Lindsey German resigns from the SWP

Lindsey German

As many of you know the British SWP is being roiled by a series of resignations, including some very high-profile members like Lindsey German, a 37 year (!) veteran and leader of their antiwar work. German, John Rees and a number of other resignees were supporters of the Left Platform faction that fought for their perspective during the 2008 SWP convention. I have written about the fight in a series of posts here:

The fight in the SWP, part one (Neil Davidson)

The fight in the SWP, part two (John Rees)

The fight in the SWP, part three (Chris Harman)

The fight in the SWP, part four (Alex Callinicos)

The fight in the SWP, part five (Lindsey German)

The fight in the SWP, conclusion (What kind of party we need)

My commentary on the faction fight was not so much about the specific differences since I avoid the “advice from Coyoacan” stance so familiar to organized Trotskyism, not that anybody would listen to my advice to begin with.

I am far more interested in how the split (that is what it amounts to) reflects on the ongoing problem of building “Leninist parties” and more specifically that of “democratic centralism”. Lindsey German’s resignation was a classic example of imposing “party discipline” on a member. While there are conflicting versions of what took place, I tend to agree with Richard Seymour that—strictly speaking—the SWP was in its rights to ask her not to attend a meeting of the Stop the War Committee, a coalition that she has led for about a decade: “Lindsey, as a former central committee member, would be well used to the expectation that members accept the decisions of its elected bodies.” So rather than accepting the instructions of the “elected bodies”, she resigned and went ahead to attend the meeting.

During the great purge of the American SWP in the early 1980s, one leading member named Diane Feeley was expelled for participating in planning meetings for an International Women’s Day action to which she had been assigned by the party. Unlike the British SWP, the split was characterized by expulsions rather than resignations. The Jack Barnes leadership had put so many constraints on the minority faction, including their duties in the mass movement, that it was almost inevitable that some would “break discipline” and get the boot. When you create an obstacle course, there will inevitably be accidents.

The Lindsey German/John Rees faction has tried to characterize the split in terms of united front advocates versus a stodgy, inward-looking retreat from the mass movement. In an open letter signed by 50 other resignees, we get this take on things:

For many years, the SWP has played a dynamic role in the development of mass movements in Britain. The party made an important contribution to the great anti-capitalist mobilisations at the start of the decade, it threw itself into the Stop the War Coalition and was central to the Respect electoral project. These achievements were dependent on an open, non-sectarian approach to joint work with others on the left and a systematic commitment to building the movements.

The SWP leadership has abandoned this approach. The task of building broad, political opposition in every area to the disasters created by neoliberalism and war is now subordinated to short term party building. We believe this undermines both the movements and the prospects of building an open and effective revolutionary current in the British working class.

The most glaring mistake has been the SWP’s refusal to engage with others in shaping a broad left response to the recession, clearly the most pressing task facing the left. Even valuable recent initiatives, like the Right to Work campaign, have minimised the involvement of Labour MPs, union leaders and others who have the capability to mobilise beyond the traditional left.

With all due respect to these comrades, I don’t think it is accurate to describe the SWP’s approach as non-sectarian for in the final analysis the SWP is and was a sect. It might have been a very successful sect, but nonetheless that is what it was. Lindsey German was a believer in the “united front” approach in politics, which led to the disaster in Respect and an ensuing crisis at the heart of the current dispute.

For those trained in Leninist and, more specifically, Trotskyist politics the united front is an arrangement in which the “vanguard” unites with reformists around a single issue like withdrawal from Iraq or opposing a fascist demonstration. While it is capable of producing beneficial results, as was the case in the American antiwar movement, it is also a very good way to antagonize other radicals who are not exactly “reformists” according to the formula. It means that in mass movement meetings, groups like the SWP come with their own agenda worked out in advance and can never be persuaded by argument to adopt proposals that differ from their party leadership. This notion of “democratic centralism” has little to do with the operation of the Bolshevik Party which carried out its debates in public. If the British SWP functioned like the Bolsheviks, you would see open debates between Lindsey German and the party leaders over antiwar perspectives in the party press.

Of course, the SWP would never permit this kind of transparency since it would be a confession that it was some kind of petite-bourgeois “talk shop” or some such thing. In reality, deep differences in a group like the SWP will always lead to splits because the internal regime is so brittle. If Britain ever gave rise to a genuine vanguard, the differences would be much more profound than they are in this little dust-up over whether Lindsey should have gone to that meeting or not.

For example, if you read John Reed’s “Ten Days that Shook the World”, you will learn that Bolshevik leaders spoke out against closing the counter-revolutionary press in 1917, after the seizure of power. They didn’t do this in closed central committee meetings but in front of the masses. Reed referred to divided votes among party members over key questions such as whether to expropriate the bourgeois press. At a November 17th 1917 mass meeting, Lenin called for the confiscation of the capitalist newspapers. Reed quotes him: “If the first revolution had the right to suppress the Monarchist papers, then we have the right to suppress the bourgeois press.” He continued: “Then the vote. The resolution of Larin and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries was defeated by 31 to 22; the Lenin motion was carried by 34 to 24. Among the minority were the Bolsheviki Riazanov and Lozovsky, who declared that it was impossible for them to vote against any restriction on the freedom of the press.”

Given the enormous appetite that our latter-day avatars of V.I. Lenin have for strict control over the membership, both ideologically and in terms of activity, this scenario seems as plausible as Richard Seymour taking a leave of absence from the SWP in order to spend a year in Cuba learning about the revolution. It is just not in their culture.

The SWP, like every other sect that originated out of Leon Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, has a small proprietor’s attitude toward politics. Its analysis is a kind of intellectual property that differentiates it from the rest of the left, in this case being how the USSR became “state capitalist”. It combines this intellectual property with hard work in the mass movement, even if it antagonizes most of the movement through its propensity to carry out fait accompli. The net result is to foster the growth of what they call a cadre that has many of the characteristics of a priesthood. Things go swimmingly well as long as there is wind in the sails of the group, but the first time the winds die down the group goes into a crisis and faces schisms of one sort or another. I saw this happen in the American SWP and am sad to see it happening to their British namesake. I doubt that the British SWP will ever assume the Hindenberg Dirigible disaster proportions of the American sect, but I also doubt that they will ever become much larger than they are now. Britain, and every other country in the world, needs a true vanguard party and the first step in making that happen is to dump the “Leninist” baggage that keeps such groups so tiny and prone to splits.