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

["Mark Lause" <markalause@xxxxxxxxx>]

I had hoped to get to the conference and left the possibility open
pretty much until last week.  In the end, I simply couldn't justify
it.

The winners do write the history, but we have to understand winners
within a very limited subculture.

Viewed from the outside, the triumphalist claims of any leadership in
any socialist group in the U.S. to have thwarted those who were
holding back the revolution merit a certain healthy skepticism, if not
simply intellectual contempt.  After all, the only real justification
for the SWP leadership's self-congratulatory triumphalism would have
have been to produce a bigger and better party.  To ascribe this
non-result to "objective conditions" misses the point, because the
leadership was claiming that it (and not the dissenters being purged)
had the handle on those conditions but were unable to move the
organization forward because of all those bastard members raising
questions.

Yet, the SWP did not do this after the purifications of the
1950s...and of the 1970s and 1980s.  It just never happened.

So anhy "history" written by such "winners" is going to a bit like a
history of the planet written by the gnats living on a mouse in a
greenhouse.

ML

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