Louis wrote: If the Trotsky Legacy conference had been somewhere in Manhattan, I might have made the effort to take in a couple of the sessions today.
[...] ...that's the official version of the Cochranites: liquidationists panicked by McCarthyism. And then you mix this with Cannon's crude sociological explanation of them as a privileged strata of the working class. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/why-i-didnt-attend-the-trotsky-legacy-conference/ ======================================================= Good post, Louis; a better use of your time today, IMO. I came across some of the material of the Cochrane group as a result of my own "workerist" turn to industry in the 70's. Those of us who had split from the pro-SWP LSA in Canada to merge with a part of the old Waffle leadership in the Mandelite Revolutionary Marxist Group quickly formed a tendency within it which was very similar to the Proletarian Orientation Tendency in the US. I think the anti-sectarian and non-dogmatic thrust which was at the centre of the Cochrane group's politics was not unrelated to its social composition. The unions, and the worker-based political parties are really the only venues where young radicals can understand first hand and learn how to relate to the liberal and social democratic conciousness of the politically conscious workers. When it made its later turn to industry, the SWP, for reasons of self-preservation, was too concerned (perhaps not without reason) about its cadres "liquidating" into the milieu to allow them to act in anything other than a sectarian way within the unions, declining, for example, to accept leadership responsibilities within these organizations or to consider the fast-growing service sector unions which now predominate as worthy of their attention. It's important to remember that the outlook of the Cochrane group, like all left organizations in that period, was shaped by an international labour and socialist movement which was still a going concern, backed by a powerful anticapitalist bloc led by the USSR and China which, however deformed, offered another alternative to the working class in both the advanced capitalist countries and the colonial and semi-colonial world. Those conditions are no longer present, and I suspect the Cochranites would consequently find themselves having to "adapt" even further following the world-historic defeats of the working class over the past three decades, but that's another question, and one which we've canvassed pretty throroughly on previous occasions. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
