This article has been reproduced with permission from Mark Steel’s blog

It shouldn’t matter. It really shouldn’t matter, should it, what goes on in the Socialist Workers Party. Their membership is roughly the average home gate at Mansfield Town. By the time I left them, in 2007, the most common comment I heard about them was ‘Oh. Are they still going?’ the way you might refer to Bernard Cribbins.

But somehow they’ve got themselves in such a mess that thousands of people have been gripped by it, as if it’s a real life Trotskyite soap opera, with onlookers settling before the internet with a tub of ice cream for the latest episode and gasping “Oh my God they’ve called the faction leader a disgraceful liberal moralist, I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.”

Articles, forums and comment sections on their travails have reached beyond the political sections of online-land; at one point Mumsnet was among the sites discussing it. There are probably discussions on winemaking forums, in which someone has written “These allegations against a leading member of the SWP have made me reconsider when to crush this year’s crop of elderberries.”

I’ve wasted whole periods of a day reading this stuff, until feeling the shamed sense of over-indulgence you get after eating an entire Swiss roll in the morning.

Part of my excuse is that I was a member for loads of years, and know many of the people at the centre of this pickle. But also, it does matter, for a whole pile of reasons.

The immediate cause is that in 2012 the party leaders reported a complaint had been made by a teenage woman, who alleged that during an affair she’d been having with one of the most senior members, a man of almost 50, he had raped her.

There had been rumours of ‘an incident’ at the previous year’s conference, but the members weren’t told the details, and after a brief mention of him being involved in ‘difficulties’, a standing ovation was orchestrated for the man concerned.

The woman was somewhat less than satisfied with this outcome, and as more members heard the full story the party decided to refer the ‘complaint’ to their Disputes Committee, to ‘investigate’ the matter. All eight people on this committee had worked with the accused for several years, most were his friends, and would you believe it, they decided the case was ‘Not proven’, so no action was to be taken against him (although the chair of the committee dissented, declaring the accused had behaved inappropriately).

At the party conference in January 2013 the members were asked to approve the Disputes Committee report. During the discussion, it was revealed by a witness to the investigation that in its course the woman had been asked about another relationship she’d been in, and about her drinking habits. It also turned out she had asked to speak at the conference, but was told she wouldn’t be allowed in, and was now in a state of distress, as it’s not hard to imagine.

And it became known that SWP members who knew about the issue, and were uneasy about it, had been expelled from the party for discussing it on Facebook. Members who objected to any of this were told they were guilty of “bourgeois morality” and accused of capitulating to feminism.

The conference voted, narrowly, to accept the report. But someone who was there leaked a transcript of the discussion onto the internet.

The reaction amongst almost anyone who saw this was of bewildered horror, so at this point, and this took guile and dedication, SWP leaders managed to make things even worse.

The leading body, the Central Committee, declared the issue was closed, and no debate or discussion amongst members would be permitted. Presumably at this point, if an SWP member was asked how they could justify dealing with a rape allegation by arranging an investigation run by mates of the accused, they were supposed to change the subject, or to really earn points with the leadership, start playing a harmonica.

Unsurprisingly, the discussions did continue, with hundreds of members professing outrage. So Alex Callinicos, a leading figure in the SWP, wrote an article condemning the critics, humbly titled In Defence of Leninism.

It begins, and this is an article written to defend their medieval handling of a rape allegation, remember, with a series of sentences such as “The theoretical development of Marxism requires above all deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy.”

To his credit, no one’s likely to say ‘Ah, that old cliché. That’s always wheeled out in cases of sexual abuse’.

Maybe if a leading SWP member was accused of battering a pensioner to rob her purse, he’d reply “Marx was adamant that the 1848 revolutions in Europe represented a final break between the emergent working class and capitalism. Can I go now?”

In 3,500 words the central incident is barely referred to, except as a “Difficult disciplinary case,” in which “Scandalously, a minority inside the SWP are refusing to accept the democratically reached conference decisions.”

Now trade unionists who had participated in SWP activities wrote a joint letter, to explain they wouldn’t align with them again. Many of the SWP’s international groups declared their fury, and dozens of speakers who had appeared at their events declared they would no longer do so. A website that had been run for years by a prominent SWP member complained that critics of the Central Committee were being subjected to “Bullying, intimidation, and threats of violence.”

To which the SWP’s leaders replied “There is no evidence of damage to the party.” And with a magnificent sense of perspective, Alex Callinicos said that SWP members who opposed the leaders would face “lynch-mobs.” Presumably, if someone tried to drag him away from lynching some poor sod he’d scream “Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy.”

Almost the entire student section of the SWP left, or joined the faction against the leaders, to which those leaders declared this was a sign of how SWP students felt demoralised following the introduction of tuition fees. Other people who’ve been accused of sexual abuse must envy how the party gets away with these explanations. Jonathan King must think ‘I should have said people were only upset with me as they were demoralised following an increase in the rate of VAT’.

Most people, who have little awareness of the SWP, may conclude that the leaders and their loyal followers are simply psychotic, and not in a good way. So just stay well away. Others may feel this is all so predictable to not be worth stating, as Trotskyite groups are, by their nature, nuts. So you might as well write an account of the Mafia, gasping “You’ll never guess what, they turned out quite violent.”

There’s certainly a part of me that thinks the SWP has become so adept and successful at demoralising and antagonising everyone in their own party, if they really want to help the cause of socialism they should join the Conservatives.

But they’re not all crazy, and that’s more chilling than if they were. My own initial instincts were that they can’t really be doing this, these people I used to know and drink with, and laughed with and did fund-raising benefits all over the bloody place for. I went to Telford once for the SWP. Surely I wouldn’t have done that if they were mad.

Now many of those I knew from those times are publicly backing this peculiar behaviour. The SWP produced a list of 500 of its members who supported the party’s conduct. I scrolled down this list gingerly edging towards the parts where, alphabetically, names I knew might appear, and I willed the Hs or Ns past in the hope they wouldn’t be there. Some weren’t but several were, people whose settees I’d drunk beer on and whose kids had played with my kids popping up, next to a declaration that proved they’d say or do anything, defend any act no matter how appalling, to protect one of their ‘leaders’, in a manner approaching that of a cult.

Yet the people behaving in this irrational way did start out rational. I recall when it was an education being in the SWP, not in how to be at war with everyone but because you found imaginative ways to engage with the outside world, which was fairly important as this was by some distance bigger than the world inside the SWP.

The names on that list belonged to people who became socialists because they were enraged by war or poverty or racism, or maybe by the way women are treated in society, and they wished to combat those injustices. Many were instrumental in the Anti-Nazi-League, Stop the War and countless local campaigns.

So how could this change have happened? Maybe it started in the 1990s, when the SWP began to shrink, probably due to socialism becoming a harder product to sell. But it refused to acknowledge it was shrinking, preferring to insist it was constantly growing. Then, if anyone pointed out this clearly wasn’t true, they were told sharply that they were mistaken.

Like Basil Fawlty, rather than admit to telling small lies, they decided to protect them, by telling bigger and more ridiculous lies. And once that happens, internal democracy is under threat. Contest the distortions and you have to be denounced as an enemy.

Or maybe it came from such a determination to defend socialist ideas, against all orthodox thinking, that they became impervious to any criticism at all. They became so defensive that any suggestion of doing things differently was met with the phrase that this would “Betray the tradition.” Even the internet was treated with heavy suspicion, with blogs and websites set up or contributed to by members frowned upon or banned.

Whatever the reasons, debate with people outside the party was replaced with vitriol. A trade unionist who usually backed the SWP disagreed with them on an issue, so a story was invented that they’d rigged the vote to get their union position. Often when people left the SWP, it was announced that they’d never been members in the first place.

The organisation which, whatever its faults, had once been a cauldron of exuberance, debate and enthusiasm, was edging towards becoming a cult. And that’s the most alarming aspect of this story, that cults aren’t circles of people who took too much acid and dance naked in the woods, they’re people who took one small decision to forego independence of thought for the defence of their group, and once they started couldn’t stop.

SWP members who have taken a stand on the current issue seem bewildered as to why their leaders behave in this illogical way. But the reason may be that the debate isn’t really about the allegations, or attitudes towards feminism, it’s about accepting that you do as you’re told, that the party is under attack at all times so you defend the leaders no matter what, that if the party’s pronouncement doesn’t match reality, it must be reality that’s wrong. Dissent on an issue and your crime is not to be wrong about the issue, it’s that you dissented at all.

So it does matter, because the end result of this process is that many bright eloquent fighters against bullying have become the bullies, and many potential bright eloquent fighters against bullying may be put off from participating in that fight, if they think it will end with behaviour like this.

And it matters to me, because I can’t claim to be entirely innocent. I was in this party for 28 years. I must have accepted claims that didn’t make sense, and ignored accounts of appalling behaviour, or sighed and hoped the tricky issue I heard about would go away of its own accord. Somehow the critical faculties that led me to join a socialist group deserted me with regard to the group itself.

It matters because anyone considering taking part in the activities of the left is entitled to ask how we can ensure that abuse of women won’t be dismissed as ‘moralism’.

And because there’s now an enduring sense of uneasy rage against the injustices of the free market, which encompasses a brilliant array of diverse characters, and between us we have to work out how to turn that into an effective opposition, without making the same mistakes. Surely we can establish movements and forums in which we can debate our aims and differences, in a spirit that inspires and invigorates all who take part, rather than berating anyone who disagrees.

There’s a mass of disparate individuals, committed to opposing the values of the bankers, the tax exiles and the sneering face of free market authority. Surely we can embrace that enthusiasm and energy, and encourage it rather than demoralise it.

We can’t ensure that no one in our ranks will behave appallingly, but we can ensure that everyone is accountable, so that no one is allowed special protection because they have a place on a committee.

Over the last few weeks I’ve almost dared to be optimistic. Effective characters such as Owen Jones, Salma Yaqoob, Caroline Lucas, Laurie Penny, along with Unite and other unions, and organisers of UK Uncut are launching the People’s Assembly, which could represent the most encouraging attempt for years, to create a movement that can attract the heaps of people appalled by the current order that’s running society.

So we have to follow the same rules as anyone who wants to win the support of a wide layer of people, by creating an atmosphere that attracts rather than repels, in which everyone who contributes feels a sense of accomplishment, where differences are celebrated rather than sneered at, and in which the many inevitable mistakes are part of the glorious chaos of building a genuine movement.

That movement will be the product of all who take part in it, and won’t be an end in itself to be protected no matter how it behaves, but a means to an end, which is a world less cruel, more exhilarating, less bullying and more fun, that it was when we found it.

PS Since writing the start of this I’ve looked up the average home attendance of Mansfield Town, and this season it’s been 2,389, which is much higher than the SWP membership. After all this I’d guess they’ll be close to Braintree, on 624.

Mark Steel

This article has been cross-posted with permission from the excellent Soviet Goon Boy blog

ORDER PREVAILS IN VAUXHALL

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
- HL Mencken

And so it is that the rigged conference has taken place, the leadership has secured its victory (though it may well be a Pyrrhic victory) and the opposition has been crushed. Rage and despair will be the natural reactions; however, it’s a good time to pause a moment and take stock.

The leadership is morally bankrupt

Let’s be blunt. The most pressing issue facing the SWP is simply this – is it a safe place? On the face of things, no; on the face of things, the majority of delegates today don’t think that is at all important.

To recap, this starts off with the allegation of sexual harassment made against “Delta”, the then national secretary of the party, in 2010. Comrade W took her complaint to the Central Committee, the result of which was Delta having to accept a demotion. Although the SWP grapevine is quite efficient, this was all that most comrades knew – that Delta had had an affair which ended badly, and he had behaved inappropriately. At the time the talk wasn’t of rape; at the time, people outside the district didn’t know just how young Comrade W was – that this case involved someone who was effectively a schoolgirl. However, the very fact that Delta – basically the leader of the party at that point – was forced to take a demotion indicated that those people in the leadership who knew the details knew that things weren’t right. They knew Delta had misbehaved badly. They can hardly deny it now, though that won’t stop them trying.

And then there was the 2011 conference. Where Delta – demoted, but still on the CC – gave a cringeworthy ten-minute speech in his own justification, followed by a (highly orchestrated) standing ovation, complete with clapping and chanting. A lot of comrades didn’t like that. Equally, and even without knowing all the details, they didn’t like the hectoring of Comrade W’s supporters that took place that year. This is important background – things were bad before we knew this was a rape complaint.

Which brings us to the Disputes Committee. With the best will in the world, and even assuming that DC members could put aside any unconscious bias (not necessarily an assumption that outsiders would be willing to make), the DC is simply not competent to hold a quasi-criminal hearing into an allegation of rape. It doesn’t dispose of any forensic resources, isn’t composed of legal professionals… and, perhaps more importantly, can’t impose any sanctions beyond expulsion. The Chinese Communist Party can lock up Bo Xilai; the SWP Disputes Committee doesn’t have any such powers at its disposal, thankfully. If a woman comrade makes an allegation of rape, the DC should gently explain that they aren’t in a position to hold a rape investigation, and should encourage her to go to a rape crisis centre and/or the police. The DC, as something analogous to a professional ethics body, is only competent to rule on whether or not an individual is fit to be a member of the party, or at least to hold a leading role in it.

One further point: it isn’t a punishment to not be a member of the leadership. The party chooses who is an appropriate individual to represent it. This needs restating for the benefit of those comrades who seem to believe in a Divine Right of Delta.

Well, the DC made its decision, and this was accepted (just) by conference. Two things, though, are important. The first is that Comrade W, who had expressed a desire to speak to conference, not only was not allowed to do so, but was not even allowed to enter the hall and listen. This is a pretty appalling way to treat a vulnerable young woman who has already been bullied for making a complaint against a leader of the party. The second point is that the vote was incredibly close – roughly 51% yes to 45% no, with 4% indicating an abstention and many delegates simply sitting on their hands in shock. The “majority” for accepting the DC report was actually one of less than two in five delegates. And this was in a context where no amendments or supplementary motions were accepted – delegates were simply allowed a straight up-and-down vote where they could either accept or reject the DC report in its entirety. Not very impressive.

And that’s before taking into account this weekend’s revelations about a further case involving a woman comrade who was beaten and raped by her district organiser. If anything, the news report understates how bad that case was. What is true is that the organiser, having been found guilty by the DC, was expelled for two years. Two years. That’s the same penalty that was handed out to the Facebook Four for an online discussion about how inadequately the party was handling the Delta case; a discussion where they decided not to form a faction and, in a Kafkaesque twist, were expelled for “factionalism”. Hell, Andy Wilson was expelled for life for proposing to set up a cultural magazine. What sort of organisation has such skewed priorities?

The obvious answer is, an organisation which feels that the ends justify the means absolutely; that in the cause of the socialist revolution (or at least maintaining the current leadership in their positions of power; the CC doesn’t distinguish the two) the only thing that matters is the preservation of authority. If Delta is a good organiser who is crucial to the perspective, he must be protected – nay, even restored to the CC as soon as they can get away with it. Most of the doubts about his behaviour – say, whether it is appropriate for the leader of the party to use his position to try it on with teenage girls – are ruled out of court as “bourgeois morality”. And the victims in all this are simply collateral damage.

It’s the logical end of a process of dehumanisation, of chewing people up and spitting them out. I once remonstrated – quite mildly in retrospect – with a senior CC member about the party’s habit of losing good people by way of the apparat’s casual use of bullying and slander to get their way. “You have to understand,” he explained, “it’s unfortunate, but some people just couldn’t carry the perspective.” I wish I’d had the nerve at the time to tell him what an utter c**t he was. But then, we didn’t know then what we know now.

The leadership is politically weak

This is the context for the rebellion in the ranks, and it’s been heartening to see so many comrades saying that this is something they can’t possibly defend. Indeed, the fact that the mishandling of the rape complaint is indefensible is itself demonstrated by the fact that the leadership and their proxies haven’t even tried to defend it. The most “substantial” justification from the CC is Professor Callinicos’ Socialist Review article, which merely refers, opaquely and in passing, to a “difficult disciplinary case”, before going on to discuss how the SWP’s Leninism is being threatened by reformist and movementist currents, the former represented by TV’s Owen Jones (here Alex reveals the little-known fact that young master Jones is a member of the Labour Party) and the latter by former SWP CC member “Donny Mayo”, who has since thrown in his lot with Counterfire and is therefore a proxy target for John Rees, the party’s current numero uno Emmanuel Goldstein figure. (Paul D’Amato has a good response here, perhaps a better one than the article deserves.)

None of this is particularly germane to the issue in hand – the party’s disastrous mishandling of the disciplinary case Alex wants to gloss over – but it has provided a useful script for the CC’s supporters. If you read through the monstrous pre-conference bulletin, the contributions of CC supporters are notable for completely avoiding the issue and banging on instead about Leninism!!!, and how the opposition have deviated from it. This is our 1903 moment, they declare, when the Bolsheviks have to split with the Mensheviks. Quite what the Delta case has to do with Leninism is anyone’s guess, but the obvious conclusion is that this is a way of dignifying a fairly insubstantial argument. There’s also the unintentionally hilarious argument that the opposition want to exchange the SWP’s tried-and-tested way of doing things for the model of Syriza, which of course is so much less successful than the SWP.

Indeed, there is a pronounced tone of brittle defensiveness all the way through the discussion. The same has been true in party meetings. The 1980s generation, the backbone of the CC’s support, have dusted off their polemics about building our ideological defences to keep us from sinking into the swamp. In particular, this means acting as if thirty-year-old arguments over Women’s Voice are the last word on feminism; the idea that if you don’t agree with Sharon Smith’s articles it’s at least worth engaging with them seems to have completely passed them by. Better to deploy the bell, book and candle.

But actually, most of this is really sub-political. It amounts to the CC yelling “Respect our authoritah!” and then deploying every trick in the book to win the vote.

It begins with CC members – Callinicos, Kimber, Bradley et al – touring the branches and lying through their teeth to the members. This, sad to say, is not unexpected. We’ve also seen Party Notes turned into a factional publication, without of course offering any sort of right of reply.

There has been the punishment of party workers – Hannah Dee, one of the few leading members to command genuine respect and affection from the rank and file, was unceremoniously dumped from the CC purely for disagreeing with how the rape allegation was handled, and then found that her employment with the party had been terminated. There have been reports of bullying at the centre; the student office either is not communicating with SWSS groups or has ceased to function altogether.[1]

We’ve seen, in the pre-conference discussion, CC supporters openly referring to the opposition as scabs and narks. As for Donny Gluckstein’s ramblings about MI5, it pains me to get Yiddish on his ass, but he’s a shonda to his father.

There’s been the practice of winner-takes-all delegate selection, where if the CC loyalists had a bare majority in a district, they scooped 100% of the delegates from that district. Particular Stakhanovite exertions were observed in Glasgow and Sheffield, and one hopes the CC appreciates the efforts of Dave “The Hatchet” Sherry and Mad Maxine Bowler. Dave and Maxine, incidentally, sit on the Disputes Committee, which is supposed to protect party members from the arbitrary use of power by leading comrades.

And then there was that little stunt at the faction caucus, when a posse of CC members and hangers-on appeared to demand entrance. It was, apparently, unheard of for a faction to have a closed meeting. Let’s leave aside the fact that at the January conference, the CC held a “supporters’ meeting” which excluded oppositionists, and even one member of the CC’s own election slate. Let’s leave aside the likelihood that they intended to disrupt the caucus. The shocking thing was the appearance of Chanie Rosenberg and Anna Gluckstein, the founder of the party’s nonagenarian widow and his daughter:

It’s hard to think of a tactic more apolitical than this. The only possible reason for bringing Chanie along was to dare the opposition to close the door on the Mother of the Party. One is inevitably driven to think of Stalin wheeling out the elderly Krupskaya to lend himself moral authority; and it does a tremendous disservice to the memory of Cliff, who really despised the whole idea of personality cults, let alone a cult of his family.

A leadership that deploys tactics like this is a leadership that has no confidence in its ability to win an actual argument. It is hard to disagree with Ian B’s assessment that:

I have the impression of a very weak leadership panicking but unable to break out of a purely defensive stance… The CC fought like cats at conference to retain the leadership, but do not seem to be offering any way forward.

Eppur si muove

If there’s been one thing that’s characterised the CC’s response over recent weeks, it’s been the reversion to technophobia. From Callinicos talking about the “dark side of the internet” – as if socialists who disagree with Alex Callinicos are on a moral level with 411 scammers – to the repeated insistence in pre-conference aggregates that “the blog” was the source of the party crisis. The latter is a clear case of shooting the messenger, and is more than a little reminiscent of Cardinal Law declaring a fatwa against the Boston Globe. It’s also rather funny in that the opposition have been very disciplined online in the pre-conference period, while CC loyalists have been extremely prolific (if not very convincing) in their online appearances.

It strikes me, again, that the SWP leadership don’t get the digital revolution at all. They still have a commandist model based on a not very accurate apprehension of what the Bolsheviks were doing a century ago, with an omniscient Central Committee and a paper that pronounces “the line”. On the contrary, the internet is corrosive of all hierarchies; it points the way towards a style of organising that is much less vertical and much more horizontal (and not in the Skegness rally sense); that we now live in a world where activists are both hyperconnected and can share information instantaneously. Above all, it means the party can’t keep its dirty little secrets to itself the way it used to.

The positive side of this – and the thing that drove the CC absolutely nuts – was that a very large element of the party membership (a) exercised its critical faculties and (b) self-organised. The comrades of the IDOOP faction didn’t wait for the CC to graciously grant them permission to organise; they did it. This is still a way of thinking that is alien to the SWP leadership, and probably has been since the late Pete Sedgwick departed.

It’s also true that the rape case – awful as that has been – has become a lightning rod for all sorts of other submerged issues. There are many people in the SWP who are sick of being lied to, being bullied, being treated as cannon fodder for the permanent leadership’s Ponzi schemes. The older ones remember when the party was better – hell, they remember that the IS of forty years ago was a good deal larger and more influential than the SWP of today. They also realise how toxic this situation is, and how it’s tarnishing Cliff’s legacy. The younger ones are of a generation that doesn’t accept authority without question.

What next? I certainly don’t have any quick and easy answers. If the good comrades aren’t to be lost to politics entirely, we will need to go through a long process of thinking, writing and discussing. What is clear, though, is that the SWP’s discredited leadership has no way forward. Even if it maintains control of the apparatus, its future will be that of Sheila Torrance’s rump WRP, which inherited enough assets from Healy to still have a sort of zombie existence nearly thirty years later. But Alex – remember your glory days, for you will never fly so high again.

You foolish lackeys, your order is built on sand…

[1] To be scrupulously fair, Mark Bergfeld’s resignation may have caused some disruption to the student office, and someone will have to be co-opted to the CC to take his place. Perhaps Martin Smith would be available.

This is a document that was sent to all SWP members yesterday. I’m publishing it here in full because I think it sums up the best of what people think the SWP could be and should be, and is a clear acknowledgement that it isn’t the party everyone wants it to be. What’s important here is that from the document, you get a glimpse of how an open, democratic, vibrant party could act. Compare it to the utter hackery, bullying, outright lying and complete inability to act like socialists you get from the CC and its more stark loyalists. I’m also publishing this on its own because, with the SWP membership trying to unite itself around what Pat Stack calls ‘filth’ – us – they need to know how wrong they are. One website has just published a series of private communications between faction members, specifically to ratchet up the tension and force expulsions. This site doesn’t do that. You might not agree with everything we publish, but we don’t pretend to want the left to succeed while working for its downfall. Ultimately, I think the faction will fail in its aims because it wasn’t willing to do what was necessary to stop the hackery – in some circumstances, I think you really do have to fight fire with fire.

After Sunday

Megan T and Mike G

As we approach the Special Conference, it is important that we discuss where we go from here. The faction has been tremendously successful: 532 party members have joined – far from the fringe grouping that we are characterised as.

Our concern at the start of this process was that the ‘middle ground’ of worried members would drift out of the party or into passivity if there was not pressure on the CC to address their concerns. The existence of the faction, and the seriousness of its arguments, have kept many comrades in the party and given heart to many more that a significant section of the membership does not agree with the CC’s tactics and responses to the questions raised by the disputes committee report, and has been prepared to stand up and say so.

In our view, we must be very careful not to abandon all that we have gained in recent weeks in the name of party discipline. In some senses, the building of the faction has been a demonstration of how a living organisation should work. It has been a conversation among comrades, horizontally, which has opened new networks and connections and made it possible to argue and debate issues directly, without formulae and slogans, without ‘holding the line’ or defining ourselves in relation to the leadership. What has emerged is not just a deep discontent, but a generalised feeling of disenfranchisement among party members.

The CC is fighting for its life, and for the methods of resolving issues it has used, largely uncontested, for a very long time. It has battered, attacked and ultimately removed people without compunction. That retaliatory spirit is obvious in the treatment of student comrades since conference, in the motion sent to Tottenham branch and in Terry, Donny and Penny’s piece in the IB, which begins and ends with threats of expulsion. The withdrawal of the Tottenham motion, proposed by two leading CC supporters and dismissing the student comrades with a wave of the hand, is an old tactic – create the arguments, spread them wide, and then withdraw the motion but not the position that it reflected. So it has created a point of reference for all those with a leaning towards heresy hunting.

We have argued that the party leadership has used exclusively administrative and procedural justifications and methods to respond to the IDOOP faction. While protesting at the “misuse” of our constitution, every bureaucratic device has been mobilised to block the faction. The manoeuvring to get CC supporters elected to the special conference by whatever means possible has nothing to do with the winning of political arguments that is assumed when we discuss democratic centralism and the unity it can promote.

That unity based on conviction, shared understandings and debate between comrades is the only guarantee that our understandings and methods are appropriate for the times in which we live (the “this-sidedness of thinking” as Marx called it). That is what politics is, not the manipulation of party structures. Or have we abandoned the idea that the centre of our theory is agency, real people intervening to change the world in circumstances not of our own choosing – or to put it another way, to break out of the structures that imprison our thinking?

The standard issue CC introduction to every aggregate gives a general, broad picture of the world and then moves on to attack the faction for narrowing that grand vision to internal matters. But that sweeping and general overview is no substitute for the complex and searching analysis of the society in which we live which has been the greatest strength of the SWP tradition, and which has enabled us to “punch above our weight”. Those ideas have been carried and won by comrades well prepared with arguments that have given them the confidence to work as they have. That confidence is severely damaged when the leaders of our organisation cannot offer a political explanation for their own actions.

The reasons for that are very clear. They were wrong. That was the immediate cause of the current crisis, and the error was then compounded by the refusal to acknowledge it and to respond to widespread disquiet by attempting to close down discussion. Indeed, it is the CC’s response to its mistake that has exposed a deeper weakness and what many of us have seen as a shocking willingness to reach for bureaucratic solutions to a political problem.

In recent years the CC has split time and again. The problem is not the splits in themselves, but the fact that they were concealed from the members of the party until they burst on us like a sudden storm. The gulf between the leadership and the party began to widen, the party apparatus increasingly substituted itself in various forms of activity and successful leadership became increasingly replaced by instructions, commands and moralism, always veiled by a tone of urgency to justify the failure to discuss things with comrades. That process has impaired the relationship between the CC and the party as a whole and withered the democratic reciprocity between sections of the party; this has not only affected individual comrades and distorted the party; it has weakened the leadership.

The DC dispute was the final straw in that imbalanced, frustrating and unequal relationship. At some point the CC began to treat the party with suspicion and outright hostility. And we have seen in the last six weeks how deeply embedded that suspicion is. It is easy to demonise two comrades who are being made responsible for a generalised leak of our internal discussions. Nothing can really be concealed in the age of the internet, and we would do well to understand that. But the faction contains over 500 comrades from every area of the party – why is this never discussed?

There is an alternative to ill-tempered protests about bloggers. It is as if the problem was not the method that came to grief and failed to convince nearly half the party’s conference delegates but the fact that it was discovered! In the age of instant communication our internal conduct and our external actions have to coincide. If we talk about democracy we have to exemplify it.

Part of the role of the CC in a revolutionary organisation is to fight to win over the majority of the membership to ideological positions and the practical activity that flows from an analysis of the current political situation. If the CC is not willing, or able, to do this then it is not leading. It is not the role of revolutionaries to support a weak leadership no matter what, but rather the obligation of party members to conduct an internal argument if they believe that the positions or tactics of the organisation are not matching the potential of prevailing circumstances and resulting in growth – numerical growth, rising levels of theoretical understanding and practical confidence, and in influence beyond our ranks.

How did the insistence on building a revolutionary organisation in which knowledge and experience, theory and practice, met in a “vibrant collaboration” (Lenin’s words) between all its members become transformed into a frozen transmission of pre-digested ideas from the top to the bottom? That’s a process that all of our comrades, and all the people we work and struggle with, will immediately recognise as the way capitalism functions. And we are supposed to be its gravediggers.

The faction has already won its first battle, whatever the outcome of the heavily rigged conference on the 10th. It has burst open the formal and restricted arena of discussion, and created a space of vigorous, honest and horizontal debate about much more than just the DC decision. It has re-established the fundamental socialist principle of accountability by demanding an explanation from the CC. And when it refused to provide one, it began to analyse that response and to connect the specific to the general, the flawed way in which the DC was handled with the general sense among a large chunk of the membership that they had been disenfranchised.

In just a few weeks, the desire to analyse how we got to this point has resulted in many faction members, both longstanding and new cadre, starting the process of attempting to fill some theoretical gaps. This is fantastically encouraging, and a glimpse at how political pride can be rebuilt and how fruitful honest collective discussion is. The very fact of the conference is a victory, but if we accept that silence must follow, then we have not achieved what we set out to achieve.

The CC argues that we are ‘permanent factionalists’. On the contrary, we are fighting to restore political debate and discussion in a democratic atmosphere to the heart of the organisation, for the SWP to rediscover the traditions that won it so much respect beyond its own ranks – in other words, to dissolve back into a party that has reaffirmed its openness to the debate and comradely argument that will make every comrade a leader, and acknowledge what every one of us contributes to our theory.

That means that while the faction will cease to exist – and on that we’re all agreed – the debate can and must continue, in the branches, the colleges, the day schools, the coffee shop discussions, the conversations after a sale or a demonstration; and it needs to continue in all our publications and meetings. There must be no separation between the theorists and the activists and, while we accept party discipline, we can’t accept the reimposition of control under threat of expulsion or sanctions or exclusion from this conference or that party event.

There should be no reprisals of any kind after conference, and a clear instruction from the CC to all their supporters that this is a condition for the party to heal its divisions. Branches and districts must continue to allow free and frank debate while we are united in our activity. That is the political duty of the leadership, and it needs to be explicit and unambiguous.

We want to win back an open democratic party culture that others can look on from the outside and admire, together with a unity of purpose that is sustained by that culture. The comrades who have argued that all this discussion inhibits activity are contradicting themselves. Socialists are active out of conviction, not out of loyalty to structures, procedures, or to this or that leadership. Our loyalty is to a political tradition and to the revolutionary project – the tradition that has kept that flame alive.