As a young Trotskyite - until my mother put her foot down, curtailed my liberty and refused to allow the Dave Spartist Militant in the house - I loathed the SWP and the WRP and, well, everything that wasn’t Militant. It was deemed a deliberate insult to be called a Trotskyite rather than a Trotskyist - or it might have been the other way about. I was told that the Soviet Union had been ideologically incorrect in its post-Lenin Stalinism and I was given a book to read, supposedly written by Stalin that was all about Marxism-Leninism and Dialectics in Physics and Chemistry.
We hated the Soviet Union, we did, and I wasted whole afternoons trying to plough through various excited promises of a new Marxist millenium. Didn’t understand why the writing was so bad, though, until I read other very bad writers - post-Stucturalists like Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan and the like and finally understood they and the authors of the politcal tracts I’d read really had nothing to say at all and were deliberately writing badly to obscure that fact.
[nb: there’s something called the Militant that seems to be an online version but I can’t be bothered to look]
It wasn’t until later that I read more about what the Soviet Union was like. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, and The Gulag Archipelago
were two instructive reads; and Orwell, too: and by striking contrast with the sluggish committee crap I was given to read, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn write so excellently. So it comes as not much of a suprise that in the Presidential election the Republicans gained from Russian Jews (registration required).
Overall there was a 3-1 break for the Democrats from Jewish voters, though.
