"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, May 22, 2014

SWP: Outriders for the Establishment

Racists?

EXTRACT: There is another big problem with the SWP’s overall approach. In the May 6 Socialist Worker we discover that the comrades want to build an “anti-racist core” in the working class.2 In reality though, that does not amount to much more than standing outside Ukip meetings idiotically shouting ‘Racist!’ at those going inside. But it is pretty clear that there is already an “anti-racist core” in the working class - as well as in society as a whole. Yet, if we were to believe the SWP, we would have to draw precisely the opposite conclusion: not only the 30% or so who vote for Ukip in the EU elections will be supporting a “racist” party, but so too will about 99% of the others - Tories, Lib Dems, Labour, No2EU ... A racist landslide, it seems.

Bluntly, the SWP is being tactically, strategically, politically and theoretically stupid. It is placing itself in a position where the mainstream parties, especially the Tories - appreciate the irony if you can - are able to turn around to the SWP and say, ‘Thanks for the good job you are doing for us’ - as outriders for the Westminster establishment. The implication of Stand up to Ukip is that you can vote for any of the ‘respectable’ parties - that is entirely unproblematic. As Stand up to Ukip innocently declares on its website, “people of goodwill” must come together to oppose Ukip “regardless of our differing views on Europe or other political issues” - not much ambiguity there: vote Tory if you have to.
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Posted by at 12:47 pm

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