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

["Marvin Gandall" <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Have former SWP'ers considered that the problems they (correctly) identify
weren't unique to themselves, but applicable for the most part to the
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small revolutionary organizations - Maoist,
anarchist, Trotskyist - which sputtered and died throughout Western Europe
and the Americas over the past three generations? And, if so, what
conclusions can be drawn from this? That each of these organizations failed
because of a "crisis of leadership" - the rationale most commonly offered in
one form or another by veterans of these organizations on departure?

If so, the theory by (I forget who, Bleibtrau?) that the working class is
congenitally unable to produce a revolutionary leadership might need
revisiting, although I don't share it. My own view, which I've expressed
before, is that the origin of the problem is not to be sought at the
subjective level, but has to do with the nature of the period, which is the
way I look at my own experience in the Canadian LSA and RMG. I think, in
retrospect, it was inevitable that these organizations would develop the
organizational and political characteristics they did, given the changed
objective circumstances in which they operated. No leadership, Lenin and
Trotsky included, could have overcome this decisive limitation. Perhaps for
this reason I'm able to look back with a little more equanimity on my
relatively brief involvement in these organizations. In fact, I draw a
positive personal balance sheet - I learnt a lot, met some serious people,
and think that, despite the deformations, they were probably the most open
and democratic organizations I've ever belonged to - but I can see things
this way because I no longer in retrospect have the same expectations of
these organizations as former comrades I have met, some of them still quite
embittered.

Marv Gandall
------------------------------------------------------

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben C" <minnows@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "marxism" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 9:22 PM
Subject: [Marxism] RE: The Militant and Who Cares?


> Mark L. wrote:
> <<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. >>
>
> (end quote)
>
>
> While I have no knowledge of how the SWP bungled this process or misled
> itself about the significance of it, it is very real and actually quite
> interesting phenomenon in my experience as a member of the DSP and now
> the Socialist Alliance.

(snip)



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