I'm a member of Workers' Liberty, and have constantly had problems trying to relate to SWP comrades.

We of course have many disagreements with the SWP, not least their failure to support Iraqi and Iranian trade unions against the Right on the basis that the latter is "anti-imperialist".

But the worst thing is that it's impossible to get the SWPers to talk to you - it's always "not the time" to argue, or they want to "agree to disagree". How is unity possible if they won't even talk.

One example was when they organised a meeting at which an anti-semitic jazz musician, Gilad Atzmon, was playing "In support of Palestinian resistance". Objecting to the fact that they'd chosen to illustrate Palestinian resistance through an anti-semite, I organised a leafletting of the meeting - but the SWPers forced us out the building and refused to have a rational discussion.

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4379

What could I do?

That's just disgusting.

May be it is time to organise a front promoting democracy within Marxist organisations.

It seems everyone spends their time attacking capitalism (or attacking capitalism yet sharing a platform with capitalists like the SWP) and never looking at the state of our movement. It's bad enough it's full of sects - we don't need lots of sects with no democratic control, which just leads to more splits. If a revolutionary chance comes and no organisations are democratic then we might as well kiss it goodbye for another 5 decades.

May be it is time to organise a group to distribute pro-democratic material to get comrades fighting for democracy in their organisations.

The SWP won't even let somebody stand outside with leaflets - let alone allow their own members inside to publish newspapers - as the Bolsheviks allowed right up until the end... Imagine that internal discussion and debate!

What do you think comrade?

Well, although at the meeting at Marxism we were forced out the building by SWP heavies, at least we weren't physically assaulted like the CPGB were at Marxism 2003 and other AWL comrades were in '93...

I think with a fair few individual SWP members, if you talk to them in private rather than at an SWP/Stop the War meeting, it's possible to make them wake up to the lack of democracy in their group.

It's frustrating, but I always try and get them to look at their group realistically.

The real problem is that the SWP is too big compared to other groups, so it could just come into the Socialist Alliance (a good organisation at the time), junk it from above and then abandon it.

My organisation (AWL) ran a joint election campaigns with Socialist Party, Alliance for Green Socialism, "Socialist Alliance" etc. - but it's not the same without the SWP, since they have the bulk of activists on the Left. All we can do is wait for the cross-class communalist lash-up of Respect to collapse, and then try and win them round to class politics...

That said, the root problem will always remain their lack of internal democracy - how can we expect Rees to be democratic to the rest of the Left when he can't even let his own membership speak out? How can we expect the SWP to have classist politics when it has no culture of internal debate through which they could work out their positions properly? Sadly, winning over the SWP "rank and file" doesn't look like an easy task - although I've seen a few signs that they're angry that Galloway is so all-powerful.

Producing materials + leaflets for their members is a good idea - I like the idea of the rest of the Trot Left "intervening" in the SWP!...

I remember talking to a couple of SWP members at the communist university in Cardiff which the CPGB organised a couple of years ago. There are certainly SWP members with a few brain cells - these ones claiming they were bringing it down from the inside. 8-)

The problem is the non-Marxists, or the "Marxists" who don't have a clue what Marxism is, who hang around for a few years and get disillusioned because they just don't understand the basics - these are the guys who make up the bulk of the SWP membership, and needed to be targeted with education about Marxism and about how important democracy is. May be they just think "top-down" is cool or something.

At the moment I'm not involved with any organisation, the collapse of the Socialist Alliance and the state of that pathetic thing called RESPECT with that egomaniac Galloway around is just too much to stomach. Personally I think the Labour Party & and the Unions themselves looks promising, certainly for re-spreading Marxist ideas, the Blairites are in a very weak position. I just saw on Question Time tonight, a couple of people in the audience were from the Peugeot factory that's closing. Of course the panel were all well need more skilled workers (to drive down wages) and so on. I was almost screaming at the TV take control of the factory and establish a workers control over it..... The answer is just so simple, especially with the very same thing happening in the world right now in Latin America.

Absolutely, but the problem isn't just with SWP members, mostly the "anarchists" in their various movements are posing a lot of problems for a lot of socialists, Marxist or not, as they see angst-ridden teens doing nothing but smash things up and getting beaten up by riot police - fair to say, they deserve it - but if people think that these are the only active left-wingers, they'd sooner not associate with them at all.

I agree with you that the core of Labour party voters are still socialist quite fed up with Blair who find themselves only voting for Labour as they would sooner have Blair than Howard or Cameron - so perhaps internal Labour party activism could bring about an end to the brief spell of Blairism and eradicate all tendencies of it within the party. It is simply not normal to turn around 180 degrees and abandon all core values!

Tony Benn needs to whoop some Blairite arse.

David, your problem seems to be that we are big. We are only big compared to the rest of the left in Britain.

While there are many comments about why our membership isn't marxist enough, there are little or no arguments as to the reasons behind this, apart from a few digs at John Rees.

As for democracy within the party? I joined the swp with little to no knowledge of marxism, but was soon invited into an atmosphere where people argued with me as an equal. At many points I have differed with the party line, but have not let this affect the level or direction of my activism. This is called democratic centralism and it works.

A revolutionary party needs to be accountable to its membership, able to take a lead in important struggles, and encapsulate where the class is at and where it needs to be going. If everybody agreed with us the whole time on these things, then there would have been a revolution years ago. As people often don't agree with our views (And I'm sure you're all used to this yourselves.) we organise ourselves to deliver them in the best way possible. It is up to the class to decide which party is best suited to occupy the ever shifting niche of a revolutionary party. If we get things wrong we will suffer and you'll all have a field day trying to figure out how and why. For the time being, I'm getting my hands dirty, reading a hell of a lot and engaging with a party that provides the neccessary tools.