SWP

What went wrong? What are the lessons? What can and should we do to rebuild the revolutionary left?
AWL London forum, with speakers Steve Freeman (Revolutionary Democratic Group) and Sean Matgamna (AWL), both former SWP/IS members.

These days the SWP concentrates its efforts on support for George Galloway, who proclaims himself a "fighter for Muslims", "not as left wing as you might think", opposed to abortion rights, and supporting a points system for immigration control - as well as a long-time friend and associate of Saddam Hussein's deputy Tariq Aziz.

The latest is the SWP inviting Gilad Atzmon, an anti-semitic crank, to its Marxism 2005, and persisting in the face of protest from leftist (including strongly anti-Israeli) Jews, whom Atzmon dismisses as "undercover Zionist agents".

Yet the SWP also lays claim to a political tradition, the "IS tradition", which supposedly differentiated from the ordinary run of revolutionary socialism by a greater emphasis on a rank-and-file orientation, less "vanguardism", less "Third Worldism", and more concern for an independent socialist stance against imperialisms both more prosperous (USA) and less so (USSR).