Thinking beyond Leninism

I have fallen out with political partys it may or may not be clear to all. I have been on a political journey which started back in 2010 starting with the labour party embarrassingly for myself it was the first glimpse into politics and social structures I encountered. I didn’t spend long in this disgusting party which claims to represent the working class. I am now here today following a time in a trotskyist party called the socialist party of England and Wales having found that a Leninist party is not for me. I genuinely believed the SP was the revolutionary party and Marxism of the Leninist variety had all the answers if only we had a more militant left union leadership and a new workers party for the working class to feel represented by. For a while I was wondering where I should go next and I still do in many ways. I'm in a state of flux my ideas always changing my thoughts developing and learning new ideas and ways of thinking all the time. Theory is incredibly important to me politically. Spending time to read and discover what others are going through and are thinking is key to anyone’s development as a human being. I have come to the position of rejecting hierarchy and preferring situations where we are not controlled what we think by a group of self imposed leaders of the vanguard of the working class. I still do hold to allot of what I understand of Marxism especially the economic writings which are still by far the best analysis of capitalism and how it works and is prone to crisis's being hugely important for today. For example I still do support and lend my full solidarity to the remaining comrades in the CWI who are battling the leadership hard on the cause of the great recession and taking on their corrupt and bankrupt ideas on capitalist crisis being a crisis of under consumption. They have come under huge attack and two of their members are still suspended indefinitely some democratic organisation huh? But on the other hand I reject Marxism’s authoritarian tendencies. I have seen it put to use and abused against our own members of our own class. At the time, these groups represented everything I believed in and wanted to work towards: internationalism, anti-capitalism, anti-discrimination, anti-racism, a strong central government that would provide the needs to survive for everyone, and the like. One topic that would frequently come up within all of these groups - whether Stalinist or trotskyist - was how there is not a single marxist-leninist state around today (even North Korea calls itself "jucheist", not marxist-leninist), and that we could build a new one if we recruited enough people into a future vanguard party and sold them more papers. A huge portion of what these groups talked about was recruitment. Their members were always seeking out ways to recruit others into their groups, and with finding ways of having their organization members get into positions of power within the current political system. Even during that time I felt a bit disconnected; I completely understood that capitalism was a destructive and immoral system, but I wanted to do far more than just recruit and vote for members of particular political parties (and parties that had very little clout in the mainstream at that). I found the more I learnt about leninism the more questions would arise how could these projects of socialism in one country like Russia, Cuba and the former Eastern blocks all fall back to capitalism in the end ? was our thinking bound to fail and we were simply naval gazing for old times’ sake. During my time in the Socialist party I learnt a lot including methods of organising and methods which I now feel are detrimental to changing things for the better. I fully accept that we need to base ourselves on the type of society we wish to see. So by creating more hierarchical structures like political parties with a leadership how will this look once the working class is in power or so called power. The Russian revolution is key to many on the left and often defines your thinking. Mine included I read allot about Lenin and Trotsky and their roles in the 1917 uprising... But one thing never sat well with me despite my acceptance of the Russian revolution being a very good thing initially for the working class the first time the workers had over thrown elite and had gained power. Or had they? I could not get my head around how did the highs of 1917 turn into the Stalinist grotesque bureaucratic monster it turned into? How can things have gone so badly wrong? Was it simply due to what the trotskyists still say today that Russia was bound to turn in on itself being a backward country with little history of capitalism and the Russian revolution being isolated and this was unfortunate as the revolutionary wave did not spread across Europe as it should have done. This is what I believed up till recently when I’ve tried to look for answers as to why this happened and could this have been prevented in anyway. For me it comes down to democracy and who is in power and how they are using power. For me the Bolsheviks started off with good intentions but good intentions alone does not make you right in your analysis and your methods. Spending time in the Socialist party has enabled me to understand how Russia turned out the way it did party's like the SP, SWP and their other 57 varieties of vanguard party's work today and wishing to recreate Russia terrifies me as the same language same methods of closing down debate and devotion to the great leadership is exactly the route the Bolsheviks took and that lead to destruction and deaths on a incredible scale putting the working class back hundreds of years. Replying to this idea that Russia was bound to fail due to isolation and destruction of the economy made democracy alive and political progress to keep on track is taken up by the excellent guys over at anarchist FAQ http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQAppendix41 " One of the most common explanations for the failure revolution is that the Bolsheviks faced terrible economic conditions, which forced them to be less than democratic. Combined with the failure of the revolution to spread to more advanced countries, party dictatorship, it is argued, was inevitable. In the words of one Leninist: "In a country where the working class was a minority of the population, where industry had been battered by years of war and in conditions of White and imperialist encirclement, the balance gradually titled towards greater coercion. Each step of the way was forced on the Bolsheviks by dire and pressing necessities." [John Rees, "In Defense of October," International Socialism, no. 52, p. 41] He talks of "economic devastation" [p. 31] and quotes various sources, including Victor Serge. According to Serge, the "decline in production was uninterrupted. It should be noted that this decline had already begun before the revolution. In 1916 the output of agricultural machinery, for example, was down by 80 per cent compared with 1913. The year 1917 had been marked by a particularly general, rapid and serious downturn. The production figures for the principal industries in 1913 and 1918 were, in millions of poods: coal, from 1,738 to 731 (42 per cent); iron ore, from 57, 887 to 1,686; cast-iron, from 256 to 31.5 (12.3 per cent); steel, from 259 to 24.5; rails, from 39.4 to 1.1. As a percentage of 1913 production, output of linen fell to 75 per cent, of sugar to 24 per cent, and tobacco to 19 per cent." Moreover, production continued "to fall until the end of civil war . . . For 1920, the following indices are given as a percentage of output in 1913: coal, 27 per cent; cast iron, 2.4 per cent; linen textiles, 38 per cent." [Year One of the Russian Revolution, p. 352 and p. 425] According to Tony Cliff (another of Rees's references), the war-damaged industry "continued to run down" in the spring of 1918: "One of the causes of famine was the breakdown of transport . . . Industry was in a state of complete collapse. Not only was there no food to feed the factory workers; there was no raw material or fuel for industry . . . The collapse of industry meant unemployment for the workers." Cliff provides economic indexes. For large scale industry, taking 1913 as the base, 1917 saw production fall to 77%. In 1918, it was at 35% of the 1913 figure, 1919 it was 26% and 1920 was 18%. Productivity per worker also fell, from 85% in 1917, to 44% in 1918, 22% in 1919 and then 26% in 1920. [Lenin, vol. 3, pp. 67-9, p. 86 and p. 85] In such circumstances, it is argued, how can you expect the Bolsheviks to subscribe to democratic and socialist norms? This meant that the success or failure of the revolution depended on whether the revolution spread to more advanced countries. Leninist Duncan Hallas argues that the "failure of the German Revolution in 1918-19 . . . seems, in retrospect, to have been decisive . . . for only substantial economic aid from an advanced economy, in practice from a socialist Germany, could have reversed the disintegration of the Russian working class." ["Towards a revolutionary socialist party," pp. 38-55, Party and Class, Alex Callinicos (ed.), p. 44] Anarchists are not convinced by these arguments. This is for two reasons. Firstly, we are aware that revolutions are disruptive no matter where they occur (see section 1) Moreover, Leninists are meant to know this to. Simply put, there is a certain incredulous element to these arguments. After all, Lenin himself had argued that "[e]very revolution . . . by its very nature implies a crisis, and a very deep crisis at that, both political and economic. This is irrespective of the crisis brought about by the war." [Collected Works, vol. 30, p. 341] Serge also considered crisis as inevitable, arguing that the "conquest of production by the proletariat was in itself a stupendous victory, one which saved the revolution's life. Undoubtedly, so thorough a recasting of all the organs of production is impossible without a substantial decline in output; undoubtedly, too, a proletariat cannot labour and fight at the same time." [Op. Cit., p. 361] As we discussed in detail in section 2, this was a common Bolshevik position at the time (which, in turn, belatedly echoed anarchist arguments -- see section 1). And if we look at other revolutions, we can say that this is the case. Secondly, and more importantly, every revolution or near revolutionary situation has been accompanied by economic crisis. For example, as we will shortly prove, Germany itself was in a state of serious economic collapse in 1918 and 1919, a collapse which would have got worse is a Bolshevik-style revolution had occurred there. This means that if Bolshevik authoritarianism is blamed on the state of the economy, it is not hard to conclude that every Bolshevik-style revolution will suffer the same fate as the Russian one. " "moreover Peter Kropotkin had argued from the 1880s that a revolution would be accompanied by economic disruption. Looking at subsequent revolutions, he has been vindicated time and time again. Every revolution has been marked by economic disruption and falling production. This suggests that the common Leninist idea that a successful revolution in, say, Germany would have ensured the success of the Russian Revolution is flawed. Looking at Europe during the period immediately after the first world war, we discover great economic hardship. To quote one Trotskyist editor: "In the major imperialist countries of Europe, production still had not recovered from wartime destruction. A limited economic upswing in 1919 and early 1920 enabled many demobilised soldiers to find work, and unemployment fell somewhat. Nonetheless, in 'victorious' France overall production in 1920 was still only two-thirds its pre-war level. In Germany industrial production was little more than half its 1914 level, human consumption of grains was down 44 per cent, and the economy was gripped by spiralling inflation. Average per capita wages in Prague in 1920, adjusted for inflation, were just over one-third of pre-war levels." [John Riddell, "Introduction," Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, vol. I, p. 17] Now, if economic collapse was responsible for Bolshevik authoritarianism and the subsequent failure of the revolution, it seems hard to understand why an expansion of the revolution into similarly crisis ridden countries would have had a major impact in the development of the revolution." Since leninists can point to only one apparent success of their model, namely the Russian Revolution. However, we are warned by Leninists that failure to use the vanguard party will inevitably condemn future revolutions to failure: "The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. . . Without the confidence of the class in the vanguard, without support of the vanguard by the class, there can be no talk of the conquest of power . . . The Soviets are the only organised form of the tie between the vanguard and the class. A revolutionary content can be given this form only by the party. This is proved by the positive experience of the October Revolution and by the negative experience of other countries (Germany, Austria, finally, Spain). No one has either shown in practice or tried to explain articulately on paper how the proletariat can seize power without the political leadership of a party that knows what it wants." [Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism] To anarchist ears, such claims seem out of place. After all, did the Russian Revolution actually result in socialism or even a viable form of soviet democracy? Far from it. Unless you picture revolution as simply the changing of the party in power, you have to acknowledge that while the Bolshevik party did take power in Russian in November 1917, the net effect of this was not the stated goals that justified that action. Thus, if we take the term "effective" to mean "an efficient means to achieve the desired goals" then vanguardism has not been proven to be effective, quite the reverse (assuming that your desired goal is a socialist society, rather than party power). Needless to say, Trotsky blames the failure of the Russian Revolution on "objective" factors rather than Bolshevik policies and practice, an argument we address in detail in "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?" and will not do so here. So while Leninists make great claims for the effectiveness of their chosen kind of party, the hard facts of history are against their positive evaluation of vanguard parties. Ironically, even the Russian Revolution disproves the claims of Leninists. The fact is that the Bolshevik party in 1917 was very far from the "democratic centralist" organisation which supporters of "vanguardism" like to claim it is. As such, its success in 1917 lies more in its divergence from the principles of "democratic centralism" than in their application. The subsequent degeneration of the revolution and the party is marked by the increasing application of those principles in the life of the party. Thus, to refute the claims of the "effectiveness" and "efficiency" of vanguardism, we need to look at its one and only success, namely the Russian Revolution. As the Cohen-Bendit brothers argue, "far from leading the Russian Revolution forwards, the Bolsheviks were responsible for holding back the struggle of the masses between February and October 1917, and later for turning the revolution into a bureaucratic counter-revolution -- in both cases because of the party's very nature, structure and ideology." Indeed, "[f]rom April to October, Lenin had to fight a constant battle to keep the Party leadership in tune with the masses." [Obsolete Communism, p. 183 and p. 187] It was only by continually violating its own "nature, structure and ideology" that the Bolshevik party played an important role in the revolution. Whenever the principles of "democratic centralism" were applied, the Bolshevik party played the role the Cohen-Bendit brothers subscribed to it (and once in power, the party's negative features came to the fore). Even Leninists acknowledge that, to quote Tony Cliff, throughout the history of Bolshevism, "a certain conservatism arose." Indeed, "[a]t practically all sharp turning points, Lenin had to rely on the lower strata of the party machine against the higher, or on the rank and file against the machine as a whole." [Lenin, vol. 2, p. 135] This fact, incidentally, refutes the basic assumptions of Lenin's party schema, namely that the broad party membership, like the working class, was subject to bourgeois influences so necessitating central leadership and control from above. Looking at both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, we are struck by how often this "conservatism" arose and how often the higher bodies were behind the spontaneous actions of the masses and the party membership. Looking at the 1905 revolution, we discover a classic example of the inefficiency of "democratic centralism." Facing in 1905 the rise of the soviets, councils of workers' delegates elected to co-ordinate strikes and other forms of struggle, the Bolsheviks did not know what to do. "The Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks," noted Trotsky, "was frightened at first by such an innovation as a non-partisan representation of the embattled masses, and could find nothing better to do than to present the Soviet with an ultimatum: immediately adopt a Social-Democratic program or disband. The Petersburg Soviet as a whole, including the contingent of Bolshevik workingmen as well ignored this ultimatum without batting an eyelash." [Stalin, vol. 1, p. 106] More than that, "[t]he party's Central Committee published the resolution on October 27, thereby making it the binding directive for all other Bolshevik organisations." [Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets, p. 77] It was only the return of Lenin which stopped the Bolshevik's open attacks against the Soviet (also see section 8 of the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?"). The rationale for these attacks is significant. The St. Petersburg Bolsheviks were convinced that "only a strong party along class lines can guide the proletarian political movement and preserve the integrity of its program, rather than a political mixture of this kind, an indeterminate and vacillating political organisation such as the workers council represents and cannot help but represent." [quoted by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p. 77] In other words, the soviets could not reflect workers' interests because they were elected by the workers! The implications of this perspective came clear in 1918, when the Bolsheviks gerrymandered and disbanded soviets to remain in power (see section 6). That the Bolshevik's position flowed naturally from Lenin's arguments in What is to be Done? is clear. Thus the underlying logic of Lenin's vanguardism ensured that the Bolsheviks played a negative role with regards the soviets which, combined with "democratic centralism" ensured that it was spread far and wide. Only by ignoring their own party's principles and staying in the Soviet did rank and file Bolsheviks play a positive role in the revolution. This divergence of top and bottom would be repeated in 1917. Given this, perhaps it is unsurprising that Leninists started to rewrite the history of the 1905 revolution. Victor Serge, a "Left Oppositionist" and anti-Stalinist asserted in the late 1920s that in 1905 the Petrograd Soviet was "led by Trotsky and inspired by the Bolsheviks." [Year One of the Russian Revolution, p. 36]. While the former claim is correct, the latter is not. As noted, the Bolsheviks were initially opposed the soviets and systematically worked to undermine them. Unsurprisingly, Trotsky at that time was a Menshevik, not a Bolshevik. After all, how could the most revolutionary party that ever existed have messed up so badly? How could democratic centralism faired so badly in practice? Best, then, to suggest that it did not and give the Bolsheviks a role better suited to the rhetoric of Bolshevism than its reality. Trotsky was no different. He, needless to say, denied the obvious implications of these events in 1905. While admitting that the Bolsheviks "adjusted themselves more slowly to the sweep of the movement" and that the Mensheviks "were preponderant in the Soviet," he tries to save vanguardism by asserting that "the general direction of the Soviet's policy proceeded in the main along Bolshevik lines." So, in spite of the lack of Bolshevik influence, in spite of the slowness in adjusting to the revolution, Bolshevism was, in fact, the leading set of ideas in the revolution! Ironically, a few pages later, he mocks the claims of Stalinists that Stalin had "isolated the Mensheviks from the masses" by noting that the "figures hardly bear [the claims] out." [Op. Cit., p. 112 and p. 117] Shame he did not apply this criteria to his own claims. Of course, every party makes mistakes. The question is, how did the "most revolutionary party of all time" fare in 1917. Surely that revolution proves the validity of vanguardism and "democratic centralism"? After all, there was a successful revolution; the Bolshevik party did seize power. However, the apparent success of 1917 was not due to the application of "democratic centralism," quite the reverse. While the myth of 1917 is that a highly efficient, democratic centralist vanguard party ensured the overthrow of the Provisional Government in November 1917 in favor of the Soviets (or so it seemed at the time) the facts are somewhat different. Rather, the Bolshevik party throughout 1917 was a fairly loose collection of local organisations (each more than willing to ignore central commands and express their autonomy), with much internal dissent and infighting and no discipline beyond what was created by common loyalty. The "democratic centralist" party, as desired by Lenin, was only created in the course of the Civil War and the tightening of the party dictatorship. In other words, the party became more like a "democratic centralist" one as the revolution degenerated. As such, the various followers of Lenin (Stalinists, Trotskyists and their multitude of offshoots) subscribe to a myth, which probably explains their lack of success in reproducing a similar organisation This is not to say that the Bolshevik leaders were 100% happy with the state of their revolution. Lenin, for example, expressed concern about the rising bureaucratic deformations he saw in the soviet state (particularly after the end of the civil war). Yet Lenin, while concerned about the bureaucracy, was not concerned about the Party's monopoly of power. Unsurprisingly, he fought the bureaucracy by "top-down" and, ironically, bureaucratic methods, the only ones left to him. A similar position was held by Trotsky, who was quite explicit in supporting the party dictatorship throughout the 1920s (and, indeed, the 1930s). Needless to say, both failed to understand how bureaucracy arises and how it could be effectively fought. "It is this insubordination, this local autonomy and action in spite of central orders which explains the success of the Bolsheviks in 1917. Rather than a highly centralised and disciplined body of "professional" revolutionaries, the party in 1917 saw a "significant change . . . within the membership of the party at local level . . . From the time of the February revolution requirements for party membership had been all but suspended, and now Bolshevik ranks swelled with impetuous recruits who knew next to nothing about Marxism and who were united by little more than overwhelming impatience for revolutionary action." [Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, p. 41] This mass of new members (many of whom were peasants who had just recently joined the industrial workforce) had a radicalising effect on the party's policies and structures. As even Leninist commentators argue, it was this influx of members who allowed Lenin to gain support for his radical revision of party aims in April. However, in spite of this radicalisation of the party base, the party machine still was at odds with the desires of the party. As Trotsky acknowledged, the situation "called for resolute confrontation of the sluggish Party machine with masses and ideas in motion." He stressed that "the masses were incomparably more revolutionary than the Party, which in turn was more revolutionary than its committeemen." Ironically, given the role Trotsky usually gave the party, he admits that "[w]without Lenin, no one had known what to make of the unprecedented situation." [Stalin, vol. 1, p. 301, p. 305 and p. 297] Which is significant in itself? The Bolshevik party is usually claimed as being the most "revolutionary" that ever existed, yet here is Trotsky admitting that its leading members did not have a clue what to do. He even argued that "[e]very time the Bolshevik leaders had to act without Lenin they fell into error, usually inclining to the Right." [Op. Cit., p. 299] This negative opinion of the Bolsheviks applied even to the "left Bolsheviks, especially the workers" whom we are informed "tried with all their force to break through this quarantine" created by the Bolshevik leaders policy "of waiting, of accommodation, and of actual retreat before the Compromisers" after the February revolution and before the arrival of Lenin. Trotsky argues that "they did not know how to refute the premise about the bourgeois character of the revolution and the danger of an isolation of the proletariat. They submitted, gritting their teeth, to the directions of their leaders." [History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 273] It seems strange, to say the least, that without one person the whole of the party was reduced to such a level given that the aim of the "revolutionary" party was to develop the political awareness of its members. Lenin's arrival, according to Trotsky, allowed the influence of the more radical rank and file to defeat the conservatism of the party machine. By the end of April, Lenin had managed to win over the majority of the party leadership to his position. However, as Trotsky argues, this "April conflict between Lenin and the general staff of the party was not the only one of its kind. Throughout the whole history of Bolshevism . . . all the leaders of the party at all the most important moments stood to the right of Lenin." [Op. Cit., p. 305] As such, if "democratic centralism" had worked as intended, the whole party would have been arguing for incorrect positions the bulk of its existence (assuming, of course, that Lenin was correct most of the time). For Trotsky, "Lenin exerted influence not so much as an individual but because he embodied the influence of the class on the Party and of the Party on its machine." [Stalin, vol. 1, p. 299] Yet, this was the machine which Lenin had forged, which embodied his vision of how a "revolutionary" party should operate and was headed by him. In other words, to argue that the party machine was behind the party membership and the membership behind the class shows the bankruptcy of Lenin's organizational scheme. This "backwardness," moreover, indicates an independence of the party bureaucracy from the membership and the membership from the masses. As Lenin's constantly repeated aim was for the party to seize power (based on the dubious assumption that class power would only be expressed, indeed was identical to, party power) this independence held serious dangers, dangers which became apparent once this goal was achieved." I now understand that the root issue of politics is not who is on top of the hierarchy but the fact that the hierarchy exists at all. You can paint the governmental state any color you'd want, christen it with any ideology you'd desire, but it is still a force that rules over you and others. That was the other big thing I remember when the topic of anarchists came up in the Marxist-Leninist circles I was a part of (usually online): the notion that anarchists were weak philosophically and that they depended on Marx and Marxist thinkers for most of their "good" theories. However, the historical reality is that a lot of Marxist ideas came from early anarchism, and if one takes a look at it they'll see how a lot of these arguments that Marx had come up with were arguments Proudhon came up with years before. For example, in Marx's early manuscripts from 1844 he talks about abolishing private property through its universalization. Of course, this was a political communism, since the state would still exist (not to mention, Marx would desire a socialist republic where the governmental principle would be present, though that's really not all that surprising when one considers the political situation of his home country Germany that existed at the time). What's striking is how this was essentially identical to Proudhon's early idea on revolution. Two years before, Proudhon had called for property to be universalized as a means to its abolition. It should be noted that Proudhon later changed his definition of "state" from a monopoly on force to a collectivity, so instead of a transition from a governmental "workers' state" to an era of "statelessness", he called for a transition from the governmental state to the "state" as a collective force. When reciprocal property relations are put into place, and new institutions based on these principles are formed, the oppressive hierarchies dissolve. With this comes the dissolution of the managerial class as workers appropriate the means of production. Credit is re-organized, so the money class dissolves as well. But all of that is beside the point; the real point here is that one can see a lot of instances where Proudhon's ideas are repeated in Marx. Theories of property (at least, early on) and theories of exploitation are very similar. It's all very weird. To sum it all up, what drove me away from Marxism and towards anarchism wasn't just the re-evaluating this whole concept of what would be called the governmental principle, or what's called the state in modern lexicon, but the history of these ideas as well. " I'm still on a journey learning all the time. I don’t reject all forms of Marxism allot of it is still very useful for today but we cannot be locked into some long time dead Russian or German to tell us what we should be doing today. We face very real and very different problems which neither Marx, Lenin nor Trotsky could ever have foreseen. We need to start in the here and now and not pretend we are in a better place than we are. We on the left are in a very low position having faced defeat after defeat over decades the unions in this country are pathetic on the whole in terms of mounting any fight back to austerity. I believe when Karl Marx rejected being labeled a Marxist too. He felt that any change in society must be brought about by the working class and the working class acting on its own not being lead by the nose by a self appointed vanguard of the working class. Nothing could be more patronizing than being told what to think and how to act. While not stating I’m any ism or it’s I am a free thinker and want to hold to that. I was close to joining the green party as seemed more left and had a chance of power but quickly realised where this would lead with them passing cuts in Brighton and various examples of greens in power across the world concerned me greatly . The Best description for Marxism and Leninism I’ve ever read has to be “analysing everything through the eyes of corpses.” Genius. This was a reference to the tendency of nearly all groups and currents (though far from all individuals, I hasten to add) which identify as Marxist to treat the writings of Marx, Lenin, et all as gospel. http://propertyistheft.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/leninism.jpg This for me is dangerous while allot of what these thinkers wrote can set you on a good path of class analysis repeating word for word a Lenin text in a meeting full of workers wishing to take action is not likely to mean much to them. Relating your everyday issues with your understanding of theory is the key to any good revolutionary. If you think reeling off a passage of Trotsky will win you support in the workers movement you are seriously out of touch. Yes, some dead guys with beards said some things which are spot on. But they were still flawed people who got things wrong as well. That’s why anarchists are anarchists and not Proudhonists, Bakuninists, Kropotkinites, etc. If you use the fact that some revered thinker of the past said it as proof of your argument instead citing them as someone who made a particular point more articulately, then what you have is dogmatism and not reasoned argument. History is something we should learn from, but we shouldn’t live our lives through it. Unless we’re after a career as an archaeologist. , the difference between anarchists and other flavours of communist to two sentences from Karl Marx can be summed up as; Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The most significant anarchist contention with Marxism is with the idea – solidified and put to brutal practice by Lenin, but originating with Marx – that the working class need a revolutionary leadership, and that rather than building the new world in the shell of the old we need this “transitional state” where a new elite takes over the state apparatus to run things in the interests of the workers before “true communism” can be achieved and the state magically “withers away”. We know this not to be true from history. The analysis of the state is what divides many authoritarian and non authoratiarian thinkers on the left. Some think we need a stronger state a "workers state" to work in the interests of the working class others see a state of any sort a block on progress. I'd tend to favor the later. "You can expand upon this, polemicise it, write gargantuan essays about it, (and – believe me – many have) but that’s about the crux of the thing. Non-anarchist communists, from this point referred to as Communists for ease, believe that a workers’ state led by a workers’ party is the necessary transition from a capitalist society to a stateless, “true” communism. Anarchists, on the other hand, believe that the state and capitalism must be dismantled simultaneously. All this does is supplanting one upper class with another. And their self-appointed role as “vanguard of the proletariat” gives them justification for self-righteous tyranny. In the words of Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s anarchist contemporary; We do not admit, even as a revolutionary transition, either National Conventions, or Constituent Assemblies, or so-called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that the revolutionary is only sincere, honest and real in the masses, and that when it is concentrated in the hands of some governing individuals, it naturally and inevitably becomes reaction. The most obvious fulfillment of this prophecy comes in the form of Josef Stalin, with his murderous purges and the vast network of gulag slave labour camps. This is undeniable even to most Communists, who are more than eager to fling the term “Stalinist” at each other across party and factional lines. But are the other Communist leaders they exalt any better? Though Stalin was the most extreme despot of any Communist regime, save perhaps Pol Pot and Mao Zedong, the fact is that they are just the thick end of the wedge. The stage for Stalin was set by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.” "Lenin’s arrogant assertion that nobody else could rule would become Stalin’s iron-fisted tyranny. His fear-mongering that everyone who disagreed with him was with the capitalists would become Stalin’s paranoid, and bloody, purges. We can look at Leon Trotsky similarly. Today, he is the thinker that most Marxists and Communists look to, his exile and death at the hands of a Stalinist agent lending him some credibility. Trotskyism is perhaps the largest wing of the Communist movement today, but the same flawed principles of vanguardism and dictatorship of the proletariat dominate. For example, for Trotsky the mistake of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War was that they didn’t mobilise “the masses against the reformist leaders, including the Anarchists,” and “they did not form their own nuclei inside the CNT, and in general did not conduct any kind of work there.” In other words, they didn’t attempt an entryist takeover. This “isolates [end] the revolutionary vanguard from the class” and so “rendered the vanguard impotent and left the class without leadership.” Once again, the assertion that the working class need an elite (conveniently enough, the same people making this assertion) prevails, and even highly successful bottom-up organisations like the CNT require a “nuclei” of vanguardists pulling the strings. Forgetting, of course, that it was the self-organised militias and collectives which were most successful against the fascists, whilst the Liberal-Communist government was more concerned about destroying worker autonomy than about General Franco. Trotsky’s attitude her matches Lenin are to the Russian soviets. And, of course, he shared Lenin’s contempt for the rebels at Kronstadt. As Bakunin once so astutely noted, “no dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it.” Those who follow the vanguardist path are the elite who will lead the workers to utopia and nothing else (especially free self-organisation, can be tolerated. We can see this even today, where accusations of being “sectarian” (that is, diverting from the party line) are not yet the first step on the road to the gulag. Taking Britain as my example, as usual it is the one I am most familiar with; we can see this most explicitly in what are currently the two biggest “left” parties: the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party. The present Socialist Party argues that its electoral policies are based on Trotsky’s transitional programmed, and it is at the forefront of the Campaign For A New Workers’ Party. After all, “in the absence of a mass workers’ party that had the confidence of the working class to fight on their behalf,” workers – whose role is reduced to that of “voters” – are simply left with “a deep sense of powerlessness.” The party almost seems proud it got itself expelled from the labour party and takes it upon itself to be the main promoters of the need for a "new workers party" which they see TUSC as a precursor of sorts. You just have to look back to last week to my post on "why we don’t need another left party" to see that the SP intend to create a labour party mark two only with them in the leadership and keen to lead the workers to grand victory. More overtly open to criticism are the SWP. Not just for their cheap and irrelevant stunts, or the engineering of pointless mini confrontations in order to appear “militant” or “radical.” They adhere to the vanguardist principle of “democratic centralism.” That is, traditional top-down authoritarianism and attacks on those who don’t adhere to the central party line. The crisis which has engulfed the SWP in the last few years of cover up's of rape allegations and rape apologism for leaders of their own party and their attitude to women stinks. I won’t expend a great deal of time drawing out the SWP’s laundry list of failures here, as they have been done to death a thousand times over. I will instead point, briefly, to members resigning over the lack of democracy and accountability, and its propensity for setting up front groups. The most notable of these, Unite Against Fascism, has a record of hijacking events [http://whitechapelanarchistgroup.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/whitechapel-united-against-division-reflections-on-the-anti-edl-mobilisations-on-sunday/ But, in the meantime, let’s return to that fundamental difference between anarchism and Marxism: bottom-up self-organisation versus the dictatorship of the proletariat in a transitional state. The latter is clearly a corruptible idea, but surely this doesn’t mean the idea itself is inherently flawed? After all, if it started with Lenin, he was only thirteen when Karl Marx died, and when he gained power the Communist Manifesto had been in print for 69 years! This point falls down when we realise that, unlike Lenin, Bakunin was contemporaneous to Marx. More than that, he was open and vocal in his disagreement with him. The result was Bakunin’s expulsion from the International Workingmen’s Association, along with all those who supported his position. We can only speculate what Bakunin’s fate might have been had their been a Communist revolution in Marx’s lifetime. Bakunin saw him as “a vain man, perfidious and crafty,” whilst noting that “the instinct of liberty is lacking in him; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian.” It was, after all, Marx who provided the theoretical foundations upon which Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and Maoism are all built. It is Marx’s “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” to which those upholding that same mentality today aspire. As Bakunin asserts; "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself. This is one reason why establishing a “workers’ state” will not lead to genuine, anarchist communism. If you establish “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” Stalinist tyranny is the inevitable result. True revolution must come from below." with quotes and extracts from communism and the state blog post by Phil Dickens at http://propertyistheft.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/communism-and-the-state/ and an anarchist Faq at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQAppendix41

South London Slavery case, Maoists implicated

Is a title I didn’t think I’d be writing for a blog when I started out but a recent case has exposed a really dark side of left wing sects? Today's revelations about the so-called 'Lambeth Slavery' case have linked those arrested to the remnants of a small Maoist group that operated in Brixton in the 1970s. The central allegation seems to be that supporters of the group formed a collective that degenerated over time into an abusive scenario where several women felt themselves to be controlled and unable to leave the house of their own free will for many, many years. Two people were arrested in a Lambeth Council flat at Peckford Place, Angell Town in Brixton - with press reports identifying them as Aravindan Balakrishnan and Chanda Balakrishnan, formerly leading members of a group called the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Unless and until this case comes to court and all the evidence is out there, it's probably best not to speculate too much about the details. It is pretty clear though that this would be a unique situation arising from very particular circumstances - and certainly no basis on which to generalise about slavery in modern Britain. Clearly there are disparate cases of extreme exploitation, abuse and servitude but maybe the isolated nature of such a tiny sect becoming detached from reality in more ways than one is a case for concern.http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/slavery_in_london_an_hysterical_morality_tale/14331 A really interesting piece over at Bob from Brockley http://brockley.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/brixton-maoist-sex-cult-slave-shocker.html "In some ways the Maoism of the group is irrelevant: their key features are those of a cult rather than those of a Leninist party. (As Lurdan writes in the Libcom discussion thread: "Looking at their writings now they seem to exhibit all the indicators of a classic millenarian sect based on an apparently literal belief in the immanence of global revolution.") However, there are features of Leninist parties that encourage cult-like activity. Comrade Bala's group is among a very small number of Leninist parties to degenerate into pure cults (NATLFED on the US West Coast is the classic example and the LaRouche network is the most successful) but many more Leninist groups are on a cult continuum. Being at war with the "bourgeois" (or "fascist") state is an exemplary control technique for forcing members into absolute loyalty and trust of insiders and absolute break with mainstream society. But more specifically there are two features of Leninist doctrine that lead to cult-like behaviour. The first of these is the notion of the vanguard party; the second is that of democratic centralism. Both are sketched out in Lenin's what is To Be Done?, written at the turn of the last century in the context of an ultra-authoritarian police state where open, democratic political organisation was impossible. The principle of the vanguard party came from Lenin's conviction (based on the thought of his two intellectual mentors, George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky) that the "the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness," and not able to develop true class consciousness by itself. Thus - whereas Marx argued that the working class could only be emancipated by its own hand and that "communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties because] they have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat" - Lenin saw a need for a vanguard to bring class consciousness to the workers. This means, inevitably, that an enormous investment is made in the truth of the party's positions: only the party is able to pierce the veil of illusion under which the rest of us labour. And the principle of democratic centralism (fully formulated by the Bolsheviks in 1905, with an increasing emphasis on the "centralism" bit rather than the "democratic" bit only later) is that a party can come to a decision democratically but once it does it must carry it out without dissent. These principles were passed into the hands of the megalomaniac psychopaths who have flourished in the movement since Lenin's death. Both principles are used to enforce absolute obedience to the party leadership, and to stifle all criticism. Criticism, however trivial, undermines the party's claim on truth, exposing that it lacks the true consciousness the workers expect of it. It is this stifling of dissent and total identification of the party leadership with the truth that enabled Gerry Healy, the leader of the WRP (for many years the largest Trotskyism group in Britain) to abuse countless female party members, as detailed in Comrade Coatesy's "Vanessa Redgrave and the Red Sex Slaves: A Marxist Analysis": What was the character of this sexual abuse? It was later stated that the women Healy pressurised into having sexual relations with him ‘mistakenly believed that the revolution – in the form of the “greatest” leader demanded this, the most personal sacrifice of all. They were not coerced … physically, but every pressure was brought to bear on them as revolutionaries’. The situation was ‘not so much rape but … sexual abuse by someone in a position of power and trust’. It was Dave Bruce comments, ‘wholesale sexual corruption in a manner analogous to these religious sects. There’s a very close parallel’. It is what has enabled the Socialist Party (the WRP's successor as the biggest Trot group) to attempt to sweep under the carpet up all discussion of very serious sexual abuse allegations. And it is what enabled the Socialist Workers Party (until recently the SP's successor as biggest UK Trot group) to totally cover up a series of allegations about leading member (and Unite against Fascism organiser) "Comrade Delta". In the lowest moment in the SWP Delta saga, the SWP refused to subject him to "bourgeois courts" (although it hasn't stopped their activist Professor Michael Lavelette from threatening bourgeois legal action against those making accusations about his role in getting Comrade Delta an academic sinecure in, of all the most inappropriate places for someone facing a rape allegation, a social work department). The SWP's refusal of "bourgeois courts" is different in degree and not in kind from the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought's view of "the fascist state"; Comrade Delta's actions are different in degree and not in kind from Comrade Bala's enslavement of Rosie and other women." Alot of murky things go on on the far left and i've been witness to some. We can’t simply brush these things under the carpet or pretend these people do not exist. We must confront them and confront our own traditions and practices on the left which allow these groups and people to get into these awful positions. My thoughts are with the women now who have an incredible uphill battle to regain their lives and start again. After 30 years of forced slavery I cannot imagine how hard it will be for them to readjust back to everyday life.

What is going on on the old left?

The old left is going through a bit of a transition right now to what and where it will end who knows but there is a crisis that is sweeping the far left right now. Mostly Leninist and Trotskyist parties but can be found elsewhere too. It is a realization that much of what they have been saying while many of them believe what they are saying is just not caching a echo with workers and none despite the biggest and gravest economic crisis since the 30's are barely treading water and in many case's loosing members and stagnating . I do think there are systemic roots for this problem on the left. Having left the socialist party one of the better Trotskyist parties out there over a month ago I have seen a few too many incidents of some very unsavory nature to be honest. I have witnessed and read about some of the worst forms of human behavior over the last year with the cover up of the rape case with Comrade Delta in the SWP to bullying and harassment from others on the left. The latest falling out comes from the AWL - Alliance for workers liberty. A smaller group than the two bigger forces on the Trotskyist left the SWP and the SP. But the sense of party crisis has not escaped the AWL either it would seem. "...In the ensuing “debate” only two members – myself and Hannah Thompson – raised any criticism of the article. It is unclear as to whether this was because those who were critical of the article were not called to speak or whether they chose not to, but the debate was primarily used to denounce and attack critics and to rally support for the leadership. In one incredible contribution, members were told that is was not even necessary to even read the offending article before springing to its defense. Any critical, or thinking, approach was actually “disloyal” to the group. Moreover, it was even wrong to post their grievances to the internal list. We were asked to show solidarity with poor Sean and told that the Executive Committee’s public response was a defense of us all. Many of the arguments made in that debate are now being rolled out across the internet and in real life in a feeble damage limitation exercise..." http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/awl-resignation-matgamnas-article http://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cpgb.org.uk%2Fhome%2Fweekly-worker%2Fonline-only%2Fawl-resignation-matgamnas-article&h=lAQGOsNDj&s=1 This rings very familiar to myself who has always tried to think critically and keeping a balanced approach to things was called all sorts and charged with being "disloyal" while still a member of the socialist party I was ticked off several times for not taking my disagreements if you could call them that and points of misunderstanding as I’d prefer to call them up with others in the party. When I did as I maintain I did all is it not always in a official capacity due to my lack of confidence in public situations and public speaking I felt contacting individuals and speaking to them in what I thought was confidence would help. It later turned out any misunderstanding or disagreement as I was told they were in the end was not held in confidence at all and allot of what I said about my concerns with the party were relayed back to my region and beyond in some case's which I found to be a breaking of my trust. I think there is one thing being a open party but another to go tell your senior every time someone has a issue I felt like I could not trust very many people in the party in the end and allot of people were out to catch me out and find me guilty of being disloyal and not pulling the party line so to speak. It really did feel very 1984 at times where I would receive a sharply toned email warning me not to put my thoughts and feelings out on my blog and on social media. I replied each time saying I did not know the party had control of my blog and what I personally felt. But apparently while I was a member my personal blog represented the party despite me constantly stating this blog is my own and nothing to do with the socialist party and is the thoughts independent of the party and do in no way represent the parties party's views. Are personal views to be frowned upon on the Trotskyist left? It would certainly seem so in my experience. But this distrust of those with a critical mind is quite co common on the left I have now realized many groups have seen a decline in membership despite what they officially will tell you. Why would a party admit its lost members it doesn’t do its street cred any good does it? But we know for a fact members come and go all the time and on the left some groups have a very high turnover of members. In the SWP for example they estimate to have over 7000 members but no one surely believes this figure? I understand you are considered a member in the SWP if you have signed a petition or brought a paper sub paying doesn’t seem to be that important. I do think the internet is something the old left has yet to come to terms with and does not know how to deal with it. It is something that is out of their control. I think that is the nub of it really the control and the lack of being able to control what members say to each other on the internet. The old left had a way of organising and working that they kept everything internal and in meetings but with the addition of the internet this is no longer possible and I feel there will be more and more tensions with party members of all groups as people realise they can think and discuss with each other online and that discussion doesn’t have to be just limited to the holy branch meeting. I think personally it shows a lack of confidence on the behalf of the old left to not wish to discuss and debate its differences out in public view of the working class. It’s pretty patronizing I think as it says that the working class are not intelligent enough to understand the debates and discussions and only we as the chosen Marxists can understand which for me is hugely insulting and shows a lack of confidence in their own ideas and also a lack of confidence in the working class to act and think for themselves and of course the old left do not wish the working class to act and think for itself it must be lead to the promised land of socialism. There is much wrong with the old left and allot of its modes of organisation and methods of interacting are out of date but this can change and may well do in time. The working class is constantly changing and is far more fluid in its work situation. With the unemployed and those in and out of work a lot it will be harder and harder for work place organising even for unions as I’ve previously explained. New ways of organising and thinking will be necessary. Can the old left adapt to the new situations coming? Only time will tell.

Can we change society via the ballot box

I am less and less convinced by the week. As various left projects to stand in elections have come and gonea nd political representation for workers is still absent from todays offerings i thought i'd take a look at where we go from here and the lessons we can possibly learn. I dont claim or even pretend to have all the answers i dont believe anyone does. I am not keen on those boasting to have all the answers and a ready made blueprint to change. Those who think we just need better leaders miss teh point in my view now it is the leaders as their role in mediating struggle which are the issue not who are the leaders as such. Much like with Trade uUnions political parties be them of workers organisations or not are there to over see struggle not to transform society as such. A excellent article i have read over at the Communea fantastic blog i've strumbled across gives a good analysis of electoral politics and its limits. what follows is Dave Spencer's excellent analysis of the failure of socialist electoral coalitions over the past decade and why organisation from below has far more to offer than vanguardism. The most striking feature of British politics over the last decade has to be the disenfranchisement of the working class. The working class has little or no voice at national, regional or local level. Our task is to be part of the reversal of this situation. But this reversal has to come from below, from the linking and networking of the campaigns and struggles of the working class itself. Unfortunately the organised left does not see it this way. As convinced vanguardists and elitists they see themselves as providing the leadership with all the answers that the workers must follow. They have had a decade in which to show leadership, but have failed dismally to build a broad united movement to fill the vacuum to the left of New Labour. It is not as though material conditions have been unfavourable, given the biggest economic crisis for over 100 years; global warming which threatens the very existence of the planet; two unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and MPs and bankers being shown to be on the take.But there have been attempts to build an organisation. In 1996 we had the birth of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and the Socialist Alliance (SA) “ all before the 1997 General Election which New Labour was expected to win. The SLP started well with a mass meeting of over a thousand in Camden Town Hall. Arthur Scargill addressed meetings of 300 to 400 in the large cities. In the 1997 general election the SLP stood 64 candidates and got just under 2% of the vote. The SSP stood 18 candidates and gained about the same percentage. The Socialist Party threw its weight behind the Socialist Alliance, mainly to form an alternative to the SLP which they saw as a serious rival.Clearly there was potential in these attempts, given that workers were voting New Labour to get the Tories out and nobody knew quite what a rat Blair was to become. Given 14 years to the general election of 2010 surely some solid progress should have been made. What happened? Scargill insisted that joining the SLP meant you left every other organisation. There was no scope for factions in the SLP. Worse still Scargills bureaucratic approach was demonstrated at the post-election SLP Conference when it came to light that a Mr Hardman was sitting in the conference with 3,000 votes – more than the rest of the delegates put together and using those votes to get through Scargills policies and also to get Scargills men on to the National Committee. People seized the microphone, led by comrades from Cardiff who had achieved the best SLP vote in the election. Why bother to have a secret ballot? they demanded. Why not ask Mr Hardman which policies he supports and be done with it? In fact why bother to have a Conference at all? Over half the Conference walked out. The SSP also made a good start and drew in a wide variety of enthusiastic members. In contrast to the SLP they quite rightly allowed minority factions. Both the SP and SWP joined as platforms of the SSP. However when Tommy Sheridan dragged the party into the courts, both the SP and SWP supported him and undoubtedly advised him to split the SSP. In my view this was no matter of principle, but a cynical manoeuvre on their part to wreck the SSP, which they saw as a rival. Left groups cannot stand competition.The same political approach of narrow sectarianism based on an elitist vanguardist view of the party was used by both the SP and SWP in the Socialist Alliance. At the general election of 2001 the SA fielded 98 candidates and the SSP 72 candidates. This was ambitious but shows the potential to build a broad movement. The SP insisted on a federal structure for the SA which meant that decisions were taken by contacting the National Committees of the various left groups involved and individual SA members had no say. The SP left in a huff when the SA decided against federalism; they refused to stay in and fight their corner. That left the SWP in charge. In February 2005 the SWP closed down the SA in order to concentrate on Respect. What a depressing sight to see SWP members, sheep-like, queuing up to join the SA at the conference, only to use their new membership cards to close down the SA which some of us had been members of for 13 years!What can we learn from this pitiful history? The first thing is that back-room deals by leaderships are not the way forward. There has to be democracy and accountability and nothing less. And the working class must be involved. And we have to have a healthy distrust of left groups. Some SSP members now argue that they should never have let the SWP and SP join as platforms. I think they are right. They had no intention of building a broad movement in which they could play an important role. They were there to sell their papers and recruit anybody new to their own organisations. Any dealings with any British left group must now contain the health warning Watch your back!This week in a large local residents meeting where I live, called to protest about cuts in bus routes, one resident stated, The cuts are going to get worse. After the election there’s going to be a slaughterhouse! Nobody disagreed. Every day in our local paper there are photographs of groups of people protesting about something. This is a new phenomenon brought about by the economic crisis. Some means of linking these struggles and grassroots organising must be found as a matter of urgency at local and national level. Some of these links already exist.As Chair of the residents’ group mentioned above I have had to learn very quickly about the transport system and how it works in order to propose our petition of protest to the Council. A few months ago we had a protest petition about a proposed PFI waste incinerator in our area. We had to find out about that. To learn about the workings of local government and their various operations is an eye-opener, believe me. All this information needs to be shared and we need to build up expertise on specific subjects like health, education, climate change etc.In the course of defending public services and jobs we should start debates within the campaigns on how these services should properly be run with the workers concerned and with the public. How would it be under communism?The questions of democratic workers’ control and self-management and accountability should be raised. After all some members of the public will argue that some public services are crap – which they are. Nationalisation is not the complete answer “ we need democratic control and accountability by workers and the public. Informed debates within protest campaigns has to be one method of building from below. It is a question of dialogue with the people involved, not of preaching from the rostrum.The last decade saw the working class sidelined. Those claiming to stand for workers rights failed because they started by insisting that they knew the answers and the workers had to follow. The new decade must be one of focussing on building communism from below.

Examining the UAF

The UAF is the SWP’s flagship front a anti racist and anti fascist organisation which has been around on many demonstrations against the far right for some time now I thought it might be useful to look at its pro’s and con’s and what we do need as a anti fascist movement as far right idea are on the rise right across Europe today and will at some point gain more support here in Britain once again. In the week Tommy Robinson’s high profile resignation from the EDL the UAF have been prominent in opposing the EDL for sometime now and do a lot of good but also do a lot of damage to the movement too I would suggest. Since the last time the EDL was in Tower Hamlets in 2011 many things have changed. They suffered a general decline in their fortunes and early this year we were all getting ready to write their epitaph. Then everything changed in May when the EDL managed to swiftly exploit the murder of a British army soldier in London. Suddenly there were 2000 of them on demos again, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was being interviewed on TV all the time, their Facebook likes went from under 24,000 to over 100,000 within a day and they seemed to have leapfrogged further ahead than they ever were before. The last few months have in general been a frightening time when the far-right has looked like they were winning. More recently, the effect of their exploitation of Lee Rigby’s death seems to be wearing off a little, but the support and sympathisers that they have gained in this period will not go away so easily, even if they are not always willing to turn out on the streets. In addition, since May, there has been a huge spike in anti-Muslim attacks both on people and mosques, including nailbomb and firebomb attacks. Many of these attacks have been directly linked to the EDL through EDL graffiti left at the scene or EDL members convicted for the attacks. Even without these direct links it is clear that a general rise in far-right activity creates a climate where such attacks happen. It feels like the clock is rapidly rolling back to the racist murders of the early ‘90s associated with an increase in support for the BNP (of which Stephen Lawrence was to become the most high profile victim), or possibly to the murderous violence of the late ‘70s rise of the NF, which claimed the life of Altab Ali among others. The EDL have not been alone in this effort to drag us back into the racist violence of the past. A whole alphabet soup of splinter groups to the right of the EDL now hold their own marches and rallies across the country, mostly in limited numbers, but making up for that in more overt traditional racism than the EDL is willing to openly espouse. The rise of UKIP and the phenomenon of ‘Woolwich Strong’ both indicated a large passive basis of support for nationalistic, racist and anti-immigrant politics. And all along official state racism has been providing the grounding context for this, slowly shifting the middle ground of politics to the right with its normalising of ‘go home’ rhetoric. The government not-so-subtly borrowed the idea of the BNP’s ‘truth truck’, turning it into the UK Border Agency’s notorious ‘racist van’ and has introduced squads of Border Agency staff illegally stopping and demanding papers from foreign-looking people on the street like we were living in pass-law era South Africa. There has been a general failure to adequately deal with the change represented by the rise of the EDL in the last 4 years. The anti-fascist and anti-racist movements have been found wanting in the swift change from combating the electoral politics of the BNP to the sudden re-emergence of far-right street gangs with the EDL. The ‘official’ anti-fascist movement represented by Hope Not Hate and UAF, for all the good work they do, are hamstrung by their close ties to the authorities – they are not willing to risk breaking the law in order to effectively confront the fascists on the streets. Politically they are tied to Labour politicians, union bureaucrats and conservative religious leaders which means their proclaimed politics can only be a fairly shallow liberal celebration of ‘multicultural Britain’, which is fine as far as it goes, but leaves them struggling to combat the EDL either ideologically or physically. Additionally anti-fascism has been hit by the fall-out from the SWP’s ‘Comrade Delta’ scandal. For those that haven’t been following all the Trot gossip – the SWP is Britain’s largest far-left group and the main driving force behind UAF, but earlier this year the party was thrown into disarray by allegations of rape and sexual abuse against a senior party member. As a consequence of the party leadership’s flawed handling of this, significant numbers of SWP members have left the party and there are many disaffected Swappies in the ranks. The effect of this on UAF is hard to precisely judge for those not involved themselves, but it certainly seems to have had an impact on their organisational capacity. The UAF have always been good in getting ood numbers out for anti racist and anti fascist demonstrations and this has been a positive thing. Big numbers opposing the racists on the street is a sign of strength of feeling but simply isn’t enough in my opinion. The point is not to get complacent. If they seem to be in some slight period of decline, that’s the time for us to organise. Better to redouble our efforts when they are in decline and try and finish them off, rather than relax and wait for the next opportunity for them to blame something on Muslims and increase their support. And if this does happen then we need to be ready to confront it, rather than being taken by surprise. Certainly UAF are not all bad and do act as a beacon for drawing in support on demonstrations for example In Tower Hamlets, UAF held a rally in the park and did not brave the police to go and confront the EDL directly. That is not the worst thing in the world. I am sure we all believe in using a diversity of tactics in combating fascism, including those that are non-confrontational. If UAF had not organised a rally, we would have had to have done it ourselves to give an option to people who did not want to risk arrest or confrontation. I disagree with much that UAF do and how they do it but we would be really screwed if they didn’t exist. They have opposed the EDL across the country and sometimes been the only ones to do so so you have to hand it to them for that. I just think an open democratic debate on tactics and strategy is needed for future attempts to oppose the far right. The EDL are eminently beatable. They are not huge. They have a lot of fair weather support that fizzles away to nothing when conditions do not favour them. They had dwindled down to next to nothing before Rigby’s death. The far-right has been chased off the streets before – they can be again.

The various fronts of the left

Now we’ve all seen them and come across them the front organisation on the left is numerous. There is a long long list of them right down the years. I’ve come across many in my short space of time on the left some more well known ones include UAF- unite against fascism, Right to work, Youth fight for jobs, NSSN, Unite the resistance, Stop the war coalition, Coalition of resistance and the list goes on and on and on. Many have come and gone and others are only taken up at certain times. Left-wing front organisations, such as the Socialist Party's "Youth Fight for Jobs," are a way to monopolise movements and demobilising genuinely radical action in favour of recruitment and paper-selling sadly. Quite often a front is something for a left sect to grab hold of and gain control of a movement. The Left and its many fronts In the world of organised crime, mobsters have respectable businesses as fronts to disguise their illegal activities. In the world of political activism, parties and organisations form single-issue groups as fronts in order to lure people in on the basis of a single issue whilst hiding their broader ideology so that they can recruit people who may not agree with it. This is particularly prevalent on the Leninist / Trotskyist left. A prime example of this is the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in Britain. Their front organisations include Right to Work, the Stop the War Coalition, Unite Against Fascism, Love Music Hate Racism, Campaign Against Climate Change, Globalise Resistance, and Defend Council Housing. Whilst they have the most fronts, however, they are not the only Trotskyist party to have them. The Socialist Party has the Youth Fight for Jobs Campaign, and has previously stood candidates in elections under the guise of “No2EU” and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has Education not for Sale, Feminist Fightback, Workers Climate Action and No Sweat. So it goes on. The sects get tinier and more mental, and their fronts more obscure, but the formula remains the same. Take an issue people are concerned about, form a front group for it, mask any other politics you may have, and monopolise the movement by declaring anybody who cares about the subject but doesn’t side with yourselves to be “sectarian.” The likely result is that the most radical action you can muster is a liberal and entirely passive protest, whilst those who want to do something effective will be demobilised and disenfranchised from above. But hey, you’ll sell a lot of papers. Admittedly, the extent to which this is true varies. AWL and SP fronts, for instance, are often less apolitical and more direct with their message than SWP ones; take Workers Climate Action declaring that “climate is a class issue,” say, compared to UAF’s unwillingness to address the class issues that surround antifascism. But the formula roughly holds true in all cases. Sadly a lot of those who do want to fight back rather than cherry pic for new recruits for their organisation are often marginalised and often isolated and feel like their ideas are not listened to. I’ve experienced this too and have seen many a good activist driven away from getting involved as they feel over whelmmed with the various left sect getting involved and looking to dominate. We should encourage militant workers to join these organisations but look to remain independent and to continue to think criticlly at all times. If they feel something is wrong or being handled poorly then they must be allowed the democratic right and freedom to speak out without being threatened or isolated out of activity. All in all a lot of the left groups do not practice the concept of the united front very well at all and end up running it for their own ends shrinking its influence the longer it goes on due to their authoritarian nature of controlling from above and not allowing views and movements from below todevelop . This is all something which will continue but we do need to combat any forms of buraucracy that looks to hold a movement back by its small C conservatism that seems rooted in many of these left wing front organisations.

TUSC and its future direction

I’ve felt for some time now even when I was still a member of the socialist party which in all honesty runs TUSC politically for the most party along with a few key trade unionists on the left anyway. I have felt TUSC has stagnated and failed to develop as I was told at the start that it would start to. Now I’m not inpatient or unrealistic to think we’d have a fully working mass new workers party in4 years of TUS being around but the general lack of debate, discussion on the project seems concerning for someone who would like to see the left get its act together sooner rather than later. For me when I was standing for TUSC it felt like a banner and not much else there is very little in the way of an organisation as such. The idea that TUSC can be the new workers party is very hard to believe at this stage. I constantly read in the socialist and tweets by various SP members that we need to build TUSC but I don’t see anyone even talking about building TUSC let alone actually trying to do so. For me it seems like a half way house in many ways a whole reformist platform which trade union figures and leaders can feel comfortable with. It is designed with the idea to try and entice trade union leaders like the Len McCklusky’s and Billy Hayes’s of the world over from backing the labour party. They have created a mirror of the early labour party and if various big 3 trade union leaders came over to TUSC one day they would be the ones in control not the workers and any ordinary member if there would be a membership by then. This is all hypothetical of course as TUSC and its steering group as its interestingly called as there is not much steering that goes on I must say has blocked attempts for TUSC to develop into anything bigger blocking off attempts for new groups to get involved such as Socialist resistance. Whilst I am no fan of their politics it seems foolish to not allow them in. Talking of membership it always is a thorny issue with TUSC being hugely opposed to any form of membership system at this stage they say. When the time is right I was always told while never given a time or a situation where membership may become necessary. Presumably no time soon I assumed. TUSC independent or the ISN as they call themselves have all but abandoned TUSC not for good but for now as they do not feel TUSC is growing, developing or even wanting to. They have tried their luck with Left Unity which at least has a membership system all be it a little odd and skewed at this point as its all before the30th November founding conference where we will start to see more about Left Unity develop. It is a crying shame that TUSC seems to be just an election front for the likes of the socialist party and the RMT it could be so much more if it opened up and reached out to groups like UK Uncut, boycott workfare and so on. There are enough people angry with the system today out there to start to form something on the ground. Talking of on the ground TUSC regularly complains about a lack of media coverage I’ve suggested a press officer in the past to contact various local and national media outlets to drum up support for TUSC yet I’m not sure if there is any movement on this proposal at all at this point. I was constantly told TUSC is a working progress and is not the finished article but for me the frustrating part was and still is to be honest the lack of any will to move it forward and try and build it. It felt like we were constantly waiting for the bigger unions like Unite and others to come join in then we could have our new workers party. Labour mark 2 if you like. As that is how it felt we were holding out an olive branch to the union bureaucracy constantly and not looking to go too far in front of them constantly. In reality TUSC consists of just the socialist party, a half-hearted Socialist Workers Party and a handful of others. The union leaders The Socialist party talks about are mainly Socialist party members, and Bob Crow is not exactly confident his union will agree to back it in future election as at a national TUSC meeting last year where it was told this wasn’t a voting conference the RMT representative Alex Gordon at the time said they may not stick with TUSC forever and a day waiting and waiting. This is reflected in TUSC’s basic and rather reformist programme to be honest. It’s vaguely social democratic with a few radical sounding ideas thrown in but it’s very sparse and basic and low on the details. Maybe for good reason I don’t know again to appease various union leaders I imagine to not scare them off but the socialist party claims to be Marxist and for a socialist society yet all it push’s for within TUSC is mild reforms to capitalism and a bit of nationalisation thrown in for good measure. All very uninspiring if we are honest. While it is true TUSC’s results in elections have been poor on the whole and dismal in others there has been a few decent results like Tony Mulhearn in Liverpool mayoral election got 5000 odd votes and Mary Jackson in Doncaster got about 2000 odd but most results are 1% to 9% and the odd one a bit higher clearly having no national profile or any way of getting through to people this is not going to change anytime soon I’m afraid. As for next years prospects I feel ill at the thought that TUSC or certain parts of TUSC are again putting their weight behind the No to EU banner once again playing into UKIP’s hands with a nationalist rhetoric that ill be hard to separate on the doorsteps where next year I would expect UKIP to do very well next year in the European elections if not win them out right actually. But what kind of workers’ party does the Socialist party want? Something pretty similar to what comrade Rob Griffiths of the old Morning Star CPB favours: i.e., a Labour Party marks two. The SWP is all for halfway houses too, but does not think the Socialist party trajectory is realistic. No meaningful layer of trade union bureaucrats is about to abandon Labour in order to set up another version of it this side of the 2015 general election. I would say TUSC has a long way to go and may not be the answer long term but please we do not need another labour party the one we got at the momentous bad enough making a safe space for various union bureaucrats is not my idea of a new workers party and I think workers need a party of their own still which they do not have.

Prospects for Left Unity going forward

I have paid a little attention to the progress of Left Unity in the recent period. It is something which could be really good for the left but could also turn out to be another stumbling block in the development of socialism in the United Kingdom. Only time will tell have course. I am optimistic on Left Unity but am cautious as always as we are right to be. There is two clear platforms appearing including the Left platform which is considered the more moderate position and then there is the socialist platform which contains a lot of disagreement but one that looks to replace capitalism with socialism eventually. This may sound bold but in today’s world we need to be. If we hide what we stand for or try to ride on the back of the right wing in the labour movement including left reformist ideas we will only head one way and that is to no where I’m afraid. I am not a member of Left Unity or of TUSC at this point but have always made my ideas clear that these two projects should look to work together whenever and wherever they possibly can. TUSC and Left Unity are not that dissimilar in my view. Both wish to oppose the labour party and offer a left wing alternative. TUSC clearly looks to look and lean towards the trade unions and those still linked to the labour party in particular which is having a tiny tiny affect so far. Only the GMB have made rumblings of cutting funding to the labour party so far and even Unite who claim to be a left union in action have made no noises at all on the labour party question. With their so called left leader which makes me laugh with Len Mckluseky who is an absolute fraud in my view as he likes to appear left but sucks up to Ed Miliband and the labour party as much as any bureaucrat would do? But as for Left Unity I am not involved and am watching with interest but would hope anything that comes to fruition would be pushed by the utmost democracy and openness. Of course the most democracy won’t lead to socialism but it certainly won’t hinder things. In my view the more democracy the better and cant do the fight for socialism any harm at all. Left Unity is a name and a position which air agree with I do think there is more that unites the left than divides it but as always there is much sectarian behaviour always on show from all sides of the left. This will have to be tackled and taken on head on for anything to change. The worry for me is that very few if any socialist groups are involved in Left Unity the likes of the SWP and the Socialist party who are arguably the two biggest socialist groups on the left today in Britain can barely agree on anything let alone a project like Left Unity. Just take TUSC it is clearly a thing that more interests the socialist party more than the SWP at this stage will this change in time? Perhaps but for now the left is more divided than ever. This can only be a bad thing until things change.

The Weekly worker

Over the last few weeks I have I must admit been reading the weekly worker. Shoot me down burn me at the stake I admit it. Yet there is nothing to admit. The weekly worker is an interesting look at the week’s events in the labour movement and doesn’t hang back in telling things as they are. They openly accept criticism which the Socialist party a and the SWP do not outside their ranks. I do accept a lot of what the CPGB weekly worker say and they are right in many ways including the need for amass Marxist revolutionary party. That is in a way our end goal. But yet I’ve not joined them and I am still a committed member of the CWI and socialist party and the Trotskyist tradition. The weekly worker whilst providing a somewhat gossipy section in their paper do offer some very good theory and technical sections which I feel the CWI could do better on which I’ve previously explained yet my main gripe and hang up and the reason why I did not go further and go and join the CPGB is their day to day activity. Whilst theory is important and I hold it up as a very important piece of Marxist understanding it is not everything. The day to day struggles being among workers and workers struggles are the nitty gritty which I get the impression the CPGB tends to shy away from. Are they for example on the picket lines with the PCS ? Are they attending TUSC steering committee meetings despite their misgivings? Are they active within their unions and helping to build the fight back? Sadly I do not see this. I do have my disagreements and reservations with the Socialist party on a number of issues but yet we are and I still think the best party to put into practice the ides of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky to not only understand the current situation is one thing to put into practice what needs to be done is far harder. I do not imagine there are any better class fighters out there than the SP. Our party is made up of majority working class people with the best militants in our ranks I do believe. We may not always be right and no one is but I’ve come to the conclusion that the socialist party are the best party to stick with for now who have the best rounded out Marxist programme for the period ahead. The weekly worker is always worth a read and is best engaged with I feel rather than writing off as another sect and saying they have nothing to contribute how about engaging with them putting a letter in their letters section for example ? Gets some debate going perhaps? I feel the socialist party tends to regard other smaller left groups as “the sects” and dismisses them and ok some may be not worth bothering with but yet others may be and to clarify our position may help us establish our position in the movement better in some ways. Or in other ways may not but I don’t think good well meaning Marxist thinkers such as those with the weekly worker can be dismissed so easily I think some of what they say is correct other parts not so much. There is a sense of arrogance with our party sometimes which needs to be tackled as we don’t know it all and new and fresh thinkers should be welcomed and taken up. Yet all this I am still as 100% a member of the CWI and continuing my leaning as a Marxist as ever. Marx taught us to think critically so I am sometimes I have criticisms of our own party I feel I should be free to raise these in order to clarify my own understanding and to benefit others too. A democratic party is a healthy party the socialist party must fight to be the most democratic party of all. If a member has concerns on democracy they should be able and feel to raise these issues. Remember everything is a process reading other parties materials and works is not a bad thing sometimes comrades may be wishing to clarify their ideas and challenge themselves and others. We should look to work with these free thinking comrades not write them off but look to encourage them to read and read our own material and provide more when it isn’t there. For example I wish to read more Peter Taaffe yet it is not available in an accessible format for me so I’m lead to go by hear say and quotes unfortunately. Marx was never afraid to say how he felt and I think all comrades should be encouraged to speak out if they have any concerns for the party to look to bridge that gap in thinking. Marxism is a constant science and is not dogmatic in any way it must constantly be examined critically and updated to fit the day to day demands. Do read the weekly worker if you can but also read it with a critical eye as I have done whilst being a open forum to many it can also lead you astray be aware of this but also not dismiss things out of hand without asking questions and challenging anything you pick up and read . Lastly keep reading and keep challenging yourselves and others. Marxism is a tool to aid workers lets make the most of it.

Taking on the far right, why we must get serious

Over the weekend and last week there has been a upsurge in racist attacks and the likes of the EDL seem to have seen a increase in their numbers whilst this may be a temporary increase we still must be rigorous in our opposition to all forms of racism and any form of fascism be that on the streets with the likes of the EDL or through the state. Racism is something we cannot take lightly and we must look to confront it wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head. I thought I’d re cap on the socialist party and formally Militants attitude to fighting the far right and our strategies we look to push for. There is the popular front model the likes of the SWP and the UAF look to push with tries to unite everyone whether you’re a labour party MP or councillor who has just made cuts or religious figures celebrities the lot unity for the UAF is something which just means getting everyone together then we can all stop the fascists they tell us. For the SWP fascism is always on the verge of taking over they have to up hold this line as UAF would cease to exist if they actually told us that fascism isn’t about to take over but we must be on our guard against it and any forms of racism. Looking back to last year’s EDL demonstration in Walthamstow which I think is a good place to look at and how the community organised and how the socialist party saw things at the time and our disagreements with the UAF and the SWP. The first was the political basis of the campaign. We all agreed on the need to mobilize the biggest opposition possible to the EDL, and we were all prepared to link arms with anyone on the day to oppose them. However, Socialist Party members argued that the most important force to mobilise is the working class, and in particular the organised working class in the trade unions. Deepening austerity means that there is the potential for the EDL, or a force like it, to grow, unless the campaign against them is united with the campaign to stop the cuts. Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs; millions more are hit by attacks on their pensions and the public sector pay freeze. Benefits are being stripped away, while essential services are slashed. Yet 85% of the cuts are still to be implemented. We are told that the cuts will continue until at least 2020. When fighting the EDL we need maximum unity. All sections of our communities have an important part to play. But it is a massive, united campaign of working class people that has the power not only to marginalise and smash groupings like the EDL, but to hold out hope in a real future to those small layers of people who might be attracted by them. The big events of 2011(the 26 March TUC demo, 30 June and 30 November public sector strikes) and the 10 May strike in 2012, all show that the organised working class in the trade unions has the power to mobilise masses of people in decisive action. The trade unions should be at the heart of any fight against the EDL, making it clear that they stand firmly in the interests of defending all sections of our communities against austerity attacks. Yet under the SWP leadership of 'We are Waltham Forest' the trade unions only played a peripheral role. It would take preparation, but the serious mobilisation of firefighters, bin workers and so on in the borough would have had an even greater impact on the ability of the EDL to march. In fact the SWP insisted throughout that the campaign could not take up these class issues against cuts. But it’s the SWP’s welcoming of pro cuts labour representatives which isn’t helpful we find. The Socialist Workers Party argued that in order to achieve maximum unity against the EDL the campaign should not introduce issues that might alienate some people, and 'not everyone is against the cuts'. In particular this referred to Labour councillors who implement cuts and Labour MPs who do not oppose cuts. The argument went that many people have joined the Labour Party recently and still vote Labour, and so Labour's involvement would draw more people into activity. If the campaign against the EDL was also against cuts, Labour leaders would not get involved, so the campaign could not oppose cuts. While of course we had no opposition to Labour Party members being involved in the campaign and mobilising on the day, we argued that it was a mistake to uncritically put up politicians such as New Labour MP Stella Creasy and local Labour councillors as speakers and leaders of this campaign. The reality is that those working class people who vote Labour and the few who have joined Labour are seeking protection against the cuts. It is the policies of the main political parties - the Tory-Lib Dem government and the Labour councillors who pass on their cuts in our borough - that create the despair and division in which the EDL thrives. It is Labour's betrayal of the hopes of masses of working class people that led to nearly 70% of the electorate not voting for anyone in the 2012 council elections. Labour politicians' uncriticised involvement could put off many workers whose jobs and livelihoods have been torn away. In fact, the Labour council encouraged people not to take part in the counter-demonstration. They even failed to put up any real opposition to the EDL planning its rally in front of the Town Hall, claiming they had no powers to stop them - despite having previously tried to stop anti-cuts campaigners holding stalls in the town square! But the growth of the far-right in some European countries is a clear warning as to what could develop in Britain. In Greece the lives of millions of working and middle-class people have been shattered and the social consequences have been devastating. Public sector workers have seen wages slashed by 40%. Many workers are paid starvation wages of €400 per month. The number of hospital beds is being slashed by 50%. Thousands of schools have been closed down. Many thousands have become homeless. Unemployment is over 21%, - 51% amongst youth. In these conditions the neo-fascist Golden Dawn has achieved 7% of the vote in the general elections in May and June. This is despite their violent terror tactics: attacking left-wing MPs on television and attacking left-wing campaign stalls; hospitalising and murdering immigrants in pogroms while the police stand by. In France, for the first time in 24 years, the far-right Front National won two seats in June's elections to the national assembly, with 13.6% of the vote. In Hungary the right wing government allows the "Garda" bands of neo-fascist Jobbik to rampage the streets terrorising people and driving Jews out of villages. Of course, in Britain the development of the far-right has not reached such proportions. The British National Party (BNP) made some electoral inroads up to 2010 but since then has lost those positions, having been riven with internal strife and successfully opposed in local communities. But we think there is a need for an honest and democratic debate in the trade unions and anti-racist movement about the ideas and methods necessary, not just to defeat them one protest at a time, but to defeat them long term.

Challenging ingrained sectarianism on the British Left

I’m a member of the socialist party of England Wales myself and up till now I haven’t really experienced too much sectarian behaviour on the left. I joined after the disasters of the Socialist Alliance, respect and now I’m involved with TUSC via the socialist party. With the addition of Left unity now I’m starting to see what all the fuss is about when people told me the left is riddled with sectarian behaviour. I’ve tried to challenge some obit to a extent online the best I can by offering a comradely open approach to both projects of TUSC and Left unity as do believe the only way we can get anywhere in this country on the left is by working together where we can. We are far too small and insignificant on our own to do it all ourselves. The old phrase United we fight divided we fall is quite apt for the present time. I also wasn’t quite a member by the time the anti cuts groups were setting up and today to have about 3 or 4 now is just silly all looking to do more or less the same thing. Of course I think all cuts should be opposed whether they are labour, Tories or lib dem or green that should be our starting point. But in terms of political representation we could either try reclaiming the labour party which I’m sure reads of this blog know of my views on that anyhow it is a dead end strategy at this point. Not to say it always will be but for now it is. So that leaves us with trying to build an alternative to labour and the debate currently going on on the left is how we do that and what sort of party do we want. Clearly, when over 8,000 people sign a petition in favour of a new leftwing initiative, and the most active set up dozens of local groups across the country, this is something that should be welcomed by Marxists. So far my involvement in TUSC has been mainly around election time effectively TUSC shuts down in between elections as far as I can see it. TUSC receives a fair amount of coverage in our paper of course due to the large amount of by elections of late but you wonder if this would be the case if by elections didn’t keep popping up? In the socialist party we organise meetings under our own names the socialist party branch of … and so on. TUSC is mentioned often in meetings don’t get me wrong and this is to be welcomed but going further and involving local c community groups or other outside forces is not elaborated on as far as I’ve seen. I’ve been criticised publicly and in private on social media platforms such as Facebook for daring to question our party’s direction with TUSC. I’m told I must raise these concerns internally or keep quiet. I don’t think that is quite the comradeliest friendly tone I’ve heard. In fact I’ve received some quite sharp rebuffs for voicing my concerns over TUSC and trying to involve the non aligned socialists we have around us. Each time I’m asked well what would you suggest could we do better? Like it’s all down to me to com up with the magic formula or something. I’m simply stating a fact that we are 3 years into a project a electoral front if you like and yet I’m none more clearer where we want TUSC to go is it a party in the making , is it simply a electoral front for our party or will it be part of a bigger project one day ? All questions I’m struggling to find answers to at present. Maybe it’s more of that wait and sees idea we put out a lot. Don’t get me wrong I fully support TUSC and its key principles of standing anti cuts candidates against the pro cuts parties it is important as Marxist we do provide an alternative for workers. It’s just our methods and practices I’m still unconvinced about and have had for some t time but have kept quiet about. What is sad though is the ingrained sectarianism the left neither the Socialist party nor the SWP the two largest trotskyist groups on the left covered what happened at the recent Left Unity national conference last weekend. (Of course, neither ‘reporters’ nor observers were permitted to attend, but you might have thought that both the socialist party and the SWP would have found a way to inform their readers on the proceedings) as there were some of their members there I do believe. The fact that neither the SP nor the SWP do not lead the left unity project at this stage may have something to do with the lack of coverage who knows. But it should have been reported on even if briefly as it could be a major turning point for the left in this country, equally it may not be but to simply ignore it is a big shame in my view. I’ve also been told the left unity project is riddled with reformists and so called middle class intellectuals. Well wasn’t the labour party full of reformists when the Militant now the socialist party was in it yet we still tried to win over the best workers out there to a Marxist point of view. It sometimes feels to me that the organised left today are not interested in joining something they neither lead nor have a bit of influence in. We all have to start somewhere surely hence we’re starting to organise in unions we have little influence in today too. The problem is that formations like LU do not set out to lead comrades “from reformism to revolutionary positions” at all. They appeal to disillusioned old Labour supporters as they are and as a corollary restrict any “radicalising forces” that join to the reformist milieu. They are designed from the beginning as forums that say, “This far and no further”. Clearly we need to go further than our own parties and our own view of the left. We are a party moving through the class trying to find the best militants but as do the other groups out there claim to be doing so. The key with any new party or grouping of the left needs to be rooted in the Marxists ideas that this system can no longer work for the many and that no amount of tinkering and fiddling with capitalism will work for the 99% and that a truly mass Marxist party with the guidance to take society toward a more advanced society based on the common ownership of the means of production is needed in the here and now and in the coming years and battles to come.