Re: Red Ken outrage

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >him he's outside Tesco's selling "Socialist Worker". The social-worker who
> >threatened to have you put in care as a kid with his "Peace" badge on. The
> >"Street-Fighting Men" of '68 who are now your boss.
> >The "Left" is the establishment. And you are part of the "Left". Go figure.
>
>
> Bit of a problem for the real (?) left innit?

Yes, it is. Ultraleft workerism of this type virtually destroyed the
American left. The Trotskyist movement stampeded all of its social
workers, librarians, computer programmers, engineers and teachers into
industrial jobs just so that the party could be cleansed of potentially
gangrenous middle-class influences. In reality the social base of a
proletarian party is not determined in a unilinear fashion. When the
American SWP had no particular orientation to the industrial proletariat
during the early 1970s, more of them were joining in fact. They joined
because they perceived the party as in the thick of things: running
election campaigns, organizing antiwar demos, etc. One working class
recruit I remember vividly: John, a longshoreman from Boston with a thick
Irish accent who had dropped out of high school. Unlike any of us, he wore
his hair long and in a pony tail. He came to Oberlin for a national
gathering in 1971 and sat by himself most of the time in the Student
Center lobby with Capital in one hand and a dictionary in the other. "What
are you up to, John," I asked in my typically solicitous manner. "Trying
to read Marx, but a lot of words I don't understand--that's what the
dictionary is for." He dropped out 6 months later. We (they,
really) didn't know what to do with someone like that. Next time we will.