No (satis)faction

Just a brief post on the comments on the Glazers by Sir Alex which have been causing such consternation.

Firstly, the rather banal comment that seems to have everyone most riled:

"I think there are a whole lot of factions at United that think they own the club. They will always be contentious about whoever owns the club, and that's the way it's always been.

"When the Glazers took over here there was dissatisfaction, so there have always been pockets of supporters who have their views. But I think the majority of real fans will look at it realistically and say it's not affecting the team. We've won four championships since they've been there and one European Cup."

is really nothing.  Even the childish cries from some supporters about how "Sir Alex says I'm not a real fan because I don't like the Glazers" aren't actually true - the set of "real fans" is not equal to the set of people who like the Glazers.  

More interesting is Sir Alex's use of the word factions, because it allows us to bring in Lenin, and his remarks on party unity:

All class-conscious workers must clearly realise that factionalism of any kind is harmful and impermissible, for no matter how members of individual groups may desire to safeguard Party unity, factionalism in practice inevitably leads to the weakening of team-work and to intensified and repeated attempts by the enemies of the governing Party, who have wormed their way into it, to widen the cleavage and to use it for counter-revolutionary purposes.

The way the enemies of the proletariat take advantage of every deviation from a thoroughly consistent communist line was perhaps most strikingly shown in the case of the Kronstadt mutiny, when the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and whiteguards in all countries of the world immediately expressed their readiness to accept the slogans of the Soviet system, if only they might thereby secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and when the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in general resorted in Kronstadt to slogans calling for an insurrection against the Soviet Government of Russia ostensibly in the interest of the Soviet power. These facts fully prove that the whiteguards strive, and are able, to disguise themselves as Communists, and even as the most Left-wing Communists, solely for the purpose of weakening and destroying the bulwark of the proletarian revolution in Russia. Menshevik leaflets distributed in Petrograd on the eve of the Kronstadt mutiny likewise show how the Mensheviks took advantage of the disagreements and certain rudiments of factionalism in the Russian Communist Party actually in order to egg on and support the Kronstadt mutineers, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the whiteguards, while claiming to be opponents of mutiny and supporters of the Soviet power, only with supposedly slight modifications.

The unintentional consequence of factionalism is to strengthen the opposition.  Our discontent is the enemies fuel.

Lenin indeed goes one step further than Sir Alex.  For Lenin, factionalism does prevent you from being a "real fan:" 

In order to ensure strict discipline within the Party and in all Soviet work and to secure the maximum unanimity in eliminating all factionalism, the Congress authorises the Central Committee, in cases of breach of discipline or of a revival or toleration of factionalism, to apply all Party penalties, including expulsion, and in regard to members of the Central Committee, reduction to the status of alternate members and, as an extreme measure, expulsion from the Party.