Profound perversion? Well, just as long as it doesn't frighten the horses, who cares. Most of the people who wanted to draw connections between "imperialism and racism, urban decay, and so forth" were not gagged by the antiwar coalition. They were free to go out and organize such demonstrations and they did. The problem with a COALITION trying to adopt such an approach should be obvious. The followers of Hal Draper thought the Soviet Union was imperialist, while Gus Hall's did not. What they could agree on was withdrawal of US troops. The single-issue approach was not intended in itself to raise political consciousness, it was intended to bring people into the street in order to put maximum pressure on the government. As far as being in bed with Birch Bayh is concerned, this is Dan's sectarian way of saying that the coalitions welcomed ruling-class politicians onto speaker's platform. People from sectarian groups like Dan's Healyite Workers League thought this was some kind of popular front, like Spain's. This inability to distinguish between countries with mass workers parties in a state of civil war and a country like the United States ruled by the 2-party system in a state of prosperity is endemic to those with a Trotskyist left-deviation.
>
>While LP mourns the "sectarianism" of the Marxist left in those days, it was
>to some extent to be expected. The left by the late 60s was a formless void
>in the U.S., totally lacking in ideology and party structure. The various
>groups that rushed to fill the void were all playing catch-up, all struggling
>to answer questions and solve problems that had been left hanging in the late
>40s and early 50s. It was inevitable that the competition would be fast and
>furious. The real tragedy is not that it occurred, but that it was cut short
>by the collapse of the American left in 1970-72.
Naw, the problem was much simpler. Groups like Dan's Worker League came to peace conferences and argued that the most important task before the left was to discuss dialectical materialism. Most people ignored the sectarian nuts and went about the business of planning out the next demonstration. The tragedy of the US left is that the sectarianism of tiny Trotskyist groups became endemic after the decline of the mass radicalization. Instead of relating intelligently to the new situation, left groups like the SWP decided to "colonize" basic industry with the expectation that they would soon be leading struggles of the sort that took place in the mid 1930s. Sheer lunacy.
>
>Once again, it wasn't our fault. It was all the fault of ... history.
No, it was not the fault of history. It was our own fault. We were trapped up in dogmatic Marxism.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)