Galloway attempting to take on SWP in Respect? September 4, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Britain, Marxism, Trotskyism.trackback
Feast or famine? I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks and then three in one day. But I came across an interesting piece courtesy of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker site.
George Galloway has published an eight page attack on the organisational and political failures of the Respect project in Britain. The SWP in Britain have issued a response disagreeing with his points.
Readers can look through Galloway’s document in more details but it accuses the leadership of being undemocratic, secretive and amateurish about staffing appointments, presiding over a serious financial crisis, a serious recruitment crisis, and being completely unprepared for an election, either to the Greater London Assembly or to Westminster if Brown decides to go next month.
Though Galloway makes no reference to the SWP, that organisation’s dominance of the internal bureaucracy of RESPECT is well known and that their immediate reaction was a lengthy document, not available on the net I believe, disagreeing with every point, suggests they knew who Galloway was talking about.
Interesting reading, and perhaps interesting times ahead for the RESPECT comrades.
Being heavily debated on the Socialist Unity blog.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
God almighty. I’ve actually said kind words about Galloway in the past, although broadly I find him enormously difficult to take, but hey, this sounds great. Cheers for that franklittle. Many hours reading ahead I suspect on the rather excellent Socialist Unity (not my politics exactly, but very interesting and always worth a read).
LikeLike
Thanks for the kind words abiut the SU blog. :o)
LikeLike
As someone who was on the all the anti-war marches from September 2002 on till the September 2006 one in Manchester,I was ultimately disillusioned by the reticence of the movement with regard to the Afghan and Iraqi resistance.I was always the only marcher who screamed loudly “Up the Resistance!” while everyone else seemed quite embarrassed to be in my company!
This was understandable when on one march I was in close proximity to the front line(yes that’s how you can tell that the numbers participating had been dwindling since the February 2003 2m highpoint)which included relatives of those who had been killed by the people for whom I was embarrassingly shouting!
Yet there was also a sense that many on the marches were actually reticent about expressing any disapproval of what our boys were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.After all their reticence suggested these boys were our boys!Why should we wish them to be ultimately repulsed by those they would occupy.
The final straw in the anti-war/Respect/SWP movement’s phobia about losing credibility and respectability with the great British public came with the SWP’s(I used to take the paper)
refusal to countenance both the idea of an Israeli lobby and the notion that 9/11 had been a US military-industrial complex conspiracy.
The failure to engage on the key issues that were used to justify war in the first place explains the current inertia and inability to maintain the momentum of public protest and pressure.
They let the pro-war corporate elite off the hook and thereby lost the public engagement they had to sustain.
It’s a failure for which they should not lightly be forgiven neither by the victims of 9/11 nor the millions who’ve paid the ultimate price in the utterly specious War on Terror they failed to stop.
LikeLike
You must have been popular, Freeborn.
Anyhow, your critique would seem to be from a point somewhere to the left of Respect/SWP?
Re 9/11, isn’t it possible that they looked at the evidence and found it wanting for a conspiracy?
LikeLike
[…] Amazing, though, how his victims will still defend him… […]
LikeLike