Aside from the title – there are a lot of socialists I respect and have a lot of time for, it’s the pro-state ideology of Leninism that I object to – the first serious problem in Pat Stack’s article is the description of anarchism as aiming to bring about “a society with no state and no rules.” Anarchism has never meant “no rules”, and as for bringing about a society with no state, to me that sounds suspiciously like Engels’ desire to create a society where “the political authority of the State dies out.”(1) If the idea of a stateless society is an unrealistic utopia, it’s an unrealistic utopia that all genuine Marxists are also committed to.
Stack then meanders through a discussion of capitalism and class consciousness before pronouncing that “the key to changing the world is the ability of the class conscious minority to win over the vast majority to act in their own interests. This is what we mean by leadership. This is not an important person giving orders or making grand pronouncements, but the most advanced sections of the class winning the majority.” This sounds fairly harmless, but it’s also entirely at odds with the way the SWP actually operates, where a few “important people” (the Central Committee) do give orders and make grand pronouncements. Their cosying up to lefty celebrities like George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan is just one of the most visible symptoms of this condition.
He argues that this abstract idea of “leadership” should not be seen as elitist, because “it is much more elitist for a self-appointed group of activists to carry out actions regardless of whether they are taking wider forces with them.” Exactly, very true, which is why the SWP sending a self-appointed group of activists to wreck the talks between striking BA workers and their employers was so embarrassing.(2)
He pronounces that “Revolutionary Marxist parties are not like mainstream political parties.
They are not concerned about winning elections, dining with the Murdochs to win over the media or watering down their politics to gain popularity.” This is odd, coming from a party who are so keen to win elections, and whose “About Us” states that “Long manifestos don’t win such struggles — practical unity does. We fight alongside anybody or any organisation that wants to build the movement.”(3) To me, this sounds a lot like the tendency to “travel at the pace of the most cautious, limiting our ability to carry the struggle forward”, which Stack identifies as a harmful effect of consensus decision-making. Beyond this, the SWP’s “about us” statement is itself a watering-down of their politics as part of the search for popularity, since it contains much less revolutionary content than “where we stand”, their older statement of principles.(4) And that’s before I even mention their dodgy history on gay rights.(5)
Apparently Marxist parties are also “not made up of passive members dictated to by important leaders.” Again, how this squares with the reality of a party where some leaders have been on the central committee for decades is anybody’s guess. “Democracy in a revolutionary party means the coming together of members to understand the world and debate a strategy” – but not, for instance, replacing a hierarchical leadership structure with instantly-re-callable delegates mandated to fulfill very specific tasks. This “democracy” then produces “centralism—unity in action” which “is essential against a highly centralised and powerful class enemy.” Leaving aside the question of how much help centralism actually is in practice (for example, compare the number of anarchist groups who regularly produce local propaganda touching on issues relevant to their area, versus the tendency of Leninist groups to just wheel out clunky one-size-fits-all material produced in London with nothing to say about local conditions), it’s still the case that real unity in action needs to come out of genuinely free and open debate over the way forward, instead of just involving the masses carrying out orders handed down from the centre. That model might work for an army or a corporation, but it’s totally useless for escaping the social relationships created by capitalism and class society.
Stack then claims that “For anarchists, the question of organisation remains a largely unanswered one.” And there is some truth to that – there is no final answer to the question of organisation, it’s necessary to constantly update our ideas and methods of organising to keep up with changes in society, rather than just dogmatically trying to repeat things that worked a century ago. It becomes crashingly obvious that this isn’t what he means when he follows that statement up with “Historically, organisation is either rejected outright or attempts to build it have floundered because of its loose and confused nature, or conversely because of the building of conspiratorial and elitist formations.” So, historically, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Spanish CNT, the Maknovschina, the entire International Workers’ Association, the International of Anarchist Federations, the Anarkismo project, even the very ideas of anarcho-syndicalism and platformism – these things just don’t exist in Stack’s narrative. I understand that reality can be tricky, but we all need to deal with it sometimes.
He then goes through another ramble about capitalism, before announcing that “At the same time we have to ensure that we take the widest possible forces with us in our actions.
Small elitist groups carrying out acts that make no sense to the majority who support their cause are likely to leave those supporters confused and demobilised.
If such elitist actions have a demobilising effect, then they do the class struggle real damage.”
To which I can bring up, once again the SWP's invasion of the BA/Unite talks in May 2010 - how much more elitist could an action be? It’s also worth asking how this logic applies to the student occupations at the end of last year, which were definitely carried out by minorities, or the workers at Visteon, Vestas and Thomas Cook who occupied their workplaces in 2009 – should they have waited until the majority of the working class were willing to get involved in occupations before taking action?
Then he concludes by talking about Proudhon and property, which is still as irrelevant as it was the last time that particular dead horse got flogged, and blandly states that “post-revolutionary workers’ states… would be necessary to defend the revolution against its capitalist enemies” without giving a shred of evidence for his assertion. Ultimately, the simplistic slogans of the SWP fail to provide a coherent strategy for how to get rid of class society and the state that it requires.

(1)  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
(2)  http://truth-reason-liberty.blogspot.com/2010/05/socialist-workers-party-demonstrate-why.html
(3)  http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=8691  http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=6282  http://www.swp.org.uk/about-us
(4)  http://www.swp.org.uk/where-we-stand
(5)  http://www.petertatchell.net/politics/respectconference.htm