...as farce

Socialist Workers Party

Long time no see, eh?

Well, try this on for size, resently linked to at the Loonies Den, from a recent issue of Socialist Ghurka:

In many countries the working class - those dependent on waged employment - are a minority in societies composed mainly of peasants, small traders and other groups.

It was Leon Trotsky who, in his analysis of the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions, showed how organised workers in modern industry could become the core of a wider revolutionary movement.

Their concentration in key economic sectors and large workplaces could compensate for their small number, and allow them to lead other oppressed groups in revolutionary struggle.

Is an Arab revolution on the Agenda.

This article is significant in three ways:

It illustrates the SWP's hankering after the Russian revolution, looking to an economic periphery in which a relatively strong working class can lead the charge as an undemocratic minority.

It shows how the SWP considers lashing up with Islamists to be a means of provoking a wider revolt in the Arab world - their writers have written hopefully of the Arab Street for years (it hasn't happened yet).

It shows how anti-imperialism seems to have come to the fore, and socialism is a means to fight imperialism first and foremost.

They are trapped by their insurrectionist ideology into wanting to locate and recreate the conditions of the Russian revolution they admit failed. It seems their members here and their alliances are fodder for a game being played out on a world stage wherein the metropolitian core is irredemably unsocialist and the revolution begins in some part of the periphery. Rather than the slog of educating the workers to socialist ideas they'd rather feed off local anti-imperial sentiment to recreate a failed model of revolution.