We have heard a lot of nonsense on this site about the manchester ANL carnival. I saw the FRFI stall on Sunday mid-afternoon at the carnival and did not witness any problems.

Neither the SWP nor the RCG are Trotskyist. The SWP is at best semi-Trotskyist--i.e. it emerged from the Trotskyist movement, but developed its own Anglo-centric take on the world. The RCG (FRFI) is Stalinoid in its politics. It began life in the SWP, but it became an uncritical supporter of Stalinist-influenced Third World nationalist movements (ANC, Castroism etc), lacking the class politcal independence necessary to build a consistently revolutionary alternative. it is an obscure, wierd little sect and I wouldn't trust anything it said about the SWP or anything else.

While the SWP has been too intolerant of political minorities, and unco-operative with the rest of the far left, IN THE PAST, it is currently moving in a positive direction. It now works with the rest of the left in the Socialist Alliance. It is seeking unity with Trotskyists, including the largest international Trotskyist organisation the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and is open to persuasion and argument in a way that it was not two or three years ago.

Most SWP critics on this site are critical from the RIGHT not the left. The left will never defeat a highly organised, disciplined, ruthless class enemy without an even better organised and even more disciplined (but internally democratic) organisation. Without a DEMOCRATIC-centralist, Leninist party, and International, the left will be cut to ribbons at the first serious revolutionary test. The ruling class will make mincemeat of the left. Get real. A disorganised rabble will be routed and butchered as anti-capitalist revoultions have in the past. That is why anarchism offers no way forward. What many people on this site criticise is not democratic centralism, but a bureaucratic caricature of democratic centralism (bureaucratic centralism) that has existed in various organisations on the British left, including the SWP, in the post-war period.

The SWP is an organisation that is currently open to argument about its internal regime and its politics. It is the only sizeable organisation on the British far left (the anarchists are just a bunch of posturing clowns). Only a fool would turn its back on the SWP. Argue constructively with them. Try to win them to the democratic traditions of the Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyist tradition, in which the "internal clash of tendencies" (Trotsky's own term) was always considered essential to thrashing out the way forward.