Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category
Iron Curtain. Anne Applebaum. Review and a Note on Totalitarianism.
Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer Recht!
Und, Genossen, es bleibe dabei;
Denn wer kämpft für das Recht,
Der hat immer recht.
Gegen Lüge und Ausbeuterei.
Wer das Leben beleidigt,
Ist dumm oder schlecht.
Wer die Menschheit verteidigt,
Hat immer recht.
So, aus Leninschem Geist,
Wächst, von Stalin geschweißt,
Die Partei – die Partei – die Partei.
Oh The Party, The Party is always right
And comrade, may it ever be so;
For who fights for the right
He is always right
Against lies and exploitation
[women] Whoever insults life
is stupid or bad
Whoever defends humanity
Is always right
Grown from the spirit of Lenin
Welded by Stalin
The party – the party – the party.
Das Lied der Partei.
Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe. 1944 – 1956. Anne Applebaum. Allen Lane 2012.
A Note on Totalitarianism.
Iron Curtain is an important and deeply researched study of Eastern European Communist states. It begins with their blood-stained birth, illustrates their brightest hopes, and deepest fears, it travels from the sweated labour that built Socialist Cities, to the spying and the stridency of everyday life. Anne Applebaum’s book is equally an investigation into regimes that aspired to “total control” and how they used their power to achieve this.
Anne Applebaum is, as Duncan Bowie observes (Chartist March/April 2013) highly “partisan”. She is married to the centre-right Polish foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski. She is, nobody will be surprised to hear, far from neutral about assessing the damage done in the name of Communism.
It would be derisory, and irrelevant, to make her parti pris stand against the mass of historical detail, mastery of several of the countries’ languages, and weighed judgements that Iron Curtain offers.
Why? The answer comes in the opening pages. The first chapters of Iron Curtain Applebaum overwhelm the reader with the terror brought in the wake of the Second World War. Axis atrocities are laid out in full and the Shoah is never far away from the narrative. Readers of Timothy Synders’ Bloodlands will be acquainted with the terrible reality of destruction on the Eastern Frontiers. But it is other events that stay in the mind the undoubted heroism of the Red Army in fighting its way to Berlin and defeating Nazism, was accompanied by its own brutality against civilians and, in particular, mass rape. The Red Army re-opened camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald almost as soon as they closed them, to house their own undesirables.
The cruelty, oppression, and ethnic cleansing (notably of those of German origin, or even, in Hungary’s case, of those with Teutonic names of other ethnicities) that followed in the first years after the war, principally, East Germany, Poland and Hungary are memorably described. Whole populations of Poles, Rutheniums, Hungarians, were summarily ‘re-allocated’ to new territories.
During the late 1940s Communists consolidated their rule. At the pivot of the system – even before the countries were openly Communist-led – were the security services. Moscow trained local functionaries under the ultimate command of the Soviet NKVD quickly consolidated these. From the Interior Ministries they directed wholesale purges of real and suspected opponents. Executions, consigning people to local camps, even sending them to the Soviet Gulag, followed. The take-over of each state proceeded remorselessly, “first (by) the elimination of right-wing; or anti-communist parties, then the destruction of the non-communist left, then the elimination of opposition within the communist party itself.”(xxxiv)
True Believers.
Yet at the same time the Communist parties were led by true believers. Their Central Committees initially allowed (relatively) free elections because they thought they could win. They thought their doctrine was true. They “really did think that sooner of later the working-class majority would acquire class consciousness, understand its historical destiny and vote for a communist regime.”(P xxxiv)
Harsh policies were a reaction to defeat in elections, notably by the Small Holders’ Party in Hungary, and (if electoral fraud had not obscured this) by the Social Democrats and others in East Germany, ‘patriotic’ parties in Poland, and elsewhere Even in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, barely covered in Iron Curtain) where the local Communist parties did have deeper bases (something Applebaum plays down) they were unable to reach a majority on their own.
Iron Curtain’s principal thesis is that Communist rule under the period of High Stalinism (that is, from the late 1940s to 1956) saw an effort to eliminate any independent life for civil society. “The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passion, talents and free time.”(Page 185) They took over youth groups, women’s leagues, churches, trade unions, independent educational movements, and, above all, the mass media, beginning with the Radio. In doing so, “They managed, undermined and sometimes eliminated churches, newspapers, literary and educational societies, companies and retail shops, stock markets, banks, sports clubs and universities.”(Page 496) Read the rest of this entry »
Against Austerity. SERTUC Conference.
Comrade: There’s a Place for You in the People’s Assembly!
Conference – Resisting Austerity in Europe and the UK.
Report.
SERTUC, the Southern & Eastern Region of the TUC, held an important meeting last Saturday.
At Congress House we began by hearing speakers from Greece, Portugal and Ireland on their labour movements’ resistance to the economic and social crisis.
The depth of this crisis was underlined by the Greek comrade, Marina Prentoulis, who spoke of how even middle class Greks were unable to heat their homes and even eat normally.
Fernando Mauricio from the Portuguese CGPT was impressive in underlining “Our Common Struggle” against the Troika of the IMF the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
The Irish speaker, Paul Murphy, summed up the main point: the economic crisis was being used, as the “shock doctrine” to implement far right privatisation policies.
After a short break comrade Owen Jones brought us back to the UK in his appeal for us all to back the People’s Assembly.
The Tendance intervened on the need to build the People’s Assembly on a regional basis.
Lunch was the opportunity to exchange ideas on how to do this.
In the afternoon there were other excellent speakers on topics that ranged from the privatisation of the NHS, Schools, and, most signficantly, the call for a TUC led General Strike.
Personally I could have done without the Socialist Party’s Single Transferable Speech on the latter.
As for the anti-European Union stuff, what is anybody going to replace it with?
Another, Socialist, EU?
Be serious.
But, the day was well worth it.
That Stathis Mithroleos ofSyriza’ dropped in was a real plus.
Labour movement activists, inspired by a hope for a better future, came away with a real glow.
Megan and her comrades should be well proud of their efforts.
Comrades, Build the People’s Assembly!
60th Anniversary of Stalin’s Death and the Great Terror in le Monde.
Yesterday in Le Monde on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death (5th March 1953) there was a supplement on the Great Terror.
See Géographie de la terreur stalinienne
The Supplement includes Identity photos of the victims. Unlike the well-known figures whose memory was effaced from the public record, many images remain of ordinary people.
More details are in: La Grande Terreur en URSS, 1937-1938, de Tomasz Kizny, Nicolas Werth, Arseni Roguinski, Christian Caujolle. Avant-propos de Sylvie Kauffmann. Editions Noir sur blanc, 412 p., 40 €.
Vestiges invisibles de la Grande Terreur
Photos of the sites of mass executions and common graves, including these.
Boutovo, near Moscow, where people condemned to death were shot.
Tomsk, in the centre of Russia. It is estimated that there are 10,00 corpses in this ravine.
The International Marxist Group and the SWP Crisis.
The International Marxist Group, and the Present Socialist Workers Party Crisis.
“For us, a socialist revolution means…the dissolution of the existing capitalist state, the expropriation of the possessing classes from the means of production, and the construction of a new type of state and economic order…..the emergence of such forms of second power, incarnating the sovereignty of a proletarian democracy alternative and antagonistic to that of bourgeois democracy, must be the long term strategic goal of the socialist movement….the tradition to which these conceptions belong is broadly speaking that of Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci.”
Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism. Extracts. Pages 194-5 1980.
“For most students the roster of Bebel, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Jaurès, Lukács, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci have become names as remote as a list of Arian bishops.”
Perry Anderson, Renewals. New Left Review. Second Series. No 1. 2000.
It is not always easy to talk about the political past. People move on, they find ideas that they worked with do not fit the present, or their own needs, they take on new political identities, they reinterpret their old ones. This is even more the case on the committed left. The IMG was such a highly dedicated force, or at least had considerable activist energy, during the 1970s. It was strongly revolutionary. On demonstrations, for years after the 1973 Chile Coup, its members shouted Armed Road, Only Road, One Solution Armed Revolution!
There is no British film, like Romain Goupil’s Mourir à trente ans (1982) which recounts the life of Michel Recanati of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), that captures the intense atmosphere that enveloped their sister Party, the IMG. As yet only sketches of the Group (of which this is one), and some account in John Callagham’s book on the British far-left (1987), are available for those interested in the history of this left.
But the IMG has reappeared, if not in substance, at last in reference, in the debates around the current SWP crisis. The SWP leadership has criticised its so-called ‘permanent factions’, that is the competing tendencies that existed within the IMG. Mike Macnair in the Weekly Worker develops a substantial argument around this (which we will return to (SWP and Theory. 28.2.13). Alex Callinicos has made another reference. He has claimed that SWP oppositionists, associated with the journal Historical Materialism, would like to see it play the role that New Left Review did for the IMG – separate and independent, but very influential. Or to put it in his own words, they had the “NLR syndrome’—Perry Anderson sought to profile himself as self-appointed generalissimo of the class struggle.”
The IMG.
There is a simply and obvious reason for these references. The International Marxist Group, (IMG. 1968 – 1982) was, during the 1970s, the chief rival, politically if not organisationally, of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party (founded in 1977). It was, from 1969, the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International. The IMG described the International Socialists as “centrists”, that is not full-bloodied revolutionary Marxists. In 1972 Tariq Ali had predicted, “This, coupled with an increasing adaptation to left social-democracy, will mark the decline of IS as an organisation containing many dedicated revolutionaries” (The Coming British Revolution. 1972)
The IMG was a ‘cadre’ organisation, that is people were ‘candidates’ expected to undertake education and show commitment before full membership. Reaching up to 1,000 members at its peak towards the end of decade the Group underwent, as Mike Macnair writes, a series of “wrenching turns” as it developed. In 1973 its “main strategic goal” was the “preparation of organs of dual power immediately before or during the general strike” in Britain (Tasks of the IMG. International Vol. 2. No 2. 1973). In 1976 the objective had shifted to the construction of a “class struggle left wing”, a “united front” to break with the “bureaucracy” of the labour movement. (The Programme We Need. International Vol. 3. No2. 1976).
The IMG’s ‘action plan’ thereafter evolved ever closer to “left social democracy”, as its relaunched ‘broad’ paper, Socialist Challenge (1977). The name of the paper indicates a shift. What else could it refer to but Stuart Holland’s The Socialist Challenge (1975) and the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) that developed on the Labour and trade union left? Despite standing as Socialist Unity (with Big Flame) in the 1979 General Election it became more and more directed towards Labour activists. By 1982 the IMG was dissolved. As the Socialist League it ‘entered’ the Labour Party.
During this period the IMG had close ties to New Left Review (NLR). The Editor Perry Anderson wrote in 1976 of the “objective possibility of the reappearance of the political ideas associated with Trotsky in central areas of working-class debate and activity.” (Page 101. Considerations on Western Marxism. 1976) Anderson’s commitment to the strategy of ‘dual power’ has already been cited.* The Managing Editor, Robin Blackburn, and several others, closely linked to the journal, including Norman Geras, Tariq Ali and Quintin Hoare, were active members of the IMG. The background of many of its debates is best looked at through NLR’s pages rather than in the IMG’s official documents.
The IMG’s internal life was marked by conflicts between a number of different ‘factions’, called ‘tendencies’. Comrade Macnair describes them as follows. “Between 1970 and 1979 there was continuously a (small) minority faction which supported the line of the US SWP, led by Alan and Connie Harris, under a variety of names. Beyond this, there were several oppositional factions (called ‘tendencies’) in pre-conference discussions, but mostly they did not lead to ‘no overall majority’ and dissolved after the conference. At the 1973 conference there were, indeed, multiple factions – the larger ones beyond the pro-SWP tendency, the Alan Jones (John Ross), Tony Whelan, ‘New Course’ (Pat Jordan, Peter Gowan, Tariq Ali and others) and Robin Blackburn tendencies – and no majority. The conference, as was USFI practice, gave the largest minority, the Jones tendency, a working majority on the national committee.”
Some may have a slightly different description. Apart from pure US SWP imported ‘The Tendency’ (Capitalised), with a cultist air; there were fairly stable divisions. These was the ‘majority’ the ‘Ross’ led grouping (Tendency ‘B’), which looked to the 1930s/1940s American SWP ‘Cannon’ model of ‘building the proletarian party’, and the British Labour left as a potential ally and (eventually) the AES as a way forward. Against them were the more European inspired IMG members (including all the New Left Review writers), Tendency ‘A’. They looked to the French LCR, and the leading theorist of the Fourth International, Ernest Mandel. They were (in the 1970s) more sceptical about the Labour Party and the AES (amongst other items, its proposals to introduce import controls and withdrawal from the, then, ‘Common Market’).
We would say that conflicts between these – partially shifting – groups did mark the internal life of the IMG to a strong degree. They must have led to a degree of political paralysis but as Macnair points out, the way this was avoided was a lot worse,
He states that in the IMG the, “core group in the apparatus was not willing to lay political turns and differences within this group before the membership, at conference; it would wait until its re-election was secure before announcing a new turn. This was, at the end of the day, functionally the same ‘not in front of the children’ behaviour as the SWP’s ban on permanent factions: differences at the top and changes of line were to be kept within the leadership, not referred to the members for decision: the apparatus had to present a united face to the membership, at least in circumstances where the leaders might lose their jobs.”
So whether moments of political immobility would have been a bad thing, given the abrupt change of line from ultra-left rhetoric to Labour left, is not clear. A brief holiday and some horse-trading might (as in all might ofs.. pretty uncertain) stabilised the IMG around a common project.
In the event it was continually wracked by change. There were plenty of them: ‘Bolshevising’ the group by a cell structure; a sudden mass campaign for a ‘No’ vote in the Common Market Referendum to the ‘turn to industry’; sending comrades into manual jobs (as always not involving the previous Central Committee itself). Macnair describes the demiurge behind this process, John Ross, as a kind of Tony Cliff. He was always “bending the stick” (with Lenin’s Complete Works to justify this). From some quarters virulent dislike of Ross, who leads a comfortable existence as an advocate of the Chinese Model, and leader of the miniscule Socialist Action, indicates the endurance of the strong feelings of those days.
Dual Power in Practice?
The backdrop to all the IMG debates of the 1970s was the expectation that Europe would experience revolutionary upheavals. To the Fourth International 1968 had thrown up a “new vanguard of mass proportions, by and large eluding the control of the traditional workers’ organisations”. (The Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe. International. Vol2. No 2. 1973). Their objective was to “crystallise into a serious Marxist political organisation”. The FI would win hegemony, and create a real international organisation on this basis. When the “next explosion of mass struggle occurs” they will be there to help create a system of “dual power” for the “logic of the revolutionary situation to unfold.”
We quoted some of the IMG’s early 1970s predictions of imminent British dual power, in this vein. It is hard to disagree with Geoff Roberts of the Communist Party of Great Britain, that its premise was to expect “revolutionary upheavals” everywhere including in the United Kingdom. (The Politics of the IMG. Marxism Today. February 1976) Indeed there were those within the Group who referred to Lukács and the “actuality” (that is contemporary reality) of the “revolution”.
April 1974 saw the start of the actual Portuguese ‘Carnation Revolution” which the IMG foresaw would the “foundation stone of the United Socialist States of Europe.” (Editorial. International. Vol.2. No3. 1974) The perspective of a wider ‘Iberian’ revolution appeared with “a Socialist Spain, a Socialist Iberia, and a Socialist Europe” was on the agenda. (Portugal, Spain.Towards the Iberian Socialist Revolution. 1975)
This was not to be. Ernest Mandel’s promise that the next Fourth International Congress would take place in a liberated Barcelona failed to materialise (Page 196. Ernest Mandel. A Rebel’s Dream deferred. Jan Willem Stutje. 2009). In retrospect it was not any ambiguity on the part of the FI’s tiny section, the LCI, towards, the still strong, Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the land’s Fifth Provisional Government, that was at fault. Nor that the fragmented Spanish groups with which it was linked remained isolated partly because of their own divisions.
Portugal and Spain were simply ‘caught up’ in a massive drive to normalise their political structures on Western European models. Generous external funding helped this. Internal political support – not least from sections of the people’s themselves – quickly excluded any revolutionary possibilities. It was the reformist Socialist parties, led by Mário Soares in Portugal and then by (most markedly) by Phillipe González’s PSOE, rapidly ‘modernising’ before the word got into more general use, in the region who became political players, not the left.
Yet as the decade wore on most of the IMG remained united around what Robin Blackburn called “working for the emergence and victory of institutions of dual power. This entails striving to develop a revolutionary alternative to reformism in the working class movement and thus educating and preparing the working class for the creation of their own instruments of power.” (What is the Democratic Road to Socialism? International Vol. 3. No 4. 1977). In 1979 Ernest Mandel admitted that the Portuguese revolutionary process had now “ended temporarily” (Page 48. Revolutionary Marxism Today 1979). However Mandel avoided predicting further ‘dual power’ crises, preferring to talk more vaguely of Southern Europe being “on the verge of a pre-revolutionary situation almost continuously” (Ibid)
Did the IMG and the FI only manufacture illusions about socialist revolutions that never happened? Not at all. Amongst the differences that marked them out from both ‘orthodox’ Trotskyism and the SWP of the period was its insistence on democracy. That is, not only did revolutionary parties have to have a “democratic internal life”, but that there “are no infallible parties…no infallible party leaderships, party majorities, ‘Leninist central committees’ or individual party leaders”. In workers’ state there should be
“unfettered political freedom for all those individuals, groups, tendencies, and parities who in practice respect collective property and the workers’ constitution.” (Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Resolution of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Imprecor. No 10. 1977).
The Failures of the 1970s.
The International Marxist Group underwent great changes as the 1970s failed to produce a mass shift to the left, let alone Perry Anderson’s “second” or “dual power”. In 1982 Tariq Ali and Quintin Hoare wrote a “balance-sheet” of this period.
The second half of the seventies, however, administered a series of brutal shocks to the entire ‘new vanguardist’ perspective. The fall of Saigon to the armed battalions of Vietnamese Communism did not coincide with a successful proletarian revolution in Portugal. On the contrary, not only did not Lisbon Commune emerge but virtually the entire European revolutionary left failed the test of how to respond adequately to the tumultuous events which were to climate in the restabilisation of the bourgeois order some groups tempted by military adventurism, others tailing the Communist Party in its undemocratic manoeuvres with sections of the officer corps.(Socialists and the Crisis of Labourism. New Left Review. 1st series. 132. 1982)
Ali and Hoare root the difficulties of the revolutionary left in their inability to “intervene with a conception of socialist democracy capable of convincing the mass even of the industrial workers of its superiority to the bourgeois democracy offered by Soares.” They list the other failures of the revolutionary left, from the implosion of Maoism as the reality of the Chinese Communist Party became more and more apparent, to the widespread inability of the radical left to grow, or to have a wider political impact, apart from (uniquely in the latter, impacted, sense) the Italian far-left’s descent into the ‘years of lead’. It would seem not just a strategic failure, but the whole idea that there was a “new vanguard” that was “detached” from traditional politics to the point where it was open to revolutionary Marxism was false. That there was no new ‘constituency’ on the left for ‘new parties’.
The answer, for Ali and Hoare, was to be found in a “united front between the Labour left and Marxists”. In other worse, the left could not create a new party at all, at least in Britain. The Marxists would need, they asserted the newly founded Socialist Society (New Left l and ll figures, from Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, to supporters of the ‘Anderson’ New Left Review and others) to supply a “cultural” and “ideological” front. Socialist activists inside the Labour Party and the unions could offer the practical workers. The AES would meld them together.
The Socialist Society itself was to dissolve, its own leadership reduced from the original broad front. In the late 1980s it helped hold the Chesterfield Conferences that seemed, for a time, to function, as Ali and Hoare would have wished. It was involved in what is now called a “network” of activists and theorists. But the Collapse of Official Communism in 1991, and its fall-out, undermined any consensus about what ‘socialism’ meant. As the quote from Anderson that heads this intervention indicates, people drifted away from Marxism, their frame of reference changed. The fate of the Labour left was marginalised by the rise of modernisation and then Tony Blair. . Attempts to ‘refound’ the left on first principles, to launch left parties, up to the Socialist Alliance, have not been successful.
What of those who wished to continue building revolutionary parties? Not everybody agreed that the game was over. For Alex Callinicos, by contrast, the SWP had become a winner by keeping its head.
“The British International Socialists (SWP from 1977 on) went through an acute crisis at the end of the 1970s, in which the main issues were, first the very question of whether or not the upturn which had brought down Heath was over, and second, the problem of how to relate the “new social movements” responding to various forms of oppression (of women, blacks, gays, etc.) to the working-class struggle for socialism. Eventually these arguments were resolved and the SWP was able to weather ten years of Thatcherism with a membership of something over 4,000 in good political spirits”(Trotskyism. 1990)
The SWP has never become a mass party. Its past and present problems do not need rehearsing here. Louis Proyect notes their ‘deeping degeneration’ which may well be true. At least some of their difficulties come from the belief that there they are the group that can occupy the political space – such as it is – opened up in the wake of ’68. That is, to put it no lower, they think they are on the side of history. For those inclined to read a more detailed, and highly amusing, analysis, Soviet Goon Boy comes strongly recommended.
That at least is part of Mike Macnair’s analysis. For him “The IMG, the LCR and the IS/SWP were all at the end of the day ‘children of 68’. In place of these reasons for a working class political party, and for organisation independent of the class-collaborators, they defined themselves as ‘revolutionary’ by commitment to events like May 68.” He continues, “By the end of the 1970s, this concept of ‘revolution’ was plainly useless to concrete political perspectives. What it left behind was ‘initiatives to draw masses into action’. But such initiatives, if to be taken by small groups, logically implied political capitulation to the class-collaborators.” The conclusion, “The IMG collapsed because the capitulators won.”
Class-collaborators are always with us, like those (the Weekly Worker included) who joined the Respect Coalition, perhaps? May 68 was, by all accounts, something a lot more rare. It was not an Event in the pompous metaphysical way Alain Badiou now labels it. But it did open up some long-termer political space for the left. Its more spontaneous legacy may be found in the self-organised activity of the Internet as well as in ‘social movements’ , ‘networks’ and even parties, A dislike of authoriarianism may be an enduring trait.
It could be that it is this that has finally caught up with the SWP. In this sense we democratic leftists are all children of ’68′.
It was not, however, only such ‘events’ that determined the life and dissolution of the IMG. It was a thoroughly wrong ‘conception of the epoch’ in which events were merely the signs of an underlying structure. Revolutions, ‘dual power’, were ready to spring into life as a ‘crisis’ unfolded. The left, networked with its ‘practical workers’ would rush up, undergo what Ali and Hoare call a “process of splits and fusions”, and something, something - a Party – would emerge. When belief in these principles waned, so did the IMG in its organised, united, form, ended. That is why it “collapsed”. But much of its wider legacy, its democratic and New Left side, and many of its former members, continues to be present on the left.
Some kind of union of the left (and please, please, no more ‘coalitions’), not in a revolutionary climate but here and now, faced with the dire right-wing Liberal-Tory government, may yet happen.
Some of us still think that before any of this, we are still stuck in the process of ’refounding’ the left.
I always had a soft spot for those Arian bishops.
&&&&&&&&&&&&
* The terms is obvious to all Marxists, “The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.
The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old “formulas”, for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to bedifferent. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.
What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of bourgeoisie, another governmenthas arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing—the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”
V. I. Lenin The Dual Power 9 April 1917.
There is also this interesting blog on the IMG.
SWP Crisis: Sectarianship, A User’s Guide.
Sectarianship, A User’s Guide.
“In one of the unpublished notebooks of Rilke there is an unpublished phrase….‘If you’re not one up (Biztleisch) you’re one down (Roteleisch).’”
Stephen Potter. Lifemanship.
As the SWP heads towards the March 10th Special Conference, feelings are running high. Public reticence by the opposition In Defence of Our Party faction (IDOP) has not stemmed the flood of allegations of sexual abuse, or the intensity of inner-SWP conflict. Unhelpful contributions, without the best interests of the SWP at heart, appear on the Internet, exploiting this newfangled device to spread their poison.
Yet there were happier times on the left. An epoch, now dimly remembered, when Alex Callinicos could play croquet with Tony Cliff, on grandfather Lord Acton’s lawn. House-guest Gerry Healy would hit in the face anybody who got in the way of the ball. Other luminaries of the left, from Peter Taaffe, Tariq Ali, to Sean Matgamma, would often pop over for a pleasant weekend.
It is no coincidence that the classic guide to the British Workers’ movement, ‘As soon as this Pub closes’ appeared during this period. It instructed a generation. It may need updating (no reference to the Weekly Worker, Permanent Revolution, the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, to start with) but it remains a monument.
Is all this to be lost amongst more sordid revelations and fisticuffs?
There are signs that something of the spirit of those glory years has not gone away. Comrade Dave Dudley remains active. Splintered Sunrise/Soviet Goon Boy has proved himself (there is no higher praise) a worthy successor to ‘As soon as’. By describing the SWP Treasurer as a master of Father Crilly economics, Andy Newman has tapped into this rich vein
As the SWP falls into the sear yellow leaf comrades must defend this, the British ‘sectarian tradition’.
(Below: Extracts from ‘Sectarianship.’ Tendance Coatesy. 2013)
Sectarianship Basics.
What is a Sectarian? “You, you and (especially) you”. That is the answer. But there is another reply. It is to be found in the practice and unceasing struggle of accredited Sectarians, licensed to be so named. We are a large group, and a growing one, formed at our Ipswich ‘Centre’ (123 full-timers). Our graduates have been active in the SWP battles and indeed elsewhere.
Stephen Potter is, as we say, “our look me up to”. He defined Sectarianship (which he called ‘Lifemanship’ pre- our epistemological break) as “how to make the member of another faction feel that something has gone wrong.”
Some think the purpose of factional fights is win a sect’s ‘line’.
But the true Sectarian, with or without rudeness, is out for another goal. Such a trained individual is able to make the other person – or ‘class enemy’ – feel ‘one-down’ (Roteleisch, also a term used by the Frankfurt School and the Platypus Society). That somehow She or He may be prey to serious political errors.
Our other master is James P. Cannon. Some might have heard tales that the founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (not to be confused with the above SWP) was the type who spent his life telling people how he’d got one over on his enemy of the moment. That, and the fact that after his death his party has ended up as a New York Real Estate company with 30 members, could lead to the conclusion that he could not be trusted in telling a child how to tie its shoe laces correctly.
We disagree. Cannon was highly skilled in Sectarianship. He remarked in the History of American Trotskyism (1944) that, “when it is a question of fighting for some political idea, Trotskyists can stay awake longer and speak longer and more frequently than people of any other political type.”
How true.
Cannon knew a sectarian when he saw one, often in the most surprising places. In 1930 he waged a “bitter fight” against admitting somebody to the New York Branch on the justifiable grounds that we wore a corduroy suit, had long hair and sported a “trick moustache”. That the man later became an Oehlerite proves Cannon’s worth.
The Trotskyist leader fought such “weaklings”, “traitorous gangs” “labour skates” for so long that he developed an unerring talent. Talking of later in the 1930s Cannon described his one-time allies in the US Socialist Party as follows, “They were inexperienced and untested. They were ignorant, untalented, petty-minded, weak, cowardly and vain. And they had other faults too.”
Cannon’s skills were put to good use in the 1950s. He linked up with Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert in that decade’s struggle against Pabloite liquidationism and its “spineless lackeys” engaged on “cadre-wrecking” expeditions on his home turf. The SWP leader left his imprint on a golden moment in the history of Sectarianship and of International Trotskyism.
The current (UK) SWP leadership has much to learn from Cannon who also said, “Party membership implies the obligation of 100% loyalty to the organisation, the rejection of all agents of other, hostile groups in its ranks, and intolerance of divided loyalties in general.” (The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. 1943) If only IDOP would listen and confine itself to sectarian – and cromulent - opuscules against Christopher Hitchens!
Sectarianship Praxis.
One can but hope to emulate the masters.
This seems a daunting task.
But it is not so!
Let us take a simple example.
Somebody who has signed the SWP ‘loyalty pledge’ is holding forth. She or He has got going on the numbers of Socialist Workers sold by the branch (normally exaggerated by a factor of three), and that the local workers were gagging for a General Strike.
Here we recommend Stephen Potter’s Canterbury Block.
Quietly add, “Absolutely it’s very encouraging, but not in the (add name of workplace).”
Since the SWPer is unlikely to know more about this workplace than its name, she or he is caught off guard. The flow is interrupted. An element of unease is introduced. Others may be encouraged to speak up, and point out that the call for a General Strike has had fewer echoes amongst the masses than Posadist’s programme for interplanetary socialism.
“But not in..” is a useful tool ….
