1. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/reflections-on-peter-camejo-1939-2008/

2. http://www.swans.com/library/art14/lproy48.html

Finally, although this might sound Talmudic, Camejo was not expelled. To be expelled from a group like the SWP involves charges, a trial body, etc. Camejo took what he assumed to be a leave of absence in 1980 in order to go to Venezuela and read Lenin with an eye to figuring out how the SWP became a sect. When he came back to NYC, he was blocked from a National Committee meeting with the excuse that his leave was really a resignation since leave of absences were only allowed within in the US, or some such nonsense. The membership never knew that this secret bureaucratic maneuver had taken place. I should finally state that Camejo’s verdict on the SWP written around this time can be read here:

http://www.marxmail.org/camejo.html

Considering the power of his arguments, it is not surprising that the SWP would want to prevent him from getting a hearing.

For what period of his life was he calling for blood in the streets?

When it’s Bob Avakian’s life?

But that’s a misreading of Camejo’s life (or, more likely, of what goes on in organisations of this kind). I wasn’t in the SWP (btw, the SW of the obit is completely different from the SWP from which he was expelled—I doubt that their paper, Militant, is even running an obit). But in the organisations that Camejo subsequently supported financially and morally, everyone knows that socialism is a long way off, and that not everyone you recruit is going to stick around. There are struggles worth supporting here and now, and so you support them, acting as a kind of auxiliary, sometimes providing resources that no-one else is in a position to access. And you provide education and training to recruits that you hope will serve them well in whatever campaigns and organisations they live their lives in. Union locals, and even, sometimes, union leaderships, are replete with people who are more effective thanks to their experiences in groups like those Camejo supported (I am refraining from naming names for obvious reasons, but I know some of these people pretty well). Compared with the training that the Democratic Party usually offers, and the trajectory of its recruits, I think Camejo’s contribution holds up pretty well.

I don’t know about how it holds up compared with Harrington. LFC is right about what Harrington’s view was. But Harrington was Harrington. I don’t know about the training DSA and DSOC have provided for recruits, but the folks I used to come across had the view that obit writer wrongly attributes to Harrington. The fragmentation of this broad part of the left in the 60s and 70s was a minor tragedy. From the outside, the fact that Camejo and Harrington were not comrades seems like evidence of that tragedy.

“one of the few leaders of the 1960s who actively maintained his commitment to the need to build a new revolutionary movement based on the mass of working-class people and students in this country.”

“Having left the SWP where he’d spent his entire political career, Peter embarked on the unexpected path of becoming a broker for Merrill Lynch. He used to laugh when he’d tell the story of how he figured it wouldn’t be too hard to make some money because he’d read Marx’s Capital, and he was good at math…”

So which is it: deluded or sell-out? And at what point in time does a life wasted in the service of revolutionary socialism stop being tragic and just become funny?

I wouldn’t either, after glancing through the SWP obit and noting Camejo’s longstanding attitude toward the Democratic Party and all its works. Contrary to what the SWP obit writer said on this, Michael Harrington, whatever his blind spots (and he certainly had them, as everyone does) did not believe that the Democratic Party could be turned into “a vehicle for advancing socialism,” or to be more precise he did not phrase it that way. Rather Harrington believed that the majority of the progressive constituencies/elements in U.S. politics were firmly in or around the Dem. party (along with other not-progressive elements), that third parties had not had much success in prying those elements away from the Dems in the modern era, and that not to recognize these facts when deciding on electoral strategy was foolish. Harrington’s approach might not have worked all that well, but Camejo’s didn’t either.