A reader has kindly supplied Trot Guide with the following addition to our account. Warning: This product may contain traces of petit-bourgeois deviationism.
And nuts.
Random surfing and insomnia led me here, so let’s be clear on these vital issues:
(i) Marxist Initiative was formed not merely by the Association of Communist Unity as your shallow understanding of dialectics may lead you to believe, but by ACU people with some leftovers from the post-New Left Party project called Left Connection, which was not a dating service whatever you revisionist enemies of the working class may think.
The ACU itself was a split from the (then) Socialist Party of Australia (now CPA and not to be confused with the Trot SPA, formerly Militant and part of the CWI (look it up if you don’t know)). The ACU split because the SPA, a split from the old CPA motivated by the latter’s craven criticism of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, was opposed to the ACTU/ALP etc’s Accord. The ACU, consisting mostly of the few union bureaucrats possessed by the SPA, suddenly found their party membership was supposed to influence their union activity in an inconvenient way, and split to form the Association of Communist Unity which pursued the difficult project of uniting the true revolutionaries in a vanguard party by basing its sole public activities on producing hate mail at every other Left party SPECIFICALLY FOR THINKING OF GETTING TOGETHER. Now that’s dialectics!
etcetera
(ii) RIM includes the CPN (M) in Nepal, which controls two-thirds of the country and has a guerilla army of over thirty thousand, has built its own capital city for the New State, and stands a reasonable chance of taking the country in the next three years. But then there was a moment some years ago when the other RIM affiliate of note, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, looked like it might become a more significant force for something or other scary as well.
(iii) However, on another matter: please, leave poor Communist Party Advocates alone. Most of the less than a dozen people in and around that project were not in any way ML or L, however the text you link reads, though I think they were all at least sort-of M. The Marcus you refer to is now busy creating a powerful radical tendency as a member of the ALP in Sydney – no really, that’s the project.
Still, these shifts happen, and at least so far as I can tell Marcus’s is just silly rather than opportunistic. Others, like a couple of founding/leading members of the Solidarity split from SA in Sydney, have now gone to join the Greens, as again Solidarity turned out to want to have some role in determining the actions of its union official members and that was inconvenient. Greens membership is apparently more compatible with the current career trajectories of these folks.
I could go on forever but this is so dull I think I’ll either sleep or watch the few cable channels this house gets.
benjamin | Homepage | 04.21.06 – 3:01 am | #
