two hundred and hate
I am going through old copies of the various socialist periodicals that I have accumulated in the last seven years or so.
Viewing the build up to the failed candidature of those on the ‘Left List’ feels rather liking looking over the wedding pictures after the divorce has been finalized. The debacle of the electoral alliance of Lindsey Germany and co. would eventually have divisive implications for the organisations leadership, with one leading member (John Rees) eventually ‘voluntarily’ resigning from its Central Committee following the Respect and Left List failures. The build up to the Left List election is reported April 26th 2008. On the 3rd of May 2008 the same publication would note that the vote had been “squeezed” by the main parties. A rarity in a publication usually given to hyperbolic reportage of all and any event as illustrative of the huge gains that will invariably follow in the ‘upcoming period’. A split followed these electoral failures. Socialist Workers Party intellectual ‘big wig’ Alex Callinicos would later compare this parting of the ways to that within the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903.
It was in my capacity as a member of the Socialist Party that I was given the task of selling papers outside a Respect conference in 2004. We were armed with a leaflet suggesting, among other things, that the SWP were seeking “votes at any price”. As illustrative of this point the article noted that leading member George Galloway had made an “opportunist, rather than a class, appeal” to Muslims within his constituency. In response to my proffered leaflet an SWP comrade told me that we should view the nascent Respect organisation as comparable to the formation of the Independent Labour Party. To which a full-time comrade still in the SP shyly replied in an aside to me “who the fuck are the I.L.P?”.
Elsewhere in the same month of 08, the magazine of the grand sounding “British section of the League for the Fifth International” urged its readership to “vote Ken for London mayor”. In doing so the organization urged said readers to hold the Mayor to a position that stressed, among other things, the more equitable distribution of social housing. The good people of London were tragically not to heed the call of Workers Power and elected the “right winger” Boris Johnson to office.
Back copies of ‘The Socialist’ are notable for the frequency of the “Why I joined” column in this year. Given the number of times articles of this sort make an appearance in the weekly paper during the year of 2008, it’s amazing the ranks of the organisation are as depleted as they seem to currently be.
That was 2008. Roll on 2009.