Matt Hale (Solidarity 296) is right about the political deterioration of the SWP, but, I think, too generous to the IS and SR groups which preceded SWP.
In his book Trotskyism SWP leader Alex Callinicos explicitly sides with “orthodox” neo-Trotskyism. When the Trotskyists split in 1939-40, over how to respond to the first pushing-out of Stalinist imperialism to eastern Poland, Finland, the Baltics, the wrong side was those who registered the imperialism and opposed it — Shachtman, Draper, the future Workers Party/ ISL. They “were indeed an instance of... drift towards... acceptance of Western capitalist democracy”.
Like the “orthodox”, Callinicos claims that the political fading-away in old age of Shachtman and some of his close comrades was the logical end of the slippery slope they stepped onto when young by opposing Stalinist imperialism.
Given the SWP’s formula about “state capitalism”, Callinicos has to obscure things here if he is not to appear ridiculous. So he claims that the 1939-40 “debate focused” not on real politics but “on the Shachtmanites’ claim that the Cannon leadership represented... bureaucratic conservatism”.
But “bureaucratic conservatism” was their word for the method by which Cannon advocated repeating “the party’s fundamental analysis of the character of the Soviet Union” (which, as it happens, Shachtman at that stage did not reject) as if it were an answer to the new specific events.
There are half a dozen other inaccuracies in Callinicos’s few sentences about 1939-40. They set the frame for him to present the SWP’s forerunners as taking a middle way between “exaggerated emphasis on the virtues of orthodoxy” into which he claims Cannon was scared by 1939-40 and the “heresies” of Shachtman and others.
In fact the SR group was “orthodox Trotskyist” until about 1959 in all but its “state-capitalist” label for the USSR. From 1960 to 1968, it was not Trotskyist at all, orthodox or heterodox. And then, from the 1970s, it readopted “orthodoxy” in one of its most stultified forms (Healy’s).
Its special version of “state capitalism” yielded, oddly, a warmer, more “appreciative”, less bitter attitude to Stalinism than most of the “orthodox” had at the time the version was coined (1947-8). (Other theories of “state capitalism”, more serious than Cliff’s, had been around for decades).
For some time the SR/IS/SWP had a more open-minded regime than its “orthodox” rivals in Britain. On some issues its position was more creditable. But the “tradition” which some SWP dissidents look to is as much an invention as Scottish tartans.
Explorations of the real history can be found here and here.
