Slobbo, Rwanda and the Surreal

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Sat Oct 7 19:58:34 PDT 2000


In a message dated 10/7/00 10:24:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time, LeoCasey at aol.com writes:

<< As much as I disagree with the politics of Solidarity and "Against the

Current" in certain crucial respects, there is no doubt that it is, by a very

wide margin, the most thoughtful and most serious of the remnants of American

Trotskyism >>

Thanks for the compliment, but we are not Trots. I mean, there are Trots or ex-Trots (of which I am not one, either present or former) amongst us, but the relation to Trotskyism is purely historical and tenuous. Soli came out of the old International Socialists, the current going back to the people around Max Schactman who stayed on the left when he went right. Soli proper was founded in 1986 by a group of people from the IS who couldn't get on with the ISO--in Britain the SWP--around Tony Cliff, because they thought its party-building turn was mistaken; and by people who had been kicked out of the US SWP for some sin or other, as well as a small group called Workers Pwer, a previous IS splinter. More recently (1990) it absorbed some of a group called the Fourth Internationalost Tendency, another group of unwilling exiles from the SWP. This is all ancient history.

However,Soli has no ideological line on Trotsky: indeed, it doesn't have a line, just twelve principles of unity, mainly left boilerplate, the only controversial one (amongst us on the left) being, No Democrats. Indeed, you don't even have to be a Marxist, though most members are. We has mainly been recruiting from movements, and the majority of current members have no prior left organizational; background. I do, but not Trot background, mine is post-Maoist.

--jks



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