OK, I get it, the world has gone to shit. We messed up. We raped the land, the powerful bankers did a big shit on our faces, there are no jobs, we’re all broke, the dam is bursting, Satan’s come home drunk, this planet is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions, real wrath of God type stuff: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! No one can even afford to upgrade their iPhone 3S to an iPhone 4 until their existing contract plays out! I’m as bewildered as you are, which is why I decided to spend five days – FIVE DAYS! – at Marxism 2010 in London, which was going to help us steer ourselves back on the right course, (which, ironically, is the Left course).
The event was supposed to reinvigorate the jaded Left winging community and deliver “ideas to change the world,’” something every worried human could try and get behind in earnest. It promised big names from the political and academic scene – Slavoj Zizek, Tony Benn, Tariq Ali and Alex Callinicos to name a few – talking on topics ranging from sexuality to Islamophobia; from climate change to capitalism’s future, and generally pointing out that we’re all fucked and it’s all our fault.
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That all happened as planned, but it’s a shame the program didn’t mention that the event’s organisers, the Socialist Workers Party, planned to hijack the whole thing with its revolutionary dogma – you know, worker’s uprising, communist living, everyone uniting in equality at the level of sheer bloody misery – leaving any opportunity for real debate (or a fucking smile) dead in the water. Turns out hanging out with a bunch of unreformed Leninists and an assortment of other sidelined alcoholics and nutters is actually less fun than going to the shitty music festival I would have been at otherwise. I probably could have learnt way more about rallying against the world’s horrors in a field watching a P!NK concert than I could from this lot anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, Marx is a great guy. In fact it’s because me and him get along so well at times that I decided to come along. Unfortunately his ardent followers need to sort their shit out. The first meeting I went to, lead by a women’s lib speaker Andrea “The Butcher” Butcher, took the heading “Pin-ups, Porn and Prostitution”. I learnt that objectifying pin-ups is bad, women in South Africa having no food is bad, women trafficking is bad; but, Lenin is good and a worker’s revolution would be not only be not bad, but in fact quite good! Everyone called each other “comrade” the whole time, which was quite exciting.
Most people on the radical left were more predisposed to throwing picnics than worker’s protests, as the beguiling number of competitively fly-posted picnic posters revealed.
Lenin, you old party goat! What’s your next trick? Using famine as a weapon against millions of your own people? Ha, you would wouldn’t you?! “The dictatorship means unrestricted power based on force, not on law” you say? Ha! Fun guy!
Who’s Roddy?
This is a pretty good picnic poster. The hammer and sickle never inspired me as much as this mighty knife and folk.
Typical that Brighton hippies would have a picnic right?
I think these guys let the side down. Where’s your pride comrades?
All I found at any of the revolutionary picnics was usually a nice spread of Tesco Value party snacks.
There was some old comrade working a bottle of liquor, telling some slightly younger comrades that, actually, comrades, Isaac Newton went to a public school, meaning all science is bourgeois and false; and that the best reference point for talking about George Osborne’s budget, comrades, is actually Engles’ diary from the 19th century.
To add to the fun there were also loads of really over-zealous, socialist students who had flown in from around Europe to sell us their t-shirts that come second only to that one you see at festivals emblazoned with ‘iPood’ in terms of quality. Also, selling your t-shirts for profit? Marx says go stand in the corner.
There were also lots of petitioners. Judging by this guy’s t-shirt, I think he was petitioning for someone to make a sequel to Borat. (Ok, I feel bad now, I just re-read the flyer he handed me and it’s about the execution of Kurdish political prisoners).
Whilst walking amongst the stands of socialist workers and socialist worker off-shoot groups, I came across these guys the Spartacist League. These proud Trotskyites take a pretty interesting (read: bonkers) stance on Asia. Particularly the line about defending North Korea from Imperialism and Capitalism.
When I asked them what exactly they meant by that and whether they were effectively saying they approve of Kim Jong Il’s tyrannical regime, they accused me of being a white boy who didn’t know what it was like to experience a worker’s struggle. When I told them I’d rather be a slave to capitalism than a slave in a North Korean gulag just because I asked for another cup of rice, they laughed at me patronisingly and then, oddly, told me I knew nothing about Yugoslavia.
Through the quagmire of shit there were a few genuinely good bits. Tariq Ali’s paralleling of the current wave of Islamophobia to the demonisation of the Jews a hundred years ago was good, particularly when he framed his argument against the rise of the BNP and the EDL.
The guy who had been on the attacked Gaza flotilla a few weeks before got up afterwards to speak, his denouncement of Israel’s illegal, racially justified activities against the Palestinians was also impressive.
Slavoj Zizek (the hirsute fellow on the right there) shouted down a nostalgic Montenegrin Titoist for suggesting a return to the Yugoslavian miseries of the last century would be a good idea. He then told everybody straight up that socialism as it’s thought of generally is a big waste of time, one that’s low on ideas that can really deal with what the world faces today. Which kind of bummed everyone out.
Follow Alex on Twitter: @alex_hoban
