Liam redux

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Fifth international for the fifth dimension

Boldness at decisive moments is an essential quality of revolutionary decision making. The world’s working class is therefore blessed that its leadership, the League for the Fifth International, has boldness in abundance. Workers’ Power in Britain has expelled more or less the majority of its trade union members, writers and experienced activists. These are the…

Liam
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Boldness at decisive moments is an essential quality of revolutionary decision making. The world’s working class is therefore blessed that its leadership, the League for the Fifth International, has boldness in abundance.

Workers’ Power in Britain has expelled more or less the majority of its trade union members, writers and experienced activists. These are the sensible one who saw that their leadership was on a mad sectarian spin that started with the launch of the LFI predicated on a pre-revolutionary situation opening up after Seattle.

I think I speak for most socialists in Britain when I observe that the last thing the British working class needs is another paper being sold at demonstrations. Situations like this also throw open the possibility of new fusions and regroupments.

As a footnote I brought Celia Hart along to their meeting on China. She declined my offers of trips to the British Museum and the National Gallery but was really keen to hear what Workers’ Power had to say on China. Having never encountered the International Bolshevik Tendency (James Connolly advised that your organisation’s name should not have more letters than you have members) I found myself tripping over them again on Tuesday night. One of them was doing that rather autistic thing of writing down VERBATIM what everyone was saying and who they were. I was described as Celia’s “minder”. Host or guide would have been less insulting to both of us. The discussion was very well informed and comradely, a fact that impressed Celia. However the conclusion that China’s economic expansion and the capitalist restoration was making inevitable a clash with the US was rather apocalyptic. I’m not saying it won’t happen. It may have started while I’ve been writing this but they are trying to educate their younger members in a spirit of “the big clash is just around the corner”

14 responses to “Fifth international for the fifth dimension”

  1. AN Avatar
    AN

    I would think the expelled comrades will be quite relieved really when they have time to reflect upon it.

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  2. Liam Mac Uaid Avatar
    Liam Mac Uaid

    Here’s hoping. It’s what they choose to do next that’s the interesting question.

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  3. AN Avatar
    AN

    join the Labour party is my guess.

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  4. Mark P Avatar
    Mark P

    It hardly makes much odds – less than three dozen punters around the world, most of them knocking on a bit, some of them inactive, all of them hardened sectarians.Having had a read through their statements I find it hard to agree with either camp. The Workers Power majority seem utterly deluded about the nature of the current situation, with hysterically optimistic perspectives. The former minority are a bit more realistic but within what is still a Spartoid framework. And they are sticking to the outdated nonsense about New Labour being a “bourgeois workers party” so beloved of religious minded sectarians.As far as the organisational stuff goes, it seems pretty clear that the minority were preparing for a split and hoping to wreck whatever was left behind. In those circumstances I don’t think the majority had much choice other than to give them the boot.

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  5. Liam Mac Uaid Avatar
    Liam Mac Uaid

    I disagree Mark. It’s true that WP in public have been increasingly demented in the last couple of years but there was a political fight inside the organisation against the leadership line.The comrades who have been expelled are most of those with serious records of class struggle and leadership. I know several of them and have found them to be critical, independent thinkers who know how to function in mass organisations. They may try to establish Continuity Workers Power or something similar but I hope not.Although their numbers are small they have a lot to contribute both in terms of activity and theoretical discussion.

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  6. AN Avatar
    AN

    Yeah – I would tend to agree with Liam here.Workers Power have historically had a few things going for them:i) since 1975 they have sytematicaly sought to think things through for themselves, often with some sophistication. ii) they have experience of working in a disciplined and accountable way within mass organisationsiii) they have developed a culture of being quite personable(their paper however is truly dreadful)So “hardened sectarians” is a bit wide of the mark.It has therefore been seemingly inexplicable why in the last few years they have lurched into bizarre catastrophism, and this absurd conceit of a fifth international. Some of their odd behaviour can be explained by the fact they have had a long running and seemingly debilitating faction fight.perhaps what Liam is alluding too is that a very sensible option for these more experienced comrades would be to develop a relationship with the USFI?

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  7. Mark P Avatar
    Mark P

    I would be astonished if the expelled Workers Power people (now calling themselves Permanent Revolution) were interested in the USFI. Workers Power are basically Spartoids. The USFI from their perspective (and on this at least I would tend to agree with them) have been seen as the “softest” of Trotskyist tendencies.And I think that both of you are missing the point that you can be personable and even theoretically original (not that I think Workers Power have ever been the latter) while still being hardened sectarians. These are the people who build Workers Power into a “fighting propaganda group” obsessed with combat with other left organisations. The fact that they disagreed with WPs recent perspectives doesn’t mean that they have rejected their decades long sectarian approach.The IBT for instance are extremely personable and put a great deal of emphasis on theoretical thought. They are also barking mad sectarian loons.

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  8. twp Avatar
    twp

    Hi Mark,I’d have to say that when I met my partner (one of the expelled) a few years back, I was very open minded about WP and knew next to nothing about them as an organisation having come from the states. I was opposed to the whole 5th International idea and a number of their political points. However, what I did notice is that there were a core of dedicated activists within the group who were fighting against what they say as an increasingly mad trajectory. Having met many of their members and gone to a number of meetings I can honestly say that the most thoughtful, open and political individuals are the ones who have been booted out. I am willing to give them some time to see what they do in the wake of the expulsions. Given their past credentials as individual activists, and also given that they were in a democratic centralist organisation and abided by that, I think calling them “hardened sectarians” is hardly useful. In fact if you read some of their older stuff in the old publication “permanent revolultion” it isn’t half bad. Let’s give these comrades a chance to get on their feet before knocking them down.

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  9. AN Avatar
    AN

    twp is right.It is an opportunity for the comrades to take stock look, around them and maybe do something a bit different.For example both the Higgins and Thornett goups eveloved to being quite different from the IS and SLL/WRP quite quickly after their expulsions.more recently the Scottish militant comrades or the Labor Party of Pakistan have clearly benefitted from no longer being in the CWI, and have moved on. Even Socialist Appeal – who on paper were the more orthodox part of the CWI- have moved on since the explusion and seem more open and intereting.

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  10. Mark P Avatar
    Mark P

    If descending into reformism and nationalism, dissolving and then turning into a feuding mess as the ISM have done is your idea of benefiting “an”, then we have very different ideas of what’s beneficial. Much the same can be said of becoming a glorified NGO like the LPP. Or a tiny ageing sect of Labour Party loyalists endlessly repeating the mantras of an earlier period like the astonishingly tedious Socialist Appeal. For that matter the Higgins group fell apart with remarkable rapidity, leaving practically nothing behid it. The only organisation you mention which could be at all said to have improved from the experience of a split is the Thornett group. And that’s true more because the WRP was such a madhouse than because Thornett’s odyssey through the WSL, ICL and ISG has anything much to recommend it. From Healy’s sidekick to cleaning John Rees’ shoes isn’t a journey I’d care to undertake.The Workers Power split consists of most of the people who were central to the organisation when it carved out its sub-Spartacist place on the map of the British left. They are already talking about how they stand on the historical programme of Workers Power. Anyone hoping for some big improvement there is wasting their time as far as I can predict.

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  11. Liam Mac Uaid Avatar
    Liam Mac Uaid

    Mark is there an active socialist outside your own organisation you have a charitable word for? Not everyone outside the SP is a clueless, sectarian buffoon.SR supporters in Respect have frequently and consistently opposed various things that the SWP and GG have done inside Respect. We have equally consistently supported them when we agree with them.I have developed a real admiration for the Socialist Appeal comrades I’ve encountered. Their solidarity work on Venezuela has been outstanding and exemplary. The entire far left can learn a lot from what they have done and their methods in building HOV. It’s utterly different from the party building sham united fronts that other groups have created.The WP expellees have led and fought. One consequence of a split is that people are obliged to re-think their former ideas. This may happen. I find it more stimulating to enagage with people who are open-minded and trying to do more than build an hermetically sealed organisation. Even if they sometimes get it wrong. Organisational infallibity is not a helpful concept.

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  12. Mark P Avatar
    Mark P

    I’ve plenty of positive assessments to make of many people in the socialist movement, Liam, in various organisations and none. My views on the politics of most of the sects which litter the left however tend to be rather less charitable. Anyone who has been exposed for any length of time to their capacity for combining different amounts of sectarianism, stupidity, opportunism, lack of principle and in many cases sheer madness would I think have to have the disposition of St Francis of Assisi to take a more charitable view.That doesn’t mean that I’m hostile to the individual members of even the most wretched grouping. Far from it. But it does mean that I’m sceptical of optimistic assessments of the direction this or that group is travelling in or of the possibility of this or that setback leading a group to rethink its ideas usefully. I’m interested in (perhaps appalled fascination would be a better description) the 57 varieties of small left grouping but I don’t look to that milieu for solutions.On your defence of Socialist Appeal, I am I must say a little amused. In my limited contact with them I found them to be the quite the most hidebound and pompous left grouping I’ve ever encountered. Their politics are like a badly drawn caricature of those of Militant in about 1970, leaving out most of the strong points of those ideas while exaggerating all of the weaknesses. One real point of departure for them however has been their uncritical cheerleading for Chavez, which goes far beyond a (correct and necessary) defence of Venezuela against imperialism right into essentially abandoning a need for independent working class political organisation.But this goes well beyond the point of this discussion. You seem to expect something interesting from these refugees from Workers Power. I expect to be served up much the same sectarian dish. Time will show who is right.

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  13. Simon B Avatar
    Simon B

    Mark,You’re very vitriolic in your description of Workers Power and the IBT as sects.(Which they are)I do think you have a bit of a nerve to say this though:”My views on the politics of most of the sects which litter the left however tend to be rather less charitable. Anyone who has been exposed for any length of time to their capacity for combining different amounts of sectarianism, stupidity, opportunism, lack of principle and in many cases sheer madness would I think have to have the disposition of St Francis of Assisi to take a more charitable view.”In their sellout of the public sector pensions dispute in the PCS, the Socialist Party have displayed huge dollops of “sectarianism, stupidity, opportunism, lack of principle”.I won’t include “sheer madness” as it made perfect sense from the organisational point of view of the Socialist Party.

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  14. Mark P Avatar
    Mark P

    Simon’s contribution to the discussion serves only to illustrate my point. What purpose is there in treating seriously or respectfully sects which are incapable of imagining there being legitimate differences on tactics between socialists? It would be one thing if AWL members (I gather from following the links that the AWL is Simon’s sect of choice) were to put forward a serious alternate course for the PCS to that taken by its Left Unity leadership. Then we could have a reasonable discussion – one in which I, like the overwhelming majority of delegates to PCS conference, would take the view that the deal was the best that could be achieved in the circumstances. Simon and his associates could argue for what I would regard as a policy of doomed posturing. Instead Simon’s bunch prefer to denounce a “sell out”. There are no honest disagreements, merely chances to expose betrayals.I do feel obligated to congratulate Simon on one thing though. It’s some time since I’ve seen an AWL member manage an article or discussion contribution without starting to foam at the mouth about the evils of George Galloway. Commendable restraint, from the point of view of those of us who don’t like being sprayed with spittle.But getting back to my earlier point, the AWL are a perfect example of the kind of sect I was talking about. Their group has perhaps 100 members, most of whom are intelligent articulate people, with a sincere subjective desire to make the world a better place. Yet in practice they have spent most of their time wageing an endless, futile, mildly demented war against whatever larger left group they find themselves rubbing up against in a particular context. In the Labour Party that meant Militant, more recently that means the SWP. Year after year of increasingly hysterical denunciations, calls for the “real left” to seperate themselves from the bogeyman du jour. Everything becomes secondary to the need to mark out some space against the enemy group. Sectarianism and stupidity in its purest form.One of their odder quirks I suppose has been their gradual jettisoning of their original policies in favour of an entirely new set of, often diametrically opposed, ideas. This has the primary advantage of allowing the group to find some unoccupied niches in the left ecosystem – Shachtmanism, borderline pro-imperialism etc. Best of all it allows the AWL to denounce the SWP as “anti-semitic” for holding substantically similar views to those once held by the AWL itself!

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