Optimism of the Will
I must admit to enjoying Mark Steel’s book ‘What’s Going On?’ penned recently to salvage a few laughs and raise a quid or two from his otherwise unpleasant mid-life crisis.
The poor guy split up with his partner and mother of his kids at exactly the same time as the scales fell from his eyes about the true nature of the Socialist Workers Party which he’d been a member of since 1978.
Readers will have to decide for themselves whether they think its worth wading through the depths of his still - to my mind - simplistic politics to get to the frequent observational gems which stud the text.
Here he is on the SWP’s ‘headless chicken’ organisational analysis as it approached its most self-deluded phase over the last few years:
“During the years of New Labour this honest accounting seemed to evaporate. Everything was proclaimed as an indicator of booming opportunities. There’d be excited pronouncements revealing new strategies with names such as ‘Action Programme’. Rallies were called, the urgency of the situation proclaimed, then everything would disappear with no explanation. It was like having a friend who announced he was getting married, held a huge stag party, then never mentioned the wedding or the woman again, but a few weeks later said ‘Guess what, I’m getting married’, and started all over again.”
According to Steel a lot of the less bovine long-term members are fully aware that things have been in terminal decline for over a decade but they’re too browbeaten to even think about doing something other than parrot the official line ie that they’re collectively on the verge of great, but unspecified political opportunities.
Take this young feller-me-lad from the comments box at Lenin’s Tomb posting yesterday about his trip to Marxism 2009:
I went to John Rees’s meeting on ‘Lukacs and Lenin’. It was absolutely fantastic. He explained how, at the core of both Lenin and Lukacs’s thought was the idea of the ‘totality’, and how this ‘totality’ created conjunctures that don’t last very long, and so revolutionary parties have to get a bit of a nip on and show initiative in case they miss their main chance. Basically, at the core of Marxist politics – and this is what Lenin and Lukacs were both trying to say as the very essence of their philosophy – is that socialists should “strike while the iron is hot”. This is something that bourgeois philosophy simply cannot grasp.recent disagreements could be entirely subsumed by such an overpowering spirit of unity. It really gave me hope for the future.
Everyone seemed full of vim and enthusiasm. There were no real arguments or disagreements of any kind, due to the tremendous consensus that exists at the moment. It was really uplifting to see John, Lindsey German, Chris Nineham and Chris Bambery together, full of confidence despite recent setbacks (based on what I saw today I’m now confident that these will prove to be only temporary.) I believe that it’s a sign of the essential health of the tradition they belong to that
Comments
| 6 July 2009, 2:53 pm |
To be fair, it’s not just trots: religious, environmental and other nutters are as bad. No one wants to believe that things are muddling along and will continue to muddle along when they can instead SAVE THE WORLD from the IMPENDING DISASTER.
| 6 July 2009, 3:04 pm |
xyzzy –
Perhaps you should stand for the “Muddlers Party of Great Britain”
Your slogan in big letters at the party conference could be “Muddling Through”.
The party journal could be called “Complacency”.
And the manifesto could be called:
“Much the Same”.
You could pledge to create a Ministry of Indifference which would publish statistics on how things don’t really change and pursue a ten year plan to reduce everyone’s expectations.
I think you’re on to a winner.
| 6 July 2009, 3:12 pm |
The sentiments exrpessed by the Far Left are all religious in nature.
And so “the scales have fallen from his eyes”?
My worry concerns the nature of the new scales he may want to place over his eyes.
| 6 July 2009, 3:25 pm |
Chant of the complacent:
What do we want?
Gradual Change!
When do we want it?
In due course!
Nah – this is spot on about the Trots. They’re like the Jehovah’s Witlesses constantly adjusting the date of the socialist Apocalypse. How anyone can tolerate this crap over a period of several decades is beyond me, but it happens. It’s not surprising they’re prone to topping themselves.
| 6 July 2009, 3:41 pm |
Mark Steel is a “comedian”? That’s funny. People only laugh at his “jokes” out of embarrassment, though the BBC still like him on programmes like the News Quiz and Have I Got News for You.
| 6 July 2009, 3:48 pm |
“this is what Lenin and Lukacs were both trying to say as the very essence of their philosophy – is that socialists should “strike while the iron is hot”. This is something that bourgeois philosophy simply cannot grasp”
Bourgeois philosophy being notorious of course for advocating striking only when the iron has cooled safely to room temperature.
| 6 July 2009, 3:49 pm |
Trotskyiites are like Jesus freaks, they walk around with signs that read “the messiah is coming,the messiah is coming.”
Only difference is that Jesus freaks know that it will never happen.
| 6 July 2009, 3:50 pm |
In a small country like Austria there are at least a dozen of trots organisations. And they are all claiming to build a new party and remain always small groups of hopeless people.
Most of their members are students or people who failed in their profession. Working people never join.
Many working people are voting for the extreme right. Between all those trots organisation there is only one common denominator: Israel bashing.
| 6 July 2009, 3:55 pm |
“Bourgeois philosophy being notorious of course for advocating striking only when the iron has cooled safely to room temperature.”
@Marcus: Hilarious!
| 6 July 2009, 4:01 pm |
You folks often seem to have a problem with the trots. Ever tried immodium?
| 6 July 2009, 4:01 pm |
“He explained how, at the core of both Lenin and Lukacs’s thought was the idea of the ‘totality’, and how this ‘totality’ created conjunctures that don’t last very long, and so revolutionary parties have to get a bit of a nip on and show initiative in case they miss their main chance.”
Yea, this is why Lukacs supported Stalinism in his country.
Revivsionist history is one thing, lying is something else.
| 6 July 2009, 4:02 pm |
I’m going to buy two crutches on eBay, engrave ‘BBC’ on one, and ‘The Independent’ on the other, and then send them to Mark Steel.
| 6 July 2009, 4:12 pm |
sackcloth, please do that! And some nappies with the caption ‘for all the trots I left behind’.
| 6 July 2009, 4:20 pm |
I enjoyed the personal stuff in the book too. Some of it’s quite affecting. If you see “Iraq” on a page, just move on.
Spot on Hawthorne, and indeed the subject of my finals dissertation ‘”A necessary reconcilaition with reality”: Lukacs and Stalinism’ (it’s a quote from Hegel about Napoleon.) When I were a lad in t’SWP you had to read the stuff too.
| 6 July 2009, 5:04 pm |
“My favorite thing about reading and laughing at Trotskyist literature is their ever apocalyptic predictions. Any Trotskyist analysis you pick up will inevitably contain references to the “shifting balance of forces” and “crisis-ridden dynamics” which are supposed to topple capitalism ANY MINUTE NOW!”
You forget the 1-2 punch. After you tell them that it isn’t going to happen, they accuse you of being perfectly happy that 500 zillion Africans are dying.
| 6 July 2009, 5:11 pm |
“You forget the 1-2 punch. After you tell them that it isn’t going to happen, they accuse you of being perfectly happy that 500 zillion Africans are dying.”
Haha, too true.
| 6 July 2009, 7:16 pm |
they accuse you of being perfectly happy that 500 zillion Africans are dying.”
Many years ago, I was leafing through some book in a M-L book store and I came across a paragraph in the introduction that was speaking about class divisions and bourgeois exploitation among… wait for it… neanderthals. I laughed out loud and the woman minding the store (we were the only two people in the store) looked up from her desk and asked me what was so funny?
I proceeded to tell her and her response -which took me aback and which I also never will forget- was: “You think that’s funny?” “You think there wasn’t oppression since the dawn of time?” “You think that’s funny?” “You think nuclear war is funny?”
| 6 July 2009, 7:54 pm |
“they accuse you of being perfectly happy that 500 zillion Africans are dying.”
And you try telling them that they’d be much better off under the British Empire and see what happens.
| 6 July 2009, 8:38 pm |
Even the SWP is relatively normal compared with a demented sect like the Alliance for Workers Liberty
| 6 July 2009, 9:43 pm |
So Mark Steel was a member of the SWP for 30 years; yet thought that he could make jokes about GWB’s stupidity.
| 7 July 2009, 3:03 am |
He’s not funny and he’s not clever.
| 7 July 2009, 9:12 am |
If all the “comedians” the BBC employs who are associated with the SWP or the equally nasty Greens, who’d be left ?
The News Quiz would consist of a chairman asking himself questions
| 7 July 2009, 9:13 am |
If all the “comedians” the BBC employs who are associated with the SWP or the equally nasty Greens, vanished, who’d be left ?
The News Quiz would consist of a chairman asking himself questions
| 7 July 2009, 9:13 am |
If all the “comedians” the BBC employs who are associated with the SWP or the equally nasty Greens, vanished, who’d be left ?
The News Quiz would consist of a chairman asking himself questions
| 7 July 2009, 11:45 am |
Socialist unity is down because it seems they didn’t know that if you don’t expand the capacity of your programn then it just jams up, sounds a bit like the SWP.
Wouldn’t disagree with what is being said above but the antics of the SWP, the rest of the Trot groups don’t matter, has had serious negative effect on the anti fascist movement for the last few years.
What I have experienced in East London and out in Essex is repeated all over the country. UAF exists or doesn’t according to the whims of the SWP CC. Throughout the 2006 campaign in Barking and Dagenham we saw no sign of them because they wereall in Tower Hamlets with their Respect hats on campaigning for Galloway.
What they did was to concoct a fictional campaign which allegedly had distributed 1.7 million leaflets in that area alone involving hundreds of activists and several days of action. The whole thing was a lie and you wonder how many of the other campaigns reported in Socialist Worker are lies as well.
What is truly pathetic is the attempt to build yet a new united anti fascist front. The open letter from the SWP which calls for this is an admission that they have completely failed with UAF and are desperate to be allowed back into the mainstream. It will be interesting to see what their pathetic conference in Manchester produces.
With TU money being pulled from UAF and directed at the Hope Not Hate campaign the SWP is facing a financial crisis as large amounts of that money was diverted to pay the salaries of the SWP full timers. There can’t be any profits from the Bloomsbury bookshop as no one seems to buy anything and membership subscriptions must be at an all time low.
There was a huge loss on the farce at Stoke football ground and most of those there were let in free because only a couple of thousand actually paid and initially photographers were not allowed on the stage as the crowd was so sparce.
What is moving against them is the fact that not only are they control freaks who lie about all of their campaigns but that the left is becoming more diverse with people who would have joined a Marxist party twenty or thirty years ago now involved in many specific campaigns that by their very nature cannot be taken over and used.
The record of collapsed campaigns is getting more frequent with a demoralising effect on what remains of the leadership. Everything they seem to touch and have done in the last ten years has ended in failure with bitter infighting and recriminations.
All of the leadership are coming up to retirement age and looking back on failed lives might just be tempted to pack it all in. We could see the company being wound up and the directors put out to grass.
| 7 July 2009, 6:07 pm |
Ladies and Gentlemen – Harry’s Place: still providing all sorts of opportunities for dimwits whether they’re conscious of it or not.
nb. This time I am being literal rather than bitterly sarcastic.
| 19 July 2009, 9:57 pm |
I was in the WRP for a brief period in the 70s. I think they realised that I was not going to be to ‘cadre’ when I innocently inquired why they were always going about this ‘Trotsky geezer’.
My favorite thing about reading and laughing at Trotskyist literature is their ever apocalyptic predictions. Any Trotskyist analysis you pick up will inevitably contain references to the “shifting balance of forces” and “crisis-ridden dynamics” which are supposed to topple capitalism ANY MINUTE NOW!