Birchall on the SWP crisis

I used to have a soft spot for the SWP. In spite of growing up in a left-wing family, and having left home already a Labour Party member in a pretty hard-left CLP, my first exposure to Marxist ideas outside the printed page was through conservations with SWP members at university. I used to attend SWSS meetings, and people from the group would take me along to demonstrations and rallies. The Cliffites served as socialist babysitters for a small-town boy in a big city, and I remain grateful to them for an education and a welcome, although I remained in Labour. A good number of SWP members are people of whom I'm personally fond.

The party's intellectual traditions are an important bequest to the wider Left. In particular Tony Cliff and Chris Harman will remain essential reading for many years to come. The state capitalism analysis of Stalinism was, in my view, a step forward and has a renewed relevance in a post-Cold War context, where 'it didn't work in Russia' is easily the most frequent objection to communism. Organisationally, the SWP and its predecessors played a central part in many struggles. The Anti-Nazi League, in particular, stands out as an achievement.

For these, and many other reasons, it's impossible to take pleasure in the SWP crisis, and subsequent splintering of break-away groups, quite apart from the appalling treatment of women that heralded the schism. Whilst I am certainly not of the 'ban the SWP' tendency that is bringing a new intolerance to university campuses at the moment, the whole episode is a sobering reminder of the persistence of sexism on the Left. At the same time, it has weakened the Left collectively and threatened the vital heritage of the IS tradition.

There is no better account to be had of the crisis than Ian Birchall's recently published one. I commend it to you. But I do do with a word of caution: those of us who read it as observers rather than participants will, if we are honest, recognise echoes of the problems Birchall identifies in the SWP throughout the British Left. If any good can come of the past few years, it will consist in us learning and changing.