Who are the Socialist Workers?

Peter Paterson

• The bewildering acronymic confusion of Britain's crowded extreme-Left political fringe caught armchair spectators as well as • the Metropolitan Police on the hop last weekend when the anti-National Front violence was orchestrated if not organised by the SWP — the Socialist Workers Party. By the time of the Ladywood riot on Monday night, the SWP was becoming rather better known.

To most observers they will be more familiar under their old name of International Socialists (IS). They appear to have picked up the anti-NF torch from the leaders of the Red Lion Square punch-up, the International Marxist Group (1MG), who, in turn, took the initiative from the WRP — the Workers Revolutionary Party.

The IS became the SWP last January, making the transition from being simply a fraction to becoming a party. This is always ,a critical moment in the life of a Trotskyist splinter group. There are no hard and fast rules: Leninist tags might well be quoted, and old Bolshevik folklore called in to give aid. But as a rough and ready guide, a burgeoning group will begin to call itself a party when its members, or, rather, its leaders, have convinced themselves that they are ready and equipped (usually with a successful weekly or daily paper) to move out of a purely propagandist role into con_ ducting 'class agitation' — campaigns against 'unemployment, or racism, or police violence, or some other unacceptable aspect of ' society with revolutionary potential.

As the IS, the SWP for long enjoyed a 'kind of 'best buy' status among the Trotsky1st groups. They were more urbane, more relaxed, more civilised, it seemed, and, s frankly, rather more middle class than their , rivals. Much of this they owed to having been quickly off the mark in recruiting the dissident student generation of 1968, just as, previously, the Socialist Labour League (now the WRP) had attracted many of the , 'half-way' intellectuals who deserted the Communist Party after Hungary but still sought a Marxist refuge.

As with the disillusioned Communists, this phase, for most people, doesn't last very long. IS managed to maintain the gilded ' youth image for several years by applying a loose rein, but gradually lost out as revolutionary discipline was more firmly applied.

What had attracted the intellectual young in the first place was a convincing political analysis that side-stepped some of the more obvious non sequiturs of the far Left. IS did not, for example, have to make obeisance to the Soviet Union before Euro-Communism was invented because its theoreticians had

already decided that the Russian regime was 'state capitalist'.

The awkward non-arrival of the final crisis of western capitalism, which gives some Trotskyist groups who live in daily expectation of the event more the character of religious fanatics than serious political thinkers, was also explained by the IS philosophy. The whole structure is held up, they argued, by the mariufacture of armaments on a mass scale. Eventually, since the arms industry does not operate in a classic 'market', the effort will undermine capitalism, or the weapons of destruction will be used, with much the same result.

IS also taught its adherents that the locus of reformism was changing. It was possible, given popular dissatisfaction with Parliamentary government, and the corrupt liaison between Labour politicians and the 'bureaucratic' union leaders, that new forms of action could be inspired on the shop floor. However, the middle-class aura was less helpful here, and IS remained more influential among the white collars of Nalgo, the National Union of Teachers and the NUJ than at Cowley or Dagenham.

The leadership of the SWP is largely of the 1960s generation. The national secretary is Jim Nichols, once a trainee accountant with the National Coal Board but now, like all the members of the' ten-man executive committee, a full-tithe, paid revolutionary. His colleagues include the SWP's spokesman, Steve Jefferies, an ex-LSE man from a wealthy middle class family, and

Jimmy McCallum, formerly a leading militant in the draughtsmen's union, TASS. Credit for much of the theory must go to the SWP's resident 'guru', Tony Cliff. An Israeli citizen whose anti-Zionism leads him to describe himself as a Palestinian, Cliff is a remarkable political figure who would doubtless be playing on a bigger board for higher stakes had he set up shop in France or Italy rather than in Britain. His right —or should it be left? — hand man is another veteran of the Trotskyist movement, Duncan Hallas, who has been in this sector of politics since 1942.

But perhaps the best-known figure in the SWP is Paul Foot, nephew of Michael, and the only revolutionary socialist ever allowed on BBC radio's staidly orthodox 'Any Questions?' programme. Not for the first time, Foot is rumoured to be out of favour with the SWP's leadership. He is currently out of harm's way on leave of absence writing a book about Shelley.

Total paying membership of the SWP is probably between 3,000 and 4,000— rather less than the number participating in the Lewisham demonstration last weekend, and well below the estimated 21,000 or so who buy the Party's weekly, Socialist Worker. The disparity can easily be, explained: the first duty of any member of a Trotskyist group — and presumably of a fascist party also— is to sell the paper. If no-one else will buy it, the member himself turns in the revenue for the papers he is instructed to sell.

Membership is a different matter. While the SWP was still the IS, its followers were numerically reasonably stable, and affluent. But expulsions and boredom have taken their toll, and the Party now finds itself forced into the same groove that has sapped the strength of the Workers Revolutionary Party (they who enjoy the devotion of Vanessa Redgrave and, in a recent development, Col. Ghaddafi of Libya).

The dynamics of extremist politics have forced the SWP to operate as a campaigning party. Each campaign, while attracting new members — the unemployed, black youth, hospital workers, etc. — also has the disadvantage that it turns off some of those who became adherents on account of the previous campaign.

So more campaigns must be mounted in order to attract more members, but all the while the Party is running hard to stand still. On that criterion, the Lewisham and Ladywood imbroglios will have been good for the SWP. Not only will a number of people have been recruited on the spot, but the publicity will pull in more members over the coming weeks.

All of which underlines the tragedy of this form of punch-up politics. Parties like the SWP measure out their lives in column inches of coverage in the newspapers, and minutes of peak time on television. But all the time they are building up the National Front, which inevitably gets its own meed of national publicity. And member for member, they cannot be far behind.