[Marxism] A comment on my blog

[Louis Proyect]

New comment on your post #581 "Lenin's Tomb on the crisis in RESPECT"
Author : Ger Francis

As one of a number of SWP members expelled for opposing SWP sectarianism 
inside Respect, I don’t accept Richard Seymore’s claim that ‘democratic 
centralism has *nothing* to do with this split’.

The SWP’s version of democratic centralism, combined with their 
ultra-leftism, has everything to do with the split.

As Respect developed and broadened, as the gap between the reasons for 
our electoral successes and SWP influence widened, so the SWP 
increasingly resorted to the same style of top down, autocratic 
management to control Respect that characterizes the regime that runs 
the SWP. Worse, Respect became infected with some of the uglier aspects 
of the SWP’s internal culture. Both our most high profile elected 
councillors in Tower Hamlets and Birmingham, Abjol Miah and Salma 
Yaqoob, complained of being bullied by SWP leader John Rees. And both 
they, and others, suffered ostracisation by a National Office controlled 
by Rees because they had the temerity to disagree with him. Not exactly 
practices conducive to the proper workings of Respect, an organization 
in which working in a consensual manner was seen as fundamental to its 
existence as a coalition. Tensions around SWP control freakery, and the 
political damage Rees autocratic style was causing, formed the backdrop 
to George Galloway’s letter.

As for the SWP attempting to counter pose this split as being between 
those who pander to the pull of ‘communalism’, (the term the SWP use but 
Seymore, quite rightly, is embarrassed about), and those who don’t, 
anybody with even the most elementary grasp of what is happening on the 
ground knows this to be rubbish.

The one person who has done more to both explain what more accurately 
would be called electoralist pressures, and show in practice how to 
undercut them, is Respect founder Salma Yaqoob (see her recent interview 
in Green Left weekly and article Feminist Review, forthcoming). Yet she 
is the very person supposedly in the leadership of a communalistic 
pandering right wing bloc! Indeed the SWP have never theorized nor 
substantiated what exactly these pressures are, and how they express 
themselves, other than making reference to ‘pocket members’ i.e. 
election candidates signing up their supporters from their networks to 
support their candidacy. Their charge of ‘communalism’, and most 
cynically, a ‘witch-hunt’, are factional devices designed to whip their 
own supporters into line behind an ultra-left turn.

The SWP would rather have a Respect they retain control over, even at 
the cost of driving out their biggest electoral successes, than one they 
don’t control, for fear that such an entity could successfully occupy 
political space to the left of Labour and in so doing prove a competitor 
to the SWP. Their conception of Respect is one that occupies a 
subordinate role to the SWP and serves as a conveyor track into it, 
facilitated by one or two high profile SWP victories like election to 
the Greater London Assembly (a prospect now dead in the water). 
Commitment to a more ambitious, non-sectarian conception of Respect, 
went down the toilet with John Rees’s failed Tower Hamlets election 
campaign and similar SWP failures elsewhere. This sectarianism has been 
massively compounded by a model of democratic centralism inside the SWP 
more characterized by a culture of bullying, deference and self 
censorship, than genuine participation, democracy and member ownership 
of the decision making process.