On 14 May, a new opposition voice emerged within the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP): a blog, anonymously-edited since it is outside the pre-conference three months each year when dissent within SWP is licensed.
The Faultlines blog represents a section of the “moderate” wing of the opposition at the SWP’s 10 March special conference. The more strident oppositionists (between 200 and 400, according to different posts on Faultlines) quit soon after that conference. Some of them have formed a loose new grouping, the International Socialist Network, which has a public launch on 8 June (1 pm at Birkbeck College, London). Rumour has it the people behind Faultlines will split in their turn, some time in the coming months, but not join ISN. We don’t know.
The tone of the blog is dispirited and pessimistic about redressing the SWP.
It promises “a space where comrades can explore and discuss the range of issues”. As yet it has little elaboration of a policy in the class struggle different from the SWP’s.
One post refers (but without expanding) to “a one-sided hostile attitude to a revival of the Labour left; a failure to recognise the role revolutionaries could play within the People’s Assembly (in drawing out its real contradictions); a persistence with Unite the Resistance despite its existence as a front group; a refusal to acknowledge that public sector strikes have not been a central site of struggle since the December [2011] sell out; turning necessities — such as the lack of speakers for [the SWP summer school] Marxism —into virtues; a willingness to smash our student work to destroy the [opposition] faction; a distortion of our politics on women’s liberation...”
It also criticises “abstract calls for a general strike”. Another post sees the SWP’s big recent political mistakes as “calling for a vote for Labour against Respect’s Lee Jasper [a call quickly dropped in favour of making no recommendation] and... [an] attack on Owen Jones for supporting a referendum on the EU”.
In our view the SWP was right in that call for a Labour vote, and in the criticism on the EU referendum. Much else in the SWP’s perspective and policy is wrong.
• AWL on SWP
• Comment on Alex Callinicos's recent "perspectives" article for the SWP
