Terry Wrigley argues that socialist thinking has become dogmatic and not dialectical on four key issues: precariousness, the trade union bureaucracy, electoral alliances and anti-fascism in a piece originally written last September for the SWP’s Internal Bulletin.
The EDL and BNP represent serious threats and we are right to combat them with great energy, but this may not be the form which repression and counter-revolution takes in the future, any more than organised racism was at the heart of Mussolini’s or Franco’s fascism, or Pinochet’s coup in Chile. The ruling class strategy, as manifested by Cameron’s gang, is more complex in its creation of divisions in the working class.
It has worked not only to create ethnic division, but to denigrate benefit claimants, stigmatise the disabled, create the delusion that public sector workers are privileged and self-seeking, and that unemployment is caused by idleness or stupidity. They seek to replace solidarity and mutuality with a war of all against all – the un-making of the working class.
► Read “Crisis – which crisis?” here.
Note: This piece was published before rs21 was established as an independent organisation in January 2014. rs21 was founded by a group of people who had been in the opposition within the SWP and who left in response to its persistent mishandling of rape and sexual harassment allegations against a leading member.
