David,
Actually, Max Schactman WAS one of those out of touch New York intellectuals? I was referring to! The fact that the SWP had him in charge of their "Negro Question" work proves my point! The SWP was the source of Trotsky's half baked and incorrect information on the "Negro Question" in America - and they were a lily White organization with almost no contact with Black Americans (despite the fact that they were headquartered in a city - New York - with a huge African American population) - and damned little contact with New York workers in general - even White New York workers. One of the great tragedies of our movement - and the great historic tragedy of Trotskyism - is that Trotsky's life was entrusted to the SWP (and alleged NKVD double agent George Hansen - who later allegedly became an FBI informant - was probably responsible for the NKVD being able to kill Trotsky - and also probably was involved with the FBI's murder of Malcolm X). But besides the role that a leading SWP cadre more likely than not played in Trotsky's physical death was the SWP's ideological toxin that infected what we now know as Trotskyism almost from birth. The SWP had HUGE ideological problems - For example, channelling the 1934 Minneapolis strikes away from revolt against capitalism and safely into the arms of the labor racketeers of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the AFofL and the Chicago Outfit (the mafia family founded by Al Capone) in Minneapolis (the SWP all but singlehandedly revived the dying IBT - a rotten racist gangster union that barely had 75,000 members in 1934 but - thanks to the SWP's hard work - had 400,000 workers safely under the thumb of mafia connected right wing union bosses by 1939) - this is, by far, the worst crime against the American working class the SWP ever committed, because without a revived IBT there is no revived AFofL and the CIO doesn't come safely back into the camp of business unionism. It says volumes about the SWP's isolation from rank and file workers, even in Minneapolis, that, after the gangsters who ran the Teamsters ousted the Trotskyists from their leading positions in the Teamsters, there was no mass base of trotskyst truckdrivers - basically, the SWP ran the Minneapolis Teamsters because they controlled the union as an institution - they - probably deliberately - failed to win even a tiny fraction of Minneapolis workers to bolshevik leninism. And, thanks to the heavy SWP influence in the 4th International (especially after Stalin and Hitler murdered most of the Trotskyists of Continental Europe - and Mao and Ho Chi Minh slaughtered their counterparts in East Asia) what we now know as Trotskyism is shot through with all of the reactionary, non revolutionary and liberal racist ideas of the SWP. The NKVD may have murdered Trotsky physically - but the SWP killed him ideologically Gregory A. Butler Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:04:04 -0700 From: nada <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Words (was 'Alexander Cocburn RIP') To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hey Greg! Good to "see" you "here"... Ok, first, it's not as if this essay on a communist America was his first word on the question of race. In fact he had some great discusisons with Trotskyists like CLR James, Max Shachtman (who headed up the CP's Youth work on the "Negro Quesiton") and others. The majority of the people he spoke with, with the exception of Shachtman and James were not part of the NY Intellectual crowd. They were in fact union militants or ex-union members now full time SWPers. His discussions on race, and they were discussions, not "proclamations" really, show both Trotsky's ignorance and profound political understanding at the same time of the Negro Question...including, and most notably, the *failure* of the American Trotskyists to address the issue as well as the need to...confront the Klan and Jim Crow. Both are in fact taken up by Trotsky in these discussions. I was once confronted in Boston by a CPer who suggested that Trotsky was a dog for referring to "American workers as "pigs"..." In fact, he was talking about the white-racist chauvinist worker who attacks the "Negro worker" instead of the boss. He noted that 99% of American white workers are chauvinist. He doesn't mince words. This is also the case with the broader class-struggle milieu that the SWP often worked inside various unions. Peace, David ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
