At a membership meeting in London on 13 May, members of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) assembled to discuss the results of the London Socialist Alliance election work. But for most of the meeting they were treated to a long attack upon the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) by Alex Callinicos \u2013 leading member of SWP central committee and international organiser for the International Socialist Tendency (IST). The ISO is the SWP\u2019s long time fraternal organisation in the United States, with around 800 members.<\/p>\n
This was the first time that most of the SWP\u2019s the membership had heard of this dispute. They were handed a 53 page Bulletin, whose contents proved that \u201cserious differences\u201d had been developing between the two organisations for around a year. They dated from the period of Nato\u2019s war against Serbia and erupted at the IST\u2019s meeting held around the SWP\u2019s Marxism event in July 1999.<\/p>\n
Then SWP Central Committee criticised the ISO for erecting sectarian obstacles to building a broader and larger anti-war movement in the US and of failing to focus sufficiently on the \u201cmain enemy at home\u201d. Why? Simply because the ISO continued to advocate the right of the Kosovars to self-determination \u2013 as well as mobilising against the Nato war \u2013 after the war had started.<\/p>\n
The SWP believes that it was impossible to build a broad mass movement if revolutionaries \u201cconfused\u201d the masses by supporting both the Kosovars against Milosevic\u2019s attempted genocide and supporting Serbia against Nato\u2019s bombing. In Alex Callinicos\u2019 view this would be a concession to Nato\u2019s \u201chumanitarian\u201d pretext for the war.<\/p>\n
The Greek section of the IST (Sosialistiko Ergatiko Koma \u2013 SEK) strongly supports the SWP position. In a resolution for an IST meeting due to be held on 8 May they stated that during the war, \u201cthe key issue was opposition to Nato and the war; disagreements over secondary issues such as the United Nations and Serbian nationalism were diversions from building a dynamic and united anti-war movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) pointed out at the time of the war that in most countries the enormous and fully justified working class sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes and homeland was not a \u201csecondary issue\u201d. In many cases a dynamic and large anti-war movement was created around support for the Kosovars and opposition to Nato\u2019s brutal bombardment of Serbia.<\/p>\n
Indeed in Britain the failure of the Stalinist and SWP dominated Committee Against War in the Balkans to take up the question of the defence of the Kosovars played a major role in preventing the building of a mass anti-war movement. The confusion among normally \u201canti-war\u201d and \u201canti-imperialist\u201d activists in the labour and student movement was precisely because this was not a \u201cnormal\u201d situation (the oppressed, exploited people on one side and imperialism on the other).<\/p>\n
Many such activists were confused because they could see, prior to the Nato war, that the Serbian regime\u2019s attempted ethnic cleaning mass of the Kosovar Albanians was unjustified. Therefore to ignore or cover up this issue played right into the hands of Blair and Clinton and the \u201cNato socialists\u201d. It did nothing to help rally activists to the anti-war movement, a fact demonstrated by the relatively small size of the demonstrations as compared, for example, to those during the Gulf War of the early 1990s.<\/p>\n
Serbia was oppressed, only insofar as imperialism attacked it directly. But winning support for Serbia against this attack could not be achieved at the expense of abandoning a principled, revolutionary defence of the rights, and lives, of the Kosovars.<\/p>\n
A non-Nato interventionist solution to this problem had to be argued for. This could be nothing other than the support of the Kosovars\u2019 right to independence and support for their armed resistance to ethnic cleansing. The fact that the anti-war movement in Britain and the USA failed to even approach a mass character was in no small measure due to fact that it turned a blind eye to, or actively minimised, the ethnic cleansing and the pogroms of Serb chauvinists in Kosova and uncritically marched alongside those Serb nationalists who supported these abominations.<\/p>\n
Not that the ISO actually supported those Kosovars actually resisting the ethnic cleansing. In this sense their support for self\u2013determination was entirely platonic. They seem to have been scared off such a position by the SWP\u2019s argument that the KLA was in league with imperialism.<\/p>\n
To this there is one answer. What about the SWP\u2019s enthusiastic support for the Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s? Not only were they arch reactionary Islamists, based on the tribal-feudal landowners, funded by Saudi millionaire princes: they were supplied with stinger missiles and trained by the CIA, on a scale that makes the US support for KLA look grudging in the extreme.<\/p>\n
It is not true that support for the Kosovars\u2019 struggle somehow prevented opposition to \u201cour own\u201d imperialism. Indeed the LRCI (unlike the SWP) openly and publicly supported Serbian resistance to the Nato bombing of their own country (both the popular mobilisations and the \u201cYugoslav\u201d Army\u2019s attempts to down Nato aircraft). We openly declared that we were for the defeat of Nato\u2019s offensive and for the unconditional withdrawal of all its forces from the Balkans. Such a position was not at all confusing. It met a warm response in many of the trade union and student organisations where we put resolutions and rallied more people to an anti-war position.<\/p>\n
The SWP\u2019s position meant that many of the anti-war meetings and demos in Britain were dominated by Serb chauvinists and British Stalinists. These people openly and repeatedly supported the forcible retention of Kosova, denied that the Kosovars were suffering ethnic cleansing, etc. They did so without any serious criticism of these reactionary and ridiculous (because anyone with a television set could see what the Serbs were doing to the ethnic Albanian Kosovan population) arguments by the SWP. The SWP even refused to \u201cmake the question of the refugees a central question\u201d (SWP Letter to ISO July 1999).<\/p>\n
This shows how desperate the IST majority were to maintain their block with the Stalinists and Serb chauvinist riff-raff.<\/p>\n
There was, as we said at the time, a self-defeating character about this for the SWP. The Morning Star Stalinists in Britain are a declining and desperate bunch. Few British workers would trust them. Their claims that \u201cKosova is Serbia\u2019s\u201d, that the Kosovars were actually pogroming themselves, or were leaving \u201cin order to provoke a Nato attack\u201d, should have been denounced for the foul chauvinism and racism and that they were. Comrades who cannot denounce Nato\u2019s crimes and Milosevic\u2019s together clearly cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.<\/p>\n
In Greece there was a mass movement, but one dominated not only by Serb chauvinism but by Greek anti-Albanian chauvinism, masquerading as \u201canti-imperialism\u201d. The defence of the Kosovars was far from being a \u201csecondary\u201d issue as Sosialistiko Ergatiko Koma says. In Greece, even more than elsewhere, defence of the national rights of the oppressed Kosovars was a litmus test of internationalism. It was a principled necessity. It was a test the IST failed.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless the ISO did, in Alex Callinicos words, \u201cmake strong criticisms\u201d of the SWP\u2019s politics in the war, namely its failure to defend the Kosovars right to self-determination, its weakness in fighting Serb chauvinism and its failure to take up the free entry of the Kosovar refugees. On this the ISO clearly maintained a more principled position than the SWP.<\/p>\n
This brought down upon its head the wrath of the SWP CC and Alex Callinicos. Why? Because the position of the US section was obviously far from a minority one. In an SWP Central Committee letter dated 2 July 1999 we read:<\/p>\n
\u201cQuite early in the war it became clear that a number of European [IST] groups had responded in a confused and abstentionist way. They were influenced by the general tendency of the far left, in Europe at any rate, to adopt a \u2018curse on both your houses\u2019 position towards Nato and Serbia, and even to support the KLA. Even the German group [Linksruck] was deeply confused and partially paralysed for the opening weeks of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n
At an international meeting, and under pressure from Callinicos and Tony Cliff this \u201cconfusion\u201d was crushed \u2013 except in the case of the recalcitrant US leadership.<\/p>\n
Despite an agreement at the end of the international meeting in July 1999 \u201cto disengage and reduce tensions\u201d the next cause of conflict seems to be what the ISO claims were attempts \u2013 by means of one or more of the famous Tony Cliff phone calls \u2013 to persuade some ISO leaders of the need to oust the most troublesome members of the ISO leadership (the Steering Committee), notably Ahmed Shawki, from that leadership body. A letter of protest was sent to SWP on 19 November by the ISO leadership, calling on the SWP Central Committee to clarify if Cliff had spoken for them and to \u201cdesist from such interventions\u201d.<\/p>\n
The response of SWP leadership \u2013 in a letter dated 13 January 2000 \u2013 was to launch a full frontal political attack on the ISO leadership over its attitude to the Seattle demonstration of 30 November. It criticised the ISO for its poor turn out (around 20 members) in Seattle at the huge anti-WTO protests. This, it claimed, meant that the ISO was hesitant about involvement in, and too critical of, the developing mass anti-capitalist movement.<\/p>\n
For the SWP the Seattle movement represented \u201cthe emergence of a new anti-capitalist consciousness at the very core of the system\u201d, a mood already witnessed in Britain by \u201cthe closure of the City of London by a \u2018Festival against Capitalism\u2019 on 18 June last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The LRCI and its British section Workers Power are not likely to downplay the importance of this. But for the SWP to place such heavy criticism on the ISO is remarkable given the near total absence of the SWP from the J18 mobilisation and their limited mobilisation for the N30 events in London which coincided with Seattle. We therefore read with some surprise the boast, quoted from the SWP\u2019s Party Notes, that, \u201cthe SWP was alone on the Left in relating to this anti-capitalist mood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given that Workers Power and the youth organisation fraternally linked to it, Revolution, were the only visible, organised far left presence at J18, and that one of our comrades is now in prison as a result of his actions in defending that demo against police attack, the SWP\u2019s claim is entirely hollow.<\/p>\n
It reveals that the SWP\u2019s conversion to the centrality of these movements post-dates Seattle. It may be legitimate to say that a group in the US should have been more aware of what Seattle would mean, but a principled criticism by the SWP Central Committee should at least have contained a self-criticism of their own failure to recognise the new mood in their own country. But for the SWP to cite even one serious failure on its part on one mobilisation is clearly dangerous \u2013 the leadership must always be right. In fact the ISO has made a grudging self-criticism, admitting that \u201cour turnout\u2026was small by our own standards\u201d, that they were not happy about it but that for an organisation based in Chicago and the Midwest, mobilising any more was impossible.<\/p>\n
Tony Cliff and Callinicos decided this wasn\u2019t good enough and decided an all-out polemic was required. In a letter dated 20 February they stated, \u201cit was a tragedy that the ISO leadership failed to take the Seattle demonstration seriously\u201d, that it mobilised \u201conly a tiny number of comrades\u201d and that \u201cthe ISO leadership had failed the test of Seattle\u201d on top of the fact that in 1999 it had \u201cfailed the test of the Balkan War\u201d. This was a declaration of factional war on the ISO.<\/p>\n
The ISO, naturally enough, observed in its reply that this was ratcheting up the conflict from, \u201cdemanding the removal of two members of our leadership to demanding the removal of the entire leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n
The assault on the ISO was further broadened to the charge that the ISO was stagnating, refusing to open its doors wide to the masses of anti-capitalist youth etc. Their \u201cstagnation\u201d was compared unfavourably with Linksruck, the German section of the IST which had (despite its early bout of \u201cdeep confusion\u201d and \u201cpartial paralysis\u201d) in fact passed the test of the Balkan War. Linksruck has grown rapidly (from about 400 to 800) because it is not \u201csectarian\u201d about mass movements, does not demand that members be cadres (sell papers attend branch meetings) and \u2013 barring that brief confusion \u2013 takes its cue from London without too much argument.<\/p>\n
This is a boomerang argument \u2013 had Cliff and Callinicos but realised it. If success with recruitment is the proof positive of correct perspectives and political line then what should be said of the SWP? In the early 1990s the SWP more than tripled in size, at one point claiming nearly 10,000 members. In the late 1990s the SWP have not merely stagnated, but declined to around 4,000 members. Nor can they plead objective circumstances since this is \u201c the 1930s in slow motion\u201d; capitalism is\/was \u201con the edge of the abyss\u201d; and society had moved to the left with a \u201cnew mood\u201d of opposition to capitalism growing all the time.<\/p>\n
This decline does not seem a very sound empirical proof of the SWP\u2019s superior method.<\/p>\n
Callinicos claims it is a sign of hopeless propaganda circle mentality if an organisation updates its membership lists regularly (i.e. discounts as members those who have not been seen or heard of for months, if ever). The polemic reveals that the SWP\u2019s Party Notes (31 January 2000) has to urge the branches to ensure that \u201cevery member gets Socialist Worker every week\u201d<\/p>\n
This conflict throws the spotlight on one crucial fact. The IST is an international tendency which has neither a common programme nor a democratically elected international leadership. It is, essentially, a grouping of co-thinkers of the British SWP. Its 462 word \u201cWhere We Stand\u201d, which makes do for a programme, defines it as: \u201cAn international grouping of socialist organisations founded on the principles of socialism from below. We stand for the direct and democratic control of society by the working class and are taking the first steps towards the building of international revolutionary socialist parties able to provide political direction within the working-class movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The principles of \u201csocialism from below\u201d include Cliff\u2019s theory of state capitalism, support for trade unions, the need to abolish capitalism and anti-racism. No wonder that such a limited set of principles cannot hold the IST together. For two decades the SWP and the IST mocked the very idea of having a programme. As Tony Cliff repeated ad nauseam, \u201cwho needs a picture of a machine gun: what you need is the bloody gun \u201d. Had he never heard of the use of a blue print when it comes to designing and manufacturing guns?<\/p>\n
Then over the last few years not only the SWP but its German and Australian sections adopted national \u201caction programmes\u201d. In a sense this was a step forward from Cliff\u2019s view that no general strategic document was necessary. But the limitations of these programmes were that they deliberately excluded the goal of the struggle for workers\u2019 power and consequently they could not show how the struggle for immediate and partial demands (in other words reforms) leads on to the struggle for power. They were not linked to an international programme.<\/p>\n
This failure to understand what a programme is has brutal consequences in the here and now.<\/p>\n
It leads to a constant feature of the SWP leadership\u2019s method. Every time there is a need to change perspective, when something else becomes the \u201cMain Thing\u201d (today it is the spirit of Seattle), all previous perspectives and other issues get shoved unceremoniously into the background \u2013 indeed become obstacles. Those who continue to defend them are hopeless conservatives and have to be shoved aside (or out), usually by organisational manoeuvres and the restructuring of branches and leadership bodies rather than by a democratic internal debate and decision making.<\/p>\n
These political somersaults used to be known as \u201cbending the stick\u201d. But they have little in common with Leninist democratic centralism. It is a bureaucratic centralist way of operating. And it is a profoundly wasteful method \u2013 losing masses of members, demoralising and losing independent minded and critical cadres, encouraging subservience and a culture in which the \u201cbest\u201d members are the unquestioning hacks.<\/p>\n
The ISO leadership itself shows a similar national centredness. While recognising that \u201cthe SWP is the leading organisation of the tendency\u201d it goes on to ask, \u201cwhy should we reflexively accept the British Central Committee\u2019s views.\u201d? It indignantly asserts \u2013 \u201cOur organisation has its own elected leadership which sets the ISO\u2019s priorities \u2013 which are best decided in the US not in London.\u201c<\/p>\n
This of course misses the point. Some of the priorities of an organisation are international \u2013 ones they hold in common with their comrades around the world. Some \u201cnational\u201d political events have a worldwide significance. So even if Seattle was \u2013 as the ISO says \u2013 only one of several important campaigns (such as the Mumia and the anti-death penalty movement) its impact across continents, its linkage to similar anti-capitalist mobilisations, its role in what many commentators are calling the \u201cnew internationalism\u201d all mean that the IST as a tendency has the right, indeed the duty to make this a priority for all its sections.<\/p>\n
This does not at all mean that all a sections\u2019 perspectives should be decided in London, but rather that national perspectives \u2013 decided at their own conferences \u2013 should be set within the framework of international perspectives. These should be decided when and wherever the delegates of the IST can best assemble.<\/p>\n
This is nothing other than the dreaded international \u201cdemocratic centralism\u201d which the ISO, like the SWP, thinks is out of the question. They demand \u2013 today at least \u2013 strict adherence to federalist principles. But life should have taught them that if you don\u2019t have democratic centralism in an international tendency then either you will get bureaucratic centralism or your tendency will just fade away as national divergences and peculiarities get more and more pronounced with time.<\/p>\n
What bureaucratic centralism means can be seen in the present dispute. Sudden denunciations, e-mail shots to all the members over the heads of the national leaderships, phone calls and whispering campaigns, sending SWP members to the US to join in the fight. In short, it means an undeclared factional struggle \u2013 dishonestly concealed behind declarations of respect for the complete autonomy of the fraternal organisations. In practice it means that one organisation \u2013 in this case the SWP and its leadership \u2013 is above criticism from any other sections.<\/p>\n
In the ongoing fight a \u201cthird faction\u201d has emerged, made up of ISO members who are critical of the ISO leadership as well as the SWP intervention. They identify the origins in the rift between the ISO and the SWP in Ahmed Shawki\u2019s request a year ago for information on the money raised in the US and other sections for IST groups that have subsequently \u201cdisappeared\u201d (the South African and unspecified Eastern European sections). Evidently no satisfactory explanation was forthcoming from Alex Callinicos.<\/p>\n
This opposition set up a public e-group through which anyone could read the documents and participate in the discussion. Due to pressure from the ISO leadership on the server this was closed down. Relaunched, it was subjected to the same \u201crepression\u201d. Interesting as its material was, it seems to us unwise in the extreme to make such a discussion public. Any uncommitted but loyal members of the ISO must have found this alienating. In any case, an organisation has the right to an internal life. This allows for, and encourages, the free expression of differences without harming the external work of the organisation.<\/p>\n
Of course if an organisation does not allow for democratic internal debate, via regular national and international internal bulletins (and today internal discussions sites via the web) it encourages disloyalty. A leadership which suppresses internal debate is itself behaving like a permanent and privileged faction against its own members. It will \u2013 sooner or later \u2013 reap the whirlwind it has sown.<\/p>\n
The most important issue this third faction has raised is precisely the question of democratic centralism which is entirely absent in the IST and is at the root of much of the repeated bureaucratic abuses of the national sections in the 1990s, and before, that have led to purges and splits. The website contained a characterisation of the dispute and proposed measures to deal with it which seems to us elementary and correct:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy don\u2019t the ISO\/SWP leaderships call for a delegate meeting of all sections of the IST to discuss and resolve the differences? Why not organise such a conference to allow both the ISO and SWP leaderships and the dissident factions in each organisation to make their cases in meetings with the leadership and members of the different sections? While we agree that the Tendency is not an international, democratic centralism (both sides of it) is a principle that should be observed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The LRCI does not view these disputes with malicious factional pleasure on the grounds that anything that is bad for the IST must be good for the working class in general and for us in particular. We agree with the SWP leadership that the recent upsurge of anti-capitalist mobilisations are to be welcomed, participated in and promoted. That is why we have worked to build a mobilisation for the IMF-World Bank jamboree in Prague in September. We are very pleased that the SWP and the IST sections support this mobilisation.<\/p>\n
But we believe that bigger possibilities exist as result of this new internationalism. Globalisation and the struggle against it poses the need for greatly increased co-operation and indeed joint actions between all workers\u2019 organisations as well as those of youth, women, the racially oppressed etc. We believe that what this poses is the question of concrete steps towards the founding of a new revolutionary International.<\/p>\n
We believe all international tendencies considering themselves to be revolutionary should be playing a vanguard role in this. To do so requires a co-ordinated, centralised expression of their strategy and tactics and a democratic decision making process. If the IST adopts such a procedure then its present internal conflicts need not be negative or destructive in their outcome. If it fails to, then the danger is further splits and fragmentation will follow and the method of \u201cinternationalism\u201d revealed by the current dispute \u2013 bureaucratic centralism and the domination of one national group over all others \u2013 will become entrenched.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At a membership meeting in London on 13 May, members of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) assembled to discuss the results of the London Socialist Alliance election work. But for most of the meeting they were treated to a long attack upon the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) by Alex Callinicos \u2013 leading member of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-3309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}