Jim Higgins

["Jurriaan Bendien" <J.Bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

An excerpt from Jim Higgins, "The Locusts, Cankerworms, Caterpillars and
Palmerworms Will Get You If You Don't Watch Out" taken from
http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext where you can read the full article. My
sentiments entirely...

ALTHOUGH I HAVE been asked to speak on it, the IS/SWP is not the problem. It
is just an integral part of the overall problem of the revolutionary left.
That problem is of a movement that is almost totally irrelevant, one that is
immured in a tradition that was once vibrant and alive but has become
ossified, as a result of slavish adherence to form without reference to
content or context. The SWP fondly imagines that it is building the British
Bolshevik party. Others basing themselves just as rigidly in what they too
see as the Bolshevik frame are rebuilding, reconstructing, organising for,
or just plain proclaiming: the Fourth International.
The political justification for all this has not advanced one whit from the
time when Lenin and Trotsky first enunciated it. Indeed the argument now
takes on a course much like that of the oozelum bird, with a better than
even chance of ending up like that unfortunate bird in a wisp of blue smoke.
The working class, in so far as they see or hear us at all, find the
theoretical underpinnings incomprehensible or just plain risible.

Strangely there are those among us who glory in their obscurantism, who
boast of their utter fidelity to the work of L.D. Trotsky, who assiduously
work through Lenin's Collected Works looking for some apposite quotation
that will set up today's problem with the day before yesterday's solutions.
For some demented souls, merely to have found the quote is to have
successfully concluded the discussion.

It is difficult to understand how anyone can believe that Lenin, who died 75
years ago, or Trotsky, who died 59 years ago, could have possibly produced
answers to today's difficulties. One would have thought that anyone with
that kind of posthumous infallibility should have made a rather better job
of things while they were alive. Surely it is unlikely that the chap who
wrote What Is To Be Done?, promulgated the democratic dictatorship of the
workers and peasants, insisted on the 21 conditions for affiliation to the
Third International and banned factions in the Russian party will be an
infallible guide about how to get close to the working class in the post
Stalinist, post Social Democratic age of Tony Blair, even to someone as good
at reading the chicken bones as a Sybil from Cumae or Tony Cliff.

As part of the homage to the Russian Revolution there is this romantic
attachment to recreating the events of Petrograd in October 1917. Will the
British Revolution not start until the leader has arrived at the Finland
station in his sealed train? If the Bolsheviks took over the Smolny as their
headquarters will the onlie begetters of British Bolshevism have to take
over Cheltenham College for Young Ladies? What is the British equivalent of
storming the Winter Palace? Balmoral I suppose, although how we are going to
get the battleship Aurora up there God alone knows.



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