April 5, 2006:
"So-and-so was a good leader. She slept with the wrong colleague and that made her crazy."
Substitution of petty gossip for political analysis.
Inveterate, helpless, irredeemable sexism.
Cluelessness — factual inaccuracy. The leader in question met her downfall in confrontation with a rival who defeated her politically. You could call that Machiavellian, but it had nothing to do with people's personal lives.
There's something more in this than ubiquitous incompetence. There's a type of relationship to the work which I want to call corrupted. Corrupted by defeat, corrupted by the milieu of ineptitude. Corrupted most irreparably by the false project. Where the project itself is false, false people group to it.
So that the organization, despite its verbal radicalism, becomes in practice a type of coffee klatch: a gossip parlor and social circle for people who are self-identified with the word "socialism" and with the badge of rebellion. Yet whose politics in practice are purest Bernstein.