When a company shows signs of weakness – poor financial results or drift in the boardroom, its competitors start to pay much closer attention to it. Might they they be able to take advantage of its recent bad luck or management incompetence and seize market share from the stumbling enterprise? Perhaps some staff can be poached? Plans are hatched in boardrooms with the same degree of sentimentality a butcher with a steel cleaver has for the side of beef before him on the table.
That’s how capitalism works, but what about socialism? Surely things are completely different and comradely solidarity is the watchword?
Don’t bet the farm on it.
Everyone who reads a newspaper is aware that George Galloway is in more political, financial and legal trouble than he’s ever been in before. We know also that the extent of that trouble is slowly filtering through to his comrades and underlings in the Respect Coalition and has recently started manifesting itself as a reluctance to commit too much time or energy to a political party so closely linked to its leaders personal fortunes.
That the party leadership allowed, in an amazing act of hubris, Galloway’s name to be so intimately associated with Respect that it appeared as part of the official name of the organisation during the May General election is now looking more and more like a fundamental tactical mistake as each new accusation, legal action or investigation surfaces against Galloway.
Well what would you do if you were a competing leftwing organisation and fi-fi-fo-fum you could smell the blood of a wounded Scotsman?
the Guardian Newsblog has the answer:
Sunday will see the Socialist party – which shot to prominence in the 1980s as Militant, the Trotskyist group of socialist infiltrators into the Labour party who took control of Liverpool city council – call for a new mass party “to represent working people”.
The signing of the declaration will take place, with deliberate irony (or possibly not), in Room 101 of the University of London Union
Anyone who has watched nature programmes on television and stared fascinated as packs of opportunistic hyenas start to nip the skin of wounded but still-kicking wildebeest might want to keep an eye on the respective fortunes of Respect and the newly resurrected Militant Tendency.
Oh sure, the Millies talk about ‘left unity’ and ‘federal structures’ but then in the business world ruthless corporate takeovers are dressed up with talk of ‘synergies’ and ‘new paradigms’. And we all know what happens after these words start to fly.