Red Inside, Green Outside: Our Great Loss
Peter Camejo (1939-2008)
by Louis Proyect
(Swans - September 22, 2008) Peter Camejo, one of the outstanding
leaders of the U.S. left, died after an 18-month battle with lymphoma on
September 13, 2008, at the age of 68. As a testament to the respect he
had earned far and wide, the mainstream media praised him as a fallen
warrior, including The New York Times:
"Active in the Free Speech Movement and in protests against the Vietnam
War as a student at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, Mr. Camejo landed on
then-Gov. Ronald Reagan's list of the 10 most dangerous people in
California. School officials eventually expelled him, two quarters shy
of a degree.
"The spark of activism stayed with him as he became a leader in the
movement to give voice to third-party candidates. He fought for
universal health care, election reform, farmworker rights, living wage
laws and against the death penalty and abortion restrictions."
Missing from these obits, however, is any engagement with Peter's
revolutionary socialist beliefs that remained with him as he ran as a
candidate for the Green Party and even while holding down a day job as a
stockbroker. For Peter, the transformation of American society would not
take place by waving a magic wand and uttering some words about the need
for communism. He always understood that radical politics were useless
unless you could get people to listen to you, and getting people's
attention was one of his greatest gifts.
Peter came from a wealthy family in Venezuela of the sort that serves as
a breeding ground for the politics that have been manifested in periodic
uprisings against Hugo Chávez. But he was outraged by the injustices he
saw all around him, just as Che Guevara turned against class inequality
in Argentina a few years earlier, and decided to cast his lot with the
working people.
Once at a dinner party hosted by his father that included top officials
from the Venezuelan government, Peter made some disparaging remarks
about Perez Jimenez, the dictator who ran the country with an iron fist.
Everybody was shocked by Peter's intervention, which his father tried to
dismiss as the words of an impetuous youth. The Camejo family was
fortunate not to face reprisals from the dictatorship since not even
wealthy families were spared in this period. When Perez Jimenez was
overthrown in 1958, Peter was impressed by the power of a mobilized people.
That year Peter was a freshman at M.I.T. and a new member of the Young
Socialist Alliance (YSA), the youth group of the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party (SWP). Despite his initial orientation to the Communist
Party (CP), Peter joined the Trotskyists because of the Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian revolt two years earlier.
Soon one of the most important developments for the revolutionary
movement would tap Peter's talents as a skilled debater. After the
triumph of the Cuban revolution, some of the top leaders of the Young
Socialist Alliance would develop a hostile attitude toward Fidel Castro
and Che Guevara, who they regarded as typical caudillos, the Spanish
term for paternalistic strongmen. Peter argued convincingly for the
pro-Cuban position and the victory of his faction helped orient the
Trotskyists to new openings on the left. Support for Cuba, the civil
rights movement, and opposition to nuclear arms were issues that many
young campus activists were responding to and the SWP and YSA tried as
best as it could to relate to these developments despite being hampered
by sectarian conceptions. In a conversation I once had with Peter in the
early 1980s, I raised the question of whether he would have benefited
from leaving the SWP earlier. I expected him to say something like the
mid-1970s, but he told me that he should have quit in 1959 -- one year
after joining. That was his way of saying that he lost opportunities to
build a genuine movement. As political people fully understand,
hindsight is 20-20 vision.
full: http://www.swans.com/library/art14/lproy48.html
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