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I am going to intervene in this thread though I may well come to regret it. Basically I think this is not good enough. Myers comes out with the same patronising self-satisfied line that I was fed nearly 40 years ago when I first made contact with the Left. Then as now the divisions were supposed to represent "ideas" or god help us principles. Those who deplored the disunity were thought of as naive, lacking in revolutionary fervour and uneducated in the vital protocols for building a mass revolutionary party. So each little sect clung to its particular piece of territory and swept it daily to keep it pure. The "method" for doing this was to rear everyone on a diet of internal bulletins. Nothing has ever come of this. Nothing. Decade after decade the Left go through the ritual imitations of what they believe the Bolsheviks practised. For instance I was assured in the seventies that Canon knew how to build a revolutionary party and we would one day have just that in Australia. In my time in the International Socialists I was fed the same line. Though this time Cliff was the guru in chief. We followed all his formulae and went through split after split. I have actually lost count, but when I last looked there were three separate Cliffite groups in Brisbane. Each supposedly representing an important idea or principle. Now the recent split in the SWP tendency has been nothing short of disastrous. Here I will declare my hand. I belong to the Socialist Alliance. I joined them because I think they are genuinely seeking for an alternative to the clapped out "Leninist" formulae that were supposed one day to deliver us the Revolutionary Party. In the mean time the capitalist offensive goes on. Indeed it is going to become truly brutal and all we can offer to the working class is the spectacle of our mutual bitterness and sectarian divisions. Long ago the Monty Python team satirised all this in the Life of Brian: Reg Right, you're in. Listen, the only people we hate more than the Romans, are the fucking Judean People's Front. All in PFJ except Brian Yeah! Judith Splitters! Rogers And the Judean Popular People's Front! All in PFJ except Brian Yeah! Splitters! Loretta And the People's Front of Judea! All in PFJ except Brian Yeah! Splitters! Reg What? Loretta The People's Front of Judea. Splitters! Reg We are the People's Front of Judea! Loretta Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front. Reg People's Front! God... Rogers Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg? Reg He's over there. All in PFJ except Brian Splitter! All that is funny in a cruel way. But it is also true in a cruel way. I can recall during the final meeting when the faction, which I was part of in IS, were purged that one of the charges brought against us was that "we were the kind of people who read Marxist poetry". Nick Clegg of Westminster School and David Osborne of Eton are now going to put the UK working class to the sword. The union bureaucracy and what remains of New Labour will do nothing to stop them. In that context it is nothing less than a disgrace to continue to defend divisions on the Left in any way. We in Australia for the moment do not face the kind of onslaught that the UK working class are up against. But our turn will come. Will we then still be going on about how important our divisions are as they represent such crucial ideas? I hope not, comradely Gary ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
