Really? you should learn to read then Nigel.
If you think slating the entire industrial strategy, the failure of political leadership over two decades, the failure to retain the ISO (for wholly political - albeit unclear and probably dishonest - reasons), implicit (it seems to me) acceptance that 1989 led to far more serious setbacks than previously accepted, and the anti-fascist strategy has been seriously over-stated...if you think all of that is 'extraordinarily apolitical' well, that's your problem.
oh yes, sorry, I was wrong above. your problem isnt not being able to read. Its being a superior snot-nosed cunt who thinks he's better than everyone else, especially those thickies not in the SP. Remind me of those magnificent theoretical contributions and insights from the SP again? Oh yes, thats right. None. Ever.
Did your Mother write the article in question, or did someone just take a dump in your rice crispies?
The core thesis of the "Sigma" piece is that Cliff was a great man, but he left behind him a succession of epigones of gradually decreasing quatlity. And its rousing call to action is a call to remove Callinicos personally. That you have to start inventing from whole cloth "implicit" arguments about anti-fascism or the collapse of the Soviet Union,
neither of which are actually mentioned in the article, should really be evidence enough that it's a personalised, soap operatic, account of characters at the top. It reads like one of those old histories of Medieval dynasties, founded by a great man but doomed to gradually decline because of the frailties of his grandchildren. Except writ laughably small.
As for my comment about the "letters from simpletons", the SWP may have more than its fair share of the kind of clown who prefers to talk about how many papers their branch sold this week than the crisis facing their organisation. And those clowns are currently on public display. But I certainly wouldn't argue that such head in the sand idiocy is unique to the SWP. Every organisation above a certain size will have its own quota of deeply closed minded punters, obsessed with their routine and actively hostile to any challenge to it. I'm quite sure that when Socialist Appeal split from Militant that there was some fool earnestly sending pieces to the internal bulletin about how all this talk was irrelevant and divisive and really we need to copy the example of Crewe branch's new paper sale technique.
It's completely irrelevant to either of the posts you were frothing about, but I'll stack the Socialist Party's theoretical heritage up against that of the SWP any day, although it too has its elements which are irrelevant now or were wrong all along. I realise that in the SWP's version of history, still accepted unthinkingly by some ex-members who really should know better, their were two basic strands of Trotskyism in the 20th Century, their allegedly iconoclastic, fresh thinking, "tradition" and their dismal caricature of the disoriented post war Fourth International. But in fact just about every strand of revolutionary, Trotskyist or otherwise, had to grapple with much the same questions. This is hardly a thread for the ritual exchange of "our 1950s theoretical work was better than your 1950s theoretical work" jibes however.
Ahem, sorry about that.
