Protest News

3 members and a sympathiser distributed leaflets yesterday in freezing conditions at the beginning of the student protest march against the cuts in London.

Everybody else was there too, including a re-incarnation of Militant in the form of "Militant Student" (same typeface as in the days of the Militant Tendency) put out by the followers of the late Ted Grant. But they haven't changed. If you read the small print (and it's all small print) you discover:

"The period that started with May 1968 was a period of capitalist crisis and revolutionary movements in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Britain and other countries. To that list we can add Pakistan, Chile, Argentina and many other countries. But [...wait for it...] in the absence of a genuinely revolutionary leadership, in every case the movement was derailed and defeated."

Since the student demo was apparently organised without leaders by Facebook, twitter, mobile phone, etc, it's rather surprising that they can get away with this sort of thing in this day and age (probably, and hopefully, they can't and won't ).

Also surprising (at least to us since we hadn't realised it was so mad) was their analysis of events in Eastern Europe and Russia over 20 years ago:

"In Europe, the counter-revolution took place under the flag of bourgeois democracy, but it was a counter-revolution nonetheless."

Mad as this analysis is, it does follow if you think the state-capitalist dictatorships there were some sort of "workers state". I suppose that they prefer the situation where Trotskyists are sent to a labour camp in a "workers state" rather than be able to openly publish their rubbish in a "bourgeois democracy".