[Marxism] Sectarianism red in tooth and claw

[Aaron Aarons]

> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:09:19 -0400
>From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
>
>>Be specific. I pointed out one misrepresentation, but I didn't catch
>>any others.
>>
>>  - Aaron
>
>I actually wrote them a letter taking exception to the following:
>
>"Camejo finally left the SWP around 1980. He was expelled, but not
>because of any fundamental differences with the party leadership's
>abandonment of Trotskyism, an abandonment that was made official with
>its 1982 denunciation of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
>Camejo's differences were confined to tactics and tempo. He was
>already developing the orientation that would take him directly into
>bourgeois politics of the Green and left-liberal variety."
>
>Since it was not published, I don't have the exact words that I
>posted to their form but this is the gist of it:
>
>1. Camejo was not expelled. Expulsions involve trial bodies that hear
>charges against a party member, but this never happened with Camejo.
>After returning from a year's leave of absence in Venezuela, he was
>told that he had effectively resigned and was blocked from
>re-assuming his duties.

So he was _effectively_ expelled, bureaucratically. Since the rather concise article by Mazelis was not about the lack of internal democracy in the SWP but aboult Camejo, this quibble over the meaning of "expelled" has little or nothing to do with their evaluation of Camejo.

>2. The differences were not over "tactics and tempo". They were over
>the problem of sectarianism. During his leave of absence Camejo
>developed a critique of "vanguard party building" schemas that the
>SWP leaders did not want to hear.

Camejo (or Louis) may have defined it as "the problem of sectarianism", but that is a political characterization by one side of the debate. I always thought that the problem with the SWP was the problem of "tailism" or, as we used to translate the SWP's line, "if it moves, fondle it". Of course, I'm talking about the SWP while Camejo was still a major leader. I paid little attention to the SWP and its terminally boring paper after the anti-Vietnam-war movement, in which the SWP played a major but -- at best -- ambiguous role, ended.

>I would add that WSW writes some generally credible material on
>culture and economics, but they really disgrace themselves writing
>uninformed nonsense such as this.

Better than all that gushing praise on this list for the lefty investment banker that I've mostly only skimmed over, wanting to not start criticizing Camejo immediately after his death. But the attack on the WSWS' reasonable evaluation of Camejo ended my reticence.

 - Aaron