[Marxism] Why I didn't attend the Trotsky Legacy Conference

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

If the Trotsky Legacy conference had been somewhere in Manhattan, I 
might have made the effort to take in a couple of the sessions today. 
I am always up for talks on "Lessons of the SWP Experience: 1960 ? 
1980? and "What Happened to the SWP?" even though I knew in advance 
that my views on the subject differ radically from the speakers. But 
the conference was up at Fordham University in the Bronx. To get 
there, I'd have to take the number 4 train to Yankee Stadium and 
change to the D train with the Fordham stop next to the last on the 
line. Once I got off the train, I'd have to take a bus to the school. 
Too much effort for too little reward, I'm afraid.

The last time I went to a high school reunion like this was back in 
October, 2000 at NYU. That one was organized by Paul Le Blanc, one of 
the speakers on the "What Happened to the SWP" panel today, and was 
much broader in perspective?to the point of inviting me to speak 
about the Cochranites who split with the SWP in the 1950s in order to 
build a nonsectarian left movement. That was definitely not Paul's 
goal in 2000, but I feel that he is edging more in that direction 
today. I would have been curious to see what he had to say and hope 
that his talk becomes available on the Internet.

This weekend's conference had a totally different agenda than mine, 
so much so that I was excluded from the mailing list that was set up 
to organize the conference. I have the impression that the conference 
organizers are not that much into the Internet anyhow, based on the 
lack of a website dedicated to the conference. Since they see their 
"glory days" as being from 1960-1980, I am surprised that they used 
the Internet at all. Maybe to be consistent, they should have used a 
mimeograph machine.

Most of the speakers are identified with the tradition that something 
like the SWP is still necessary. They look at their time in the party 
as the best time in their lives, like 60 year olds who today might 
feel nostalgic about their senior year in high school when they were 
football players or cheerleaders. As for myself, I hated high school 
and didn't care that much for the SWP even when I was hard at work 
building it. I considered it more or less as a bad marriage, 
something endured for the sake of the revolution rather than the children.

For what it's worth, here's the talk I gave at the October 2000 conference:

According to Al Hansen, who wrote the preface to "Speeches to the 
Party", a mostly obscure collection of James P. Cannon's 
anti-Cochranite rants from the late 1940s and early 1950s:

". . . Sol and Genora [Dollinger] expressed the following views. The 
party should not be trying to build branches, running election 
campaigns, or even trying to recruit members in this period. The 
country was facing the triumph of fascism and there wasn't a damn 
thing we could do about it because of the conservatism of the workers 
and our party's weakness. When fascism triumphed here, all known 
Trotskyists would be wiped out as had happened in Nazi Germany. 
Therefore the best thing that we could do as revolutionists was to 
spend as much time as we had writing down and printing our ideas, our 
program, and then hide this printed matter in attics, basements, 
etc., for future generations to discover."

So that's the official version of the Cochranites: liquidationists 
panicked by McCarthyism. And then you mix this with Cannon's crude 
sociological explanation of them as a privileged strata of the 
working class. These were UAW Joe Six-Packs tired of the class 
struggle and anxious to live the good life paid for by high union 
wages. When a raw recruit like me first heard about the Cochranites 
in a 1969 Frank Lovell lecture, I felt thankful that the good guys 
had won, just like they always did in the SWP. In revolutionary 
parties, as in politics in general, history is written by the victors.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/why-i-didnt-attend-the-trotsky-legacy-conference/


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