Harry's Place

Richard Seymour had been a long term, high-profile member of the Socialist Workers Party until his recent resignation. He now believes everyone on the left has to confess to their crimes:

If you have never, as a socialist activist, found yourself defending a line you later regretted, kept quiet about something you shouldn’t have, rationalised away [...]

I concluded in Part 1 that the SWP view feminism as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle. It might be argued that Marxist feminism exists and the question can be asked as to whether such an ideology is supported by the  SWP. In response to that question, one can say that the term “Marxist [...]

The crisis in the Socialist Workers Party has brought an issue for Trotskyists to the forefront: that of feminism. Richard Seymour has commented “students, are yelled at in [SWP] meetings, denounced for ‘creeping feminism.’” Feminism has become a dirty word, a pejorative with which to denounce the non-ideologically sound. That is the position of the [...]

Today the Daily Mail has published a two page article headlined, “Did the SWP cover up nine rapes?” The headline is based on Linda Rogers’ claim that she made in a post at the end of January: “the [SWP Disputes Committee] has investigated 9 rapes in the past (I’m not clear on how recently these [...]

According to this insider account of the Socialist Workers Party’s Special Conference on Sunday, a principal target of the leadership’s wrath was something identified only as “the blog.”

Speakers, crass or not, repeatedly defended the view that the blog was the problem… When some of us heckled a speaker for claiming that the blog was a [...]

Yesterday was the long awaited SWP Special Conference. One can recall that the Disputes Committee of the party had formed what can only be described as a kangaroo court. It exonerated one of its senior members of rape and sexual abuse of a young female teenage member of the party. The investigators, judges and the [...]

This is a cross post from Howie’s Corner
The countdown to the “glorious tenth” continues with the publication on-line of the Socialist Workers Party’s internal bulletin. The document which has been published on both the Socialist Unity and Weekly Worker websites is of truly gargantuan proportions in that it is 108 pages long, each page containing three columns of the printed collective wisdom [...]

We would love to hear the answers to two important questions:
1. Did Winston Silcott’s brother George ever join or become closely associated with the SWP?
2. If the answer to the previous question is a “Yes,” what were the circumstances surrounding the termination of any relationship between the SWP and George Silcott?

As the Socialist Workers Party prepares for its fateful (and possibly fatal) Special Conference, chief ideological enforcer Callinicos sends saluti proletari da Venezia.
Venice basks ahead of me against a blue sky in the afternoon sun.
— Alex Callinicos (@alex_callinicos) February 28, 2013

Good article at The Weekly Worker about how the SWP’s leadership appears to have out-maneuvered [...]

On his own blog Richard Seymour uses the nom de plume, “Lenin.” Because I do not think he would have the guts to murder as many people as his hero, I prefer the nickname “Lenny.”
I have previously mentioned that his recent book, The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, is not worth reviewing. It has been reviewed elsewhere. What is [...]