[Marxism] Re: A sectarian approach

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Two things.

What Tom O’Lincoln calls the ‘British section’ of the Grant-Woods 
operation is no such thing. It is not the section in Britain of a 
genuine international political current but the imperialist hub around 
which semi-colonial clone organisations have been constructed. There is 
a long tradition of this on the would-be British revolutionary left: the 
Healyites did it, the Cliffites do it, the Workers’ Power people do it, 
Grant-Woods do it. This is noting more than a superficially 
r-r-r-revolutionary version of Fabian paternalism. The belief that it 
would be possible for a British sect to come up with the political 
answers for revolutionaries world-wide is simple chauvinism.

Second. Tom seems to think that to call someone ‘sectarian’ is itself 
sectarianism. Not so. Joaquín in his excellent post points out what 
sectarianism really is by quoting the Communist Manifesto: ‘The 
Communists […] do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by 
which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.’ But this is 
precisely what the Grant-Woods people are doing. The political and 
organisation demarcation off of their co-thinkers in Venezuela, an 
operation which runs counter to the real process of political 
development in the revolution, is *precisely* building an organisation 
founded on ‘sectarian principles of their own’, *precisely* putting the 
interests of the sect before that of the real movement of the masses. 
Pointing this out is not sectarianism; it is simply saying what is.

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