RE: [Marxism] assisting the work of the police

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

AGENT-BAITING AND FALSE ALLEGATIONS OF AGENT-BAITING
by Walter Lippmann

Agent-baiting is a time-tested tactic to produce division
within the left and revolutionary movements. During the
COINTELPRO lawsuit, all of us who were member of the SWP
got a great education about such things. This should be
of ongoing use today.

False allegations that someone is an agent can disrupt
any kind of political movement, as we saw with the Healy
allegations against Joseph Hansen, or as we saw in the
case of the CP, where a prominent party member back in
the 1950s, who was promptly (If I remember the details
accurately) expelled from the Party and then spent many
years trying, ultimately successfully, to clear his name.

Now what about fake allegations that someone is doing the
work of the police. What role do they play?

First of all, they are designed to divert attention from
the discussion of contested political ideas and into
discussions about who said what last year and so forth.

My memory isn't what it used to be, [and whose is?] but
my recollection doesn't include any allegations that Jack
Barnes embezzled money from the SWP. I could be wrong.
The question isn't what they do with all their millions,
but what they do in the socialist and the working class
movements. That's what counts.

I have no such recollection. I do recall a few wry notes
about the sale of the SWP's headquarters which had been
at 410 West Street, based on a report in the New York
TIMES saying that the SWP obtained $20 MILLION US dollars
from the sale of the building, and yet the SWP keeps
up active fund-raising to sustain its activities.

Steve Gabosch's comments are usually in defense of the
peculiarly indefensible politics of the Socialist Workers
Party,USA, the group whose patriotic concern for and its
militant opposition to "anti-U.S. demagogy", its hostility
to the Iraqi resistance, its denunciations of Venezuela's
President Hugo Chavez Frias as a "bonapartist" and so on
have been topics he hasn't seen fit to discuss. But now
we get nearly FOURTEEN HUNDRED WORDS devoted to the non-
discussion of the politics of the SWP's right-ward trend
in politics.

The Socialist Workers Party is far from the only leftist
orientated socialist grouping in the United States, but
it IS the one which I'm most familiar, as are others on
this Marxism list. It's worth following because it gives
a sad but good example of how people can go off the deep
end politically, when the group's thinking and political
practice is remove from the daily life of real people,
and which has convinced itself that it, and only it, is
the only source of the one true wisdom in today's world.

Holding a firm position is one thing, but assuming that
yours is the only possible position, that is another.
With that approach they decided over a year after the
triumph of the Cuban Revolution that Fidel Castro and
his team were the main danger to the Cuban Revolution.
And with that approach they decided that the rescue of
Elian Gonzalez from his kidnappers violated democratic
rights in some way.


Walter Lippmann
former member
Socialist Workers Party



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