“Socialist” Party of Ireland crisis
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Weekly Worker once more has offered up some tit-bits about the Trotskyist Left. It is not just the SWP going through a crisis but the CWI'S Irish wing with some high-profile resignations.
- “… fundamentally I do not feel the party is a truly democratic organisation”
- “I feel there is a serious democratic deficit within the Socialist Party. Slates are an inappropriate way of electing a leadership. No minutes, records of votes or written reports of national committee or executive committee meetings are distributed. It is impossible for ordinary members to know which members of the leadership bodies are playing a positive role and which ones you might agree or disagree with on a particular issue.”
- “Branch democracy is also non-existent. In essence, the full-timers pick those people that they think are most equipped to build the party in a particular way and install them as the branch committee, ultimately making the most important decisions about how the branch is run, if not all the finer details.”
Par for the course for groups organised on a Leninist basis. I'd expect a similar controversy to break out sooner or later in the SPI's sister party in Britain (SPEW), as some of those attracted by its programme of immediate reforms realise that they are not really Trotskyists but simple democratic reformists:The article (though written by an obvious CPGB infiltrator) does make the same criticism as us of the typical Trotskyist reform programme that "aims to tailor its demands to the present consciousness of workers":
Quote:And, to reassure the floor of the SP’s ‘credibility’, the table presented ‘solutions’ to the Irish state’s €16.2 billion fiscal deficit. There followed the expected reformist drivel about the need for higher corporate and capital gains taxation, a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax and so on. (….)The terrible irony here is that such ‘credible’ demands are utterly impossible to achieve under capitalism and do not even articulate the need for socialism. They are truly transitional to nothing; save sowing illusions. The inevitable effect of this ‘transitional’ routine – in which the (supposed) socialist consciousness of the SP plays no part – is that the SP’s ‘programme’ is nothing more than an eclectic, incoherent mess of demands that could never advance the cause of socialism. Socialism is an utter non-sequitur as far as the actual practice of the SP is concerned.Quite. It's the same with SPEW here with their incredible 'credible' demands to "tax the rich" to finance "massive public spending" on houses, schools and hospitals.
An academic point perhaps, but aren't all unorthodox trotskyists dismissed as reformists by orthodox trotskyists?
I would have thought orthodox trotskyists would have seen unorthodox trotskyists as soft non-revolutionaries. From recollection of WSWS, this seemed to be the view of SEP on Cliffite and Grantite groups etc.
jondwhite wrote:soft non-revolutionaries.I think the jargon they use is "centrist". But what is an "orthodox trotkyist"?. I'd say a group that says Russia used to be a "degenerate Workers state" (as Trotsky decreed). In which case, the "Grantites" and their offshoot SPEW would be "orthodox trotskyists". What do they call the SEP (one of the fragments of the old WRP)?
It does seem that the "Socialist" Party of Ireland has become almost a reformist parody of "Father Ted," with Father Joe playing the lead role and Father Paul MEP as his hapless sidekick, or dauphin in terms of electoral succession. The prurient curtain-twitching that appeared to predate Claire Daly (Mrs Doyle?) & her expulsion from the "Socialist" Party that resulted in the distegration of the doomed reformist egoistic fiasco that was ULA in the Dail, seemed more based on her relations with the Pat Mustard of Wexford (Mick Wallace) rather than on any particular ideological schisms.As is ever the case, RSL successor parties insist on a top-down leadership around a Messianic figure offering glib, incorrect solutions, under the guise of "transitional demands," while members are expected to unquestioningly accept inconsistencies, parodoxes & other false rhetoric in a mass hurtle up a reformist blind alley.However, the good news is that socialists in the "Socialist" Party will leave as they realise the parody of class politics Comrade Taafe's Vanguard has nothing to offer in terms of a solution.
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