Unless you are a member of the tiny SWP (reported to be about 125 members) or part of their formal supporter’s network, made up mostly of burned out ex-members, you will agree that the collapse of this once powerful left group is of Hindenburgian dimensions. Such a spectacular fall has been the subject of books and articles, both on and off the Internet. I have probably written about 150 pages on the topic including some material that was transformed into a comic book memoir in collaboration with the sorely missed Harvey Pekar.
My memoir is played mostly for laughs, but it shares the analysis found in Peter Camejo’s “North Star” and the article on democratic centralism by Joaquin Bustelo posted to this blog yesterday, namely that Marxist-Leninist “vanguardism” is to blame. There is something in this party-building cookbook dating back to the early 1920s that leads to sect and cult formation. It led not only to the collapse of the SWP but literally hundreds of other Trotskyist and Maoist groups that once dominated the political scene in the 60s and 70s. From the ex-Maoist perspective, Max Elbaum’s “Revolution in the Air” covers a lot of the same terrain. Les Evans, a leader of the SWP until his expulsion in the early 80s and editor of Peter’s memoir, bases his explanation of the demise of the SWP in the earlier traditions of “the god that failed”. In other words, it is Marxism itself to blame rather than a misapplication. Of course, there is an odd disjunction between Evans’s fear of the revolutionary party assuming totalitarian control of American society and the SWP’s self-destruction. If the SWP had 25,000 members and was growing rapidly, then his updated version of Arthur Koestler might make sense. But one senses that if the SWP had ever achieved such proportions, Les Evans—always the avid careerist—would have remained a member. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/barry-sheppard-peter-camejo-and-the-role-of-the-revolutionary-party/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
