Over the kerfluffle in the Socialist Workers’ Party:
The CC now unfortunately represents a conservative layer now firmly ingrained in the party and focused on preserving its position. Many of it’s members have worked for the party for a decade or more, they rely on the party as an income and have become career bureaucrats entrenched in their jobs. Somewhere along the way the leadership stopped being a group of leading revolutionaries and started to be a self-serving political class in their own right.
Err, yes?
WTF do you think all the free marketeers and anti-bureaucracy peeps have been saying for generations then?
Not that young Emma will manage to make the connection of course. Nor Seymour himself. Exactly what is happening in the SWP is exactly the argument against that self-appointed vanguard telling the rest of us how to live our lives.
The only possible defense of their stupidity is Kip Esquire’s Law. That they’ll be the ones doing the telling. But let’s be honest here: if you can’t get on the Central Committee of a party that has barely more members than seats on the CC, then no one’s going to hire you to run an entire country now, are they?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Diogenes // Jan 15, 2013 at 1:05 am
it was ever thus……just look at the life of Trotsky. His career ended because he was off shooting bears when lenin died while Stalin was sewing up support in the central committee. Luckily, Stalin won the power struggle.
2 Frances Coppola // Jan 15, 2013 at 10:08 am
Orwell said it first. Young Emma clearly hasn’t read Animal Farm.
3 Tracy W // Jan 15, 2013 at 3:23 pm
Emma’s a bit politically naive, isn’t she? Calling for the heads of the CC to dismantle themselves – no turkey votes for an early Christmas.
4 Flat Eric // Jan 15, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Yes, and Seymour himself – in his previous post on the crisis – says:
“But one hardly blames those who have had enough of the Kafkaesque nightmare, enough of listening to people spout demented gibberish in meetings and aggregates, enough of hearing the same lies repeated, enough of wildly tenuous historical analogies, enough of cheap realpolitik passed off as wisdom. ”
…as fine a description of far-left political debate as I’ve ever read.
SPLITTERS!
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