examines the symptoms of galloping sectarianism in Britain's biggest far left group. Q: WHAT GROWS all the time, yet never appears to get any bigger? A: The Socialist Workers Party.
The SWP now claims 8,000 members, which since the split and rapid decline of Militant makes it by far the biggest organisation on the British left.
Wekeep being told it is growing and - building, yet there is little evidence that many of those allegedly joining the SWP are playing any effective role as revolutionaries.
One explanation of this phenomenon came to light during the March 25 FACE demonstration against education cuts. SWP militants stood on the Victoria Embankment approaching people at random as they walked past to join the march, asking them if they would like to "join the SWP".
Joke
Among those who "signed up' for a joke, no questions asked, was a leading supporter of Socialist Out. look. For all they knew, he could have been a Tory - or a policeman.
There has been previous experience of this type of "mass" recruitment on the British left. In the early 1970s Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party embarked on a frenetic 'recruitment drive' aimed at rapidly reaching 10,000 members. Young WRP activists were encouraged to sign up new members on doorstep sales, on High Streets and wherever they could find a captive SWP ignores the broader campaign to defend the health service audience.
Healy's daily paper Workers Press carried campaign features delighting in the news that two pensioners had been recruited' going up in a lift, and that enterprising. WRPers had made recruits in chip shops and by canvassing car drivers stuck at traffic lights.
Of course it was fantasy - a symptom of decline rather than a springhoard to growth of the WRP. Experienced members, saddled with long lists of 'recruits' wasted fruitless hours trekking around false addresses or attempting to organise dozens of indifferent or hostile 'members' who had agreed to "join", just to get rid of a troublesome recruiter.
There is little reason to believe that a formula which failed to spectacularly in the 1970s should succeed LOW.
And it does seem that this symptom of sectarian posturing is an effort to compensate for the SWP's abject rest of his life in Hong Kong uSt failure to make its mark on the British labour movement.
Of course the SWP appear to be everywhere. They have sophisticated printing presses and plenty of resources for posters, leaflets and stickers, and they have become specialists in maximising their public profile. They can turn out impressive numbers of paper sellers.
But what is the real political impact of the organisation atter almost three decades of of public activity?
Marginal
With the exception of anti-racist work, where their Anti Nazi League has managed to capitalise on the political weakness and internal divisions of the Anti Racist Alliance, the SWP are little more than a marginal factor in the political life of the labour movement.
The SWP of course stands outside the political battles now taking place in the Labour Party, as it has done tionary. It simply means that since the mid 1960s. Their answer to any worker wanting to fight for socialism is to leave the Labour Party and "join the SWP".
But the SWP's isolation from these key struggles is less surprising than its lack of serious impact in the trade unions.
Its ambitions have since the early 1980s been restricted to 'building a rank and file movement within the unions'. This formula has translated into recruiting individuals and avoiding any real nitty gritty fight with the existing unions bureaucracies, which might call for alliances with other left wing forces.
A conscious policy of refusing to stand for national executive or regional positions in the unions, and a persistent failure to join with any independent left forces in the unions means that the SWP has little or no influence at anything more than branch level.
Yet Socialist Worker presents itself as a no-nonsense paper for ordinary trade unionists. So it comes as something of a surprise to find that of the SWP's 8,000 members just 1,500 attended their Trade Union Conference on March 18.
If the centre-page coverage in Socialist Worker is to be believed, speaker after speaker parroted the messianic zeal of SWP founder Tony Cliff, on the need to sell the paper as the 'key' to "building resistance inside the workplaces'.
Perhaps the saddest contribution, symptomatic of serious sectarian delusions, was that attributed to a Guy's Hospital student nurse. According to the Socialist Worker report, she told the conference:
"When I first started as one of 200 student nurses, the UNISON reps didn't come near us because they were so demoralised. But we did a regular Socialist Worker sale around the nurses' home and were able to Chen, who founded the mount our own union drive:
"We recruited 50 student nurses to UNISON, and they made up the bulk of the nurses on a recent march to save Guy's.
"Since then the hospital has been reprieved."
If the answer is so easy, why doesn't the SWP do the same and save Bart's and the other London hospitals threatened with closure?
Of course recruiting student nurses to unions is a good thing. But to look at the fight for Guy's as purely a trade union struggle, completely ignoring the vast effort and activity carried out (without significant SWP involvement) by the local community-based campaign, ignoring the 1-million strong petition, ignoring the political fight by Labour, Lib-Dem and Tory MPs, and suggesting that the recruitment of 50 UNISON members tipped the balance to save Guy's, is absurd.
No fight The SWP remains incapable of working seriously within such broad-based campaigns. It has no track record of fighting cuts in the NHS, education or local government.
It is this political failure of the SWP which compels its leaders and its journalists to create their own, fantastic world: a world in which there is no need for a united front tactic, because the working class is to be won over one-by-one to join a mass party - through a combination of denunciation and the most basic propaganda.
Given the scale of this mission, 8,000 members is not so large. And many of these appear already to be flagging, even as a new list of bogus and unreliable paper members is signed up.
It's an old trick. And it still won't work.
new materials published in