>
> Isn't that the problem with most vanguardist parties? It seems to me that
> Workers World (before the split) and ANSWER had done a reasonably
> credible job in organizing antiwar protests during the run-up to the Iraq
> War. Eventually though, they hit a ceiling, and they seem to have been
> unable and/or unwilling to do what would have been required to expland
> these protests into a mass movement on the scale of the antiwar movements
> of forty years ago because that would have meant sharing control with people
> not affiliated with WW/ANSWER, and like most vanguardist groups, that was
> something that they were loathe to do.
>
Precisely. The twin goals of recruiting for the party and the ostensible goal of the front group are contradictory. One negates the other so the whole thing becomes self-limiting.
One thing I genuinely do not understand is the almost uniform failure by the left to organize on the financial crisis the way they did on the Iraq War. We have a humongous crisis of capitalism and the response from the left has mostly been crickets. I don't get it.