Some poor innocents can get suckered into thinking that the SWP works with other groups to organise events and mobilise folk; even that their paper-selling could in some way be seen as free speech and an understandable desire to argue their case.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the true facts:

1. The SWP was founded in 1973 as part of a secret plan cooked up between MI5, the CIA, the KGB, Mossad and the Tufty Club.

2. Its aim is to demoralise and 'turn' the vast numbers of people who effectively oppose capitalism and imperialism by smoking spliffs and saying 'tut' at the news, by luring them into diversionary activities like demos and marches.

3. All SWP members agree upon joining to have a small clockwork Trotsky inserted in their brain who will self-destruct if they ever deviate from 'building the Party'. This is why no SWP members have jobs or kids or ever laugh, dance or have sex.

4. Many trade union activists have some respect for the SWP and even read their paper; thus proving what sell-outs the SWP are, since we all know trade unions are bourgeois tools and trade unionists are tabloid-reading knuckle-dragging morons without the political sophistication prevalent among the better class of anti-capitalist.

5. Anyone attending Globalise Resistance or Anti-Nazi League meetings will note that they are asked to sign in. For further info? No; so that at a later date the SWP can replace you with a clone designed in one of their vast Leninist robot factories hidden under the North Pole.

6. All the SWP leadership are giant alien lizards under the direct control of Yog-Sothoth, an alien deity from the Outer Realms.

So now you know.

The last post exposing the SWP seems exactly right, a useful corrective to the supine acceptance of SWP strategy that dominates Indymedia discussion lists(!?)

However, there are good things about the SWP. For example, the way that, whenever they organise a demo, be it Brighton, Barcelona or Whitstable, attendance figures soar into at least the lower hundred-thousands - once it's been reported in an SWP magazine or paper that is. How do they do it?

The only thing that's more incredible than SWP organising skills is the awe-inspiring backseat driving abilities of the UKs anarchists who never fail to come up with critical, historical, and tactical critiques of the Trotskyist 'trolls' (while apparently rapidly losing power in the 'Movement' they helped create).

Indeed the two groups, for all their no doubt sincere and committed constituencies (both are due respect and criticism), would seem to be locked into a discursive embrace, a kind of ongoing love-hate clinch no doubt fuelled by SWP incursions and successes on formerly anarchist anti-corporate-globalisation territory but which, like the Spanish Civil war, predates this particular spat/snog. In reality, anarchists have been just as likely to jump into bed with social democrat reformists or even change their shirts from socialist to fascist as any Bad Bolsheviks; many of the father figures of anarchism were avowed anti-semites, their analyses of 19th century capitalism as flawed and simplistic as (many)contemporary anarchist takes on the complexitites of globalisation; today there are certainly proto-fascist anarchists (read Stewart Home's critiques of Green Anarchist for example)as much as there are robotic / reformist SWPers. However, if the anarchists tend toward spliff-smoking inertia and carping and the swp to sexless rigidity and placard-waving conformism (both caricatures i see on this site), why do they find each other so attractive? Perhaps because there is an ongoing process of mutual and reciprocal self-definition going on, each finding their identity in opposition to the other and thus, ultimately, asserting an underlying identity they do not suspect or acknowledge.

Perhaps there are other leftist traditions beyond the Trotskyist and Bakuninite which deserve more of an airing on this list. I believe that a valid anti-capitalism that is neither Trotskyist and party-based/ proto-stalinist nor anarchist and (eg) essentialist/ proto-fascist is possible and that if this is so many people people who currently define themselves as anarchists or trotskyists may find themselves caught up in and transformed by the process of realizing this - as some of the posts here indicate, we are not fixed in our political identities, many an anarchist admits to 'flirting' with the swp and vice versa, the thing now is to evolve politically beyond the current sectarianism (and mutually reinforcing antagonisms)without giving any ground to the police and the bureaucrats of revolution, time to flirt with some other options rather than engaing in the old trot-anarchist two-step ad infinitum. Perhaps the anti-globalisation struggle's greatest gift will be to move us beyond the incredibly tedious cliches of the old left, anarchist and trot, into a new and more fertile period of political contestation (if we aren't all arrested in advance for wearing the wrong t-shirts, that is).
Anyway, I seem to remember reading about other strains of leftism (non-reformist) than the swp and anarchists - perhaps if there's anyone out there who represents them or is at least interested in other perspectives they'd like to say something about all this?
Ben

looks like we are well and truly split......great stuff........ divide and conquer and so it keeps repeating! nice critiques and meanwhile the shit hits the fan
yawn!