The SWP is, despite everything, the biggest self-styled revolutionary Marxist organisation in Britain today. More than that: there are a lot of ex-IS-SWP people around.
It is now what the Healy organisation was in the late 50s and through the 60s — “a machine for maiming militants.”
Politically, it has assumed the traditional role of anarchism. It is a movement of incoherent militant protest living politically from moment to moment, with no strategy and not much in the way of stable politics. It has one goal only — to “build the party”: the party conceived as a fetish outside of politics and history, cut off from the real working class and its movement.
As an organisation it is a rigidly authoritarian variant of the Stalinist model of a party. It is organised around a pope, Tony Cliff, who has the power to loose, bind and eject. In terms of the organisation of its intellectual life it is pre-bourgeois, in fact medieval.
Like the Healy organisation before it, the SWP leaves most of its ex-members politically bewildered and disoriented.
To help traumatised ex-members of the IS-SWP get their political bearings and to establish before younger readers its real history, we publish the symposium that follows. There will be other contributions in subsequent issues. We invite contributions. The discussion is completely free. Should representatives of the SWP wish to participate, they will be welcome.
Some of those who participate in this symposium have moved a long way from the politics they had in the IS/SWP, and from the politics of Workers’ Liberty now. Nonetheless, at the end of this discussion we — and the thinking left in general — will be better equipped to formulate the lessons of the IS-SWP experience.
