[g8-sheffield] [FSE-ESF] Re: Why SWP undermined social forums?

[Jon Cloke]

Dan,

Your frustration is understandable, but you have to understand that what you 
classify as stupidity by the SWP is actually something rather more sinister. 
When the Rees/Callinicos clone addresses the multiplicity of social 
movements that have arisen since Seattle and 1999, it says that the SWP has 
identified itself with these struggles and joined in with them; what it 
should actually say, as with StW and GR, is that what the SWP is good at is 
identifying new movements early on and then rapidly organizing a hegemonic 
leadership body dominated by the SWP, which is interested not in joining in 
with new movements, but in taking them over and co-opting their aspirations 
and frustrations as part of their messianic self-belief system - a good 
recent example of this is the No2ID movement, another SWP stooge.

The problem for the SWP in all of this is two-fold. Firstly, horizontalists, 
experienced political activists and other more open folk who believe in more 
democratic, participatory organizations and methods can see this coming a 
mile off and refuse to accept the bullshit, understanding the need for such 
campaigns and joining in to the extent that they can without accepting the 
dictatorship of the cupula of SWP comandantes - the 
Rees/Callinicos/German/Nineham entity. As such groups continuallly point out 
the reality of SWP autocracy, the SWP is unable to adopt the democratic 
colouration to which it has pretensions (in spite of the reality of its' 
actions) and so lashes out savagely at anybody who dares to cast aspersions 
on the semi-divine utterances of the pantheon of SWP holies.

Secondly, despite what the white male middle-class elite of the SWP thinks, 
people aren't stupid. Even where the SWP is temporarily able to take over 
leadership of new, broad-based movements which are born of a genuinely 
popular fury and frustration, the honeymoon is short. As with StW and GR, 
political newbies who may have become active for the first time as a result 
of various events and actions start looking around and demanding a voice in 
their own movement, understanding that it's no good to complain about the 
way the system is run if you haven't got a better way of running it. At 
which point they're told to shut up, stop complaining and sell some more 
copies of the Stepford Worker.

At which point they do indeed shut up. And leave.

It is one of the great ironies of the Social Forum movement, that the most 
powerful and well-organized of its' member organizations here in the UK is 
itself a living reminder of the only good thing about Tony Blair - that he 
isn't John Rees/Alex Callinicos/Chris Nineham. Because if he was, and they'd 
been in power in the UK since 1997 you and I, Dan, and most of the other 
horizontals would be in a prison or a gulag by now. The SWP is itself that 
thing of which it pretends to be the cure.

Jon Cloke (ATTAC UK)



From: Dan <dan at aktivix.org>
To: SF UK <uksocialforum at lists.riseup.net>, SSF <ssf at lists.aktivix.org>,     
    G8 Sheffield <g8-sheffield at lists.aktivix.org>
Subject: Why SWP undermined social forums?
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 15:34:34 +0100

Hey up,

Just got forwarded this little snippet from the Conference proceedings of 
2004 SWP annual conference. As usual, I really can't quite believe anyone 
would be so stupid. Sectarian? Oh yeah - we're sectarian if we don't do what 
the SWP thinks is right - I forget. Bloody hell - I try to get over it and 
just chill out, then I read something like this! AAAUGH!

“Because of the presence revolutionary socialists in the leadership of the 
Stop the War Coalition, the anti-war movement has come to occupy the radical 
space occupied in France by ATTAC or in Italy by the social forums and, 
later, the anti-war movement.

"This is why attempts by the sectarian left to supplant the Stop the War 
Coalition by social forums have failed and deserve to fail. Such attempts, 
portrayed as a programmatic shift to left (because social forums raise 
issues of economic exploitation as well as war), would in practice be a move 
to the right because they undermine the attempt to break the Blair 
government over the issue on which it is most vulnerable.”

http://www.swp.org.uk/resources/Conference2004.pdf

Dan


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