On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, dave.walters@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> On Jul 23, 1:45 pm, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> What strikes me as most distinctive about the Lambertiste approach is
>> their view that implementing the transitional program requires
>> "materializing" (their term) specific transitional demands in broader
>> organizations. Through work in these organizations, they recruit
>> members, influence other tendencies, and even effect fusions with left-
>> moving currents. I don't know if this was always their approach, or it
>> was only adopted with the Workers Liaison Committees.
>>
>> The Lambertistes think the SWP's failure to fight seriously for a U.S.
>> labor party was a root cause of its sectoralism in the 60s and its
>> ultimate degeneration in the late 70's (not the middle 70s, as I had
>> posted). What is a serious fight for a labor party?
>>
>> NOT (at least not primarily) carrying "Build a Labor Party Now"
>> placards, like the Healyites. Rather they fight for local independent
>> workers' candidacies and for a Black Party with a perspective aligned
>> with the formation of a U.S. Labor Party. They are presently
>> sup****ting the U.S. Presidential candidacy of Cynthian McKinney.
>>
>> Also NOT in the manner of the Robertsonites, who form transitional
>> organizations that are really party adjuncts rather than broad forums.
>>
>> srd
>
>
> SRD, what you say about 'in retrospect' is largely true. The OCI
> barely commented on the SWP's anti-Vietnam war work. It' position on
> the Labor Party..and I agree here with their analysis.. is also
> retrospective. Looking backward, so to speak.
>
> What the OCI talks about, and the Balance Sheet you posted, is based
> on a more extensive do***ent by Frank Wainright that did a detailed
> study of the application of the Labor Party position (as opposed to a
> 'slogan' or bullet point in a program) by the SWP from the 1930s
> onward. It showed the weakness of the SWP's position and their lack of
> waging a real fight around it, even though propagandistically they
> were very much for a labor party be organized. They just didn't do
> much about it. You made good point above.
>
> David
>
Cannon was burned in the "Farmer-Labor" disaster of 1924, pretty well
described in Bryan Palmer's book, as a result of which the American
Trotskyists were a bit slow to take up the Labor Party slogan at the
only point after then when it was really on the agenda, in the mid and
late 1930s with the CIO.
Perhaps some useful agitation around the labor party slogan could have
been done during the big strike wave after WWII. The Spartacists did
call for a "Freedom Labor Party" during the Civil Rights movement, but
the black-white racial polarization in the industrial working class
during the ghetto rebellions of the late 1960s meant they didn't get
very far with this call.
Aside from those episodes, the labor party demand has been a dead
letter for practical purposes since the great Farmer-Labor fiasco of
the 1920s. The Spartacists' propagandistic call for a "revolutionary
labor party like the one they had in Russia under Lenin" is about all
the demand is really worth at this moment, given the sad state of the
American labor movement.
-jh-
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