Those pesky right-wing NDP radicals

The Sidney Smith Building on St. George Street is often the site of a whole lot of the crazy on the U of T campus, particularly as each new school year starts. Here, for example, we have a guy shilling a paper for something called the Spartacus Youth Club:



The Spartacus Youth Club seems to be your typical Marxist-Leninist outfit, as is evident from this website. It's not that I can't respect the Marxist point of view, but you have to wonder about groups like this who don't seem to recognize that it's not the 1930s anymore. Check out the opening paragraph about the club from the website I linked to above:

The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter.

Note to the SYC -- the Leninist vanguard party is lone gone, and it isn't coming back.

Of course the most amusing part of this whole scene is the sign attached to the guy's table:



This sign is self-evidently funny, but it's worthwhile to think about why it's so funny.

The idea behind the message is rather clear -- the NDP are a component of the same big political/capitalist machine that comprises Canada's other major political parties, so they're not going to enact the kind of change a good Marxist-Leninist is after. That's fine. But are they really the "frontmen" for "Canadian imperialism". I mean, maybe they're somewhere in the cheap seats. But the front men? I don't think so.

Anyway, if you're going to make such a strongly-worded sign, shouldn't you go after a bigger target like, I don't know, capitalism? Or maybe one of the major institutions that symbolizes capitalism and/or imperialism? The IMF, maybe? Or the World Bank? Wall Street? NATO? Something like that?

Here you get the impression that this guy's NDP-supporting girlfriend dumped him, and this is his way of getting back at her. Funny stuff any way you look at it.