Re: [Marxism] Peter Camejo died this morning, September 13, 2008

["Mark Lause" <markalause@xxxxxxxxx>]

(I'm taking the liberty of reposting these comments from the SWP list.
 We're still suffering intermittent email and internet services from
the hurricane damage here in southern Ohio, and we're catching up on
email accumulated while we were gone....ML)

A few years ago, my wife and I were spending a week in a cabin in West
Virginia and happened to come down from the hills to visit a bookstore
in Parkersburg...just in time to see the plan slam into the second of
the twin towers. This year, I emerged from a cabin in the Boston
Mountains of Arkansas to check email and found that Peter Camejo had
passed on. When we last spoke a few weeks ago, he was an enthusiastic
and full of life as ever, eager to finish his autobiography and move
on.

Many of us fully appreciated Peter as a brilliant orator, certainly
one of the best I've ever heard. A popularizer without equal among us,
he could win roomfuls of people by doing what Gene Debs always said,
explaining to them and clarifying what they already really knew.

I would suggest that Peter was equally a strategist of rare
brilliance, exceptionally good at understanding what was important and
separating that from what was incidental. His rapid embrace of the
Greens, his natural ascendancy to leadership in the current, and his
clear awareness of the shortcomings of the party, while always keeping
his eye on the potential of the insurgengy. Nobody of his stature in
the movement had so consistently reliable a compas on the direction we
needed to do.

I think we'd only begun to realize this last point and, it is on that,
that I expect we will sorely miss him.

ML

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu