Re: Whatever happened to the SWP(s)?

["Alan Bradley" <alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Richard Fidler"
> But there were other issues, too, as I recall that divided the Americans
> and Australians in the early 1980s. One was the latters' rather crude and
> poorly argued support of Croatian nationalism, based apparently on a
> seemingly opportunist orientation toward a group of Croatian exiles they
> were in contact with down under. This debate - and it was publicly
> debated in those days - continues to inform the DSP positions on
> nationalism, discussed recently on this list. (I won't at this point get
> into the contradictions of supporting Croatian nationalism against the
> Yugoslav state while opposing Georgian nationalism against Soviet
> Russia.)

I think that this "debate" was mostly a pissing contest between the
Australian SWP and the (old) CPA.  Its actual political meaning was fairly
minor.  I agree that our arguments aren't particularly convincing, although
that is partly due to the other side being equally crude.

> Still another point of contention, if memory serves, involved the
> attitude to the Cubans and building a "new international". Here, too, the
> Aussies ran further with Barnes' ball than the U.S. group was then
> willing to go.  The SWP-DSP began maneuvering with the Australian CP and
> environmentalist currents, for example, and broke openly with the Fourth
> International. A few more years were to pass before the U.S. SWP was to
> publicly state its opposition to the FI,and for Barnes to meet with Kim
> Il Sung.

The truth is that the SWP wasn't willing to run with their own ball.  They
turned inwards, not outwards.  As far as I am aware, they made no attempt
at "maneuvering with the ... CP and environmentalist currents", for
example.  We did.  That is, we did everything we could to break out of our
semi-sectarian existence - and failed.  But there is a kind of success in
the fact of the attempt.

Our split with the SWP made a major contribution to us becoming
disenchanted with the FI.  While we stayed around in the FI for a while
after breaking with the Barnesites, we had realised that there was
basically something fairly wrong with our politics, and that we needed to
get out more.

> Thus, while the Percy grouping was indeed capable of taking its own
> initiatives, in most cases - at least initially - it was on the basis of
> positions they had learned from the U.S. SWP: for example, a tendency to
> welcome armed foreign intervention by "workers states"; to embrace
> nationalists who employed left-sounding rhetoric; or to see traditional
> Trotskyist shibboleths such as Permanent Revolution as obstacles to
> aligning with forces outside the FI.

Well, yes.  The DSP's positions still have a lot in common with the SWP's
positions _on paper_.  The difference is between a living animal and a
stuffed one.

> Jim Percy was a very capable and talented individual, but I think that in
> some ways the force of his personality overwhelmed comrades with fewer
> verbal skills or less self-confidence - much like the way in which Jack
> Barnes has dominated the SWP leadership. If you think about it, virtually
> every Trotskyist group has experienced a similar pattern, tending over
> time to become the reflection of a single man's thought (Pablo, Healy,
> Lambert, Moreno, Posadas, etc.).  Even lesser groups tended to suffer the
> same phenomenon, as new recruits inevitably imbibed the influence, and
> mannerisms, of the dominant individual in the initial small nucleus. ...
> The Australian SWP (now DSP) was more successful than most of the smaller
> FI groups in building a collective leadership, probably because the
> initial nucleus radicalized more or less simultaneously and developed
> for a while independently of any international affiliation. ...
> But I also remember a discussion with Jim Percy at one of the SWP's
> Oberlin gatherings in the late 1970s in which he argued at length with me
> that a democratic centralist organization had to have a "primus inter
> pares" (not his words) who would represent and speak for the organization
> as a whole, particularly in international forums such as the FI. Needless
> to say, he saw himself playing that role for the Australian SWP. His
> concept of leadership was clearly modeled on the SWP template as
> developed under Barnes.

I'll accept some of this.  There was a very clear "Jim-shaped hole" in the
DSP leadership after his death.  We had to get used to not having a
charismatic leader, but we also knew that we didn't want one.

One of the interesting things about the Cannon tradition is that it pays a
lot of attention to the formation and maintainence of leaderships.  This
means it can sometimes it can be used to justify many kinds of sectarian
shit, but it also means that it is very aware of phenomena like cultism,
cliquism, and so on.

What I am saying is that Jim knew very well that cultist leadership was
endemic in the Trotskyist tradition, and tried to avoid it.  I'm not quite
sure how I am going to prove that, and maybe the fact that I typed it at
all shows that I am a Jim-cultist myself (!), but it is the case that the
DSP leaderships of which Jim was generally at the head have systematically
attempted to build collective leaderships, and to educate our members on
the importance of doing so.

Regardless of all that:  Jim has been dead for 8 years, and no guru has
emerged to replace him.  Our current leadership is genuinely collective,
and if anything, is perhaps a little weak on the side of "inspiration" and
finding new ways forward in tricky situations.

There are many vices built into the Trotskyist/Cannonist/Leninist/whatever
models of organisation, but I think that they can be overcome by a
sufficiently astute Party and its leadership.

> But, of course, an "International" current founded on such concepts can
> tolerate only one dominant leader. This is, at least in part, the
> explanation for the DSP's split from the SWP, and the latter's eventual
> split from the FI.

This is why we have rejected this model.  That said, maybe we are
replicating it with our current international relationships.   But if we
are, it is in spite of our opposition to such a development, and therefore
it is hopefully not too likely to go too far.

Alan Bradley
alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx