Acting on medical advice I try to avoid going to meetings where I know the punchline from the principal speaker is guaranteed to be “and that’s why you need to join XYZ”. But we don’t always do what’s good for us. That’s why there’s usually bacon for breakfast at the weekends and full fat milk in the fridge most days.
Political inquisitiveness dragged me out of the house a few nights ago to hear what would be said at a meeting with a title along the lines of “why workers need a party that’s different from those scumbags”. That’s a paraphrase but it conveys the general purpose. There’s no point saying who the organisers were since the method is wearily familiar and no one has the copyright.
The opening gambit is a review of some recent successes which were only made possible by the correct application of the Marxist method, triumphs which no one else has replicated in recent years. Then comes the acknowledgement that these are difficult times though without much of an explanation of why. Yet hard though these times may be they are ripe with promise as that recent dispute where everybody lost their job but got a rather better payoff than expected proves. If we make enough people aware of that then unimagined vistas open up before us. Let’s not bother about the fact that what makes much more of an impression is the drip drip of job losses and pay cuts.
When the principal stops the congregation takes up the theme and each one has an anecdote of a recent conversation which proves irrefutably what has just been said, if only enough people were open to the message. People might think that this handful of true believers gathered in a room are crazy dreamers but the time is not so far off when events will prove that they are right “and that’s why you need to join XYZ”.
So many things make this a dismal template. There’s the insistence that the entire political situation swivels around a group of a few dozen or few hundred people; the delusion that by just persuading a few more individuals that a big breakthrough is imminent; the refusal to acknowledge in public that anything which contradicts the schema might be plausible; the dopey belief that just because you’ve spoken to someone who’s agreed with you to make you go away proves you are right and the relentless insistence that good times are just around the corner. This list can probably be added to.
If you were to be unkind you could conclude it’s the mentality of the cult. It’s certainly no way to treat intelligent people.
Liam redux 
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