Socialist Workers Party (Britain)

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is one of the largest political parties of the far left in England. It describes its beliefs as revolutionary socialist. It does not currently contest elections as a party but is a member of the Respect coalition which has one MP (who is not a member of the SWP) and a number of councillors (one of whom, Michael Lavalette, is a well-known member of the SWP). In Scotland the SWP exists as a platform of the Scottish Socialist Party.

The SWP has an industrial department, which co-ordinates its work within the working class movement and a student section, named the Socialist Workers' Student Society which has groups at numerous universities. It participates in a number of united fronts, most notably the Stop the War Coalition. On the international level it leads the Trotskyist organisation the International Socialist Tendency.

Publications

The SWP publishes a weekly newspaper Socialist Worker, a monthly magazine, Socialist Review (now a supplement to Socialist Worker), and a quarterly theoretical journal, International Socialism. In addition it publishes an international bulletin and an internal bulletin Party Notes, various pamphlets and books (often through its publishing house, Bookmarks), and with others its publishes a number of rank-and-file newspapers, such as Post Worker ^*, for specific industries.

Leadership

The leadership is formed by a central committee of around 10, and a national committee. Elections to the central committee are held yearly at the national conference. As of 2006 the central committee members are: Chris Bambery, Weyman Bennett, Michael Bradley, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German, Chris Harman, Chris Nineham, Moira Nolan, John Rees, Martin Smith and Candy Udwin ^*.

The national committee consists of 50 members elected annually at national conference. At least four party councils a year are to be arranged by the central committee. At these councils 2 delegates elected from each branch plus the national committee will be entitled to attend. ^*

Other prominent members include: John Molyneux, John Rose and Mark Steel.

History

The Socialist Review Group

The origins of the SWP lie in the formation of the Socialist Review Group (SRG) which held its founding conference in 1951The group, initially of only 8 members Revolutionary Communist Party. Three documents formed the theoretical basis of the group: The Nature of Stalinist Russia, The Class Nature of the People's Democracies and Marxism and the Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism. [http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/higgins/1997/locust/chap03.htm" target="_blank" >^*

The tiny size of the group meant that they adopted a position of working in the Labour Party in order to reach an audience and recruit Of particular importance was the Labour League of Youth. Of the 33 members at the first recorded meeting, 19 were in the LLY [http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/cliff/works/2000/wtw/ch03.htm.

Through campaigning within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the new Labour Party youth movement the Young Socialists the Socialist Review Group was able to recruit among a new generation of activists and by 1964 had a membership of 200.^*.

Labour Worker and renaming to International Socialists

1961 saw the creation of the paper Industrial Worker (quickly renamed Labour Worker) which was to evolve into Socialist Worker. Socialist Review was reduced in size and then scrapped The Socialist Review Group became the International Socialism Group (IS) at the end of 1962 [http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/cliff/works/2000/wtw/ch03.htm.

With Labour in power and many Labour Party members becoming disillusioned more of the work IS was doing was external to the labour party and after 1967 few ISers were active in that party. In 1965 an article in Labour Worker said "Obviously Marxists should take those positions which give access to the direct workers’ organisations. But in the wards and GMCs the practice of buying the right to discuss politics by over-fulfilling the canvassing norms, should cease or be reduced to the minimum." It marked a turn to more of a focus on work in the trade unions and a key part of this process was the pamphlet published in 1966 - [http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/cliff/works/1966/incomespol/index.htm Incomes policy, legislation and shop stewards which opposed the Labour Party's incomes policy and discussed how it could be fought.

Rapid growth and turn to industry

1968 saw the IS heavily involved in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and large numbers of student struggles from which it recruited As a result the IS grew from 400 to 1,000 members but also suffered many splits [http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/cliff/works/2000/wtw/ch04.htm.

The early 1970s saw the creation of rank and file newspapers and a general turn to industry including setting up factory branches During the 1972 miners strike Socialist Worker was taken and sold by miners ^* and also recruited a large number of manual workers into membership.

Labour in power, the SWP formed

In 1974 Labour returned to power. A key part of their struggle was to introduce the Social contract which sought to introduce a voluntary incomes policy. It was backed by left wing union leaders such as Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones. This period also saw an increase in the number of full time union convenors and these factors along with an increase in unemployment have been blamed by Tony Cliff and the SWP for a drastic fall in union militancy (A World to Win, Chapter 6). In 1974 the IS was ambitious and optimistic (Cliff, pg 132) expecting to double the number of factory branches over the year. In practice they declined swiftly from 38 in 1974 to only three or four by 1976. When the firefighters went on strike in 1977 against the Social Contract the IS was unable to deliver any significant solidarity. The national rank and file movement fell apart. In 1976 the SWP decided to stand in parliamentary by-elections but the results were very poor and the original idea of standing in 60 seats at the next election was dropped (Cliff, page 142).

In January 1977 IS was renamed the Socialist Workers Party. This decision was a result of the move to stand in elections along with a perception that: "IS’s ability to initiate activity, rather than simply join in movements launched by others, had never been greater. Industrially, there were more members than ever able to lead disputes in their own workplaces" According to Martin Shaw this occurred with no real discussion within the organisation ^*.

Anti-Nazi League and Rock against Racism

Another campaign to which the SWP was central at this time was the Anti-Nazi League. The National Front had grown in the 1970s, and by 1976 they had polled 15,340 votes in Leicester and large votes elsewhere. They were even more visible on the streets through graffiti, racist attacks and street protests. A key turning point came when, on August 13 1977, thousands of anti-fascists, including large numbers of local black youths, prevented the NF from marching through Lewisham. This was to lead to the creation of the ANL as an initiative between the SWP and sections of the Labour Left. It also received support from other Trotskyist groups and the Communist Party. In response to Eric Clapton's public support for Enoch Powell, Rock Against Racism was set up in close collaboration with the ANL, and a series of successful carnivals were organised. By 1981 the NF was in retreat and had split, and the campaign was wound up.^*

The "downturn"

From 1978 Tony Cliff began to argue that the period of rising militancy had come to an end (Cliff, Chapter 7),^* and a downturn had begun. Cliff writes that: "The crisis in the organisation went on for about 3 years, 1976-79". By 1982 the SWP was refocused completely on a propagandist approach, with geographical branches as the main unit of the party, a focus on Marxist theory and an abandonment of perspective of building a rank and file movement. The rank and file organisations were wound down as was the women's organisation "Women's Voice" and the paper for ethnic minorities "Flame". The closure of Women's voice in particular was bitterly disputed (see Chapter 10 of Sex, Class and Socialism by Lindsey German for more on this). During the 1984-85 miners strike the SWP's propaganda concentrated on the need for solidarity and explaining why this was not happening. Cliff described the approach as one of concrete propaganda - "It had to answer the question 'What slogan fits the issue the workers are fighting over?'" (Cliff, chapter 6).

This change in outlook and methods is viewed by many on the left as being a retreat into sectarianism by the SWP (see for example, Where is the SWP going?by Murray Smith of the Scottish Socialist Party) but this change in methods is credited by the SWP as allowing it to survive a very hostile period with substantial numbers of party members ^*.

The 1990s

The early 1990s for many of the far left was a period of demoralisation and disorientation due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. However for the SWP this was less of an issue as they believed that "the transition from state capitalism to multinational capitalism is neither a step forward nor a step backwards, but a step sidewards. The change only involves a shift from one form of exploitation to another form for the working class as a whole", (Harman, The Storm Breaks, ISJ 2:46).

The SWP were involved in the campaign against the Poll Tax in England although they failed to intervene in Scotland ^*. They also helped relaunch the ANL in 1992 in response to the growth of the British National Party, the successor to the NF and campaigned against the Criminal Justice Bill (with the memorable slogan of "Kill the Bill").

In 1997, despite being highly opposed to Tony Blair's policies, they called for a vote for the Labour Party, with the belief that there would rapidly be a crisis of expectations in Labour which would lead to an upturn in class struggle. John Rees wrote in July 1997: "In the mid-term the 'sado-monetarist' strategy followed by the Labour government will clash increasingly sharply with a working class movement which has drawn hope and confidence from its electoral victory over the Tories." ^*.

Recent Activity

More recent work is influenced by the SWP's analysis of a "current revival in consciousness and combativity, discernable from the mid-1990s and unmistakable since the Seattle demonstration in 1999."Recent activity has seen the SWP involved with the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales. Its Scottish members joined the Scottish Socialist Party as the Socialist Worker Platform in May 2001 [http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj97/smith.htm. The Socialist Alliance has now been succeeded by involvement in Respect.

On a campaigning front the SWP has been heavily involved in the anti-war movement through the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) - Lindsey German is convenor of StWC. The SWP has also been involved in the anti-globalization movement, which it believes is more accurately described as the 'anti-capitalist' movement, mostly through the Globalise Resistance organisation and the World Social Forum and European Social Forum.

The SWP are also responsible for the annual Marxism conferences (effectively a summer school for sympathetic activists) in central London. It is believed to be the largest annual event held by any far-left group in Britain.

Theory

Duncan Hallas, who was a founding member of the predecessor of the SWP, wrote: "The founders of the group saw themselves as mainstream Trotskyists, differing on important questions from the dominant group in the international, but belonging to the same basic tendency."^*. Here "the group" refers to the Socialist Review Group, forerunner of the SWP and "the International" to the Fourth International - the main Trotskyist grouping.

Because it sees itself as Trotskyist, the SWP describes itself as a 'revolutionary socialist party' and considers itself to stand in the 'tradition' of Leon Trotsky. It also shares many of the political positions of other Trotskyist groups, a tradition rooted in Marxism and Leninism (see for example Tony Cliff, Marxism at the Millennium ^*). In common with other Trotskyists the SWP defends the body of ideas codified by the first four Congresses of the Communist International and the founding Congress of the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky in 1938.

Its supporters often refer to their beliefs as 'socialism from below', a term which has been attributed to Hal Draper. This concept can also be traced back to the rules of the First International which stated: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves"They see this as distinguishing themselves from other socialist groups, particularly both from reformist parties, such as (the Labour Party) and from various forms of what they disparagingly term 'Stalinism'—forms of socialism usually associated with the former Soviet Bloc and the old Communist Parties. These are seen as advocating socialism from above. In contrast Cliff argued: "The heart of Marxism is that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class. The Communist Manifesto states: All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." ^*

The SWP also seeks to differentiate itself from other Trotskyist tendencies. Three key theories are at the centre of its difference from other Trotskists: State Capitalism, Deflected Permanent Revolution and The Permanent Arms Economy (see below for more details).

Unlike most Troskyist organisations, the SWP does not have a formal program (see for example the Transitional Program) but an outline of the SWP's ideas called "Where We Stand" ^* is published in Socialist Worker every week.

State Capitalism

The SWP maintains an opposition to what it terms 'substitutionist strategies'. This is the idea that social forces other than the proletariat, which is for Marxists the potentially social revolutionary class due to its 'radical chains', may substitute for the proletariat in the struggle for a socialist society (see above). This idea led the founder of the SWP, Tony Cliff, to reject the idea that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state, the position held by other Trotskyists and derived from Leon Trotsky's analysis in the 1930's. Cliff was to argue that in fact the USSR was a form of capitalism which he referred to as bureaucratic state capitalist and also argued was the case in Eastern Europe and later in other countries ruled by Stalinist parties such as China, Vietnam and Cuba. Cliff's approach to this idea was published in the 1948 article The Nature of Stalinist Russia ^*

Other IS/SWP theoreticians such as Nigel Harris and Chris Harman would later extend and develop a distinct body of state capitalist analysis based on Cliff's initial work. This theory was summed up in the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism". The slogan is said to have originally come from Max Shachtman's group, the International Socialist League, in their paper 'Labor Action' and was only borrowed by the IS/SWP at a later date. This is seen as ironic because one of Cliff's concerns when first developing his idea of state capitalism was to differentiate his ideas from the idea of bureaucratic collectivism associated with Shachtman (see for example The theory of bureaucratic collectivism: A critique (1948) ^*). However, the formula also echoes the Fourth International's 1948 manifesto, Neither Wall Street nor the Kremlin. Cliff's version of state capitalism must also be differentiated from those associated with other Trotskyists, such as CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya.

Deflected Permanent Revolution

As a Trotskyist tendency, the SRG/IS was faced with developing an explanation as to why and how a number of countries in the former colonial world had succeeded in overthrowing the rule of various imperial powers and forming states characterised by the SRG/IS as being bureaucratic state capitalist. In part, such an explanation was needed to understand why these colonial revolutions had not developed into uninterrupted or Permanent Revolutions, as predicted by Leon Trotsky in his theory of the same name. Taking Trotsky's theory as his starting point, Tony Cliff developed his own theory of 'deflected permanent revolution'. He argued that where a revolutionary working class did not exist, the intelligentsia could, in certain limited circumstances, take the leadership of the nation and lead a successful revolution in the direction of a state capitalist solution. The outcome of such a revolution would be deflected from the goal of a social revolution as envisaged in Trotsky's original work.

Cliff's essay Permanent Revolution was first published in International Socialism Journal, No. 12 Spring 1963 in response to the Cuban Revolution and largely took it and the earlier Chinese Revolution as its subject. However the general concept of a deflected permanent revolution would be much exercised as a key analytical tool by IS theoreticians in the coming years. Most notable in this respect is the work of Nigel Harris in relation to India and later of Mike Gonzalez on Cuba[http://www.marxists.de/statecap/cuba/80-cucas.htm and Nicaragua. Most recently the theory has been given a central place in Cem Uzun's work Making the Turkish Revolution.

The permanent arms economy

State capitalism and deflected permanent revolution came to be seen as central to a distinct IS politics by the mid-1960's along with the theory of the permanent arms economy (PAE). This theory sought to explain the long boom in the global economy afer the Second World War. This boom was in contrast to the period after the First World war where there was a period of stagnation.

The three theories taken together are often seen as being the hallmarks of the IS tradition, although this is contested by some former leaders of the IS, including Nigel Harris and Michael Kidron both of whom worked on the PAE and now repudiate it, and by some other Trotskyists outside the IS Tradition. The PAE, the most contested of the three theories, is also the only one that did not originate with Tony Cliff.

The PAE originated with a member of Max Shachtman's Workers' Party/International Socialist League named Ed Sard in 1944. Sard, writing as Walter J. Oakes, argued in Politics that the PAE was to be understood as allowing capitalism to achieve a level of stability by preventing the rate of profit from falling as spending on arms was unproductive and would not lead to the increase of the organic composition of capital. Later in 1951 in New International, this time writing as T. N. Vance, Sard argued that the PAE operated through its ability to apply J. M. Keynes multiplier effect. Although briefly mentioned by Duncan Hallas in a Socialist Review of 1952 the theory was only introduced to the IS by Cliff in 1957.^*

In his May 1957 article Perspectives of the Permanent War EconomyCliff offered the PAE to readers in a version derived from Sard's earlier essays but without reference to Keynes and using a Marxist theoretical framework. This was the only attempt to develop the idea, which it is suggested explains the long post war boom, until the publication of Mike Kidron's Western Capitalism Since the War^*" target="_blank" >in International Socialism No 100. This was followed by a rejoinder from Chris Harman (Better a valid insight than a wrong theory)[http://www.marxists.de/theory/harman/insight.htm. Since this time the PAE has assumed less importance within IS theory, as the long boom which it seeks to explain recedes into history.

Criticism

The SWP has been criticised by many of those in the direct action, anti-capitalist, and anarchist movements for its perceived attempts to manipulate them for its own ends (see Monopolise Resistance? published by the Brighton-based SchNEWS collective). These criticisms were echoed by some within the anti-war movement. The SWP, for its part, tends to promote the view that reliance on direct action by small groups is elitist, and instead favours mass mobilisations, strikes, and the most militant mass action that can be achieved at any given time (see e.g. Socialist Review, November 2002).

The SWP has been accused of being overly willing to accommodate the concerns of the Muslim community – for example the SWP is the largest British leftist party with a policy of Anti-Zionism – and it has also been accused of sidelining the issues of gay rights and abortion. This strong relationship between the SWP and Muslims, which owes to shared opposition to the "War on Terror", has received criticism from a wide assortment of left-wingers. While such criticisms have generally been the result of policies from the Respect coalition, as one of the coalition's key components, the SWP comes in for criticism as well. The party, however, denies the accusations - see for example [http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=7834 this article from Socialist Worker in which it is argued that Respect has a clear commitment to opposing homophobia. Another SW article from November 2005 publicises a new campaign against the lowering of time limits for abortion.

Members of other socialist political parties often claim that the SWP is undemocatic, however this is fiercely countered, and the SWP has an annual conference with its central (using slate system) and national committee elected by delegates, as well as policies for the next year being proposed and voted on with alternatives offered to some proposals.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty has attacked the SWP's politics as "second campist" - i.e, in their view, too uncritically supporting all groups opposed to the United States government, without offering independent working-class perspectives(They claim that the group's "anti-imperialism", rooted in a 1987 change in attitude to the Iran-Iraq war when the USA 'intervened', forces it to ally with anti-socialist groupings for the sake of opposing a "common enemy" ([http://archive.workersliberty.org/publications/readings/swpschool2000/swp4.html).

There has also been criticism and debate in, around and outside the party about its perceived failure to intervene or be a visible part of many united front movements; some commentators criticising it as sectarian on the grounds that some of its members argued that the early ecology and animal rights movements were middle class and reformist, while many members of these movements, the critics argue, may turn to revolutionary socialism if the links are made. As a counter to such criticism, the SWP has, for example, started campaigning on climate change in the past decade and is involved heavily in united fronts such as the Stop The War Coalition and Unite Against Fascism.