I think that the full Cockburn parody of the CP jargon was 'the lower organs of the party must penetrate the backward parts of the proletariat'. Apocryphal, I guess. I think it's in his autobiog. Crossing the line.
In a similar vein Christopher Isherwood related a tale about working with filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and WH Auden at the GPO film unit. Jennings had written a line that ran 'the workers lay down their enormous tools', which creased up Auden and Isherwood, but they did not have the heart to tell the naive Jennings why.
Tariq Ali tells a story about working on the radical paper the 'Black Dwarf' (named after an eighteenth century radical paper). The week before a big demo, the editorial board was satisfied with its intervention, a double page spread by Hilary Wainwright, 'ten theses on womens' liberation'. Handing the copy over to the hippie designer, the EB was well-pleased with itself. But editor Tariq Ali was woken in the small hours by a tearful Hilary Wainwright, demanding that he come down and sort things out with the designer.
Falling out of the taxi in his dressing gown, Ali was confronted with the scene - the designer had drawn a huge pair of breasts, Robert Crumb style, the cleavage falling in the stapled fold of the centre page, with five theses written over each breast. 'Womens' liberation, right?' said the designer, uncomprehending of Wainwright's distress.
[Disclaimer: all these anecdotes from memory, of written memoirs.]
In message <001301bfb52e$adfc9d40$350b063e at mjones>, Mark Jones
<jones118 at lineone.net> writes
>Sorry to be predictable but which bits of Marx/Lenin are out of date?
Not this proposition from the preface to the first edition of Capital:
'the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism, capable of change, and is constantly changing.' (p21 of the Lawrence and Wishart ed.)
Marx and Lenin both adopted the method of historical specificity. They considered that social forms were transient. All analyses, consequently, are only contingent, not set in stone.
-- Jim heartfield