I’VE noticed that the SWP have taken to defending Galloway and various other people they’re shacked up with by pointing out that said scumbags are “not revolutionaries”. In the case of Galloway, this (absolutely indisputable) fact apparently justifies every crime from demanding at least £150,000 a year to hob-nobbing with Ba’thists to supporting the Pakistani military dictatorship.
Similarly, I remember Socialist Worker explaining Livingstone’s scab-herding on London Underground by pointing out that he is, after all, a “reformist politician”.
This oh-so-revolutionary position in fact lets fakers like Galloway and Livingstone off the hook. You don’t have to be a worked-out Marxist to know that support for fascist regimes or crossing a picket line is incompatible with the claim to be left-wing. Here’s one for the SWP comrades. During the last Tube strike, the reformist politician Livingstone called for scabbing while the reformist politician John McDonnell went down to the picket lines. How do you explain that?
