"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, August 08, 2013

Roar of the Dead Lion

New Mode Army: lessons
EXTRACT: We communists want to sweep away the entire British constitutional political system, not reform it or get rid of individual “parasites”. Logically, therefore, we fight for a democratic republic - something else you will never see mentioned in Socialist Worker, which fails abysmally to take democratic questions seriously (including the democracy in its own organisation, it goes without saying). Similarly, we treat with contempt the current craven Labour Party leadership. Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Harriet Harman, the “living dogs” of Labourism, find the very idea of republicanism - or any sort of radical change - utterly alien. They are her majesty’s very loyal opposition.

Rather, we admire the genuinely glorious tradition of radical republicanism, as represented by Gerard Winstanley, Thomas Rainsborough, the Levellers and the agitators of the New Model Army. We certainly need to learn from the example of Oliver Cromwell and his stunningly successful military campaign against the crown. Eg, Leon Trotsky favourably contrasted Cromwell’s decisiveness and revolutionary boldness to the flabby gradualism of the Fabians. “British workers”, he said, “can learn incomparably more from Cromwell than from MacDonald, Snowden, Webb and other such compromising brethren. Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the 17th century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”
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