Re: strange ideas

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>The place of Pathfinder books and pamphlets: from Algeria to Cuba,
>to factory gates and mine portals, to street corners in workers
>districts, to the 'Lumumba' film show


I love the catchy titles they give their talks.

And the way, despite all their attacks on 'petty-bourgeois' circles, they
just keep turning up on campus.

Last week I was putting up some posters for a talk on 'Why we need a
revolution'.  Like most of our posters, this has a big picture on it and as
few words as possible, in order to be somewhat visually attractive.
Anyway, on one wall, there was a poster from a Barnesite meeting of a few
weeks before.  it was A4 size, white paper, with the whole sheet of paper
covered in writing.  It was advertising a meeting on the electricity
industry in NZ.  The title was about two lines long of relatively small
print!  And the rest of the page cotained a mass of writing that seemed
like an only slightly shortened version of the talk to be presented, by
their Auckland mayoralty candidate Felicity Coggan.

Poor Felicity.  Many years ago when I first met her, she used her own name
and was a doctor.  Now, she uses her husband's name - they must think that
this is more 'proletarian', fits in with calling people Anthony Blair and
William Clinton etc.  Felicity, after joining the organisation back in the
early-mid 1980s, was a prominent spokesperson for the right of women to
abortion.  The fact that she was a doctor gave her a certain amount of
prominence as an abortion rights spokesperson.  Something you'd think a
revolutionary group would welcome.  But no, they eventually managed to get
her to throw in the doctoring lark and "make the turn" where she could be
as least effective as possible.  Oh, and take on her husband's name.  And
move her around the country.

Anyway, the Barnesite leaflet reminded me of the kind of picture-less
leaflets, chock full of Stalinist jargon and verbosity and long, dreary
titles, that one used to see put out by the nuttier Maoist groups in the
1970s.  Given that most of the Barnesites here went to university before
adopting their more-proletarian-than-thou hokum surely one of them must
have learned how to use a scanner and make a poster that contains a picture
*rather than* a thousand words.

Still, I suppose life would be less amusing without them. . .











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