The long hot winter of the SWP

“New International” is a journal published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party and their international tendency. This issue contains two main items: an article by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, “Capitalism's long hot winter has begun”, and a resolution titled “Their transformation and ours”.

Barnes' article was penned in 2002 and was originally a SWP conference report. While Barnes manages to predict the finance crisis and the collapse of the speculation bubble, I don't think his article overall is very perceptive. Barnes imagines that the coming “hot winter” will be more or less identical to the Great Depression of the 1930's, culminating in fascist dictatorships and a new world war. Provided that human society survives, the cycle of capitalist accumulation, boom and bust will simply begin anew. Says Barnes: “So long as they [the capitalists] don't lose state power, the law of value guarantees that their system will start back up. They must only endure; we must conquer”. The SWP leader seems oblivious to the ecological crisis, peak oil, peak uranium, etc. This presumably explains why he believes that the system can be restarted at a later date. Barnes also predicts massive working class resistance to the crisis. Outside Greece, this has so far failed to materialize, at least not in the Western nations.

Another curious aspect of Barnes' speech is that it doesn't mention the US-Chinese conflict, nor does it say much about Venezuela, the left's favourite nation in Latin America. Barnes' political strategy is centred on selling more Pathfinder books (Pathfinder is SWP's publishing company), and a surprisingly large portion of his report deals with purely technical issues of book distribution. On a murkier note, the SWP leader implies that the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was a good thing! What about the civilian causalities on the plane?!

The party resolution “Their transformation and ours” repeats many of Barnes' points (including the misses), adding that Muslim fundamentalism will become weaker in the near future, obviously another miss or even wishful thinking. On one point, the “transformation” article revises Barnes' analysis, arguing that new ground wars with millions of drafted soldiers are unlikely, and that the Western governments will attempt to wage war through other means in the future. (The recent drone attacks on suspected terrorists come to mind.)

All things considered, a rather boring read and a political let down. Only two stars.