The Professor and the Socialist Workers Party.

This is Professor Alex Callinicos, one of those upper class Trotskyist mandarins whose biography appears on one site thus,

(Born in 1950 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) is a Marxist intellectual and a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He received his BA and DPhil from the University of Oxford, and was Professor of Politics at the University of York before being appointed Professor of European Studies at King’s College London in 2005.

In 2009 he opined,

"A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves ... and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them."-

Every year the Socialist Workers party's hold their Marxism festivals to frame the argument that the left has missed with regards the opportunities offered by the financial crisis.

In 2009 Professor Alex Callinicos saw the crisis as an opportunity because without them the SWP would be confined to the doldrums and the much deserved status of a cranky sect on the fringe of politics.

With this frustrated ideologue writing in the Guardian it's not difficult to see why. Trotskyists such as Callincos see politics as an opportunity to 'frame the debate' which really means producing slogans that agitate the masses to hate the system and to get on the streets.

This is one reason why it and its theorists played such a leading role in the 'anti-war' movement.

As with all Imperialist Wars, the Iraq War seemed to reveal to contradictions of capitalism in Britain which is was necessary to exploit in order to channel Islamist anger towards the system that required their and their fellow Muslims exploitation in the oil rich Middle East.

In other words, hijacking the arena where any sign of social discontent manifests itself in order to wave those placards, punch those clenched fists with faces contorted by militant hatred and grab publicity for a tiny sectarian group otherwise justifiably condemed to irrelevance.

The past decade has seen a renaissance of Marxist political economy and of radical thinking more generally.

Actually, it has not. It has seen a deserved revival of Karl Marx as a brilliant observer and theorist on the built-in instabilities of capitalism and the way all triumphalist new world orders carry within them the seeds of their own demise.

That does not mean that those who claim to be 'Marxist' represent the master faithfully nor that the political strategies or tactics they espouse represent the resurrection of revolutionary communism minus those social democratic and Stalinist divertions.

We certainly have a long march ahead of us. This is partly because of our own divisions and mistakes, but mainly because we carry the burden of the historical disasters of the mainstream left, in the shape of Stalinism and social democracy.

Social Democracy is a broad term and after World War Two was more a disaster for the SWP revolutionaries than for working people and to equate it with Stalinism which ended up murdering millions of workers shows a complete indifference to reality.

After all, the very term Socialist Workers Party is a linguistic fiction as the party does not contain workers but at the district level mostly teachers and disgruntled pseudo-intellectuals parroting slogans. I attended Marxism 97 whilst at university to see what they were about.

At no time even then did I feel the SWP was anything other than a kind of political cult for people who wanted knowledge to act wholly as a provocation to action, even if it meant preserving myths that could not be challenged.

In particular, the myth that the Bolshevik's role as the vanguard of the Russian Revolution was essentially a progressive force and that Trotsky was a heroic figure instead of a sophisticated political gangster who espoused mass murder in Terrorism and Communism.

Just as the SWP is a linguistic fiction ( what is a "socialist worker" ? ) so too did its members enmesh themselves in curious phraseology of 'worker's self determination' and 'self-organisation' and the necessity of 'building the party'. All regurgitated Bolshevik fictions.

Which really meant trying to agitate the workers to act in precisely the revolutionary way that History, guided by the Party, would direct. The task of the 'Socialist Worker' drone was to latch on to any movement that threatened to destroy liberal democracy.

That mentality is shown when Callinicos drones on,

'socialist politics has always been about much more than elections – above all, it is about the mass struggles through which working people defend their own interests rather than relying on politicians to act on their behalf. ....the economic crisis has provoked the return, for the first time in a generation, of the factory occupation, notably at Visteon and Vestas......

Callincos then develops the kind of of ideas put forward by Rosa Luxembourg, the romantic German revolutionary who actually condemned the Bolshevik approach to revolution that dominates SWP thinking.

...while workers may lack the self-confidence they had in the left's glory days in the 1960s and 1970s, the memory of the defeats they suffered under Thatcher in the 1980s is beginning to fade. The SWP has been in the forefront of those building solidarity with the Visteon and Vestas occupations'.

Yet in 'the glory days' the Trotskyist left was still a broadly secular apocalyptic cult and the full scale of the bloodshed unleashed by Lenin and Trotsky had not yet been revealed as it subsequently has after the archives in Moscow opened up when the Soviet Union collapsed.

With the demise of the secular revolutionary left, the SWP cult had to go in search of any force that could act as a detonator exploding the system's foundations from below. With time their ideological gymnastics have grown ever more surreal.

In 1997 the SWP had not yet cynically hitched the Party to the Islamist movements on the grounds that the ummah were a proto-proletarian force that could be harnessed to achieve objective revolutionary goals.

At that time the SWP was still broadly sympathetic to Irish nationalism on the spurious basis that Sinn Fein and the IRA were quasi-Marxist and internationalist. The only the reason they were supported was because they were anti-British and hence anti-Imperialist. The same logic follows it's support for the Islamists.

In short, the SWP was and has remained nihilistic and set wholly on the destruction of the existing system of fake liberal democracy, a message always ready to gain a following when that democracy is being undermined. For that's 'inevitable' where capitalism only requires 'the facade of liberal democracy'.

That's something which appeals to Islamists who at least see the dialectic between the West's propping up of regimes in the Middle East to appropriate the oil that in generates the system of illusions on which consumerism depends.

Such a neat explanation can be used to rationalise terrorist attacks by Islamists- as the sinister Salma Yaqoob did when viewing the 7/7 attacks as a 'reprisal'-or to see terror as one desperate ( if never justified ) attempt to redress the balance of terror.

For if the decision to go to war in Iraq was all about oil and regarding Arab lives as expendable, then those who saw their oppression as a result of systemic oil imperialism were bound to want to attack those who failed to prevent the injustice.

The only movement that hated democracy which it was fine to challenge was Fascism, of course, because the existential enemy was needed to rouse the dispossesed and alienated against the capitalist system that required it.

Deviations from a "workerist democracy" were rationalised away. The revolution degenerated or was diverted by Stalinism. Not by the fact that terror and coercion was built in to the system from the beginning.

Any dissent from the use of terror for expedient bureaucratic reasons was explained away with the criticism 'OK, but what would you have done when faced with such a coalition of imperialist forces ?' etc etc.

Not suspending the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, repressing a free press, and building a One Party state and then, when workers in Kronstadt by 1921 had no means of redress, ordering their repression by military force.

The slide into expedient falsehood and totalitarianism is inherent in the SWP's politics. They are hardly important, though highly laughable as a bunch of "cargo cult socialists", and have never been able to accept that Trotsky was a mass murderer on a huge scale.