What Is Your Trauma With Leninism Anyway?

If I had a Swiss franc for every time my friend next door asked me that – and not always in response to a comment of mine about Leninism, mind you – I would have close on $US5.

“There is a story – possibly apocryphal, but also, sadly, quite possibly not – of a wonderful faux pasa few years ago at the Socialist Workers Party annual school, Marxism. A young and inexperienced comrade chairing a large session at the event was being shepherded through the experience by SWP old hands. In addition to whispered advice and instructions, the comrade was also on the receiving end of a steady stream of written notes suggesting announcements she could make to the meeting.

“Another arrived and she dutifully read out its contents, no doubt to the consternation of its now departed author, Lindsey German. The gist of it was along of the lines of: ‘Don’t let any speakers from the sects in – make sure SWP comrades talk’.

“Priceless.”

In other news, the workers and peasants of Berlusconi Youth, being equal opportunity bourgeois cynics, extend communist felicitations to Comrade JD who “has topped up his existing regular payment by £5” and comrades MZ and EM “who forked out £50 to buy a new party gazebo“. We can only echo the sentiments of Comrade Fischer when he writes, “Your conscientiousness does you credit, comrades!”

Finally, the workers and peasants of Berlusconi youth extend the most militant of juche greetings to the 28,116 deputies unanimously elected to local authorities in North Korea, with an impressive voter turnout of 99.7%.

Advertisements