SWP regroups at its “Marxism” festival

The SWP held their annual Marxism festival on 2-5 July in London, with talks on politics, history, theory, etc. Members of Workers’ Liberty sold literature outside and talked with attendees.

Socialist Worker had predicted 3,000 attendees, and, over the course of the four days, it is entirely possible they reached this number.

It was a success for the SWP in this regard. However, it was difficult to get taken to speak from the floor in most sessions. Attendance was high and many hands were raised in some, but it was apparent that regardless of how fast one raised their hand to speak, most of the time members of the SWP would be taken out of order and almost exclusively.

Rarely were sessions close to being debates or even really discussions on the headline topics. They were more a series of speeches reinforcing the SWP’s line.

The session on popular fronts for instance was on the virtues of Stand Up To Racism and the Together Alliance, with unqualified claims that those are in fact united fronts rather than miniature popular fronts. There was no opportunity to give a dissenting opinion or argue the importance of independent working-class anti-fascist action.

In sessions on Israel Palestine, SWP members spoke about their “critical but unconditional support” for Hamas and their celebratory view of the 7 October 2023 atrocity as a great “prison break”. Rob Ferguson in his session did acknowledge antisemitism as a real issue in responses to Israel’s wars, but nonetheless the event was marred by (maybe wilful) ignorance towards binational peace movements in Israel so that emphasis could be placed on Palestinian or non-Israeli regional resistance, and a “one state” solution, as the only way forward. There was of course no room for dissent from the floor for any of this.

Jeremy Corbyn spoke, although he and his faction are responsible for kicking the SWP and other left groups out of “Your Party”.

It isn’t bad in itself that Corbyn was invited to Marxism. However, having him come to be paraded in advertising and to speak on Palestine (without mentioning that he supports some form of “two states” and opposes blanket BDS) as he did, rather than to debate the SWP and the expelled left, or try to hold him accountable in some way, shows the SWP’s lack of a backbone, their lack of care.

Perhaps Corbyn would never appear if he knew he would be scrutinised. Mostly, I think, the SWP is afraid that any effort at debate would burn bridges too useful to their front building activities.

Let’s also remember that Corbyn’s people in YP are currently trying to expel YP committee members who spoke at a conference of the Socialist Federation, a group of dissident YP members and ex-members. Will Corbyn himself be punished for attending an event by a proscribed external party? As if!

Resurrection

A session on permanent revolution highlighted the SWP’s resurrection of “deflected permanent revolution”, a 1963 idea from SWP founder Tony Cliff. There has also been an article on it in a recentSocialist Worker, signalling this to not be a one off spectacle.

The idea was that states still lumbered by “feudalism and imperialism”, but where the working class was unable to become revolutionary, would see the intelligentsia lead the masses to revolution instead. That would end in not a workers’ state or to market capitalism, but state capitalism modelled on the USSR. Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba were the prime examples. They were the “opposite”, Cliff wrote, of a workers’ revolution; but, “dialectically”, as he put it in his 1948 text on the USSR, also a “transition to socialism”, outrightly more progressive than market capitalism.

Pragmatically, in the 1960s, the theory allowed Cliff to take distance from those who saw China and Cuba as models of socialism, but also to accept those states as great advances. In 1967, Cliff was critical of Egypt’s leader Gamel Abdul Nasser, but also applauded him for seeing “bourgeois parliamentary democracy as a fraud”.

This concept therefore became relevant in a session on Cuba where, to their credit, the SWP’s line was one that the Cuban state was no ally of the working class. However, it was also that the Cuban revolution, in acting as an example of this “deflected permanent revolution” and instituting state capitalism, was a progressive event with gains worth defending. A move back to market capitalism from the current state capitalist system may very well be bad, as the SWP argues, but it would also present a positive opportunity to replace the oppressive one-party state with a more liberal one under which workers’ organising may be allowed.

The Cuba session was also the one with most dissent. Members of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) were, maybe accidentally, taken to speak, and launched into tirades against the SWP as “betraying the Cuban revolution” and “apologists of imperialism and the USA”. SWP speakers from the floor mostly gave soft replies that didn’t really rebuke the RCG for the Stalinist apologia it was, rather stating that the SWP also regards the USA as the big bad. An unimpressive display on all fronts.

Crisis

Maybe, with the SWP’s “crisis of leadership” outlined by Matt Cooper in Solidarity 770, the SWP is anxious to restate its “old” ideas as the older leaders are being replaced with younger and less experienced ones.

On display throughout the event were forms one could use to give the SWP your details, set up a subscription, and join them, along with a members’ handbook. However, at no point was it clear what you would do as a member of the SWP beyond supporting a lot of causes seemingly external to, or on the periphery of, the workers’ movement.

There was talk of workers’ control and revolution, but I can’t say that I have any clearer an idea of how the SWP’s current methods will make anything of the sort happen.

As Matt Cooper puts it, “the SWP now seems to be thrashing around for a clear political direction: clinging to its key front, Stand Up to Racism, and looking to the milieu around Palestine solidarity, but without a clear perspective beyond ‘build the SWP’.”