Green Swipe

The Socialist Workers Party 

and other cults

The Marxist tradition — Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels¹, Rosa Luxemburg², Theodore Lenin, Leon Trotsky.

«Bloodline

The SWP was set up in Britain by a Jewish immigrant who called himself Tony Cliff.  He had studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and he had moved to Britain in 1947: just a year before Britain’s Palestine Mandate ended and the state of Israel declared its independence.  Cliff founded the Socialist Review Group in 1950.  That became the International Socialists in 1962 and then the Socialists Workers Party in 1977.  It copied that last name from its counterpart in the USA. 

The media often describe the SWP as ultra-left or subversive.  The SWP describes itself as Trotskyist, whatever that means, but they are also big fans of Lenin.  Trotsky was actually an ally and a rival of Lenin.  They were both members of a revolutionary party called the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which was also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. 

Trotsky was a member of the Mensheviks, who were the minority in the RSDLP.  They believed in governance by the masses.  Lenin was a member of the Bolsheviks, who were the majority.  They believed that professional revolutionaries and intellectuals ought to lead the party and rule over the masses.³

Trotsky ducked and dived his way though post-revolutionary politics.  He did whatever was expedient at the time.  He held several senior positions in the Communist government.  He joined his old rivals the Bolsheviks, and he agreed to Lenin’s reintroduction of privatisation to allow the Russian economy to recover from over-centralization.⁴  Trotsky believed that the proletariat had to work with the bourgeois to create a liberal and capitalist regime which could then be transitioned into a socialist regime.

Lenin died in 1924.  He was succeeded by Stalin, who expelled Trotsky circa 1928-29.  Stalin accused Trotsky of treason in 1936, and he had him assassinated in 1940.

Now let us ask a few questions about cults in general and the SWP.  What is a cult?  Who are the SWP?  What are the SWP’s methods?

«What is a Cult?

The enlightened and forward-looking Star Trek TV series and feature films actually tried to dramatise cult behaviour.  The Federation were the good guys.  One of their deadliest enemies was the Borg Collective: a self-satisfied race of hybrid bionic people or cyborgs.  They lived in hives which were modelled on those of bees, ants and termites.  The Borg thought that everybody’s brains ought to be interconnected by antennas to form a giant neural network.  That way they would all keep singing from the same hymn sheet.  Anyone or anything that wasn’t one of them was to be ignored, assimilated or destroyed.  Their motto was: “You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile.”

The Borg Collective represented real life cults that try to control people by demanding conformity.

Everyone has an instinctive need to belong to something.  People search for others who share their interests and beliefs; birds of a feather flock together.  There is safety in numbers.  Some people call it tribalism or sectarianism.

We have all been influenced by cults: probably much more than we realise.  Most people would deny it, but we should ask ourselves some simple questions.  Do we support or take part in any sports?  Are we members of any gangs, groups, circles, clubs, institutes or guilds?  Are we devoted to any religions or sects?  Are we members of any political parties?  Are we members of any secret societies?  Do we prefer a particular way of life or culture?

All these activities, hobbies and pastimes have one thing in common: a set of rules, which all participants must obey.  These rules are often useful and harmless but strict interpretation of them can be dangerous.  Over-zealousness is what distinguishes a cult from a hobby.

As well as rules, all cults have the following things in common.

Cults always have a deity, an oracle or, perhaps, a spaceman who must be exalted or revered as supremely good or powerful and must be worshipped and obeyed.  Karl Marx represents that saviour figure for the SWP. 

Cults always have wise charismatic leaders, prophets, Gnostics or pedagogues who recruit and teach their followers.  They are usually venerable old men who stand on pedestals or soapboxes.  They pose as orators and spout rhetoric and propaganda.  An exception was the actor Vanessa Redgrave who performed a similar role for her own outfit: The Workers’ Revolutionary Party.  Tony Cliff acted out that role for the SWP.

Cults must have a dogma, a creed or an ideology: an uncompromising set of beliefs or principles, which must be learned, believed and disseminated.  Socialism provides a dogma for the SWP.

Cults usually have some sort of preeminent scripture or Sacred Writ, which serves to provide history, credibility, validity and authority for their creed.  “The Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels is the SWP’s bible.

Cults usually impose severe censorship.  They tend to push their own stuff.  The SWP consider English Literature to be decadent; they frown upon it and more or less blacklist it.  They also disapprove of any specialized textbooks and reference books about hobbies and interests which might distract their members.  SWP members are spoon-fed the works of Lenin, Trotsky and the SWP's own latter-day philosophers.

Cults often need an adversary: a mystical enemy, a devil or a hate-figure who opposes them.  The “Ruling Class” are held to be the arch-enemies of the SWP. 

Cults always have blindly devoted disciples who suck-up to their leaders and who are totally dedicated to their causes.  Latter-day apparatchiks, commissars, sycophants, hangers-on, lackeys, mugs, and suckers are the  SWP's disciples.

Cults are never democratic.  They usually have a one-way communication system: top down.  Questions from beginners may be tolerated at first but new recruits soon get the message: “Keep your gobs shut!  Just listen and learn.”  Woe betides anyone who asks awkward questions at any kind of SWP gathering.

Cults often use Brainwashing techniques to control their members.  Coercive Persuasion, Conditioning or Mind-Control is a systematic effort to persuade nonbelievers to accept a certain allegiance, command, or doctrine.  The SWP uses a wide range of psychological mind control techniques: including pernicious isolation and tragic betrayal tactics.

Cults usually insist that their members make sacrifices; they must suffer hardship or perform some sort of rite of passage, ritual baptism or rebirth to demonstrate their eligibility and commitment.  The SWP expects its members to jeopardise their health, safety and livelihoods.  Members are told to organise union activities at work and to provide “truncheon-fodder” on public protests, demonstrations and riots.

Cults usually ask their members to contribute resources: time, effort, money.  The SWP expects its members to attend meetings, to do voluntary administrative duties, to sell newspapers, to buy party publications, and to tithe and subscribe.

Cults are nearly always patriarchal or misogynistic.  The SWP hates feminists.  A typical SWP husband will quit his job and sit in an armchair ranting and raving about Karl Marx, while his submissive woman is expected to behave like one of the “Stepford Wives”⁵.  His attitude seems to be: “You wanted equality didn’t you?  Well, I’ll stay at home and you go out to work!”  Could you even imagine a GP woman putting up with that?

Cults usually promise their followers a wonderful reward, which is often imaginary, distant, and unlikely; it is usually some sort of utopia which can be gained only after a life-time’s struggle.  The SWP does not promise its members "pie-in-the-sky"; it offers them a communist republic after they have fought a protracted, blood-soaked, revolution.

Cults are always intolerant of other cults.  Marx mockingly called religion: “The opium of the masses.” 

«Welcome to the SWP

The SWP has always targeted the same sorts of people: the intelligentsia, the academics, the visionaries, the idealists;  the agitators, the instigators, the inciters; the bored, the curious, the seekers, the hobbyists; the wayward, the alienated, the blamers; the misfits, the dead-beats, the-ne’er-do-wells, the also-rans; the outcasts, the lost, the lonely, the destitute, and the irrational.

That hodgepodge of humankind does not represent a cross section of the general public; it represents people who exist on the fringes of society: they who are searching for something to believe in, for something to latch on to, for an extended surrogate family, for basic help and support. 

The SWP’s organization structure is hierarchical: pyramid shaped.  At its apex is the politburo: the executive or principal policy making committee of the party.  The politburo is made up of the party’s smug leaders: the elite intelligentsia who think that they are the modern day equivalents of Lenin and Trotsky.  They are prolific talkers and writers who publish heaps of pamphlets, newspapers and books, and they expect their inferiors to consume it all and distribute it. 

The next tier down is occupied by the apparatchiks or spin-doctors: the fanatical SWP cohorts who hold official positions, get paid, and aspire to join their leaders on the top of the pile.  They do not just spin facts; they twist them.

The next tier down is occupied by the obliging commissars, who maintain discipline and keep order in the ranks.  These voluntary henchmen quell dissent and persistently grovel to their superiors.

The lower tiers are occupied by the foot-soldiers: sidekicks, hangers-on, sycophants, lackeys, and mugs.  These include rebellious, condescending students who seem to think that they are performing some sort of civic duty or national service, and wide-eyed, uneducated, proletarians who think that they have found sophisticated bourgeois comrades who will actually speak to them and accept them as equals.

Some of those people become institutionalized in the same way that some convicts are reluctant to leave prison or some veterans are reluctant to leave the armed forces.  They know that freedom would be better than stagnation but they have gotten used to the constant and orderly procedures, which govern how they think, what they say, and what they do.

That is why seasoned SWP foot-soldiers seem to exist in semi-conscious, vegetative or vacant states like insensible “zombies” and robotic “Stepford Wives”.  Those conditions have been instilled into them.  Organized, insidious abuse, which includes tedious and repetitive browbeating makes them malleable, compliant and steadfast.  They will stubbornly hold on to absurd ideas against all reason and logic.  They cannot be reached but, sometimes, their inner turmoil gets betrayed by the involuntary, mischievous grins, which suddenly erupt on their senseless faces.

Psychologists might call that cognitive dissonance: mental conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.  George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called it Doublethink: “... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

«Modi Operandi

The SWP operates in the same way as most other cults.  They target vulnerable people: the feebleminded, the empty-headed, the suggestible.  They befriend them.  They talk to them.  They “hook” them with a few undeniable facts like: “The 1% rule over the 99%!”  They invite them to join their group.  All is well, but then the brainwashing starts: a cascade of half-truths and downright lies.

The SWP uses all sorts of brainwashing techniques to achieve its particular indoctrination.  It wants individuals to deny themselves; the party must come first.  These techniques may include: Re-education, Hypnosis, Repetition, Peer Group Pressure, Love Bombing, Rejection of Old Values, Confusing Doctrine, Control of Communication, Meta-communication, No Questions, Uncompromising Rules, Controlled Approval, Finger Pointing, Guilt and Shame, Isolation, Shunning, Induced Dependency, Financial Commitment, Mockery, Deception, Verbal Abuse, Threats, Dread or Fear, Ostracism, Exclusion, and more.

Look at some of those techniques.

Repetition

Anyone who has spent any time with the SWP soon gets sick and tired of their continual repetition of stock phrases: “Marx said blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack ...”  “The ruling class blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack ...”  “Capitalism blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack ...”.  No matter how many times somebody tries to change the subject, the conversation always gets reverted back to: “The ruling class blah, blah, blah, quack, quack, quack, etc.”  It is intensely irritating, annoying, and insulting, especially when it is accompanied by that crazy, sly, grin.

Verbal Abuse

The SWP introduce all sorts of startling, bizarre and extreme topics into their rhetoric.  “Pacifists and feminists are misguided!”  "The Green Party are Nazis!”  “We’d line up the Ruling Class against a wall and shoot them all.”

People are expected to listen to all that without batting an eyelash.  Suddenly, mass murder is alright!

Anybody who disagrees with the SWP about anything is likely to be labelled a racist or a fascist or a Nazi.  The SWP attend national Marxist rallies where they organize sham debates between them and, say, Christian representatives.  Those debates do not last long.  The Christians get insulted, abused and threatened: heckled, jeered and yelled out of the room.  It is just baiting, which gets laid on for the amusement of the herd.

Isolation

It is not possible for a normal member of the public to go along to an SWP meeting, and to sit in to find out what is going on.  The SWP do not respect personal space.  They believe that people must be challenged, provoked and shaken.  The shunning starts immediately.  Bystanders get eyed with suspicion and treated like trespassers.  They soon get accosted by stern, self-righteous, finger-pointing, foot-soldiers whose body language says: “You're not one of us.”

Bystanders who decide to stay receive mind-control treatment.  One of the first things that the SWP tries to do is to separate people from their families and friends, because all cults know that families and friends will try to protect one of their own. 

The SWP also try to limit outside influences.  Hobbies and interests are discouraged.  Members are guided toward political activities.  The SWP insist on detailed study and analysis of every political issue whether it is necessary or not.  That means members have to spend years reading cheerless books written by old and new philosophers; they have no time to read anything else.  A typical SWP member’s bookshelves are filled with party publications, which will probably include the dubious works of working class heroes with titles like “The Thoughts of Johnny Nobody”.

Evasion

People who can be bothered can easily win arguments with the SWP.  That is because much of what they know is received and much of what they say is not just highly controversial but just plain wrong; their dogma is riddled with contradictions and double-standards.  The SWP usually react with evasion tactics.

They might keep trying to change the subject; they go off at a tangent.  The original argument gets lost or forgotten and a different angle gets explored.  

They might use emotional blackmail or the old "have faith" trick: “I can’t explain, but I know I’m right.”  The normal person might feel sorry for them.

They might try to make the argument personal: “Are you calling me a liar?”  Normal persons do not want to fight so they let them have the last word.

They might resort to crass insults or shock tactics to cast doubts in their opponents’ minds: “You are a fascist!”  A normal person might think: “Wow!  If they are that serious, they must be right.”

«If it looks like a duck …

Tony Cliff was probably an Israeli secret intelligence agent who was working for Mossad and the newly created American Central Intelligence Agency.  His mission was probably to recruit left wing activists and to disillusion them by making respectable Marxist theories appear sinister and ridiculous.  He seems to have succeeded.

The SWP is a cult and it is similar to the fictional Borg Collective.  It is totally uncompromising and intolerant of every other political party or well-meaning organisation.  It calls members of the GP, Feminists, Pacifists, Animal Rights Activists and other decent people: racists, fascists and Nazis!  At the same time, it instructs its followers to vote doggedly for the Labour Party, whose members really do include fraudsters and war criminals who advocate and practise euthanasia.

Ask a typical, brain-dead, SWP member why he or she votes for the Labour party.  They cannot explain because they have been programmed that way.

The SWP are just another group of doom and gloom merchants with outlandish solutions.  They pretend to be good people but they are not.  Good people do not resort to mind games.

We do not need a university education to understand politics.  We do not need any lessons in history, philosophy, law, economics, sociology or any other subject.  We just need to ask a few simple questions.

What has the SWP achieved over the last seventy years? The obvious answer in positive terms is nothing. The less obvious answer in negative terms is much. They have wasted lots of valuable resources: good people, energy, and time.

The SWP have severely damaged the trades union movement and the prospects of working class people.

By supporting every workers’ strike, no matter how unworthy, they have helped to bring trades unions into disrepute. A good example of this was British Leyland in the seventies. So called communist trouble makers, who led the union and who behaved like pantomime villains, caused industrial unrest nearly every week; they continually demanded and received “Pools Winning” pay increases until the nationalised company collapsed. Those union leaders were probably undercover establishment agents. Both the government and the bosses played their part; it would not be the last time that an entire industry would be sacrificed in order to destroy a powerful trades union.

They SWP also damage justifiable strikes by well intentioned workers who are just trying to gain fair pay and decent working conditions. The SWP join their picket lines and pretend that their industrial action is the beginning of a revolution; that ensures the loss of public support and the defeat of the strikers.

The SWP’s support for unlimited mass immigration such as the Asian Invasion has played into the hands of the establishment and it has created mass poverty for British natives. All the main political parties, including the GP, support unlimited mass immigration. It is one of their common policy “ID badges”, which unites them. British working class people would be unbelievably wealthy were it not for mass immigration and the web of lies and subterfuge which surround it.

Britain is critically overcrowded; its population needs to be reduced by at least 30 million people. Property developers are building houses on the green belt. Millions of British people cannot afford to buy any kind of accommodation. Hundreds of thousands of British people are homeless. Millions of British people are unemployed; they cannot get jobs because of Positive Discrimination, which puts immigrants first. The capitalist establishment encouraged mass immigration to create blackleg labour which undermines the trades union movement , holds down wages and pushes up prices.

The SWP helps to malign the British working class by chanting their invented “bigot” and “racist” slurs. Anybody who speaks out against mass immigration and the use of “scab labour” gets smeared, and possibly branded and blacklisted for life. That way the SWP helps the establishment to restrict opposition, dissent and freedom of speech.

What was input to the SWP?  Resources were input: people, effort, and money.

What was output to the SWP?  Claptrap, empty promises and double-dealings were output.

Who are the winners?  The Labour party and the conservative establishment are the winners.

Who are the losers?  The losers are the environment and everyone who wants to bring about real change for the common good.⁶

Readers might think that this article is mere lampoonery and a bit improbable.  After all, the SWP do not manage to hold on to all of their followers.  The majority of them grow up; they become disillusioned with the precarious, never ending drudgery, and the total lack of success, not to mention the none-existent rewards.  Thousands of students drop out after graduating; they have to choose between self-sacrifice and self-actualization. 

So, it seems likely that Tony Cliff and his SWP were agents of the establishment.

Look at this. 

The Labour party have just lost an election.  They still have two hundred seats in parliament but they will not use that strength.  Instead, they will do nothing but skulk and mope about and make excuses for the next five to ten years.

Imagine what the GP could do with two hundred MPs!  Without a doubt, they would be running the country.

One of the best things about the Green Party is that it is not a cult.  GP members are not brainwashed; they are not forced to believe or accept anything; they are more or less aloud to say and do what they want.  Let us keep it that way. 

The GP is not perfect, but I think Trotsky would have loved it.

«Footnotes

1)   Friedrich Engels German Socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx in the foundation of modern Communism.  They co-authored the Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.  He died of cancer in London in 1895.  (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008)

2)   Rosa Luxemburg was a polish born Jew who married a German to obtain German citizenship.  She became a revolutionary and agitator who helped to found the Communist Party of Germany.  “Luxemburg advocated the mass strike as the single most important tool of the proletariat, Western as well as Russian, in attaining a socialist victory. The mass strike, the spontaneous result of “objective conditions,” would radicalize the workers and drive the revolution forward.  In contrast to Lenin, she de-emphasized the need for a tight party structure, believing that organization would emerge naturally from the struggle. For this, she has been repeatedly chastised by orthodox communist parties.”  She was assassinated by reactionary troops in 1919.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008)

3)   Was Lenin elitist?

4)   In 1928 Stalin abandoned Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in favour of headlong state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008)

5)   The Stepford Wives was a novel which was written by American author Ira Levin.  It was published circa 1972/73.  It was difficult to classify, but critics called it a feminist science fiction story.  It has since been described as a satirical thriller.  In 1975, British film director Bryan Forbes made it into a disturbing horror movie.  The GOOGLE definition of a Stepford Wife is “someone who is so obedient and perfect that she seems almost like a robot."

6)     Doesn’t that sound populist?

«Wind Up

Some people ask Green Swipe why we continually attack parties on the so-called left.  Well, we do that because they are so disappointing.  They promise so much but deliver so little.  Their supposed opposition to the so-called right is ineffectual.  They have under-performed so consistently over the years that we think that they must be agents of the so-called right.