The good old RNCPGBML might effectively spoof what remains of the Stalinoid far left in Britain, but the language employed isn't that far removed from bona fide Western Maoists. Below is a paragraph of a 1974 polemic between two American groups, Workers' Viewpoint Organization and the Communist League. As per the general rule of the tiniest of tiny revolutionary groups, the denunciatory decibels increase in proportion to the political proximity rival groups have to each other. Just witness some of the polemics between the Spartacists and its wayward progeny in the International Bolshevik Tendency and the League for the Fourth International, for example.
This comes from Leftist Trainspotters, the one mailing list no discerning sectarian can do without. In this the WVO angrily takes the CL to task:
I wonder if the people involved in this spat, which probably numbered less than the four-strong curry evening I had a few weeks back, ever stopped to think if this nonsense helped. It's one thing to fight for 'theoretical clarity' (always the standard excuse for hyperbolic exercises of revolutionary identity politics), but quite another to rubbish your opponent to the point of self-parody. Did the thought ever occur that the working class they claim to lead might see it and *not* fall into line behind them? That it is so absurd that 36 years later an ex-Trot might seize upon it for blog filler (and a few cheap laffs) and show them up for the joke political tradition they are? Probably not - it's a job of work figuring out what groups of socialists you can denounce next as counterrevolutionary running dogs of US imperialism.
This comes from Leftist Trainspotters, the one mailing list no discerning sectarian can do without. In this the WVO angrily takes the CL to task:
As we have seen, the 'C'L's counter-revolutionary nature comes out of every pore, on every issue. Despite its Marxist-Leninist phrasemongering, the 'C'L has its feet planted firmly in the worst of two worlds – the worlds of revisionism and Trotskyism. On its right foot, the 'C'L wears the notoriously stinking shoe that the social-imperialist Khrushchev once waved in the United Nations, while on its 'left' foot the 'C'L wears the battered and soiled shoe that Trotsky once wore while trotting around the world demanding his 'permanent revolution.' The 'C'L today proudly wears both of these shoes, stumbling around the 'USNA,' trying to build its 'Party.'Aren't Maoist polemics a beautiful thing to behold? Don't you just love the 'C'?
I wonder if the people involved in this spat, which probably numbered less than the four-strong curry evening I had a few weeks back, ever stopped to think if this nonsense helped. It's one thing to fight for 'theoretical clarity' (always the standard excuse for hyperbolic exercises of revolutionary identity politics), but quite another to rubbish your opponent to the point of self-parody. Did the thought ever occur that the working class they claim to lead might see it and *not* fall into line behind them? That it is so absurd that 36 years later an ex-Trot might seize upon it for blog filler (and a few cheap laffs) and show them up for the joke political tradition they are? Probably not - it's a job of work figuring out what groups of socialists you can denounce next as counterrevolutionary running dogs of US imperialism.
