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Post by dodger on Jul 30, 2013 11:48:43 GMT
An account of the early years of the SWP, 24 July 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: More Years for the Locust: the Origins of the SWP (Paperback)
The late Jim Higgins wrote this account of the early years of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was at one time Chairman of the International Socialists, the SWP's forerunner, and was also its National Secretary for a time.
The SWP was and is led by full-time bureaucrats, who live off other members' dues. Its founder Tony Cliff never worked for a living, yet thought himself eminently qualified to tell the British working class what to think and do. Cliff's permanent dogmas of a corrupt trade union bureaucracy and a revolutionary rank-and-file have tended to split and weaken our unions.
Higgins wrote of Reg Birch `founding one of the short lived Maoist groups'. This is either ignorant or a deliberate lie. The Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist is alive and growing, unlike the successive Trotskyist groups - the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Revolutionary Socialist Group, and the International Socialists - which have all, thankfully, perished, and the SWP, which is currently dying messily.
The SWP wrongly judged, "In itself the Common Market cannot tilt the class balance against us ..." It demanded "rejection of all talk of `national independence'." Like the European Commission, it slanders opposition to the EEC as `chauvinist and Little Englander ... positively racist'.
Higgins notes the `idiocies of sect politics' and the SWP's abuse of the `one shot noisy campaign'. He notes Cliff's overweening ambition, permanent factionalism, sordid manoeuvring, hypocrisy and dishonesty. Cliff was the problem, as Martin Smith is now: this `party' cannot even succeed in expelling people who discredit and wreck it.
Trotskyism always tells workers `you can't do it on your own', which boils down to `you can't do it', so no Trotskyist group has ever won power anywhere, nor ever will. Higgins admits the SWP's `long grinding years of failure'. These groups take in too many students and young workers and burn them out, wasting their lives.www.amazon.co.uk/More-Years-Locust-Origins-SWP/dp/0956817637/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
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Post by dodger on Aug 1, 2013 18:37:33 GMT
Woeful stuff, 21 Feb 2012
This Will Podmore review is from: Trotskyism After Trotsky: The Origin of the International Socialists: (Paperback)
"Trotsky had predicted that after the war the Soviet Union would be wracked by political instability, that the West would be plunged into severe economic crisis and that national liberation in the Third World would only be brought to victory by the working class."
So Trotsky was wrong about socialism, wrong about capitalism, and wrong about colonialism.
Then along came Cliff, to save the day - by being wrong, in a different way, about capitalism, socialism and colonialism.
So Cliff (or rather, Mike Kidron) put forward the notion that a permanent arms economy would - presumably permanently - save capitalism. Very rrrrrrevolutionary.
Then Cliff put forward the dogma that Russia was state capitalist, a theory first proposed by the renegade from socialism Karl Kautsky, and always opposed by - Trotsky! Capitalist classes use the state to grow the economy, but when a working class used its state power to grow a socialist economy, Cliff denounced it as capitalist.
And finally Cliff called national liberation movements examples of `Deflected Permanent Revolution' - so, not examples of Trotsky's permanent revolution notion - very helpful.
So after events had completely demolished Trotsky's notions, Cliff `reinterpreted reality' by falsifying it, in order to claim some tenuous link with the discredited Trotsky.
The blurb says, `socialists who looked to the ideas of Trotsky were forced either to abandon socialism or to reinterpret the reality they faced'. But Cliff did both.
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Post by dodger on Aug 8, 2013 12:08:06 GMT
The book usefully reveals Trotskyism's pro-fascist stance
A people’s history of the Second World War: resistance versus empire, by Donny Gluckstein, paperback, 269 pages, ISBN 978-0-7453-2802-7, Pluto Press, 2012, £19.99.
www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2HV3D3YQ1RBCF/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0745328024#wasThisHelpful
Donny Gluckstein, son of Tony Cliff founder of the so-called Socialist Workers Party, is a lecturer at Stevenson College, Edinburgh.
In this book, he claims that the Second World War was not one war but two. One was an inter-imperialist war between equally exploitative powers; the other was a people’s war against all these powers.
He asserts, not argues, that it is ‘preposterous’ to believe that the government of ‘Russia’ (he can never call it by its proper title, the Soviet Union) opposed the principle of world conquest. Abuse takes the place of evidence.
Throughout the book, he proves the point that Trotskyism’s role is largely to lie about the Soviet Union He quotes the Tory peer Lord Hugh Thomas in support of his lies about Soviet foreign policy towards Spain in the 1930s. He lies that Soviet soldiers were ‘encouraged into intense hatred of enemy civilians’. He lies that Bose’s ‘Indian National Army’ fought the Axis.
So his ‘history’ is so misleading as to be useless. Gluckstein embraces his daddy’s dogmas of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘the Stalinist counter-revolution’. Dogma corrupts, but permanent dogma corrupts permanently.
Another fatal flaw in Trotskyism is its opposition to nationalism. Instead of working with people’s legitimate national feelings in the class struggle, Trotskyists abuse them.
In the Second World War, the Allies did whatever was necessary to defeat fascism. They rightly focused all their efforts on this one necessary, gigantic task. They united all those that could be united against the main enemy.
By contrast, Trotskyists assisted the Axis by smearing the Allies as just as bad as the Axis powers. This book is just another revelation of Trotskyists' treason and defeatism.
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Dogma corrupts, but permanent dogma corrupts permanently. Equally permanent contortion leads on to incommodious positions. Excruciating.
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Post by dodger on Aug 10, 2013 10:33:33 GMT
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Post by dodger on Aug 10, 2013 13:52:29 GMT
"STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH" It's from La Vérité, June 22, 1944 and it's called : "Let's fraternize, reaching out to German soldiers"
June 22nd, 1st day of Operation Bagration. Two weeks after D-Day Landings--this:
 "Of course, the revolutionary class, even with the organized workers militas, would be absolutely powerless if it was to confront Hitler's and Eisenhower's gigantic armed forces. But Hitler's and Eisenhower's armies are made of workers who, as we do, want bread, liberty and peace. The workers who drive the tanks and the aircraft mechanics have the same interests as us.
Whoever speaks now to German soldiers know that they are ready to break with the bourgeoisie and to turn back their weapons against the Nazis, provided that they feel that the French workers are their allies against their common enemy: the bourgeoisie of all countries.
Workers won't fall into the trap of the international bourgeoisie who wants to set them against each other, with chauvinism. They will shoot the S.S. (who wear the eagle on the sleeve and the S.S. badge). They will shoot Gestapo agents and reactionary officers, but they will offer to the soldiers of all countries and above all to German soldiers a friendly hand. They will help them to form their own soldiers committees, here is the only true path to peace."
...........................................................
French Trotskyists--fools or knaves? You decide. Not easily shocked, but that level of class treachery is hard to rationalize.
All of the French trotskyists organizations collaborated with the enemy during the war or condemned the Resistance. The main part of the trotskyist movement in France was divided between the International Workers Party with Molinier, and Naville's Independant Workers Party. Molinier entered the fascist National Popular Congression (RNP - Rassemblement national populaire) of Marcel Déat. Many trotskyists followed his path : Roger Foirier, André Gailledrat, Maurice Déglise, Jean Desnots. Some of them even collaborated directly with Petain's governement such as Paul Cognet. In 1940, a new trotskyist group split from the International Workers Party : the National Revolutionary Movement. It became clearly a fascist organization. They declared : "The state and the nation must defend themselves (...) against every attempts of occult domination, wether from Judaism, masonry or Jesuitism".
Most of the trotskyist groups unified in 1943 in the Internationalist Communist Party (Parti communiste internationaliste - PCI). When the allies landed on 22 June 1944, the PCI's newspaper, The Only Path (La seule voie), declared : "They are equals" (anglo-americans and nazis). It means that from the beginning of the war until the end, the French trotskyists analyzed the war as a simple war between imperialist powers. As they thought that nazi soldiers were "workers in a uniform", they promoted "revolutionary defeatism". The PCI declared with other trotskyist parties : "Today it is you, the German proletariat, the proletariat of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who above all need the solidarity of the proletariat of other countries."
Of course, they didn't forgot that the USSR existed. The fact is that according to true communists, the USSR made this war very different. But the trotskyists thought that USSR wasn't different frome other capitalist states, that they were all the same (even Nazi Germany !), and thus, it was indeed an imperialist war. Molinier was the worst. He stated that USSR was state capitalism, "which assimilated it with Nazi Germany, also characterized as state capitalist" (trotskyist source) books.google.fr/books?id=_eUtQjseKaIC&pg=PA368&lpg=PA368&dq=French+trotskyists+collaboration+with+Germany+WWII&source=bl&ots=AeNQRX7JMI&sig=Gh-1JovZsmqaxk4cUkWA6EF_yGM&hl=fr&ei=VW5jTsrDF4abOqT13JQK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=falseYUCK !
source) www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol07/no01/german.htm The International Workers Party (POI) did the same and even edited special newspapers such as Arbeiter und Soldat. In 1939, Jean Rous (he would later become the leader of the fascist MNR) declared : "The party will not be put off the belief that the main enemy is in our own country by the possibility that mass revolutionary agitation in time of war may contribute to the military defeat of our country. Accepting this possibility does not mean encouraging or wanting victory for Hitler, but on the contrary will encourage the total defeat of Hitler and worldwide fascism." In fact, during the war, French trotskyists condemned any attempt to liberate the country inside a national movement. They declared that De Gaulle was "an enemy of the French workers", even though he was struggling against the main enemy : fascism and Pétain. www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=52753
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Post by dodger on Aug 24, 2013 8:55:28 GMT
Hagiography of a traitor to the revolution, 26 Aug 2004
This William Podmore review is from: The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1 921(Paperback)
From the start, Trotsky always thought that revolution in any one country could only succeed if it received the active support of revolutions in other countries. But similarly, these other revolutions would also need to receive help from others: the Russian revolution could not survive without a revolution in Germany, but neither could a German revolution survive without a Russian. This mutual dependence meant that no country could ever start a revolution: it would have to wait on the success of another.
So to provoke these indispensable other revolutions, Trotsky was quite prepared to invade other countries. For example, in 1919 he wrote, "A cavalry corps of 30-40,000 horsemen must be formed to invade India."
Similarly, at Brest-Litovsk in February 1918, Trotsky made the Soviet revolution's very survival depend on the putative German revolution, risking total defeat by the German army on the throw of a revolution in Germany. He said, "We declare we end the war but do not sign a peace. They will be unable to make an offensive against us. If they attack us, our position will be no worse than now ..." This phrase-mongering did not frighten the German generals, who saw only that Trotsky was refusing to sign the offered peace. They then attacked, as he said they could not do, and seized millions of square miles of Soviet territory, making the Soviet position far worse than before.
In the 1930s, the Opposition leagued with Hitler. Churchill wrote, "The German government was in touch with important Russian personalities through the Soviet embassy in Prague. The plot aimed at overthrowing Stalin and introducing into Russia a new pro-German regime. Soviet Russia carried out a merciless but doubtless useful purge of political and economic circles. The Soviet army was purged of pro-German elements." Goebels admitted, "Stalin got rid of all the opposition circles in the Red Army and thus succeeded in making sure there were no more defeatist groups in the Army."
The Opposition fought against the programmes of industrialisation and collectivisation that made possible all the Soviet Union's heroic achievements. For instance, in April 1930, Trotsky's Bulletin of the Opposition said, "Put a stop to 'mass collectivisation'. ... Put a stop to the hurdle race of industrialisation. ... Abandon the 'ideals' of self-contained economy. Draw up a new variant of a plan providing for the widest possible intercourse with the world market." In 1938, Trotsky called for the collective farms to be closed down, and for Soviet enterprises to be handed over to foreign powers.
He consistently called on the Soviet people to overthrow the Soviet government when Hitler attacked. He called for a 'revolutionary uprising', an 'insurrection' against the Soviet government, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. He wrote, "the impetus to the Soviet workers' revolutionary upsurge will probably be given by events outside the country." "The first social shock, external or internal, may throw the atomized Soviet Society into civil war."
He asked, "Can we expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the present regime." "The defeat of the Soviet Union is inevitable in case the new war shall not provoke a new revolution. ... If we theoretically admit war without revolution, then the defeat of the Soviet Union is inevitable."
He wrote, "It would be childish to think that the Stalin bureaucracy can be removed by means of a Party or Soviet Congress. Normal, constitutional means are no longer available for the removal of the ruling clique. ... They can be compelled to hand over power to the Proletarian vanguard only by FORCE."
"Inside the Party, Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the State. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination. Every oppositionist becomes ipso facto a terrorist."
Trotsky lied to the 'Dewey Commission' when he told them that that he had not been organising an underground in the Soviet Union.
The leader of Trotsky's Fourth International, Ernest Mandel, openly applauded Boris Yeltsin, the key figure in the counter-revolution that finally restored capitalism in the Soviet Union. He wrote, "The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps."
The Socialist Workers Party backed the US-organised and funded terrorists, which spawned bin Laden, against the people of Afghanistan. "Mujehadin victory will encourage the opponents of Russian rule everywhere in the USSR and Eastern Europe."
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Post by dodger on Aug 24, 2013 9:01:49 GMT
Hagiography of a deserter of the revolution, on the side of the bourgeoisie, 14 July 2011
This Will Podmore review is from:The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (Paperback)
This second volume of Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky proposed that Trotsky, not Lenin, inspired the Bolshevik revolution. (By the third volume, Lenin vanished altogether, as Deutscher ludicrously called Trotsky `the leader of October' and the `intellectual initiator of industrialization and planned economy'.)
On the notion that Trotsky upheld Lenin's thought, we should note that Lenin wrote, "uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world ...."
Trotsky denied Lenin's conclusion, writing, "it would be hopeless to think ... that, for example, a revolutionary Russia could hold out in the face of a conservative Europe." He then accused Lenin of `that very national narrow-mindedness which constitutes the essence of social-patriotism'.
Lenin riposted in 1918, "I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense."
Yet Trotsky repeated, "real progress of a socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the major European countries."
But Trotsky won few to his defeatist dogma. Deutscher admitted that "in Leningrad there were at the beginning of 1926, not more than about 30 Trotskyists." In 1926, the Trotskyists claimed that there were 4,000 Trotskyists in the whole of the Soviet Union, as against the 750,000 Party members.
Deutscher wrote of the 1924 Lenin enrolment of workers into the Party, "Among the mass of new entrants, the politically immature, the backward, the dull-minded and the docile, the climbers, and the nest-featherers, formed a considerable proportion." He gave no evidence for this assertion: it seems to be sheer class prejudice.
Again, he wrote, "the great majority of the party was a jelly-like mass; it consisted of meek and obedient members, without a mind and a will of their own." He called factory workers `the great credulous mass'. Deutscher plainly echoes his idol's contempt for the working class, his intellectual snobbery, arrogance and dogmatism.
But the truth broke through, just once, when Deutscher wrote that Trotsky was `Full of the sense of his superiority' and that "his mind remained closed. He lived as if in another world, wrapped up in himself and his ideas."
This whole biography is special pleading, as objective as a Jesuit's biography of a Pope or Christopher Hitchens' book on Orwell.
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Post by dodger on Aug 24, 2013 9:05:14 GMT
Hagiography of a traitor to the revolution, 14 July 2011
This William Podmore review is from: The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (Paperback)
Deutscher wrote of `the Trotsky legend' - which he promoted. Lenin vanished, as Deutscher ludicrously called Trotsky `the leader of October' and the `intellectual initiator of industrialization and planned economy'.
Trotsky said that Stalin was the grave-digger of the revolution, but there was no counter-revolution in the Soviet Union until 1991, when Boris Yeltsin restored capitalism there. On the notion that Trotsky made an original contribution to Marxism with his theory of `permanent revolution', we should note that Lenin wrote in 1905, "From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and just to the extent of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution."
The leader of Trotsky's Fourth International, Ernest Mandel, wrote accurately that Yeltsin "follows in Trotsky's footsteps." (Socialist Worker wrote absurdly that the counter-revolution brought "the workers of the USSR closer to the spirit of the socialist revolution of 1917, not further from it.")
Trotsky encouraged all sections of his sect to interfere in each other's affairs, so he wrote endless letters telling Belgian Trotskyists why the French Trotskyists were squabbling, and vice versa. Deutscher depicts the Trotskyists' squabbles, feuds and splits, all driven by ego, all mimicking in a minor key their master's monstrous ego. Deutscher notes Trotsky's `fiascos, fallacies, and miscalculations', especially, later, `his fiasco with the Fourth International'. (Incidentally, even Trotsky opposed the SWP's dogma of `state capitalism'. As Deutscher explained, "The concept of state capitalism was meaningless where no capitalists existed.")
In response to the German Communist Party's disastrous policy, Trotsky called on the Soviet Union to attack Germany, thus risking the Soviet Union's survival on war and also justifying Hitler's propaganda that Germany was being encircled by hostile powers.
In 1936, in `The revolution betrayed', Trotsky wrote, "If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism is incomparably stronger. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the régime which issued from the October Revolution."
So, without revolution in the West, the Soviet Union was doomed. But there was no revolution in the West, yet imperialism did not sweep away the Soviet régime. So Trotsky's forecast was wrong, as well as defeatist.
Trotsky said that Stalin was both progressive and reactionary in the Soviet Union, but always reactionary abroad. So, according to Trotsky, a workers' state was an agent of counter-revolution. Denying the Soviet Union's revolutionary nature led straight to absurdity.
Deutscher wrote, "It is probable that had there been no Teheran and Yalta compacts, western rather than eastern Europe would have become the theatre of revolution." So Deutscher thought that the Soviet Union should not have made these peace agreements, agreements that helped to stop the USA and Britain attacking the Soviet Union, in Churchill's `Operation Unthinkable'.
This whole biography is a travesty of history, as objective and accurate as Michael Gove's biography of `Michael Portillo, the future of the right'.
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 16:34:39 GMT
Counter-revolutionary attack on Leninism, 14 July 2009
This Will Podmore review is from: All Power to the Soviets: Vol. 2: Lenin 1914-1917 (Paperback)
Trotskyists like Cliff claim to be the only real, orthodox Leninists. They claim that all Marxists were for `international socialism', `international revolutions', until Stalin in 1924 suddenly adopted the `socialism in one country' approach. But on this key question, Trotskyists suppress what Lenin actually did and wrote.
In 1915, Lenin wrote, "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world." (The `United States of Europe Slogan', Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 232.)
In 1918, Lenin wrote, "I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense." (Speech delivered at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, 14th May 1918, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 9.)
These statements prove that Lenin, not Stalin, originated the idea that workers would have to build socialism in one country.
Cliff, and his acolytes, are examples of the 'sages' "who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries."
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 19:26:07 GMT
Hagiography of a counter-revolutionary, 15 Feb 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from:Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (Paperback)
Ian Birchall, a long-time Socialist Workers Party member, has written a revealing account of its founder and leader, Tony Cliff.
In 1936, Cliff did a year of paid work, after which he never did another day's paid work in his life. He was never a member of a trade union, but this did not stop him spending the rest of his life telling trade union members what to do, like a monk telling us how to conduct our family lives.
Birchall calls Cliff's notion that Russia was state capitalist his `major contribution to Marxist theory'. But it was neither new nor true. The renegade Karl Kautsky called Russia state capitalist in 1919. Capitalist classes use the state to grow the economy, but when a working class used its state power to grow a socialist economy, Cliff denounced it as capitalist.
Cliff's hatred of the Soviet Union led him to back nationalists, as long as they were anti-Soviet terrorists as well. In 1955, he praised the CIA-backed Ukrainian Resurgent Army, anti-Soviet terrorists who attacked the Red Army from 1942 to 1949. So, later, along with Thatcher and Reagan, he backed the Afghan mujehadin terrorists against the Red Army (see, for example, Socialist Worker, 4 February 1989.)
Similarly, Cliff praised looters and rioters, as in 1981, "The riots and looting have been fantastic, but they have not gone far enough. Because they have not been organised, the kids have attacked shops when they should have been attacking factories."
The SWP still always misreads situations. For example, Birchall writes here that in 1980 "the industrial downturn was accompanied by a political upturn." His evidence? Labour party members' votes for Tony Benn - as if Benn's brief rise (and inevitable fall) outweighed the dreadful effects of the millions of jobs lost in Thatcher's onslaught.
The SWP always proposes the wrong strategy and the wrong tactics: a general strike now is always the only right thing to do, whatever the situation (and as if 1926 was not a disaster). The SWP spreads confusion and demoralisation and causes only harm to our class.
Cliff's endless attacks on `trade union bureaucrats', falsely posing rank-and-file (good) against bureaucrats (bad), tended to split and weaken our unions. The weaker the class, the more it allows the SWP to influence it, and the more influence the SWP has in a union, the worse the outcome for the class.
For example, when steelworkers went on strike in 1980, they invited Cliff to speak to their meetings across the country. The strike failed utterly. The SWP imposed the same `death by solidarity' on the Fire Brigades Union in 2005, and is trying to do the same in the pensions dispute.
Cliff said, "We need to get back to the basics of trade union organisation - solidarity at every level between workers." Prioritising solidarity led to Cliff's (inevitably ignorant) interference in unions' internal affairs. So he urged the SWP to make "individual interventions in individual disputes. In ninety cases out of a hundred we will do it from outside." The basis of trade union organisation is organising at the workplace. Without this, solidarity is nothing.
Cliff claimed that he wanted the SWP to have `worker leadership', yet ensured that it was led by full-time SWP staff (that is, bureaucrats, surely?), living off other members' dues. The SWP mimics the old CPGB organisation, of full-timers telling workers what to do, and the old CPGB strategy, of seizing union positions in order to tell the members what to do.
The central Trotskyist message to workers is `you can't do it on your own', which boils down to `you can't do it', which is why no Trotskyist group has ever won power anywhere, or ever will. These groups take in idealistic young people and burn them out.
Birchall wants his `lovingly crafted biography' to help build the SWP. Instead, it will surely put people off having anything to do with a group that is not even a squalid parody of a Bolshevik party.
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Post by dodger on Aug 30, 2013 16:43:02 GMT
Revealing study of Trotskyist leader, May 17, 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: Ernest Mandel: A Rebel's Dream Deferred (Hardcover)
This is a most revealing biography of Ernest Mandel, a long-time leader of Trotsky's so-called Fourth International.
Stutje notes that Mandel `did not support the Allied war effort'. Stutje follows Mandel by calling World War Two a `defeat of the international workers' movement'.
In 1938, Mandel joined Belgium's Revolutionary Socialist Party. From 1951 to 1964 he was a member of the Belgian Socialist Party. Expelled in 1964, he joined the Walloon Workers' Party, and in 1971 he joined the Revolutionary Workers' League, which became the Belgian section of the Fourth International. But apparently, like his enemy, the SWP's Tony Cliff, he never joined a trade union.
According to Trotskyist theory, Stalinists could not lead revolutions, so the Chinese revolution in 1949 proved to Mandel that the CCP was not Stalinist, not that Trotsky was wrong. Mandel wrote in 1951 that the Yugoslavs under Tito `reiterate point for point our 25-year-old criticisms of Stalinism'. Stutje noted that in the 1956 events in Poland and Hungary, the rebels called `Down with the Jews'.
Mandel defined the struggle between capital and labour as only a `sociopolitical condition', not as part of the capitalist system: class struggle was `an independent, exogenous factor'.
He believed that capitalism's dynamic was `not deduced from one factor alone but from an array of factors'. At first he claimed that there were five factors, later, six, then five again and later ten. Stutje admits that Mandel's `analytical method (the interplay of all the variables) seemed unusable' and that his supposed masterpiece, Late Capitalism, `does not add up to a convincing synthesis'.
In the early 1980s, the Fourth International had 20 full-timers in Paris, falling to 5 in the late 1980s. Mandel organised it as a `world party' pronouncing on every country's internal affairs, denouncing one week `the sectarians in Ceylon on the Tamil question' and the next `the IS group on state capitalism'. The Fourth International took three years to come to its (wrong) decision about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Stutje observes, "Mandel, like Trotsky, was unable to achieve a general theory of the party." Stutje notes `the disintegrating fabric of the International', with setbacks in France and Spain and `catastrophe' in Italy.
Stutje writes, "In his 1989 book Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev's USSR, ... Mandel sketched four possible scenarios for what Gorbachev had set in motion. He did not devote a single word to the possible restoration of capitalism." In November 1989, Mandel wrote of the `real revolution' happening in the GDR.
Stutje sums up Mandel, "He walled himself off from self-criticism and preferred to move on to the next item on the agenda. This impatient, adolescent attitude helped keep him aloof from key problems - from realities."
So, in sum, Mandel failed to understand either class struggle, or capitalism, or the difference between revolution and counter-revolution, and he failed to build either a revolution or a revolutionary party.
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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 14:11:33 GMT
 www.leninology.com/2013/01/swp-in-crisis-what-do-socialists-say.htmlSWP in Crisis: What Do Socialists Say?
Guest post by Keith Watermelon:
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Will Podmore • 7 months ago
This was one of the most hilarious pieces I have ever read.
It is amazing that members of a self-proclaimed 'revolutionary party' think it right to communicate - or rather factionalise - on Facebook. MI6 must have a right laugh at such folly, if they even bother with the adolescent antics of such a half-witted organisation.
Why should anyone want to 'stay and fight' inside the SWP? The writer has exposed it as a bureaucracy,whose 'CC' is composed almost entirely of full-timers - which makes the SWP's eternal strictures against British trade unions nauseatingly hypocritical as well as totally anti-working class and dishonest.
The SWP has had the same structure, with its 'rotten' leadership, not just for 30-odd years - it's been rotten ever since it was founded. And that's what you joined!
Now you want people to 'stay and fight', just like those who join the Labour Party to 'win it for socialist policies', which was the old CPGB line, which the SWP (incapable even of original errors) echoes, or those who want to change the old CPGB, to win it for revolutionary policies.
The SWP grotesquely mishandled the rape allegation against ‘Comrade Delta’ (and everybody knows, including doubtless MI6, that it was Martin Smith - so much for this 'revolutionary party''s 'security'). It managed to do worse than an ordinary court would have done. It showed not just a lack of judgement but also revealed Trotskyism’s political and moral bankruptcy.
It exposed the true character of Trotskyist politics - bullying, undemocratic, anti-women, anti-young people, and servile to senior male authority figures, from Leon himself down to Martin, Alex and the rest of the self-appointed bureaucrats.
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Will Podmore • 7 months ago −
Watermelon writes, “This marked what those of us involved in the Facebook conversation had feared and worked hard to avoid – the matter … being leaked into the public domain.” After discussing these matters on Facebook, Watermelon claims that he and his friends had “worked hard to avoid – the matter … being leaked into the public domain.” Do they think that Facebook is not in the public domain?
He writes, “It is officially only in exceptional circumstances that SWP members
are allowed to take elected trade union positions on 100% facility time.” Yet
this rule has never applied to SWP CC members. The majority have always been on 100% facility time. So it is one law for the working class, and one law for the SWP.
Watermelon writes, “Party policies and ‘turns’ are decided in similar fashion, with a National Committee or Party Council presented with a CC document that is discussed and then invariably approved, usually without any discussion in the wider party, let alone the class.” So the SWP is less democratic than most
trade unions.
Watermelon then reveals that self-seeking egoism appears to animate SWP members - “Comrades who wish to develop their standing in the party, be selected for slates in trade union elections [‘selected for slates’ – very democratic!], be added to the CC themselves [‘added’, note, not elected], …”
He goes on, “All of this has more in common with the organisation of Stalinist
Parties than with the libertarian roots of the IS tradition.” The evidence that
he presents proves only that the SWP is undemocratic. It says nothing about communists.
Watermelon then writes that the SWP leadership ‘has been unable to offer any leadership or direction to comrades regarding the Comrade Delta issue’. This is a slander of the SWP leadership – it has led, it has given direction, but just in the wrong direction.
Watermelon continues, “No discussion, unless it is specifically around personal or possibly illegal matters, should be conducted in private and away from the
class or movement.” With this caveat – ‘unless it is specifically around personal or possibly illegal matters’ - he is accepting the SWP CC’s case which he was trying to refute.
After ‘slamming’ the entire leadership as ‘rotten’ which should be ‘swept aside’, he then writes piously that “we should value and encourage differing strands of
opinion within the party [including the leadership’s?]
Watermelon writes, “”Our tradition is not based on orthodoxy …” which is a denial of what he has just written about 30-odd years of expulsions. He has an idealised image of the SWP, divorced from reality.
After recording the SWP’s cover-up, double standards and lack of democracy, Watermelon claims that the SWP “remains … the best thing the British working class has as its disposal.”
Thankfully, this is not true.
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SWP has 2 membership “categories”, the first one, “has paid a contribution in the last two years”,
and the second, “pays a regular sub”. So Menshevik and progressive. in a manner of speaking.
Martin Smith affair proves the rottenness of the SWP, proves that its vaunted feminism is a lie, and proves that its purported respect for young people is a lie.
Subsequent debate is just gutter politics, name-calling and factionalism. Piety, daily devotions, veneration of high priests paid by your financial dues has only succeeded in making yourselves a laughingstock across wide sections of our movement.
Ponder this: whether the dishonest lack of realism, evidence stacked high, now, typifies your whole counterfeit ideology? |
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Post by dodger on Oct 7, 2013 23:57:58 GMT
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Post by dodger on Oct 15, 2013 8:11:52 GMT
Rubbish forecasting, 17 May 2012
This Will Podmore review is from: Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev's USSR (Paperback)
Jan Willem Stutje, in his revealing biography of Ernest Mandel, writes, "In his 1989 book Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev's USSR, ... Mandel sketched four possible scenarios for what Gorbachev had set in motion. He did not devote a single word to the possible restoration of capitalism."
Stutje sums up Mandel, "He walled himself off from self-criticism and preferred to move on to the next item on the agenda. This impatient, adolescent attitude helped keep him aloof from key problems - from realities."
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Post by dodger on Oct 15, 2013 8:14:51 GMT
Over-rated and unconvincing analysis, 17 May 2012
This Will Podmore review is from: Late Capitalism (Verso Classics) (Paperback)
Jan Willem Stutje, in his revealing biography of Mandel, observes that Mandel believed that capitalism's dynamic was `not deduced from one factor alone but from an array of factors'. At first he claimed that there were five factors, later, six, then five again and later ten.
Stutje admits that Mandel's `analytical method (the interplay of all the variables) seemed unusable' and that his supposed masterpiece, Late Capitalism, `does not add up to a convincing synthesis'.
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