A cattle dealer once drove some bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came nigh with his sharp knife.
"Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner on our horns," suggested one of the bulls.
"If you please, in what way is the butcher any worse than the dealer who drove us hither with his cudgel?" replied the bulls, who had received their political education in Manuilsky’s institute. [The Comintern.]
"But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as well afterwards!"
"Nothing doing," replied the bulls firm in their principles, to the counsellor. "You are trying, from the left, to shield our enemies — you are a social-butcher yourself."
And they refused to close ranks.
A packet of sweets for everyone who recognised that this is taken from Trotsky’s What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat written in 1932.
Sitting through some of the discussions about the demonstration against the English Defence League (EDL) this little story kept buzzing round my head with the persistence of a track from the new Stornoway album.
The EDL’s ostensible target was a conference called ‘The Book that Shook the World’ organised by a group called UK Islamic Conferences (UKIC). I am as bereft of information about them as they are of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Apparently however some of the headline acts hold pretty nasty views about women’s rights, LGBT issues and what should happen to atheists. In this regard they resemble the wilder shores of most religions. The weird thing was that no one had thought of getting cross about their event until the EDL hit on the idea first.
The upshot of all this was that a huge amount of time and energy was squandered at a couple of the planning meetings while several speakers made the point that UKIC is just as bad as the EDL. From this came the demand that United East End put out a statement condemning them as well as the hard right street fighters. The idiosyncratic claim was made more than once that the EDL were being allowed to seize the moral high ground by their uncompromising defence of LGBT rights. Their rallying point was outside a gay bar which they were going to “protect” from the fundamentalists. Just who would be stupid enough to confuse a bunch of racist thugs with Stonewall’s self defence squads was a question left unanswered.
Now of course the people arguing this point of view felt that the two most important things that had to be done in the event of the EDL coming into the area were first to make clear to anyone who was interested just how much they disliked UKIC and secondly to make arrangements for their own variety of mobilisation. This would have no connection with the broader community and trade union mobilisation on the day. A funny sort of principle and a pretty daft practice.
My own experience of the radical Islamists is that they receive the same rapt attention from most Muslims that the Spartacist League can expect on a bus drivers’ picket line. The best way to marginalise groups like that is to demonstrate broad unity on principled anti-racist politics. That was the big achievement of Sunday’s meeting in the London Muslim Centre. No one sitting in that audience could have been left in any doubt that the people involved in building Sunday’s event were supporters of LGBT rights. And even if anyone in the audience was equivocal on the subject the display of fighting unity would have opened the door to persuading them.
They wouldn’t even have to go to the trouble of reading Bakunin or Trotsky to work it out.
Liam redux 
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