Of course we all signed up to the SWP vountarily. We volunarily contributed huge amounts of our time, energy and money, and I for one don’t regret it a bit. What sticks in our craw is our former “leaders” not living up to the high standards they set for us, the “Outer Party.” I remember once telling a co-worker (this was 1982 or so) that I gave $50 a week to the Party. She was absolutely astounded, saying “that’s more than I spend every month on rent!” Of course, that wasn’t the least of it. In addition to the 48+ hours a week that I spent working at the time, I was expected to do at least two paper sales a week, one at a plant gate early in the morning, another Saturday. In addition 2-3 hours for branch meeting Sunday, plus innumerable hours in pointless fraction and committee meetings. Plus Saturday night Forum.

There was never any formal requirement that members get jobs in industry, but you were made to feel like a turd if you didn’t. If I had gotten exclusive seats at the Symphony (something Barnes and Waters are said to have done on occasion), I would have been looked at real funny. If I had bought a house or gotten married to someone “outside the movement” or had kids, or inherited some money and not given a sizeable chunk to the SWP, likewise I would have borne the mark of Cain.

But here we have two “leaders” who by several accounts work a maximum of 20 hours a week, who live live fairly comfortable lifestyles, at least in comparison to their minions, and have just made a sizeable profit on a real-estate deal. Our bitterness is understandable.

That is, presuming you weren’t reminded of that Cannon quote because I’m one of the people you’ve endured listening to—and rather because I mentioned the afterlife.

There’s a lovely passage in Cannon’s History of American Trotskyism where, after describing the various wierdos he had to hang out with in and around the branches in the early 1930’s (CLA, I think, not yet SWP), he says something like this: “If, despite my unbelief, there is indeed an afterlife, I’ll be well treated in it, not because of anything I have done but because of all the people I’ve had to endure listening to”. Christopher’s comment in #2 above reminded me of it.

How can we get hold of Redemption?

Barnes appears as the leader of a group called PISPAW (the Party of the International Socialist Proletariat something something) who dreams that a certain part of his body has morphed into a miniature version of Fidel.

In any event, the long and short of this is that out of those currents the Socialist Workers Party was created in 1938. The SWP soon suffered a major loss of heterogeneity when about half its membership (a majority of youth, a minority of adults) quit and formed a rival group, Max Shachtman’s Workers Party). But still the SWP had some important intellectuals in the 1940s—James T. Farrell, C. L. R. James—and some serious trade union composition.

By the 1960s the SWP revived with the antiwar, student, women’s, and black liberation movements. And the particular apartment-sellers mentioned in the above news item came to power as a clique in the party in the 1970s and forced all its members to go into “proletarian” occupations, reducing its membership dramatically, purging virtually all the veterans remaining from the 1930s and 1940s, and making Castroism rather than Trotskyism its ideology.

So there is a kind of degeneration within the opposition at work here, a small-scale tragedy and travesty within a libertarian socialist revolutionary tradition that had once had serious intellectual cachet and heterodox politics, reduced to farcical economism, workerism, and dogma—all to the apparent enrichment of a tiny caste.

It is an obscenity that would be comical if hundreds of people’s dreams hadn’t been wrecked along the way.

The Barnes people were new leftists at Carleton College in Minnesota. Barnes himself was a business administration major, I believe, which now makes infinite sense. They were attracted to the Cuban Revolution and were won to the SWP because of its Fidelista politics. Back then, the early sixties, the SWP had a kind of critical edge to its support for Cuba, but the one constant in the Barnes grouping was to reduce that critical distance to zero and just stick to support for the Cuban state through thick and thin—from which follows the North Korea nonsense, a reflection of Cuban foreign policy.

The problem with conspiracy theories—i.e., let’s blame the CP —is that they don’t explain how a supposedly otherwise healthy party put those people in the leadership and followed their line. It would be so simple an explanation, but there is a much more logical one: the party was full of flaws and the Barnes grouping just condensed them and drew them out to one logical conclusion, purging the best elements along the way. Ego times power, plus a steady element of sectarian thinking: that is the arithmetic.

Most of what Barnes did can best be put down to honest stupidity. Except about real estate, evidently.

The “turn to industry” for Barnes and Walters probably meant looking west toward New Jersey during their morning exercises.

Turn to speculation, turn to real estate: it all turns to dust.