The smog is doing awful things to my hair. What should be long, flowing locks has turned into a thick mat on top and stringiness on the sides.

David Cassidy obviously never dealt with air pollution

I'm writing about anti-imperialist movements for my scholarship applications. I've received sage advice that my application isn't very scholarly; that instead, it reads like a political pamphlet. Which makes sense, given I've written way more leaflets and polemics than scholarly texts. In fact, it's safe to say I've gotten through school by finding sympathetic profs and polemicizing on my favourite topics. Now I need to learn to step back and consider texts, rather than arguments; points of view, rather than positions; hypotheses, rather than programmes. Every political cell in my body rebels against this, but it's necessary. School is not a place for polemics: it's a kind of workplace, with its own rules - in this case, the artifice of neutrality. Thank god I have my blog.

What do you mean, I can't polemicize???

Here's a great picture of Andre Breton, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky from Mexico, 1938; it's in my big book of surrealism. Notice how dapper Breton and Trotsky are (the latter was, apparently, a life-long dandy). Can't say the same for Rivera.



Vorwartz!

In the last thing I'll post about vanguards, Ernest Mandel has an excellent piece on the topic. Mandel was the lead theoretician of the Fourth International, a loose grouping of Trotskyist organizations, descended from Trotsky's original attempt to refound the Communist International without Stalinism. As such, he naturally thought vanguard groups were necessary. Here's why:

If the workers would be at the highest point of militancy and consciousness all the time, you would not need a vanguard organization. But, unfortunately, they are not and cannot be there under capitalism. So you need a group of people who embody a permanently high level of militancy and activity, and a permanently high level of class consciousness. After each wave of rising class struggle and rising class consciousness, when a turning point arrives and the actual activity of the masses declines, consciousness falls to a lower level and activity falls to nearly zero. The first function of a revolutionary vanguard organization is to maintain the continuity of the theoretical... and organizational acquisitions of the previous phase of high class activity, and of high working class consciousness. It serves as the permanent memory of the class and of the labor movement

Working class consciousness is uneven. Therefore socialists have to consciously intervene, in an organized fashion, to maintain and renew the lessons of struggle. By "groups of people", Mandel means layers of the working class and its allies, not tiny sectlets.

Pierre Rousset has a very interesting article on the evolution of the far left in Europe and the Philippines. I will comment on it soon.