RE: [Marxism] The CWI may go where no one has gone before- overcoming sectarianism

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Prem K Govindaswamy writes, "One of the local Trotskyist groups where I
live has a chance of truly overcoming sectarianism, and developing a
mass movement. This is the Socialist Alternative, in the US affiliated
w/ the CWI. This group has got a fairly good record of actual
organizing. There's some things that anyone in Socialism can learn from,
even if the SA itself doesn't "make the revolution". There are  policies
which may prove to be a double edged sword. While I'm not a member, I
have seem them work, and am impressed."

Inrigued by Prem's description, I went and checked out the web sites of
the group. As an international current they have an admirable collection
of them, but --frankly-- I could not find ANYWHERE an answer to the
questions I had: why do they exist? what makes them different from any
other group? Why should I join THIS group rather than, say, the ISO,
which seems to do much the same kind of organizing that SA is doing.

Instead I found lots of writeups of a very generic sort of socialism, a
"fightback" against this, that, the other, a march here and a rally
there.

It is very reminiscent of Moreno's approach in Latin America, which was
to set up groups with lots of sizzle and very basic socialist propaganda
and very little steak, at least that one could see at first blush. Not
that the steak wasn't there, it was, but just well-hidden. In Moreno's
case, the steak was a profound messianic sectarianism that led to
catastrophic opportunist adventurism like the now-little-remembered
"Simon Bolívar Brigade" that intervened in the Nicaraguan revolutionary
process in 1979. And let us remember what the strategic line behind that
project was. It was to try to build an alternative to the FSLN to
challenge it for leadership of the revolutionary process. Moreno
actually believed that if he'd had 100 people in Nicaragua in 1977 he
could have conjured up a mass party by giving it leverage with his
parachute "brigade."

That the FSLN was a product of a process which brought together the
leading revolutionary fighters that had been forged in that country as a
result of Nicaragua's own unique history and development bothered him
not one little bit. They were not "orthodox Trotskyists," as he
conceived of it, members of the one true church, and that automatically
disqualified them. It may seem contradictory that someone who claimed to
be a dialectical and historical materialist proved unable to look at the
question of the vanguard contingent of a revolution underway in a
historical and materialist way, and instead followed a completely
impressionistic and voluntaristic approach. 

But in fact Moreno --and not just him, by the way-- was an idealist in
Marxist drag. He thought the revolutionary movement was about "program":
meaning not the systematic expression of the goals of mass social
movements, but a series of formulas drawn from texts written about other
places in other times and crowned by the idea of a "Leninist" party
built around adherence to that dogma. With minor variations, you can say
this about ALL the groups that claim to be building "Leninist" parties.

And I suspect if somewhere on their web sites there is a page devoted to
what the CIW and SA are REALLY about, we'd find a similar "Leninist
Party building" schema. Otherwise, it is very difficult to understand
why this group exists as a separate group.

Joaquín


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