<< Sometimes I used to get the impression that [the SWP] developed that personae from old Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson gangster movies. "All right, you dirty rats, what do you got to say now about that Popular Front betrayal." >>
In the sixties, C.L.R. James told a story on the old SWP during the days when he had been a staunch Trotskyist. The leadership learned that E.G.R. was sympathetic to Trotsky, so Cannon dispatched a comrade to meet with him, possibly to recruit him. Robinson asked how much money the party could use. The comrade said $100 would be welcome. Robinson furiously threw him out, having determined that the SWP wasn't serious.
True? Apocryphal? I don't know. But it did resonate with my later, always wary, experiences with that group. I was on the 1972 ballot in Mississippi as a presidential elector pledged to Linda Jenness and Andrew Pulley.
For those of us in other Marxist political currents that looked more favorably on the decade's insurgencies, and immersed ourselves in them, Noel Ignatin later summed it up accurately: "In the sixties, we didn't know it was the sixties."
Louis's screen doesn't acknowledge these (RYM-II and allied) currents as even tiny blips, though we created insurgent factory- and community-based collectives (in Chicago, federated as the Union of Organizers; in Detroit, as the Motor City Labor League) that far exceeded RYM-I/Weather, PL, and other ex-SDS political groups in membership and subsequent importance.
Namedropper Ken