It’s a knotty problem. You’ve got your vanguard cadre organisation and you’re up for a bit of revolutionary action because you know it’s right and necessary. The only trouble is that the working masses don’t share your enthusiasm. What’s a fighting Marxist party supposed to do?
Che Guevara went off to Bolivia and look at what happened to him. The Red Army Faction thought they could shake the German proletariat from its Social Democratic torpor. That ended in tears too.
Yesterday’s stunt, to use one of the kinder possible descriptions, by “some 200 SWP members and supporters” was more farce than tragedy.
In a way you can understand why they did it. They been stuck in a hall at the wholly independent Right To Work conference for hours on the hottest day of the year so far. Speaker after speaker after speaker had fulminated against the injustices of capitalism. People, they may have been told, are angry. A mood of resistance is building. Oh and that dreadful Willie Walsh, British Airways union busting chief executive is in negotiations with Unite’s leaders just a short walk away.
Seized with righteous anger and maybe chanting “Willie, Willie, Willie – out, out, out” they re-enacted the storming of the Winter Palace. Though in this low budget version the masses weren’t there.
With each month that passes the British left sets as new standard for embarrassing, counter-productive behaviour. Years of setting up phony “campaigns” controlled by a single group; electoral “alliances” in which no one talks to each other and now a small group of activists and political full timers decide that it’s they rather than Unite members who have the right to tell Tony Woodley what to do. Or let Willie Walsh know how dreadful he is, or something.
This is a low water mark.
Overzealous use has given public self-criticism a bad name but there is a place for it. It does not have to involve people sitting in the streets with placards around their necks saying “I am guilty of anarchist situationist deviations” but surely when the pictures are viewed in the bright morning sunshine someone should put their hands up and say “maybe that was a wrong call”.
Who would now fancy being a member of the SWP trying to do serious work in Unite? No matter how well intentioned yesterday’s protest was it was as clear an example of a propaganda group substituting itself for the working class as you’ll ever see endlessly looped on the news channels.
Pete Townshend’s warning of the dangers of this sort of thing is below and Dave has a good piece here.
Liam redux 
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