At the SWP aggregate at Glasgow Caledonian university in early 2001, which I was present at, the thrust of what the SWP sought to do as the about to be SW Platform was to capture the SSP for its type of politics. This was the bullish charge led by Julie Waterson, one of the SWP Central Committee members, leading the SWP negotiations with the SSP. The previous rivalry with Militant meant the SWP believed it could show itself to be the real revolutionary force and, thus, dominate the SSP. It believed it could show this to be the case by recruiting more members to the SSP (where these new members would be more aligned to SW Platform politics than those of the ISM leadership). Come the split over Sheridan, a conversation with Lindsey German in 2012 in which I argued that the SWP helped Sheridan wreck the SSP, she responded that the SWP Central Committee did not fully know what was going on in Scotland and effectively delegated it decisions on this matter to Waterson and Chris Bambery. Both Waterson and Bambery as Scots were SWP full-timer organisers in Scotland before moving to SWP national HQ in London.
Phil Hearse's account of João Machado in 1991 captures the bet at its most articulate moment, but it had been made publicly a decade earlier. In 1981, the EM TEMPO collective, the journal associated with what would become Democracia Socialista, published O PT e o Partido Revolucionário no Brasil. It is one of the foundational documents of the FI tendency's strategy in the PT and is worth reading alongside Phil's testimony from the 1991 World Congress.
The 1981 document got the form right and the content wrong, which is the pattern I think recurs across the cases Phil discusses. On form: the PT was correctly identified as a historic break from the cycle of small revolutionary groups, the strategy of dual membership rather than dissolution was correctly argued for, and the rejection of stagism in favour of uninterrupted struggle was right. On content: the document underestimated how readily the PT apparatus could absorb its own internal vanguard, overestimated DS's capacity to win the battle for the party's soul, and treated bureaucratisation as a problem of vigilance rather than as a structural pressure that would intensify as the party moved toward government.
By 2002 and the Letter to the Brazilian People, the question was settled. By 2003 DS faced the choice it had spent two decades preparing for and lost the bet, in Machado's own retrospective formulation.
What strikes me, reading the 1981 text now, is that it contains, in embryo, every analytical resource the FI tendency needed to predict its own defeat. It just could not bring itself to apply those resources to itself. That is the harder lesson the British cases also pose: the bet was right to make, the dissolution was wrong to accept, and the difference between the two depends on whether the revolutionary current can criticise its own trajectory in real time.
You are mistaken. Allan McCoombes from the SSP leadership was jailed. I have already mentioned this.
No-one in the SWP was cited to testify. You are arguing that it was correct not to testify without noting two scenarios: SWP members were not called to do so; others were. It was easy for the SWP not to testify.
Honestly, it doesn't feel like SWP members were well informed.
I wasn't a member of the SWP in Scotland at the time you mention, so my view is very much based on what I have heard. The SWP merged into the Scottish Socialist Party to build a joint organisation. In some areas the former SWP members were a majority in branches. In others the branches were dominated by ex-members of Militant. This led to division amongst the branches, not unity as political differences came to the fore. When the 'scandal' around Tommy Sheridan emerged the Leadership of the SSP agreed to appear for the prosecution. The SWP refused to testify against a comrade. In the end, the SWP in Scotland left the SSP and reformed into a separate organisation.
As I said, I was living in England at that time so wasn't a witness to what happened. However, I hope this is a useful input.
Jim Ritchie, thanks for your honesty about what you witnessed and what you heard secondhand. The trajectory you describe is largely right: the SWP joined the SSP on 1 May 2001 as a Platform, branch-level relations varied considerably across the country, and the Sheridan crisis was the terminal moment.
Two points where I would put it differently.
1. On the merger, the SSP was always a multi-tendency formation by design rather than a fusion of two organisations. The ISM came out of the Militant tradition and was the largest single component, but the SSP was built from the start as a federation that included CWI Scotland, the SWP Platform, the Republican Communist Network, and others. Branch tensions were structural to the form rather than evidence of failure to fuse. What broke the SSP was not the federation itself but what happened inside it when one leader decided his personal defence took precedence over the party's collective decisions.
2. On testifying, the framing as a refusal to testify against a comrade misdescribes the legal situation. Witnesses in Scottish criminal proceedings cited by the court are required to attend and answer questions truthfully. Alan McCombes and the other SSP members who appeared at Sheridan's trial were not volunteering. They were cited. The choice was not between testifying and declining to testify. It was between telling the truth under oath and committing perjury. Sheridan was eventually convicted of the latter. The SSP majority's decision was that the party would not require its members to do likewise.
Hearse's reading in the article, that with a more sensible attitude the SWP could have helped maintain the organisation despite the Sheridan crisis, seems to me the right one. The framework for understanding why is the subject of a piece I have coming next week.
A couple of points. I was a founder member and activist in the SSA/SSP unit after Tommy's trial. Gregors information about the SWP stance is helpful. Re Tommy. He told a SSP national that he had been to a swingers club with several women one of whom was a journalist with the News of the World. The NotW. published this. Tommy wanted to sue them and for the party to back him. The party advised him to either fess up or say nothing. Tommy was unhappy and walked out of the meeting to give an interview to the Daiky Record. At the trial several women members were called as witnesses and spoke of their relationship with Tommy. Part of Tommy's defence was to cross examine these women about their sex lives. It was appalling behaviour by him designed in .my opinion,to protect his reputation as a respectable married man
You are misinformed. No one cited by the court refused to testify. Alan McCombes refused to comply with a court order to hand over internal party documents (minutes of a meeting). As a result, he was found in contempt of court and jailed for 12 days. Even then, this wasn’t a refusal to appear in court, but a refusal to produce evidence.
At the SWP aggregate at Glasgow Caledonian university in early 2001, which I was present at, the thrust of what the SWP sought to do as the about to be SW Platform was to capture the SSP for its type of politics. This was the bullish charge led by Julie Waterson, one of the SWP Central Committee members, leading the SWP negotiations with the SSP. The previous rivalry with Militant meant the SWP believed it could show itself to be the real revolutionary force and, thus, dominate the SSP. It believed it could show this to be the case by recruiting more members to the SSP (where these new members would be more aligned to SW Platform politics than those of the ISM leadership). Come the split over Sheridan, a conversation with Lindsey German in 2012 in which I argued that the SWP helped Sheridan wreck the SSP, she responded that the SWP Central Committee did not fully know what was going on in Scotland and effectively delegated it decisions on this matter to Waterson and Chris Bambery. Both Waterson and Bambery as Scots were SWP full-timer organisers in Scotland before moving to SWP national HQ in London.
Interesting Gregor, thanks for sharing. I was in Greater London at the time, so wasn't involved at all.
Phil Hearse's account of João Machado in 1991 captures the bet at its most articulate moment, but it had been made publicly a decade earlier. In 1981, the EM TEMPO collective, the journal associated with what would become Democracia Socialista, published O PT e o Partido Revolucionário no Brasil. It is one of the foundational documents of the FI tendency's strategy in the PT and is worth reading alongside Phil's testimony from the 1991 World Congress.
The 1981 document got the form right and the content wrong, which is the pattern I think recurs across the cases Phil discusses. On form: the PT was correctly identified as a historic break from the cycle of small revolutionary groups, the strategy of dual membership rather than dissolution was correctly argued for, and the rejection of stagism in favour of uninterrupted struggle was right. On content: the document underestimated how readily the PT apparatus could absorb its own internal vanguard, overestimated DS's capacity to win the battle for the party's soul, and treated bureaucratisation as a problem of vigilance rather than as a structural pressure that would intensify as the party moved toward government.
By 2002 and the Letter to the Brazilian People, the question was settled. By 2003 DS faced the choice it had spent two decades preparing for and lost the bet, in Machado's own retrospective formulation.
What strikes me, reading the 1981 text now, is that it contains, in embryo, every analytical resource the FI tendency needed to predict its own defeat. It just could not bring itself to apply those resources to itself. That is the harder lesson the British cases also pose: the bet was right to make, the dissolution was wrong to accept, and the difference between the two depends on whether the revolutionary current can criticise its own trajectory in real time.
I wasn't there so I can't say what the actual arguments were. I only know that no-one went to prison.
Alan McCoombes from the SSP leadership did go to prison. You don't need to have been there to research the facts.
Im not talking about the SSP but the SWP, no-one to the best of my knowledge went to prison. We were discussing testifying against Tommy remember?
You are mistaken. Allan McCoombes from the SSP leadership was jailed. I have already mentioned this.
No-one in the SWP was cited to testify. You are arguing that it was correct not to testify without noting two scenarios: SWP members were not called to do so; others were. It was easy for the SWP not to testify.
Honestly, it doesn't feel like SWP members were well informed.
I wasn't a member of the SWP in Scotland at the time you mention, so my view is very much based on what I have heard. The SWP merged into the Scottish Socialist Party to build a joint organisation. In some areas the former SWP members were a majority in branches. In others the branches were dominated by ex-members of Militant. This led to division amongst the branches, not unity as political differences came to the fore. When the 'scandal' around Tommy Sheridan emerged the Leadership of the SSP agreed to appear for the prosecution. The SWP refused to testify against a comrade. In the end, the SWP in Scotland left the SSP and reformed into a separate organisation.
As I said, I was living in England at that time so wasn't a witness to what happened. However, I hope this is a useful input.
Jim Ritchie, thanks for your honesty about what you witnessed and what you heard secondhand. The trajectory you describe is largely right: the SWP joined the SSP on 1 May 2001 as a Platform, branch-level relations varied considerably across the country, and the Sheridan crisis was the terminal moment.
Two points where I would put it differently.
1. On the merger, the SSP was always a multi-tendency formation by design rather than a fusion of two organisations. The ISM came out of the Militant tradition and was the largest single component, but the SSP was built from the start as a federation that included CWI Scotland, the SWP Platform, the Republican Communist Network, and others. Branch tensions were structural to the form rather than evidence of failure to fuse. What broke the SSP was not the federation itself but what happened inside it when one leader decided his personal defence took precedence over the party's collective decisions.
2. On testifying, the framing as a refusal to testify against a comrade misdescribes the legal situation. Witnesses in Scottish criminal proceedings cited by the court are required to attend and answer questions truthfully. Alan McCombes and the other SSP members who appeared at Sheridan's trial were not volunteering. They were cited. The choice was not between testifying and declining to testify. It was between telling the truth under oath and committing perjury. Sheridan was eventually convicted of the latter. The SSP majority's decision was that the party would not require its members to do likewise.
Hearse's reading in the article, that with a more sensible attitude the SWP could have helped maintain the organisation despite the Sheridan crisis, seems to me the right one. The framework for understanding why is the subject of a piece I have coming next week.
I look forward to reading it but I still think the members who refused to testify were correct. Personal opinion of course.
A couple of points. I was a founder member and activist in the SSA/SSP unit after Tommy's trial. Gregors information about the SWP stance is helpful. Re Tommy. He told a SSP national that he had been to a swingers club with several women one of whom was a journalist with the News of the World. The NotW. published this. Tommy wanted to sue them and for the party to back him. The party advised him to either fess up or say nothing. Tommy was unhappy and walked out of the meeting to give an interview to the Daiky Record. At the trial several women members were called as witnesses and spoke of their relationship with Tommy. Part of Tommy's defence was to cross examine these women about their sex lives. It was appalling behaviour by him designed in .my opinion,to protect his reputation as a respectable married man
You are misinformed. No one cited by the court refused to testify. Alan McCombes refused to comply with a court order to hand over internal party documents (minutes of a meeting). As a result, he was found in contempt of court and jailed for 12 days. Even then, this wasn’t a refusal to appear in court, but a refusal to produce evidence.