Supporter
Yes! I want to become a Socialist Outlook , supporter O I want more information about Socialist Outlook O I Outlook to sell O Name: i Address: Tel:. 2UU Nov. 23, 1991 No. 12 I want to take an order of ......... copies of Socialist I Please return to: Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London, N4, DISCUSSION at the Socialist Workers Party's recent annual conference centred on the notion of a prevailing 'vacuum on the left". But does the organisation have the politics that can fil it?
The claim is that Stalinism, the Labour left and Miltant can all be written off, leaving the SWP as the only organised force to the left of Kinnock With the collapse of the competision, the theory runs, the SWP can both grow sharply and politically dominate all the activists it cannot -as yet - recruit. in a speech by party leader Tony Cliff, who admitted Our 6,000 mem1 bers alone are not enough to make adecisive difference. But if a fighting periphery of just 10,000 can be buir, he argued, we can be a decisive factor The schema neatly leapfrogs such outdated and inconvenient concepts as building a mass party or consistent united front work. The SWP is not poitically equipped to undertake either. Instead, i plans a go-it-alone stab at winning real influence, real soon.
In practice, the organisation stil has to resort to misrepresentation in is arremois to dran wider ayers around it. Hundreds of disillusioned former Labour activists were recently persuaded to sign an SWP-circulated open letter, condemning Kinnock and demanding the formation of 'an independent sociaist alterna tive to Labour.
The deliberately ambiguous wording did not mention the party by name once, purposefuly implying a call for exactly the sort of new broad left grouping ruled out by the vacuum on the left posture. But then a more honest leave Labour - join the SWP' declaration would have atAny apparent vacuum in British politics results from the imminence of a general election. The present quiescence of the labour movement could rapidly shatter, especially after a Labour victory.
Stalinism and Bennism are both currently down, but they're certainly not out. 1992 could see significant regroupments around the CPGB's Democratic Left project andior the Socialist Movement.
Militant, even after the forthcoming likely split, wil still be at least as strong as the SWP numerically, and enjoy a qualitativety superior implantation in the working class. When it begins to work outside the Labour Party in Scotland, the SWP will soon And while the Scottish National Party was not deemed worthy of a mention in the party's Anglocentric general perspectives document, it is now winning widespread working Dissident platforms appeared in pre-conference discussion bulleens for the first time since the mid-80s. calling for democracy inside the no, i red sedale stall des, the adoption of a programme. Astonishingly for a revolutionary party, the SWP has managed without one since 1975.
Southampton members earlier this year circulated a call for the right to fom permanent factions and a regular internal bulletin. A long-running external pro-democracy grouping is increasingly active and gaining members.
In response, tha central committee has now abolished the standing national committee, the lay body which oversees it, on the grounds that it was "largely irrelevant. Democracy is obviously the vacuum in the SWP.