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John Holmes
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 Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 11:54 am Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, David Stevens wrote:
| Quote: | John Holmes replied:
+ [Kirk-Kaye] pulled no punches in their fight for intraparty +
democracy, either; with regard to expulsion of the + protoSpartacist RT,
they wrote that Dobbs had "expelled the + wrong man" (meaning that
Wohlforth, not Robertson, should have + gotten the boot).
+
I am no fan of Wohlforth to say the least, but to support the SWP
expelling him in 1964 is going too far.
Holmes' formula -- is it a formula? -- smacks of what Stephen and Fran
rightly called moralism.
The Leninist answer, for those inside SWP/US, was somewhat less nuanced:
Robertson, Mage, and White did
not violate Party discipline. Wohlforth did.
|
Circa 1964 or 1965, the SWP was no longer a revolutionary party, so
violating its discipline may have been very stupid on his part, but
was not a crime. His grouping, whatever its many problems, had a
better political line by and large than the official SWP's, not a
worser.
....
| Quote: | When you get right down to it, exactly what Dick and Clara were up to
circa 1965 is not at the top of my personal agenda at the moment,
We can agree on that!
But Holmes slandered the Frasers, and not merely by omission. His ignorance
offers insufficient grounds for race-baiting speculation about "alleged
revolutionaries who had 'tactically' decided to go along with joining the
Democratic Party" at a time when Kirk-Kaye was a
disciplined tendency within SWP.
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Grounds for said speculation were laid by you, in your posting about
their alleged position re: the MFDP. If you got it wrong, then you are
the one who misrepresented them.
| Quote: |
Nor do I know of anyone advocating "the benefit of getting an official
delegation sent to the convention"
outside of Comrade Holmes' imagination...
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The advocates of this were an organization called the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party.
-jh- |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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On Aug 18, 8:23 pm, "David Stevens" <passchenda...@ymail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Stephen Diamond wrote:
At the risk of sounding doctrinaire, isn't the first question the
class character of the Green Party.
I agree that it's the *first question*.
At the risk of sounding less doctrinaire than some readers may
expect, I suggest that it isn't necessarily the *final word*.
Several years ago, Gore Vidal appeared to be considering a
run for US Senator of California, as a Democrat. (In the
event, he didn't run).
The Spartacist League/US mooted the idea of endorsing
Vidal. (In the event, they didn't either).
I thought the Spartacists made a good case (if not a
correct one).
|
Do you know if the IBT or the IG commented?
| Quote: |
On behalf of my Eduoard Bernstein-style opponents, who
assert the goal to be nothing, the movement everything, allow me
to suggest the [admittedly extreme] counterexample of the
Marcus Garvey "Back to Africa" movement.
Garvey accepted money from the Ku Klux Klan, which
understandably agreed with blacks going "back" to Africa.
Garvey was a con-man, who dressed like a British admiral
and had no intention of personally going "back to Africa."
Yet hundreds of Marcus Garvey clubs sprung up, propelling
blacks into political life in a way that they hadn't been before.
Few of those Negroes had any more intention of "returning"
to Africa than Garvey himself; rather, the movement outgrew
and ignored its formal programmatic bounds.
That's dialectics.
|
Can you spell out what makes this development or this account
dialectical?
| Quote: |
The Garvey movement, and its immediate inheritors, did not
achieve lasting gains or "go" anywhere. But that is surely an
improvement over going back to Africa.
In a more positive vein, consider the orientation by theKirk-Kaye
tendency (today's Freedom Socialist Party) towards the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party during the 1960s.
|
I haven' followed Kirk-Kaye, but I recall superficially looking at
them in 1965-1966, when I explored parties holding lines consistent
with my confused Maoist/Trotskyist consciousness. They and another
tendency--or perhaps the same one (Swabeck tendency) was quasi-Maoist.
I preferred the outright Maoist Marcyites at the time. I wonder if
Kirk-Kaye's Maoist proclivities carried over to the FSP.
| Quote: |
That it did not work -- the Freedom Democrats were absorbed
into the regular party of the Bourbon Dixiecrats -- is obvious with
the advantage of hindsight. But that was nowhere near obvious at
the time, and it is to the credit of the Fraserites that they *tried* to
intervene with their limited forces.
The SWP/US, following the position of George Breitman, essentially
abandoned the field of black liberation: citing shibboleths of racial
autonomy, they effectively abstained -- leaving leadership to the
liberals and the porkchop nationalists.
Just like the ultralefts who refuse to work within reactionary unions.
- David Stevens (Fraserite of the Third Mobilization)
|
Well, let's get back to the initial point you raise. Might it have
been a good idea to support Vidal, running as a Democrat. Or does
running as a Green make McKinney unsupportable. Frankly, I would have
answered with an automatic no to both, but I do have the sense that my
position might be doctrinaire. The question is, if the goal of
electoral work is advancing the working class toward political
independence, how can it be accomplished from within a bourgeois
party? David Walters implies that the McKinney campaign might escape
this criticism, because the McKinney campaign is not a campaign *for*
the Greens, but isn't the struggle for class independence predicated
on the concept that classes express themselves politically through
parties. If the party question becomes secondary, isn't that itself a
major obstacle to political independence?
srd |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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On Aug 18, 8:23 pm, "David Stevens" <passchenda...@ymail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Stephen Diamond wrote:
At the risk of sounding doctrinaire, isn't the first question the
class character of the Green Party.
I agree that it's the *first question*.
At the risk of sounding less doctrinaire than some readers may
expect, I suggest that it isn't necessarily the *final word*.
Several years ago, Gore Vidal appeared to be considering a
run for US Senator of California, as a Democrat. (In the
event, he didn't run).
The Spartacist League/US mooted the idea of endorsing
Vidal. (In the event, they didn't either).
I thought the Spartacists made a good case (if not a
correct one).
|
Do you know if the IBT or the IG commented?
| Quote: |
On behalf of my Eduoard Bernstein-style opponents, who
assert the goal to be nothing, the movement everything, allow me
to suggest the [admittedly extreme] counterexample of the
Marcus Garvey "Back to Africa" movement.
Garvey accepted money from the Ku Klux Klan, which
understandably agreed with blacks going "back" to Africa.
Garvey was a con-man, who dressed like a British admiral
and had no intention of personally going "back to Africa."
Yet hundreds of Marcus Garvey clubs sprung up, propelling
blacks into political life in a way that they hadn't been before.
Few of those Negroes had any more intention of "returning"
to Africa than Garvey himself; rather, the movement outgrew
and ignored its formal programmatic bounds.
That's dialectics.
|
Can you spell out what makes this development or this account
dialectical?
| Quote: |
The Garvey movement, and its immediate inheritors, did not
achieve lasting gains or "go" anywhere. But that is surely an
improvement over going back to Africa.
In a more positive vein, consider the orientation by theKirk-Kaye
tendency (today's Freedom Socialist Party) towards the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party during the 1960s.
|
I haven' followed Kirk-Kaye, but I recall superficially looking at
them in 1965-1966, when I explored parties holding lines consistent
with my confused Maoist/Trotskyist consciousness. They and another
tendency--or perhaps the same one (Swabeck tendency) was quasi-Maoist.
I preferred the outright Maoist Marcyites at the time. I wonder if
Kirk-Kaye's Maoist proclivities carried over to the FSP.
| Quote: |
That it did not work -- the Freedom Democrats were absorbed
into the regular party of the Bourbon Dixiecrats -- is obvious with
the advantage of hindsight. But that was nowhere near obvious at
the time, and it is to the credit of the Fraserites that they *tried* to
intervene with their limited forces.
The SWP/US, following the position of George Breitman, essentially
abandoned the field of black liberation: citing shibboleths of racial
autonomy, they effectively abstained -- leaving leadership to the
liberals and the porkchop nationalists.
Just like the ultralefts who refuse to work within reactionary unions.
- David Stevens (Fraserite of the Third Mobilization)
|
Well, let's get back to the initial point you raise. Might it have
been a good idea to support Vidal, running as a Democrat. Or does
running as a Green make McKinney unsupportable. Frankly, I would have
answered with an automatic no to both, but I do have the sense that my
position might be doctrinaire. The question is, if the goal of
electoral work is advancing the working class toward political
independence, how can it be accomplished from within a bourgeois
party? David Walters implies that the McKinney campaign might escape
this criticism, because the McKinney campaign is not a campaign *for*
the Greens, but isn't the struggle for class independence predicated
on the concept that classes express themselves politically through
parties. If the party question becomes secondary, isn't that itself a
major obstacle to political independence?
srd |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 9:15 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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On Aug 19, 11:54 pm, John Holmes <jhol...@OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
| Quote: | On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, David Stevens wrote:
John Holmes replied:
I am no fan of Wohlforth to say the least, but to support the SWP
expelling him in 1964 is going too far.
Holmes' formula -- is it a formula? -- smacks of what Stephen and Fran
rightly called moralism.
The Leninist answer, for those inside SWP/US, was somewhat less nuanced:
Robertson, Mage, and White did
not violate Party discipline. Wohlforth did.
Circa 1964 or 1965, the SWP was no longer a revolutionary party, so
violating its discipline may have been very stupid on his part, but
was not a crime. His grouping, whatever its many problems, had a
better political line by and large than the official SWP's, not a
worser.
|
If moralism is at issue at here, seemingly making an absolute
principle of party-discipline represents the moralistic pole. But a
certain complexity might upset this diagnosis. Wohlforth could not
have defended a violation of discipline based on the non-revolutionary
character of the SWP, because he believed the SWP remained
revolutionary, before and immediately after the Robertsonite
expulsion. The Robertsonites, on the other hand, had no reason in
principle to avoid breaking the discipline of a party they considered
centrist.
srd |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 9:15 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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On Aug 19, 11:54 pm, John Holmes <jhol...@OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
| Quote: | On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, David Stevens wrote:
John Holmes replied:
I am no fan of Wohlforth to say the least, but to support the SWP
expelling him in 1964 is going too far.
Holmes' formula -- is it a formula? -- smacks of what Stephen and Fran
rightly called moralism.
The Leninist answer, for those inside SWP/US, was somewhat less nuanced:
Robertson, Mage, and White did
not violate Party discipline. Wohlforth did.
Circa 1964 or 1965, the SWP was no longer a revolutionary party, so
violating its discipline may have been very stupid on his part, but
was not a crime. His grouping, whatever its many problems, had a
better political line by and large than the official SWP's, not a
worser.
|
If moralism is at issue at here, seemingly making an absolute
principle of party-discipline represents the moralistic pole. But a
certain complexity might upset this diagnosis. Wohlforth could not
have defended a violation of discipline based on the non-revolutionary
character of the SWP, because he believed the SWP remained
revolutionary, before and immediately after the Robertsonite
expulsion. The Robertsonites, on the other hand, had no reason in
principle to avoid breaking the discipline of a party they considered
centrist.
srd |
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| Back to top |
stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:59 pm Post subject: Re: the McKinney Campaign was: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truth |
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On Aug 24, 12:32 pm, ross <nob...@nowhere.net> wrote:
| Quote: | What is e.g. Nancy Wohlforth's attitude,
|
Nancy Wohlforth???? What a topic for gossip! Is this person identical
to one "Nancy Fields," Tim's partner at the time of his suspension?
And was she always a lesbian, or did marriage to Tim drive her to it:
"Nancy serves as the National Co-President of Pride at Work. In 1980,
she was a founding member of the Lesbian and Gay Labor Alliance, the
forerunner of Pride at Work." (http://www.opeiu.org/AboutOPEIU/
OurNationalLeaders/NancyWohlforth/tabid/122/Default.aspx) |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:59 pm Post subject: Re: the McKinney Campaign was: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truth |
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On Aug 24, 12:32 pm, ross <nob...@nowhere.net> wrote:
| Quote: | What is e.g. Nancy Wohlforth's attitude,
|
Nancy Wohlforth???? What a topic for gossip! Is this person identical
to one "Nancy Fields," Tim's partner at the time of his suspension?
And was she always a lesbian, or did marriage to Tim drive her to it:
"Nancy serves as the National Co-President of Pride at Work. In 1980,
she was a founding member of the Lesbian and Gay Labor Alliance, the
forerunner of Pride at Work." (http://www.opeiu.org/AboutOPEIU/
OurNationalLeaders/NancyWohlforth/tabid/122/Default.aspx) |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:01 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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It seems Nancy Wohlforth supports Obama:
http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=name&lname=Wohlforth&fname=Nancy
srd |
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stephen
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:01 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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It seems Nancy Wohlforth supports Obama:
http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=name&lname=Wohlforth&fname=Nancy
srd |
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nada
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:08 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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It is likely that McKinney will adopt Cindy's Sheehan's labor
platform:
http://www.cindyforcongress.org/article.php?list=type&type=13
However, Truman was simply reflectng then CIO and AFL politics which,
at that time, represented 33% of all workers in the US. Today...it's
almost zilch.
The WWP, FRSO, the WIL and SO are the only left groups supporting
McKinney. It's not politically relevant, however, its what comes out
of that campaign.
Sheehan, for example, has a lot of labor support on the SF Labor
Council. She has excellent local contacts, etc. For McKinney, not so
much.
David |
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nada
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:08 pm Post subject: Re: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truthist? |
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It is likely that McKinney will adopt Cindy's Sheehan's labor
platform:
http://www.cindyforcongress.org/article.php?list=type&type=13
However, Truman was simply reflectng then CIO and AFL politics which,
at that time, represented 33% of all workers in the US. Today...it's
almost zilch.
The WWP, FRSO, the WIL and SO are the only left groups supporting
McKinney. It's not politically relevant, however, its what comes out
of that campaign.
Sheehan, for example, has a lot of labor support on the SF Labor
Council. She has excellent local contacts, etc. For McKinney, not so
much.
David |
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| Back to top |
nada
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:10 pm Post subject: Re: the McKinney Campaign was: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truth |
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Wholforth lives in DC and is the boss of hte OPEU now (Office and
Professional Employees). She sit's on the AFL-CIO ex board. She takes
a series of radical positions but won't break from the Demos.
David |
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nada
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:10 pm Post subject: Re: the McKinney Campaign was: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truth |
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Wholforth lives in DC and is the boss of hte OPEU now (Office and
Professional Employees). She sit's on the AFL-CIO ex board. She takes
a series of radical positions but won't break from the Demos.
David |
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ross
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:32 am Post subject: Re: the McKinney Campaign was: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truth |
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stephen <srdiamond@gmail.com> wrote inter alia in news:558c920f-a322-
436b-b30d-1ccce2930a86@k36g2000pri.googlegroups.com:
[snip]
| Quote: | Well, let's get back to the initial point you raise. Might it have
been a good idea to support Vidal, running as a Democrat. Or does
running as a Green make McKinney unsupportable. Frankly, I would have
answered with an automatic no to both, but I do have the sense that my
position might be doctrinaire. The question is, if the goal of
electoral work is advancing the working class toward political
independence, how can it be accomplished from within a bourgeois
party? David Walters implies that the McKinney campaign might escape
this criticism, because the McKinney campaign is not a campaign *for*
the Greens, but isn't the struggle for class independence predicated
on the concept that classes express themselves politically through
parties. If the party question becomes secondary, isn't that itself a
major obstacle to political independence?
srd
|
This question has come up in my conversations with Barry W. of Socialist
Action Canada. I'm beginning to wonder myself what the connection is
between McKinney (and Cindy Sheehan) running as anti-Democrats, if you
will, and the active construction of / campaigning for a labor party in
the US per the Programme. The two campaigns are certainly pro-labor on
paper, with lots of fine demands like the repeal of Taft-Hartley, etc.,
but is an actual organisational connection being made with the struggle
to build a labor party, or even a Black party, given that the
Reconstructionists are not actually active as such that I can see right
now? Who besides the SO and their sympathisers are actually doing
anything to further this? Is anybody in labor officialdom breaking with
the Democrats in the McKinney and Sheehan direction, as part of the
construction of a class party? What is e.g. Nancy Wohlforth's attitude,
David? Anybody else in SF?
--
Ross in Toronto |
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ross
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:32 am Post subject: Re: the McKinney Campaign was: Cynthia McKinney - 9/11 Truth |
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stephen <srdiamond@gmail.com> wrote inter alia in news:558c920f-a322-
436b-b30d-1ccce2930a86@k36g2000pri.googlegroups.com:
[snip]
| Quote: | Well, let's get back to the initial point you raise. Might it have
been a good idea to support Vidal, running as a Democrat. Or does
running as a Green make McKinney unsupportable. Frankly, I would have
answered with an automatic no to both, but I do have the sense that my
position might be doctrinaire. The question is, if the goal of
electoral work is advancing the working class toward political
independence, how can it be accomplished from within a bourgeois
party? David Walters implies that the McKinney campaign might escape
this criticism, because the McKinney campaign is not a campaign *for*
the Greens, but isn't the struggle for class independence predicated
on the concept that classes express themselves politically through
parties. If the party question becomes secondary, isn't that itself a
major obstacle to political independence?
srd
|
This question has come up in my conversations with Barry W. of Socialist
Action Canada. I'm beginning to wonder myself what the connection is
between McKinney (and Cindy Sheehan) running as anti-Democrats, if you
will, and the active construction of / campaigning for a labor party in
the US per the Programme. The two campaigns are certainly pro-labor on
paper, with lots of fine demands like the repeal of Taft-Hartley, etc.,
but is an actual organisational connection being made with the struggle
to build a labor party, or even a Black party, given that the
Reconstructionists are not actually active as such that I can see right
now? Who besides the SO and their sympathisers are actually doing
anything to further this? Is anybody in labor officialdom breaking with
the Democrats in the McKinney and Sheehan direction, as part of the
construction of a class party? What is e.g. Nancy Wohlforth's attitude,
David? Anybody else in SF?
--
Ross in Toronto |
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