If your parents (and indeed in my case, their parents too) and yourself have been around the radical Left for the whole of your life, then something strange starts to happen: the people who tried to recruit you to their group, organisation or party have often resigned from the party they tried to recruit you to. So, for example, as a child, I can remember people coming to our house to try to woo my parents back into the CP but later resigned themselves. As a teenager and at college people who tried to recruit me to several different organisations (e.g. Christopher Hitchens trying to get me to join IS!) later resigned. And then since 1968, many, many, many different people from different organisations tried and then resigned themselves. What should one make of that? Should one just say, oh thats how it is? The radical left is made up of a series of small corridors, down which people fly at speed, struggling to recruit others whilst they themselves are already preparing to fly out the other end? Should one admire and respect those who have stayed on through thick and thin fighting to.improve and refine the organisation theyre in even though many of their erstwhile comrades have left? And why is it that one of the principles of being in a radical Left organisation is it that once someone has left, the reasons why they left are by and large ignored…because obviously they are traitors, apostates and renegades? Or put more simply, they are, by definition, wrong, as the organisation, in order to continue, is right. Meanwhile, many people on the outside who never were members are not so bad because potentially they could be nearly right. I suspect that for most radical Left groups there are more ex-members than members alive at any given moment. What does that tell us? Does it tell us that we dont know how to talk to each other about what is possible and what is ideal and what can and cant be achieved? If (like me) youre interested in the idea of a radical Left that can retain people and get bigger, what can we say - looking over the last 50 years - have been the obstacles to this? And what, if anything, has helped?
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 09:46:56 +0000
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