SWP

The SWP / IS tradition

“Not revolutionary”

I’VE noticed that the SWP have taken to defending Galloway and various other people they’re shacked up with by pointing out that said scumbags are “not revolutionaries”. In the case of Galloway, this (absolutely indisputable) fact apparently justifies every crime from demanding at least £150,000 a year to hob-nobbing with Ba’thists to supporting the Pakistani military dictatorship. Similarly, I remember Socialist Worker explaining Livingstone’s scab-herding on London Underground by pointing out that he is, after all, a “reformist politician”. This oh-so-revolutionary position in fact lets...

How not to deal with anti-semitism

The 2005 NATFHE (college and newer universities lecturers’ union) conference passed a motion — written by a member of the Socialist Workers Party — which declared, “to criticise Israeli policy or institutions is not anti-semitic.” But many of the criticisms of Israel are anti-semitic. That the conference did not recognise this is one indication of the disease of “left” anti-semitism that currently exists in the union. Rather than oppose the motion, general secretary Paul Mackney (a former member of the SWP, then called IS), “interpreted” the clause to mean, “to criticise Israeli government...

The truth about Marxism and religion

By Paul Hampton Read this article in French here . An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were. The article is largely rationalisation, reading back into history the SWP’s current politics of courting some Muslims organisations. It fails to represent the complexity of Marx and Engels’ views on religion: their fundamental atheist outlook; their opposition to organised religion; the place of religion in...

Cheerleaders for someone else’s “revolution”

Pablo Velasco reivews Venezuela and Revolution in the 21st Century by Joseph Choonara, Socialist Worker pamphlet The emergence of an independent labour movement in Venezuela has been one of the most exciting developments in Latin America in recent years. The formation of the UNT, whose leadership includes many class struggle militants, is a welcome development after forty years of domination by the bureaucratic and corrupt CTV union federation. Embryonic elements of workers’ control in some factories show that the labour movement has the potential to challenge both state and capitalist control...

Missing the point again

The SWP have had another go at theorising their opportunism by appealing to the classics. In the 4 March issue of Socialist Worker, Anindya Bhattacharyya claims that the SWP’s attitude to Muslims and Islam as a religion mirrors the approach Marx outlined in his famous essay On the Jewish Question. According to Bhattacharyya, the opposition to civil rights for religious Jewish people by philosopher Bruno Bauer which was the primary target of Marx’s polemic “prefigure[s] the arguments put by some today for downplaying, ignoring or colluding with Islamophobia”. Who is being talked about here...

Real and invented differences on Political Islam 1: the Sharia Socialists

“But [against the state] socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes 'Islamic' forms. "It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty...

The “IS tradition” and the Independent Labour Party

The “IS tradition” of the 1960s, which members and old ex-members of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) cherish, was in fact largely taken from the Independent Labour Party in its last years. The first part of this article described the earlier history of the ILP. After 1946 the ILP mutated. This article tells the rest of the story. From about the time James Maxton died, and Fenner Brockway, John McGovern and others left to join the Labour Party, the ILP shed its character as a trimming, evasive, manoeuvring left social-democratic organism, and took on the character of an “ideological”...

Very "loyal rebel" fails to win SWP ranks

The Socialist Workers' Party's annual conference, which took place over the weekend of January 7-8, witnessed an event unprecedented in the last twenty years: a contested election. What's going on? The SWP's pre-conference bulletin No 3, contained an announcement from Portsmouth SWPer John Molyneux of his intention to stand for the group's Central Committee, on a platform mildly critical of the SWP leadership. Molyneux is an SWP member of longstanding, and his challenge was significant enough to receive a reply from the CC. At the conference, Molyneux's proposal that he be elected in addition...

"Cover your heads", SWP tells protest women

Solidarity 3/6, 30 April 2002. I attended a picket on Saturday 27 April outside the Israeli embassy in High Street Kensington. My previous experience of pickets there had been primarily of ones organised bv the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, but supported by other organisations who also take a two state position on the Middle East conflict. I was somewhat shocked by some of the things I saw and heard on this picket. I arrived to see about 50 or 60 people, mainly from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the SWP, although there was also a Workers' Power stall at the back. I was the only...

Respect/ SWP in decline?

Selling Solidarity outside the annual conference, this weekend, of the George Galloway/ SWP coalition "Respect", I thought the crowd looked thinner, older, and more dispirited than at the "Respect" conference last year. "Respect" insiders confirm this, saying that the conference is smaller despite last-minute efforts by the SWP to drum up people to attend as observers and fill the hall. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party's annual weekend event (last weekend, 12-13 November) was bigger than previous years. About 500 there, and a lot of them young, according to AWLers who attended. I attended one of...

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