When Comrades attack....
Here are some choice extracts from the CPGB's polemic against the 'the loose-cannon patriach of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty':
"The AWL should have gone into (actually long overdue) outraged rebellion and demanded the man’s head on a pole when his shameful piece...Even by Matgamna’s putrid standards, this contribution marks a new low in his political decay...The article’s last feature of note is Matgamna’s straw-targeting of those who would condemn Israel for making a nuclear attack on Iran. He bundles together no less than nine varieties of deviation from his moronic viewpoint - most are figments of his imagination alone....More importantly, how much longer can Matgamna hold his sect together? This is thin gruel indeed - reminiscent of nothing so much as the senile final writings of Kautsky...Clearly. Matgamna is a ‘stick-bender’ and this an attempt to maintain his hold against what he sees as creeping ‘kitsch leftism’ in his organisation’s ranks". One of the co-authors is one James Turley, a name he shares with the global head of Ernst & Young. Or maybe they are one and the same? Doubtless dialectical materialism is more fun than International Financial Reporting Standards...
And in the other corner, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty:
"“AWL’s Sean Matgamna” excusing an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran”. Supposedly a reference to a “discussion article” which I published in the last issue of “Solidarity”, the words on WW’s front page were a straightforward lie. No reasonable (or even unreasonable!) “construction” on what I wrote could licence or justify those lying words...The latter, expressed in duff “anti-imperialism”, pretend, one-sided, pacifism and hysterical appeals to “international law” and “the UN”, will be the response of the kitsch left to an Israeli attack. International socialists should have no truck with it....
There is a fundamental issue of current politics involved in all this Stalinist dung- pile, into which the WW has pulled AWL and the present writer: Is it possible to have a rational discussion on the Middle-East and Israel — or on anything? — in the existing “left”? This doesn’t involve only the WWG, which is insignificant in its ideas, size, influence (it is “significant” only as the producer of a “left” gossip sheet). But the WWG gives it a sharp, indeed a looney, expression.
The WWG is a strange political formation with a very strange history and political “practice”. Over nearly 30 years they have produced a paper under three titles — the “Leninist” (!), “Daily Worker” (It wasn’t a daily, anymore than the miniscule WWG is the “CPGB” — and the “Weekly Worker”). Their main asset is that the paper passes for a well-informed source of information amongst those who don’t themselves know much about the affairs of the left".
(Pulls up chair, opens popcorn)Apparently the 'Kitsch Left' also goes by the terms 'post left' and 'rococo left', but I think we could do with a bit of Socialist Realism......
Labels: Extreme Left
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on Friday, August 08, 2008 at 7:46 am.
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I admire your fortitude. I couldn't be arsed to wade through all the faeces in exchange for the odd bit of comedy gold.
Rococo Left eh? Sounds chahming, how long 'til the Baroque Left, or even Left Deco?
Tossers.
What's a stick-bender?
A stick bender is someone who bends their principles or democracy for a particular aim, Tony Cliff was Britains best stick bender, he could change the IS's/SWP's tactical or political line at the drop of a hat.
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