On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, pattyjoe wrote:
> i would love to hear more from people in response to the essay written
> by Alan Benjamin for Socialist Organizer. i have long been impressed
> with them theoretically, and wonder what critiques others might offer,
> aside from the usual, snide, substance-free denunciating.
>
I thought the essay was merely a sort of attorney's brief for the
Lambertistes, that did not provide much real insight into its supposed
subject, the history of the 4th International in the US. Combined with
an attorney's brief for the SWP of the 1970s. I have no idea what the
Lambertistes thought about the SWP in the 1960s, but surely they had a
much more critical stance then about the rapid rightward movement the
SWP was undergoing in the 1960s.
The absence of much mention even of the Revolutionary Tendency of the
SWP in the early 1960s is telling. What happened in the SWP in the
early '60s is surely much more im****tant for that history than the
final last gasps of something resembling Trotskyism, at least on
paper, by Joseph Hansen before his death, after which Barnes simply
abandoned Trotskyism altogether.
There was no great objection from the SWP rank and file, as it meant few
real
political changes.
-jh-
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