I inadvertently joined the comrades at the barricades yesterday when I went to hear the CAW's Jim Stanford speak on the roots of the financial crisis.
I hadn't realized that he was speaking at the Socialist Action convention which apparently is an annual event. These are Canada's very own real live revolutionaries. I hadn't seen that many Che posters since the sixties.
Given events at GM, Stanford was understandably held up, and so the entire show was running late. I had the chance to peruse the literature tables; Leon Trotsky, Fidel, Bob Marley and Emma Goldman (wasn't she an anarchist?) loomed large. It was like entering a time warp.
And speaking of time warps, I also was able to sit in on the opening speaker, one comrade Adam (yes, they really do talk like this). He held forth, in impenetrable Marxist jargon, on the current economic crisis. Drawing on my grad school days, I tried to interpret, and what I got was an analysis not appreciably different from that offered by Minsky twenty-five years ago (see my previous post). In the Q & A session it was clear that everyone there knew everyone else, and they spoke in the same impenetrable jargon and all addressed each other as comrade. It was embarrassing.
Serendipitously, I was at the same time finishing the second part of Orwell's Road to Wiggan Pier which readers may recall is a scathing critique of socialism as it existed in England in the interwar years. Orwell's argument, in brief, is that socialism is both necessary (in fact, desperately so) and yet impossible so long as this crowd is in charge of the project. He argues further that the job of the main stream is to take back this project and make it inclusive and welcoming for all.
The problem, therefore, is to walk a fine line between nonsense such as I saw yesterday and simply being co-opted remembering that power co-opts and absolute power co-opts absolutely.
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