Re: Louis's comments on a John Percy article and Solidarity

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jose:
> Which is all the more reason why I've been surprised by Louis's comments
> on the stance taken by some members of Solidarity and the stance taken
> by Solidarity as a whole on the Cuba trials and petitions debate.
>
> A few Solidarity members signed one of the petitions, Soli as a group,
> by unanimous vote of its PC including at least a couple of the people
> who signed the petition criticizing Cuba, endorsed the "Appeal to the
> Conscience of the World" initiated by Mexican intellectuals to counter
> the lynch-mob kind of atmosphere the imperialists were trying to create
> against Cuba.

I think the problem is that I have had almost no contact with Solidarity
members in NYC as an organized political group. Unlike the CofC, they have
not sponsored an open forum of any sort in the entire time they have
operated here. Even at the Socialist Scholars Conference, where many of
them like Charlie Post participate as individuals, they never organize
workshops under their name. If I were to join Solidarity, that's what I
would do since it is the sort of thing I did best in the SWP and in the
Central America movement.

The thing that kept me from joining Solidarity, ironically enough, is that
I object to too many articles in Against the Current, which amounts to a
public face of the organization even though it claims that it is formally
independent. My criticisms obviously revolve around items involving
Yugoslavia, but I have also been strongly critical of one item on Colombia
that contained an unsubstantiated charge of murder against the FARC. In
general, I find that these sorts of articles betray a kind of Stalinophobia
that was present not only in the state capitalist members at the outset,
but among some of the SWP'ers who never got over a kind of one-sided
understanding of the USSR, even though they had broken with sectarianism.

In any case, I think it would be a good thing if Solidarity grew,
especially if it were able to attract revolutionary-minded fighters like
those in the Atlanta branch.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org