In the Nick of timelessness
It must be that time of year again. Nick Cohen has just published/repeated his annual installment of RCP gossip and sectariana, this time in the New Humanist. Unlike last year's effort, he makes a concession to the thoughtfulness of Munira Mirza. Maybe he thinks she's a "cutie".
The odd up-to-date reference in Cohen's article suggests that he at least embellishes his single transferable rant, not letting his word-processing software do all the work. But he still goes in for the same lies about the 1980s politics that I took part in:
"reform ... would prolong the ‘capitalist’ system and avert the glorious moment when communism came. Its members were ‘revolutionary defeatists’ in the old jargon of Leninism, who campaigned for the world to get worse so it might one day be better."
Supposedly damning, but completely untrue. My Leninist campaigns always revolved around reforms - decriminalising homosexuality and abortion, scrapping immigration controls, "work or full pay" as a solution to unemployment, and so forth. It was better to campaign around these demands than to do the "one solution, revolution" line to be found elsewhere on left.
And revolutionary defeatism means working for the defeat of your own national rulers in wars and colonial conflicts, rather than a more general sense that "the worse it gets for them, the better it gets for us". (Cohen probably knows this, not least because his co-thinker Oliver Kamm has just busted the SWP for having a secret revolutionary defeatist position in 2003.) Tweaking the cliche, clearly Cohen's not one to let the truth get in the way of the same old story.
The odd up-to-date reference in Cohen's article suggests that he at least embellishes his single transferable rant, not letting his word-processing software do all the work. But he still goes in for the same lies about the 1980s politics that I took part in:
"reform ... would prolong the ‘capitalist’ system and avert the glorious moment when communism came. Its members were ‘revolutionary defeatists’ in the old jargon of Leninism, who campaigned for the world to get worse so it might one day be better."
Supposedly damning, but completely untrue. My Leninist campaigns always revolved around reforms - decriminalising homosexuality and abortion, scrapping immigration controls, "work or full pay" as a solution to unemployment, and so forth. It was better to campaign around these demands than to do the "one solution, revolution" line to be found elsewhere on left.
And revolutionary defeatism means working for the defeat of your own national rulers in wars and colonial conflicts, rather than a more general sense that "the worse it gets for them, the better it gets for us". (Cohen probably knows this, not least because his co-thinker Oliver Kamm has just busted the SWP for having a secret revolutionary defeatist position in 2003.) Tweaking the cliche, clearly Cohen's not one to let the truth get in the way of the same old story.
posted by Graham | 10:16 pm
1 Comments:
Well spotted Graham. Here's me thinking Cohen had seen the light and was partly on side. Still, at least his schoolboy crush means he says nice things about Munira...
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