[lbo-talk] Jobless Workers Look to Shift Elections

[brad]

SA wrote:
>I'm not trying to deny that the party did all these good things. I'm
just saying that they didn't *appear* to amount to all that much at the
time. What looks to you in retrospect like "sustained and nationally
coordinated activity" looked at the time like scattered local actions,
stirred up by a CP that had - what, 10,000 members? A "national
conference" was often perceived rightly as CP headquarters deciding to
book a hall and instructing its cadre to drag enough people to it to
make it look full. I'm certainly not criticizing it - far from it. I'm
just saying it didn't feel like an unstoppable groundswell at the time.

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I did a bunch of research on this after I queried the list for sources
on it about a year ago.  The CP started organizing the unemployed in
the late 1920s.  Sure it didn't look like a groundswell then, but it
turned into one,  or more accurately, they built it up into one.

This confirms that Carrol is full of crap when he claims that the left
can't build a movement but must wait for it and attach itself to it.
The exact opposite is necessary: the left needs to start building a
movement now around an issue(s) that will become important in two to
five years (immigration, student debt...).  The idea that we wait and
tail after movements that somehow self organize needs to be rejected
fully.

Brad