Talk About The Party: Conversations With The Swp

Abstract

What do socialists do? A joke-question, perhaps? If we ignore the rich array of half-truth answers, this becomes a biographical question. Because socialists live--or try to live--according to the dictates of the super-ego and because the stumblings of the super-ego are the very essence of the comic. Put the question differently. Where can we find, in our own era, traces of a creative collective subject? Or is the collective subject always only either corporate-capitalist, or irrational-destructive, or inertly consumerist? Socialists, rather obviously, believe in socialist values, such as justice and equality. But beyond the obvious, what does that mean, day by day, year by year, to espouse justice and equality? And how exactly do we espouse a noble abstraction? What might be the cost of the requisite sublimations? How complicated and inconsistent and self-surprising is an authentic political passion allowed to be? And where do those beliefs come from? Evidently not from books alone. From one's family history? From early visions of injustice? From an inspiring leader? From the traumatic experience of persecution? Once embraced, how are those beliefs sustained, especially in times of adversity? Not the high drama of exile or imprisonment, but the grey, cheerless, prosaic adversity of boredom, weariness and disappointment. The seasons of disenchantment, when hope and energy are fading and we turn aside, in search of pleasures less austere. It has often been said, usually from the right, that radical political commitment withers away, in the course of a lifetime. Can that be so? What about all the old socialists? Are they the exception? What makes them exceptional? The year 2008, being the fortieth anniversary of 1968, prompted the asking of these questions a little more insistently than usual. Perhaps such questions invite collective inquiry rather than individual introspection. Thus it was in a mood of maturely affectionate scepticism that I contacted some actually existing socialists, to ask them about their beliefs and about how those beliefs had been woven into their lives. This would be a compelling biographical project, as well as an opportunity to revisit my own years in the party. The enterprise was prompted by a commission from BBC Radio Four. I was asked to prepare two fifteen-minute programs on the history of the Socialist Workers Party, for their late-night Sunday politics program, The Westminster Hour. The brief was simple. 'We want you to look back', said the home current affairs producer. 'Look back on your own time in the party. Talk to your old contacts. Twenty, thirty years on, where are they now? On the buses? On the dole? Or thinking about the next BMW? Find out what the party is up to. Describe where it came from. How it survives. Where it's heading. That sort of thing. Serious material, but with an element of humour. The regular audience for your slot is one million. Which means that most of the nation's political community will be listening'. I decided to interview half a dozen members and ex-members of the SWP. I would invite them to explore the whole experience of political activism. What made you join? What did you do? What kept you in? What made you decide to leave? I would be speaking--as it were--from the left. I would be sympathetic and receptive, and well-informed. I was intrigued to learn, from my first informant, that the Central Committee of the party had said that it was OK to talk to me. This was a project that asked me to reconsider my own practice as a biographer. My previous subjects had all been long dead. I had written about Sartre, Flaubert, Napoleon, and George Sand. What I did was called literary biography. I was drawn to that congenial generic mix of story-telling and conventional academic research. Literary biography is defiantly idealist, in its celebration of agency, identity, and--often enough--unreflective class-privilege. …