Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 19:47:29 -0500
From: UticaRose-AT-aol.com
Subject: Re: A proletarian Thanksgiving


In a message dated 95-11-25 15:50:04 EST, Louis Proyect wrote:

>Why would the SWP turn its back on something like an 
>incipient Labor Party today, he wondered?
>
>The answer was simple in my view. The SWP had 
>degenerated into an ultraleft sect that was indistinguishable 
>from the Spartacist League. No mass movement was pure 
>enough for them. They were content to sit on the sidelines 
>and wag their fingers at every "petty-bourgeois" movement 
>that passed it by.
>
>He tended to agree with me, but thought that the party 
>would wake up when a new radicalization emerged. The 
>pressure of events would rectify the wayward vanguard. I 
>argued that the SWP had been sectarian at birth and was 
>simply existing in its most normal state currently.
>
>

aside from your enjoyable prose and curiously insightful comments on
northeastern cities, et cetera, your passing observations on the SWP
reinforce my experience as an outsider and reading as an interested student
of the left. the SWP has always been a degenerated left wing sect, nicht wahr
? and just when left wing politics catch the wind of a popular movement, the
SWP is re-born, ever with a hint of a promise of creative leadership. my
experience was primarily through the YSA (??) or whatever the junior chamber
version of the SWP is, in the late 60s and early 70s. i thought they always
had some of the brighter, kinder and funnier people. and they often made more
sense that the ponderous and all-too-serious Thinkers. they also made an
interesting counterpoint to PL's worker student alliance cadres, the
all-too-serious non-Thinkers.

the left just wouldnt be worth much without the SWP "types" but, like alot of
engineers of revolution, when that popular wind has turned in another
direction or just stopped for awhile, the times are not kind.


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