Well que, as if to confirm my point above about this sometimes being the way the debate has to be conducted in a certain milieu – I saw a leading member of the SP dismiss the people who wrote this statement, on the grounds that they published it on the Spirit of Contradiction website, and one of the people who is most involved with that site has written some articles that take a positive view of Karl Kautsky’s contribution to Marxism (not my cup of tea but that’s another day’s work), so therefore, through the relentless logic of guilt by association, the ex-SP members are Kautskyists, which is the German for ‘Menshevik’. So we’re back to railing against the danger of Menshevism in a few easy steps. If you think it’s odd to be citing Lenin in the context of today’s political debates, citing Kautsky as some kind of bogeyman is one step further down the same road, he’s not exactly a household name, even for people on the left.
Now this sort of thing might be grand if you just want to put a hex on people and avoid responding to what they’ve said, but it doesn’t really count as a response. The stuff about how the Bolsheviks really organized could have been left out of this statement, the core of it is an argument about the way the SP organizes itself, which is very similar to one that was made by another ex-member in an article for the Irish Left Review a while back. What they say about the SP’s organizational culture is either true or it isn’t true; they’ve made a number of specific claims, such as there being no real political discussion in the branches, conference delegates effectively being selected by the leadership, the leadership being re-elected without any challenge year after year etc. Either that stuff is true or it isn’t true. It would be a bit more convincing if someone came back and said ‘actually, that’s not the way it is, we do have real political discussions among the membership’ rather than just calling them Kautskyists.