North Star
A Tribute to Peter Camejo
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
ed. Louis Proyect's tribute is based on his own experience and
recollection as well as his reading of Peter Camejo's unfinished
memoir published posthumously, North Star: a Memoir, Haymarket
Books, 2010, ISBN 978-1931859-92-9.
(Swans - July 12, 2010) In November 1969, I was ready to drop
out of the Socialist Workers Party in New York City just two years
after I joined. Although I had no political disagreements, I felt
alienated from the organization. I was in a kind of limbo that
most people with regular jobs experienced. Unless you were a
student at a place like Columbia University where all the action
was going on or a full-timer with a sense of mission about being a
"professional revolutionary" in Leninist terms, it was easy to
feel like a fifth wheel.
Just before I had steeled myself to turn in my resignation and
become a "sell-out" to bourgeois society, the organizer called me
into his office to ask me to take on an important assignment. The
Boston branch was out of step with the rest of the party and
required reinforcing with "solid" people who would work with the
organizer Peter Camejo to "turn things around." Feeling a sense of
validation that had escaped me before, I said yes on the spot.
This would be my introduction to a comrade who I can describe as
one of the major influences on my political evolution over the
past 30 years. It was thus with a keen sense of anticipation that
I turned to his posthumous memoir North Star, a book that not only
captures his winning personality but also the ideas that
transformed me.
Before moving up to Boston, I knew Peter only by reputation.
Apparently, he was one of the few Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
members who had won a following among the broad left, especially
in Berkeley where his leadership in the Telegraph Avenue struggle
of June 1968 had helped to cement his reputation. After the cops
had attacked a rally in support of the French strikers, the
movement mounted a counter-attack to defend the constitutionally
protected right to protest. Although there was a considerable
amount of violence, Peter played an important role in making it
clear that the cops were responsible and not the protesters. His
description of the confrontation would be especially useful to
young people today grappling with the problems of black block
machismo that have served to muddle the message of
anti-globalization protests.
After seeing the power of a united left in the battle of Telegraph
Avenue that included the Black Panther Party, the Peace and
Freedom Party, and thousands of unaffiliated radicals and
progressives, Peter began to think about how "out of touch" the
left, and Trotskyism in particular, was with "the reality of what
it would take to build a mass current for social justice." He
found himself becoming more and more aware of how detached it was
from American realities:
We were so disconnected from our own history that to join our
organization and remain active, a member had to become interested
in and invested in the internal factional struggles of socialism
in Russia and Europe. This was important but couldn't serve as the
framework for a mass movement for social change.
He doubted that a single party member could name the first
candidate of the Liberty Party, the original third party in
American history formed to oppose slavery. It was also unlikely
that any had ever read Frederick Douglass's newspaper "The North
Star" that would eventually become a symbol of the kind of broad
left that Peter sought to build.
read full at: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/lproy62.html
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