The trouble is, Nigel, that when you throw around phrases like that, all it shows is that you're more interested in insulting people than anything else. Which is what happens with small sectarian groups: they denounce and insult people. Which is why I don't take them awfully seriously.
See, Nige, these days I go on gut instincts. By gut instinct, I'm a socialist. Now I don't really know any more what sort of socialist I am, but I do know that my instincts are to support people rather than denounce them, to want a broad movement rather than a narrow one and to be an internationalist. These things are in many ways the same thing. It means supporting and apprecaiting people who I might strongly, even vehemently disagree with - but it does mean supporting them, i.e. backing them up, defending them from attack, sticking my neck out for them: rather than what it means on the sectarian left, where support means no more than issuing a statement saying "we support such-and-such" and then folowing it with a thousand reasons why they're terrible. I won't do that.
It's a bit like "Two Souls of Socialism" except they're a different two souls to Draper's: there's the soul of solidarity and the soul of denunciation. I can't abide denunciation. I like solidairty. Real solidarity, not paper solidarity. I could quote Lenin on Luxemburg or something to back it up, if that be the format you like, but really, as I say, it's about gut insitinct. You don't have to be uncritical, but you do have to stand by people when they're under attack. That's basic, to me.
It's not, however, basic to anarchists and sectarians, who want everything to be just so. Their gut instinct is to disassociate themselves from everybody who isn't quite right: the anarchists, from anybody who's not an anarchist, the sectarians, from anybody who hasn't got the right line. Not entirely, of courde, but on the whole, that's what what they do. Their first instinct is to subject somebody or something to bitter criticism. Which is why they end up on their own, wondering why they're in such small numbers. They understand how right they are and can't udnerstand why everybody else doesn't see it that way. But a movement of millions is, of necessity, many movements, and is also of necessaity, a movement where those different movements are generous towards one another. Where we don't approach everything with the outlook "right: I need to show what's wrong with these other people". Or where everybody else has to be described with insults and abuse.
