Mike Marqusee on the latest SWP Crisis, and some personal comments.

 

SWP Central Committee.

 

Mike Marqusee writes (Extracts),

The recent conflict within the Socialist Workers Party over allegations of serious personal misconduct by a leading member has brought back sharply my own rupture with the (then) SWP leadership, ten years ago, and how this was handled by the party (of which I’ve never been a member).

To explain. After twenty years hard graft in the Labour Party I resigned in 2000 and became active in the Socialist Alliance campaign for the London Assembly. A year later, I was joined in the SA by my partner, Liz Davies, who had been a Labour councillor and an elected member of Labour’s National Executive. Liz was elected chair of the SA national executive in late 2001. As such she was made one of the signatories for the Socialist Alliance’s (meagre) bank account.

In autumn of 2002, we discovered that Liz’s signature was being forged on Socialist Alliance cheques. The forging was being done by people in the SA office, members of the SWP whom we knew to be in daily contact with the SWP leadership. When Liz raised the discovery with the SWP leadership, she was met with hostility. None of this was to be discussed by anybody. That was not acceptable to her. She brought the matter to the SA Executive. In the course of the discussion there it became apparent to Liz that there was a comprehensive refusal to grasp the seriousness of the offence or to take any meaningful measures in response. That was articulated by one SWPer at the meeting who said it would have been wrong not to forge the signature since the money was needed to get placards on a demo. Liz resigned in disgust and I followed soon after.

In the wake of our departure from the SA, we were dismissed as “Labourists” or “reformists” preoccupied with “formalistic bourgeois morality”. SWP leaders put it about that we were going to go to the police about the matter – an allegation that said more about their own petty mentality than it did about us.

The rest of the article here.

I think I am qualified to speak on this matter – it was my good self who revealed the outline of this  in Tribune (though comrade Deputy  Editor  wrote it under his by-line).

As Labour Briefing  supporter I followed Mike and Liz, left the Labour Party and joined the Socialist Alliance (SA).

They are some of the best comrades I have ever met in my life.

I was a Labour Party Branch secretary.

I was election agent for the SA candidate in Ipswich shortly after the General Election (2001) - during which I had resigned to join the SA  see  The Socialist Alliance: A Regional View.

That by-election  was not a happy experience.

The SWP candidate Peter Leech was, to put it mildly, not an easy person to work with.

Amongst his many foibles he had this bizarre belief that the SWP were a ‘revolutionary party’.

But I digress.

Comme dirait l’autre, the SWP: I bleeding hate ‘em.

 

 

From the Big Sectarian Song Book.

Hat-Tips to Vaultist Michael Ezra and to Pete Shield for reminding us all.

The Big Sectarian Songbook, 1987

SWP LOVE SONG TO TED GRANT

(Wonderful World)

Don’t know much about history
Marxism’s still a mystery
Don’t ’bout the line that Lenin took
‘Cause I’ve only read Tony Cliff’s book
But if you’d sign a non-aggression pact
We’d support an Enabling Act
And what a wonderful world it would be

Now I don’t claim to be a real Marxist
All I’m trying to say is maybe if the Millies
Would all join Socialist Worker
Then the Labour Party would go away.

57 VARIETIES
(The Chicken Song)

We’re a small Trot sect
With a small red student base
But we dream one day
That we’ll rule the human race
People laugh at us
But we’ll show the world they’re wrong
Overthrow the State
While we sing this left wing song

Build a Workers’ Front
Sell a paper to your gran
Have a fuse then split
Be as wacky as you can
Caucus in a letter box
Change your name another time
Turn to industry
And then alter all your lines

There’s fifteen of us
We’re the vanguard of our class
Proletarian
With a dialectic task
Met this bloke in Greece
Now an international’s formed
Like the Bolsheviks
When the Czar’s Palace they stormed

Have a faction fight
Write polemics by the score
Purge your tendency
And reduce your ranks to four
Call for unity
Say the enemy is Benn
Liquidate in Workers Power
And then do it all again

Become entryists
Utilise the bourgeois courts
Launch an armed struggle
Try and build a base in Shorts
Call a general strike
Like Possadas  look to the stars
For you never know
Perhaps there’s a loony Trot in Mars

The Red Mole Song of Tariq Ali.

I met Tariq Ali on an Underground Train

Like a Bloated Red-Mole in Considerable Pain.

He said he’d been there since a quarter-past nine.

Trying to find the majority Line.

IMG, IMG, fear and the dread of the whole bourgeoisie,

IMG, IMG, volumes and volumes of bankrupt theory.

Christopher Hitchens and Richard Seymour: a Trial.

Hypothrophied Christophobia?

We await this book with bated breath,

Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Seymour Blistering and timely interrogation of the politics and motives of an infamous ex-leftist. Among the forgettable ranks of ex-Leftists, Christopher Hitchens stands out as someone determined to stand out. Rejecting the well-worn paths of hard-right evangelism and capitalist “realism,” he identified with nothing outside his own idiosyncrasies. A habitual mugwump who occasionally masqueraded as a “Marxist,” the role he adopted late in his career—as a free radical within the US establishment—had ample precedents from his earlier incarnation. It wasn’t the Damascene conversion he described. His long-standing admiration for America, his fascination with the Right as the truly “revolutionary” force, his closet Thatcherism, his theophobia and disdain for the actually existing Left had all been present in different ways throughout his political life. Post–9/11, they merely found a new articulation.

For all that, the Hitchensian idiolect  was a highly unique, marketable formula. He is a recognizable historical type—the apostate leftist—and as such presents a rewarding, entertaining and an enlightening case study.

This is a recent example of Seymour’s take on Hitchens (Guardian May 2012),

Yet in his final years, Hitchens resembled nothing so much as the wretched apostate assayed by William Hazlitt – haunted by “the phantoms of his altered principles”, driven “to loathe and execrate them”, offering “all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards… at the shrine of matured servility”, becoming, at last, “one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself”. And it is a sorry thing, but I suspect it is that Hitchens who has been posthumously honoured by the Orwell prize. *

The Seymour ‘idiolect’ , ‘Forgetable ex-leftists”, “Damascene conversion”, “habitual ‘Muwamp’ with post-Marxist ‘articulations’, “Theophobia” (?) with all the laboured citations from Hazlitt that begin with “wretched  apostate”, merits perhaps a short, very short, study of its own.

Harry’s Place remarks on the need perhaps to look at Seymour’s own stand on another “contrarian”,  Alexander Cockburn.

We await a study of Cockburn and Counterpunch that deals with them as  publishers of authors from the neo-fascist Entre la Pume et l’enclume.

We will, however, restrict  ourselves to Hitchens and his politics.

Seymour has described Christopher Hitchens in  similar terms already on his memoir Hitch-22  (International Socialism),

Given Hitchens’s political inconsistencies, Hitch-22 is better than it ought to be, a fact which is a consequence of his undeniable talent A petty bourgeois individualist, in his last years Hitchens identified with no tendency other than his own, and could be found defending his former radicalism even as he embraced imperialism and American nationalism. A Mugwump who occasionally masqueraded as a “Marxist”, he was, as Terry Eagleton put it, in some ways “a reactionary English patrician, in other ways a closet Thatcherite, and in yet other ways a right-leaning liberal”. These characteristics, always active elements in his political personality, were dominant in his later years.

The Tendance began a review of the same work with these words. Handy, and no doubt satisfying to their author, we do not use words like “petty bourgeois”, or “mugwump” (the latter because we’re not certain as to what it means). “Closet Thatcherite” is a little clearer but what by the way exactly is a ‘closet’ in this context? Is it something to with Hitchens’s  gay youth? “Masquerade”, delightful as it sounds, with all the associations of court balls and fancy-dress, is not a word we employ often, if ever. Here is looks, simply worn-out.

Instead we said.

Christopher Hitchens is one of the most talented polemicists of the last decades. The former International Socialist, left-wing journalist “as someone who had spent much of his life writing for The Nation and the New Statesman” he became an enthusiast for Humanitarian Interventions, and assembled “an informal international for the overthrow of fascism in Iraq”. After calling for war on Saddam Hussein, he “stopped calling himself a socialist in 2002”. To most people of the left, Hitchens has been thereafter associated with Neo-Conservatism. There are others who still appreciate him, and are saddened at his present cancer, even while opposing liberal internationalism by force.

On 9/11 the Tendance did not moan about Liberal Imperialism or the Liberal Apology for Murder but summarised a different reaction.

But many of us were deeply affected by this inferno of death. Even those who are no longer ‘anti’ but simply non–American were profoundly troubled. I lived in a daze of sadness for days. In my guts brewed the utmost bitterness at those from the ‘left’ who announced that the US “had it coming.” But did this mean approving a ‘blow back’? Nothing could be less sure. Realist and ethical thinking on the call to overthrow Saddam, from its justification in claims about his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to the principle of parachuting in a new government in Iraq, indicated that the US-led Coalition’s plans looked shaky. But for Hitchens the time had come to join the bandwagon that would eventually roll into Iraq. He would take American citizenship and become “keener on the foreign policy response of the Administration than on its crude and hasty domestic measures.” (Page 250)

We were, then not uncritical of Hitchens.

But often in ways Seymour would ignore.

A passage on the SWP observes,

Even in the microcosm of the 1960s and 70s British far left some of the important divisions between those shaped by the authoritarian side of Leninism’s legacy and democracy were being played out. This was not just a matter of recognising the “cultism” and “mental and sexual exploitation of the young and credulous” by the Workers Revolutionary Party. (Page 88) For all of his tribute to Sedgwick Hitchens fails to mention that his mentor was opposed to the IS becoming the Socialist Workers Party (Here). Sedgwick argued that it was being built on the suppression of internal democracy. Hitchens took a few more decades to become publicly concerned about this incipient ‘totalitarianism’, or, more modestly that particular fly in the leftist ointment.

This is how Seymour has described Hitchen’s anti-religious views,

…the vulgar anti-Muslim rants and ugly blood-lust that he ventilated without care, and which sentiments formed a transparent motive for his turn to hypertrophic theophobia after the occupation of Iraq began to fail badly.  And what of the crude sociobiological reductionism that he pinned his mast to?  At this point, it is arguably more pernicious in its effects than even the encyclicals of the Catholic Church, or the opinions of Muslim scholars.

The Tendance has also analysed Hitchen’s on religion (New Religious Politics: How Secularists Got Lost) , though “blood lust” fails to have appear,

Christopher Hitchens uses great wit and a fine analytical razor to cut faith up. But he ends by calling religion ‘barbarism’ and suggests, in a windy generality, that it is a fount of totalitarianism (god Is Not Great. 2007).

On the political aspects of Islamism we have suggested,

The Arab Spring itself has opened up a new basis for world-wide democratic and social advance; one that directly confronts not just Western supported dictatorships, but also poses the problem of Islamist projects. A secular, that is ‘religion-neutral’ approach to opposing the ideology of various religious groups, including forms of Islamism, has already had an influence in the countries from which many European Muslims originated. This is now a key battle-ground. Morality, and the Sharia are at stake. Opposition to the desire of faith leaders to order public life, to restore a segmented organic while that globalising culture threatens. In Egypt and Tunisia the demands of Muslim ‘Constitutionalists’ who seek to seal public and private life around their ideology, by law, and (if need be) by intimidation, have been opposed. If genuine secularist internationalism is to emerge it has to liaise with political forces in the countries swept up in the Arab revolts. The potential for internationalist co-operation on these, and wider social issues, has never been greater. Unlike the majority of the British left, the French secularist left has nurtured contact with these forces, notably in North Africa.

On the Euston Manifesto and Hitchen’s political shift we expressed this judgement. Not one of anathema at apostasy but an observation as its descent into gut-reactions and futility,

Hitchens has played a part in a wider political trend. That is the shift of a part of the left away from Marxism and democratic socialism to a belated ‘anti-totalitarianism’. This reached a brief high-point in the UK with the Euston Manifesto (though it had long-standing European counterparts in journals such as the French ‘anti-totalitarian’ intellectuals and the reviews le Débat and Esprit). This makes universal moral claims against absolutist political regimes. Despite its supporters’ claims to defend reason it has let emotion overwhelm them. Without a Soviet enemy to fight, it focuses on a variety of targets, from Islamism, the remnants of Stalinism, and parts of the socialist left. These are attacked in lurid terms, as if one can raise the genuine menace of Islamism in various Moslem majority countries to a global threat, and tie to it a vast range of left-wing views, from relativism, post-modernism, and the political activities of small Trotskyist parties and leftish campaigns against War. Hitchens and his allies have attempted to define the political landscape in terms of a division of the world, between liberal ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’.

Our review of  Hitch 22 concluded,

(the) Coalition between anti-totalitarianism, armed-internationalism, and anti-illiberal views was never very secure. The failures of Middle Eastern policy, the desolation reigning in Iraq, the mire that is Afghanistan, weigh heavily. The ‘anti-totalitarian’ international began to disintegrate in Continental Europe some time back. In France, the division of the troops over the relationship between republicanism and liberalism erupted over a decade ago. Today it’s a realisation that the domestic right is the main illiberal threat dominates politics in many countries. Italy and France present some of the best-known examples of how attacks on liberty – social and political freedoms – from that quarter are more pressing than the prospect that a totalitarian left or Islamist Caliphate will come to power. In the circles closer to Hitchens awareness that social democracy – which they claim to support – has an enemy in the market state, has pushed some back to the left. Their reaction to the Liberal-Conservative Coalition impels many to also look again at the kind of passionate egalitarianism that Tony Judt argued for. How is Hitchens reacting? Hitch 22 shows few signs of seeing this. He is in danger of becoming an embarrassing reminder of long-past enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq. In his adopted homeland they say that being called history is not a compliment.

We stand by this.

Will Seymour be able to say the same about his writings in the coming years?

Will he become truly the Palme Dutt of the SWP ?

* Update: It is likely that it is Samuel Coleridge that the Hazlitt quote refers to. This is a clumsy comparison. Coleridge’s enthusiasm for Unitarianism, the beginning of the French Revolution and the Pantisocracy, were within a religious framework. “Coleridge’s writing during this period about what had gone wrong with society had a considerable influence on Christian Socialists such as Frederick Maurice and Charles Kingsley. However, Coleridge’s articles in support of Lord Liverpool and his Tory government in The Courier caused William Hazlitt to denounce him as a “turncoat”.

Seymour is no doubt aware that this stream of Christian ‘socialist’ thought was formed as a reaction to the Chartist ‘Physical force’ current. They supported spiritual and moral equality within a well-ordered, hierarchical, state and society.

The “apostate” Coleridge would  have had, from a modern left-wing standpoint, a dubious position to start from.

Mind you Hazlitt remained true...to Napoleon.

Callinicos and SWP on the NPA’s Crises.

As Mélenchon gathers support in the French presidential elections, Professor Alex Callinicos identifies the causes of the left-wing rivals of the Front de Gauche (the NPA crisis). Here.

“The first is a tendency to dismiss the forces occupying the political space between the LCR/NPA and the PS.

Well, as we have posted on this, at great length. Some credit to the Picquet Tendency who made this point would be due.

None is forthcoming.

Instead the Professor makes this point, “the NPA’s formation, when Christian Picquet, traditional spokesperson of the LCR right wing, led a breakaway, Gauche Unitaire, into the Front de Gauche.

Though he does say, “As it is, the NPA’s refusal to engage with the Front de Gauche, beyond a call by Besancenot for a unitary anti-capitalist presidential candidate that was not followed through by the party, has allowed Mélenchon and the PCF to set the agenda and present themselves as the champions of left unity—something that, as we may remember from Respect’s heyday in the mid-2000s, is enormously attractive.”

Followed by,

“The problem is that the NPA’s political life is centred on elections.”

Which is to say the least, not true.

But political life as such is centred on elections – when you actually have councillors and have had Euro deputies.

Which to my knowledge is not much of the case with the SWP.

Still he does talk about how bad institutionalised factionalism in the NPA is  - otherwise known as democracy.

Something the SWP internally is not too well-known for.

He then makes this charming observation,

“ The simple truth is that a substantial section of NPA activists take up a reactionary Islamophobic position towards questions such as the veil. “

Some might say that Respect, which the SWP helped found, is a reactionary communalist organisation whose leader, Galloway, has close ties to the reactionary Iranian regime and has supported blood stained tyrants across the Middle East.

We bet Krivine really likes being given lessons by the likes of Callinicos.

Occupy Movements and the Theology of Consensus.

Stifling 90% Consensus Rule has Religious Origins.

Below is in an important article.

 It clarifies some of the issues raised in  our review of Why it’s Kicking Off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions. Paul Mason. Verso 2012.

We warn however that it is wholly American centred, of the kind that seems to believe that the Occupy movement began in the Wall Street protests, rather than the much much larger Spanish Indignados some of whose ideas are expressed in the French book (which sold hundreds of thousands in its Castilian translation)  Indignez vous! (Cry out!),  by Stéphane Hessel (discussed on Tendance Coatesy here)

Kauffman’s valuable article, based on activist experience, sees  the consensus model’s origin  in Quakerism. 

We, by contrast, have traced a similar principle in European autonomist theory, notably in the manifesto, l’Insurrection qui vient. (Comité  Invisible 2007 discussed by the Tendance in 2009 here).

 
THE THEOLOGY OF CONSENSUS

L .   A .   K auffman

Occupy Wall Street from the start has embraced consensus decision-making, a process in which groups come to agreement without voting. Instead of voting a controversial plan up or down, groups  that make decisions by consensus work to refine the plan until everyone finds it acceptable. A primer on the NYC General Assembly website explains, Consensus is a creative thinking process: When we vote, we decide between two alternatives. With consensus, we take an issue, hear the range of enthusiasm, ideas and concerns about it, and synthesize a proposal that best serves everybody’s vision.”

Consensus has been adopted by a wide array of social movements over the last thirty-five years, and proponents make broad claims for it. They argue that it is intrinsically more democratic than other methods, and that it fosters radical transformation, both within movements and in their relations with the wider world. As described in the action  and book of an Earth Day 1990 action to shut down Wall Street, which included a blockade of the entrances to the Stock Exchange and led to some 200 arrests, “Consensus at its best offers a cooperative model of reaching group unity, an essential step in creating a culture that values cooperation over competition.”  Few know the origins of the process, though, and they shed an interesting and surprising light on its workings.

 
Consensus decision-making first entered the world of grassroots activism in the summer of 1976, when a group of activists calling themselves the Clamshell Alliance began a direct action campaign against the planned Seabrook Nuclear Plant.  

Many activists at the time were well aware of what feminist writer Jo Freeman famously called “the tyranny of structurelessness.” The tendency in some early 1970s movements to abandon all structure in the name of spontaneity and informality had proven to be not just unworkable but undemocratic. Decisions still happened, but without an agreed-upon process, there was no accountability.  

 The organizers of “the Clam,” as it was often called, were eager to find a process that could prevent the pitfalls of structurelessness without resorting to hierarchy.

Two staff people from the American Friends Service Committee, the longstanding and widely admired peace and justice organization affiliated with the Society of Friends, or Quakers, suggested consensus.   As historian A. Paul Hare has written, “For over 300 years the members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have been making group decisions ithout voting. Their method is to find a “sense of the meeting” which represents a consensus of those involved. Ideally this consensus is not simply ‘”unanimity” or an opinion on which all members happen to agree, but a “unity”: a higher truth which grows from the consideration of divergent opinions and unites them all.” The process, adherents believe, is in effect a manifestation of the divine. A 1943 “Guide to Quaker Practice” explained, “The principle of corporate guidance, according to which the Spirit can inspire the group as a whole, is central. Since there is but one Truth, its Spirit, if followed will produce unity.”

 
 Quakers do not, as a rule, proselytize their faith, and the two AFSC organizers working on the Seabrook anti-nuclear campaign were no exception. They introduced the decision-making method without any theological content. As one of the activists, Sukie Rice, told me in a 2002 interview, “Friends consider [consensus] a waiting upon the Spirit, that you pray that you will do God’s will, and that wasn’t there in the Clam. The Clam used it as a decision-making process that was consistent with nonviolence.”   Rice continued, “[The activists of the Clam] had no idea that Clamshell would be the prototype for all the other groups that took off from there, they had no inkling of that.” But indeed it was.

After the Clam, consensus became the accepted decision-making process among many segments of the activist left, especially those that embraced direct  action as central to their strategy, up to and including today’s Occupy Movements. And though Rice and her colleague were careful to exclude any explicit theology from their trainings on consensus, something of that religious origin arguably adheres to it up to the present day.   Perhaps it’s something about the reverence with which consensus is sometimes discussed in activist circles, leaving those who find it unwieldy to feel like apostates.

 
Perhaps it’s the assumption embedded in the process that division results from differing views (which can be reconciled) rather than competing interests (which often cannot).   Perhaps it’s the way it sometimes seems to be, well,an article of faith that consensus is intrinsically more democratic and more radical than other forms of decision-making. 

Consensus process has considerable virtues, but it also has flaws. It favors those with lots of time to spend in meetings; unless practiced with unusual skill, it can lavish excessive attention on the stubborn or disruptive. Occupy Wall Street has opened up for questioning so much that was previously taken as given. May it do the same with its own methods.