Whether you agree or don’t agree with Barry Sheppard’s analysis of the decline and eventual collapse of the Socialist Workers Party, volume two of his memoir titled Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-1988 is must reading. As one of the more important groups on the American left since its founding by James P. Cannon in the 1920s as a faction of the CP to its transformation into a bizarre cult around Jack Barnes having little in common with its past, it is worth studying both as a positive and negative example.
Seen as official history, Sheppard’s book has none of the missionary zeal of James P. Cannon’s History of American Trotskyism. This is almost inevitable given the sorry state of the group called the SWP today. Instead of using the history as some kind of peg to hang organizational and political lessons from, Sheppard lets the facts speak for themselves. Although he is unsparing when it comes to Barnes’s role in destroying the SWP, he is always fair and dispassionate. Considering the hair-raising account of how he was driven first from the leadership and then from the party itself, Sheppard’s tone is remarkably detached. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/a-review-of-volume-two-of-barry-sheppards-memoir/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
