Sclerosis of a sect
Geltman, Emanuel
Information comes second-hand, and it varies as to details. Fifty or more members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' party have been expelled, most of them old-timers. Apparently there were...
...SOME LITERATURE has come to hand, too, and it's more confusing than illuminating...
...Or keep expelled members from attending public meetings...
...I remember coming around, at about age 16, to the Trotskyist movement...
...One group wants to form a new International, with Cuba at its center...
...They apparently took their case to mere party members...
...Disputes, factions, even splits are common enough in political organizations...
...One of the theoreticians of the SWP proposed to jettison Trotsky— arguing that he was wrong whenever he differed with Lenin, that "the permanent revolution" (a cornerstone of Trotskyist theory) was wrong...
...preferred "critical" support of Castro...
...There is something ludicrous in the twirling of these sects, but one feels also just a little sadness...
...Trotsky clobbered the opposition in true MarxistLeninist fashion...
...With several grouplets of expellees or voluntary exiles, dating back at least to 1977, getting at the whys and wherefores is not easy...
...Apparently there were many differences, but what seems to have precipitated the expulsions is not so much that the "expellees" wanted to hold to traditional Trotskyism but that they spoke about their differences outside such channels of High Office as the SWP National Committee...
...They were indicted under the Smith Act with, it is worth recalling, the applause of the Communist party, whose leaders were later indicted under the same Smith Act...
...But it is a sad spectacle: old-timers, who have devoted a lifetime to their beliefs, expelled from a "Trotskyist" organization for being undeviating Trotskyists...
...opposed Khomeini as a counterrevolutionary...
...Leaders argued in public...
...Big issues were at stake, which I may or may not have understood: China, industrialization in Russia...
...Among those expelled are many who were leading members for decades: one was celebrated a few years ago in the Militant for his membership of 50 361 years and time served in a Minnesota jail along with leaders of Teamsters' Local 544...
...SOME ISSUES are so grave, there is no way out except to separate...
...But expulsion...
...Like a foreign language once learned and forgotten, the language in these documents has to be relearned...
...What caught my fancy most was a certain spirit of open debate...
...Castro, however, doesn't seem eager to receive them, or to give them the time of day...
...That, too, is happening, just as years ago when some of us tried to attend Stalinist meetings...
...he had a talent for sharp polemic, to put it mildly...
...Another "ism" is taking over...
...You name it...
...That's what Stalinists did...
...There are at least four grouplets, of which only one has gone public: "Social Action...
...It took a few years before I, and others, began to think that people outside the party—Russians in particular—also deserved full democratic rights...
...The official line favors Khomeini, opposes Solidarity, offers uncritical support for Castro—Cuba having replaced Russia in the canon...
...The expellees, I gather, favored a degree of support to Solidarity...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
