Posadas

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2003 5:03 pm

Re: If you were on Mastermind...

they'd tell me to go fourth and multiply

Source: http://www.screamingwhisper.com/viewtopic.php?t=2531

(actually, when I visited Britain in the summer of 1984, a friendly and
intelligent British Trotskyist assured me grimly, that there were 24
different revolutionary groupuscles in the UK. He must have been justabout
correct, because when I joined the London CND demonstration against Ronald
Reagan's visit of Britain, they were nearly all there, selling their
literature. Subsequently I picked up a pamphlet from the IMG's "The Other
Bookshop" called "Go Fourth and Multiply", a wickedly funny satire of the
British Marxist sects, from the IMG to the RCP. It was sold to me by Charlie
van Gelderen, a kind old man who was present at the founding of the FI in
1938. I also picked up a Workers' Power booklet on Stalinism at the same
time. Van Gelderen's comment on my latter purchase was: "it's just a
Stalinist tract". I attended a Socialist Action forum on the New Jewel
Movement so boring that I nearly fell asleep, and a RCP meeting in an attic
of a pub in Tottenham, where a vigorous youthful male activist performed
swept-up imitations of the Militant tendency style of argument, in arguing
about Gadaffi and imperialism - an ex-Spanish FI'er, now an RCP convert,
assured me that the best thing to read on the USSR was Alec Nove's economic
history of the USSR (Nove had just previously assumed an advisory role in
NATO). After that, I confess I lost confidence in the political activity and
political style of English Marxism, and upon returning to New Zealand,
recommended to friends not to worry too much anymore about the English
revolutionary left, and concentrate on our own experience).

J.