Why we are hostile

McCain or Obama? Tweedledum or Tweedledee? The event is one protracted yawn, utterly irrelevant to working class interests. You might, therefore, be surprised to learn that the Socialist Standard mentioned Senator Joe Biden a decade before (April, 1998) either of the present presidential candidates:

"A few years ago Joe Biden fancied himself as the next president of the United States but his candidature came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that he had repeated word-for-word parts of a speech by Neil Kinnock. We can assume that Biden was not penalised because he lifted someone else's words but because it was clear that anyone who thought Kinnock even said anything worth repeating must be too mad to be trusted in the White House."

But no longer! If you really want to read more about Kinnock, you can do so here. Since that article was written, the Welsh Windbag as he is otherwise known, has risen to the House of Lords. But, perhaps the most apposite piece about Baron Windbag dates from 1983 when he stood for election as leader of the Labour Party:

"..The first task of the Labour faithful was to choose a leader. Needless to say, nobody questioned whether it was necessary to have a leader. None of the followers voted to stop following. In the end, the reformist fantasies fell, appropriately enough, for a "dream ticket". The poverty of imagination which regards Kinnock and Hattersley as a dream is reminiscent of the advertisement-mums who get kicks out of seeing their son's underpants whiter than white. Of course, the Kinnock-Hattersley dream is a fantasy conspired by the pragmatists who seek to sell their policies or capitalism like soap powder, with Boy Neil supplying the soft soap. Kinnock is without doubt an indignant opponent of the injustices of the system which he wants to keep intact. He peppers his reformist rhetoric with undefined references to "socialism", but in his main speech to the conference he, like Owen of Salford, advocated no more than the tried and failed Keynesian plan for investment in British industry...."

"...They are irrelevant to our needs; they have no political answers; their sincerity is wasted and their dishonesty is grotesque. If they never again uttered another word, issued another policy statement, appointed another leader, assembled at another conference, the world could only be better off. They are all "but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of the master class, the party seeking working-class emancipation must be hostile to every other party". But we are not only hostile to them - the socialist objective for which we stand is far, far bigger than the miserable band of political relics which stands in our way."