r/MarxistUnityNews

"The CPB’s uniform ban, its craving for respectability, the purging of young rebels who object to its Zionism and its reactionary attacks on trans people - all are morbid symptoms of bureaucratic control-freakery. Eddie Ford tells the tale of two lives and two funerals"

"So, in a letter on April 15 from Gordon to CPB members, there is a stern warning of a “concerted breach of democratic centralism” aimed at influencing YCL members “to adopt a so-called ‘dress code’ when attending public events and political demonstrations”. He goes on to state that “various purported instructions” to YCL members “have been circulated without authority, agreement or prior knowledge” of the YCL general secretary, or the chair of the central committee - and furthermore that these “unauthorised ‘instructions’ to YCL members” are in “clear defiance of our party’s policy against wearing uniforms when carrying out party activities”."

"The very idea of banning young comrades from displaying a certain fashion style shows, yet again, a morbid oversensitivity to any hint of factionalism and is, arguably, also part of a current left culture of boring conformity. In the name of keeping control, the CPB, under Robert Griffiths and now Alex Gordon, has certainly killed off the second YCL, to all intents and purposes."

"YCL comrades have also rebelled, quite rightly, against the ‘anti-Semitism awareness’ training courses run by Mary Davis. Looking at her reading list, we are clearly dealing with a Zionist doling out Zionist propaganda.5 The Israeli embassy would thoroughly approve. You can understand then why some YCL comrades are up in arms, because the CPB obviously has not got an anti-Semitism problem - just as the Labour left, or the left in general, hasn’t. What the CPB has got is a Zionist problem."

"Our Long Weimar is coming to an end. We are in a period of transition in which the world spirit does not arrive on horseback, but rather sits within an unmarked van, or hunches over at the controls of a drone, from which the payload of all previous history is let loose upon its prey. This Spirit, this enemy, has not stopped, for they will not stop until they are stopped. Transitions are times of break and rupture, and yet also continuity. This is why fascism does not ‘refute’ capitalism simply by gaining the upper hand over liberalism in the institutions of government

"The charge of social murder is a charge of totality, that both in and for itself, the capitalist state knows that its production and reproduction guarantees such murder by its very actuality.

This is why social murder is a revolutionary concept, because it is fundamentally anti-reformist. There is no liberalism compatible with an analysis of social murder that does not find itself implicated, and we should note that the ease with which liberalism denies genocide is a trained habit from the ease with which it shrugs off the slaughter of its own history, even within its own territory. Liberal reformism, including the national welfarism of social democracy, is the demand for less (noticeable) murder. It charges governments as murderers, rather than the classes and class structures which manifest in said governments."

"If what horrifies us about fascism is its murderous political program, then this terror must also be extended back towards the conditions which spawned it. To understand fascism’s political relation to distributions of social murder is to understand capitalism as a system which always bears within itself the capacity for fascism, and that this latent quality is not something that can be reformed out of it."

"To stand or not to stand in elections has long divided the left. Marx argued for standing. But on what programme, around what issues? On April 11 the Netherlands Communistisch Platform held a day-school to discuss ‘Marxism and electoralism’. Mike Macnair and Rogier Specht provided introductions"

"The issue of silencing leads to that of electoral coalitions. It is clear that both the German SPD and the Bolsheviks used stand-down agreements where necessary to win representation in undemocratic electoral systems.5 What is unacceptable is, first, government coalitions without the workers’ party having majority control and the ability to implement its minimum programme, which involves accepting political responsibility for the choices of the pro-capitalist parties. And secondly, coalitions which present themselves as broad-front political unity. What is objectionable here is that this is, again, to accept the line of the Possibilists: self-silencing for the sake of unity."