Being the slow reader that I am, I've only just spotted* this most excellent competition in the September issue of your soaraway Socialist Standard:
Competition for the Twittering Classes
The latest fad for micro-blogging is coming under fire, with a study showing that 40 percent of ‘tweets’ are ‘pointless babble’ and only 8.7 percent pass along ‘news of interest’(BBC Online, 17 August). Considering the gargantua of garbage which is the printed book output, this is not a bad batting average. However, keen as ever to raise the bar of public discourse, Pathfinders proposes a competition for the best expression of the Party Case in 140 characters or less. Brief reflection offers: ‘World for the Workers, not the Rich W**kers’ however you are sure to do better than that. Emails or letters to our Clapham office. Closing date 10 November, for our December issue, and best ideas will be printed. First Prize will be, of course, comradely adulation, as we socialists are trying to move away from material remuneration systems.
Why not? I'm sure I read somewhere that someone has been putting The Communist Manifesto on twitter (bugger if I can find it, though). And, no doubt, someone from Aufheben will eventually get around to serialising The Grundrisse on twitter . . . but we may get socialism before that particular exercise in twitter publishing is actually completed.
My contributions to the comp are the following:
world socialism - for a world without war, want, wages and the fat controller. Banish the gods from the sky, the capitalists from the earth and the chuggers from the high street.
I thought I'd play it safe with a careful tweaking of the classics.
I can already feel the "comradely adulation" coming my way, and I don't like it. It seems so unnatural: comradeship and the SPGB, I mean.
*'just spotted' roughly translates as 'this post has been in draft for three weeks'.
