By Stacy Barber
I can’t imagine why I left a milieu that was and is composed of cultist Leon-Trotsky- is-Jesus-Christ types who are forever dividing into smaller and smaller sects, and whose effectiveness at organizing hasn’t gone beyond Dungeons and Dragons in the west in over seventy years. Ever since I was a kid, I would love having the feeling of following what I called ”other thans”, or as a surrealist would have it, knew I was happiest when I was creatively inspired. The major reason I was and remain a socialist is because I think it is the best way possible to release human creative potential, having a lifelong love of learning and the arts, having been an arts geek in high school and having gone on to obtain my English BA.
My involvement with Trotskyism started when I was 15. Some friends and I had done an independent study on socialism the year before. So I had already made up my mind that I was roughly some kind of socialist. I was initially introduced to NWROC / RWL by someone I was seeing from another high school. I don’t remember much other than soon being involved in one on one independent studies of “State and Revolution “ by V. I. Lenin and being given a bunch of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL)’s documents to read as well as getting involved in their front group, the National Women’s Rights Organizing Coalition (NWROC).
While on paper there were 600 members, I recall more like 40 people who bothered to show up for the national convention. Also all of the national steering committee was RWL. But I was blinded by wanting the revolution tomorrow and the novelty of it. I wound up doing clinic defense, anti-fascist and anti-cop brutality work for a few years, but never formally joined the RWL.
I left for good when they tried to commit, against his will, someone I was seeing who was a party member at the time for having dissenting opinions. He wasn’t the first and he wasn’t the last. There was that and their just being in the habit of whenever there was a march or any kind of coalition work, tending towards taking everything over and being pretty sectarian about it.
I became involved with Radical Women/ Freedom Socialist Party hoping for a more democratic, healthier organization, and still bought into many of the myths of identity politics. FSP is Clara Fraser ‘s old group and known for their Trotskyist feminism, or putting women’s oppression on par with class exploitation. While women are half the working class, fact remains that men are the other half, and no socialist revolution was ever won with a divided house, but will be won with men, women and LGBT struggling in solidarity together. Not to say women’s oppression or any other form of social oppression doesn’t play a role, but economic exploitation is more the car engine of the exploitation mobile and things like race, nationality, gender or sex and sexual orientation are the component parts of the car, each holding up the oppressive structures of class society while being a way for the ruling class to conquer and divide the working class and oppressed against each other.
One other game that FSP used to like to play was the hierarchy of oppression game, like it was Chutes and Ladders. Basically, if one were black, gay and female, one would have the most insight into oppression while completely ignoring the person’s class background and being little more than the milquetoast corporate leftism that seeks diversity in the board room and pits members of the oppressed against each other since they all have to vie with each other on what can be an individually self-serving careerist basis. While any organization should seek to foster the leadership of the oppressed and have what can be considered a rough affirmative action program, there also needs to be the idea of meritocracy as well, when the best person for the job might be a white, working class man.
I had originally joined the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) on the basis of their criticisms of identity politics and some of their international positions. I left IBT when it became clear that I at 20 was going to be recruited as someone’s girlfriend, to drop my studies and move to London; I didn’t think so. I tried a few other Trot groups in my 30s but found them just as cultist as any I had previously been involved with, if not more mildly, incredibly cliquey. Or just controlled by slimeballs.
A major criticism I have of all these various orthodox groups is that they all assume their individual grouplets are the vanguard, when I think only the course of mass struggle determines who that will be. They’re putting carts before horses. They all seem to also like to load up every flyer they write with every demand under the sun and scream socialist revolution like some excited old lady screams bingo if the cash award is especially big and might riot unless she gets her prize.
At this point, I think anything that doesn’t defend basic reforms like the New Deal or affirmative action and says it can only be solved by socialist revolution really wants us to try navel gazing and inactivity while the working class and oppressed are thrown further back into the nineteenth century.
It is with some hesitation but increasing respect that I’m currently an observer of SD USA.
Thank you for sharing more of your experience, Stacy! I’m increasingly seeing our healthcare crisis as our biggest tool for change. Increasing numbers of Americans of all persuasions are fed up with capitalism’s role in making healthcare have nothing to do with health or care. In the Non-Violent Medicaid Army’s Winter Study, I’m learning how wary we have to be of the ruling class’s tricks to divide us, as well as lure us off-track by offering “support.” More than anything, we have to get together. It’s hard because as well as the powerful working to divide us, there are power-hungry comrades among us ready to pit us against each other to build up their own following. I hope you’ll join us and help us find our way.
A Stalinist friend of mine recently told me he wasn’t feeling well. When I inquired what was wrong, the admirer of Uncle Joe told me he had a bad case of the Trots.
What do you get when you lock two Trotskyites in a room? Three Parties.
What do you feed a hungry Trotskyite on a cold day? Split pea soup.
I thought I had every Trot joke, but I hadn’t heard yours, My favourite is the Maoist chant, “A chicken in every pot and icepick in every Trot.” My favourite song from Yipsel Song Book is The Old Bolshevik Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4Dj3ognJN8
Twitterist or trot? Lol.
A very interesting essay. I’m sorry you missed the discussion with Paul Le Blanc, likely America’s foremost writer on things Trotskyist. Yours would have been an interesting interaction.
The Revolutionary Workers League had a strong presence in Detroit when I lived there. I think RWL began in Detroit. That doesn’t mean I know much about the RWL. How did they view “The Old Man?” Trotsky is an enigma to me. He drowned the Kronstadt Soviet in blood but wrote the most prescient analysis of National Socialism long before Winston Churchill took up his cudgel. I was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth group of the predecessor organisation to the SD, USA, The Socialist Party USA which was “Second Generation Trotskyist,” What RWL line on US. Imperialism apart from citing Lenin? Please write more essays as you get the chance,
The rwl actually began in Boston catty Anne. I lived in Detroit for about maybe up to year or I think more like eight months myself.
The rwl wound up becoming bamn or that was their latest front group. By any means necessary. Which…when I was last involved in formal politics, had allegations of sexual abuse swirling around it. Which, ideally, I think the left would organize some independent workers justice of their own and would form a what, an independent commission, to investigate such allegations and potentially publicize their findings, enough so I would hope anyone who was accused of allegations, would be shamed from and ostracized from the left if those allegations were proven true.
While in general catty anne I support modern day justice as being an advance beyond say having to plead ones case to a noble or have church courts of law decide legal affairs, it would be nice to see the u.s. left do some house cleaning.
With the rwl, it was heavily an LGBT organization, back in the 90s, 80s. I’m kinda glad you never got involved with them catty. Going on what I’m gathering of your temperament thus far, they would have driven you up the wall.
Also, if youve never read Sarah? Schulman’s ” my American history “, it’s a good read about gay liberation struggles in the 80s and 90s.
Thanks for the feedback. Appreciate it.
Sorry, but if the allegations proved correct.
Yeah, I’m not up on the current trends in the lgbtq community catty Anne. But do support people’s right to self expression and being true to their own vision. Be it in their sexuality or spiritual life or any other area of life. I tried going online to get both sides, coming from a libraries background to a certain extent and having my MLS, but if there any resources you think I should look at, feel free to email them to me privately.
Try to be an open and fair minded person and not jump to a snap judgment.
Mike has my permission to pass on my email.
Trying to view the latest trends of human sexuality as sexuality as an art. And the soul’s expression. And generally try to be supportive towards people’s creative quests. It’s not my beeswax to tell people who they should or shouldn’t bonk or what to do with their bodies. Nor is it that of the state’s. Like funding for abortion should be restored to Medicaid, think poorer transsexuals who may or may not be able to afford the sex modification surgery should be able to get it through Medicaid as well. Both are suppression by what I think by and large has become the Christian nationalist section of the right. And a bunch of moral hysteria.
Twitterist or trot? As far as how I joke about it.
And as far as anti trot jokes go, twatterist or trot? But that is only a joke. I’ve obviously learned my lessons about sectarianism the hard way. Adam or Catty.
You can say the sectarianism of the far left is kinda like the childhood game of pick up sticks. Or the fable of humpty dumpty, that the egg has been cracked but the omelette that can be made from poor old humpty is going to taste pretty gritty and that there is a real issue with the ortho trot cooks who serve it up.
I’m not sure how much workers defensist versus schactmanism necessarily matters much anymore when I look at China and call it state cap, and max schactman snapped the same thing about the Soviet union when, in 1939? May have become more of a question for sovietologists to worry about. IBT stopped being workers defensist towards the former Soviet union in 1991 I believe. But i forget another of it.
Seems though that Marxism put it’s money where it’s mouth was historically and helped transform a good chunk of the globe, that I hope to live to see it’s 200 year old birthday, and you have to give it up to one that took over a good chunk of the globe.
But that stuff like workers defensist or state cap would be more of a historical question, to be studied for the future, lessons drawn from the past, but as far as the present goes…modern day trots i think need to realize we don’t need to be bound by the chains of the past, that current historical necessity with how counter revolutionary things have become necessitates a drawing together of the wagons, and better to try to band together and start pooling resources at least and become more flexible and open minded about doing concrete political work together.
Interesting article Stacy. I remember NWROC very well during my time as an undergraduate at SUNY Albany (during the years 1993-1997). I had no idea they were a front for the Revolutionary Workers League. I learn something new every day. And I also enjoy your witty writing style. Looking forward to reading more articles on Socialist Currents.