> On Feb 28, 2024, at 2:08 PM, Marv Gandall <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I beleive you were in the SWP in the 70's. Wasn't the long UMW strike in
> '77-'78 a precipitating factor in the SWP's "industrial turn"? I had left the
> Trotskyist movement by then, but I recall my criticisms and those of other
> comrades at the time was that the implementation rather than the timing of
> the turn was ill-conceived. If you correctly guaged then that union
> bargaining power was on the threshold of a major decline, you were more
> prescient than most.
I quit the SWP in 1978 in Kansas City. I had been anticipating "the turn"
since 1974. By the time it was announced at the 1978 convention, my enthusiasm
had turned to cynicism. Louis has a few panes in his comic book, The
Unrepentant Marxist, of he and I talking in a bar where I was saying that the
radicalization of industrial workers was not happening, at least not in KC. I
do recall exceptions in other parts of the country, such as the miners' strike.
There was also Steelworkers Fight Back - in Chicago. I was in KC and there
was no fight back going on there. But the ARMCO mill where I worked was
relatively small, ~4000 workers, compared to Chicago mills. I've heard from a
comrade who stayed in the SWP into the 80s that the SWP leadership repeatedly
made the mistake of making localized struggles into national campaigns. In the
70s and also the 80s, the most important union struggles were arguably in the
services sector - hospital workers and teachers, for example. But the SWP
leaders predicted a revival of militant industrial unions, or else they just
wanted the big sustainers from members in higher-paid industrial jobs, higher
at least compared to teachers and hospital workers at the time. So the SWP
leadership were either wrong or corrupt. Or maybe wrong and corrupt.
Mark
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#29169): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29169
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104608543/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
