RE: [Marxism] SWP:"U.S. troops consolidate victory in Fallujah"

["Lil Joe" <joe_radical@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't understand your attack on the Workers League (of which I was a
member for a time) based on their making folk aware of the need for a Labor
Party. One didn't exist at the time, but it does now, possibly in any case,
of which I am presently a member.

The WL were ridiculed because of their left sectarianism and supremacy
organizational ego, not because they sold newspapers to workers (as well as
at anti-war functions) calling for a labor party. There were a group of
'revolutionary ' Black nationalists (Maoists) in South Central LA/Compton
who were serious about revolution but didn't know how - the WL providing us
with Trotsky's Transitional Program, and pamphlets containing LT's
discussions with the early SWP leadership on the need for a trade union
based Labor Party, changed our perspective on class struggle politics as the
road to power. A few of us joined the Workers League (for a time) and others
were recruited by the Sparticists, but the point is that we never got this
information from the SWP, which only sold or gave us Black nationalist
literature.

Lil Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: marxism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:marxism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Louis Proyect
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2004 9:58 AM
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
Subject: Re: [Marxism] SWP:"U.S. troops consolidate victory in Fallujah"


ameritech acoount wrote:
>      The way the SWP is degenerating, how much longer will it take Jack
Barnes to turn into Gerry Healy?

We should maintain a sense of proportion on this. When Gerry Healy was
in his prime, he had a party of several thousand members in Great
Britain. He was not only hostile to the British antiwar movement, he
actually had his goons beat up antiwar leader Ernie Tate (who survived
the attack and lived to join Marxmail. ;-))

In the USA, the Healyite Workers League would show up at antiwar
conferences in the 60s and harangue bemused college students about the
need to organize a Labor Party. They were a minor nuisance.

The SWP today does not even constitute a nuisance. They effectively
washed their hands of all these sorts of "petty bourgeois" movements
back in the late 1980s and are not a factor like the ISO, the WWP or the
CPUSA. For this we should be thankful on this colonialist holiday.

In fact, if their newspaper wasn't available on the Internet, their name
would never come up, I'm sure. What happens is that an ex-member will
read some particularly boneheaded article and get all worked up. If
there was only a print version, I'm sure they'd be happily ignored. I
guess that's testimony to the power of the Internet where nobody knows
that you are actually a dog.

Probably the best way to approach this problem is in terms of brand
name. Although this group has the same name as the group that many of
us, including me, once belonged to, it is not really the same. Think of
those crappy Packard-Bell computers from the 1980s. The company bought
the rights to the Packard-Bell name, which was attached to a highly
reliable and powerful radio during the 1950s and then they slapped it on
a piece of junk. That's the proper analogy.




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