SWP loses sister organisation in America... again

international | anti-capitalism | news report Saturday September 20, 2003 18:06 by Turning Left

Left Turn, until recently the sister organisation of the Irish SWP in the USA has decided to sever its links with the International Socialist Tendency.

The observant amongst you will remember that this is the second time in a few years that British and Irish SWPs have suffered an acrimonious split with their organisation in the USA.

The first one, the International Socialist Organisation was thrown out by the British SWP for displaying a bit too much in the way of independent thought. A small group of SWP loyalists then set up Left Turn.

Now it looks as if Left Turn have had enough too. Below is a letter from Alex Callinicos, unelected head honcho of the International Socialist Tendency explaining the situation to his subordinates.


Dear Comrades,


Left Turn and the IS Tendency


This letter accompanies some correspondence between the Socialist Workers
Party in Britain and the comrades of Left Turn in the United States. As
you will see, the bottom line is that the comrades have decided to
dissociate themselves from the IS Tendency and have therefore asked us to
remove them from the list of IST organizations on our web-sites. We have,
of course, complied with this request, and we must ask you to do the same.
In an apparently related move, the original description of Left Turn on
the group's website as 'a network of anti-capitalists and revolutionary
socialists' has been modified by the removal of 'and revolutionary
socialists'.

This is a very unwelcome development, and one that requires explanation.
This is particularly so because the rather curt tone of the Left Turn
communications implies that their decision was the outcome of a long and
acrimonious debate between them and the SWP. This is not so. As I said in
my initial reply, the decision came to us as a bolt from the blue. To
understand what happened some background is necessary.

Left Turn was formed in the early months of 2001, on the initiative of
several comrades who had been expelled from the International Socialist
Organization, which had been, till then, the US affiliate of the IST. This
was the result of a debate between the ISO (US) and the rest of the IST.
At the heart of this debate was the ISO leadership's rejection of two
propositions accepted by the rest of the Tendency: (i) the Seattle
protests marked the emergence of a movement against global capitalism and,
more generally, the beginning of a new phase of radicalization; (ii)
revolutionaries should accordingly make themselves part of the movement,
starting not from their disagreements with other activists, but from the
much larger area of agreement that united the entire movement.

History - particularly the Genoa protests of July 2001 and the emergence
of the anti-war movement after 11 September - has decisively settled who
was right in that debate. The ISO (US) leadership's refusal to recognize
reality reflected a larger sectarian turn by the group. The founders of
Left Turn were expelled because they expressed views similar to those
shared by the rest of the Tendency. Their expulsion and the ISO (US)
leadership's role in helping to engineer a split in the Greek Socialist
Workers Party (SEK) prompted an IST meeting held in July 2001 to exclude
the ISO (US) from the Tendency; that same meeting invited Left Turn to
attend meetings of the Tendency.

Though there had been comparatively little contact between the SWP
leadership and the founders of Left Turn before the latter's expulsion,
there was some intensive discussion between us as to the nature of the new
group. We encouraged the comrades not simply to form a new revolutionary
socialist organization (a New Model ISO) but rather to create a looser
anti-capitalist network. Our thinking was that through an organic
involvement in the new movements the comrades (who were already active in
different networks) could begin to crystallize around them a cadre of
revolutionary activists unscarred by the sectarianism of the ISO (US). We
took it for granted that building such a network was a means to developing
a much more healthy revolutionary Marxist organization in the United
States.

Initially all seemed to go very well. Very early on Left Turn comrades
based in New York began producing a magazine of the same name. This made a
considerable impact: the group began to attract activists repelled by the
sectarianism of the established left organizations but wanting more than
the cult of spontaneity dominant in the anti-capitalist networks. Bilal
Elamine in particular played a leading role in organizing a very
successful conference on Globalization and Resistance in New York in
November 2001 that helped to rally the local left after 9/11. This dynamic
start did great credit to the comrades after the bruising experience they
had suffered in the ISO; it also reflected the strong support they
received from the IST and its sympathizers.

Relations with the rest of the Tendency were initially excellent. A
relatively large number of LT members attended Marxism 2001. Some of them
stayed on to join in the IST intervention at the great Genoa protests. I
spoke at the New York conference and afterwards took part in an excellent
caucus with about 20 LT comrades. We all shared in the grief when one of
the group's founders, Pete Moore, died in a car crash in September 2001.
Anothing founding member, Brian Campbell, wrote to me after attending the
IST meeting in London in January 2002 to 'say how useful I found the
international meeting'.

In the early months of 2002, however, it began to become clear that
significant disagreements were developing between Bilal, Brian, and other
leading Left Turn activists, on the one hand, and the two IST
organizations in closest contact with them, the British SWP and the
International Socialists in Canada. The comrades were resistant to public
sales of Left Turn (for example, at the anti-WEF demo in February 2002)
and to organizing any forms of Marxist discussion within the group.

It slowly emerged that the comrades conceived themselves as a loose
network of experienced activists involved in different single-issue
campaigns (Palestine, Colombia, etc.). Some of these activists had been in
the ISO (US); others were members of orthodox Trotskyist tendencies. They
didn't need Marxist education, it was sometimes argued. At other times, it
was argued that it was too 'early' to start trying to create a larger core
of revolutionary socialists. Like all stages theories this suffers from
the difficulty that if you don't start the way you mean to carry on, you
don't get to where you intended.

Inevitably, practice reshaped theory. Having deferred building a
revolutionary Marxist organization to the future, the comrades came to
abandon it altogether as an objective (cf. Sasha and Legba: 'the majority
of Left Turn members do not see building the revolutionary party as the
project of our organization.') Logically enough, the idea of recruiting
new members came to seem an unattractive one. Recruiting young radicalized
students became associated with the ISO (US)'s sectarianism. But what was
wrong with the ISO's methods wasn't recruiting youngsters, but rather
trying to enclose them in a hermetically sealed, intellectually arid
organization, instead of encouraging the new members to develop themselves
through actively participating in the struggles and debates inside the
movement.

Clearly one driving force in this process was a perfectly understandable
reaction by the founders of Left Turn to the sectarian practices of the
ISO (US). But in an important sense they are still accepting the terms of
debate set by the ISO. Effectively the ISO leadership posed a dilemma:
either a 'hard' Leninist organization or the loose, fluffy 'movement of
movements'. What the rest of the IST did was to reject this dilemma. We
say that the only way to build serious Marxist parties today is to be
thoroughly in the movement. The SWP, for example, is being transformed
through our role in building the Stop the War Coalition and other
movements such as Globalise Resistance.

What Left Turn has, in effect, done is to accept the dilemma posed by the
ISO (US) leadership: the difference is that the comrades have opted, not
for a sect isolated from the movement, but for liquidation into the
movement. In a certain sense this too is understandable. The movement is
diverse, lively, dynamic; in the hands of many far left groups, Marxist
theory is dull and dreary. The same temptation to dissolve ourselves into
the movement has been felt elsewhere in the IST: it was, for example, one
factor in the very serious crisis that afflicted Linksruck in Germany in
2001-2. And in a more mundane level, most groups, in turning towards the
movement, rightly dismantled existing routines and structures that were an
obstacle to this turn but didn't replace them with new ways of organizing
appropriate to the changed situation - a failure for which we have paid a
certain price, even though we are now trying to correct this mistake.

But simply to become part of the swarm is a form of surrender. As I have
tried to show in An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, the development of the
anti-capitalist movement has posed a series of tough theoretical and
strategic problems: the state, imperialism, reform and revolution, party
and movement. The revolutionary Marxist tradition - creatively applied to
the present - can help activists to address these questions. The movement
needs Marxism - Marxism of the right kind, a Marxism that is rooted in an
active and organized participation in the movement.

Politics abhors a vacuum. The failure of the leaders of Left Turn to
address these strategic problems is reflected in a certain decline in the
political quality of their magazine, which has tended to become a
collation of articles on specific issues lacking a coherent focus. Thus
last autumn Left Turn led on Enron rather than the coming war in Iraq that
was evidently becoming the dominant issue in world politics and
subsequently producing a huge anti-war movement in the US. The latest
issue reflects a certain adaptation to the kind of libertarian politics
dominant in many anti-capitalist networks in the Americas - celebrating
the 'horizontalism' of the movement, as if decentralized structures are
sufficient to take on global capital. Rejecting revolutionary Marxism
isn't adopting a neutral stance but opening up to other forms of politics.

The emergence of these divergences put the SWP leadership in a quandary. A
relatively brief and (for our part) amicable meeting between Bilal of Left
Turn and John Rees and me for the SWP at Marxism 2002 produced such a
vehement response from Bilal that we decided to pursue our disagreements
with great caution. Martin Smith's offer of a speaking tour was turned
down by Left Turn, but his visit to the West Coast last autumn involved
friendly and positive contacts with LT comrades in San Francisco, Seattle,
and San Diego.

During a visit to New York in March I had a frank but perfectly friendly
discussion with Bilal, Brian Campbell, and another comrade. I made clear
our desire to pursue the discussion in a constructive and
non-confrontational fashion and within the framework of LT's continued
connection with the IST, despite the ambiguities arising from the
participation of supporters of other currents in Left Turn. The comrades
did not dissent from this approach. Chris Harman on a visit to New York a
few weeks later had similarly friendly contacts with Bilal and Brian (with
whom he stayed), and later pursued the discussion by e-mail.

So why this sudden and brutal break a few months later? It is hard to be
sure looking in from the outside, but the driving force seems to have been
tensions within Left Turn itself. A scattering of comrades around the
country expressed two sorts of overlapping concerns. First, some at least
shared our worries about LT's failure to pursue the project of building
revolutionary socialist organization within the movement. Secondly, there
were concerns about the internal democracy of Left Turn. The main
complaint was that control of the magazine and over broader decisions (or
non-decisions) about the development of the group seemed to be in the
hands of a few founding members based mainly in New York and Washington DC
with no way for the other members to hold them accountable.

Argument over these issues seems to have produced growing tensions between
the leading comrades and in particular some activists in Baltimore. The
latter successfully pushed for a national meeting in Washington DC in
July. This initiative had nothing to do with the SWP. When we learned
about it we were concerned that, given the defensive way in which Bilal
had responded to John's and my criticisms, such a meeting would only
intensify the tensions within the group and between LT and the rest of the
IST.

We made these concerns clear to the three members of LT who attended
Marxism 2003 in London this July (none of the leading comrades from New
York or Washington came). At a meeting with them, Martin Smith and I
underlined that focusing on organizational questions is usually not the
best way to pursue an internal argument. We stressed that the broader
debate on the future of Left Turn should be pursued on a long-term and
fraternal basis and that confrontation should be avoided at the meeting in
Washington.

Because two of the Baltimore critics had connections with IS Canada (an
ex-member of the group and her partner), our Canadian sister organization
had been blamed by Bilal and his co-thinkers for the confrontation that
did develop at the LT national meeting. IS Canada has an entirely
legitimate interest in the fate of the Tendency in the US, given the very
close links between the workers movements and anti-capitalist networks
across North America. Two leading members of IS Canada, Michelle Robidoux
and Paul Kellogg, attended the meeting with LT comrades at Marxism 2003,
and argued along the same lines as Martin and I did. Michelle put this
approach at length on the phone to the ex-IS member in Baltimore before
the national meeting.

Despite all this (what seemed to us) good advice, the meeting was a
disaster. A bitter confrontation developed between the dominant comrades
in Left Turn and the two Baltimore comrades linked to IS Canada. It is
impossible to say at this distance whose fault this was. But the LT
leaders do have a heavy responsibility for what happened next. The two
Baltimore critics were summarily excluded from the group. As far as we can
tell, there was no vote or other procedure. The comrades were simply cut
off the LT e-mail discussion list.

It has to be said that this has certainly reinforced the concerns that had
been expressed earlier about the absence of democracy within the group. It
is simply amazing that most of the founder members should have taken such
an arbitrary action in the light of the fact that they themselves had been
expelled from the ISO (US) barely two years earlier (though it has to be
said that the ISO at least paid lip service to the formalities of
constitutional procedure). This episode - and the subsequent decision to
break with the IST - underline that the decentralized structurelessness
characteristic of many anti-capitalist networks isn't necessarily more
democratic than the representative structures traditional inside the
workers' movement.

In any case, it seems to have been the catastrophic meeting in Washington
that decided the leaders of Left Turn to force a break with the IST. This
decision involved no discussion with the SWP or any other sister
organization. Beyond a brief e-mail by Bilal to IS Canada blaming them for
what happened in Washington, the first communication with the rest of the
IST after the meeting was his e-mail of 2 September announcing their
decision to break. Sasha and Legba in their subsequent e-mail say that
this was 'a democratic decision of Left Turn members' taken by
'consensus'. Once again it's hard for an outsider to be sure, but one is
entitled to be dubious about this claim. Mike Davis, for example, Left
Turn's best known member (who shared our concerns about the group's
evolution), only learned about the decision from me. It seems as if the
'consensus' was one of those in the loop.

Plainly, however arrived at, the decision is one that we can only greatly
regret. It is natural to ask ourselves whether, in hindsight, there was
anything that we could have done to prevent to this outcome. It is hard to
see what this would have been. Given the hypersensitivity to criticism
that Bilal displayed after Marxism 2002, any attempt to pursue the
argument more vigorously would almost certainly have precipitated an
earlier break. Perhaps we could have tried harder to persuade the comrades
in Baltimore to avoid any confrontation with the dominant figures in Left
Turn. But this would probably have simply postponed the break.

This would have been a better outcome than the present one, since it would
have allowed the debate carry on. It wouldn't have changed the basic fact
that Bilal, Brian, and the other leading comrades in Left Turn have
drifted quite a long way politically from the IS tradition. They have
committed the opposite mistake to that made by the ISO (US) leadership.
Rather than build a sect isolated from the movement, they have liquidated
themselves into the movement. This error implies an assumption as present
in that made by the ISO (US) - that revolutionary Marxist politics
necessarily take a sectarian form, so that we have to choose between this
politics and the movement. As I have already pointed out, this is a false
dilemma that we have rejected. To be a real Marxist today you have to be
fully involved in the movement.

Left Turn's departure is certainly a sad loss for the IST, but Left Turn
will lose out as well. They are cutting themselves off from the Tendency
at one of the most exciting moments in our history, when we are expanding
dynamically thanks to our active involvement in the movements against
global capitalism and war. Having made a significant impact at last year's
European Social Forum and the World Social Forum, particularly in making
them the launching pads for the global day of anti-war protest on 15
February, we are preparing our interventions at the forthcoming ESF in
Paris and the WSF in Bombay. Many of us will be involved in further
protests against the occupation of Iraq on 27 September. And of course we
are in the thick of the struggle in our different countries. What a pity
that Left Turn is opting out of the Tendency now!

The comrades' regrettable decision doesn't mean that the US is a closed
country to the IST. We continue to have our supporters there - most
notably Mike Davis. Our Canadian comrades have many connections with
activists in the US, as does the SWP through the international anti-war
movement. And the door is always open to the Left Turn comrades -
individually and collectively - to rejoin us as the opportunities for
revolutionary socialists continue to widen in the new century.


Yours fraternally,
Alex Callinicos,
for the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers
Party (Britain)