Communist Students (logo to the left), the student group established by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the end of 2006, has always had a slightly rocky relationship with the Communist Party of Britain's youth group, the Young Communist League (YCL). Perhaps this is because typing communiststudents.org does in fact take you to the YCL homepage, or perhaps it's because Communist Students and the CPGB, for all their faults, are actual bona fide Communists, unlike their Stalinist counterparts in the CPB.And then, a few days ago, this rocky relationship fractured further when an exec member of the YCL removed all information from the Communist Students Wikipedia page and replaced it with
information of another group called - you guessed it - Communist Students and founded by the YCL (logo to the right). This Communist Students claims to have been in existence since 2005; if so it predates the CPGB's Communist Students. Having said this, I've been fairly active in the students' movement and though I'm by no means a leftist trainspotter (this post belies that statement somewhat, doesn't it?) I can't claim to have seen the CPB's youth active under any name other than the YCL.How very strange. So now, where one Communist Students would no doubt have been enough for the world, we find ourselves blessed by two. Who will get to keep the name?
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8 comments:
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
I propose a merger!
hahahaahah!!
Cheeky bloody Stalinists. They've backed off from the Wikipedia page after a stern warning.
@Ste: ROFLOL! I can't see it anytime soon!
Can you explain what makes the CPGB "communists" whilst the CPB are "stalinists"? Unless you are referring to the waty the CPB are clearly trying to rewrite not only wikipedia but history too?
Just that the CPB's programme, the Road to British Socialism, isn't a programme of workers' revolution. And Stalinist because it stands in the tradition of the old CPGB. No concept of internationalism either, as nationalist No2EU initiative shows.
Well both the contemporary CPGB and the CPB both come out of the Stalinist tradition. Maybe this is their way of getting back at the pretend CPGB for stealing the name they had a better claim to.
I think the least plausible part of the CPB deciding they've had a student group since 2005 called Communist Students is that I've never encountered any of their members who are students or are under the age of 30.
Duncan, why do you think the CPB had a "better claim" to the name CPGB? They are a million miles away from the politics that the original CPGB was set up with.
And who was the name stolen from, by the way?
The few CPB students who I have met have up until now organised under the banner of the YCL. When we met the CPB's CS convenor, Dan Cole, at NUS conference last year we had a good chat. While we didn't see eye to everything, he made no mention of the fact that we use the name Communist Students.
Certainly we are not going to stop using the name!
Mad tankie scumbags.
I didn't even know they existed.
But at least they've both got their priorities sorted.
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