for lefties too stubborn to quit
An interesting take on the state of the ULA from the CPGB
ULA Ireland: Sectarian self-annihilation
The Cedar Lounge gets a few mentions in it too.
funnily enough what pops up on my radar only a post written today… Why I joined the ULA
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worldbystorm2014ATgmailDOTcom
The Cedar Lounge Revolution
Is there more than one member of the GPGB in Ireland?
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Its just really sad to watch.
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was going to post up the “Why I joined the ULA” post. I thought it was very thoughtful and made a lot of sense to me as an independent Socialist. A shame that the ULA isn’t really the right organisation for what he envisions.
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The CPGB (WW) on the ball mostly! LRC Nov 10, the Labour project UK is a must. Looking forward to it.
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A couple of slight corrections to Anne’s otherwise very good article
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And a response to “Why I joined the ULA” – http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/anarchist-joining-the-ula-misunderstands-an-essential-part-of-trotskyism/
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James has a reply to the response by Alan above: http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/rowan-duffy/2012/10/25/why-i-joined-the-ula#comment-361
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And my reply to him – http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/rowan-duffy/2012/10/25/why-i-joined-the-ula#comment-363
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IRSP Strabane. Is it true that the IRSP is part of the Ghadaffi fan club.Even sadder. Sorry I had to say it
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No thats not true Jim, the Communist Party of the Irish Republic held an anti Imperialist day school in one of the rooms in our Dublin offices, hardly a ringing endorsement of Ghadaffi from the IRSP or maybe I missed that press release from the party. The IRSPs offices in 33 Gardiner Place are open for use to any progressive elements in Irish society from your local community groups to your anti imperialists and thats nothing I feel we should have to defend publicly Jim.
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What is the CPIR. I thought I was fairly up to date with the alphabet soup. You should get the IRSP to distance themselves from this particular crowd of nutcases. Opposing imperialist intervention does and should not mean endorsements of dictators.
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Mind you, the London Review of Books recently ran an enormous essay defending the legacy of Gadaffi and decrying his removal. So in fairness that particular line is not just the preserve of some nutcases on the fringe.
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Jim the IRSP are against the trend within the Left in Ireland that manifests itself in the hierarchy of socialists. The amount of elitism within the Left is totally sickening and I’m surprised at you calling other Irish Socialists “nut cases”.The CPIR may have different internationalist views from yourself but who are you to stand judge jury and executioner over them. As long as any progressive group agrees with the charter for using 33 Gardiner Place then they are more than welcome to.
eamoncork I never seen the London review must have a look for it here although a cursory glance at what is happening in Libya today leaves one under no illusions that what happened there was not a popular uprising and some very sinister forces are at work.
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I presume this is the one you mean?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go
I wouldn’t quite say it was a tribute to Gadaffi, although I didn’t think it was very good; more confused and rambling than apologetic. The gist of what he said about the regime was that it was a dictatorship, although a very strange one, that allowed no space for political activity, and that the improvements in living standards under Gadaffi were mainly due to oil money (you could say the same thing about Qatar or Kuwait). I thought the main weakness was, he didn’t give you any real sense of why people would take up arms against the state, and I wasn’t very convinced by the idea that there could have been a negotiated peace. Looking at it again though, this paragraph is interesting in the light of the current state of play in Libya:
“The situation that developed over the weekend following the initial unrest on 15 February suggested three possible scenarios: a rapid collapse of the regime as the popular uprising spread; the crushing of the revolt as the regime got its act together; or – in the absence of an early resolution – the onset of civil war. Had the revolt been crushed straightaway, the implications for the Arab Spring would have been serious, but not necessarily more damaging than events in Bahrain, Yemen or Syria; Arab public opinion, long used to the idea that Libya was a place apart, was insulated against the exemplary effect of events there. Had the revolt rapidly brought about the collapse of the regime, Libya might have tumbled into anarchy. An oil-rich Somalistan on the Mediterranean would have had destabilising repercussions for all its neighbours and prejudiced the prospects for democratic development in Tunisia in particular. A long civil war, while costly in terms of human life, might have given the rebellion time to cohere as a rival centre of state formation and thus prepared it for the task of establishing a functional Libyan state in the event of victory. And, even if defeated, such a rebellion would have undermined the premises of the Jamahiriyya and ensured its demise. None of these scenarios took place. A military intervention by the Western powers under the cloak of Nato and the authority of the United Nations happened instead.”
I wouldn’t exactly lump it with the wing-nut stuff that Hugo Chavez was coming out with about Gadaffi being a great anti-imperialist leader (not sure what politics Hugh Roberts has, is he a leftist? He works for the International Crisis Group, they’re not exactly radical Marxists).
Anyway this is all diverting attention from the real issue: so the CPIR is real? I thought we established on the other thread that the Gadaffi day-school was a practical joke …
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the London Review of Books recently ran an enormous essay defending the legacy of Gadaffi
This one?
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The author of that article, Hugh Roberts, also
wrote “The Battlefield Algeria”, which was
poorly received:
http://www.meforum.org/1538/the-battlefield-algeria-1988-2002
Roberts also wrote the pro-Ulster Unionist
book ” Northern Ireland and the Algerian analogy : a suitable case for Gaullism? ” which had
a foreword by Robert McCartney.
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I wouldn’t say a negative review from the think-tank headed by Daniel Pipes – an unpleasant ultra-right crank who spends most of his time trying to silence academics who say anything critical about Israel – is anything to be ashamed of. It’s not really a negative review anyway, more of a whine that Roberts doesn’t make Al-Qaeda into the central theme of his Algeria book (rightly so, given the subject matter).
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“International Socialism” also argued Roberts’
book, while useful, had flaws:
While Roberts is right to highlight the ‘self-defeating opportunism’ of the FIS’s attitude towards both the state and its own mass base, his rejection of ‘economic determinism’ means that he can only look to the FIS’s ideology for explanation. He argues, for example, that Algerian Islamism has a superficial quality because it has simply imported Islamist ideas from outside, failing to produce an Algerian Islamist thinker of the stature of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb. There is more to the opportunism of the FIS than this, however.
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=149&issue=108
Lara Marlowe (political centrist, AFAIK) also
gave Roberts’ book a poor review in the IT
in 2003.
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Ahh…now I see. Thanks for the clarification on the CPIR, IRSPStrabane.
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Ingratitude and forgetting your old friends is not a good sign in a man.
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The CPIR can’t exist if they don’t have a website!
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I’m presuming they’re some sort of a joke – no?
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WorldbyStorm, its you and your fellow gelded cynics that are the joke.
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And with that my patience is exhausted. Farewell SJC. Perhaps some day you’ll realise that insulting people who you claim to want a discussion with and an engagement with your ideas is almost invariably a bad idea.
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Try Soviet.ie
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ttp://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/10/hes_behind_you.html
Stolen from another blog. Intersting stuff.
Was Healy potentially worse than Ghaddafi
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Dear oh dear, not another one quoting Adam Curtis. Did you ever stop to wonder why the BBC, and its lapdog Curtis, would like to dismiss Al-Gaddafi as a joker? Also, its amazing how some people, who call themselves republicans, suddenly want to distance themselves from Al-Gaddafi. No doubt, if he was still supplying Adams & Co. with tens of millions of pounds, he would be a great chap…
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Back to the ULA, the non-SP/PBPA members had a national meeting yesterday and selected two new reps to the ULA national steering committee – http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/ula-national-steering-committee-gets-new-members/
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