Bambery quits SWP

On 10 April, long-time leading member Chris Bambery resigned from the Socialist Workers Party, complaining about “factionalism”. Chris Bambery has been secretary of the SWP’s front anti-cuts campaign, Right to Work. On 12 April, 38 Scottish SWP members followed. Tom Unterrainer analyses the background.

According to Chris Bambery there is a “cancer eating away” at the SWP’s “heart”. The name of this cancer is “factionalism”.

This claim is repeated in a joint letter of resignation signed by a significant number of SWP members in Glasgow.

Bambery claims that the “party has been afflicted by factionalism for four years and grips the leading group on the CC [Central Committee] who seem addicted to it.”

The “factionalism” found expression at a recent meeting where Bambery’s fellow CC member Martin Smith variously described him as having played a “filthy”, “disgraceful” and “foul” role within the party. Along with the vast majority of SWP members, we have no idea if this is a fair summary of his recent activity.

His robust treatment at the hands of the leading committee of the SWP — including the abusive language — should not encourage any pity for the man. Bambery has all the charm and savoir faire of a sledge hammer and meted out similar invective to SWP members when serving as National Secretary over many years.

Nevertheless, and like John Rees and Lindsey German before him, Bambery has taken a sizeable number out of the organisation with him. All indications suggest that this grouping will now join Rees’s and German’s Counterfire organisation.

Once again the political lines forcing an SWP split are far from clear. Very little of political significance is revealed in the statements from either Bambery or the Scottish comrades who left with him.

Any organisation in which democratic accountability and debate is suffocated and preserved for a small, self-selecting and self-reproducing “elite” is liable to undisciplined factionalism. The risk is even greater when the only democratic tradition in the organisation is the systematic suppression of democracy.

Factionalism in and of itself is not necessarily an unhealthy or destructive feature of revolutionary organisations. In normal democratically functioning groups, members have the right, and even, where there are sharp disagreements beyond the usual, the duty, to form factions. Where no such democratic norms function, the only feasible routes for dissenters is to remain quiet or leave the organisation — en masse or individually.

In response to the resignations of Bambery and company, the leadership have accused him of failing to follow “tradition” in his refusal to mount a political fight at the National Committee and among the members.

They’re right, aren’t they? Well, only up to a point. One of the most revealing things about the “debate” in the SWP is the distinct lack of written polemic and clear differentiation from either side.

For sure there are reams of articles from the pages of Socialist Worker, the party magazine and journal spelling out “how they see things”. None of it is related to the specific issues resulting in the “factionalising” of the party.

Likewise, documents produced by the party leadership in the run-up to conferences throughout the “four years of factionalising” have contained not a single substantial theoretical contribution explaining or analysing the differences.

Search the website of the Counterfire organisation and there’s really nothing explaining where they came from and why they’re no longer in the SWP.

These features make clear not just an unwillingness but an inability to coherently articulate the political differences.

So why the inability to explain? Could it really be the case that there are no real differences? Or is it the case that an organisation which strives to suppress real debate and discussion cannot do other than crush the ability to theorise and explain political differences and ideas?

The few political morsels in the letters from Bambery and the Scottish group indicate a continued dissatisfaction with the organisational direction taken by the SWP in recent years.

Since Bambery’s removal from the position of National Secretary and the subsequent reign of first Martin Smith — who was himself removed from the post under a cloud — and then Charlie Kimber, the SWP has taken a turn towards “party building”.

One would expect “party building” (i.e. recruitment and the “promotion” of revolutionary ideas) to be part-and-parcel of any normal revolutionary organisation’s functioning. Not so for the SWP, it seems. First Rees and German and now Bambery and the Scottish group have accused the current Party leadership of abandoning the “successful” model of “united front work”, tried and tested through the zenith of Stop the War and Respect, in favour of blunt and inward looking recruitment exercises.

Accordingly — so the criticism runs — the party has neglected anti-cuts work, instead intervening from the outside at local and national anti-cuts events and initiatives.

But from close observation and first-hand experience, one of the few admirable qualities possessed by each and every active SWP member is their tenacity when it comes to recruitment. No opportunity is wasted to sell the paper or wave the recruitment form. This is good and normal practice for revolutionary socialists and especially in a period of relative upturn in political activity in the working class. The differences, then, do not arise from a new found distaste for or opposition to rigorous recruitment.

The problem, it seems, is that the SWP has accentuated “party building” as an abstract exercise to cover an inability to present a coherent strategy or to cohere and dominate an anti-cuts “united front” around itself. It took a swift initiative in setting up the Right to Work campaign, but the tried-and-tested front building model embodied in the Stop the War Coalition was soon overtaken by real initiatives by working class organisations and working class communities the length-and-breadth of the country. Surprisingly enough — for the SWP at least — most of these trade union backed, democratic and accountable local groups saw no reason to affiliate to a SWP front group.

Worse still for the SWP was the initiative taken by former SWP leaders in Counterfire who managed to set up a slightly more attractive looking and more successful front group of their own — the Coalition of Resistance.

What this amounts to is yet another clear demonstration of the wrongness of SWP “theory” around the issues of party, class and united fronts. The bottom line for the SWP is the interest of the party itself, which they substitute for the real labour movement and working class organisations. As such, they insist on organisationally dominating what they call “united fronts” and dilute working class politics out of the equation in order to pose as the “left” within a large, populist grouping.

Real united fronts are combinations of working class organisations which unite the various wings of the movement and do so democratically. Within these united fronts, revolutionaries democratically and vigorously battle for political leadership — the “leadership” is not granted in advance.

By any account, the SWP is a much diminished organisation. According to Bambery’s letter, there is now only one person on the leadership body with any significant history in the group — Alex Callinicos. With Bambery, the SWP has lost a leading comrade who — whatever his personal qualities — is a proven political force. There is no clear direction from the leadership, other than a new call to “build for June 30” when united national strike action is likely in some public sector unions. The SWP is politically and organisationally adrift, and there is no-one and no group of people set to turn this situation around.

This much is clear: there has been no promised democratic renewal in the SWP and ordinary party members are unable to express dissent or be organised into a democratic minority. As long as the SWP continues to function in such a way, it will be susceptible to more such defections.

If, as some have suggested, Bambery remained in the SWP after the previous round of resignations in order to carry through another damaging split at a later date, this speaks of a majority of the leadership who are — to put it bluntly — politically witless.

Witless not because they failed to “deal with” Bambery and his activity bureaucratically, but because they had neither the wit, ideas or organisational will to conduct a thorough and open political counter-attack. Such facts cannot be anything other than discouraging for the majority of SWP members.