Archive for the ‘Theory’ Category
John Rees and Counterfire: Ministry of Truth Rectifies.
Diamond Geezer.
Ministry of Truth Communication,
“Tendance Coatesy: unbad Counterfire, John Rees and Lindsey German. Misprints rectify. Immediate upsub to Ministry, vaporise duckspeak or Coatesy joycamp.”
Coatesy writes,
“It has come to our attention that Tendance Blog has published material that may give an impression that John Rees, Lindsey German and Counterfire can be criticised.
Our multi-volume series, “The Struggle against Reesite Liquidationism” and our pamphlet, “What Counterfire is and how to Smash it” are in the process of being re-edited.
The Children’s book, “The Famous Five Unmask the Zinovievite-Rees Spy Centre” has been returned to the publishers.
We now accept that, following Georg Lukács that 2 plus 2 can sometimes, in an “Aufhebung ” be dialectically sublated into 5.”
Sitting at his usual table in the Chestnut Tree Café Coatesy sipped his clove-flavoured Victory Gin.
Watching the telly-screen he saw John Rees on Russia Today.
He felt a swelling of pride: he had always backed Counterfire!
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!
“Feminism is a dirty word’. What would Marx and Engels think today? – Camilla Power.
Feminism is a Dirty Word’. What Would Marx and Engels Think Today?
This is am extremely important guest post by comrade Camilla Power that we have been requested (amongst other leftists) to present (original here).
“The article takes ‘dinosaur marxists’ to task for refusing to treat rape as a political issue. The author looks at events in the SWP, RMT and across the British left in the light of what Marx and Engels – so often invoked by these ‘dinosaurs’ – wrote about sex and its connection with class.”
‘Bursting like a bombshell over this article as first drafted have been accusations of domestic violence by one RMT comrade against another. *The accused man is a prominent class-fighting activist. The woman victim, who took the case to the police, accuses the RMT of failing to support her, and a specific Union officer of ‘victim-blaming’ by proposing that she ‘beat herself up’. On International Women’s Day 2013, she published photographs of her bruised face, while, ironically, the RMT published a model Domestic Violence Policy for the workplace.
This case confronts every revolutionary activist and will be a stern test for the RMT union as to how it implements its own policy. Unlike the SWP, the RMT have some apparatus of women’s conferences, women’s sections and advisory committees. Will they prove equal to the task of resisting the patriarchal institutional bias of disbelieving the woman who dares to come forward? Their document pays all the right lip service. Will the RMT demonstrate zero tolerance of this behaviour? No person can be a class fighter and commit such violent outrages. The very actions are politically divisive and undermine revolutionary class struggle itself.
Feminism has long been a dirty word in the SWP. In his brave account, former Socialist Worker journalist Tom Walker describes how the male-dominated Central Committee closed ranks with Comrade Delta when a young female comrade was pressured into dropping a rape allegation. When asked what is at the centre of the crisis, what’s the hidden agenda, Walker responds: ‘There isn’t one….It really is about rape, the crisis in the SWP. Specifically the appalling treatment of a young woman who made an allegation of rape against the party’s de facto leader’.(1)
The Guardian online (Mar 9) reports a second alleged rape and cover-up by the SWP, detailing systemic abuse of young women members.(2) The victim claims she was told the alleged rapist was going to be suspended and encouraged to read up on women’s liberation. ‘They said, if you go around calling him a rapist, you’ll be in trouble. If you tell anyone, you’ll be in trouble … They didn’t elaborate. They’re not the kind of people to get on the wrong side of.’
In a March 3 podcast(3) offered by a leading male comrade of the Communist Party of Great Britain, feminism is again identified as the problem. Jack Conrad laments that the issue splitting the SWP appears so ‘trivial’ (listen from around 20 mins in) and the arguments apolitical. He hastily corrects himself that of course ‘rape is not a trivial issue’, but in his view it’s still not a political issue, so hardly worth splitting over.
It would seem that feminism is a dangerous contagion threatening to infect all these Marxist sects with their privileged knowledge of the sacred scripts. Feminists of all hues, bourgeois and revolutionary, will insist that violence and sexual abuse in all circumstances be brought to account. It is the State’s dream to have key organisers of the RMT or even the SWP brought to answer sex charges before a bourgeois court. But the whole of the socialist left currently has no apparatus that remotely provides any means of independent investigation into such serious crimes against the person. It is a matter of revolutionary culture and consciousness to begin to develop alternative systems of justice. Have we got any chance of doing so if rape itself is not considered by marxists a political issue?
As a direct-action, anarcho-marxist, feminist and Darwinian anthropologist – which makes me a pretty weird leftie – I am writing on International Women’s Day, 96th anniversary of the start of Russia’s February revolution. And I’m holding my head in my hands. Do these marxist sectlets seriously imagine they are going to improve their 85 to 15 per cent male/female gender ratio by putting out this message like a broken record? ‘Women comrades, forget you’re female, join your struggle with the workers… Yes, you may be doubly oppressed as mothers and houseworkers – but just put your faith in the revolution, dears, and patriarchy will come out in the wash!’
Isn’t it time these comrades of both sexes stuck their heads out of their caves, scented the air and smelt the decreptitude of late capitalist patriarchy? Haven’t they noticed all these catholic priests, cardinals, BBC apologists for paedophile rings, Lib Dem chief executives, RMT and SWP key organisers accused of violence and sex crimes – exposed because victims increasingly will not shut up to maintain alpha-male offenders in positions to which they have become accustomed? The victims have been women, men and children. But in all these cases, ancient Neolithic hierarchies of gender are being deeply challenged, and not just in Europe but across the world.
But even beyond the headline-grabbing collapse in respect for patriarchy, isn’t it time that marxists apprehended the real crisis in concrete conditions underlying the banker bailout austerity programme? This is undeniably a gendered crisis of working women, who can’t manage any more to pay the rent, find childcare and go to work; while mothers are being pressed onto the job market, under threat of loss of benefits, and deportation wholesale with children to poorer accommodation hundreds of miles from their homes and schools. The crisis in housing itself compels more women to put up with abusive partners as they simply have nowhere else to go.
Even The Guardian’s Seumas Milne writes of the ‘historic shift of women moving left of men’(4) as women pay disproportionately for the banker’s crisis. The lower-paid, part-time and casual workforce of precarious labour is female-dominated; as these working women suffer most from the cuts, so of course do the men and children in their lives. In terms of public sector job losses, women in their fifties are identified as major victims – a generation who are highly experienced and also politicised.
Meanwhile, the BBC’s Paul Mason, in his famous 20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off, specifically identified factors of youth and gender as contributory: the typical activist is the graduate with no future, linked up on social media. Women, he says, are the backbone of these new movements: the archetypal protest leader, organizer, facilitator and spokesperson is ‘an educated young woman’.
The more that women come out onto the streets to occupy and organise, the more there will be specifically female experience of protest, including both intense cooperation and revolutionary solidarity, but also, harassment and rape threat, as has been seen to such horrendous effect in Tahrir Square at the cutting edge of the Egyptian revolution. This expresses all the contradictions of a struggle involving islamic patriarchs camped alongside conscious revolutionaries.
Rape not political? Try telling that to a woman in Tahrir Square who faces shaming harassment and threat of rape by thugs bribed by the latest patriarchal hierarchy installed into government. The vanguard of the revolution includes precisely those men who realise the political importance of protecting and helping women comrades to be out there on the street. In other words, the vanguard includes men who understand rape for the political issue it is, and prioritise women’s presence as vital for the conciousness of the revolution.
Rape not political? Try telling Marx. The various Marxist sects, anxious to guard their sacred doctrines for the day they lead the revolution, may not consider women, reproduction and sexuality as important, political topics. But is that true of Marx and Engels originally? Let us take a look at what they say on this.
In 1844 Marx wrote: ‘The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is found in the relation of man to woman.’ He continues:
‘From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being, a human being. …It also shows how far man’s needs have become human needs, and consequently how far this other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being.’(5)
‘Species-life’(6) in its natural form was sexual life, with all that implied in terms of reciprocity, exchange and productiveness. In its distinctively human cultural form, species-life was economically-productive life, i.e. labour – again, with all that implied in terms of exchange and reciprocity. From the beginning, human production was a dual process of species-life: ‘The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship.’(7) Yet, the natural relationship – sex, – was itself social, and the social relationship, labour, was a relationship with nature.
In Marx and Engels’ understanding, the original human situation involved no conflict between the two forms of species-life – between sex and labour, family and industry, woman and man. Both production and procreation were carried on through the clan (the gens, governed by the principle of ‘mother-right’, with females of one clan ‘married’ as a whole group to males of another), and were under the reciprocal and communal control of women and men. Men’s and women’s lives consisted of acts of exchange between individuals as consciously social beings, sexual exchange being as widely socialised as possible and integral to the system of labour exchange:
‘Exchange, both of human activity within production itself and also of human products with each other, is equivalent to species-activity and species-enjoyment whose real, conscious and true being is social activity and social enjoyment. Since human nature is the true communal nature of man, men create and produce their communal nature by their natural action, they produce their social being which is no abstract, universal power over against single individuals, but the nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own enjoyment, his own.’(8)
The motive of exchange was not private gain but the pleasure of giving, reciprocity, since, as in sexual relations, one’s partner’s enjoyment was equally one’s own: ‘In so far as man is human and thus in so far as his feelings and so on are human, the affirmation of the object by another person is equally his own enjoyment.’(9)
Women’s loss of their original equality, clearly associated by Marx and Engels with the rise of agriculture, occurred when, instead of the earlier relations of sexual and economic reciprocity, there arose ‘Property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family’ (my italics). A man as husband was now able to privatise and exploit a woman’s sexuality, her reproductive power, and her and her children’s economic labour power. Species-life has now been subordinated to its very opposite – the lust for purely private gain. The family has become an institution demarcated from and counterposed to the wider community, society being separated into families ‘opposed to one another’. This is the foundation of the whole consequent structure of class society. Engels quotes Marx:
‘The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus) but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and the state.’(10)
Engels goes on to describe how, to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, ‘she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her he is only exercising his rights.’ As private property, the wife has yielded control over her sexuality and the products of her sexuality, her children, merely to maintain her own existence. Species-life has become a ‘means of individual life’. Both wife and labourer perform compulsory forms of labour in which ‘life activity, productive life, now appears to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain physical existence.’(11)
The contradiction is now complete: the very activity in which women and men go beyond themselves and express their human essence – producing for others rather than merely for themselves – has been subordinated to selfish, animal greed. Social production and reproduction, both forms of human species-life, now appear as separate, alien powers opposed to the individuals whose activities have created them. Marx writes of the worker under capital:
‘To say that man alienates himself is the same as to say that the society of this alienated man is a caricature of his real human nature, his true species-life, that therefore his activity appears to him as a suffering, his own creation appears as an alien power, his wealth as poverty, the natural tie that binds him to other men appears as an unnatural tie and the separation from other men as his true being; his life appears as a sacrifice of life, the realization of his essence as a loss of the reality of his life, his production as a production of his own nothingness, his power over the object as the power of the object over him, and he himself, the master of his creation, appears as its slave.’(12)
Replace the word ‘man’ in the above passage with ‘woman’ and it might exactly describe the situation of a woman in a patriarchal family who has lost conscious control over her sexuality, and has been alienated from the products of her sexuality. In her introduction to Engels,(13) marxist-feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock writes: ‘In some ways it is the ultimate alienation in our society that the ability to give birth has been transformed into a liability. The reason is not simply that, since women bear children, they are more limited in their movements and activities… this was not a handicap even under the limited technology of hunter-gathering life; it certainly has no relevance today.’ Marx and Engels clearly rooted their model of the alienation of power inherent in class oppression in the ‘ultimate alienation’ of women from their own reproductive powers.
In these early writings, Marx saw a systematic parallel between, on the one hand, woman (opposed to man) as the materially productive sex, and on the other, labour (opposed to capital) as the materially productive class. The class relation duplicated on a social level the sexual relation: it included that relation and stemmed from it. The system of sexual dominance under which women were treated as mere instruments of production ended up treating men as mere instruments of production, too. Everything followed from and took its model from that initial sexual domination.
Capitalist economic principles themselves amount to prostitution, insists Marx. No capitalist could object ‘if I earn money by the sale of my body, by prostituting it to another person’s lust’. Prostitution is only the logical extrapolation of the system: ‘Even the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce.’(14) Or again: ‘Prostitution is only a specific expression of the universal prostitution of the worker.’(15)
The evidence is that Marx and Engels took sexuality very seriously indeed. Marx and Engels’ dialectical vision of the proletarian future was of a return on a higher level to the ancient freedoms of the gentes or clan society, as depicted and argued by anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in ‘Ancient Society’. And that meant, centrally, women’s sexual emancipation through restoration of the old equalities. If the root relationship of oppression was the private oppression of female by male, this private oppressive relation was the first and foremost target for revolutionary political attack. The single greatest failure of the marxist tradition has been its inability to develop Marx and Engels’ analysis of sex and class. Yet development of Marx and Engels’ basic thesis on sex could only be undertaken in an era informed by feminist consciousness and practice.
Marxist feminists most often have aligned themselves with a tradition which effectively ignored Marx’s own discussion of sex, treating Engels’ ‘Origin of the Family’ as embarrassing and indefensible. They tow the line that the class struggle was primary, while the ‘politics of the personal’ was an irrelevant side-issue – and we observe them doing so yet again as those loyal to the SWP leadership pontificate. Women had only to wait for the victory of the workers’ revolution, when their personal difficulties and suffering of sexual oppression would ‘wither away’ as surely as the alienating powers of the capitalist system were dissolved. Women could fight – but only as workers, that is brought into men’s world; women who remained housewives or childcarers – women who maintained and reproduced labour under Capital – had little contribution to make. The struggle for women’s rights encompassed their equality in the workplace rather than their position in the home.
Where marxists assert that the working class becomes revolutionary through collective control of its own labour power, feminists have fallen short of asserting that women become a revolutionary force to the extent they exert collective control over their own sexuality. The notion of collectivity – sisterhood – as fundamental to women’s power has certainly been central to feminist thought, as has the demand for women’s right to control our own bodies. But an explicit linkage of the two ideas, into a concept of women as a collective body, a class exerting class-control over their collective power expressed in sexuality, has not yet emerged. But it is present in Marx and Engels’ concepts of earliest human society.
Today, Darwinian anthropology is validating the essentials of Marx, Engels and Morgan’s position on the communistic, collective and matrilocal nature of our human origins, and the idea that we are product of a Human Revolution.(16) The revolution which made us human was mobilised through a crisis in childcare; to ensure adequate support for their large-brained and very costly offspring, women (with their sons and brothers) used collective ‘strike action’ to organise men’s labour. In this account, the first word was women’s NO! Today, late patriarchal capitalism rapidly arrives at a point of such crisis of childcare and alienation from our humanity. We need once more a great, collective NO!, creative refusal to accept the destruction of health, welfare, education, childcare and housing. That NO! will be spoken loudest by women of the working class.
So, yes the class struggle is primary, but the class itself is gendered. Too often we still hear marxist dinosaurs discussing the ‘woman question’. That is to assume we’re all men. As an anthropologist I have done fieldwork with the Hadza people, a hunting-gathering group in Tanzania. Their collective noun for all the people is female and plural, including within it all women, children – and men. Their assumption is people are all women! It expresses how central women are to camp life, as producers and reproducers, but it includes everybody. For the Hadza, society is unimaginable without women at the core. And women depend entirely on their collectivity, drawing on that to resist any male attempt to exploit or coerce them.
We need to understand our class struggle in that way. How are we to collectivise and socialise modes of production and reproduction? Our humanity was realised through cooperative childcare and labour. Only so can it be restored. From this viewpoint, it is not a matter of which is the more political issue: the abusive behaviour of men in the movement or questions of revolutionary organisation. We can have no revolutionary consciousness without organising as women and men against any such abuses of power.
As Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight argues at the end of Blood Relations:
‘We have been here – at this point on the spiral – before. The revolution’s outcome is not simply in ‘the future’ conceived as something abstracted from the past. As we fight to become free, it is as if we were becoming human for the first time in our lives. But in this sense, because it concerns becoming human, the birth process we have got to win – our survival as a species depends on it – has in the deepest sense been won already. None of us would be here if it had not been. To understand this may be to understand, and thereby make ourselves the instruments of, the real strength of our cause and the inevitability of our emancipation as women, as workers and as a species. The working class is the first materially productive class in the history of the class society to have acquired the power of the strike. It is the first such class to have acquired the power to say ‘no’. When it understands the identity between this ‘no’ and the ‘no’ which women have been trying to say for the past several thousand years – a fusion of forces will take place to generate a power which no force on earth will be able to stop.’(17)
And what the left must take on board is that the first rule, without which there can be no human culture, is the rule against rape.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Camilla Power is a member of the Radical Anthropology Group. @radicalanthro
Notes
1. http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7550
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/09/socialist-workers-party-rape-kangaroo-court?INTCMP=SRCH
3. http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts/podcast-swp-conference-stitch-up
It should be noted that the Weekly Worker has done a great job in hosting Tom Walker’s article on why he left the SWP, as well as numerous articles on Women in human evolution, the Human revolution and Women and revolution. These comrades have provided space for open debate.
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/05/women-left-of-men-historic-shift
5. Marx, K. 1963 [1844] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in T B Bottomore (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Writings. (London: Watts), p.154.
6. Plenty of younger postmodern feminists will be abrasive about this heterosexism dated 1844. For the purpose of this discussion on the analogies of sex and class in Marx, I am using his language, as quoted. In this day and age of Judith Butler’s gender performativity, sex as just culture anyway and aspirations to ‘abolish’ gender, of course such terminology needs reworking. But from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective on human culture, it is hard to avoid some degree of heterosexism in ‘species-life’. An old marxist’s reponse to bourgeois postmodern ideology is to say, well if women’s sections are good enough for the RMT (and evidently very much required in that context) how do young feminists think they will work for the abolition of gender on their terms without being able to organise separately as women?
7. Marx, K and F Engels 1947 [1846] The German Ideology. Parts I & III. (New York: International Publishers), p.18.
8. Marx K 1971 [1844] The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in D. McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Texts. (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.193-194.
9. ibid. p.178.
10. Engels, F. 1972 [1884] The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p.121-122.
11. Marx, K. 1963 [1844] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in T B Bottomore (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Writings. (London: Watts, p.127“0.
12. Marx K 1971 [1844] The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in D McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Texts. (Oxford: Blackwell), p.194.
13. Engels, F. 1972 [1884] The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p.40.
14. Marx, K. 1963 [1844] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in T B Bottomore (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Writings. (London: Watts), p.37.
15. ibid., p. 156n.
16. See S. B. Hrdy, 2009 Mothers and others. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), on cooperative childcare in human evolution; see C. Knight 1991 Blood Relations, Menstruation and the origins of culture. (Yale UP) for the Human Revolution. Also see J. O’Connell, K Hawkes and N G Blurton-Jones 1999 Grandmothering and the evolution of Homo erectus. Journal of Human Evolution 36: 461-485, for the Grandmother hypothesis; F. Marlowe 2004, Marital residence among foragers. Current Anthropology 45: 277-284 on evolution of matrilocal tendencies; and Beckerman, S. and P. Valentine, 2002. Cultures of Multiple Fathers. Introduction. (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press), for modern updates on ‘group marriage’.
17. Knight, C D 1991 Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 533-534.
Socialist Action, a Response to the SWP Crisis.
Sam Marcy lives!
Socialist Action is a descendant of the International Marxist Group (IMG).*
A descendant.
It has now waded into the SWP crisis, asking,
Why the bourgeois media offensive against the SWP?
There are answers:
There are really two issues involved. First, why this crisis in the SWP has developed. Second why the capitalist media, who are implacable enemies of anything progressive, have decided to take such an interest in the matter. As will be seen the two issues are very different.
Before seeing how SA responds their own political background has to be borne in mind.
Socialist Action is best known for its close co-operation with Ken Livingstone.
Amongst Livingstone’s ‘bag carriers’ were (Wikipedia reports) Socialist Action supporters, chief of staff Simon Fletcher, deputy chief of staff and director of public affairs and transport Redmond O’Neill, economic adviser John Ross, green adviser Mark Watts and culture adviser Jude Woodward.
In 2007 Livingstone changed the GLA rules so that his eight key advisers, four associated with Socialist Action (including John Ross and the late Redmond O’Neill), who as temporary appointments would not normally have been entitled to severance pay, received an average of £200,000 each.
Hedging their bets, “Socialist Action has also participated in Respect – The Unity Coalition since the 2007 split in that party. Several of its supporters became members of the party and one serves as its national treasurer.”
A failure to secure Livingstone’s re-election led to Respect being given more priority. However Kate Hudson’s exclusion from the Galloway orbit (she was O’Neill’s partner though had been in the Communist Party of Britain), may have meant that this strategy was downgraded.
What is SA’s ideology?
Socialist Action has evolved far from the Trotskyism and new leftism of the IMG. Very far. Its ideology is often described as “Marcyism‘ after the former US Trotskist Sam Marcy (Sam Ballan, 1911 – February 1, 1998).
Marcey saw the main duty of the left was to “defend the existence of the USSR and its satellites in spite of their bureaucracy”. He supported the Soviet military intervention, in Hungary 1956, arguing that the initial worker uprising had attracted class elements that sought to restore capitalism.
After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Stalinist states SA has defended ‘anti-imperialist’ forces of any kind.
Jane West and Tom Castle’s articles on the Socialist Action site define everything in the world in terms of the fight against ‘imperialism’ – the US and to a lesser extent the European Union.
If you be bothered to wade through them you will learn that,
The class struggle in Egypt is still unfolding. Recent steps in foreign policy by President Morsi have been progressive – including the decision to visit Iran for the non-aligned summit and to pay a state visit to China before making one to the US. But so far domestically there has been only a limited response from the Muslim Brotherhood to demands of the Egyptian masses for improvements in their living standards and in standing up to the army, behind which stands the US.
Most immediately at the heart of the relationship of forces in the region now lies the struggle in Syria, where the imperialist-sponsored, financed and armed Free Syrian Army is seeking to overthrow Assad in order to break the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah axis which has successfully resisted the Israeli state and is one of the chief obstacle to untrammelled imperialist control in the region.
More recently Castle opines,
The US is encouraging its junior imperialist partners to step up their military role in Africa, with the US providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance rather than the key fighting forces. This is to allow the US to continue prioritising its ‘pivot’ to Asia, which is aimed at stepping up its presence in the Pacific as a curb on China, partly aimed at forcing a diversion of Chinese resources into defensive military spending in an attempt to curb the growth of the Chinese economy.
Human Rights? Forget it.
The SWP ‘Crisis’ to the SA.
Socialist Action begins by listing various crises in the SWP’s recent past, largely to do with their own hot and cold, very cold, relations with windbag Galloway.
Then comes the Macryite line,
The real roots of this crisis are that the SWP was founded on a wrong analysis of the international class line of divide between the international working class and imperialism which led to major misunderstandings of the class struggle. Its famous strap-line ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism’ expressed its analysis that the Soviet Union was a variation of capitalism, dubbed ‘state capitalism’. No class distinction could be drawn between this ‘state capitalism’ and the capitalist and imperialist powers.
The SWP failed to understand that the destruction of the USSR, and the re-establishment of capitalism constituted a great victory for imperialism which set back the class struggle internationally.
This is followed by a tortuous paragraph,
Throughout the last two decades the SWP’s comrades have therefore been led to expect a major upsurge in the struggle in the imperialist centres, which has failed to materialise, while turning their faces away from the really progressive developments in world politics such as Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba and the whole advance of the left in Latin America. This over-heated view of the possibilities in the class struggle also led to a sectarian and wrong attitude to other forces pursuing limited but progressive struggles within the imperialist centres – one of the issues which lay behind the wrong approach of the SWP in Respect.
Put simply they didn’t keep on Galloway’s bandwagon, or support unconditionally Chavez and Cuba.
The SWP, Socialist Action condescends to say, did, apparently, stand on the right side against ‘imperialist interventions’.
What the Bourgeois Offensive against the SWP?
The bourgeois media thinks, accroding to SA, that a Labour victory in the next election is probable.
So,
This therefore leads to the ruling class’s second goal: to reduce, divide, weaken and confuse any potential leftward pressure on Labour or emergence of forces to its left. This is why the bourgeois media is jumping on the crisis in the SWP to run a campaign against it. It is taking the opportunity of the SWP’s crisis to weaken as much as possible a significant component of the left that would oppose Labour’s austerity policies and help organise the resistance to it. And to discredit and smear the left in general.
In other words it should be clearly understood that the current attack on the SWP by the Daily Mail and its ilk is not carried out to ‘improve’ the left but to damage it as much as possible.
So, so,
Whatever discussions continue on the left about the issues raised by the crisis in the SWP, there should be no confusion about the fact that the bourgeois media campaign against the SWP has no progressive content whatever. It is merely part of an offensive to weaken the left as much as possible now and prevent the emergence of a powerful left campaigning against Labour carrying out austerity policies after 2015.
Quite Right Comrades!
We have been confused by the bourgeois attacks. We have thought they have an oppressive content”, we considered the Daily Mail was out to “improve” the left.
The scales have fallen from our eyes!
More information on Socialist Action, Stalinist, secretive and not left-wing: Socialist Action, the group behind ‘Student Broad Left’
*As is Tendance Coatesy.
The Crisis of the SWP, Leninism and the Left.
To defend press freedom the 19th century French liberal Benjamin Constant used analogy. * He imagined a society before the invention of language. Suddenly people could speak. When it undermined order figures in authority began to regret this state of affairs. Gradually the innovation was accepted. Nobody any longer had the idea of forbidding talking on the grounds that it could be used to spread rumours, lies or fantasies.
Perhaps the Socialist Workers Party will consider Constant’s argument when they next stick on their internal documents, “Under No Circumstances Should This Text be Posted on the Internet, For SWP members Only.”
* Cited Page 227. Les Gauches Françaises. Jacques Julliard. 2012.
The Crisis of the SWP, Leninism and the Left.
“…the fact remains that as long as the dialogue between reform and revolution continues, Trotskyism will claim its own place as the continuation of the classical Marxist tradition with its orientation on working-class self-emancipation from below.”
Alex Callinicos. Trotsky. 1990.
What does the “dialogue” about “reform and revolution” mean today? The Socialist Workers Party’s present crisis came about when members challenged the role of its Disputes Committee in ‘judging’ accusations of rape. But this has rapidly developed into charges about a “serious deficit in party democracy” (Democratic Renewal Platform). The issues at stake have broadened out, to feminism, and the nature of the SWP’s form of the Leninist ‘revolutionary party’. Alex Callinicos has now upped the stakes. He asks, “Do revolutionary parties, like the Socialist Workers Party, that draw on the method of organising developed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks still fit in the twenty first century?” (Is Leninism Finished? Socialist Review. January 2013).
Far from burying his critics with a ‘Zionviest’ appeal to loyalty to Bolshevism Callinicos could have begun a serious debate. It might avoid what he calls the “dark side of the Internet” – people circulating “salacious gossip.” How far indeed do the SWP’s claims to be part of the ‘classical Marxist tradition’ in the working class’s fight for “self-emancipation from below” stand up to scrutiny? What sense does this goal have in the 21st century? Is the SWP’s crisis a symptom of how this version of revolutionary Marxism, based on the (disputed) appropriation of Trotskyism, is fundamentally awry? Are there other theories and vehicles, reformist or not, that could advance a socialist project?
There are many critics of the SWP, Leninists, or from other Marxist, socialist and different left currents, including ‘reformists’ (a wide category for present-day ‘revolutionaries’). They start from asking whether the SWP has it been able “to bring together all the forces of the oppressed in a common struggle against capitalism, under the leadership of the proletariat”? (John Molyneau. Marxism and the Party 1999) The SWP, on the evidence, has since it launch in 1977, remained far from helping fulfil this objective. It remains politically marginal. Many have suggested that the SWP party-form is one of the reasons why it has remained the “smallest mass party in the world” since its foundation in 1977, and looks like getting even smaller.
Nobody ignores the host of other reasons for this impasse, not least the shadow left by Official Communism and its break up. But we have to ask whether the SWP is trapped in what Callinicos himself has called, following the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, “conventionalist stratagems”, designed to protect the hard core from the persistent refutation of its auxiliary hypotheses.” (Trotsky. 1990) At present the Central Committee looks at if it is acting to protect its own organisational ‘hard core’ whose ‘auxiliary’ actions (its string of ‘united fronts’) have not been successful for some time. Can the SWP look, as Ian Birchall announced in his history of the International Socialists and the SWP (1951 – 1981), “with confidence at the struggles ahead”? Nothing is less sure.
Democracy in Question.
There is a lot of evidence, ranging from the anecdotal (that cannot all be dismissed as title-tattle) to detailed accounts of the SWP internal life, that have been mustered to argue that that the group’s ‘party form’ is flawed. They centre on the widely shared experience of the party as a would-be directing force. It is run by a powerful – many say overweening – Central Committee (CC) through the National Executive (NE), the Centre and regional organisers. To critics this means that the CC commands the membership. It goes its own way, decides on “tactical flexibility”, and only accepts a minimum of dissent. In this political environment it is not surprising that stories about obnoxious or simply out-of-touch party ‘cadres’ – following a ‘line’ decided by the top, emerge.
The Weekly Worker, through a variety of by-lines, calls the SWP internal regime “bureaucratic centralism”. ‘Jack Conrad’ has also traced its faults down to a lack of thought-out programme (Weekly Worker. 72.13) ‘Soviet Goon Boy’ states that the SWP is “not fit for purpose” with an “interventionist leadership” that acts without restraint, appoints Centre workers and organisers by patronage, and a “disciplinary set-up based on in-groups and out-groups.”Martin Thomas argues that the fault lies primarily in the SWP’s “commandist” workings. “The SWP’s version of “democratic centralism” lacks both the best bits of “centralism” and the special sort of democracy needed by revolutionary socialists. (Workers Liberty. 30.1.13) Read the rest of this entry »
