CWI: A bureaucratic farce, solidarity with Bruce Wallace

and the group of 11 My former party the CWI the Socialist Party of England and Wales is under going a crisis it would seem. With the news that long standing member Bruce Wallace has been suspended has not surprised me in the slightest. This all feels very familiar to my time in the party where my blog was used to attack me and my critical thinking was frowned upon too. You would think, perhaps naively, that advocates of two different theories of crisis could co-exist in the same organisation and fight things out at length. Apparently not. After a protracted drama, Wallace has been suspended, in substance for making his criticisms openly - his blog, apparently, is “a platform for a continual stream of invective and attacks on the party”. He has already declared his intention to appeal. While I am no longer a member I have full solidarity with Bruce and the others under attack I know how it feels to feel isolated and cast out as a trouble maker. Indeed this very blog came under intense scrutiny for my own critical views of the way the Socialist party was heading in terms of its methods and ideas. There is much with Bruce and the group of 11 which I agree with most of what they say are spot on to call out the Socialist party’s reformism and dedication to a under consumptionist position economically when it comes to understanding capitalist crisis. Bruce and others including Professor Andrew Kliman who is not a member of the CWI I’d like to point out rightly point towards the Tendency of the rate of profit to fall to find the under lying cause of crisis under capitalism. Why a party cannot co exist with members holding differing views on things I’ll never know. Where is the democracy I wonder? Whilst I don’t agree with everything I can identify with their outlook when it comes to theory. They argue for vigorous theoretical debate in SPEW, based on the actual practice of the Bolsheviks in the pre-revolutionary period. They write, entirely correctly: “democratic centralism prescribes unity on the basis of action, such as programmatic action and activity, and not unity on theory. What is clearer to me though is the fact the revolutionary left and the Marxist and trotskyist left is in crisis and it doesn’t look like a solution is anywhere to be seen as many of them are stuck in their old dogmatic ways and methods. We are going through a period where, it is fair to say, the long-standing organisations of the Trotskyist left are fraying at the edges. We have seen two splits in the space of a year in the SWP. As I write, the Renewal Platform of the International Socialist Organization - the SWP’s erstwhile US group - has been expelled. Workers Power, an orthodox Trotskyist group, has shed a large proportion of its small membership over the last few years. In Ireland, the CWI organisation has itself lost a clutch of experienced members. All these splits have taken place on an extraordinarily thin political basis. We are beginning to recognise the pattern. Comrades, whether through a short, sharp shock (the SWP’s rape debacle) or through a longer disillusionment, come to realise that the grand breakthrough is not, after all, just around the corner. They advance criticisms of the toy town Bolshevism of their organisations, the delusions of grandeur, and set out on their own - whether they jump or are pushed - to really build the movement. What they do not do is sit down and think, and come up with a rounded political alternative. Thus, they drift into liquidationism.

The brilliance of ideas

For me I’ve always been a deep thinker questioning everything where I can. This has lead me to all sorts of troubles in the past where I’ve questioned things I may not have been right to do so but I do not regret that now. I think people with ideas are brilliant being critical of things is important in this day and age of rolling news and so much information at the tips of our fingers we should be very careful what we believe and what we don’t more than ever before. I would maybe say my political ideas are somewhat cynical now and this is mainly born out through experience of various ideas and experiences I’ve been through. Having experienced being in a mass political party in the labour party and also a much smaller party in the socialist party I’ve found that party politics whilst have their merits in terms of collective thinking and the mix of ideas I do think ultimately these can be undemocratic in their outlook and their practices. So I now am not in any political party but I do still pay close attention to the former parties I was in and watch with interest as they look to improve things. I do think however political parties are not ideal for a number of reasons and for me the arena to question and think critically of things being frowned upon does not help them develop and adapt to new situations. For example labour and the socialist party is still banging on with the same tired worn out slogans which appeal to very little people or if they do they are communicated wrongly in the wrong format or medium. I think the biggest thing to remember is that we are all still learning and even when we are older and seemingly know a lot there is always more we can learn from each other and ourselves. I think questioning things and questioning ourselves in particular is a key ingredient to becoming an outward thinking person being able to reflect on what has been and what is required in a positive yet critical fashion can prove very useful in time. Politics is a funny business. Many people just don’t get it and feel turned off by it and I can’t blame them at all in fact I’ve been turned off mainstream politics the stuff you see on television for some time. But for me what we see on TV at Westminster is not politics. Politics or political thinking is all around us. The shopping we buy every week, the newspapers we may read, the conversations we have with our friends and where we work is all political everything can be political if you choose to see it that way. I think our lives are shaped by how we see the world if we wish to affect change we can do so. Things are not static and are constantly evolving all the time. We are in affect a cog in a giant wheel where we can decide to change things if we wish to. Having a idea is a brilliant thing if it is shared by others is not the point if you wish to see how far it can go you can be challenged and tested to see if your idea has any legs by this we can tweak our thinking and come to a much more rounded out way of thinking that helps us understand the world around us much more. I should really take up critical thinking with the Open University or something as there must be something I can do with my deep thinking that can benefit others. But lastly I would just say to people don’t just accept what your being told question everything and keep on doing so. The day we stop thinking is the day we stop living.

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.