SWP posters and leaflets at an election rally at George Square, Glasgow

Who will teach the teachers?

Mike Gonzalez has written a discussion paper on the crisis in the SWP and the relationship between party and class. 

We should stop trading quotes from Lenin. Not that he has not much to teach us, but that the first lesson he will offer is that the forms and methods of organization of revolutionaries will be shaped by the historical circumstance, and will change constantly as those circumstances change. There are no rules to be applied, no constitutions to obey. There is a revolutionary method – one part of which acknowledges that the teachers must themselves be taught by those they set out to instruct.

► Read “Who will teach the teachers?” here.

Mike’s article is a response to Alex Callinicos’s “Is Leninism finished?”, a justification of the SWP leadership’s conduct published in the January 2013 issue of Socialist Review. It was offered to party publications but the offer was turned down.

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.