In reply to Chris Leary.... In our "open letter to Chris Harman", we wrote: SWP members... they have few democratic mechanisms to challenge the Central Committee. But they are not helpless. They can talk to other members who are unhappy with the foul political and moral morass into which the SWP has been led..
They can organise with them, secretly if they need to (they probably would). They can read the criticisms of SWP policy produced over the years by other socialists. They can break through the barrier of misrepresentation, demonisation, and slander which the members of the SWP Central Committee, including you [Harman], have erected to stop them even talking to people like ourselves [AWL]...
The central SWP leaders today are people bred and raised to “leadership” by the SWP machine which you [Harman] and others helped Tony Cliff build. Your typical methods have been political demagogy, bureaucratic and manipulative organisational practices, eternal willingness to shed principles for perceived short-term advantage, and refusal to allow the SWP rank and file any real freedom of discussion or control over the leaders.
Whatever else is right or wrong about that, it's certainly not exaggerating the democratic possibilities inside the SWP.
But what do we say to an SWPer, or Respect supporter, who is not yet ready to agree with us on the big range of quite complex questions (quite complex, anyway, if you start looking at them from the angle of having had your first "induction" into what socialism and Marxism mean from the SWP) which define AWL against SWP - Third Camp, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, reactionary anti-capitalism, the relation between agitation and propaganda and tactics and principles, etc.? But who has to take a decision now, today, on which side they take in the Respect split, and can't wait to do so until they have sorted out all those questions?
Do we assent to what must be the "natural" inclination of many critical-minded people - to side with the Gallowayites on grounds of the hamfisted bureaucratism of the SWP's methods? Of the implausibility of its claims that it has faced an attempt to "drive it out" of an organisation where it commands the administrative machine and the majority of the membership and of its faux-naif statements that it "never imagined" that Galloway would side with communalists?
Or do we say that there are much bigger fish to fry here? That Galloway is a maverick bourgeois politician with a disgusting record of links with the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Pakistan, Saddam's Iraq, etc., while the SWP are socialists who frequently talk anti-socialist rubbish but are still socialists?
I'd say the latter. It was certainly the latter assessment that made us denounce the SWP (as a body of people with whom we shared some common criteria, at some level) for unprincipled alliance when it lashed up with Galloway - rather than denouncing Galloway (as someone with whom we might have something in common) for linking up with someone as bad as the SWP.
