Biodegrading sects

Submitted by AWL on 3 December, 2013 - 6:36

Thirty-three years ago Tariq Ali quit the International Marxist Group (IMG), then the second-highest-profile group of the revolutionary socialist left in Britain. He had never been a rank-and-file activist. He had been a well-known leader in the IMG ever since he joined it in 1968.

He called for the withdrawal of the Russian troops which had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, while most of his comrades thought that their definition of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state” (which Ali shared) ruled out that call.

He was right on that; but he didn’t stay to argue. He quit. He has been “around” the left ever since, but never really active. He declares that “the communist ideal” is dead.

He used the Guardian on 26 November to claim that the arrest of leaders of a tiny Maoist sect, on charges of holding three women captive for 30 years, “tells us about the far left” in general.

Nothing special about Maoists, he says. “The Maoists’ antics were rivalled by a number of Trotskyist sects... Even those most critical of Stalinist style and methods tdended to reproduce the model of a one-party state”. He considers the (now bio-degraded) Norwegian Maoists, however, not so bad: “a far cry from the cult... in Brixton”.
Best to bio-degrade into a bourgeois or social-democratic career, and then you’ll avoid the risks of anything so intense as revolutionary activism...

As well to argue that since the pursuit of science can lead you to obsess about squaring the circle or making a perpetual-motion machine, or into daft experiments, it is best to stick with uninquisitive common sense.

“Every [socialist] sect is religious”, wrote Marx back in 1868, in order to argue for non-sectarian activist politics rather than relaxed acquiescence to bourgeois society. The Maoists, with their cult of Mao, were special, and those remained Maoists after the about-turns of China’s leaders in the 1970s and 80s were more specially sectarian still.

The main religious sects in bourgeois society, however, are... the religious sects, including large and “respectable” ones like the Catholic Church, with a record of abuse exceeding the Brixton Maoists’.

Comments

Submitted by Matthew on Thu, 05/12/2013 - 21:35

Sects are usually small groups that split off from larger religious bodies, such as the Protestants who broke from Rome in the Reformation. Do you think the Catholic Church is a sect because all religious bodies are sects or because of something specific to it?

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