Re: What's in the latest Green Left Weekly? #492 May 15, 2002

["Alan Bradley" <abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Louis Proyect
> On Fri, 17 May 2002 06:59:58 +1000, glparramatta wrote:

Just for the record, the article in question wasn't written by Norm Dixon
(glparramatta), but by Dick Nichols, who is someone else entirely.

Nichols, in fact, is the person who over the last few months has told us
that the US ISO is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that the
Italian PRC has taken a sharp turn to the left.

In fact, he is exactly the kind of independent thinker that Louis tells us
that left groups need.  What Louis has overlooked is that most of what such
thinkers produce is nonsense!  : )

This brings to mind another nest of independent minds:  British Trotskyism
of the late 40s.  This crowd ended up excommunicating each other and giving
rise to a disproportionate share of the 57 different varieties of
Trotskyism.  There was clearly a political pathology at work there, but was
it really the "Zinovievism" that Louis has written about?

I suspect that it wasn't.  I have a sneaking suspicion that Louis has
actually overgeneralised the experience of the US SWP and, to a lesser
extent, other Trotskyist and ex-Trotskyist grouplets.  The "model" used by
the US SWP throughout its history wasn't, I think, the model used by groups
like the French and Italian CPs, which were, after all, actual groups
involved in the early days of the Comintern.

Before the Russian revolution, and the formation of the CPs, the Marxist
movement in a number of countries including the UK, the USA and Australia
was fragmented into a scattering of sects, just as it is today.  The
formation of the CPs partly changed this, by marginalising the sects that
didn't merge into the CPs, but the CPs themselves were rarely able to
achieve a stable mass base (in these countries), and were for much of their
history merely the largest of the sects.

Does the "Zinovievist" model apply to these groups?  If so, how?  How does
it apply to the PCI or PCF?

Alan Bradley
abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx




















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