Re: [Marxism] oops! I meant to send that off list. My bad!

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis: "At the very time when Walter Lippmann was expelled from the SWP, the
group was discovering that the ANC was beyond reproach. Openness to
non-Trotskyist forces globally went hand-in-hand with super-sectarianism in
the USA. While the SWP was hoisting Mandela on its shoulders--metaphorically
speaking--it was discovering that the social movements in the USA were all
"petty bourgeois". So support for the ANC and Cuba is not a prophylactic
against sectarianism. You are better off with penicillin or a condom."

Well, since Louis opens the door to at least some discussion of these SWP
issues here, I think there is something that it is very important to
understand, which is not just what the SWP's "position" was in relation to
Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Maurice Bishop and the Grenadian
Revolution (the stuff about the ANC came later, I think), but the POLITICAL
role it played in the SWP.

Mindless cheerleading for the "three giants of the Caribbean" and later
manifestations of the same sort of stance were the opium of the cadre. They
were a DISTRACTION FROM facing up to the increasing disarray within the
party and the plain fact that the "turn to industry" showed itself to be a
cadre-killing catastrophe within a year or so of being adopted, and the
coming "big class battles" which were the supposed REASON for the turn never
materialized; on the contrary by most conventional measures union
combativity fell off a cliff at the beginning of the 1980's.

But this *use* of the inspiring victory in Nicaragua and Cuba's ongoing
resistance to imperialism carried a very high price. The SWP refused to
honestly look at or analyzer the difficulties and challenges facing these
revolutionary processes. I can testify for a fact that the reporting from
the Militant correspondents in Managua was constantly altered and "spun" to
hail minor advances, and even just verbal coincidences between something
some comandante said and some SWP catch-phrase as a world-historic advance
of the world revolutionary movement, whereas all difficulties, setbacks and
defeats were presented, if at all, in the lightest pastels.

Adulation for (the SWP's version of) what was going on in Nicaragua, etc.,
was also used as a factional club against minorities, to poison the
atmosphere against discussion and finally ram through a series of expulsions
without a real clarifying political discussion in the party as a whole.

Joaquín



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