Fudge, muddle, clarity
James Marshall of Labour Party Marxists provides a rough guide to the issues and arguments that will dominate the January 30 Zoom conference
Another Labour Left Alliance conference; another massively overloaded agenda. Over the course of four hours (plus half an hour for lunch) we are going to debate the crisis in the Labour Party and decide what to do next. Doable, if the conference had been organised with a view to achieving clarity. Unfortunately that is not the case. The methods of the labour and trade union bureaucracy have been thoroughly internalised.
There is a mixed bag of eight motions - surely in a calculated attempt to dumb down, all limited to a maximum of 350 words, then nudged up to 400, by the LLA’s conference arrangements committee. This was strongly opposed by Labour Party Marxists. There is also the certainty of various amendments (with no word limit).
Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis
“My goal is to save the public soul by first punching it in the face.” Ezra Pound
The main failure of the rise of the conservative right in America has been its fear of producing its own brand of cultural elitist in the style and substance of the well-bred Reactionary. Its cultural contribution has produced no aesthetic vision, no artistic sophistication only the cult of commentary, endless commentary. There we stand after all this time: no film studios, no high-end
literary publishing houses, no museum board of directors of consequence, not a single Ivy university under our influence, no “great editors” of the Buckley–Hilton Kramer or even Lewis Lapham–George Plimpton variety; no Condé Nast, no sitcom/dramas of interest save so many rather twee “aristocratic” nostalgia series lavish with bygone-era minutiae.
At the end of November Joshua Leifer, an Associate Editor of
Jewish Currents [
JC], wrote an article about the “tragedy” of Jeremy Corbyn. He did not seek the opinions of any Jewish victims of the “antisemitism” witchhunt in the Labour Party. As the first Jewish member of the party to be expelled I submitted a response.
At first I was simply ignored and after a reminder, Arielle Angel, Editor-in-chief, explained that it was a lack of resources that prevented them publishing my reply.
JC “simply do not have the bandwidth to publish full response articles to articles we’ve published”. So I am publishing my response here.