British Trotskyism
Jul 10 2008 14:38
#32
syndicalist wrote:
Hey Catch, what does "blinkered" mean? I see you use it but I have no idea what it means.
It is a term that comes form horse racing. Blinkers are the things that you put on the horses eyes to make sure it only looks in one direction (straight ahead). Blinkered is the adjective, so it means something like narrow minded, focused on one thing...
Devrim
Jul 10 2008 14:40
#33
catch wrote:
Devrim wrote:
and we get called 'nutjobs'.Who called you a nutjob, or is there some news we haven't been told?
No, but we are in solidarity with them. We as in our tendency.
Devrim
Jul 10 2008 14:41
#34
you are in solidarity with nutjobs.
well well.
Jul 10 2008 15:18
#35
syndicalist wrote:
Hey Catch, what does "blinkered" mean? I see you use it but I have no idea what it means.
It's from cart/race horses - they put 'blinkers' on them so they can only see forwards to avoid panics from seeing stuff at the side. weeler used it in a very poor attempt to insult me in response to my criticising the (supposedly practical and outward looking) behaviour of the WSM joining groups like HOPI.
Jul 9 2009 23:11
#36
i spent a few years in the madness of trotworld. very nasty ways of keeping discipline within and the guru pricks at the top just love themselves. the group is a support mechanism for sad bastards egos- a procurement forum to provide sick drunken middle aged men with young women- not just Healy!
i was in a scout hut in oxford with about one hundred other believers when the big wig (John Lister it was- the merger between Alan Thornet and Sean Matgamna's mobs) told us "Comrades this is the most significant coming together of the working class since Lenin addressed the...." my mate Jamie said "Pint?" and I knew my days in the vanguard were numbered.
Jul 17 2009 10:17
#37
I think pre-war continuities might also have something to do with the prevalence of Trot versus Maoist groups on the far left.
Countries like the U.S., U.K., and France had relatively significant Trotskyist organizations before the outbreak of WWII, and the post-war developments simply represent a continuity with that initial "strength".
In Germany, by contrast, the KPD, in its ultra-left "third period", was the overwhelmingly dominant force on the German left (not counting the SPD, of course) before the National Socialists came to power. In the 1970s, when SDS activists started constructing communist groups, the main expression was in "anti-revisionist" organizations seeking to reconstruct the KPD. Despite Ernest Mandel's prestige in the eyes of SDS activists like Rudi Dutschke, the USFI group, the GIM, was always really small compared to the plethora of K-groups. There were also a handful of groups (Proletarische Front in Hamburg, Revolutionärer Kampf in Frankfurt) that were oriented towards Operaismo (Potere Operaio in the case of the former, Lotta Continua in the case of the latter). The Brit SWP's satellite, the SAG, always had an extremely marginal existence, until the mid-1990s, when they sent their activists into the youth group of the SPD to do entryism, thus emerging later as "Linksruck".
Jul 17 2009 12:25
#38
additionally, the German Trotskyists did entryism in the SPD from 1951 to 1969 and had no visible publication in that period which made it difficult for e.g. revolting students to join them ... another thing was, that the criteria for becoming a member of the GIM and of the Spartacusbund (the other main trotskyist group in Germany during the 70ies) were higher than in most maoist groups, they only recruited people whom they considered to be really dedicated activists, they did not take everybody like the paperselling currents of "British trotskyism" (which only became influential during the 80ies & 90ies)
Jul 17 2009 15:55
#39
Obviously you can't keep up with everything, but I didn't realise that the WSM signed up with HOPI. Is there a spirited defence of this somewhere?
Jul 18 2009 12:02
#40
There was this thread here: HOPI and anti-war organisation.
Jul 18 2009 12:23
#41
Ed wrote:
There was this thread here: HOPI and anti-war organisation.
I'd forgotten about that thread. Catch is the man.
Oct 3 2009 18:49
#42
The WRP met with Libyan officials in 1977 and issued a joint statement, opposing Zionism, U.S. imperialism and Anwar Sadat. There were immediate suggestions that this statement might be linked to Libyan funding for the party's newspaper, News Line.[9] Close links continued, with party members regularly speaking at official events in Libya.[10] In 1981, the Sunday Telegraph alleged that News Line, was financed by money from Muammar al-Gaddafi's government.[11] In 1983, the Money Programme made similar claims, which were repeated by the Socialist Organiser newspaper, and the WRP chose to sue them, but soon abandoned the case.[12] When, a little later, the WRP disintegrated, an investigation was carried out by the leadership of the ICFI, with the support of Mike Banda and Cliff Slaughter, leading figures in the WRP. The report concluded that the WRP had collected information for Libyan Intelligence. As printed by Solidarity, the report claimed over £1,000,000 had been received by the group from Libya and several Middle Eastern governments, between 1977 and 1983. While only a small proportion of this is alleged to have come from Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government, it draws particular attention to photographs which it claims WRP members were instructed to take of demonstrations of opponents of Saddam Hussein, and it states were later handed to the Iraqi embassy.[13] Dave Bruce, who oversaw the printing press, claims that income from Libya mostly covered the cost of raw materials for printing work for them, including copies of the Green Book, and that the party could otherwise cover its own costs
This doesn't answer the question. Simply defending Lenin and the Bolsheviks as being a proletarian current that got many things wrong doesn't make them "Leninists". On the basis of this criteria, they are also Luxemburgists, Councillists, Bordigists, Trotskyists, and even anarchists (given that they state quite openly in recent articles that the CNT was a proletarian current, even if it ultimately betrayed like the Bolsheviks and Trotskyists did).
Using the term "Leninism" in the way it's being used here empties it of any significant content beyond being a term of abuse.