Re: [Marxism] The SWP (USA) and its continuing significance

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If no one took the SWP seriously, serious people wouldn't
discuss or debate its significance. Keeping Malcolm X in
print, selling books about the Cuban Revolution give the
SWP a presence on the political left and a certain actual
weight which continue despite the group's hostility toward
living struggles. The Socialist Labor Party, by contrast,
which prepares and publishes better-written analyses of
current events in their monthly paper, THE PEOPLE, really
is a group with no influence outside its immediate circle.

The SWP, because of its continuing links to Cuba and
Malcolm X, retains a certain discouragative presence in
the actually-existing left. Its hostility toward Chavez is
an echo of its previously hostility toward both Fidel Castro
and the leadership of the Cuban Revolution in the period
after the triumph. They participate, in on an ultraleft axis,
occupying a modest but symptomatic political space which
reflects questions, doubts and hesitancies which more than
a few on the left themselves feel.

The SWP's numerical size isn't what make it important,
but the political issues it discusses and the way that it
focuses on the issues it chooses to address. To argue
that the SWP is but "a bizarre cult-sect" misses the point.
An e-mail list on the internet simply isn't a substitute
for and shouldn't be confused with organizations which
exist in the real world. They're not the same thing.

E-mail lists are not organizations, they're places where
a range of ideas, conceptions, platforms, stragegies,
tactics and whatever can be discussed, debated, and
on a good day, clarified. Emphasis on "can be" as there
is no guarantee anything good will come out of it.


Walter





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