A Far Fetched Resolution

I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I’ll tell you.. You can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Answers on a postcard...

My little throwaway comment on Daniel Randall being the everyones 6th favourite troskyist revolutionary seems to have got people talking....

Since I completely made it up and there currently aren't any top-ten lists of trotskyist revolutionaries, and since this site is so aptly named, I thought I would throw this out to the public at large. Please write in with your top five least favourite trotskyists. It's about time a site named after "That Speech" had such a competition.

(Please, nothing libellous and no threats of violence or anything.)

The winner will recieve ...the first bullet when we're all against the wall...

Can I make it clear that the relevant people should be members of actual trotskyist organisations secretly or otherwise.... It's not good enough to just shout "Trot" at someone who's a bit lefty.

posted by Pickles @ 12:06 pm  

19 Comments:

  • At 12:42 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    1. Kate Ferguson
    2. Mary Partington
    3. Niklas Albin Svensson
    4. Maria Exall
    5. Alan Woods

     

  • At 12:48 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    1. Sacha/Alex Ishmail
    2. Faz Velmi
    3. Kate Buckle (sp?)
    4. Laura Schwartz
    5. Helen Russel

     

  • At 1:28 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    My favourite trot is Helen Salmon :-)

    Least favourite (by a fucking country mile) is Alex Ismail

     

  • At 1:37 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Tariq Ali's got to be up their amongst the upper echelons.

     

  • At 1:48 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    The book I'm reading keeps insisting that various memebers of the Bush administration 'have the name of Leon Trotsky somewhere in their cortex' ("Ya got any Trotsky in ya, baby?" "Ya want some?").

    So controversially (and inaccurately) my least favourite Trotskyite is... Paul Wolfowitz.

     

  • At 2:09 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    how are we defining 'trot' for the purposes of this competition? as 'revolutionary leftie' or as 'avowed follower of trotsky himself'?

    either way faz velmi's definitely at the top of the list.

    closely follwed by the delightful alan clarke.

     

  • At 2:21 pm, Blogger Pickles said…

    As stated in the original post it's someone who is, openly or otherwise, a member of an avowedly trotskyist organisation - or if not simply someone who would self-define as a troskyist without being a member of such a cabal. Although I don't know anyone that applies to.

    If the organisation calls itself Marxist-Leninist or something similar or just Marxist or whatever then it counts if the Young Communist League says they're Trotskyists. They're the only proper Communists who's General Secretary's mobile number I've got so they've been appointed independent mediators.

     

  • At 3:05 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    please excuse my ignorance but are YCL the youth wing of CPGB?

     

  • At 3:11 pm, Blogger Lola said…

    it seems from the lists already submitted that AWL-leaning types are most def classed as trots. in that the woman who was on steering for 16 or so years should be in top 6.

     

  • At 3:18 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    =1. Kate Ferguson/Mary Partington (sorry, I just couldn't choose!)
    3. Alan Woods
    4. The Svenser
    5. That silly Trot from Brookes

     

  • At 3:19 pm, Blogger Pickles said…

    By "Proper Communists" I mean communists with the Cojones to actually admit that Communism is Communism and that the least they can do is stand up for other Communists.

    Whilst I'd hardly identify with their silly politics either they have a number of advantages

    1. They're honest with themselves and others about what the implications of their ramblings are.

    2. They're almost as good as "Hard Labour" at crushing Trotskyist infiltration (See NUS & Labour Students in the 1970s and Liverpool in the 1980s)

    3. They're harmless - unlike the Trots - since the liklihood of anybody in the UK actually succesfully winning mass support for an overtly soviet-style policy is slim

    I have their general secretary's mobile number because I was at junior school and in the Woodcraft Folk with him.

     

  • At 3:25 pm, Blogger Pickles said…

    Also - the Young Communist League are the youth wing of the Communist Party of Britain, not the Communist Party of Great Britain. (Stalinists are like Trotskyists in many ways...)

    My understanding is that the Communist Party of Great Britain disbanded in the early 1990s and formed "Democratic Left" which later became the New Politics Network.

    They kind of admitted it was all a bit of a lost cause. The Morning Star, which was their paper, split off to continue the struggle at some point.

    A Liverpool Branch of the Communist Party of Britain used to have it's branch meetings in my front room as my mum was a member. When I used to succesfully nag my mum to get chocolate biscuits when we did the weekly shop they would disappear in one evening when there was a branch meeting, whilst I was upstairs in bed. Therefore Communism is a dead ideology which tends to violence and suffering.

    Anyone wants to give us the full history of either?

     

  • At 3:26 pm, Blogger Pickles said…

    sorry that was the communist party of Great Britain that stole my chocolate biscuits.

    The others are the YCL who, so far as I know, never have done.

     

  • At 3:29 pm, Blogger Lola said…

    http://www.woodcraft.org.uk/aboutus/who.php

    did you wear a 'woodie-hoodie'?

    is this an asbo-worthy offence?

     

  • At 3:34 pm, Blogger Lola said…

    "Woodcraft Folk groups meet weekly, enjoying a varied programme including games, drama, discussion, projects, crafts, singing and dancing..."

    any dances in particular?

     

  • At 5:33 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Can I start calling you Woodchip? Or Elfin?!

     

  • At 5:53 pm, Blogger Pickles said…

    When I left the 'Folk in the late 1990s when I left Britain for my gap year I had attained the rank of DF or 'District Fellow'. If it please you I would prefer to be addressed as such.

     

  • At 11:32 am, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    1. Kate "I'm a fucking, like, socialist, comrades" Ferguson, aka Kate "election rules are, like, fucking bourgeois, innit" Ferguson

    2. Mary "I'll spend this meeting drinking from a bottle of coke, thus supporting the murder of trade unionists in Columbia" Partington

    3. Fred "Marxism is like the tide going in and out, no it's like a volcano, yes I am a boring, useless speaker" Weston (replacement for Alan Woods)

    4. Sacha "The Steam Engine and Agitator Supreme, and infamous OUSU joke" Ishmail

    5. Niklas "Ze Labour Movement" Albin Svensson

    6. Maria "Not a very Ordinary Person" Exall

    7. Matt "I get sad and confused when people question my dogma and much prefer listening to brainless rock" Brookes Trot

    8. Derek "Capitalism is bad, even though it has provided ponies for my daughters, and allowed me to model menswear for the bourgeoisie" Hatton

    9. Tom "the revolution will bring humus for the workers!" Dale

    10. Leon "revolutionary Marxism is such a humanitarian ideology that it is necessary to oversee the murder of thousands of people [see the Kronstadt uprising, the re-introduction of the death penalty, the establishment of the gulags, the continuance of a secret police under Bolshevik rule, etc] Trotsky

     

  • At 11:40 am, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    How could I forget..?

    11. Dan "Using the NUS as a weapon in the violent struggle between the forces of labour and capital" Randall

     

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