[Marxism] Sectarianism red in tooth and claw

[Aaron Aarons]

>Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:55:29 -0700
>From: Jeffrey Thomas Piercy <mqduck at sonic.net>
>
>This article's pathetic. Do they expect anyone who wasn't around to
>witness it while it was happening cares about the thousands of splits
>and fusions and this charting of every single position Peter Camejo took
>or tendency he joined telling us exactly where he was right, where he
>was wrong and why he was wrong? The conceit of this article is palpable.

I _was_ around to witness the events described, at least from the beginning of 1962 until mid-1964. I was recruited to the YSA by Fred Mazelis, who wrote the WSWS article. After joining the YSA in February of '62, I became somewhat of a protegé of Camejo's for a few months, although I also kept on talking with Mazelis and with Jim Robertson, et al.. When I joined the SWP in June, I was pretty much a supporter of the minority, and when the minority split a few months later, I was actively with the Robertson-Mage side.

I found the Mazelis WSWS article to be an accurate portrayal of Camejo as I knew him, and their characterization of his later political trajectory seems reasonable from their political perspective -- and from mine, which is very different from theirs.

There is one thing in the article, however, that is a deliberate distortion. Mazelis writes:

"The reunification with the Pabloites came in 1963. Those who fought against this move were soon expelled and went on to the found the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party."

But the majority of those who fought the reunification were in the Revolutionary Minority Tendency led by Robertson and Mage that went on to found the Spartacist League. We were expelled before the Wohlforth-Mazelis group was expelled and, as I remember it, the latter didn't make much of a fuss about our expulsion. (They were expelled not long afterwards.)

 - Aaron

P.S. For the record, my party name in those days, at least the few times my name needed to appear in print, was Roger Abrams.

>Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:05:06 +1000
>From: "Greg Adler" <grega2728 at gmail.com>
>
>The WSWS cyber-remnant of the md eighties imploson of the International
>Committee of the Fourth International has done a service with its mind
>boggling obituary of Peter Camejo
>http://www.wswsw.org/articles/2008/sep208/came-s16shtml

There are THREE typos in this URL. (Comrade Adler apparently doesn't believe in "copy and paste".) The correct URL is <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/came-s16.shtml>.

>The service is not in throwing any light on the life of Peter Camejo but in
>tearing away the scab of sometimes reasonable sounding articles and the odd
>insightful film review to reveal the seething pustulence of the infection of
>sectarianism and falsified history.
>
>It establishes a continuity with the most degraded practice and theory of
>the old Healy dominated ICFI under the leadership of Dave North the onetime
>political toady and bully boy of Healy until
>he opportunistically turned on his former mentor and benefactor to sop up
>some mouldy remnants of the crumbs of "Healyism".
>Greg Adler