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Notes -
I went for a walk this morning and passed the staging area, by Marble Arch, for the now weekly Palestine protests. On opposite sides of the street, and in an excellent bit of unintentional visual comedy, sat the information tents for the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party respectively, both in many ways orthodox Marxists, and yet sworn enemies for reasons you can read about in this twelve-part volume. (They largely concern just how disastrous the fall of the Soviet Union was for the world revolution, and an apparent disagreement over the nature of North Vietnam’s specific form of communism.)
Both factions have seemingly determined that these Palestine protests are the main way they might attract new blood, and therefore hand out many posters and flags with their respective logos on them. So a bizarre spectacle plays out on London’s streets, as two bands of aging white communists try to appeal to young Muslims (who likely neither know nor care about Marx) in the waging of this strange internecine war among Leninists.
I believe they will do a good job attracting a flock. I saw plenty of brown immigrants in the communist orgs back in university, and it was clear that Marx provided their Palestinian loyalty with something that other thinkers did not.
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