I hope you’ll forgive this Yank for finding the crackup of the Respect coalition and (now in process) the Socialist Workers Party endlessly fascinating.
However I just can’t force myself to the wade through the endless position papers by various SWP bigshots which have been appearing at the Socialist (dis)Unity blog. Occasionally there appears a brief and blinding flash of insight (e.g., Chris Harman’s disparaging remark about “right wing Islamists”), but more often you get a tiresome compendium of complaints about poor leadership, personalized disputes among the Central Committee and lack of democratic participation by the rank-and-file (which can be remedied within proper Leninist bounds, of course).
After glancing through several of these multi-thousand word documents, my heart leapt when I saw the latest contribution from Alex Callinicos (WHAT’S GOING ON – A REPLY TO JOHN REES) posted at SU. At first glance it appeared that Comrade Callinicos had managed what no doctrinaire leftist involved in an internal dispute has ever done– that is, to compress his entire case into two brief paragraphs.
This, I thought, was the kind of Trotskyism I could respect. But then my eye fell on the dreaded word: (more…). And more there is.
And so the SWP’s long hard slog to irrelevance continues.
Update: Hmm. Looks like David T and I were thinking more or less along the same lines at more or less the same time. So I’ll close the comments box here and direct all comments to his post above.
David T adds… Sorry Gene.