On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, nada wrote:
>...
> If Thornett was a "Labourite" so was Lenin and Trotsky. There was not
> ONE wing of organized British Trotskyism that at one time or other
> wasn't inside the Labour Party.
>
"Labourism" is the historical curse of British Trotskyism, of which
Thornett is just one of many sufferers. Healy, with his entry into the
BLP for an entire decade, was one of the worst afflicted.
When Lenin advocated entry into the British Labor Party that was
supposed to be a *tactic,* useful when the Labor Party was putting on
a left face and workers had illusions that voting for the BLP meant
voting for a party that was going to introduce socialism. Not a
*strategy,* which is what most British so-called Trotskyists have
usually seen it as.
It was a valid tactic in the early 1920s, when the Labor Party was
talking very radically indeed, and it was also valid in 1946, when
Churchill was voted out and the BLP parliamentarians marched into the
parliament building singing "the workers flag is deepest red."
*Maybe* it was briefly valid at some point in the late 1930s, *maybe*
it was valid when Harold Wilson ran for office in the '70s I think it
was using a lot of radical rhetoric.
I doubt entry in the British Labor Party was a good idea at any other
times.
>> The problem wasn't Pablo in the 1960's per se but the
trotskyist
>> movement post war in France and its relation****p with its own colonies
>> which had more close links with the tradition of stalinism than to
>> bolshevism.
>
> Now, this might be true, in the tactical sense. Not in the overall
> strategic sense. The IC wing certainly opposed, unconditionally, the
> existence of a French colony in the Maghreb.
Vangelis has posted a lot of stuff indicating that the CP and the
Social Democrats and various middle-class Resistance leaders had truly
rotten lines on Algeria. And Lambert's sup****t for the MNA was clearly
a disastrous mistake, although to some degree an understandable one,
given Messali Hadj's history as a leader of Algerian nationalism tied
to the workers movement and the revolutionary CP of the 1920s in
particular.
Was it a betrayal? Only if that sup****t continued *after* Hadj and the
MNA went over to De Gaulle. If so, no evidence to this effect has been
posted here.
As to the SWP, here's something I heard a long time ago that still
sticks in my brain. According to my memory, the main writer on Algeria
and the MNA for the Militant was the SWP'er personally closest to the
Lambertistes, who had spent some time in France in the late 1950s and
was impressed by them.
A youthful activist then who much later actually threw in a post or
two to apst more than a decade ago, named Shane Mage.
He, Robertson and Wohlforth were shortly thereafter the leaders of the
Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP. He was a Lambertiste more or less,
Wohlforth a Healyite, and Robertson considered himself a Cannonite,
although Cannon disagreed.
-jh-
>
>> The French CP was in government during the anti-colonial revolutions
>> in french indochina and it did next to nothing for the struggle for
>> Algerian independence...
>
> Yes, and no wing, even YOUR wing was in the French gov't during this
> time nor had that perspective, that I'm aware of.
>
>> Now specifically what actually happened and what the Mandelites did
>> isn't for a medium such as this.
>
> Probably true. But at this time there was a difference between the
> Mandel wing and Pablo's wing.
>
> D.
>
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