Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Like Arthur Scargill’s flying pickets on speed

The mobile phone age, with its myriad instantaneous forms of interaction, has provided a miraculous deliverance to the diminished activist army. With disciplined direction, a relatively tiny number of determined foot soldiers can resemble an invading horde. They are like Arthur Scargill’s flying pickets on speed.
Janet Daley on the Socialist Workers Party in the Daily Telegraph

If only we were that good. Still, I suppose to an average Daily Telegraph reader, this probably makes some sense, just as to an average Daily Mail reader, Melanie Phillips must seem at least partly sane when she attacks the Socialist Workers Party in more traditional reactionary fashion ('extremist agitators', 'placard-toting obsessives', 'droning Marxist bores' and 'far-Left thugs'). Anyway, since my readership includes at least some of my fellow 'die hard SWP agitators' whose 'aim is to destroy British society', I feel I might as well highlight the fact that the contents of the second series of International Socialism, the quarterly journal of the SWP, are now slowly being put online here and here at the Marxists Internet Archive - the first series (1958-1978) is already online here. While the scale of pace at which the 'determined footsoldiers' of the internet revolution are putting the contents of the back issues of the SWP's theoretical journal online is unlikely to terrify even the most sheltered of Daily Telegraph readers, it is likely that as it slowly appears, the content, with its trenchant analysis of the Tories and the class struggles against them throughout the long 1980s - including the Great Miners' Strike - and wider developments in international capitalism and the struggles against that from the 1980s onwards will prove both useful and instructive to any self-respecting 'anti-capitalist extremist'...

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4 Comments:

At 11:17 am, Blogger Adam Marks said...

When people say stuff is like other stuff "on speed" I generally wonder have these people ever been on speed?

 
At 1:03 pm, Blogger Snowball said...

Its a very good point - maybe you could email Janet Daley direct and ask her...

 
At 2:02 pm, Blogger Adam Marks said...

I would, but I'm too busy with my compulsive chewing and head nodding.

 
At 2:58 pm, Blogger Colin Falconer said...

I LOOOOOVE the Daily Telegraph - the paper that turned me into a socialist (especially the Letters column). Who remembers the columnist Peter Simple, who invented the term 'Rent-a-crowd' to describe the student demonstrators of the Sixties, especially those of us at the LSE ? Funnily enough, Tony Cliff used to parody the original, with a joke along these lines : "The LSE is fantastic - put up a poster about a demo and you'll get 100 students on it, and if you say what the demo's about, you'll get 400 !"

 

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