“Kid, there will be a revolution in the United States before you are pushing up daisies”.

Back when I was a baby Trotskyist, Belfast used to get fairly frequent visits from the more intrepid type of revolutionary tourist. That was how I met my first ever real life vegetarian. On one occasion I was given the job of showing the sights of the Whiterock and Turf Lodge to a Belgian chap. True, you have quite a good view of the city and there’s the mountain, but other than that the tour consisted of “this is where the Brits shot eleven civilians; this is where the Provies shot a Brit.”  

After the English, Americans were the largest group, and the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was always sending people over. They were motivated by a genuine internationalism but they were also behaving a bit like Mormon missionaries in an ideological fight. Anyone with an interest in these matters can take this article as a jumping off point. It roughly boiled down to whether you thought the Sandinistas, Provies and Cubans are infallible. They also wanted everyone to get jobs where the most oppressed sections of the working class could be found, cleaning abattoirs and that type of thing. I impressed them by announcing that I had got a job repairing sewers.

The American SWP was in many ways a very impressive organisation. It had led major strikes in the 1930s, it provided many of Trotsky’s staff and bodyguards in Mexico, members had served on merchant ships delivering war materials to the Soviet Union, it was targeted by McCarthy and was very prominent in the movement against the Vietnam War. It also used to print and distribute materials for the Fourth International which arrived in Belfast every week. So, when one of them told me “Kid, there will be a revolution in the United States before you are pushing up daisies”, I took it at face value. The phrase stuck with me because it seemed odd to hear an American use it.

So, with the American election imminent I thought I’d have a look at what the US left is saying and visited their site. They always stand a presidential candidate. Now, I appreciate that there are significant material and ideological factors in the United States that can affect people’s ideas, but Jesus!!! These people have gone completely bonkers while retaining the same methods of argument, the same leaders, some of the same positions that they had decades ago.

They agree with Netanyau

Here’s what their head honcho has to say about climate change:

“Workers must not fall into accepting the common view — that is, the bourgeois view — that the environment … is a ‘scientific’ question, a ‘natural’ question, that somehow hovers above classes and outside the class struggle.. The working class must also reject all forms of fake science, exaggerations, catastrophism, and crankism.” By “fake science” he means the scientific explanation of climate change.

That really isn’t the worst of it.

They are 100 percent supportive of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Here is their own report of one of their public meetings.

“I have a message for you,” Netanyahu said in an appeal for support at the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 27. “Israel will win this battle. We’ll win this battle because we don’t have a choice.”

The Socialist Workers Party stands with the fight to defend the safety of a refuge for Jews, Prince said.”

If there is a mention of Palestinian deaths and US imperialism’s role in the slaughter, I can’t find it. All their arguments are the sort we hear from supporters of Israel about how it’s the only safe place in the world for Jews, people who don’t want Palestinians to be killed are antisemitic etc. Their handful of supporters in Britain have also taken the side of the Israelis.

The US left is even more marginal than that in Britain, so in a sense it’s not that important if a group makes some odd decisions or adopts a peculiar position. There may be some weird reason other than the material pressure of a cult functioning in the major imperialist power that explains the American SWP’s embrace of the IDF and Netanyahu racist supremacist state. It doesn’t seem to be doing them much good, but it is hard to think of a moral and political degeneration of this magnitude.

If there is to be a revolution in the United States before I’m pushing up daisies, those people will be on the wrong side.