty of winning new members to “a reform SWP” perspective. The votes at NUS conference, where less than one in 30 delegates were members of the SWP (i.e. the votes were decided not by the party, but by our potential audience) showed clearly that people outside our ranks understand the moral difference between the comrades who fought against the leadership, and those who sided with oppression: 189 votes for a fighter, and 15 votes for the stooge. On paper, they were both members of the same organisation. Outside the party’s ranks, everyone could see the difference.

A party of 200 or 300 students would be infinitely more fragile that a group of 100 workers. The best student networks are based on intense circles of friendship; the end of the three years of a degree course breaks this up. The best activists, usually in the second or final year of their studies, have by definition just 8 or 20 months of university life left. Countless generations of radical students have been lost to the movement not through a lack of will, but because of the extraordinary discipline that is needed to adjust from the relatively-political atmosphere on campus, to the depoliticised atmosphere in most workplaces. And that is before you think how difficult it has become for any ex-student to find a job anymore which has a recognised union, and any sort of political atmosphere, even a diminished one.

This is why the brief period, from October to January, is so significant. In our strange, indefensible calendar of 3 months of relative democracy and 9 months of silence, it is the only occasion when the majority of comrades are confronted with the extraordinary gap there is between how we think about our politics, and how our politics looks to everyone in our audience. The black mirror of the internet gives a distorting image, but it is nevertheless a mirror. It shows us something of how other people see us. Other people know that this is our calendar; that everything builds up to a conference where the old leadership will either be replaced in its entirety, or it will not, and (if not) the party’s last chance of renewal will be gone.

There is a logic to what I am saying; that people will have to start preparing now for the battles in the autumn. We should not be planning on the basis of “set piece” articles published in waves to coincide with the internal bulletins. We need to duplicate rather the internal culture of last year, in which a very large number of people were writing, using every outlet available to them. There would be good reasons to be setting aside now articles, arguments, ideas for publication in the autumn. There are a range of positions where the party’s thinking has become outdated: on class, on oppression, on democracy, on the nature of neo-liberalism… We need to show the practicality of next January’s central argument: that the present leadership is running the organisation into the ground but that there is an alternative leadership in waiting and that the narrow leadership faction does not know best. It will not be easy, the maths make victory almost impossible. Without some significant movement of the middle ground, which is so unlikely as to be almost impossible, our best chance is very heavy defeat. And yet what have socialists ever done in circumstances of isolation but to argue and to fight? We plan to defeat capitalism don’t we: and in that battle, what forces can we presently call on?

In the branches, when comrades who identify with the leadership try to pick on you; respond with politics. “We need a Leninist party”. Aye, but I am a Cliffite, and I remember how much he wrote about Lenin and how little about Leninism. “There are five big meetings coming up over the summer, we need to build them.” Good, and when we have built them what, really, do we will hope they will produce? “The district organiser has appointed a branch committee, and the branch committee has decided what tasks you are required to carry out.” Yes, but I believe in this revolutionary idea, you may have heard of it, it is called socialism from below. 

Argue for different meeting titles. Argue for a wider set of speakers. Make the first half of the meetings longer, and force the old guard for the first time in decades to read: Duncan Hallas, Paul Foot, Dave Widgery… Tell them what you have been reading, and how much livelier it is than the ideas now in SW.

We need to cohere as many people as possible. “It is so difficult”, comrades say, “there are barely a couple of hundred of us left. Yes, but 200 people in an organisation of 2000 is a serious number. Get to January, fight, and if we lose, we leave. To be 200 people then, in a population of 60 million.  That is isolation.

It is May now. Those outside are no longer watching us so closely. And they matter more than we do. The goal is not to reunite the fragments of the Socialist Workers Party. The goal is not to make a party hospitable enough for the ISO to be able to resume fraternal greetings. The goal is not to get “one over” our former comrades in the IS Network. The goal is a mass party, which a decent leavening of the best comrades carrying into that organisation something of the IS tradition. The large majority of the potential members of the party are neither in the SWP right now, nor in any other organisation. And yet, all the time, they are watching us.

How could we explain to anyone we might hope to rally to our banner: “in March 2012, the party made a decision that was indefensible.” “Ok, why, then did you leave months later? If it was right to stay in March but wrong in the summer, what had changed in the interim?” “Well, nothing had changed, but …” There couldn’t be an explanation, or no good one that I can think of. “I did not want to stay to fight it out one last time, because I was not finding the party hospitable.” Of course it’s not. There was a faction fight; and, we lost. More is to play for than our personal comfort. What is at stake is whether any fragment of the present, decaying SWP will have the moral authority to play any part in the left realignments of the future. I still believe that there is enough good left in the party so that we deserve to be heard, but we must earn the right to speak. And that means staying a little longer...

Senex

48 comments:

  1. This article is a complete waste of space, the "leadership in waiting" was precisely the problem with the IDOOP faction. These people did not lead, the only thing they did was sabotage the people who were willing to lead. Both the Loyalists and the alleged opposition consists of middle-aged boy wonders who will not speak to anyone younger than them on an equal basis: arrogant through and through.

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    1. Roobin - appreciate why you feel this way.
      A post in the near future will be going up explaining the blog editor's situation and expanding on why we have done this but will just say that the 'opposition' that remain in the SWP aren't homogeneous.

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  3. Get out comrades, there's nothing to fight for.

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  4. Comrades or 'former comrades', if 200 in a population of 60 million is isolated then 200 in a party of only 2000 (and 2000 members is at a push)is surely just as isolated? Particularly when said 2000 have gone along with the cover up of a rape case and resulting revisionism and denial. Seems like a dig at the IS Network to justify your staying in the organisation rather than a serious grappling with the actual numbers you have to hand or why comrades left the organisation.

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  5. what is the point of a 'leninism' where it takes years to put even glaringly obvious mistakes right?

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  6. "earn the right to speak"...where? from whom does this moral authority have to be earned? And at what price to your own: inside the class itself?

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  7. Wow . The ISN lot are bitter at their ex-faction chums , aren't they?

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  8. I think the main bit that rankles is the phrase "former comrades". However, the word "comrade" is interchangeable with "SWP member" in Swuppie speak. A sectarian habit of phrase, but not always intentionally so, by a long way.

    I find the idea of there being a (readymade?) "leadership in waiting" slightly disconcerting as it appears to continue the elitist, cliquish "big name" notion of leadership that's often present in the SWP, and which is part of the problem, not the solution. However, this mayjust be an unfortunate turn of phrase on the author's part, and the intention may be a more nebulous "party of leaders" notion of leadership.

    On the whole while there is plenty to disagree with (actually a good thing in many respects), it's extremely heartening that dissent is once again openly being expressed by SWP *comrades*. Breaking party discipline is thoroughly bolshevik and these comrades have my solidarity, even if we disagree on whether indeed the party is retrievable at this late stage.

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  9. Oh, and having been expelled for a facebook chat and not receiving the immediate and full solidarity of many in idoop especially the "leadership", Roobin has every right to be bitter.

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  10. OMG Roobin is Clare Solomon?

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  11. not an SWP member but I just dont get the idea that there was a cover up, I and many others heard about all of this because there was an internal investigation, the results of which were reported to 500 people and reported in the press, not much of a cover up!

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    1. You do realise much of the dissent and disgust being expressed is precisely about the corrupt and abusive nature of the so called "internal investigation" and "report to 500 people".

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    2. Err the reporting of it 'to 500 people' doesn't mean there wasn't a cover up. There was a cover up for Saville which was reported by the same people that covered it up. Get a grip!

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    3. The only reason the 500 received a full(ish)report was the intervention of a 30 people who wanted to form a faction over the issue of mistakes made in the process. They refused the faction(!) but then allowed the group to organise speakers for the report back at conference. However, Comrade W was not allowed to speak and neither was a comrade who supported Cde W throughout the whole process. And even then, details have failed to emarge around the original allegations by Cde W and the evidence presented to the DC and CC back in 2010-11. There also remain serious questions around why DC members changed their votes subsequent to the hearing last year.

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  12. I'm surprised at the bitterness comrades, it doesn't become you.

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  13. The SWP's reputation is completely in tatters. Hundreds have left. The majority remaining are 'loyalists' who have shown some very nasty sides to their character and politics over these past few months: bullying, sexism, rape apologism and the some of the most shameless and/or delusional smear-jobs and straw-manning ever. There is no way for the SWP to recover from any of this.

    Yes, those within the party that are 'oppositionists' will not be held as responsible for the crimes of the CC and its supporters, but the point is that there are too few of these comrades remaining. The fight within the party is lost, and there is nothing to suggest otherwise.

    The IS tradition does not start and end with the SWP and it is clearly time to move on. The CC will not be toppled (I suspect they have plenty of reasons to want to hold on for dear life - when a leadership of many decades standing are not accountable and do not operate in an open and transparent way, you can bet your life that the skeletons in closets will have piled up. A couple have toppled out in recent months, but who honestly believes there are not many more? No way are they handing the reigns over any time soon.)

    Leave them to it comrades - there is a world to fight for.

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  14. Your rallying cry rings deathly. Internationally the SWP is a busted flush. Marxism Festival is dead in the water. Callinicos is black-listed.

    The only justification you have to stay now is because the SWP is marginally larger then any other organisation and has maintained certain 'assets'. You have reduced your political commitment to allegiance with the owners of a bank account. The 1800 have shown very clearly they will not budge, and they have destroyed the name of the SWP, meanwhile the IDOOP leadership handled the crisis meekly when we most needed a tough line.

    The ISN have begun to rebuild the IS from below, and yet you continue to try and recruit to the drones. You are wasting your own time, you are wasting the time of those you recruit and you are sabotaging any movement you build from its foundations up. Time to move on comrades, you are talented militants, don't waste it!

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  15. It's pretty simple:

    If anyone shows up with SWP kit to a leftwing event, I'll heckle. (And I'm not alone.)

    At this point I (as someone who's been a lot more patient than most) really don't care about your personal attitudes. You're part of a democratic centralist outfit that employs 'Comrade Delta'. You are part of the problem, you are (in some level) OK with rape apologism. You are tolerant of your name being on their roles, and distribute their material. You are a knowing member of a group which has institutionalised rape culture.

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    1. What a great way to push forward the case for left wing politics! I'm in as much disagreement with the CC as you but heckling them is just childish sectarianism of the worst kind, far beyond the horrendous sectarianism of the SWP.

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    2. Rape apologists don't belong on the left.

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  16. Great! An ISN blog purporting to represent 200 in the SWP. Just what the doctor ordered.

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  17. I'm a bit disheartened by some comments from ISN comrades. We really *are* comrades and let's not allow any of the bullshit and tensions of the situation to make us forget that.

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  18. To the comrades in the SWP who are prepared to fight on, I say go for it, there is plenty worth salvaging. There is plenty to change too, yes Delta has to to go! Yes, its reputation has to be rebuilt, and it can be. Yes, it will be hard but anything worth while is hard, but while there is glee at the troubles in the UK, other IST affliates are working in harder conditions. That is what you are fighting for not just the SWP but the IST. Could the RS survive without the SWP?
    As for the ISN, why the bitterness you choose to leave, Shawki held your decision as one of world wide importance, didn't he? Live up to it, leave this fight and build your group.

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  19. I too am disappointed with the tone of some of the comments from the ISN. Whatever the disagreements, this blog proves there is life left in the SWP. I would like to have arguments with those behind involved, but they should be constructive arguments about strategy and tactics. An organisation like the SWP does not magically split into two parts, with the real Marxists on one side and the shitheads on the other - it's a long process, and if we are to wring anything useful out of it, that will require exercising patience towards those who have been slower to shift. I think ISN members would be well advised to remember that, inevitably, they themselves will have at least *some* history of keeping quiet about the SWP's democratic deficit. Dare I say it, I expect that some in the ISN at some time even had illusions that the SWP could be changed from within through the formation of canny alliances of interested parties. It is important to keep a sense of proportion, to keep lines of communication open, and to maintain comradely relations in a difficult situation.

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  20. OK, I'm going to be a bit nicer. I think this blog is important, and its stated mission - to discuss those things that became so glaring during the faction fight - is laudable. I will be interested to see what it has to say.

    I think the tone of the IS Network contributions above should be read as a response to the formulations in this article in particular, some of which are reminiscent of the arguments deployed against various factional formations that became IS Network - that it was "impatient", even "tactically inept". The student/worker distinction and familiar comparison to German ultra-lefts made in this piece are hard to read charitably.

    On strategy, then, I think a "long battle" perspective is certainly better than doing nothing. However, as you know, we came to the conclusion that "open work" will be much more fruitful, by building something outside the SWP and engaging with the rest of the left - in short, there is *much* more to engage with outside the silo walls of the SWP than inside them. The risk, always, of "staying a little longer" is that it's an argument you can keep making, year after year...

    But I am not here to lecture you on strategy, which is obviously our point of sharpest disagreement. On the actual politics, we will find ourselves closer together.

    Tom Walker

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  21. As someone still in the party but planning to leave I disagree with this articles call to stay.

    Lets not forget what our aim is as Leninists and revolutionaries. It's to build a mass workers party that can draw in the best newly radicalised militants. The potential for the SWP to become a mass party is now totally redundant. How can we expect to be the 'vanguard' of the working class when we haven't had a serious analysis of the shape of the working class today? Whats more, its not like we can force this debate and self criticise (look at the 'debates' in the ISJ, fucking joke). This failure to understand the nature of the working class in 2013 has manifested itself two fold:

    1) The complete absence of an industrial cadre that goes beyond the relatively privileged layer of public sector workers that currently make up our 'trade union comrades', where are the call centre workers? where are the supermarket workers? where are the young workers? They're not in our party thats for sure, and they're not going to be for reason two

    2) The inability to conceive of an industrial policy that looks beyond the established unions, of course we should still intervene in these unions, but when the vast majority of the class are not unionised at all then an industrial policy has to include how we can engage with non unionised workers in new industries in the service sector. This massively important issue has never been raised once in any SWP outlet ever. The consequence is that in the US McDonalds workers are going on strike whereas in the UK we're just worried whether we can get one or two comrades on the UNISON NEC which'll still leave the left in a minority anyway.

    The SWP is a dead project because its politics are stale and there's no possibility to revitalise them through discussion and debate, just look at how those of us (me included of course) are cowering behind anon usernames. The SWP does plenty of practice which we should all strive to, but that only means something with the right theory which the SWP isn't providing nor allowing the space for one to formulate. Our alleigience has to be to the Marxist and leninist method, not the SWP apparatus.

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    1. this should be a separate piece on this blog, please expand slightly and put it up

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    2. Baaria13, it's good that you condescend to allow us to intervene in established unions,though I feel that your picture of the "relatively privileged" public sector workers, which I have seen echoed on other opposition blogs from comrades both inside and outside the party, fits better with the Tory/UKIP caricature of the feather-bedded public sector worker with a gold-plated pension than it does with the reality of life for the overworked nurse or healthcare assistant and the target-battered teacher. It may have escaped your notice that our public services are under attack as never before from this government, facing massive cuts and galloping privatisation. Fighting to defend the jobs, working conditions and pensions of public service workers as well as the services we all rely on is perfectly legitimate and necessary. Teachers have been on strike in Chicago, in Denmark, in Greece and some (I wish it were all) here as well. Union density in the public services is higher than in the private sector, though the fastest growing area of unionisation is banking. Where unions take action, they grow and young workers join. that's another good argument for building where we have members.

      However, it's a downright lie to suggest that the Party's industrial strategy is confined to worrying about whether we can get comrades onto the UNISON NEC (though it might make a difference to the potential for action in the NHS if we did and stop the attacks on union militants by the officials). Are you unaware of comrades' involvement in the anti-blacklisting campaign? In the campaigns for contract cleaners on university campuses in London and the 33 sacked London Underground cleaners? Were you too busy finding fault to be notice the campaign around the many and varied workplaces, including bus garages, hospitals, transport depots and IT centres where Unite members work in support of Jerry Hicks' election campaign? How do you imagine he won 80,000 votes? Once the decision to support him was taken at Conference, Unite members got behind it, whether they had voted for it or not (that's Democratic Centralism) and worked hard supported by the Industrial Department and other comrades. This work is being followed up.

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    3. My reply to Baaria 13 continued: You say we ignore the shape of the working class today. I'm sorry, we've had branch meetings to discuss it. There were articles in the IB. Your questions could be asked in your branch, you could write a letter to Socialist Worker where, incidentally, if you weren't too busy criticising it to read it, you could have learned about the Sparks' campaign, the anti-blacklisting pickets etc.

      In our branch, though they don't often come to meetings,we have nine bus drivers - a result of regular sales and interventions at local bus garages. We have two call centre workers one tried to organise a union, with some success, but lost his job, the other used to sell three papers at work regularly, but has had his hours cut and his shift changed.

      Organising in non-union workplaces is not easy. It's easier to organise from inside than from outside in any workplace, though that shouldn't stop us trying. Some of our unemployed and retired members are joining Unite Community which, among other things, tries to organise non-unionised workplaces. It is simply not true that this question "has never been raised once in any SWP outlet ever". Why don't you go to your branch,stop "cowering behind an anon username" and propose trying to organise a local supermarket (some do actually have unions, though usually sweetheart ones) or call centre. One comrade in our branch (a retired RMT member) is helping workers at the ASDA near her home to organise. She talks to them in the place where they go to smoke. Give it a try or think up some other way. Maybe get a letter from your Trades Council, go to Tesco or Sainsbury and ask for the Union rep.

      I'm sure you'd get a welcome if you went to your branch with a positive suggestion for organising young workers, but not if you go saying "We should stop bothering about those wealthy teachers, nurses and council clerical workers and only concentrate on young supermarket workers". We have to organise where we are, increase our strength where we have already some then extend our influence wherever we can.

      Genuine criticism, discussion and debate is welcome and necessary, but it needs ot be based on sound information.

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    4. 1) First I'd like to clarify that I'm not saying teachers etc. are 'middle class' or whatever, they're workers too and I absolutely recognise that. What I'm referring to is the layer of public sector workers that have managed to maintain job security, and higher rates of pay and pension relative to other less skilled workers that have faced casualisation or outsourcing i.e. its fair to say that at a university we're more likely to have members among academic staff rather than the non academic staff at a university (cleaners etc.). Theres nothing wrong with having that milieu of workers in the party, just when they make up the dominant section of the partys industrial cadre that becomes a problem.

      On non public sector interventions (my jibe about UNISON NEC aside) e.g. sparks dispute or bus workers strikes, blacklisting etc. It has to be recognised that those sets of disputes were excellent but among a group of workers that were already unionised and have a militant, radicalised minority (especially the sparks where a number of left parties were represented among the workers) that pushed forward that struggle i.e. this isn't new ground, we were just intervening in areas we already had a base in, not that thats wrong and what we did was great. But it can't be held up as a dynamic industrial policy when it doesnt reach out to those we’ve never reached out to before.

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    5. Reply to Sarah Cox continued: My main gripe is that we've clearly failed to engage with workers in the new indutries (service sector etc.), you may have individual stories of call centre workers that have joined but there's no evidence that we've (or anyone else) have managed to build in a big way from workers in such industries. I'm sure you don't deny that the bulk of our industrial cadre are older members, we simply do not have a significant amount of young workers in the party, the problem with this is that the SWP will become more and more obsolete if we fail to reflect the composition of the working class in ‘the real world’.
      Discussions in the SWP about the shape of the working class are massively superficial, mainly consist of saying how teachers or other professions that were previously seen as ‘middle class’ are now just the same as other workers (see Charlie Kimbers ‘Struggle for Workers Power’ pamphlet). That’s just not enough, if we did have a real analysis of the changing nature of the working class maybe we’d be asking questions around why the composition of the party doesn’t reflect the new realities of class the 21st century. There’s also a real lack of analysis of new class movements, where is the anaylisis in SW over the pop up union at sussex? Where is the analysis over justifications for the breakaway union in the Marikana dispute? Where is the analysis over the fast food workers strike in the US – which would allow us to think how we can replicate in the UK. New and exciting movements are happening in the class, the SWP isn’t keeping up with them.

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  22. "[Delta] works full-time in a job funded, controlled, and set up for him by our leadership".

    More details on this, please! What job?

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    1. Yes , what job ? First I've heard of it .

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  23. For 'love music, hate racism' essentially controlled by the swp. funded by the unions from their connections to uaf/swp

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    1. Well it's a matter of opinion (or a sectarian slur , take your pick) whether lmhr is "controlled" by the swp . And the job (if there is one ) is you say funded by the trade unions not the swp .
      You must try harder than that .

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    2. Who decides who works for LMHR?

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    3. The SWP...the unions might donate money and it might be a united front but it has always been the SWP who decides the full timers for UAF and LMHR.

      He's also still been writing un-named articles for Socialist Worker and had an expenses paid trip to Greece after January conference. Go figure.

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    4. Someone who multiple people have accused of raping them is still a professional political organiser.

      That is fucked up, whatever the particulars.

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    6. You know what happenned , do you ? Cause I don't . Enlighten us.

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    7. "Sectarian slur" to say that LMHR is controlled by the SWP or just a matter of fact? All three company officers are leading SWP members (Martin Smith, Simon Assaf and Stuart Curtlett - notice anything about this list?) and the registered office is SWP HQ in Vauxhall. Go to CompanyCheck.co.uk and search LMHR Ltd. This is all in the public domain - no conspiracies necessary.

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  24. It almost seems like Delta has said 'if I go down, I take you all with me'. Hard to explain any of this otherwise.

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  25. Martin still uses a UAF email address on Twitter .is he an employee or just living on their name .

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  26. I too am disappointed by the tone of some of my comrades in the ISN - I understand the anger, but it is a miscalculation and at the moment we need cool heads. It is great to see the appearance of this blog. The differences we have can be explored down the line. Right now we need to demonstrate real solidarity. What we need most is a process of regroupment.
    This was never going to explode in a single mass exodus. Much more likely has been a series of waves with members of the SWP leaving at different points. Partly, because consciousness develops at different rates, and partly because some good comrades will fight to the final moment to win every possible member worth saving. Good luck, just bring as many as possible to the party.

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    1. To be fair, the first comrade has every right to be bitter. Many of the people still in the SWP did not show the expelled comrades real solidarity when it didn't suit them tactically, e.g. voting against fighting their expulsion at the first faction meeting. But hey ho, good luck comrades!

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  27. RE: Rosa Luxemburg. I'm not sure if this comparison really helps. In any case, RL's final 'campaign' was not to stop her young comrade's attempted insurrection, but to support it once it had started. 'Although she had opposed any attempt at a rising, she was adamant that once it was under way there was no choice but to carry it forward energetically'.

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