Having been at Marxism 2002 and having seen the SWP's last flop of a youth group (Rebel), it's interesting to see how they are so desperate to get more young people involved with them. In the whole of the event, and certainly compared to previous years, there were miniscule numbers of young people– plenty of older SWP honchos and hacks to physically threaten and hurl abuse at anyone who wants to expose or criticise their politics.

There's no workers' democracy in the SWP– just Cliffite bureaucracy. In meetings a slip system is used to try and filter out opponents. At one point Alex Callinicos was being given people's slips so that he could vet them. No prizes for guessing the nature of most of the speakers. I saw people get their tickets snatched without full refunds, people getting excluded from meetings without even having said anything; that's the character of the SWP and it's in no small part due to their politics and what they really stand for.

The SWP aren't revolutionaries, they're Labourite reformists who vote for and support Labour and capitalism, who say that in 1991 Russia transfered from one form of capitalism to another and who supported the Mujahedin in Afghanistan and Khomeini in Iran who murdered women and thousands upon thousands of trade unionists and communists. The SWP support British troops in Northern Ireland and don't call for their withdrawal; they will never defend China or Cuba from counterrevolution because they believe they are just more capitalist states. The list is endless.

Don't join Red Spark, the only thing you might gain from it is a more in depth –and perhaps slightly too close for comfort– experience of how the SWP works. If you want to fight for socialist revolution then look elsewhere.

DEFEND CHINA FROM COUNTER -REVOLUTIONARIES! the biggest slave labour camp in the world, Otto the stalinist!. The anti-capitalist movement for all its faults and contradictions is a breath of fresh air and i never thought i would say this but the old left, certainly the unreformed left has little or nothing to offer it.

Quote from the first copy of Red Spark in an article on students and exams:

"It is NECESSARY that all students sell Socialist Worker, talk to other students about their beliefs and create conversation-this attracts others to join our debate."

Nuff said?

Hey, correction needed....Yes, the SWP has authoritarian creeps at the top..I hate them,...but you are just spouting some old myths which are easily refuted by anyone in the know. This blunts real, effective criticism of the SWP and change on the far left.
I have seen the SWP run around with "Troops out Now" placards, so they don't support British troops in Northern Ireland! You are probably reproducing a garbled version of a long dead discussion from 1969, when the troops went in. Then sections of the militant Catholic community actually welcomed the troops, believing they would protect them from the Orange state, the RUC and ethnic cleansing by loyalists. In this situation Socialist Worker called for the barracades to stay up in the Bogside insurrection - and didn't immediately raise the slogan 'troops out' - But soon after they did, and this become their slogan. Whatever you think about this, it is along way from "The SWP support British troops in Northern Ireland and don't call for their withdrawal".
As for the rest, this shows where 'Antid Oto' is really coming from: "The SWP wont defend China from counter revolution" - You mean the SWP supported the students and workers revolt in Tiannamen Square 1989! Well good for them! So would any decent activist who fights for true liberty and communism! Its a bit rich to criticise the SWP for being 'authoritarian' and then support the Chinese State regime!
No, people disillusioned with the behavior of the SWP will find such stalinist cretinism far more repellant! Your criticisms are therefore just the rantings of an opportunist authoritarian.
You do a diservice to those of us who have serious and effective criticisms and alternatives. If SWP membership heared Oto's line, they would just shrug and say "if these are the SWP's critics, then I'll stay with the SWP".
Fuck that!
So many lies are told about the SWP, - another old favorite is that they told their members to 'pay the poll tax'! When in fact they said "don't collect, don't pay", and initially placed more emphasis on Trade Union action, than community action. This shows they had an unrealisticly optimistic view of trade union militancy for the time, and underestimated community resistance - (or had a merely propagandistic rather than practical approach) - but which they did correct. These finer points get lost in the sectarian mud slinging, and become passed down as myths to a new generation.
What we need is anti-capitalist organisation, rooted in daily life and struggle, and with democratic control from below. The SWP is not this, but to be honest, much as I often dispise and ridicule them, they are a million times better than some Stalinist "defend China" shite.

What about Cuba? - It is a heroic third world regime resisting US Imperialism - but not a socialist paradise. For instance, the Castro regime started to put Gays in detention camps as their first response to Aids. Hardly a socialist policy! I'd defend Cuba against the USA, but I wont fall for the lie that that is 'socialism'.

Who am I? I'm not in any far left group - my mates & I just get on with organising grassroots anti-capitalist resistance. Just do it!

red spark is yet another swp front trying to lure unsuspecting kids who are involved in radical anti capitalist demos to their cause, this cause being pro labour backing sowing illusions in british trade unionism and anti cuba propaganda which george w bush would be proud of. Of course gays were treated bad in cuba some 20 30 years ago but they were just about everywhere else as well, many gays in the world were murdered but not in cuba which today even according to groups like amnesty international there is no govenment repression of gays in cuba and has better rights for gays even than britain or the usa. my advice to the youth today is check the facts out and dont believe anti communist rants by swp wankers.

The only reason that the SWP Central Committee set this up is to recruit young people to the Party - and lead them.

Fuck them and their patronising attitude.

We can organise ourselves, independently of Parties, leadership, Central Committees, "grown-ups" and authority.

I left the SWP some while ago out of disgust and it has left me with a very poor image of the organised Marxist left (although I would still call myself a Marxist, even though I don't hark on about 1917 or the Paris Commune). I found their articles and slogans clichéd and irritating - particularly their repeated use of the pretentious word "comrade". The worst thing is their complete lack of internal debate, even within meetings. Anyone who strays from the party line is shot down by others. For instance, I advocated the line that Islamic extremists should be condemned for targetted civilians as much as western states should be condemned for their destructive war on terrorism. I was ostracised to such a degree that I was treated like a member of the KKK in a black caucus. Then I had the audacity to oppose the destruction of Israel. From that moment on, I was a pariah and virtually forced out of the party.
There is no room for debate in the SWP and I pity any young person engaged in politics for the first time ending up with this intellectually immature bunch. They might have armfulls of degrees, but they can't think for themselves, which is an important element of growing up.

There's a whole, exciting world out there beyond the four walls of an SWP meeting or the two dimensional computer screen. If you are young, get out there and enjoy yourself, experiment and dabble with any idea or creative movement that inspires you until you find out what you really want in life. Don't hang about with the SWP shower, who will trying to restrict you - learn to love liberation.

The SWP do indeed do that to anyone who has the temerity to advocate courses of action , or even dare to think in new ways. The SWP is 'marking time', 'treading water', dragging its feet' or however you want to term it. it perpetuates itself for its own sake, and is willing to coast along with whatever the predominant thinking among the left of centre Labour happens to be. ideology is virtually abandoned, policies shift with the latest headlines of the dishrag paper, and all thats left is a kind of social agregate.
here comes the point about the ostracisation; the SWP has failed to mount a serious challnge to the ultra-conventional mode of thinking which has predominated GB society since the 1840s. faced with a Labourite working class which has proved as reactionary in its thinking as a freemasons lodge, the SWP has failed to help rid the Labour movement of this fog, and instead finds itself replicating it ! if you want to see and fell real class prejudice in action, join the SWP, and you'll soon know 'whos who' , who gets invited to what and who forgotten, who gets apppointed to the important posts and who left to flog the grubby paper, etc. Now, SWP members may object, you cant expect perfection: you must expect to find some of the flaws of general society even in a socialist grouping... and that would be fair enough BUT in a socialist party, individual backgrounds should be of DIMINISHED importance, NOT EMPHASISED ! To sound a bit fey, its whats in your head and heart that matters, not whether you live in Lambeth or studied in Oxford ! Unfortunately, social presumptions go unchallenged in the SWP, with the result they lose many good people; perhaps they dont want them at all. Both myself and my partner have extensive experience in the socialist movement, and Im sorry to say the way in which the average SWP memeber adresses you often varies with how youre dressed, what accent they think you have, who your family might be, and so on. Perhaps we all do it to a certain extent, but when such prejudice becomes inherent in a party, this spells trouble.

..yes, damn those bloody reactionary workers! Who needs them anyway? Bloody backward, useless, labourite working class bastards!

What a fucking joke! Tell me, how does it feel to be completely irrelevant to the class struggle in Britain? Because, make no mistake about it, that's exactly what you lot are...

Perhaps it's a bit late to respond to a thread that I departed from last night, but in summary: I'm a Trotskyist, and defending China against counterrevolution doesn't imply supporting Stalinism. The bureaucracy in China and Cuba oppress workers and political revolution is necessary to extend the gains of those revolutions and return them to the course of permanent revolution. I support the students and workers who challenged the bureaucracy at Tianamen Square in 1989 because they presented an opportunity for political revolution to oust the bureaucracy but not to overthrow the social gains and the property forms in place. You can guarantee that, if you post a comment on Indymedia criticising the SWP from a Marxist perspective you'll get a set of standard responses; someone attacking you for being a Stalinist when in fact you're the Trotskyist, someone being factual and reporting instances where the SWP has called for "troops out" and other "myths" (notwithstandign the fact that the SWP are opportunists and will alter their position depending on how best it can get Labour re-elected); an anarchist or two denouncing Marxists for infighting and bickering, for statism and so on; an RCGite with no recognition of the nature of the Cuban bureaucracy and a handful of anti-capitalists who organise for the sake of organising.

Marxism, and what's more Bolshevism remains the way forward. There's no coincedence that those "revolutionary" organisations which declared the Russian Revolution doomed due to Bolshevism, which advocate "new class" theories, which were happy to support the Mujahedin and Khomeini and which stood on Yeltsin's barricades –doing their bit towards consigning the workers of Russia to extreme poverty and exploitation– would hail counterrevolution in China or Cuba as some sort of victory for workers. There's no coincedence that these organisations refuse to break the working class from their social obstacles and thus are themselves obstacles necessary to be removed and defeated. The SWP is just part of the target, and it won't be threats and bureaucracy which remove them from the political map but the advanced working class and a proletarian leadership.