>On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
> Yoshie puts it very nicely: Both Lou and Doug
> (not to mention Max and Nathan) want to do battle against these
> "sectarians" because they disgrace the left. What neither
> Doug nor Lou will admit is
> that it is in fact utterly futile to rage against these sectors
> of the left. All these sects and local jackasses are as much a part of
> the weather of capitalism as snow was of the weather of Antarctica.
> And the only thing fulminating against them achieves is puff up the
> self-importance of the fulminators who bless god that they are so much
> superior to such lowlife.
> The sectarians were just being themselves. They will always be with
> us. They are as much a part of capitalism as is the econ department
> at Harvard or humanitarian bombing.Those to blame (if anyone is to
> "blame") are those non-sectarians who have not the political know-
> how or courage or energy to keep things going in spite of the sectarians.
I half agree with you here, Carroll, but one way the non-sectarians use "political know-how" to fend off the sectarians is to expose them when they play their political games. If it is widely understood among activists that certain practices - seemingly in the name of "internal movement democracy" or "more radical" action - are being promoted by identifiable groups with identifiable self-interested motives, it makes it easier to outmaneuver them.
Charges of "red-baiting" are one standard trick used by the sectarians to assert their right to commit any anti-social act they deem appropriate.
But one role leftists can do is by challenging those tactics as antithetical to socialism and the left, they remove that virtuous gloss from the sectarians-- ie. we don't hate commies, just this particular group.
To give an example (which I've mentioned on this list) of my favorite - sic - experience with a sectarian group. During the Berkeley fight to defend affirmative action, the lovely Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) sent half its staff from Detroit to take over the movement, creating a front group called By Any Means Necessary to attempt a takeover or alternatively a destruction of the broad-based student-led group called Diversity in Action (DIA).
Now, undergrad students don't necessarily have the sophistication you demand, so they tried to cope rather hapharzardly. One option was to exclude every member of a socialist group from DIA. This option was leftover from one of the largest left-leaning student groups on campus, Students Organized for Justice in the Americas (SOJA), the longtime advocate around Central American issues. Through years of fending off sectarian attacks, this group had developed the rule that no participant could have a membership in a socialist organization - which technically barred anyone from DSA on leftwards. This absolute exclusion from socialist participation in some groups is one result of sectarian idiocy.
On the other hand, DIA had such an infusion of new activists in the heat of the affirmative action battle, that the organization was suspeptible to the charges of "red-baiting" raised by the RWL when there was criticism of their actions at meetings and demonstrations. As those actions got worse, at one point involving the physical assault of a first-year woman as the RWL tried to seize the mike at a rally, the student leadership was not sure how to legitimately respond.
So what I and some others did was create a letter signed by leaders of various Bay Area left groups, from the Committees of Correspondence to DSA to the Freedom Socialist Party to the International Socialist Organization denouncing the RWL tactics as antithetical to socialism or proper action by any progressive activist. This letter by a variety of socialist groups was circulated and helped neutralize the ability of the RWL to manipulate "red-baiting" charges to destroy the movement.
As well, when DIA held a mass rally -- about 5000 people at Berkeley, one of the largest in over a decade -- various left activists got together to act as a security force. About 30 of us tracked the RWL folks throughout the rally and prevented them from assaulting the stage or drowning it out with their own amplified sound as they had planned.
The visibility of socialist activists in fighting off the RWL had two good effects. One, it preserved the ability of the student leadership to build an important movement. Secondly, by being so visible, it helped educate the new activists involved that socialism was not equivalent to sectarianism. A number of the leaders of that affirmative action student movement, relatively hostile to the organized left initially, would go on to join various left groups in the Bay Area in the next few years.
So if attacking sectarians is just a way to excuse bad organizing, that is just talking about the weather. But if it is part of a concentrated effort by leftists to educate non-socialist activists about how to avoid being the victims of those tactics and teaching them that socialist activists can be honest, trusted partners for social activism, then exposing and denouncing sectarians is part of the "political know-how or courage or energy" that nonsectarians need in surviving the storms of sectarianism.
-- Nathan Newman