The Failure Of GR and Why The SWP Are To Blame

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday May 31, 2002 01:27 by Daniel Finn - Socialist Alternative rogerprotzlives at yahoo dot co dot uk

For the past year the radical left in Ireland (such as it is) has been preoccupied with disputes over Globalise Resistance. The arguments which developed almost immediately after the Reclaim the Streets march of May 6th brought the dispute into prominence once again. It would be fair to say that no topic has attracted so much attention on the Indymedia newswire. The partisans of GR indignantly deny that it is a front for the Socialist Workers' Party. The SWP dismisses the allegation as the carping of paranoid anarchists. But this view has come to be held by a wide range of people involved in anti-capitalist activism. In this article I want to explain how the failure of GR can be attributed to the actions of the SWP and its style of politics.

THE SWP AND UNITED FRONTS

Much of the suspicion of the SWP's role in GR derived from knowledge of its past record in united front organisations. There is no serious question that the most enduring of these organisations, the Anti-Nazi League in Britain, is run by the SWP, for the SWP. Tony Cliff himself, the party's founder and dominant figure, explained with admirable candour:

The question of ... the Anti-Nazi League being independent of the SWP was a problem for us a few years ago, at the present time it's not a problem at all. The leadership of the Anti-Nazi Leagie is in reality the SWP and we don't give a damn (1).

This remark was made in the seventies; that this practice continued when the ANL was revived in the nineties is confirmed by the testimony of ex-SWP members. They were told to make sure that the leadership of all local ANL groups was dominated by the SWP (2).

This need not be true of all groups within which the SWP has a presence. The Socialist Alliance, for example, seems to have avoided the fate of the ANL and remains a broader church in which groups such as Workers' Power and the ISG operate, along with many non-aligned socialists. But this may be explained by the fact that the SA was not initiated solely by the SWP. The same cannot be said about the Irish SA set up by the SWP (3).

So there is clearly a history of the SWP establishing front groups, under its control, for the sole purpose of recruiting new members. There were certainly grounds for mistrust.

APOCALYPSE NOW : THE SWP'S PERSPECTIVE

To understand the behaviour of the SWP it is necessary to discuss its ideology at some length. For the last decade the SWP and its affiliates in the International Socialist Tendency have been committed to a catastrophist perspective on world affairs. This perspective is summed up in the phrase "the 1930s in slow motion" which is said to describe the predominant features of contemporary capitalism. This perspective has led to consistently erroneous predictions. In the early nineties Chris Harman, one of the party's leading theoreticians, argued that given the rise of far-right parties in Europe, it would be necessary for revolutionary parties to achieve a breakthrough in the short-term; otherwise we would all soon be in concentration camps.

This was followed by a prediction that Tony Blair's election as British PM would be followed by a massive polarisation of society with huge gains for the far left and far right. Parallels were drawn with France in the 1930s when the Popular Front was elected. Needless to say, such a situation never materialised. The Irish branch of the IST has made its own contribution to the apocalyptic scenario, predicting in 1998 that the Irish economy would collapse within six months.

No rethink within the IST was prompted by the failure of reality to conform to theory; rather, the British SWP has taken to hounding dissidents out of the Tendency altogether. There had already been splits in Canada and New Zealand before a lengthy dispute between the SWP and the American ISO led to the expulsion of the latter from the IST in 2001; this was accompanied by a split in the Greek party, with the splitters attacking the catastrophist perspective as the root of their party's troubles. Alex Callinicos, the de facto leader of the IST since Cliff's death in 2000, warned against "complacency", explaining that the "errors" of the the ISO could be repeated by any group within the tendency (4). In such a hothouse atmosphere there was little chance that the Irish SWP leadership would challenge the London-based theoreticians and their dogma.

This lapse into catastrophism has a lengthy history within the Trotskyist movement; the SWP have followed a well-trodden path. But while the doom-laden predictions of groups such as the Workers' Revolutionary Party condemned them to irrelevance, a revival of the left has taken place in the past few years, lending a certain credibilty to the SWP's pronouncements. The SWP has been unable to form a balanced and realistic view of the anti-capitalist movement because of its distorted view of the world; they have tended to exaggerate promising but limited developments out of all proportion to justify their own rhetoric. But the revival of activism in the past few years has given the SWP the opportunity to reach a broader audience.

MONOPOLISE RESISTANCE?

The SWP had little part in the early stages of the movement's formation, but once Seattle had shown its potential significance, they were not slow to throw themselves into action. The build up to Genoa provided the first real test of the movement. In the previous few months Globalise Reistance had been established in the UK. I can't claim any detailed knowledge of the situation in Britain (5). But it would be surprising if it differed greatly from the story in Ireland.

A conference was announced under the title "Globalisation and Resistance". As the conference was drawing to a close a member of the SWP leadership suggested the formation of a network to be called Globalise Resistance. The illusion of spontaneity was spoilt somewhat by the choice of name, borrowed directly from the British group.

A further conference to properly discuss what the nature of the group should be was promised at a later date; it is still to materialise.

In its early stages GR attracted a broad range of people on the left, including many non-aligned activists. Its main focus was on building for the Genoa protest, and in this respect it was quite successful. But it was in Genoa where the trouble really began. The British SWP insisted on its leading role in the GR contingent; decisions made at GR meetings were over-ruled by SWP members who took charge assertively. The same pattern was repeated within the Irish group where SWP members irritated many with their high-handed and domineering behaviour. Soon Gluaiseacht became the first group to walk out of GR Ireland; they weren't to be the last.

Despite this everyone returned from Genoa highly motivated to build a successful group in Ireland. But it wasn't long before things turned sour. Our own experience in UCD is probably typical (it would be useful for other people to contribute their stories about GR). The members of the embryonic GR group in UCD decided to change its name in advance to Global Action. The change was in part aesthetic (anyone outside the SWP who likes the name Globalise Resistance has yet to be identified). But it was also motivated by a desire to distance ourselves from the developing fracas over GR; whatever about the Irish group, at this stage it was beyond doubt that the British version was run by the SWP. Changing the name was a simple way to show that our group was going to be more than a recruitment front (as such, it was supported by the UCD branch of the SWP).

The change was greeted with horror and indignation by the two leading organisers of GR (both SWP full-timers). The group member held responsible was subject to abuse and accusations of "undemocratic behaviour" and "splitting the movement". When it became clear that the UCD members of the SWP were unwilling to support the leadership's line, they backed down and accepted the name change (thereafter their attention switched to the fight against heresy within the UCD branch, a story that has been told at some length elsewhere (6) - this also provides some useful insights into the nature of the SWP. But I digress).

No opportunity arose to propose such changes at a national level, as the promised national conference was postponed indefinitely. GR progressively began to fall apart as groups such as the WSM and Attac walked out. The line between GR and the SWP became less and less clear; the theme of Marxism 2001, the party's annual showcase, was "Globalisation and Resistance".

RECRUITMENT SWP-STYLE

At this point it needs to be said: there is absolutely wrong with trying to recruit members while operating in a group such as GR. There is also nothing wrong with trying to win the group over to your position. A quote from one of its members that has frequently been used against the SWP ("A united front is a way for a tiny minority to win over the majority") in fact contains nothing objectionable in itself. The problem lies with the manner in which this is conducted.

I have criticised the SWP's evangelical style of recruitment elsewhere (7). Its approach of harrassing anyone who attends a meeting or a march until they buy a paper and/or divulge their phone number is Iinseparably related to its catastrophism. Unable to explain why it has yet to become a mass revolutionary party, the leadership concludes that more effort is all that is required and drives its members into a frenzy of recruitment. This approch can be successful in the short run but ultimately antagonises more people than it attracts. It is damaging both to the SWP and to GR.

Furthermore, there has been no serious attempt by the SWP to win people over to its ideas by thoughtful argument. In fact there has never been any forum for debate between the different tendencies within the movement, green, anarchist, socialist etc. The SWP is guilty of profound intellectual arrogance, summed up in its presumptuous claim in Genoa that "we are the only ones with an overall political perspective for this movement". Refusal to accept that others involved in the movement have anything worthwile to say is hardly conducive to productive discussion.

The SWP's insistence that revolution is nigh lies at the heart of GR's failure. After returning from Genoa, members of the SWP's leadership group informed us that "masses of people want to tear the head off the bourgeoisie" and that the most pressing danger was that the SWP would be outflanked on the left by popular opinion. A year on, the head of the Irish bourgeoisie remains obstinately in place; the "anti-capitalist mood" is still nowhere to be seen. All we have is a lot of bitterness and ill will.

CONCLUSION

The SWP are likely to reject the arguments of this article as contemptuously as they have dismissed previous criticisms. It is true that their behaviour in GR has not been as crude and idiotic as it might have been. They haven't (so far as I am aware) packed meetings with their own supporters to guarantee artificial majorities. GR includes still includes some non-SWP members. But the whole point of a recruitment front is that it is broader than the existing party.

Anyone who still believes the SWP's line that all criticism of its behaviour is paranoid and irrelevant (most recently expressed by Simon Basketter on Indymedia) should consider these questions. Why is the SWP utterly intransigient about the name "Globalise Resistance", and has been from the start? Why has there still not been a conference more than a year after GR was set up? Why have Gluiaseacht, Attac, the WSM etc. left? Are they all incorrigible SWP bashers? Or is there something else wrong?

The Reclaim the Streets demo was the first event of any significance for the movement in Ireland. We're finally making the news for something we've done ourselves. If all the problems with GR had been sorted out before, we would have an existing organisation ready to bring in new members and put across our views in the national media. Instead we had an immediate row. Since George Monbiot gave a talk in Dublin earlier in the year GR seems to have grown somewhat, but none of the underlying problems have been adressed. It is still to all intents and purposes run by the SWP's Political Committee.

If the SWP are really proud of their behaviour over the past year, they should consider the damage they have done to their own party, never mind GR. There is no contradiction between establishing a broad-based, democratic group and advancing the SWP. On the contrary, if the SWP had taken the initiative in setting up GR, had shown proper sensitivity to the concerns of others, and had been instrumental in the creation of an effective anti-capitalist group in Ireland, they would have greatly improved the image of their party. If they had put forward their ideas through intelligent argument instead of trying to ram them down everyone's throat, they would have been recruited many new members. Instead they are the targets of invective for everyone from Gluaiseacht to the Socialist Party. Martyrdom may be a consoling delusion, but when they apportion the blame for this situation they should look closer to home.

What we need now is a fresh start. We need to start discussing the basis of a new group and in the not too distant future hold a conference where all the necessary arguments can be thrashed out. This has to be done if we're going to bring the movement home to Ireland and give the slogan "Think globally, act locally" some meaning. Rallying around GR in the name of unity would be worse than useless.

(1) Quoted in "The Far Left in British Politics", John Callaghan

(2) See the "ISG Discussion Document" at www.angelfire.com/iso/journal/

(3) For an attack on the SWP's conduct, see the website of Socialist Democracy, a Belfast-based group who took part in the SA

(4) See "The Anti-capitalist Movement and the Revolutionary Left", Callinicos' theoretical justification of the ISO's expulsion.

(5) For a critique of GR Britain from an eco-anarchist perspective see the article "Monopolise Resistance" (at www.socialistalternative.cjb.net)

(6) See "UCD SWSS Disaffiliation Documents" at www.socialistalternative.cjb.net

(7) Ibid