Cultists & communists – too close to us for comfort

Like the whiff of a mouldy madeleine, the statement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) on the expulsion of Comrade Balakrishnan takes you back to a time that is well worth forgetting.

‘Balakrishnan and his clique were suspended from the Party because of their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities and because of their spreading social fascist slanders against the Party and the proletarian movement,’ it read.

The churn of Dalek denunciations can only have come from one time and place – the Marxisant left of the 1970s.

I’ll try to translate. The central committee used ‘clique’ and ‘splittist’ to accuse Balakrishnan and his friends of seeking to divert the faithful from ‘the task of organising the industrial proletariat [that] will surge ahead, under the leadership of the Party’, as the communique went on to say. No crime was worse, because the party was the best and only hope for the working class, and by extension, all humanity.