Wonderful Logic

I had promised myself I wouldn't do it, but in a slack moment I decided to have a look at what the AWL were saying about the current financial crisis. Oh dear, what utter confusion. One simple example will suffice.

They write,

"But on the whole Government-supported or even Government-owned banks are run in just the same way, by the same sort of people, as the pre-crash privately-owned banks.

Ron Sandler, put in by the Government to run Northern Rock, gets £90,000 per month - £1,080,000 per year - actually higher than the £690,000 basic salary of Northern Rock's previous chief executive, Adam Applegarth.

Sandler's deputy, Ann Godbehere, is on £75,000 a month. Meanwhile, Northern Rock workers lose their jobs and Northern Rock mortgage-holders have their homes repossessed."

See: The Bailouts .

What then do our faux Marxists conclude from this fact, the nature of which anyone could have forewarned them, and some of us did, beforehand. Did they arrive at the obvious and logical conclusion that there is nothing progressive in demands for nationalisation by the Capitalist State as Marx had pointed out long ago in his Critique of the Gotha Programme? Did they follow Marx in advising workers to palce no reliance in it, but instead to establish and develop their own Co-operative enterprises? Aftre all, the AWL are "Third campists" who believe in "independent working class action", don't you know. But, no.

In a separate piece they provide us with a Workers plan for the crisis in which we find as the first solution -

" 1. Take control of the banks"

By which they do not, of course mean that workers should use their resources to strengthen the Co-op, Unity Trust and so on and take over these Banks. Oh no what they mean is that the same Capitalist State which, "run(s) (the banks)in just the same way, by the same sort of people, as the pre-crash privately-owned banks." should take them over!!!

Priceless. As Marx once put it, "If this is Marxism then I am no Marxist."

Of course, just as their teachers, the Lassalleans, did they cover their shame, or what for any self-respecting Marxist should be shame in making such cringeing requests of the bourgeois State, by adding in that the bosses State in carrying through this request, should also be so kind as to give the workers control over this property!!!! It would be hilarious were it not so criminal.

And to top it off their Christmas wish list includes a request for a Workers Government!!!! This from people who not only do not beleive that we are in a revolutionary epoch, but who are totally defeatist about the working class in general, who have declared the only rewal Workers Party that exists - the Labour Party - dead, believe the Trade Unions are in not much better shape, and so on, and yet with a supposedly straight face raise the demand for a Workers Government - made up of who exactly - that will take serious measures against the bosses - without of course, having control of the State apparatus, and thereby even were it likely to happen provoking the kind of backlash that Allende provoked in Chile, and with the same consequences for the working class.

These are seriously deranged people. The only thing that is required now in their evolution is for them to top of this list of demands with the request for Posadas' flying saucers to come down to save us.