The revolution will be slightly rubbish

· If you clean the bathroom of someone that considers themselves elite or is an elite sympathiser, like a right wing professor, can you never put loo paper in their bathroom?
· If you work in a restaurant where elitists eat, can you serve the food once it is cold or cook the wrong food?
· If you are a builder repairing the house of an elitist can you also bug it and share the footage and audio online?
· If you are a pest controller and you are called to the office or home of an elitist or elitist sympathiser can you fail at destroying the pest and possibly introduce new pests?

This is what you get if you plough through to the bitter end of Elitism Leads to Tyranny, the manifesto of Trenton Oldfield, the man who swam into the Boat Race. As can be seen from his serving suggestions, the elite will be vanquished not with a bang but a whimper. The rest of his manifesto, like all calls to arms written by lone whippets begging for attention, is unreadable:

The boat race itself, with its pseudo competition, assembled around similar principles of fastest, strongest, selected ...etc, is an inconsequential backdrop for these elite educational institutions to demonstrate themselves, reboot their shared culture together in the public realm. It is also inconsequential to the performance that the overwhelming majority of the population continue to remain interested in their own lives and disinterested in the boat race. The boat race, while accessible to everyone, isn’t really advertised or promoted as something for the general public to attend, you know when it’s on because it is part of the social networking calendar. This is a public event, for and by the elites with broader social relations aims. The fact that it happens in the public realm (visible) almost exactly as it has done for the last 158 years also becomes important; the untouched; the unchanged is significant. Most standing alongside the Thames today are in fact the pumped-up though obedient administrators, managers, promoters, politicians and enforcers; functional, strategic and aspirational elites. The transnational-corpo-aristocratic ruling class (invisible) haven’t turned up today and would never consider doing so, despite the best endeavours of Bollinger, Xchange and Hammersmith and Fulham’s mayor.

Clearly this man has done Studies of some kind. According to the Guardian:

Privately educated with an MSc in contemporary urbanism from the London School of Economics, Trenton Oldfield makes an unlikely agitator against elite society.

That explains where he got his verbosity, pomposity and inability to write. But it also leaves one wondering whether the Guardian should get out more often. Privately educated with a Masters degree from a good college and a propensity for chain-linked thinking makes Mr Oldfield almost a stereotype  of an agitator against elite society. Has the Guardian never hung out with the Socialist Workers Party? A bunch of toffs in donkey jackets talking in acquired nasal drones about late capitalism, the SWP is a highly disciplined organisation, where no deviation from the party line is permitted. It has more than a whiff of the Officers' Training Corps about it.

Then there is the SWP's one true enemy - the Workers' Revolutionary Party - the red luvvies. Being thespians, they are more prone to tantrums; as an example, here is something from Chapter 12 of a  long book that you had best avoid reading:

Lacking any ideas of her own, Torrance had no objection to using Healy as a source of political advice, and at first was quite ready to go along with this. But the emerging pro-Stalinist line was challenged on the Political Committee by Richard Price, who rejected the identification of bureaucratic reforms with the political revolution, arguing that these developments were an expression of Soviet Bonapartism in crisis. At one PC meeting Price condemned Healy’s line that a section of the bureaucracy was playing a revolutionary role as ‘Pabloism’, which reduced Healy to apoplexy! Accustomed to an organisation in which his every word, however mad or mundane, was treated as the tablets from the mountain, Healy was unable to live with this kind of thing. ‘For supporting perestroika’, Vanessa Redgrave recounts indignantly, ‘Gerry and I were accused of “capitulating to Stalinism”. We realised that the split we had made before had been incomplete.’ But to carry out a further split a pretext had to be manufactured. From August 1986 onwards, therefore, Healy began to provoke a series of confrontations with the WRP leadership. First of all he demanded the expulsion of Alex Mitchell, who had departed for Australia in May and resurfaced as a journalist with the Murdoch press. Then Healy objected to a series of articles written by Athow and O’Regan (‘G. Healy: Fifty Years a Fighter for Trotskyism’), which appeared in News Line in late August. And he resumed his complaints about being excluded from the party leadership the previous January.

And so on and so on.

Sadly, the International Marxist Group (posh trots like to call themselves Marxists: the word hides the taint of Pol Pot) is no longer around - having disappeared up its own theory after its own long and historically inevitable history  of splittings and expulsions;  Tariq Ali was one of its luminaries. Joe Strummer once claimed to be a supporter.

And so it goes. The late capitalists need not worry to much and clearly they don't: if they wanted to put a stop to the inevitable tendency towards revolution, all they would need to do is cut off their children's allowances.