Are we condescending purists who turn our backs on anyone who's not part of a left as I've defined it here? Well, it's difficult to be a witness in one's own cause, but I can say that we have a different recruitment pattern than the one you posit below. Recruiting and burning through members is certainly the way ISO does it, and probably other sectarians as well. Solidarity tries to recruit people who already have substantial activist experience, and who are moving in a socialist direction due to that experience. That means we don't recruit nearly as many college students as some other groups. It also means, though, that our members tend to stick around longer. I know that since I've been in my branch (well over a decade now), no one has gone into union work and then left the branch. So you're generalizing a pattern to our group which simply doesn't fit. Moreover, the institutions Solidarity has worked in tend to stick around. Our
branch is pretty active in the Chicago Teachers Union, and our people have worked through the past three union elections, with their insurgent coalitions winning two of the three elections. Again, I can't recognize this practice in the picture of arrogant sectarians that you're trying to paint.
As far as "turning [our] backs on great numbers of people opposed to attacks on public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere," that doesn't fit very well with the daily reports I was getting back from Chicago and Madison comrades on the Wisconsin mobilization. Our people were there in the capital from early days to the end, and not out trying to sell the paper (we don't have one), preach the Trotskyist gospel, or whatever you imagine we Soli folks do. I confess that I'm still influenced by a now very old book by André Gorz, Strategy for Labor, and its call for socialists to promote "non-reformist reforms" - arenas where the struggle for reform confronts the contradictions of capitalism head-on. The struggle of public-sector workers currently does that, because those workers reach down into every corner of the country, and mobilizing in defense of those workers helps people to realize that (a) these workers have a face, and a well-known face at
that, and (b) the work they do is not work that you can simply leave to the tender mercies of the market. Health care is another - a massive sector where the market is manifestly failing miserably, and where the most plausible reform ("Medicare for All") would entail taking something like 1/6 of the economy out of the market.
Believe me, I understand what you're saying about Marxist sectarians alienating their base. (And I don't think it's only Marxists, by the way. I watched footage of "The Audacity of Hope" trying to get out of Greek waters on Democracy Now today. I find these people extraordinarily admirable. I've known Kathy Kelley for a long time, and I don't know anyone more courageous, even if her political analysis is sometimes lacking. But when I saw footage of this group where everyone but Alice Walker seemed to be white, all I could think was how unreflectively enamored of their own privilege these people seemed to be.) What I'm trying to do is find a middle ground between those who have in fact given up on socialism and those whose sectarianism is self-defeating. You seem to think that I'm in the latter camp (along with Carrol), but as far as I can tell that judgment is based on certain rhetorical affinities you hear between what I've written and
your past experience. I think your inference about my/our practice based on those affinities is hasty.
________________________________ From: Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Thursday, July 7, 2011 11:41 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Response to MG -- Was Poll....
On 2011-07-07, at 2:59 PM, Dissenting Wren wrote:
> Perhaps I should have been clearer that by "left" I mean a political formation whose horizon extends beyond capitalism to socialism (not social democracy). With that clarification made, CB's response to points 1 and 3 below are simply factually incorrect. And with those props removed, his entire argument collapses.
You beat me to it, but I was going to remind Charles that Carrol and yourself do not consider as part of the left anyone professing support for the Democratic party or capitalism, notwithstanding that a growing number of those who currently support both are becoming progressively disillusioned and want to reform each. Thus you turn your backs on great numbers of people opposed to attacks on public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and who, among other things, are demanding jobs, mortgage relief, universal medicare, clean energy, reining in the banks, and an end to US wars abroad. What is more decisive for you, however, is that they have not yet jumped to the conclusion that both the DP and capitalism are "unreformable" - that is to say, these poor souls have, as you put it, a limited "horizon" which does not "extend beyond capitalism to socialism (not social democracy)."
This disregards that people radicalize mainly on the basis of their own experience as the failings of their leaders become apparent. Radicals who are in close proximity to them can help this process along, but only insofar as they are willing to be patient and to refrain from exhibiting a condescending attitude to their current values and political choices. That part of the far left which you and Carrol represent may acknowledge the need to reach out to US workers in their unions and other venues, save for the Democratic party, but such gestures as you make are mostly negated because you inevitably signal your condescending hostility to the liberal political consciousness of these activists and their continuing loyalty to the DP and its leadership. I well know the shortcomings of this approach on the basis of my own past experience as a Trotskyist active in the unions and the NDP, which has the same social base and program as the DP. Whatever limited
success I may have had i! n these organizations was always in spite of and not because of my politics, which were very close to what you and Carrol currently espouse. You might want to reflect on why more members of left-wing sects who join unions and other working class organizations abandon their groups than new workers are recruited into them, which is not the direction in which the traffic is expected to go, and which can't entirely be explained away by "objective conditions".
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