Workers Power have split

[Delroy Booth]

Aren't the RCG the ones almost entirely funded by Cuba? That is to say, a one-party authoritarian state with no legal opposition?

 

[elbows]

My first encounter with them goes all the way back to Blair's first war, the one in the Balkans, when I was a wee slip of a lad. We had a local anti-war meeting which was chaired by a Labour party member and one of the stood up and called all Labour party members, including the chair of the meeting, fascists.

Crypto-fascists!

 

[emanymton]

On the sitcom thing, it has to be a spart an SP member and an SWP member end up sharing a house with a normal person not interested in politics with hilarious results. Hmm, I'm wondering if there should be a tory in there somewhere as well? No better a Lib dem! Yeah the normal one has a friend/relative/partner who is a lib dem and only turns up occasionally.

 

[frogwoman]

Not on a par with some of the stuff on here but I've always found the RCG's position on the Labour party to be pretty bizarre. From what I can gather from speaking to them; the labour party is fascist and so are all it's members. You'd have though the fact that they where openly selling their paper on the streets while me had a Labour government may have given them pause for thought, but apparently not.

My first encounter with them goes all the way back to Blair's first war, the one in the Balkans, when I was a wee slip of a lad. We had a local anti-war meeting which was chaired by a Labour party member and one of the stood up and called all Labour party members, including the chair of the meeting, fascists.

LOL.

Yeah, I would find that ridiculous. I find some of the rhetoric about "tories and fascists" pretty tiresome tbh (i know i have done it myself but as a joke). Learn what fascism is before you call something fascist ffs.

 

[elbows]

On the sitcom thing, it has to be a spart an SP member and an SWP member end up sharing a house with a normal person not interested in politics with hilarious results. Hmm, I'm wondering if there should be a tory in there somewhere as well? No better a Lib dem! Yeah the normal one has a friend/relative/partner who is a lib dem and only turns up occasionally.

I'd be more interested in a sitcom that took place in a fictitious country that was working under a different and more desirable system. The sitcom could demonstrate the ways in which peoples lives were better as a result.

This has plenty of potential, of either messing it up real bad and making a mockery of interesting ideas, or of dying in a freak accident should the series capture the popular imagination.

 

[emanymton]

Aren't the RCG the ones almost entirely funded by Cuba? That is to say, a one-party authoritarian state with no legal opposition?

I don't know if there funded by Cuba but they thinks it's really socialist, and the Love Castro and of course Che. Which always made me wonder why they don't just buy a lot of guns, piss of to the Pennines and start a guerilla war.

 

[Delroy Booth]

At this point I'd just like to affirm my creation and therefore ownership of the idea of a sitcom about crankish trots as my own private property. Copyright infringement will not tolerated from this point onwards.

 

[frogwoman]

One of those mental anarchists from america who think that eating meat is counterrevolutionary etc should also be involved too.

 

[Red Storm]

The problem is that the new left organisations have not always worked but neither have the disciplined revolutionary cadre 'parties' (sects). Those sects have survived, sometimes grown, sometimes shrunk, but never made the break through. I agree that any new organisation which is broader is not guaranteed to work, but I think it is a better type of organisation to build. I suppose what I am saying is I have been in far left politics for 11 years and I want to spend the remained of my life building a new type of politics, one that has the healthier tradition from the RSDLP/new left organisations, not the post war isolation and sect building that came to dominate the socialist left.

Taken from facebook.

Doesn't every claim to have a healthy tradition from the RSDLP?

 

[Delroy Booth]

You've got so much to choose from we're spoilt for choice. I think a sketch show would be better format.

So are we gonna do this or what??

 

[elbows]

To be more relevant to these silly times you might want to stick David Icke or Alex Jones in the loft too. They should only be given a catchphrase or two as dialogue.

 

[SpineyNorman]

I'd like to suggest, "It's an inside job" and "the government/lizards did it."

We should write out some scripts and put something on youtube.

(Note: That's a joke. Please, please don't do that)

 

[emanymton]

I'd be more interested in a sitcom that took place in a fictitious country that was working under a different and more desirable system. The sitcom could demonstrate the ways in which peoples lives were better as a result.

This has plenty of potential, of either messing it up real bad and making a mockery of interesting ideas, or of dying in a freak accident should the series capture the popular imagination.

Well if you want to go down that route I think you need a 'fish out of water' character from a normal capitalist country. All the humor can come from his inability to understand how things work and showing how foolish all his ideas about how things should be are.

 

[frogwoman]

Yeah this is something I saw on the blog of this guy I occasionally talk to on facebook the other day - as I said, heart's in the right place but completely fucked, i saw him write something on another messageboard about how he was "won to trotskyism at the age of 10"

Froggy has made her worse mistake in adapting to this middle class layer who have those illusions in Liberal Bourgeois layers. Froggy obviously does not support the Liberal Bourgeoisie or shares these middle class illusions. The mistake is she makes is conceding to English Liberal Nationalism by even signing up to “We like England”. Trotskyists should set up separate facebook groups calling for a workers/Socialist England. We would pose transitional demands to win workers; middle class; and all oppressed nationalities/ethnicities; women; and gays/lesbians of those classes over to this politics.

 

[Delroy Booth]

Being "won to trotksyism" at the age of 10 sounds pretty chilling to me? how would you go about winning a 10 year old child to the transitional program? I dread to think.

Anyway an adolescence of trot theory and the involuntary celibacy that would no doubt entail will leave you writing things like that on the internet without even the slightest degree of self-awareness. And the use of the word "layers" haha fucking hell I mean that's ripe for the piss getting taken out of it!

 

[Belushi]

On the sitcom thing, it has to be a spart an SP member and an SWP member end up sharing a house with a normal person not interested in politics with hilarious results. Hmm, I'm wondering if there should be a tory in there somewhere as well? No better a Lib dem! Yeah the normal one has a friend/relative/partner who is a lib dem and only turns up occasionally.

Its beginning to sound like Only When I Laugh

 

[Belushi]

Being "won to trotksyism" at the age of 10 sounds pretty chilling to me? how would you go about winning a 10 year old child to the transitional program? I dread to think.

I was a hardline Stalinist at the age of 10, but that's my Dads fault. One day I'll right a memoir about it, just can't decide whether it will be misery lit or a comedy.

 

[elfman]

Love a bit of Trotspotting I do

 

[frogwoman]

I mean look at this:

On November 15th it will be my 23rd year as a Trotskyist. I was won to
Trotskyism at the age of 10 in the battle within the Socialist Action editorial
board in Britain over Permanent Revolution between supporters of that theory and
the Barneites which destroyed the most important Trotskyist organisation in the
world:- the American SWP. At school when I was 12 I came out as a Trotskyist.
That was six months before Eastern European Stalinism was weakened with the
revolutionary upheavals in the autumn and fall of 1989.

 

[Belushi]

If my 12 year old came out as a Trotskyist I'd drive them out into the night

 

[frogwoman]

well i would hope that any kids I had would make up their own minds about what they believed, i would never try to force a kid to be a trot or something or to believe in a certain type of permanent revolution. obviously i would tell them about political stuff but i would never force them to be anything, i even feel a bit weird sometimes when i see kids on demos! especially if they're obviously too young to understand what it's all about lol

 

[Belushi]

My parents used to make me wear a sandwich board

 

[frogwoman]

Lol. Yeah I'd never do that, I don't think that I would ever take them to sell newspapers either unless they actually wanted to do that, rather than go to the park or something.

 

[Delroy Booth]

One of my old lecturers told me he sent his kids to catholic school because "A bit of dogma is good for kids" I had a feeling it was a precursor to being brainwashed into a life of deeply theoretical marxism.

 

[Belushi]

Lol. Yeah I'd never do that, I don't think that I would ever take them to sell newspapers either unless they actually wanted to do that, rather than go to the park or something.

What kind of kid would actually want to go and sell newspapers?

 

[frogwoman]

What kind of kid would actually want to go and sell newspapers?

rather fewer tthan the number of kids who would want to sit in a Tank, I'd imagine The quest for rebuilding the 4th international hobbled by stalinist opportunitism and adaptations to bourgeoise social conditioning suggesting that tanks are "cooler" than newspapers at the age of 5

 

[elfman]

A couple of years old but this thread made me remember it

http://libcom.org/blog/trotspotting...ted-know-about-sects-were-afraid-ask-18092009

 

[Delroy Booth]

A couple of years old but this thread made me remember it

http://libcom.org/blog/trotspotting...ted-know-about-sects-were-afraid-ask-18092009

Yeah that's a good intro I wanted to write something along those lines but more comprehensive.

Like, imagine that the capitalist system went into self-destruct freefall all over the world, and the socialist movement sent out a call to rally all the remaining socialist groups to one banner and to take on capitalism, once and for all. Imagine it's like the final battle scene from Lord of the Rings or something. Well, if such a thing to occur, what would the forces of socialism be and how many would answer that call? If we had to have like a roll-call of the left, who would be on it. Like if you view it in liberal, Robert Dahl style terms, you could say "what if we aggregated all the political resources available to the socialist movement into something cohesive and organized, what resources would you have play with?" Resources in this case means members, money, influence etc. All the things you need to win a political struggle.

Because I think we're entering a very dark period of history where we don't know if we'll even survive as a movement, and that issues of left unity will not be an indulgent hobby for saddo's like me, but paramount to keeping the movement alive and providing some hope of an alternative to capitalism. Suggesting that capitalism is the best the human race could ever hope to achieve is a terrible slur on the human race.

Back in the day tactics like Leninism and Social Democracy were formulated under the assumption that we would ultimately win, that we would by the iron laws of history prevail, and that all we needed to do was refine the tactics and wait for history to take it's path. Tactics like reform and revolution were developped by people who believed that the world was theirs to inherit. Today, to speak of either tactic is perverse, reform vs revolution is a debate for people who stand a chance of winning power, we on the other hand have no chance of winning power by either reformist means or revolutionary means.

Right now we're in engaged in a defensive struggle and what the left is attempting to do is to "Rally to the flag" to defend what little gains we managed to make in the era of Social Democracy from the full-on attack of neo-liberalism. It doesn't mean we're all social democrats, but this is all that's left now of socialism and it's under attack. They know we're weak and divided and they want to act now because they think they'll be able to do it without causing too much fuss from the left. They will not stop until all services are privatized and all political movements that aren't co-opted or controlled by capital are destroyed. They will go after the trade unions and the right to fund a political party via collective working class action, regardless of anything Milibean does, and with it the era of working class representation in parliament will die with it. This is new and uncharted territory and old theories won't help us here.

apologies for shit spelling and grammar etc it's late I'm tired

 

[DownwardDog]

There was that film where the guy thinks that he is a reincarnation of trotsky wasn't there? I've never seen it though.

"The Trotsky"

It's pretty good. The guy is very good at potraying the very annoying sanctimonious bore that the real life LT almost certainly was.

 

[DownwardDog]

I'd be more interested in a sitcom that took place in a fictitious country that was working under a different and more desirable system. The sitcom could demonstrate the ways in which peoples lives were better as a result.

This has plenty of potential, of either messing it up real bad and making a mockery of interesting ideas, or of dying in a freak accident should the series capture the popular imagination.

Cancelled on the orders of Thatcher in 1986. Eight episodes that shook the world.