How does the Battle of Prague expose the SWP as hypocrites?
To evaluate the sincerity of the SWP’s proclaimed commitment to “democracy” and “centralism” we just have to look at the actions of their contingent at the demonstration against the WTO and IMF in Prague on September 26th, 2000. Let us recall that on September 16th, the SWP had argued as follows: “It is no good people coming together in a struggle, discussing what to do and then doing just what they feel like as if no discussion had taken place.” They stressed that importance of “centralisation” which they defined as “arriv[ing] at decisions which everyone acts on. Without unity around decisions there would be no democracy — minorities would simply ignore majority decisions.” In practice, the International Socialist (IS) section of the Prague demonstration (the SWP and its sister parties) totally ignored their own arguments. Instead of ending up in the Pink sector (for which they had put themselves down) they somehow ended up behind “Ya Basta” in the yellow sector. As they were at the
