This is not to say that divergent views within the CCP, but when the leading proponent of one of two models ends up being expelled from the party and placed under arrest for crimes which it would be fair to suspect every senior politician in the People's Republic of committing, it is very unclear in what way the CCP is actually tolerant of differing opinions. This lack of any real transparency in decision-making and meaningful involvement of party members makes a mockery of those who try to maintain that the CCP is 'not a monolith' (by which one assumes they meant that it is a party that accommodates divergent views, since all parties contain differing views if only unexpressed ones) and practices a kind of 'internal democracy'. This encapsulates the nature not only of decision-making within the British Communist Party (a group of crack-pot would-be revolutionaries now happily disbanded), but within any party which, like the Chinese Communist Party, makes decisions at the top without members lower down having any real say in matters. It has not yet begun to learn the meaning of the ‘inner-party democracy’ of which it boasts, and cannot do so as long as it continues to worship the sacred cows of ‘democratic centralism’ and the ‘ban on factions’. The fact is that the democratic claims which the Communist Party regularly makes for its own internal organisation are a sham, save perhaps at the lower levels of the party. Which is in fact a device for the oligarchic control of the leadership Party, in which the leadership is well able to reduce the scope andĮxtent of debate and to do so in the name of a ‘democratic centralism’ It has to do with the fact that the Communist Party is an exceedingly managed The reason for this lack of serious debate is very simple. This quote from the same article is also worth reading from the point of view of an observer of Chinese affairs, even if it is about a different party in another country: Unacceptable, even in the cynical acceptance and even expectation ofĪs a description of how not only the Labour party but any party (including the Chinese Communist Party) can divert the intentions of those joining to serve the ends of its leadership this is hard to better. Resolution-mongering exercises, in the resigned habituation to the They have been caught up in its rituals and rhythms, in ineffectual More often than not ended up being transformed by it, in the sense that Have set out with the intention of transforming the Labour Party have But it has also occurred at the grassroots: people on the left who Parliamentary level, though it is there that it has been most obviously
Phenomenon which has very commonly occurred, namely the ‘capturing’ of Is not here that this is an illusion but rather that it is the obverse Which has held generation after generation of socialists in its thrall,Īnd which consists in the hope of ‘capturing’ the Labour Party for theĪdoption and the carrying out of socialist policies. It is however one form of expression of a much more general aspiration,
The speech itself was described in the article as 'audacious' - a word which in the Grauniad's thesaurus appears to sit next to 'intellectually bankrupt' and 'inane' - but the comment was a quote from Ed Milliband's father, Ralph, the ever-wrong and ever-intelligent Marxist intellectual: I was just reading through the comments on the Guardian website under their article covering the latest speech of Ed Milliband, Labour party leader, when a comment caught my eye.
0 kommentar(er)
