. . . the International Socialists --
which was taken over by the folks at the top, who decided to send the
rank-and-file members to "colonize" blue-collar factories, etc. powered by
excessive, triumphalist, rhetoric. (Louis Proyect's old organization, the
Socialist Workers' Party, went through a similar process.) It helped
produce Teamsters for a Democratic Union, but a lot of it was craziness,
sending skinny middle-class kids into factory work, right before the
shake-out of the 1980s, when a lot of those factories shut down. . . .
At the time it didn't seem crazy at all.
I'm always surprized when people disparage
this policy, with the benefit of hindsight.
This is what professional communist cadres
do.
If we had been at the beginning of a labor
upsurge, the colonizers would have had a
salutary and important role. At the very
least, for someone from a bourgeois student
milieu it was educational.
Problems would come from sending someone
in who was mandated to carry out a crazy
politics (i.e., PLP, assorted maoists),
or sending someone who was wrong for the
task by disposition. ISO was not crazy,
in my view. Wrong in various ways but
not crazy. Probably the most realistic
of all the would-be colonizers, in fact,
aside from the CP-USA.
mbs
