RE: [Marxism] RE: The Militant and Who Cares?

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that on a list, there's an awful lot that we're not all reading,
so I don't see why comments on the current positions of _The Militant_
aren't worth making available.  I enjoy the periodic discussions among
our former Maoist and Stalinist comrades, as well.  Understanding where
these things misfired is helpful.

Tony's correct in pointing out the predisposition of ex-SWPers to see
the degeneration of the party strictly in terms of their own experience,
and he hits the nail on the head when writing:

"What killed the SWP IMO, was group think and a lack of a true
democratic culture within its ranks.   The organization was seriously
overly centralized, and the NO tried too much to micro-manage local
affairs.  This made it impossible to learn from mistakes, and to grow
within the local culture of areas where the SWP had branches. It made it
impossible for the group to reconsider bad national decisions made
within the NO, and applied everywhere without any real thought or
feedback being accepted from comrades who had to carry oiut those often
times, totally miserable NO orders."

Of course, the SWP wasn't a living entity and, if it were, saying it's
dead wouldn't make it so.  More than this, the problem Tony cites are
the symptoms of the underlying causes of the party's demise as a
revolutionary force.  At no point in our lifetimes was there a serious
and self-critical political culture within the branches (what passed for
a political life was more something on life-support with hoses running
from the top-down).

The problem former SWP-ers have is acknowledging this to have been the
case means that there actually was something in each of us that found
this appearance of strength and coherence appealing enough for us to
have joined the SWP/YSA anyway.  In my case, I think it was refreshing
after the experience of the chaos that was the SDS.

However, I also think that this prior political experience meant I was
never as entirely comfortable with the lack of internal political life
in the party than were those for whom the SWP/YSA was their first
radical organization.

Another invisible weakness in the SWP/YSA was that a lot of the people
"recruited out of the mass movements" weren't.  They were recruited
independently, then assigned to work with antiwar or women's groups, and
identified with those movements in a kind of after-the-fact self-hyping
that we were winning more out of the movements than we actually were.

Indeed, one of the most disturbing trends while I was in the party was a
kind of social recruitment of people who weren't and never had been
active about anything--much less "leaders" of any mass movement.  Being
a woman didn't make you necessarily a woman's liberation activist, any
more than being gay made you a gay activist or being black made you an
activist for black liberation or being a young white guy made you an
antiwar activist.  At best, these recruits were radicals by abstract
sentiment of some sort.

I'm not saying it wasn't a good thing to recruit them.  The problem is
that they became mechanism for further party self-deception.  Their
presence in the party even locked the process of self-deception into
place, making it impossible to look at the process in a critical and
accurate way.

Solidarity!
Mark L.




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