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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Interesting to see that the communist party of Britain came out against gender identity, being the “only party in Britain to do so”.

Rather good arguments as well.

https://www.communistparty.org.uk/the-gender-recognition-bill-and-equality-law/

Of course the average generation Z twitter communist (of the type who has read one book and it’s not the communist manifesto, but the one from the evil transphobe) is up in arms in their respective bedrooms and basements. What would the communist party of Great Britain, an actual party rooted in tradition and theory, associated with actual working people who leave their bedrooms know about communism anyway. It’s all about beating up terfs. It’s always been about beating up terfs, that’s what historical determinism is about.

I don’t live in Britain anymore but if I did I would vote for the communists for the first time ever.

Is the communist party of Great Britain associated with actual working class people? I mean this is probably evidence that it is, but there’s a wide variety of tiny old-school Stalinist parties willing to denounce modern -isms as a distraction from class conflict.

The "Communist Party of Britain" isn't even the British communist party. That would be the "Communist Party of Great Britain" (which was Soviet-backed, and disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union, with its leaders drifting seamlessly into senior positions in the left wing NGO-sphere). The "Communist Party of Britain" was a tankie splinter group that split off from the "Communist Party of Great Britain" in 1985 (de facto) or 1988 (de jure).

The bit in The Life of Brian about the rivalry between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front was inspired by real events in British hard-left politics at the time Monty Python were making the film.

Of all British "communist" groups, the one you really need to watch out for are the "Revolutionary Communist Party", who appear to be libertarians (but are currently LARPing as anti-woke social conservatives).

My understanding is that CPGB went "gender critical" before and harder than CPB.

My understanding is that the CPGB dissolved in 1991, long before this question was mainstream enough for a party to want to take a stance on it.

Ah yes, I see the full name of the group is CPGB(ML). This is the one I meant, though.

Yes, they are separate and apparently unrelated parties. The genealogy appears to be as follows:

  • CPGB (main British communist party for most of the 20th century) – dissolved in 1991

    • CPB – split from CPGB c. 1988 – extant

  • Labour Party – extant

    • Socialist Labour Party – split from Labour in 1996 – extant
      • CPGB(ML) – split from Socialist Labour Party in 2004 – extant

The above is not exhaustive. There are a bunch of small far-left sects which are not included here.

There are a bunch of small far-left sects which are not included here.

Including Simon Pure's Good Brand, which has managed to survive for nearly 120 years without ever being relevant to wider politics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain

Gotta say that "Instantly enact complete and full communism with abolition of money and everything else, but only if we get 50%+1 in the election" is at least a slightly endearing position.

At a guess, it's associated with working class communists. All two of them.

To their credit, the 19th century left ran a lot of educational programs for working men, and so their genuinely was a large cohort of working class people who understood and believed in socialist theory. But their main representative was the Labour party. The Communists must always have been the extremist fringe of the movement.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm an American and even I can recognize that this would be a bigger deal if it was Labour that was putting out this statement. Having a Communist Party in the UK seems almost redundant.

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