Equal Opportunism
The SWP has a history of indiscriminately using “useful idiots”
Nigel Farage was condemned on Breakfast TV for saying that behind BLM is a Marxist organisation, with an agenda of overthrowing capitalism by social revolution.
Nigel called Brexit right, and the corona crisis wrong. And on the BLM issue, he’s being confused by a Kabuki mask.
Watching Gary Mcfarlane’s revealing interview with Mike Graham on Talk Radio, I was transported back 40 years to street corners in Islington, Pentonville and Hackney.
I was there, physically confronting the National Front. Sticks and stones can indeed break your bones. NF on one side, my lot on the other and the Met hanging around the corners, looking for enough people to fill up their black van quota.
Now, I’m not saying that I was braver than the statue toppling stalwarts of Bristol. But our opponents were rather better at fighting back. Still got the wound and bruises to prove it somewhere.
I can’t claim I was very good at the steel toecaps method of persuasion. Strongly worded writing was definitely more my strong point. And I worked in that too. Seriously analysing racism in the UK: its origins and its currents and structures in present day society.
I thought of ringing round the notable anti-racist thinkers of those days: Frank Furedi (now a sociology lecturer); Mick Hume (now a leader writer). But I know what they’d say about statue toppling. It’s tragedy dressed up as farce: to borrow from Karl Marx. Who, by the way, thought that what he called “negroid races” were backward and hopeless.
That Marxist organisation - the SWP -has always been the opportunist butterfly of the left. You can read for yourself on the SWP website :
The SWP strategy has always been to use – with equal opportunism – any social movement which in its analysis, can advance socialist revolution. Well meaning people who, in Lenin’s phrase, are “useful idiots”.
Like the SWP front organisation: the Anti-Nazi League. Using British patriotism – embodied in statuary by Winton Churchill – to fight racism. It was a standing joke: do the members of the National Front really bear party cards for the national Socialist German Worker’s Party? Because that’s what a Nazi is. Or rather was, 80 years ago. It might be remembered that their Fuhrer poisoned his dog, then his wife, then shot himself. Difficult to be a Nazi after that.
The same goes for using the attack word “fascist”: 80 years after the leader of that lot Mr Mussolini ended up being shot and hanged upside down from a tree outside a petrol station in April 1945.
Rock Against Racism, which morphed out of the ANL was another SWP experiment. Sure, music can inform as well as entertain. But the original blues musicians and the reggae artists were doing that long before RAR went all Alison Moyet.
As anti-racism settled down into a matter of middle-class taste, together with the correct sort of curtains and matching table covers, the SWP went off in search of other bedfellows to plump up their apparent numbers. Like supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war, whilst pushing placards into the Stop the War coalition. Here’s John Rees saying:
"Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein."
Or supporting Hezbollah: the party of god. Created by the Ayatollahs of Iran. Neatly going full circle in their endless opportunism, joining with these arch anti-semitic who could have stood on the same rostrum as Herr Hitler. Indeed, their great-grandfathers did.
Black lives don’t matter to the SWP.
All that matters is finding those “useful idiots”. Well-meaning liberals who can be used to make bigger waves than the SWP ever can. Because, even to Marxists, or revolutionaries, or anarchists, the SWP are a joke. They are stuck in a weird bubble of 1960’s euro-marxism. Their ideas are calcified remnants of the cold war.
If you’re genuinely committed to the ideals of black lives matter, go have a look at revolutionary socialist outcomes around the globe. Come back and point out a single country where black lives are better as a result of the successful implementation of socialist revolution.
Stop selling out your justified sense of racial suffering to these shameless SWP opportunists.
Start with the fact that capitalism is colour blind. Free market democracy is the only equal opportunity dynamic that human kind has ever successfully invented. It is not a system and it does not produce systemic racism. It is an amplifier of social trends, rooted in history. You can’t alter history, outside of time travel fantasies. You change the future by building it together. Not by hypocritical and nonsensical pin-prick attacks on symbols of the past. Use the free market democracy amplifier to make small changes in black opportunity massive. Who knows: one day a person of colour could be President of the United States.
And please cease acting as the amplifier of cold war cretins.
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