Steven Simpson’s death should not be dismissed

Content Warning: Contains description of an ableist/homophobic killing.

by Maxi B

In the early hours of the 23rd of June, Steven Simpson was set on fire by 20 year old Jordan Sheard, who had gate-crashed his house party in Cudworth, near Barnsley. He had been verbally abused, stripped of his clothes and had phrases like “I love dick” and “gay boy” scrawled across his body. He was then doused in tanning oil and Sheard lit his crotch with a cigarette lighter, and the flames engulfed his body. Those involved fled as Simpson’s neighbour tried desperately to put out the flames. Simpson died the next day after enduring 60% burns to his body.

Steven Simpson’s brutal killing was the result of the hatred and humiliation caused to him because of his sexuality, and his disability. He was bullied, de-humanised and then killed. It follows the format of many killings of LGBTQ people world wide.

Sheffield Crown Court’s view on the matter has been frankly disgusting. Judge Roger Keen dismissed the crime as a ‘good-natured horseplay’ that had gone too far, and sentenced him to a unusually short sentence of three and a half years in prison. Sheard’s defence lawyer called what happened to Simpson as a ‘stupid prank that went wrong in a bad way’.

This was clearly a hate crime. Simpson was being taunted for his sexuality and his disability. He was devalued so much in the eyes of those involved, that they thought setting him on fire was somehow acceptable. He was a bright young man studying at Barnsley College, but his last moments alive on this earth must have been dehumanising, painful and terrifying.

How Judge Roger Keen can dismiss this so flippantly as “horseplay” is beyond me. He is re-enforcing the same notions that lead to Steven’s death: that homophobic bullying is fun, rather than a crime against LGBTQ people, that it is okay to mock or take advantage of someone’s disability, rather than looking out for them and treating them with respect, that setting someone on fire and burning them to death is “a joke too far”, rather than one of the inevitable consequences of the way we still treat people like Steven in our society.

It makes me sick to the stomach to think someone so young has been killed because he was different – and the frightening fact is that could have been any one of us that lives with a disability, or who is LGBTQ. Many have commented on the lenient sentencing of Steven’s killer, however I think this misses the point. The point here is the criminal justice system is complicit in the oppression of LGBTQ people and disabled people, when it makes comments like those of Judge Keen’s. It is churning out the very same ideas that lead to hate-crime.

It is not a joke, funny, or horseplay to treat someone in the way Steven was and we should not condone it as such. If we do condone this behaviour we are sending out the message that LGBTQ people and disabled people are fair game to be bullied and preyed upon. We are sending out the message that this okay for other young people to do what was done to Steven. It appears it is all okay with Judge Keen, just as long as you don’t kill someone.

But the point is, the way Steven was killed, was precisely a result of how he was treated. If he had just been treated like any other young person, with a bit of decency or respect, it would never have happened.

This is the message that Sheffield Crown Court should have put out. We should condemn Judge Keen’s remarks, call for him to make an apology, and call for Sheffield Crown Court to recognise the daily battle people like Steven face because of their sexuality and their disability. Sign the petition against Judge Keen’s remarks here: goo.gl/qxioc

Steven’s death should serve as a reminder of what our LGBTQ and disabled youth face today.

This article first appeared at Marxist Queen.

The actuality of a successful capitalist offensive

We've been waiting five years for a coherent left-wing response to the recession. We've been waiting three years for a coherent left-wing response to the cuts. Two years ago, I was asked at a talk how we could communicate the socialist solution to the crisis; I said it would be nice if we had one. It would still be a step forward today. If the extant strategies, groups or alliances were sufficient to deliver this, we would have it by now.

As it is, the only interruption to our "pervading dysphoria and utter perplexity" was brief, if giddy - followed by the briefer tumult of the riots and the panicked reaction from the Party of Order. The trade union movement fought, not an expansive struggle allowing it to hegemonise a wider movement against the cuts, but a typically narrow 'economic-corporatist' battle for a pensions deal roughly equivalent to what a Labour government would have offered. The last year was one of uninterrupted, quiet defeat for the most part. Labour continued to adapt to forces to its right. The government promised more cuts. The left-of-Labour forces remained fragmented, with each group championing its own 'united front' project. As for a left electoral project, a look at TUSC is enough to die a little inside.

***

Why have things been so bleak? We continually hear that the system is in 'crisis'. This should be great news for us, surely? We hate the system. This should be the moment when the Left advances and begins to prise open the integument...?

We have a number of apparently self-serving, but ultimately self-defeating, consolatory lines about this. For example: the Left is weak, yes, but the system is weak, and so is the ruling class and its governments: their hesitating, divided response to the crisis shows us this. However, the Euro-American ruling classes, whatever divisions and uncertainties have inhibited them in their short-term, tactical orientations, have displayed extraordinary unity on the long-term strategy of 'austerity'. And such has been their success in colonising the dominant parties, that parliamentary opposition to this objective is negligible, and almost entirely provisional and technocratic in articulation. And as much as the resources of the bourgeoisie have been tested, they have yet to a lose a serious fight.

Another, subsidiary, example: an underlying weakness on the part of the ruling class may be inferred from the fact that 'they' attack us in such a ferocious and indiscriminate manner. The logic here is that if the government and employers have to launch a sweeping, frontal attack on the living standards of the whole working class, this itself proves that the system is losing its ability to support the traditional bases of consent. Okay: there is an element of truth in this. But a prima facie ground for distrusting this logic is that if and when 'they' attack us with anything less than full, sweeping force, that too is interpreted as a sign of weakness. The government's early complacency led many of us to underestimate its technical virtuosity. Yet there is no sign of a simple, indiscriminate attack. In fact, the attack is not so frontal; it is a phased assault, deploying a diverse array of techniques which affect layers of the population in an uneven fashion. This is more sophisticated than simply 'salami-slicing' the working class, and defeating one section then the next, and so on. It involves mobilising residual and active elements of discourse to constitute new social categories, who are targeted in discrete ways. Consider, in addition to the greedy union member with gold-plated pensions, and the skiving benefit scrounger, the new phenomenon of the bedroom scrounger, the welfare recipient who is under-using space in her flat and should be removed to a pebble-dashed cupboard in Thamesmead. There are also, let us not forget, 'our people', 'the strivers' who are opposed to 'the skivers', and who are being offered certain material incentives even as their overall standard of living stagnates or declines.

A third example is the idea that because the cuts "can't work", the project will begin to collapse. In a sense, this is true. If the objective is GDP growth, then in the short run, austerity will just keep undercutting investment and growth. And of course it is also true that, in the long run, even if a new source of dynamism is found, these measures will just store up further pathologies. As a result, we can presume that both Marxists and left-Keynesians are 'proven right' in a different way every time the economy starts to dip again: the cuts 'aren't working'. This will undermine the authority of elected governments, just as much as unelected central bankers. It will produce incredibly bitter class struggles which it would be prudent to anticipate in our strategies. Yet, we find that the government actually benefits, to an extent, from a 'crisis' mindset - linked to a set of articulations about deficit, overspending, living beyond our means, etc etc. We find that by invoking the crisis, blaming the scroungers and systematically lowering expectations - they aren't promising us high times, but years of grim belt-tightening before the good old days return - the government gives itself a very long leash. Like Mrs Thatcher, the coalition government says 'iron times', 'backs to the wall', etc., and achieves a degree of quiescence as a result.

***

All of this is hardly to deny that the system is in crisis, or that this crisis will continue to produce bitter class struggles. I have defined the current situation as one dominated by an 'organic crisis', meaning a long-term, structural, multi-layered crisis that calls into question the ability of the whole system to reproduce itself. However, it is to say that this much over-used term 'crisis' has been doing a lot of covert intellectual and propaganda leg-work, which obscures what is really happening. Let us dissect it a bit. What exactly do we mean by a 'crisis'? In terms of the capitalist system, the dominant image from mainstream economics and bourgeois social science is of a state system that more or less efficiently reproduces itself until some imbalance or bad behaviour causes it to have a temporary rupture. In most cases, this is plausible, because the recession passes, and dynamism resumes. But in periods like the present, it loses even this surface resonance. That is why attempts to conserve the status quo end up having to be projects for its fundamental overhaul and renovation.

There is an obverse view which is not much more useful. This is the 'fundamentalist' catastrophism according to which capitalism is always progressively moving toward its worst crisis yet. At the base of this is a valid marxist insight, which is that the elements of a capitalist crisis are not exogenous or heteroclite, but actually integral to the reproduction of the system itself. That is, the system is reproduced through class struggle and intra-capitalist competition, which are the basic antagonisms that, through various mediations, tend to result in crises. These are the antagonisms behind the so-called 'law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall', through which marxists explain the most basic drive toward crisis: put crudely, capitalists in competition with one another strive to cut labour costs and reduce prices; they overaccumulate capital in doing so; they also reduce the total pool of potential profit, so that while individually they might hope to maximise their market share and thus profits, in the long-run they tend to create a crisis of profitability across the system. In the 'fundamentalist' version of this theory, the successive stages of capitalist development show a marked tendency to 'sharpen' crisis tendencies; the 'resolution' of each crisis, unless it involves a truly cataclysmic destruction of capital, merely stores up more pathologies. At last, the concept of 'crisis' is stretched so that it comes to cover a certain stage of capitalist development. The whole system, since a certain threshold, has been in a permanent state of crisis.

Such an approach occludes what is truly relevatory in Marx's account of crisis, which is that permanent crisis tendencies are part of the system's health and its dynamism. Of course there will be symptoms of ongoing crisis while the system is booming! Of course it will be rotting away in parts even while it is engorged, hypertrophic, in others! Subsuming long periods of reproduction and growth into the concept of crisis erases its specificity. Linked to this approach, sometimes, is an economistic reflex according to which the resulting class struggles erupt first on the terrain of industry, the direct capital-labour relation, which then results in a straightforward feedback from an economic crisis into a generalised political crisis of the system. The result of such an approach is that, when a real crisis does occur, far from preparing one adequately to act on it, it produces an apocalyptic complacency: this is, if not the final crisis of capitalism, certainly one of the last death convulsions, which will produce many symptoms along the way. We can tick them off as they arrive: industrial militancy, political instability, the revival of left reformism, the rise of fascism, etc. Eventually, the 'contradictions' will be sharpened to the extent of producing a revolutionary situation. The task of marxists in such circumstances will be to assist in this sharpening, through propaganda and interventions, while trying to provide the political leadership workers will need as they progress to that final battle.

If you don't recognise the above (only slightly caricatured) sketch, by the way, you could conclude that it isn't aimed at you. But I assert that such fatal tendencies do exist and are discernible in the way that revolutionaries have responded to the current crisis.

***

I have argued in a previous post that the ruling classes are usually best situated to respond proactively to a crisis, and to take advantage of it. The obvious corollary of this is that the institutions of the working class, and the Left, are usually not so well situated. Stathis Kouvelakis made the point that a real crisis of capitalism is also a crisis of the Left, both revolutionary and reformist. This is only logical. For while reformist parties get comfortable with governing in a particular way - maintaining a client base in office; cultivating their popular base by mobilising them against the government when out of office; sustaining their links with the trade union bureaucracy at all times - revolutionary parties get used to a certain method of self-reproduction, a certain routine, a certain balancing operation between different components of the party, and a certain set of perspectives that either guide their concrete actions or (as is often the case) soothe the symptoms of aimless drift and sharp, barely explained turns, with a general theoretical anaesthetic. A crisis upends all of that. The reformist party has to re-define its base, as traditional constituencies and political identities are shaken up; old methods of governance, be they welfare-capitalist or neoliberal, must be radicalised or abandoned. The revolutionary party likewise finds itself in need of new perspectives, a new base, a break with routines and entrenched dogma.

This brings us to the SWP. Must we? Yes, we must, and not for the last time. I have no desire to spend the rest of my political life writing about the party I have just left, but there is a necessary process of political clarification following such a break. I have until now defended the party's general lines and strategies, notwithstanding my Syriza heresy. But in the course of an acute crisis triggered by an unbelievable and unforgiveable rape cover-up, the contours of a chronic crisis linked to the lack of democracy, congealed dogma and strategic vapidity became clear(er). An accounting of this is called for, if the right decisions are to be taken now.

'It is no accident', as we used to say, that the SWP's protracted crisis has overlapped to an extent with the capitalist crisis since 2007. The credit crunch coincided with the manifest failure of an old method of leadership, and an old set of perspectives, and with a degree of turbulence in the party's base. The cuts are also going to exert a long-term impact on the party's means of self-reproduction. The SWP has one part of its base in an ageing public sector workforce, and another in an increasingly class-divided student body: austerity in practice has meant that the public sector workforce is going to be decimated, while a larger part of the student body is going to be made poorer and chained to debt. Given that the party didn't grow at all during the years of antiwar radicalism and constant discontent with New Labour, this is serious. An obvious response, supposing we are unable to prevent the cuts to massive neoliberal cull of the public sector, might be to ask how one builds in the unorganised working class, which is the overwhelming majority of it - indeed, it is one of the few growth sectors in capitalism right now.

However, austerity poses the more immediate dilemma: what do we need in order to reverse, halt or at least slow the cuts, and what can a revolutionary socialist party contribute to that? The current SWP leadership vaunts a 'rank and file' strategy in response to the cuts - although on inspection, one finds neither a 'rank and file', nor a strategy. The idea of a 'rank and file' strategy is based on the simple insight that, there needs to be a fight; the public sector unions have the means to lead the fight, but are always going to be betrayed by union bosses; and therefore we need to build a 'rank and file' network of militants capable of acting independently of and against the bureaucracy where necessary. In reality, what this amounts to is the creation of a party front that seeks to build influence over the left union bureaucracy in order to hopefully generate strike action, thus substituting (hopefully temporarily) for the initiative of the non-existent 'rank and file'. In theory, one could say that the appeals for action are formally directed at the union bureaucracy, but are actually addressed to rank and file workers, whom it is hoped will pressure the bureaucracy for action. In practice, it's probably more the other way about. Insofar as this produces results, one can cynically overlook the problematic character of relying on such operations. And indeed, some averagely intelligent people seem to have convinced themselves that the bureaucratic mass strikes of 2011 were effectively a fight between the SWP and the Tory government, in which the party was a tiny cog turning the massive cogs of the union bureaucracy. (I assure you, it's true.) All cynicism aside, SWP members played an important role in building support for such strike action as did occur - but as footsoldiers in a program of controlled confrontation devised by the trade union general secretaries, whose aim was to get the Tories to offer them roughly what Labour would on the pensions issue.

Aside from being a substitutionist strategy based on influence-peddling, which placed a ridiculous amount of prestige and authority on the shoulders of the man who could peddle such influence, the 'rank and file' strategy had other demerits. First, it left the leadership shrugging and mumbling vacuous generalities when it came to answering how the strategy hadn't delivered. After the sell-out of the pensions dispute, there was a long period of sobering defeat. But the CC's contributions to 2013 preconference bulletins offered no analysis of why. Of course, if the implicit answer was "the SWP isn't remotely the decisive factor in these struggles and cannot determine how the bureaucracy will behave", that would be true and sober: but such an answer would also sit uneasily next to the earlier triumphalism, and would evade the real question of why the strategy yielded nothing.

Second, aside from being substitutionist and elitist, the strategy was also an alibi of sectarianism. It was obvious early on that a unified anti-cuts movement was needed - a point I'll come back to. Many of the most effective challenges to the government were coming, not from the industrial coalface, but from the social movements, and it made sense to coordinate them sustain them beyond the immediate upsurge of rebellious frenzy. The party leadership knew this, and indeed claimed to be interested in helping build it. But, pursuing the 'rank and file' strategy, it actually preferred to maintain an ineffectual party front which could fill out a London meeting hall, but achieved little else. Partly this is reflects the pathology of splits: the party leadership obsessively avoiding the 'movementism' of the recently departed groups, and anything that smacked of it.

It was also obvious that there would be a space for some sort of radical left party, as Labour councils implemented the cuts and Ed Miliband shifted to the right. The party leadership sounded sensible notes on this. It responded appropriately to George Galloway's victory in Bradford, and lauded the Front de gauche. I recall the national secretary admitting, in a meeting set up by Socialist Resistance, that it wasn't enough to bang on about the struggle as if everything would be resolved on the picket line - we need a form of political representation, he said. It is true that the party newspaper reflected a sectarian line on Syriza, but not with any real conviction on the part of the leadership as far as I could tell. Even when I was lightly bollocked over coffee by Bishop Brennan and Father Jessup for my strident Facebook missives on the issue, they seemed far more worried about the offence to the Greek comrades than the argument itself, which I was permitted to spell out in more measured terms for the ISJ. Despite all this, the height our exertions on this terrain was TUSC - a misleading moniker insofar as it evokes anything other than a blunt instrument, and apt only so far as it recalls 'husk', as in 'chaff'.

Why did the party leadership plump for this hardly ideal situation, as if TUSC was the basis for anything? In part, I suspect this is because sections of the leadership opposed the whole idea of left realignment. But I suspect it is also because, to actually contribute to the process of realignment, the leadership of the SWP would have to deal with a massive lingering burden of mistrust. This pall resulted from our disastrously nuclear response to criticisms within Respect, some of which were obviously well-founded in retrospect, and the sectarian logic of our behaviour in the subsequent Respect break-up. It would have to be capable of demonstrating remarkable humility and good faith, which it was not. The party's official stance remained that George Galloway was overwhelmingly responsible, and we had at most made some regrettable errors in responding to reformist treachery. And it hadn't really broken with the 'punching above our weight' modus operandi that had led to the party's mistakes in Respect, the assumption that we should try to be in charge of everything. It wasn't capable of abandoning the dreary lash-up with the Socialist Party that was going nowhere, and striking out for something better, because that might involve accepting a subordinate position in a much wider formation, in coalition with forces that we would be unable to control.

This litany of complaint may seem overly harsh. In truth, when a struggle broke out in the last few years, the party acquitted itself reasonably well within its modest means. It did a good job of 'relating to' (a phrase for the stale cliches amnesty, perhaps) the student revolt. It was helpful in building support for mass strike action. It was also important that the party continued to take the right stance on the Arab Spring as it spread to countries that were the targets of US imperialism; but it also threw itself into the Gaza protests, for example. It stood up against a certain leftist moralism about the English riots. It has continued to take a hard line against Islamophobia, when some sections of the Left would be happy to capitulate to the Muslim-baiting under the rubric of a vulgar, idealist 'atheism'. And it carried out important work in UAF: in my opinion taking the right line on how to most effectively defeat the EDL in Tower Hamlets and elsewhere. And I think the paper struck a good line on Assange in a piece written by Tom Walker, who is now despised by the hacks more than I am. But generally insofar as the SWP proactively sought to shape the response to austerity, it largely failed, and instead succumbed to delusions of grandeur. Members of other parties and groupuscules can explain their own failure, of course - they have to, if they want to participate in this discussion. But I can only speak of the SWP.

***

We need to change course, badly. To be more specific, I think we need:

i) an anti-austerity movement capable of mobilising a hegemonic majority against the cuts. The 'crisis' will not do our work for us. It will affect people and relations in all sorts of ways, but our opponents will be working hard to construct a particular 'lived relationship' to the crisis that favours them. There is an article in a recent issue of the thrilling Parliamentary Affairs about the 'Winter of Discontent', which you might want to read in order to see how this is done. It demonstrates how the Right operated on lived experiences of hardship, violence and social breakdown in order to produce the imagined experience of a crisis produced by union power, nanny-statism and tax-and-spend 'socialism'. Remember that this in an era when workers were suffering massive de facto pay cuts and the Labour government was cutting spending and embracing monetarism to appease the IMF. Many workers were won to the Tories on the basis of this mythology. The point is that the alignment of forces can by no means be taken for granted because of the assumed historical pattern of capitalist crisis: political subjectivities have to be constructed, assiduously, along the main lines of antagonism. In the UK at the moment, there is no generalised political, cultural, social or industrial counterpoint to the Right's efforts. That's one reason why it was so easy to demonise the riots: there was only a weakly entrenched narrative that the cuts were probably going a bit too far, but a far more deeply rooted narrative that there was not enough discipline in schools, too much immigration, too much easy welfare for 'chavs', and too much freedom for 'feral youths'. That's why the most dynamically growing force at the moment is UKIP. We need a campaign that prepares the terrain around existing struggles and ahead of coming struggles and outbursts, that explains them in advance as responses to unbelievable class aggression and brutal state violence, not as the criminal actions of social deviants.

I think we need a generalised, 'nationwide' campaign encompassing various levels of initiative. We presently have a series of localised fights, such as the impressive struggle in Lewisham over the hospital closure, and the heroic fight by Sussex students and staff against privatization, but by themselves these are not sufficient. The 'unevenness' of these campaigns reflects the unevenness of the effects of austerity, as well as the way in which the coalition is trying to isolate certain groups. This is obviously not good for us. Strategically, its a priority that we overcome it. Of course, we do not need a nationwide campaign with little or no democracy, where a general strategy is set by a small steering committee, and local campaigns have to accommodate it. The point of a nationwide campaign should be to federate existing struggles in a democratic way that is led by the grassroots. Any general 'line' that emerges has to come from concrete experiences of activism not from a coffee-flogging cognoscenti. For that reason, any such campaign probably needs a broad elected national leadership composed mainly of people who have earned the right to lead in campaigns, and a relatively federal structure with a great deal of autonomy for local groups. The slightest whiff of hectoring phone calls, back-room lobbying, finger-wagging from the lectern, presenting fait accomplis worked up behind closed doors, etc., will be the ruin of any organisation aspiring to be the institutional basis for an anti-cuts movement.

ii) a realignment of the left-of-Labour left. I think in this case we need a narrower form of organisation that is capable of concentrating the experiences and perspectives of anti-cuts activism in a way that a broader movement could not. An anti-cuts movement would probably have to be open to participation from right-wing Labourites who favour prudent, slower cuts, as well as anarchists who want to picket the offices of those same Labourites; as such its line could not be too defined. We need to popularise not just a moralistic rejection of the cuts, but an alternative analysis of the crisis and a serious, detailed set of solutions. These solutions wouldn't be based on a 'neutral' measure like how effectively they contribute to GDP growth. There is no socially neutral way of resolving a crisis. Not only do such solutions have costs which must be borne differentially according to class, race, gender, etc. They typically involve transforming, attacking, inventing, reorganising, or annihilating the institutional and relational bases of particular types of class power. A left-of-Labour party would have to identify a number of in principle achievable measures that would a) plausibly gain mass support, and b) alter the balance of class forces if implemented. For example, nationalising the banks and turning them into public utilities, would be a popular measure and it would also hit at an institutional nerve centre of the dominant form of ruling class power today. It would also, in principle, give any government tremendous leverage over the economy, a resource with which to plan green investment, job creation, etc. We do not have to kid ourselves that an elected government could just wave a wand and make this happen; the point is to develop an analysis and a set of concrete objectives would help the sorts of social struggles that would make it possible.

Now even if it were once possible, it is no longer realistic to expect the Labour Left to fulfil this role. It is recovering a bit, and will continue to do so for a while, but it is far too weak relative to the dominant forces in the party to be able to take a leading role in articulating a radical left response to austerity. As for the Greens, they have made it clear: they oppose austerity in principle, but will do nothing stop it if given control of a budget. Something else is needed. So, is this a recommendation for a 'British Syriza' or, worse, a 'Seymouriza' (as some bastards have suggested) or 'Sino-Seymouriza'? Yes and no, in that order. I am not in favour of abandoning the project of independent revolutionary organisation, as I'll explain momentarily. Further, as I favour Scottish independence, the 'Syriza' I propose wouldn't exactly be British. Nor would it look very much like Syriza, as the social and political forces available for such a project in the UK are totally different and reflect different historical experiences and different immediate challenges - we don't have to address the problem of the eurozone, for example, in a population that has generally been pro-euro. But everyone notices that the SNP, the Greens, George Galloway and any plausible alternative can take big chunks of Labour's base away at a moment's notice. We all know that Labour's electoral recovery is extremely tentative. It's obvious that the break-up and break-down of its base is part of a secular process in the neoliberal period that is also affecting European social democracy. So, if we're as smart as all that, we should be doing something about it.

The creation of a radical left party has been slower and more hampered in the UK than elsewhere in Europe. I do not believe this is because of the mistakes of the SWP. If you look at the constituents of some of the successful groups, I suspect you'll find a lot worse by way of authoritarianism, sectarianism and opportunism. Rather, as I've said in a previous post, it is because of the greater difficulties in generating a significant split in social democracy due to the serious defeats inflicted on the Left in the UK, and particularly the defeat of the militant wing of the labour movement. No other Western European labour movement experienced defeats like this. The result was Labour's wholesale capitulation to neoliberalism well before any other European social democratic party. After this, there was simply no general political basis from which the remaining rump of the Labour Left could mount a challenge to the leadership: they could oppose the policy consequences to New Labour's neoliberalism, but had no plausible alternative political-economic basis for their opposition, much less to lead a split as did Oskar Lafontaine in Germany, or Jean-Luc Melenchon in France. Only the 'war on terror' produced such a split in the UK, and that was too small and narrow.

Nonetheless, it remains a compelling fact that Respect didn't have to crash and burn in the fashion that it did; and that, even after the launching and crash-landing of previous left formations, small, committed and talented groups of people with sometimes gaping flaws seem to have been able to surprise Labour in its former heartlands. All it takes is a name, or a local campaign with resonance. Now, if left at that, they would simply be vanishing, 'last gasp' blips of resistance to the further neoliberal takeover of politics. But the current conjuncture is one that will be formative of a generation or so. Whatever stable political forces can be forged now are likely to last.

iii) a realignment of the forces of the revolutionary left, which are hardly in an optimal state of organisation. There is no historical or conjunctural need for the 57 varieties of revolutionary socialism to be distributed in twice as many sects, groupuscules and minorities of one. But to unite them in an effective organisation has never been a simple matter of stitching together the existing fragments. They are too committed to their trademarked orthodoxies, their turf, their routines, their hierarchies and their internal cultures. Any serious new party or formation would have to be heterogenous, open to heterodoxy and far less bureaucratically centralised than the existing revolutionary sects. Realignment requires the old fragments to be shaken up and, in a sense, radicalised: this is the potentially productive aspect of the crisis.

But let's be honest: such realignment will also require a discursive process akin to a Truth and Reconciliation commission. If we need realignment, it's because there has been a general failure. To a large extent, and self-righteous protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, I think what is wrong with the SWP is also wrong with much of the wider left. It's not good enough for a bunch of revolutionary socialists to try to unite around the lowest common denominator of agreeing about the SWP's latter day treachery. Every participant, particularly if they come from an existing sect, would have to be capable of a minimum of honesty about why their own political tradition did at best no better in practical terms than the SWP. Those who aren't capable of that much honesty probably wouldn't get us very far anyway, whereas those who simply want to strip the carrion from the carcass may as well stay away.

Shall I start the ball rolling? What mistakes did I personally make as an SWP member? Not making my objections to our hosting of the antisemitic crank Atzmon, and the preposterous rationale for doing so, explicit - particularly when it was made clear to me that the paper wouldn't host a letter on the subject. Party members can attest that I and others took this up within the party, and that I trolled Atzmon's talk at Bookmarks, but it really wasn't enough. Next? Defending our stance on Sheridan uncritically, which meant defending Sheridan uncritically. I still think it was right to defend him against the state and News of the World, and wrong to cheer his being imprisoned. But surely by now we can admit it was wrong, whatever you think of the SSP leadership, to defend his right to bring this disastrous case in the first place? And then let him off the hook for lying his arse off, hanging Katrine Trolle out to dry, and contributing to fucking up the Scottish far left for years? Can we at least admit to an element of bad faith in taking such a stance, and then pretending to be strictly extraneous to the subsequent meltdown of the SSP? For my part, I was wrong to rationalise all this, wrong to defer facing up to it, wrong to cop out when the truth of the matter was obvious. What else? Defending the party uncritically during the Respect debacle on the basis of who I trusted, circulating unhelpful gossip, allowing myself to be a conduit for lies and misdirections coming from Rees's office, and living in denial when the latter started circulating slimy rhetoric about Muslim 'communalism'. Then only tentatively and gradually facing up to the truth once it dawned.

That will do for now: ball = rolling = now in your court. Also, to mix this metaphor in a properly Cliffite fashion, that court = surrounded by a glass house. If you have never, as a socialist activist, found yourself defending a line you later regretted, kept quiet about something you shouldn't have, rationalised away a feeling of unease, then you're either still deluded or a fucking liar. I know that sounds harsh, but this is the terrain. And the point of facing up to this stuff now, is that you don't want to repeat that situation.

***

Grim though this analysis may seem, there are three possible causes for optimism in the next year. First, a horrible scandal is also the occasion of a form of radicalisation on the left, particularly the revolutionary left, in which many people are literally re-evaluating their root assumptions. This percolation is itself indicative that people are wrong to simply assume this is yet another stage in the ongoing mitosis of revolutionary groupuscules. There's a feeling - don't you share it? - that as nasty and depressing and shaming as this crisis has been, something has been unblocked by it, and new possibilities have been created. Second, is the People's Assembly idea, which has achieved a lot of media coverage and has the support of sections of the Labour Left, the trade unions, celebrities, and obviously Counterfire. The People's Assembly is attracting some criticism for the fact that its big 'arrival' is marked by a celeb-driven rally in a swish Westminster venue at a cost of £25000, rather than a democratic conference where actually existing campaigns participate in decision-making. But it would be churlish not to get involved and try to change it in a democratic direction. And third, is the Left Unity initiative for a new left party, which I think has achieved 6,000 signatures thus far. (I have signed and, for what it's worth, I think you should too.) The fact is that if half of that many people joined a new party right now, you would have the basis of a reasonable sized radical left party. Clearly, there's a lot still to work out. It's still a nebulous initiative, and the basis for individual and group affiliation is not yet clear. Nonetheless, local Left Unity groups are springing up with plenty of support after just a couple of weeks or so. This suggests a degree of initiative and energy that hasn't been seen on the Left for a while.

There is your hope, if you like. It's about as far from bland, upbeat can-do puffery as it's possible to be, but it is hope.

The Social Project Strategy

Guest post by Kieran C

I am making this post to try and kick off a discussion about something I have become interested in, but am not sure if it is a good or bad idea.  Even if it is a bad idea, as a friend said to me, we ought to at least be clear why we don't agree with it.

I attended one of the early Left Unity meetings called by Andrew Burgin and Kate Hudson in Central London in February and was interested by the mix of people who'd come.  It is not true that it was all people who had been around the Left for over a decade and had been through the experience of RESPECT or previous attempts at Left realignment.  There was a layer of younger people, some of whom were yet to be convinced that elections are the way to fight capitalism and it was from some of these people that I started thinking about what I will call, for shorthand, the Social Project Strategy.

One guy expressed frustration about something I hadn't previously considered: involvement in a food bank.  Food banks were, of course, a rare thing in Britain until the ConDems came to power and the explosion in their numbers is one of the most damning facts about what sort of government they are.  The young man lives in South London and the one most local to him is run by evangelical Christians.  Not being a Christian, he felt that this was something he could not easily join, but he also questioned whether or not there was something in the fact that people who go to the food bank – inevitably – end up in a discussion about God (note: no-one is suggesting that these Christians were refusing to help anyone who was not of their religion).  He put a question – if we, as socialists/communists/anarchists/whatever believe that the solution to the problems of working class people today lie in transforming society and not the great hereafter, do we not want these people to hear about that instead?

I spoke to a few people about this notion and was told that there has been engagement in this in South London. I have since found out that the very interesting People Before Profit group has been looking at instituting food banks in Lewisham and Greenwich were they are contesting elections with some success. The idea comes from a slightly romantic view of the Black Panther Party and its celebrated “Survival Programmes” - things like free breakfast for school kids, volunteer medical programmes, addiction support and so on. I  The Panthers picked up these strategies partially as result of their interest in Maoism, and they weren't the only ones.  Maoism may now be quite rare in Europe, but two Maoist-derived parties that have both survived the twentieth century and remain influential are the Belgian Workers' Party (WPB) and the Dutch Socialist Party (SPN), both of which managed to outgrow the 'official' Communist Parties in their states with strategies that involved providing “proletarian services” - a range of provisions that ended up including medical, educational and advise centres.  In the case of the SPN, the party has grown to become a viable electoral party that is a significant player in parliament – the Dutch equivalent of SYRIZA or Die Linke.

Now, in the Trotskyist-derived Left, particularly in Britain, we haven't previously had much experience or consideration for this sort of activity.  There are perfectly sensible historical reasons for this – the far Left in this part of the world after World War Two did not grow and develop by organising primarily among oppressed and marginalised workers like black Americans, it became rooted in student radicalism and organised workers and in any case the welfare state had become much more progressive and effective.  The thing is, this post-1945 settlement has been done away with and this has massively changed the structure and shape of working class life.  It is only logical that would change the way that revolutionary socialists would attempt to organise the class.

The SWP has maintained a number of organisational traditions carried over from the pre-neoliberal era that are of questionable relevance today.  Consider the words “Educator, agitator, organiser.”, every SWP member can recite the phrase that is used to explain the role of the paper.  But what evidence do we have that it fills any of those roles?  The party was famously reluctant to gather any proper data on the success and effectiveness of its activities, but I think that if I claim that Lenin's Tomb is more read than the paper, that weekly paper sales are sporadic events at which people you never see again are abstractly propagandised to and that sales figures of the paper outside and inside work places have likely not left double figures in a very long time, it would not be controversial.   Personally, I have always been treated as very odd for trying to sell a paper to workmates, it has become a bizarre thing to do!  I don't think Socialist Worker has really been an effective organising tool since the early 2000s.  If a revolutionary paper isn't the scaffolding of the party, what could we use instead?

I think one possibility is that we could try launching “Social Projects” with a view to growing our membership and organisation.

What would this mean and how would it help?

Here's a thing I bet you have never done – go on the website of the BNP, download the .PDF of their “activists' manual” and see what the very first thing it instructs BNP members to do is.  I'm sure most of you have better things to do, so I'll tell you what I'm talking about: it advises members that the first thing to do in an area where the BNP is targeting is to organise days out and about litter-picking, trimming hedges and helping old people get around.  This is scarcely the first thing we associate with the BNP, but that's the point isn't it?  In his book Bloody Nasty People, Daniel Trilling has identified this innovation by the fascists as something they successfully imported from the Front National and other French “New Right” “thinkers” partly inspired by a reading of, of all the things, Gramsci's theories of seeking cultural hegemony before trying for power.  New Rightists have sought, with considerable success in many countries, to enable fascism to reorganise and gain new respectability by presenting themselves as socially useful and relevant – Greek Golden Dawn are currently doing an extreme version of this, taking on many of the social provisions that have been left undone by the crumbling welfare state.  It is coming to something if the fascists are not only stealing from communists not just our symbols and rhetoric, but our theories as well!

Obviously the way that fascists seek to organise and relate to people is not the same as ours – they are seeking the most isolated and bitter people, ideally not from the working class in their view.  But the gaps in social provision that the fascists have exploited could be filled in other ways.  That's not say, by the way, that people might not think that organising litter-picking and recycling would be such an awful thing to do.

The food bank issue is one example – suppose food banks could be organised not as charity, but solidarity.  Could we initiate the self-organisation of working class people in their own interest, to make them into an expression of the victims of austerity taking control of their destinies, rather than being hostage to generosity?  Could, and this would be making a real leap, we provide an immediate solution to the problem of hunger in such a way as to show people that the problem of people lacking food is not linked to shortages, but to the logic of a market that puts the profitability of food ahead of ensuring that people can eat?

In the past few months I have a read of a number of other developments that are also interesting and do recall some of the things that the WPB and SPN did successfully in the Low Countries.  SolFed supporters experimented with trying to set up unemployed advice centres in Liverpool, Unite Community have collaborated with the National Union of Mineworkers on a more serious (but presumably less radical) project in Yorkshire.  If the Left could be seen as a source of, often vital, advice on how to cope with life under the crisis, this could be used a means to move away from abstract propaganda into real relevance.  Whether these service could, or should, be extended into the field of medical services (surely, we should be fighting to preserve our hither-to world-class NHS!) I am not qualified to say.

One idea that was put into my mind by the ever-inventive Roobin was to take 'cultural hegemony' a little more literally: working class kids have nothing like the access to art and culture they had in previous generations.  The SWP paid a load of money to some jazz musicians to play on stage, more or less forced us all to watch them in the style of commercial gig and called it 'Cultures of Resistance'.   Imagine turning that on its head: getting people to participate in making the music – creating culture as resistance.  One might get some decent art out of it, if nothing else.

These sort of activities could enable socialists to talk to, influence and ultimately organise potentially large numbers of working class people and reach beyond the circles we have previously been trapped in.  Yes, it is all work and requires commitment, but it might be a lot more rewarding, even fun, then the declining practises of just turning up to places to do the increasingly anachronistic task of selling a newspaper.

Why might we not do this?

As I began to write this, two horrible words jumped out and hit me in the face: “Big Society”.  In many ways I've described is precisely the idea of using voluntary labour as salve for Call Me Dave stealing away the rights and entitlements of the working classes.  An example of this pitfall being very effectively averted that I know of close to home (literally for me) is that of the Frien Barnet Library occupation.  When the Ultra-Tory council in Barnet shut the library about a year ago, the initial response was a group of activists setting up a novel form of protest: the pop-up library, a form education-as-direct action that saw the grounds of the building used as the centre of volunteer organised library-in-a-tent that was directly linked to the wider and ongoing to campaign against neoliberal policies in the borough.  The people driving this had a very healthy attitude towards this: that they were doing it to show that a library was both wanted and needed in the area and not that they were happy with voluntary labour would fill that gap.  Things went a stage further when a group of activists who had been enthusiastic for Occupy London squatted the library premises: the building reopened as the People's Library, and despite bitter moaning from the Tories, has been restored to use.  It's nice to have a both a positive example and victory, but also important that if occupiers had been less politically aware and had not been directly linked to the Barnet Alliance for Public Services which links the issue of public sector jobs to the provision of services (and perhaps, if Barnet Tories were not so thuggish and Neanderthal), one can see how this could have been co-opted into the opposite of what it wanted to be.

That's not the only danger, some of the things I've discussed are really complicated and take serious organising.  There is a real danger that a socialist organisation that tries to go down this route might become completely bogged down in the administration and logistics of making its operations look professional.  I've been a Team Member at many Marxisms and volunteer for the Workers' Beer Company every summer, so I have a very clear idea of how quickly the ostensibly simple activities of having lots of meetings in a university or selling beer in a field rapidly become challenging if you want to do them properly and do it on the same scale as a commercial operation.  There is also the issue of responsibility – if you giving people help, aid or advice, you have an ethical duty to do it properly and safely and this requires expertise and training.

Something to Think About

The implosion of the SWP has had a significant effect on the whole of the rest of the Left.  A landscape that had previously been extremely fixed and stagnant has suddenly been severely stirred up.  It's easy to point out that the Ken Loach led Left Unity declaration does not say anything amazingly new, but the scale of its resonance (over 3,000 signatures) is in itself significant.  What the Left Unity project could potentially create is still highly debatable.  There is a serious argument to be had about many aspects of this and a lot so far has been said about electoral possibilities – and I do think that we need to debate when, where and how to stand in elections, but what I've tried to do with this is open up a different front in discussion.

Anyone who knows me will know that I've been critical of the SWP's overarching strategies for some time, while I was still a confirmed member.  We need a thorough debate on how we can build up working class organisation in this new landscape that is the product of a generation of neoliberalism, and if we can't find it inside the unions as they currently exist, we need to think about where we can find it.

Resignations from Sheffield SWP

SWP Central Committee,

We are hereby resigning our memberships of the SWP. We’re sure you've read enough of these by now to realise that we're all going for similar reasons, but we’re going to explain once more in the hope that at some point you'll realise what you're doing to this organisation and do something to rectify it.

Some of us have been in the SWP for many years, others have been members since the student movement of 2010. This may not seem long to those of you who have been in for decades, and perhaps you will think you can just recruit new students when they arrive on campus, but once upon a time we believe the line was that every member was 'gold dust'. It's a shame that this no longer seems to be the case.

We are resigning because we cannot defend the catastrophe you have created. We considered waiting until next conference and proposing a slate with none of you on it, but we have come to realise that this would make no difference. You have killed a once brilliant organisation. The SWP’s reputation is in tatters, no credible anti-sexist will touch us with a barge pole, and the degeneration in the conduct of debate over the few weeks has been soul-destroying. You ought to write a thank you letter to the original 30 comrades who formed the IDOOP faction, for they are responsible for at least 540 members remaining in the organisation since National Committee. Those 540 were the most inspirational, principled, determined, brilliant comrades you will ever have the pleasure of working alongside, and you should be fighting with every core of your being to ensure that any who remain stay inside the organisation. You could learn a lot from them.

The response of the CC to the concerns raised by a huge layer of membership has been staggeringly inept. We won't be able to list all of the mistakes, but these are the ones that spring to mind. In each case we have added a suggestion for what we think should have been the alternative course of action; we sincerely hope you will take this on board:

Refusing to arrange a commission to investigate and review our disputes processes as this is 'going against conference decisions' (followed by the addition into the CC motion of the review of disputes processes)
you should have: not refused, but set up the commission at national conference, avoiding this entire fucking mess

Accusing the factions of being apolitical because they failed to mention UtR/UAF/crisis of capitalism in an argument about the handing and fallout from a disputes case 
you should have: not done this and attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case

Passing around of the Facebook conversation which was the excuse for the expulsions of the 'Facebook four' around select individuals in our district 
you should have: not passed it around attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case

Allowing the women (yes, there were two women, unless you're a bureaucrat who needs an official box ticking to recognise a complaint) to be smeared as police spies, liars, trojan horses, politically suspect. Allowing their districts to ostracise, bully, intimidate, exclude and insult them by denying all knowledge of it.
you should have: maintained regular contact with both women to ensure they were being supported through a very traumatic experience, visited their districts regularly and in no uncertain terms condemned the above behaviour with promise of disciplinary action for anyone who continued in this manner, on the grounds that this is extremely reactionary, sexist behaviour which should not be tolerated in any organisation that prides its record on fighting sexism. 

Attempting to convince our organiser to overrule a vote in order to stop one of us, an ex-faction member, getting elected onto district committee
you should have: not done this and attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case

Denying that our work outside of the party has been severely affected (generally by citing numbers of papers sold) and that our reputation is in tatters among the wider left
you should have: not denied this, but thought about what this meant, and considered a constructive approach to repairing damaged relationships - note, you should still do this

Deliberately misrepresenting the IDOOP faction, (suggesting that comrades such as Ian Birchall, Mike Gonzalez, Pete Gillard etc have waited decades to reveal that they are in favour of permanent factions) 
you should have: not done this and attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case 

Creating the bogeymen, Richard Seymour and China Mieville, in order to obscure the argument 
you should have: not done this and attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case

Asking comrades to sign a loyalty statements to the CC (before realising you had less support than the faction and conveniently never mentioning it again) 
you should have: not done this, and attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case

Passing around of our organiser’s resignation letter to the CC to select individuals in our district 
you should have: not passed it around and instead attempted to win the argument about the issue at hand - the handling and fallout from a disputes case

Suggesting that for the faction to call for Comrade Delta to cease to represent the party for the foreseeable future is 'going against conference decisions' (followed by the 'political decision' for Comrade Delta to cease to represent the party for the foreseeable future)
you should have: not suggested this, and accepted that we were correct, admitted a mistake and gone ahead with ceasing his representative and paid roles

Blaming party members for the fact that a list of academics and trade unionists have raised concerns 
you should have: not blamed party members (it is patronising to those who signed to say they did not make that decision themselves, whoever organised it) but thought about what this meant, and considered a constructive approach to repairing damaged relationships - note, you should still do this

Allowing members of the IDOOP faction to be treated with utter contempt, suspicion and hostility
you should have: not allowed this, it is the primary reason that many members have left. This is unforgivable  It is your responsibility as the leadership to ensure that comrades are treated with respect, are not shouted down, are not ostracised, bullied, ignored, smeared and excluded.  You should have followed up every complaint, and ensured that comrades knew that their behaviour was unacceptable and would not be tolerated. Conduct in this debate has been despicable, and you have done nothing.

Using phrases like "You were defeated!" and "Show some humility!" when talking on the phone to ex-IDOOP members when they tell you they are thinking of leaving the organisation
you should have: remembered that every member is gold dust, and attempted to engage in a constructive discussion of concerns

Removing party employees from their positions based on their involvement in the disputes case/their votes at conference/their involvement in the factions
you should have: not done this. Always to remember to think about what you are doing and how it might look to the membership and the outside world.

Using the phrase "This is not a cover-up" when issuing public statements
you should have: not done this. If you are being accused of a cover up, you must patiently explain why it is not a cover up, with credible justifications, not empty phrases.

Finally, when a union is putting out a statement regarding safety of oppressed groups in the labour movement suggesting amendments that state that we 'do not presume innocence or guilt'*, 
you should have: not done this, and instead congratulated the union for it's progressive stance on supporting survivors of sexual violence

We hope you find this list helpful. We noticed that you seemed to be having difficulty recognising and admitting mistakes, and thinking of alternative courses of action, so we hope this alleviates that issue.

Regards,

Rosie Warren (Sheffield North Branch, South Yorkshire District Committee, University of Sheffield SWSS, University of Sheffield Palestine Society Committee, NUS)

Tom Maguire-Wright (Sheffield North Branch, University of Sheffield SWSS President, NUS)

Alison Worsley (Sheffield North Branch, University of Sheffield SWSS, NUS)

Patrick McNeill (Sheffield North Branch, University of Sheffield SWSS, NUS)

Isra Jawdat (Sheffield North Branch, University of Sheffield SWSS, University of Sheffield Palestine Society Treasurer, NUS)

Neill Grant (Sheffield North Branch, Sheffield North Branch Committee, University of Sheffield SWSS, NUS)

Ben Wadsworth (Sheffield North Branch, Unite)

Christian Hill (Sheffield South Branch, Sheffield South Branch Committee/Paper Organiser, Unite Community)

Kieran Boden (Sheffield South Branch, Hallam University SWSS, NUS)

Jenny Evans (Sheffield South Branch, University of Birmingham SWSS, NUS)

The following people have already resigned individually for similar reasons but would also like to add their names to this statement:

Matt Hale (Sheffield South Branch, Unite Community, Sheffield Trades Council)

Andrew Gallacher (Sheffield North Branch, University of Sheffield SWSS, NUS)

Aidan Barlow (Sheffield North Branch, University of Sheffield SWSS, NUS)

Matt Bond (Sheffield South Branch)

Jackson Baines (Sheffield South Branch)

Gina Elby (Doncaster Branch, Unite Community)

Rhys Lloyd (Doncaster Branch)

Martin (Sheffield South, NUT)

*The final point, for those who are unaware, is in reference to the Unison women’s statement
The CC were informed about the statement published, and about several comrades being approached to sign it. In response, the CC proposed the following amendments (highlighted in bold):

“We recognise the enormous challenges faced by women victims of male violence, and the pressures which women face, including from abusive men, not to complain about violence and abuse. We therefore believe that, when women complain of male violence within our movement, our trade unions and political organisations should start from a position of believing women but without making presumptions about guilt or innocence."

"We believe that all women who complain of male violence have the right to be listened to and supported, and to have their complaints properly and sympathetically investigated through due process .”  

The amendments were immediately rejected with comments attacking the Party.

The CC position then became that no comrade should sign the statement.

A Response To SWSS Notes: The National Student Meeting

On Saturday the 23rd of March the SWP finally answered the calls for a national student meeting. The students themselves up and down the country have been demanding a national meeting to deal with the unravelling crisis the SWP is undergoing. Many of those that called for the student meeting wanted to develop a strategy to keep student members in the party and active after the demoralisation, intimidation and verbal abuse they’d suffered in the run up to and after the first conference in January 2013. The failure of the Central Committee (CC) to call this meeting earlier in the year has resulted in the loss of several SWSS groups (Leeds, Queen Mary’s, Brighton and Sussex, Hull, Kent) and the collapse of many others into inactivity.

Normally, when a national student meeting is called, we aim to get as many students as possible to it, but not this time. This time we were limited to two delegates per university (presumably so we couldn’t make the CC cry - which has apparently happened at previous student meetings) which meant there were less than 30 students representing SWSS nationally. The day was broken into 3 relatively short sessions; General Perspectives, Marxism Festival and NUS Conference.

The first session was lead off by Charlie Kimber (National Secretary). This was a surprise to a lot of the students present, not only does Charlie rarely come along to student meetings, but he is also not in touch with any of the SWSS groups and has little to do with our student work. Usually a national student organiser would lead off at a National Student Meeting, and one does wonder why one of the three women were not given a platform at this one. The lead off covered everything from Cyprus to the bedroom tax (important issues, no doubt) but failed to even mention students until the final five minutes of a 25 minute speech, which many in the room found quite bemusing. The 5 minutes dedicated to the students actually drew out a number of laughs and sneers from the student delegates, who were justifiably confused by the lack of discussion about student strategy. The strategy was under-developed, detached and vague; carry on as before; relate to local campaigns; build SWSS groups and privatisation is bad!

The discussion was then opened up to the floor, where delegates, and the three other CC members present were asked to keep their contributions under 3 minutes. Unfortunately, it seems the chair may have overestimated the reaction there would be to Charlie’s lead-off, and there was silence. Absolute silence for 5 minutes, broken only by nervous laughter and the shrugging of shoulders. The students had come to talk about how to keep SWSS together nationally, to develop a nuanced strategy in the face of fragmented and localised struggle, and to hold their leadership to account for the bizarre mixed messages SWSS had received for the previous few months. We didn’t know how to respond to this patronising, generalised, detached lead off about the crisis of capitalism and the bedroom tax campaigns. Did Charlie realise 150+ people had already left, that SWSS groups were falling apart and that we’d just come through the biggest faction fight the SWP has ever seen? It seemed not.

Eventually students started to make good contributions raising a number of concerns, and asking questions to the CC. Unfortunately the CC failed to satisfactorily answer most of these questions. For instance, when students asked what the CC were intending to do to prevent students from leaving and SWSS groups from disaffiliating, Charlie Kimber said that he 'regretted it', and gave no clear indication as to what he intended to do to stop this from happening.

Students also asked plenty of questions about how we are meant to relate to the International Socialist Network, and the SWSS groups that have disaffiliated. This question was impressively skirted around; initially the question was ignored. When another comrade asked, during the summation, for an answer, Amy L did her best not to answer the question whilst still making sound. Eventually she managed to acknowledge that it was an ‘interesting question’, but apparently not interesting enough to warrant an actual answer. When pushed about whether the ISN would be invited to debate with the SWP, Amy L did not outright deny it, but did suggest that this would ‘dilute the event’, which seems strange following a discussion about how difficult Marxism will be with very few external speakers.

Jo C didn’t really contribute anything to the meeting. In fact, when an FE student made a contribution, instead of listening intently and trying to answer his question as best she could, she instead chose to heckle him. This was incredibly rude and inappropriate, not least because she’s a middle aged adult and the FE student is one of the youngest members of the organisation. When the same FE comrade asked for advice as to how we build in FE, he was told to “call a meeting” with no explanation as to how and with whom.

It became clear during the meeting that there was, in fact, no proper student strategy, and the students began to make helpful suggestions such as Radical Revision sessions. The idea of these sessions is to keep SWSS groups engaged in the run up to and during exams by taking a more academic, ideological approach to discussion groups in the quieter second term. It was a strategy that was implemented at some London universities this time last year, and that they found generally successful at keeping people engaged politically through the stressful exam period, while continue to develop students theoretically in times of relatively low struggle. The CC welcomed this suggestion, Choonara seemed particularly impressed by the idea, along with re-establishing National Student Committee and Northern Student Caucus. While we acknowledge this is progress, some students think this may be a little overdue, since only 2 northern groups remain.

The final session was for the NUS delegates, and Sheffield SWSS, who planned to help out at the conference stayed behind for this. The student organiser spent this meeting essentially asking students what she was meant to be doing, and the meeting would have probably been much more productive without her there. She did not bring the motions, the list of delegates, or any real plan to the meeting. When asked if a SWSS stall or Marxism stall had been booked she seemed surprised, mumbled that she didn’t know, and attempted to blame Mark Bergfeld. Clearly she hasn’t attempted to contact anyone about this and has instead chosen to divert blame to ex-CC members who have resigned, rather than accept that this is now her role.

We felt it necessary to give an account of the National SWSS Meeting in reaction to yesterday’s ‘SWSS notes’ which allegedly reported back from the meeting but didn’t actually mention any of the concrete proposals that came out of it, including the ‘Radical Revision Sessions’, the National Student Committee and the Northern Student Caucus, along with considering the role of EAN to relate to current struggles like the Sussex Occupation where SWSS has not been able to intervene and very few remain SWP members.

Sheffield Delegates To NSM

Violence against women

Guest post by Toni M

At the beginning of the 21st century, British women have had the vote for almost 100 years. We’ve got access to contraception and abortion, have equal pay legislation and maternity pay, and can even stand as MPs. We have seen the rise of the women’s movement and the gay liberation movement which won demands for oppressed groups to be treated with more respect and fairness. As a result of these we have won rights like legal freedom from sexual harassment and abortion. It is not entirely stigmatised to be single, childless, a single parent or lesbian. Women’s role within family life has altered and women are told that they have choice. Women can now “have it all”. They can be mothers, workers, or even strippers, and all of these things can be an interpretation of “womanhood”.

That’s not to say that these rights aren’t under attack. Tory ministers are lining up to argue that abortion should be limited to much earlier in pregnancy and women still earn 20% less than men. But the freedom of women and girls to live safely, without fear of physical and sexual violence, has never been won. In fact, far from it: conservative estimates suggest that over 1,300 women are raped every week. A woman rings the police every single minute to report domestic violence and two women die every week at the hands of their partner or ex-partner.

As we’ve seen in recent years, there are always people ready to cover up for perpetrators and blame victims instead. The BBC has been revealed to have been covering up for a predatory sex offender who targeted young girls. Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is avoiding trial for rape, the Socialist Workers Party has imploded in a rape scandal and the RMT union has been criticised for its handling of a case of domestic violence.

These problems aren’t new, but there’s a developing battlefield about consent and freedom from violence which is forcing these issues into the media. It exploded in January 2011 when a Toronto police officer giving a talk to a group of students said “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised”. This led to a worldwide movement as women and men took to the streets in protest to reclaim the term “slut” and declare that women were not to blame for rape. Not long after, Kenneth Clarke, the Conservative justice secretary at the time, went on radio and distinguished between “serious rape” and “date rape”. The interviewer asked Clarke about the lowering of rape sentences, which then averaged 5 years. Clarke replied: “serious rape where, you know, violence and an unwilling woman, the tariff, i.e. the sentence, is much longer than that”. When the interviewer responded by saying “rape is rape”, Clarke argued, saying, “no it’s not ... they include date rapes which can sometimes be very confusing”. The use of the word “unwilling”, implying that some women are raped willingly, caused a fierce reaction, but these views are disturbingly common.

These are not just conservative views. Last year George Galloway argued that if Julian Assange is guilty of anything it was “bad sexual etiquette” because it is not necessary to ask permission before each “insertion”. Julian Assange is accused of raping two women. They were already in the “sex game”, according to Galloway, because they had gone out to dinner the night before, had sex and slept in the same bed. Does Galloway believe that permanent consent is even possible? What does that mean for women who are raped within marriage? In an attempt to dismiss rape, the women who came forward were even accused of being CIA agents. This was the same week as a US republican Todd Akin argued that abortion should never be an option. He said that when it’s a “legitimate” rape, women’s bodies have a way of shutting down and preventing pregnancy.

Victim-blaming

As shocked as many of us are when prominent figures, especially on the left, say things like this, it reflects how rape is seen within society and how victims are blamed. It is only in regards to violence against women, especially rape, that there is such acceptance that the victim may be to blame. But there is a movement building against this. Trade and student unions have passed motions “no platforming” rape apologists. This may not be the chosen tactic of revolutionary socialists, who would wish to reserve such a sanction for fascists, but it is reassuring that there are those in the labour movement taking this seriously.

The societal view that women should take responsibility for rape is widespread. It is reinforced by the courts and the media. Many people believe that victims can be blamed for all sorts of reasons. A 2010 research report by Havens, “Wake Up To Rape”, found that 56% of those who participated in a London-based survey thought that in some circumstances the victim must accept some responsibility. Out of those 56%:

• 73% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d performed another sexual act on their attacker
• 66% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d gone to bed with them
• 64% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d drunk to excess or “blacked out”
• 29% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d gone to their attacker’s home for a drink
• 28% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d dressed provocatively
• 22% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d danced in a sexy way with a man at a nightclub or bar
• 21% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d acted flirtatiously
• 14% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d kissed their attacker
• 13% thought that the victim was responsible if they’d accepted a drink and engaged in a conversation at a bar

It’s hardly surprising that rape within marriage wasn’t criminalised until 1991 – 28% of people thought that non-consensual sex within a relationship either wasn’t rape or they weren’t sure.

The recent scandal involving Jimmy Savile demonstrates how those in power are protected by those around them. Jimmy Savile was a BBC celebrity. He was knighted by the queen and was close friends with Margaret Thatcher. This meant he was protected despite being a sexual predator of children. After his death in 2011 journalists at Newsnight tried to air an expose of his crimes. It was blocked by those in charge and instead the BBC broadcast a tribute to him. Savile knew he was untouchable, even boasting in his 1978 autobiography “Love Is an Uphill Thing” of how an underage girl who had run away from a remand home stayed overnight with him before he handed her over at a police station the next morning. No action was taken, he wrote, “for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me”.

This year, when a group of Asian men were convicted of years of sex crimes in Rochdale, the tabloids claimed investigations were blocked because of supposed “sensitivities” about race. Muslim men were told to take responsibility, and it was argued that Islam and its attitudes towards sex and women led these men to prey on young, white girls. The real reason that the cases were not investigated was because the girls who made complaints were not taken seriously and blamed for their predicament. The problem wasn’t race or religion, but society’s attitudes to young, vulnerable girls. The newspapers that feign shock and despair are the same newspapers that treat women as sexual commodities every day. A recent Facebook campaign has attacked the Sun for its page 3 and protests were held at the Sun’s offices over its treatment of women.

Fighting abuse

Savile was a particularly predatory example of a child sexual abuser and a rapist to boot – but this is the thin end of the wedge. It was not uncommon for male celebrities to abuse their position and have sex with underage fans. That’s why the media’s reaction is so unpalatable. This was widespread. Savile was one of the most shocking examples, but not one of the only ones. Because Savile was part of the establishment and had friends in the media and police he was never brought to justice as a serial child abuser.

The Socialist Workers Party has recently found itself unable to operate following the revelation that it had attempted to hold its own investigation into an alleged rape by a leading member, and been found wanting. The quasi-judicial panel was made up of the accused’s long-standing friends and colleagues, asked the two women about their sexual history and drinking habits, and returned with a verdict of “not proven”. The women involved, along with many who were opposed to this blatant sexism, found themselves slandered and bullied, as the leadership gerrymandered a ratification of these awful mistakes and wittered on about Lenin. Not long after, another woman came forward and reported that she had been treated with blame and disbelief by the disputes committee when she reported rape and domestic violence. Shocking behaviour like this may plague the media and the ruling class establishment, but revolutionary socialists should refuse to accept their leadership behaving like this. Many did. Many left.

It is not just in the UK that the fight for women to be free from violence is taking place. In 2011 a young woman lost her case in the US Supreme Court after she took her school to court for suspending her from the cheerleading squad. Her offence? To refuse to cheer somebody who had raped her. He had been charged with sexual assault, but pleaded guilty to “misdemeanor assault”, meaning he could return to school and wasn’t imprisoned. Not only was this condoned by the Supreme Court but she was ordered to pay the equivalent of approximately £27,000 damages for bringing the “frivolous” case.

The brutal gang rape of a student in Delhi and her subsequent death led to mass protests on the streets across India as demonstrators demanded that the police and courts take violence against women more seriously. In Steubenville, USA, two young men were convicted of raping an unconscious young woman – and the media coverage was appalling. Bemoaning that these young men’s lives and football careers were ruined, the major US news channels failed to mention the impact on the young woman who’d been thrown around like a doll whilst unconscious and repeatedly raped. The societal view, compounded by the media coverage, was that compared to these successful football star/grade A students this young woman didn’t matter. She’s been vilified and received death threats. In reference to the case, one moron posted “if you’re drunk/slutty at a party and embarrassed later, just say you got raped!” This is despite the pictures of the victim being posted all over the internet clearly demonstrating that she was unconscious.

Domestic violence and privilege

Domestic violence and rape are crimes that often take place in private, behind closed doors. To be told that someone has done something horrendous and abusive, especially if that someone is famous, is difficult – if they’re known to us personally, it’s even harder. People try to find ways of explaining it away. This is easier with sexual harassment. Those dismissing and minimising it may claim that a woman misunderstood, or it was a joke that was taken the wrong way.

There are very few ways to do this with rape or domestic abuse. The most often used is to assert that the woman is lying. The chances of being right if we take that position are minimal - false accusations account for only 5% of all cases reported to the police. 1,300 women are raped each week, and most aren’t reported to the police. Chances are that if somebody tells you they’ve been raped, then they are telling the truth. It is the same with domestic violence. It is thought that less than a quarter of domestic assaults are reported to the police and that there are 13 million separate incidents of domestic physical violence or threats of violence against women every year. Believing women is not only statistically sensible, it is crucial to enable women to recover. Disbelief and blame of victims re-traumatises them.

Domestic abuse is complex, involving the persistent and sustained control and manipulation of women (and sometimes men) and those around them by their partner. The violence itself is never the whole picture – it includes insults, mind games, bullying and manipulating children. Emotional and psychological abuse will be happily dismissed by witnesses and friends as a “crap relationship”. This is a weak and sorry position which fails to acknowledge the obvious fact – very few women will remain in relationships where they are assaulted if the perpetrator hasn’t first convinced them that they deserve it. It involves facilitating the emotional and physical exhaustion of women, best achieved by taking no part in domestic or childcare tasks, often by prolonged periods of absence from the home, often with no explanation (also causing worry). This is known within domestic violence work as “abuse of male privilege”. It is a factor of domestic abuse that can often take place without other forms of domestic abuse.

Revolutionary socialism often claims that men do not benefit from women’s oppression. Well in the long term almost certainly not. Women’s oppression including domestic violence and sexual abuse divide our class and prevent us from achieving the solidarity required to overthrow class society. But to say there is no benefit – this is failing to acknowledge the real and tangible experiences of working class women, including the most miserable experiences. If a man rapes somebody or assaults his partner, he benefits from the failure of society, the police and courts in taking that rape seriously. If a man behaves as he wishes, while a woman is at home cooking and cleaning and caring for children, he has less to do and is in control. That is a tangible benefit and a privilege he is not entitled to.

It is clear that violence against women and girls, including sexual violence, continues to be a weapon used against half of the class. It seems clear that this is detrimental to the class as a whole, including men, undermining the basis of our solidarity. The men who perpetrate these crimes demean themselves. One would hope that at the very least they experience occasional shame. But it is also clear that reducing this to an argument about class solidarity is no longer tenable for revolutionary socialists. In every one of the cases discussed in this article, as is the case in all domestic and sexual abuse, the male perpetrators experienced a tangible benefit. They gained something that they had no right to – either sexual gratification or power or both. In many cases the apologism around these crimes benefitted future perpetrators.

So what is next for revolutionary socialists who are ready to fight on this issue? Unity with all of those who oppose gender violence is essential. But crucially, that unity means learning from activists who have been at the forefront of the fight for women’s freedom. This time, it is about our freedom from abuse, and we have a great deal to learn about how to fight for it.

Sources

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/nov/22/gender-pay-gap-falls-full-time-workers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/05/us-supreme-court-cheerleader

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/jan/11/male-female-rape-statistics-graphic

http://www.thehavens.co.uk/docs/Havens_Wake_Up_To_Rape_Report_Summary.pdf

http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/03/06/india-us-nirbhaya-gang-rape-honour-idINDEE9250G720130306

http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=29755

http://www.womensaid.org.uk/domestic_violence_topic.asp?section=0001000100220036

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B4I5F05jNg&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6tmD5RDzok

The magic circle

Guest post by Martin Pravda and Keith

They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.

Brecht

The largest group of revolutionary socialists in Britain is falling apart. Not because of major shifts in the ‘balance of forces’, nor because of some new ‘turn’ in strategy or tactics but because of its leadership’s appalling response to members coming forward with rape allegations.

No one could’ve predicted that it would end like this and we can’t ignore the ‘balance of forces’ or the ‘structural’ explanations on offer (oftentimes referred to as ‘history’), but it has been shockingly bleak to watch individuals that we’ve known for years – decades in some cases – retreat behind explanations that start in 1976/89/99… for something so vile and immediate, something right there in front of you, that'll ultimately destroy the party’s reputation.

So much is thrown into doubt. The chasm between formal commitments and actual behaviour seems unbridgeable and for many it will mean abandoning left politics and political activism for good. For others there are the after-effects of shock and disgust while the work to explain the roots of the crisis continues in order to avoid another.

The authors of this article are from separate generations in the party’s history, with a 20 year gap between our experiences. The creation of the International Socialist Network has brought together members and former members of the SWP from very different periods, who have witnessed different shapes and turns in the Party’s strategy of the years. There has been much discussion as to where it all went wrong.

We started with that Brecht quote to home in on an aspect of the causal explanations that we find wanting from much of the recent debate: the “subjective element”. What is it in the character of a certain type of political activist that leads them to inexplicable conclusions (lying women, police spies, agents of the bourgeoisie)? Can you wire up a convincing story that starts with epochal trends and ends with so-and-so’s [insert this week’s most pernicious hack] latest statement?

One explanation is bureaucratism.

John Game’s recent contribution challenges rigid conceptions of “Leninism” as practiced by the SWP. He mentions the increasing levels of substitutionism which took precedent over the party’s strategy during the downturn of the 1980s, and which continued to dominate – despite the ever-changing political circumstances the party was operating in – throughout the 1990s to the present day.

He points out how a bureaucratic leadership emerged, taking ownership of all decision making processes within the party, undermining the principles of “socialism from below” which had first attracted people to it.

John suggests that the roots of these problems are in the very existence of a well-organised central structure. He argues for an organisation “without a single full-timer”, such positions of formal leadership would inevitably lead an organisation towards bureaucratic substitutionism, so should be avoided.

However, while in the SWP’s case full time workers have taken up such a role, it is problematic to place all the blame on party structures and to write-off any form of central leadership all together.

Most members of the SWP were first drawn towards the party because of its organisational prowess. As John accepts in his account, it was the party’s involvement in real campaigns and struggles which made it stand out for his generation - from the Anti Nazi League and Rock against Racism to the support and solidarity campaigns in the Miners’ Strike – the party was centrally involved, and this required a high degree of organisation.

One of those “stand out” elements was the Party’s reputation for covering every spare wall with its flyposters and stickers and for producing a plethora of campaign-specific pamphlets, papers and magazines. All that took an organisational apparatus to produce, distribute and sustain. It is no exaggeration to say that the Party visually dominated demonstrations, either against the Nazis or during the Miners Strike and on into the anti-Poll Tax campaign. At one point in the late 1980s the BBC phoned the Party’s print shop for sample fly posters to make Albert Square look more authentic!

The apparatus [Party full time workers] was, if anything, smaller at these peaks of struggle than it is now, but it was an apparatus. Individual members would pay split subs (divided between the local branch and the party nationally), if you were lucky (and no irony here) your district might have a full time organiser, that organiser would report into a national office where campaign or routine functions (paper distribution, industrial department, SW journalists) were organised and where CC members had regional responsibilities as well as particular industrial fractions to look after.

Local branches had their own micro-apparatus. Members would take responsibility for organising both public and workplace sales of SW, the Review and ISJ. There would be a bookstall organiser and someone responsible for following up with contacts made who’d expressed interest. Someone would organise “educationals” (essentially book clubs with a focus on a pertinent bit of the canon) and someone looked after the money. A healthy SWP branch looked and felt like a mini-party in your town.

They were shut down in the mid-1990s, but we’ll come back to the lessons for abolishing that particular part of the Party’s structure.

For today’s generation of SWP members it was again the party’s organisational structures that were able to draw activists together. The wave of anti-cuts and fees protests and University occupations were spontaneous, and the SWP was in no way an initial leading force in this. The party was however able to build quite significantly out of the movement.

As it was in the 1980s, a political and financial crisis was deepening and social democratic parties continued to offer no answers. Those who were involved in political campaigns saw revolutionary socialism as a very appealing solution. The SWP were able to print pamphlets arguing for socialist ideas, organise meetings and rallies across the country, and put on coaches to other important campaigns such as the Unite against Fascism protests against the EDL.

While the party failed to gain leadership of the movement, which it misguidedly attempted to do with subsitutionist fronts such as the Education Activist Network, it was able to grow as people saw the need for a radical organisation to pull things together.

The Party gave this new layer of membership the apparatus to organise and encourage others to be involved. It required organised structures and a leadership of sorts to make this happen. Someone needed to write the pamphlets, someone needed to print them. Someone needed to organise meetings, someone needed to book the rooms for them. Someone needed to advertise the anti-fascist protests, someone needed to get people on the coaches. The number of people who become drawn to socialist politics can quickly become overwhelming when spontaneous movements arise, as was the case with the student protests in 2010. Having full time workers and a body of organisers was crucial in making sure that everything that needed to happen did.

However, the full time workers and leadership have, over a period of time, assumed an increasingly bureaucratic role within the organisation to the point where party decisions are made almost exclusively by full time members of the Central Committee, and these decisions are wholly unaccountable. It is too simplistic however to simply lay the blame for this on the very existence of a central structure.

Some blame “the balance of class forces”.

We were already on the back foot in the 1980s and the decline has continued. Not catastrophically but it has continued. The defeat of the Miners paved the way for wholesale privatisation of key industrial sectors, the rise of the right inside the Labour Party and a new combat model for the ruling class. However, the deliberate isolation of the Miners dispute by the trade union leaderships also limited the negative effects. Key sections of workers in rail and the civil service won disputes during and immediately after the strike. The anti-Poll Tax campaign was a huge success and, after shattering the Tory Party we got Blairism and (by chance) a mini-boom in the economy.

The non-descript ‘90s was a tough time for the SWP [note: neither author was in the Party during this period, one was “in the wilderness” and the other had just started primary school]. The Party’s ‘official’ perspective was summed up in Cliff’s formulation “the 1930s in slow motion”. It was desperate, Cliff was obviously nearing the end of his tenure, there was an enormous amount of scrabbling around for quick-wins and most of them were quite destructive.

First came the micro-branches. The canny idea here was that big branches has somehow ossified and needed a shake up, so you took a city branch with 30-40 people meeting in it every week and spread it across the borough or county so that you then had far more branches. They met in people’s front rooms, average attendance 4-6 and lots of staring at each other’s feet.

Then came branch abolition. The membership were still acting as a ‘conservative bloc’ so now they wouldn’t be allowed to meet at all, save to pick up the paper, read a bullet-point list of ‘to do’s and sell tickets for some London event or other.

Then Cliff died after leaving the family business, catastrophically, to Rees and German. Had Callinicos blocked with Harman during this phase/period the world would, most certainly, be positively different. But he didn’t and so the Party got ‘The Project’: The break-out strategy combining electoralism and opportunism by various turns and… well, we know the rest.

Of course, there is nothing in these transformations which is necessarily inherent to all forms of central organisation. It was the self-imposed bureaucratic nature of the SWP’s leadership, the way it positioned itself at the head of the Party, the disengagement it forced onto the membership with the “not in front of the children” approach which forced these shifts. This is not how organised structures within a socialist organisation or even a leadership within it has to work.

Instead of throwing away the very concept of central structures and losing the important functioning role it can play - simply because the SWP let theirs go rotten - we should instead invent a type of leadership which is both useful and accountable to the membership it serves. Theoretically, paid workers and elected bodies for a socialist organisation should be servant to its membership and if this was put into practice the role it would play could be extremely positive.

There is always the need for someone to take a lead on a particular task. In our network for example, while we are nowhere near a size that requires any sort of paid full timer, there is still the need for a central leadership.

On a national level, someone will need to overlook the blog, moderate the forum, keep together contact details, organise childcare and rooms for our meetings, sort out transport and organise places for members to stay overnight etc. There are plenty of day-to-day tasks that need sorting and without real structures or an elected body taking a lead it’s impossible to see how all of this will get done.

These “leaders” of course would be democratically decided, act transparently and be accountable. With the email lists, blogs and message boards this is actually very easy, if not somewhat inevitable. Oh, and money. The organisation's finances need to be available for review by the membership in whatever level of detail required.

These are the [Dark Side] mechanisms where regular report backs can be made, where members can raise questions or put forward suggestions instantly. With regular national meetings these bodies can be discussed, debated and fully assessed by all of the membership. This way a leadership of sorts can be both scrutinised and be best placed at task with ideas from around the country to aid their work.

Such a central body could of course only be a backbone for regional groups, where a similar leadership of sorts is required to cover the local tasks. The key to holding this all together is the nature of the relationship between all these different structures. Local organising bodies should be subservient to local membership and national bodies should be subservient to federal groups.

These of course are just a few loose suggestions, but the key point is that a national organisation could quite easily function in this way without the need for a “party line” imposed by an unaccountable central committee. We aren’t going there but we do need an organising council/panel/board/committee.

Revolutionary organisations that have attempted to exist without any central structures or leadership always ultimately fail in their objectives. Even the Anarcho Syndicalist mass organisation the CNT - who completely rejected Leninist ideas - realised the need to have a sophisticated central body with a layer of paid workers.

There is a real need to collectively decide exactly what being a member or associate of the IS Network actually entails. If we want to keep it simply as a talking group, then it is fine to reject these structures. If however, as John and others have suggested, we want the organisation to play a practical functioning role for activists to help build and organise in class struggle – we must accept that centralisation and an accountable leadership is a must. We feel it is crucial that such an organisation is built. Victor Serge perhaps best put it in a pamphlet reaching out to anarchist groups during the Russian Revolution:

Instead of being a subjective and utopian doctrine, the possession of tiny sectarian groupings, [Revolutionaries] should embrace the working class and revolutionary movement as a reality and not as a myth.

Serge