SWP history: More Years of the Locust: Review

Stuart King reviews More Years for the Locust - the origins of the SWP, by Jim Higgins (IS Group £5.99)

DON'T BLAME ME! "... the International Socialists was the very best chance we have had since the 1920s to build a serious revolutionary organisation. It was a chance that was not taken and those who were responsible for that error have much to answer for... "

As a leader of the International Socialism Group (IS - forerunner of the Social­ist Workers Party) in the 1960s and its National Secretary in the early 1970s when it grew significantly, Jim Higgins should be in a position to shed a clear light on its errors. Certainly, a critical political analysis and history of IS would be useful to a new generation of revolu­tionary militants. Higgins unfortunately produces bad history and even worse analysis.

His idea of responsibility is to lay the blame almost entirely on Tony Cliff. While Cliff has enormous influence on his organisation, Higgins reduces the twist and turns of IS politics, which are a symptom of its empiricism and cen­trism, to the political vagaries of a single person. He informs us that:

"For Cliff, the group is like something he owns and, in the final analysis, can dis­pose of as he wishes even on a whim; for he has a whim of iron."

This is convenient for Higgins' analysis but he cannot be allowed to get off that easily. He was himself complicit in the purges and manoeuvres which reduced the democratic rights of the members in IS. For example, he was absolutely in favour of expelling the Trotskyist Tendency, led by Sean Matgamna at the end of 1971.

Of course in the process, Higgins and others strengthened the Cliff faction's bureaucratic tendencies. Permanent tendencies were banned. Political debate was increasingly limited to the leadership, "cabinet responsibility" was imposed on NC members at conferences. The lively internal life, which could have ensured an educated membership able to control its leaders, withered.

But the Trotskyist Tendency was only the start. Higgins does not mention the expulsion of the so-called right faction in 1973. He supported it. The Left Faction of IS, of which this reviewer was the secretary and which went on to form Workers Power, hardly gets a mention either.

Formed in 1973, the Left Faction opposed the capitulation of the IS leadership when the IRA bombing campaign started in Britain. Leaders like John Palmer appeared before the press to condemn the bombing of the Aldershot barracks without a word of support for the Republicans' struggle against the British army. Jim Higgins took an identical position. Unconditional but critical support of the IRA, the formal IS position, was unceremoniously dumped.

The Left Faction, between 1973 and 1975, fought to change the organisation not only on Ireland, but in its whole politics and perspectives. It exposed the economism of IS practice in the workers' and women's movements, its contempt for building an International, its failure to understand or develop tactics towards reformism and above all its rejection of fighting for a transitional action programme, within the working class.

Anyone who has been in the IS or the SWP for any period of time would recognise the cycle of events that led to Higgins' own removal from the leadership. Higgins remarks on Cliffs tendency to boost this or that favoured individual:

"Woe betide the chosen one if he or she falls short of the mark or develops contrary ideas. From flavour of the month he is transformed into last night's dodgy vindaloo."

Higgins can provide no political explanation for the sudden outbreak of fac­tional warfare in the 1970s except the personal desire of Cliff to keep control of "his" organisation. In contrast, the Left Faction, because it recognised the weaknesses of IS politics, knew why the Cliff leadership was thrashing around dur­ing this period, looking for a new schema.

Between 1970 and 1974, IS grew from around a thousand members to nearly 3,500. But after the defeat of the Tories growth faltered, turnover of membership became an increasing problem. Cliff looked for new short cuts to maintain growth but the problem was that a key part of the IS theory and perspective had been proved bankrupt by events.

From the late 1960s, IS had argued that reformism, in the shape of the Labour Party, was losing its influence as workers entered into renewed struggle after the quiescence of the long boom. The "chang­ing locus of reformism" for IS meant that the Labour Party was an empty shell, workers were looking to their own strength, developing a "do-it-yourself reformism". The Left Faction challenged this idea, pointing out that reformism remained influential in the trade unions, especially via the union leaders and their link to the Labour Government.

The 1974 Labour victory and the social contract deals struck between Labour and the unions led to an imme­diate downturn in struggles. These events hit the IS leadership like a broadside. Cliff thought the solution to their problems lay in recruiting "raw workers", those who he thought were unsullied by reformist traditions.

Socialist Worker had to become more popular, it had to be a workers' paper, written "by workers, not for workers". Anyone standing in the way of the new turn was irredeemably conservative and had to be removed. Roger Protz, the editor, and Jim Higgins, now a reporter on the paper, were duly sacked.

By May 1975, Higgins was leading the IS Opposition, a faction committed to taking IS back to its political roots which gained over 130 signatures, including long-standing NC members and full timers as well as significant numbers of experienced blue collar trade unionists, particularly in the Birmingham area.

The days of oppositions in IS were however, numbered. The basis of the 1975 conference was quickly and unconstitutionally changed by an Organisation Commission, reducing the number of delegates and electing them at district meet­ings on a winner take all basis. This reduced any opposition to negligible pro­portions at the conference.

After conference, factions were banned and the ISO and Left Faction both received - and refused to abide by - ultimatums to dissolve. By the end of 1975 both factions had been expelled. Many more members left as a result of the purges and the SWP, as it became in 1977, consolidated an internal regime that has more in common with Stalinist bureaucratic centralism than with Leninist party democracy.

But what of Jim Higgins? There is a missing chapter in his book - it's called "Forming a new organisation". He does not mention that the IS Opposition went on to form the Workers League. The leadership of this organisation had great hopes of building a Cliffite organisation without Tony Cliff.

The Workers League survived for just a couple of years before collapsing. Some of its younger members joined Workers Power, the forerunner to Permanent Revolution.

It is entirely appropriate that the IS group, which had a similar project to the ISO, has published Higgins' memoirs. It too is now defunct. 

Sat 12, December 2009 @ 15:55