The Golden Age
Posted on September 3, 2008
The disastrous Shiraz Socialist website is the hobby horse of a pathetic Drudge-like gossip, who is interested in little more than attempting to embarrass his former comrades in the AWL and cheer-leading for the Democratic presidential candidate. It is a train-wreck in progress and rubbernecking is inevitable and irresistable. Recently this creepy figure, who styles himself ‘Voltaire’s Priest’, published a 2000 word diatribe by an AWL ‘dissident’ who, having stormed out of the AWL in a huff one day (claiming to have been ‘expelled), in a truly Stakhanovite effort, had a new party and website ready to launch the next. The article alleged bureaucratic malfeasance and anti-democratic practices, and when it was patiently pointed out that the allegations were distortions, it was comedy central as a succession of cranks and rank hypocrites lined up to lecture the AWL about party democracy. The AWL may reasonably be characterised as ‘dotty’, however one thing they cannot be fairly accused of is intolerance of dissenting opinion, as they freely allow factions within the party.
David Broder was not so much a dissident as the disloyal opposition, a conceited public schoolboy who attempts to fake gravitas and profundity by means of an extravagant neck-beard, who joined a Trotskyist sect with whose platform he fundamentally disagrees — when he’s not not even a Trotskyist!
What happened when AWL members went to attend a public meeting advertised on ‘the commune’s’ website?
On the evening of Monday 1 September, the new group the Commune/Group of International Communists (two of whose three known supporters are recently ex-AWL members David Broder and Chris Ford) attempted to ban the AWL from their first public meeting.
When we arrived at the venue for their — publicly advertised — meeting on workers’ struggles in 1968-74, we were told by Chris Ford, before we had opened our mouths, that it was not a public meeting, that we had come to disrupt and that we should “fuck off”. After ten or so minutes of arguing, David Broder, to his credit, let us in; that was followed, however, by repeated attempts to get us to leave; we were told by the third Commune supporter that if we didn’t she would “make a scene”. After very calmly and reasonably refusing to be banned, we were allowed to speak; but whenever one of us raised an issue that the comrades didn’t like, the chair attempted to shut us up (aided by the person who had promised to make a scene leaping up and, well, making a scene). The same happened when one of our comrades began her contribution by objecting to this sort of behaviour.
The building of a healthy left requires a culture of free and open debate; not the replication on a micro-level of the SWP’s practice of bans and exclusions. It is particularly weird coming from a group whose members claim, falsely, that they were subject to bureaucratic suppression in the AWL.
