Steward in SWP Backed Mêlé, “Kick their Cunts in”.

Kick Their Cunts in Say Some.

In Glasgow, Saturday, faced with protests against the SWP,

… something happened at the Glasgow Anti Bedroom Tax demo yesterday, and it needs to be talked about. It happened because a rape apologist was invited to speak on the platform. Dave Sherry was invited to speak in his capacity as UNITE Scottish Federation of Housing Associations branch secretary, but one of his other roles is as a member of the Disputes Committee of the SWP which it has emerged has delivered a “not proved” verdict in the case of senior party member Martin Smith raping a teenage member of the party. It has also taken it upon itself to “rule” on several other rape cases. That Disputes Committee, and all in the SWP who have lined up to support it and silence internal dissent against its decision to even entertain holding its own rape trial, let alone come to the decision that they “didn’t think that Comrade Delta [Martin Smith] raped W” (Candy U, Disputes Committee member, from leaked transcript of an SWP conference), is a Committee of rape apologists.

“ One unknown young female steward was very keen to let every female Sherry protestor know that she wanted to hurt them, threatening various women with ripping their throats out/kicking their cunts in/stabbing them. I very much doubt she was SWP and to be honest it was more upsetting to see older people who should have been diffusing that situation for both her own safety and ours actually egging her on – it seemed to be a pretty clear example of them using a working class woman as their disposable attack dog while they stood comfortably behind her. For all anyone knew she could have personal reasons why her immediate response to feeling under attack was to threaten violence, and the stewards and bystanders who definitely knew exactly what we were protesting against had a duty not to allow the situation to escalate to threats of violence (but you know”

This is the report we have.

There have been no denials.

Julian Assange Joins SWP.

Julian Assange: Soon to be Selling Socialist Worker.

In a shock move Julian Assange has joined the British Socialist Workers Party.

In a Press Statement from the Ecuadorian embassy Julian said,

“The SWP’s stalwart anti-imperialism is second to none.

The IS tradition and the Permanent Arms Economy, not to mention Cliff’s views on State Capitalism, are right on line.

They way they replied to some unpleasant women in Glasgow on Saturday deeply impressed me.

But it is the fashion with which they have dealt with accusations of rape against Comrade Delta which has really struck home.

My team of lawyers is at present negotiating with the Swedish authorities to arrange that the allegations against me be settled by the SWP Disputes Committee.”

The SWP  announced, “Julian is right to fight US imperialism, and right to bring assault cases to our Disputes Committee. “

On the American International Socialist Organization: the Joy of Sects.

 

Since the Fall of the British SWP some people have got interested in the American IS (full name International Socialist Organization).

Now there are some solid reasons to like the International Socialist Organization (though I can’t say I will ever get round to that ‘Z’).

Let me list them.

• They have a link with Hal Draper, who is the Tendance’s all-time favourite American Marxist (also about the only one,  but there you go). We are aware that there were, shall we say, differences between Draper and the ISO  (see in detail here) But their basic  ideology, democratic Marxism,  is not too far off ours.
• My beloved comrade Steve Buttle (1 January 1953 – 5 June 2012), the footballer, was a member of the ISO in Seattle for some years. He had a good opinion of them.
• The British SWP CC don’t like them. The CC  told the ISO  to sod off because they had some sensible things to say about the anti-globalisation movement. That is, as far as we can grasp, they said was not the next wave of the world revolution. The ISO were right, doubly right.

Against this we have this.

• They sell a paper and have an on-line daily called Socialist Worker.
• Oh and there’s this,

 

“ISO: The Joy of Sects

John Lacny

A WIT once remarked that of all the Jesuits, the worst are the Protestant ones. I have come to the conclusion that this cogent observation has a counterpart when it comes to the world of the sectarian left: of all the Stalinists, the worst are the Trotskyites.

While the group has the good sense to call itself the International Socialist Organization, rather than ridiculously terming itself a “party”, it makes no secret that its activities are intended to be the “beginning stages” of building a party. (No doubt the plan is to follow the example of its parent organization, the International Socialists of Britain, who renamed themselves the Socialist Workers Party in the mid-1970s. The group’s own estimates – which are not necessarily to be trusted – put its membership at over 10,000. That’s a lot o’ Trots, but even still does not qualify as a real political party. The designation is arbitrary, and ultimately rests only with the group itself.) And the kind of party it intends to build is clearly to be modeled on classic Leninist lines, with an emphasis on the principle of “democratic centralism”.

The comrade continues,

I know for a fact that there was at least one purge within the Pittsburgh branch some two or three years before I arrived on campus. The local commissar who was directly responsible for it told me her version of the story, beaming with pride at how she had engineered a virtual coup to clear out the “petty-bourgeois intellectuals” from the branch. I have spoken to several of those who were purged as well, and their story jives with that of the apparatchik – excepting, of course, that it is told from the other side. Apparently, the Pittsburgh ISO had around a dozen members at the time the above-mentioned member arrived from the branch in Providence, Rhode Island.

This member got in contact with “the Center” (the ISO’s name for its Politburo in Chicago), which in turn sent an agent to Pittsburgh to set the branch on the approved course. He held a meeting in which he denounced the members for allegedly running a mere “intellectual” talk shop, for insufficient aplomb in selling Socialist Worker, for not recruiting enough members, and for being “petty-bourgeois”. All of the branch quit, with the exception of the local enforcer of the Party Line.

This particular action was part of a wave of crackdowns by the Center on branch autonomy throughout the country. And while I cannot substantiate the hunch, there are indications that there may be another purge occurring within the ISO right now. This is a ripe time for such an event, because the ISO has undeniably seen some growth in its membership since the victory of the Teamsters’ strike at UPS, which raised the profile of the labor movement in general. Having temporarily switched to a more liberal membership policy, the Center may now be trying to fully impose organizational discipline on newer members. The branch in Pittsburgh was far too small to exhibit any of the telltale signs of this, but I have heard stories of members in other cities being insulted for being “class traitors” and for “opting out of the class struggle,” with some leaving the group in tears.

And even in Pittsburgh, I recently talked to another member with years of experience who left after a barrage of insults (a matter to which I will return), thus reducing the membership of the Pittsburgh branch to five. A fine achievement, indeed, for a group that expelled ten or twelve “petty-bourgeois intellectuals” several years ago for their ostensible failure to recruit enough members.

Read the full article here.

Sticks in yer gullet.

No amount of pro-ISO comments can wipe that away.

 

Weekly Worker Announces New Intergalactic SWP/CPGB (Provisional Committee) Bloc.

Say HISlaH to new Weekly Worker Initiative!

“Feminists do not look terribly much like allies just now” with these words cde Paul Demarty announced the newly launched SWP/ CPGB (Provisional Committee) Intergalactic Bloc.

 He continued, “Now the curtain-twitcher’s finger is being wagged at the SWP – and it has no answers at all.”

The CPGB (Provisional Central Committee Planet Venus and Mars Sectors, Tendency 3), went on to say,

“The succesful campaign of cde. Jerry Hicks for Presidency of the The United Federation of Planets, is the way forward.

As the Weekly Worker merges with SW and we become a daily, our  ”very style of politics practised by the SWP” becomes a breath of fresh air to all species.

Our ongoing negotiations with our Klingon Empire comrades show the potential is there.

Onwards and Upwards!”

End of Internal Document.

Laurie Penny, Brendan O’Neill, the SWP and Feminism.

The SWP and rape: why I care about this Marxist-Leninist implosion

Laurie Penny describes the way the SWP Disputes Committee has handled allegations of rape.

She notes,

So far, so throat-closingly vile – but why should we care about the implosion of a Marxist-Leninist party with a few thousand members? Here’s why. The SWP is small, but it has been a significant organising force on the British left for more than 30 years, taking a leading role in coalitions like Stop the War, Unite Against Fascism and, recently, the fight against austerity in the nation’s poorest communities. Its affiliate parties in Europe and the Middle East, like Germany’s Die Linke, also punch above their weight in terms of influence. Lots of writers, thinkers and journalists have been members of the party; some still are. I’ve never been a member, but it matters that it is disintegrating because its leadership cannot confront its own misogyny.

Let’s leave aside the claim that Die Linke is one of the SWP’s “affiliate parties” – it isn’t.

Penny concludes, rightly,

In fact only one question truly matters: do you believe that it is possible to fight for a better world, for a world of justice, tolerance and liberty, while simultaneously denying the agency and autonomy of half the human race? And if you do, just what kind of a better world are you fighting for? Socialism without feminism, after all, is no socialism worth having.

Three cheers for comrade Penny – though we suggest she gets a more modern account of the British Left than ‘As Soon as this Pub Closes‘ which she has famously read.

Brushing  up on what “Marxism-Leninism” (definitely not SWP territory) is would also help.

But Penny is right.

So, let’s back the “women on the left, along with those brave men who support the fight against abuse and exploitation” who have put their heads above the parapet.

Cue for the Spiked-on-Line’s Brendan O’Neil to claim in the UK Huffington Post,

I’m no fan of the Socialist Workers’ Party, so I won’t be losing much sleep over the fact that it is currently imploding under the weight of two sex scandals. But I do find it intriguing that this intellectually moribund organisation is having the final nail pounded into its coffin, not by the state or by the right, but by feminism.

The SWP, one-time declarer of war against mighty capitalism, is being done in by feminist disdain rather than by free-market fundamentalism. And it isn’t the only one – more and more radical left-wing groups are meeting their ends at the hands of feministic finger-pointing.

Cue for the columnist for  money-making scam, The Big Issue, to skim through a few ideas.

You can’t help thinking that some observers are turning the SWP’s two alleged victims of rape into Trojan Horses against Trotskyism, using them as battering rams against an ideology and party that they never much liked.

Left-wing radicals always feared, or perhaps fantasised, that they would be battered by the forces of the state. But it’s feminism that is pushing them over the edge.

If you have little idea of what “feministic” or indeed feminism,  is, and why it is a bad thing, he elaborates,

Rather, the crises in these radical groups reveal the divisive and destructive impact of identity politics, of which modern-day victim feminism is a key strand.

Now we heard that one, er, rather a long time ago.

I recall ‘identity politics’ as something around in the late 1980s.

In No Logo (1999), Naomi Klein, after a long series of socialist feminists, leftists and Marxists, took identity politics to pieces a couple of decades ago.

But here we this repeated, with a twist.

It is a problem because,

Firstly because radical leftism was built the idea of universalism, on a belief in a common cause, whereas the politics of identity is particularistic, pitching women against men, disabled people against the abled-bodied, gays against straights, and so on. And secondly, where the old left was driven by a conviction that human beings are strong-minded and strong-willed, capable of governing both their own destinies and the world they live in, modern-day identity-obsessives promote the cults of fragility and victimhood instead, the idea that people are easily harmed by words or unfortunate experiences and thus might occasionally need the state to look after them.

Robert Hughes, you should be alive in these days, the Culture of Complaint (1993)  is reborn!

‘Identity politics’ are all about healing the lame, exalting the sick, gays and women against straights and men.

“Fragility” and “victimhood’?

Call the State!

O’Neill does not need any account of what a variety of feminists says (there was  a guide to its strands as complex as As Soon as This Pub Closes).

Nor that the women leading the campaign against the violence and abuse inside groups like the SWP are socialists committed heart and soul to the universal principles of equality and liberty.

So he turns to very former Communist Beatrix Campbell for a few toss-away lines on Communism.

“.Left-wing radicalism is “macho, manic”, she said; it “valorises conquest of nature and other humans”; it is a “men’s movement masquerading as egalitarian and socialist”.

In short, the old Socialistic worldview was just too darn cocky, too ambitious, too keen on exploiting nature’s resources to create a world of plenty, and thus it needed to be put in its place by the more caring, apparently mumsy creed of feminism. This, fundamentally, is what the feministic finishing-off of various radical left groups represents: the downsizing of the left imagination to make it fit better with the petty obsessions and humourless authoritarianism of today’s inward-looking politics of identity.

So much better is the Daddy, John Bird’s (MBE) and his Big Issue.

Their imagination soars to the conquest of the streets by the ‘homeless’ (one local seller here has been flogging it for over a decade).

This is what ex-Workers’ Revolutionary Party  Bird says nowadays,

If welfare is to be fairer and more useful to its beneficiaries it will have to come with strings attached. That could mean that those who have the time and ability should help the aged and the infirm, the mentally unable and the physically incapable in their communities.

Limiting the hit on the taxpayer by capping benefits is one necessary thing.

O’Neill has yet to pronounce on these issues.

But given his efforts to link Feminism with the State, and take a swipe at the left, you can’t help thinking that he’s going that way.

He is that humourless.