Harry’s Place

Excellent. (In a manner of speaking, I suppose. Well, at least it means one RCPer less to pop up incessantly on “Moral Maze”).

And a Mayor who is Opposed to The Politics Of Fear can only be a good thing, surely.

Just when were the RCP last either “revolutionary” or “communist” anyway?

(One also thinks this may be a good time to crack open the barrel of Taki columns published while Boris was at the helm)

Anyway, I think all this talk of “entryism” is a bit, (a) old hat and (b) vaguely conspiratorial. Typical leftist denying of individual conscience and presuming that people only act on the orders of their “organizations”.

I have no more objection to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London appointing advisers who are members of the RCP than I had to Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London appointing advisers who were (purported to be) members of Socialist Action.

Let many flowers bloom, or something.

Is she the one who had a run-in with Anjem Choudary on tv a year or so back when he criticised her for not wearing a headscarf and she told him to go and live abroad if he didn’t like the UK?

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5090/

and

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5038/

The RCP is quite culty. They do all tend to write exactly the same articles, and use the same arguments. Others who have been involved in the RCP do suggest that there is quite a lot of “democratic centralism”, as it were.

It might just be that Frank Furedi’s brain is so brilliant, that everybody in close proximity to it ends up repeating his arguments, verbatim, without dissent…

Is Zin an RCPer?

“controversialist libertarians with a love of GM foods, and a strong love of Westphalian notions of national sovereignty”

Where can i join?

The RCPers are all absolute nutters, but ones with a smart (if ultimately vacuous) turn of phrase. I think they eat a bowl of “discourse” for breakfast every day

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4105

In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside?

Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical!

The CIA – through various agencies – clandestinely funded abstract expressionist artists in Europe and America. Its purpose was to undermine the appeal of socialist realism which was seen as overtly political, but also to make the point (without irony) that free market governments don’t tell their artists what to paint, unlike in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to conclude that this principle still has the same support in contemporary state subsidy.

I think her appointment is so that those of us who are still a bit sceptical about Bozza’s suitability for the Mayorality will look at her and think, ah, in comparison, he is up to the job, almost.

The working class are just not a revolutionary force for change - the Bullingdon club however…

I was flirtyfished by 2 RCP members once - a man and a woman, they weren’t sure what would work, although “neither” was the answer. They’ll probably have better luck with BoJo; if Andrew Gimson’s book is anything to go by, it’s a struggle to keep his trousers on.

Yes Graham ,but what does “working” and what does “class” mean? It’s quite clear that these terms no longer have the absolute intentionality of meaning that they formerly had. And when you talk of “Bullingdon” you allude in the texture of sound both to the “bullying” that these non-proletarian heroes would have been subjected to were they to be let loose to wander the backstreets and shanty towns of West Greenwich*, but simultaneously to “Bully”, the true proletarian hero of the popular (in both senses of the term) Saturday Evening Television Quiz Show, “Bullseye”, thereby demonstrating their affiliation with the underclass. At any rate their ascension means an end to the Politics of Fear, and that is what counts.

*Editor’s note: Term used by crooked property developer Matt Crawford on the Archers to refer to Dulwich

erm ,Deptford, not Dulwich… I clearly became a ponce while typing that.

Maybe Montag will be along soon to clarify what her policies are likely to mean

Zin is Straight Left, I think.

The Spiked\IoI\RCP cadre are a mysterious lot. The chief mystery being how a group of intellectually engaged ideologues can get so excited about the idea that a diminished sense of agency and the consequent ‘precautionary principle’ is pretty much the whole problem with modern life, to which an entirely new politics must be addressed.
Unless…

Unless they’re not actually, that smart.
In conversation with a number of them I was initially puzzled by their apparently inscrutable ideological core. Surely, I assumed, there must be some arcane formula that coherently reconciles the hair-raising libertarianism with all the old lefty crap.
Or perhaps their positions are a deft tactical maneuver, intended to align themselves with whatever historical forces are presently most likely to accomplish the revolution.
Nope.
They’re just not that smart.

The RCP were akways a vanguardist party that despised the actual working class, who they felt had been defeated by bourgeois ideology.

They despised the trade union movement and any form of reformism as this simply erodes the capacity for real revolutionary transformation.

So it doesnt’ surprise me that many are happier working with the right.

They do practice serious entryism however, I was breifly a target for recruitment in the early 90’s (hand written, arty postcards, wittty comments with lots of ’so lovely to meet you again’ even personal phonecalls, invitations etc).

Actually I rather like some of them and played along for a while as they were ‘culturally’ literate.

I have good friends who wrote for Living Marxism (their Magazine) which was a blend of the good the bad and the hilariously deranged.

My favourite ever article was all about the reactionary, bourgeois ideological nature of pets.

Particularly pets owned by working class people.

This showed the irremediable slave mentality of the working classes who were ideological automatons driven to feed ‘pet food’ (created by industrial scale production) to dirty and unhealthy animals that kept them poor and diverted calories from the poor of the world to the alienated slaves of capitalism.

This alienation of workers from true sociaist relationships of community with each other would be ended by a socialist revolution as.

As people would really have each other they would have no need of pets, which could be prohibited in their own best interests.

I have never laughed so much reading a political magazine in my life.

I christened this the final tirumph of Marxism;

‘The withering away of the pet’.

This became a joke that ran for years among my closest left wing friends as we embellished the idea to remind us of the worst excesses of elite dominated collectivist communism.

We gave ourselves names such as ‘Block Committee for the defence of the revolution, Pet Division’ and ‘Ministry for non-alienated Social Relations’: ‘Pet , Commodity Fetishises and Other Alienating Items Comptroller’ etc etc.

Oh those were the days.

The RCP are no fun now as they are much more secretive, though just as barking.

This could be fun though, with Boris because they don’t seem barking, unless you have a historical and political education, they just sound like posh clever people with strong neo-liberal tendancies.

Ah yes you can barely get a feather between “West Greenwich” and “East Bermondsey” these days…..

Anyway why have you turned into Roland barthes?

“barking”

ho ho

“pet” - I think you mean “companion animal”, metta, and even that is a bourgeois deviationate euphemism for “slave”.

She is gonna piss off minority ethnic groups even more than Lee Jasper did, isn’t she?

The RCP always had the top revolutionary totty. Lucky Boris. He should just lay there and enjoy it.

Venichka: “*Editor’s note: Term used by crooked property developer Matt Crawford on the Archers to refer to Dulwich”

Young fogey alert, ahoy! although, I must concede, I have started listening to the everyday story of country folk on a more regular basis ever since it became available on podcast.

One reviewer described Matt Crawford as sounding like Jon Gaunt. Or was it t’other way round.

The RCP amuse me.

Are you saying that Frank Furedi and co believe that Mrs Slocombe’s pussy was to blame for diverting the Marxist dialectic to the point where those who should have been running collective farms by now had to get jobs as Times Columnists instead?

Talking of controversialist libertarians, is there an amusing reason why hp has stopped Blogrolling samizdata?

I think you mean “companion animal”, metta, and even that is a bourgeois deviationate euphemism for “slave”.

Speak of which, my own overlords are currently a pair of magnificent specimens - large furry, slightly dishevelled mops of hair lounging about in a slightly incoherent manner making slightly incomprehensive utterances but all the while exuding a great deal of charm and love.

Its like having two Borises in the back garden.

Munira Mirza is the girlfriend of a Cameron speechwriter, which may indicate just how successful her entrism has been. Sleeping with the enemy, indeed…

In fact, on race and a whole host of social issues such as child-rearing, youth crime etc the RCPites aren’t saying anything that hasn’t appeared in newspaper comment columns a million times - ‘robust, common-sense’ sort of stuff. Frank Furedi and his acolytes are smart enough to realise that the “communist apostate’ tag adds a certain lustre and they get a profile for rehashing this stuff because they purport to be doing so from the far left.

Some of their geopolitical views are good deal more peculiar, of course, but I doubt they’ll have much joy selling their line on China to the Tories or anyone else.

The obvious question hasn’t been asked: at which point does one stop being an RCPer and become a slightly-unconventional right-winger?

She is certainly totty.Although I’m not sure I’d like to sleep with someone who believed the Bosnian war atrocities are a bedtime fairy story.

Adnmittedly, I lost most of my interest in this after someone mentioned her boyfriend, but for the sake of consitency, why won’t anyone mention the Bosnians?

Yes its over a decade and a different century ago and perhaps current members are not gulity by association - but make no mistake during the 1990s, Frank Furedi and the Foxes via LM/RCP were aggressive supporters of ultra violent Serb groupings against the only government out of the Balkan trimuverate Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia to pay lip service to democracy and multiculturalism.

Of course westen intervention in the Balkans post Kosovo has been far from squeaky clean - but the reason -pre-Bush WMD- there was relative international support was the global guilt felt by the international community for enforcing a one-sided embargo against the multi-faith Bosnian government - in April 1992, the Serb irregulars promised Milosovic that by being given the lions share of the ex-Yugoslav armmi’es munitions that they could take Sarijevo in three days - but were stopped dead in their tracks by civilans of Serb, Bosniak and Croat origin (or people who looked the same, were largely irrieligous, very mixed but are divided now because thir forebears chose Orthodox, Muslim and Catholic names)

OK Tim you beat me to it - Yes david “a strong love of Westphalian notions of national sovereignty” is a bit weak no matter how accptable looking she may or not be

David T wrote:
“Zin is Straight Left, I think.”

rofl

Nah David, Zin is a youngish old tankie, just ask him about Eastern Europe and the Soviet conquests, he’ll suddenly get textual laryngitis or vanish

Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 are a bit difficult for such people, and Zin probably supported the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (not sure, best ask him) but these “anti-imperialists” get into a twist when you pick apart their conflicting views

oh, and I’ll bet Zin agrees with the Chinese occupation of Tibet as well

As far as I know the RCP disbanded about 10 years ago. I was a Living Marxism/ LM reader then (can’t remember the ‘pet’ article though).I must say this does sound like a conspiracy theory to me. I see nothing wrong with questioning the divisive aspects of multiculturalism

I heard Munira Mirza speak at an arts festival in Spitalfields a few months ago. She struck me as an intelligent, thoughtful and rather engaging person, not at all the dogmatist portrayed here. As for all the schoolboy comments about her physical appearance, attractive women find it hard enough to be taken seriously in public life without left-wing blogs behaving like Loaded.

do they actually still consider themselves to be the RCP? Or have they folded into one of their front groups? Fairly explicitly pro-capitalist these days anyway…

Harry’s Place, behave like Loaded?

As if.

David T says:

The RCP is quite culty. They do all tend to write exactly the same articles, and use the same arguments

So on the one hand you are saying the LM spiked people are a political party - the Revolutionary Communist Party - but on the other you are saying that they are ‘culty’ …who ‘all write the same articles’.

Well, if they were a political party then they would have the same line, woudn’t they? So what is going to be - a party or a cult?

I find any involvement with Boris rather odd for those who proclaim to be into progressive politics. But maybe that says more about the desperate state of left wing politics in the UK than it does about Boris Johnson’s brand of personality politics.

But we should also remember that these spiked people have grabbed media attention because they are coming up with arguments that are outside the strangling conformism that is modern day UK politics.

Oh, I don’t think they’re particularly sinister, or anything. And there are generally similarities between political parties and cults, I think.

But there’s far less dissent between the Spiked lot than you’d expect from a regular mainstream political party. Perhaps that’s a function of their size. They’re so small, there’s little scope for a schism. Or possibly, it is because they’re the scion of a trot family tree, so ‘do’ party discipline really well.

I find it odd that a group of bright well educated people should write in exactly the same style on a diverse range of topics. You wouldn’t get that in Harry’s Place, for instance. There is a spiked voice but not an individual contributor’s voice. Is there an editor who “spikes” all their articles so that they all carry the same kick?

I think this blog would be improved 1000 fold if you got Brendan or Mick to contribute here

Did BoJo bend over when he was penetrated?

Oo-er, get a load of teh Grauniad on this “alleged appointment”:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/05/will_boris_johnson_ditch_the_f.html

(9.38 and 10.20 comments are obviously drones of spiked, ‘interns’ perhaps)

Oh, well spotted, David. I hope you’ve caused the odd flutter in Tory dovecotes. I wonder whether Boris will react? Or will her attractiveness overcome her post Trot track record? His wife is supposed to be left wing, anyway.

And no, I don’t think comments like the following come across as like Loaded. They’re much more typical of ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes:

The RCP always had the top revolutionary totty. Lucky Boris. He should just lay there and enjoy it.

She is certainly totty.Although I’m not sure I’d like to sleep with someone who believed the Bosnian war atrocities are a bedtime fairy story.

Or perhaps a few pathetic dirty old men fondly imagining they’re talking only to similarly pathetic dirty old men.

Well at least she is a female Muslim advisor, that must be a first - up yours HuT.

In case you dopes hadn’t noticed, the Boris - Spiked hook up happened long ago - Spiked writers appeared far more regularly in the Spectator when Boris was in charge, than they did in the New Statesman. They were pretty much shown the door when D’Ancona made it the world’s only neocon duty-free catalogue.

Given that the pro-war left seems happy to be in bed with Bush etc, why is this latest process of cross-over any more mysterious? Left and right are losing just about any usefulness as descriptors of current positions. For a blog founded by old tankies, you’re lacking a certain sense of irony.

The speculative political sociology at the heart of the Hegelian system asserts an ever-evolving, irreducibly organic connection between the development of national cultural and state structures. On one reading, it is quite close—once you get past Hegel’s terminology—to Burke’s Reflections of the Revolution in France (”imposing democracy on a society that is unready for it inevitably leads to violence”, which may sound strangely familiar).

The RCP comes, it seems to me, from the East-central European Hegelian “dialectical” school of Marxism, exemplified in economics by I.I. Rubin, Roman Rosdolsky and Henryk Grossman, which emphasises the “dialectical methodology”, the incessant movement between abstract and concrete, that characterises the structure of Capital (ie the meaning is inseparable from the structure); and in politics, perhaps by Lukacs (”History and Class Consciousness” = history is more or less the story of the development of class consciousness) and Korsch (German communist deputy who wrote “Marxism and Philosophy”, about the need to adapt Marxism to each successive era and to analyse (the failure of) Marxist movements using Marxists methods of analysis; he would thus probably have had a field day trying to explain how contemporary western anti-imperialism has become one of the main fetters on world socioeconomic development).

The RCP’s current strategy of trying to kick start of the development of the historical subject within national borders (”humanism in one country”) fits perfectly well within this framework, straddling the two stools, moving between left and right incessantly. Therefore, in once phase of thhis movement, their outlook sits perfectly well with that of the Tories, I should think.

***
“Is Zin an RCPer?”
I believe he’s a former tankie: the Harrow of the far left to the RCP’s Eton. But lately he’s transformed himself into the foreign service of the Bolivarian centre-left social autocrats. He runs that awful “socialism for the 12th century”, I believe.

Eh?

Dave, I find that very interesting.

What about Frank Furedi’s formative years in Hungary and his apparent loathing of totalitarianism?

Danny, they think of themselves as “libertarian Marxists” (I sort of agree with them on this, since if Marxism isn’t a philosophy of freedom, then it’s nothing, it seems to me). Furedi, who is by far the best of them—he’s like a wistful, curious little imp—is certainly anti-totalitarian. He’s just for everyone standing up for themselves, using their own critical judgement (Fromm calls this the development of positive freedom). The Hungarian poet and Marxist Attila Jozsef—the greatest working class poet, who is also within the above tradition, although with a heavy does of Freudianism thrown in—says in one of his “prayers” something like: “God helped me by not helping me. That’s how I learned to stand on my own.” The RCP outlook is a bit like that, so far as I can tell.

David T

well I never! Some factual stuff on the SPGB, not mythology.

Thankyou for pointing out that the RSL/Militant have gone about calling themselves “Socialist Party” even though the Socialist Party of Great Britain (whom they know quite well since we have debated with them - in a debate in ‘84 it was us the Socialist Party debating Militant as they described themselves) has used its full name, the initials SPGB and the Socialist Party in over 100 years.

The Eletoral Commission has upheld our complaint so RSL/Militant cannot stand as “Socialist Party” in elections.

Thanks Dave. That’s very helpful.

“since if Marxism isn’t a philosophy of freedom, then it’s nothing, it seems to me”
Then it’s nothing I’m afraid, as by no conventional reading of either Marxism or the philosophy of liberty is Marxism a philosophy of freedom.
It’s a philosophy of justice. Of course freedom, of a type, is hoped for once perfect distributive justice is achieved under communism, but for most Marxists liberty is a chimera, a nugatory portion of civic space doled out to people to mask the true power relations which hold them in subjection.
Bollocks, obviously, but that’s how commies roll on this one.

Bloody well - Islamophobia Watch and Harry’s Place have the same story… whatever next… “Guest post today by Bob Pitt”

http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2008/5/11/munira-mirza-joins-boriss-team.html

I am a commie and I see it like this: the implementation of justice, experienced as liberation, leads to freedom.

Well of course you do.

Most Marxist thinkers feel a kind of queasy imperative to comprehend liberty within their model of justice.

Can’t be done though, not without doing real violence to both the plain meaning of words and the deeper conceptual structures that lie beneath them.

Any system that kept people from benefiting differentially from their different efforts and abilities would require extensive coercion.
This is putting it mildly, if not euphemistically.

I don’t suppose Harry’s Place is really for this sort of chat though, is it?

“Any system that kept people from benefiting differentially from their different efforts and abilities would require extensive coercion.”

O course, capitalism already prevents people from benefiting differentially from their different efforts and abilities—that’s what the class system is for, to channel my effort into your benefit, so to speak—but perhaps this is one of the reasons that it so often requires coercion. However, there are at least two problems with your assertion. First, it doesn’t appear to recognise that “human nature”, or some aspect of it, can only manifest itself in the kinds of society in which people find themselves (ie different kinds of society value and so stimulate different aspects of human potentiality). Second, there is no single “plain meaning” to words: they have many connotations, which change over time. As Eliot says: “Words strain,/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Will not stay still.”

Aware that our bums might be smacked at any moment for veering crazily and tediously off-topic (does that happen here?) I’ll nevertheless crack on in pursuit of the last word.

Capitalism doesn’t prevent people from benefiting according to their efforts. It just doesn’t, amidst the historical swirl of non-economic power structures and contingent inefficiencies, *guarantee* that they will so benefit. Communism *must* prevent them benefiting in order to enforce equality.

These are entirely different orders of injustice, and coercion plays an entirely different and morally distinct role in each of them.

Among their many meanings, words do have plain meanings. Using words in a way that cuts against the grain of this plain meaning is often a good sign that some obfuscatory funny business is afoot. The blurring of moral distinctions being the most common species of this sort of funny business.

Marxist theory is written in brain-twanging prose either because such are the requirements of a theory that captures the depth and complexity of history and society, or because that’s how it needs to be written to mask error and confusion.

I know which my money’s on.

“Communism *must* prevent them benefiting in order to enforce equality.”

No: communism “must” ensure that they don’t benefit to a degree commensurate with their effort so as to enable equality. I put it like this because it presupposes a radical change in socio-economic structure (property relations), and the stabilising legal-political-ideological superstructure along with it—including presumably the ideological linguistic substructure that effortlessly substitutes the loaded terms “prevent” and “enforce” for the more neutral terms (for them, in future communist society) of “ensure” and “enable”. That is, it presupposes a radical cultural transformation, in which different aspects of human nature, other than the desire for benefits commensurate with effort (which, by the way, is Marx’s definition of the transitional stage of socialism), are socially valued, or “brought out”.

There are a lot of reasons why many Marxists write poorly or obscurely (though some of them don’t: Trotsky can be quite a racy read, for instance), and one of the reasons is that they are sometimes trying to cover up an absence of understanding in some area or other. With Marx, however, it’s often because he’s using terminology from an intellectual tradition that is not so familiar to us today, or he is trying to develop new terms to handle tricky topics, here with more success, there with less.

Aware that our bums might be smacked at any moment for veering crazily and tediously off-topic (does that happen here?)

I can’t see it happening when you are having such an interesting discussion. (But it ain’t my thread.)

Anyway we did Boris and Ken to death…

“No: communism “must” ensure that they don’t benefit to a degree commensurate with their effort so as to enable equality.”

Your points are interesting and well-put, so I don’t want to be rude. But I have to say that ‘ensure’ and ‘enable’ are no less loaded or more neutral than ‘prevent’ and ‘enforce’.

If I might benefit from my labour to the tune of so many units of value, and you stop me doing so in order to spread the units around equally, either by nicking them off me or by a ‘radical change in socio-economic structure’ then it seems truer to say I am ‘prevented’ from so benefiting, than that you have ‘ensured’ that I don’t. Similarly, in giving my cash to some others you do seem to have ‘enforced’ equality rather than merely ‘enabled’ it.

The problem, for you, is that if I, at any point resist this radical change then you must act coercively. You can paint your coercions as ‘ensuring’ and ‘enabling’, but not without sounding like Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Also, “a radical change in socio-economic structure…
—including presumably the *ideological linguistic substructure*”
Didn’t some chap write a novel about that sort of thing?
198-something?

I exempt Marx from the accusation of bad-faith in his choice of jargon. You’re right, it’s the Hegelian inheritance. That inheritance however, doesn’t get him off the charge of error and confusion.
In fact, it pretty much closes the case.

“But I have to say that ‘ensure’ and ‘enable’ are no less loaded or more neutral than ‘prevent’ and ‘enforce’.”

That’s the point I was trying to make, Deric.

The transformation of the process of surplus extraction would give rise to a different social and cultural system of interpretation, a different system of consent. You are only “prevented” from holding onto something if you desire to hold on to something and someone else wont let you. I suggest that you are seeing a future possibility through today’s glasses: I’m just suggesting that other methods for the corrrection of one’s eyesight could then exist.

Sometimes Marx is confused, somtimes he’s quite insightful, in my experience.

Deric

If I might benefit from my labour to the tune of so many units of value, and you stop me doing so in order to maximise your profit because you are my employer, and because you can choose to hire or fire me, whilst I must work for you or starve (as there are no other employers around you holding a monopoly on the purchase of my type of labour);

then you have not merely failed to guarantee my access to the full benefits of my labour value but you have prevented me from gaining x amount of units of value.

sometimes this kind of prevention is commonly known as theft.

oh

theft occurs when you intentionally permanently deprive a person of property that belongs to them with the intention of acquiring it for yourself.

That you might claim that you did not know it belonged to another is no defence in law it is a matter of evidence.

Thus surplus labour ‘taken by the state for the purpose of redistribution is not permanently depriving someone of their property as a matter of malicious intent or for personal gain.

So taxes in bourgeois legal systems are not theft if lawfully taken.

The taking of someones property permanently for personal gain (as in a capitalists profit) has a more ambiguous legal status until rescued by the law of agreement (as ‘caveat Emptor) as in Common law contract.

Perhaps because Civil legal systems have always had a notion of bargaining in good faith they have always found it easier to imagine a good faith social restraint on contracts of employment.

Thus basic elements of socialism are seen not as theft or coercive violations of freedom, but as enabling a social contract of good faith where justice lays the foundation for freedom.

RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Spiked/etc are a little clique of libertarians who embrace controversy for its own sake, but badly tripped up over claims they made about the reporting of a Serbian concentration camp. I went to a Living Marxism conference and found a bunch of coke-snorting overly serious arrogant young suits who viewed themselves as intellectually superior to the proles but behaved rather oddly. They had an obsession with fighting health and safety officials, environmentalists, the NHS, etc, and constantly campaigned to give the BNP a platform and against multi-culturalism. Despite their supposed libertarianism, they pursued a narrow dogma that no-one was allowed to question, although it was always hard to pin down where they were actually coming from: not Marxism or anarchism, but not of the right either. There was also talk that full membership of the clique required an examination and personality test to ensure intellectual purity as well as large fees. Of all campus cliques, their’s was the most strange purely for the kind of people they seemed to attract. I’m not particularly alarmed about one of their members being in the London administration since I think they are devoid of any coherent political agenda or ideology.

‘There was also talk that full membership of the clique required an examination and personality test to ensure intellectual purity as well as large fees’

Scientologists then?

The Scientologists at least believe in something, even if it is a pulp scifi novel revealed in stages of enlightenment or “clear”. I struggle to see what the RCP/LM actually believe in.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5143/

…and yet another article here critical of boris. Your criticisms of the RCP is nothing but silly bias

“Or perhaps a few pathetic dirty old men fondly imagining they’re talking only to similarly pathetic dirty old men.”

Whoops, Judy, you know me so well. And there I was thinking I could pass it all off as a trendy post-modern irony. My cover is blown at last, I see. Could it be we are now in the post-post-modernist era? It’s hard to keep up with these things when you’re old, male and pathetic. But “dirty”? All I can say is try me, love!

(On second thoughts don’t, if that’s your picture on your blog; who are you calling “old”, anyway, grandma? ;¬])

So Brendan O’Neill thinks it is “tempting” to punch London underground staff does he?

Tosser.

Nothing that new about the RCP cooperating with the tories. I remember them lining up with the Conservative Students in anti NUS debates at my Uni in the 1980s. They have been driven largely by a consistant desire to define themselves in opposition to their roots in the SWP since their formation and thats now reached its ultimate conclusion in their support for Johnson.

In their time in the SWP/IS were they not part of another secretive outfit called the group or somesuch who also gave birth to the Revolutionary Communist Group who produce ‘Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism’ ?.,

Wow. This is possibly the funniest thing I’ve heard in the last month.

(Ok, I don’t get out much. And I have a weird sense of humour. But still.)

Do we expect to see Boris start talking about the risk-averse society a lot, now? Or will he simply concrete over Hammersmith with a vast complex of nuclear power stations? Or maybe that’s a step too far, and we will just see GM wheat and potatoes being introduced into all state school meals?

So we’ve gone from a Socialist Action administration to an RCP one. Hasta la victoria siempre!

In their time in the SWP/IS were they not part of another secretive outfit called the group or somesuch who also gave birth to the Revolutionary Communist Group who produce ‘Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism’ ?.,

They both came out of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency.

They both came out of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency.

No they didn’t. The RCG had been part of the “right opposition” in IS, and was formed by the supporters of David Yaffe after their expulsion from IS and their break with the supporters of Roy Tearse. The predecessor of the RCP, the RCT, was expelled from the RCG in 1976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Group_(UK)

David T’s hatred of Trots, much like his hatred of Islamists, is evidently not overburdened with any knowledge of the subject.

Screwed up the code for that link. I’ll try again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Group_(UK)

The RCP claim that this is not true. They claim that the RCG left the RCT (which then became the RCP), and that they continued onwards, after the RCG split away from them.

The RCG could hardly have “left the RCT”, since the RCG was formed out of a split from the IS some two or three years before the RCT came into existence. The RCT’s claim was that they were upholding the political principles on which the RCG was founded but which the RCG majority had abandoned. Organisationally, however, the RCT was a split from the RCG.

On the organisational splits I take the side of Anon over David T here. The way Anon describes it is my understanding and it is in line with what Denver Walker states in his amusing book Quite Right Mr Trotsky! (London: Harney and Jones, 1985) pp. 41-42

Ah right… that may well have been it.

Wow, and there was I thinking that those of the Left(s) persuasion found it easier to crack a Brazil nut with their teeth than crack a joke. What a thread; fun and information all at once.
Incidentally, did Marx write in English or German? If the former, it was his second language; if the latter, perhaps he has been badly (execrably) translated.
Engels is a cracking good read at times, too.

Labour is used to entryism. The Tories aren’t.

That may not be quite true. According to Sean Gabb, the Libertarian Alliance had its own project of Tory entryism at around the time of Militant.