Hello to all.
I'm the Doug Hainline mentioned earlier in this thread ... for those who haven't read the part to which I refer, it was about the Spartacist
League, its internal life, and why intelligent and non-neurotic people might want to join such an organization, and, more interestingly, why they would remain
in it for more than a year or two.
I was a member, with a three-year break after I deserted the Army as an 11B10 on the way to Vietnam (and was expelled for doing so), hid out from the FBI for 18
months, turned myself in, served six months at hard labor in military prison, then was expelled (from the Army, I'd already been expelled from the SL), re-joined (the SL, not the Army),
was sent into the International Socialists to help split them. I finally left the SL in 1980.
I'm happy to answer any questions anyone may have
. May I suggest you not use people's real names here? (Unless they've already been used.)
We're probably all now either in our graves or heading there soon, but there just might be someone who is embarrassed, or even worse,
by the revelation that they were a member of a communist group.
I just want to make two points about why people stayed in the SL:
(1) We wanted socialism.=> We thought that socialism was only achiveable via a mass workers' revolution.=> We thought that such a revolution required a revolutionary party to succeed.
"
Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer."
(Read "=>" as "implies".)
ABC, really.
So why did we think the SL was that party? (Or, to be precise, a propaganda group for the moment, but the nucleus of a revolutionary party, which we did not believe would
come into existence via the recruitment of ones and twos, but mainly by a process of splits and fusions from other leftwing groups -- and we assumed that those groups would grow
as a natural product of capitalist contradictions -- rather like the Bolshevik Party in 1917, which pulled in various subjective revolutionaries from non-Bolshevik groups, like Trotsky's
Mezhraiontsi. [
August 7-13: Mezhraiontsy unite with the Bolsheviks ])
No doubt everyone had their reasons, whether or not they were aware of them.
For some, the SL was just the first radical organization that got to them. For me, it was this: the SL was honest, it told the truth about the world, no matter how unpopular
this was among the radical left, and no other organization did. It didn't suck up to the Black Panthers, it didn't whitewash Stalinism, etc etc etc etc.
It was -- or so I thought and still think -- brutally honest.
Why was this attractive? Perhaps for ''moral' reasons, but it also seemed to be the quality necessary to resist the pressures of bourgeois society, pressures
which in the past had derailed several protential revolutions via corrupting their leadership. So, whatever the" real" reaons for this attractive honesty,
there appeared to be good pragmatic reasons as well.
At the same time, yes, I was one of the SLers who felt that its general style was too angular, too sectarian, too much given to propagating abstract truths as opposed to being
active as the 'best builders' (as the SWP/YSA used to put it) of movements fighting for a supportable goal. I personally put this down to historic/social circumstances:
a bunch of mainly middle-class people, isolated from the labor movement and working class generally ... but something we would overcome in time, as the class struggle
propelled more and more working class people into the organized Left, including us.
(2) I do not agree at all that the SL was a cult, or that Robertson's motive was just to build a group of personal loyalists so that he could live a posh lifestyle from their dues money.
It was a sect, and it was, increasingly over the years, one that tolerated no one who was not a Robertson loyalist, but I believe Robertson's main motive
was to keep the organization politically pure, and that he was the only one who could guarantee that --- thus all potential rivals who did not demonstrate total loyalty
to him had to be purged.
This was the motive -- the only one -- for purging Bill and Adaire Logan. Whatever they did in Australia, they did it with the full knowledge and approval of the central SL leadership.
Nor was their leadership of the British SL particulary 'bureaucratic' or abusive -- rather more 'liberal' than the practice in the US, in fact.
They are good, decent people -- however misguided their political beliefs.
(One
déformation professionnelle of being a hard-line political person, on either side of the barricades, is to believe all your opponents are driven by base motivations.
For a refreshing exception to the rule, see this conservative's appreciation of an old Soviet soldier: [
An Old Soviet Soldier - The Salisbury Review ])
It is probably true, as the 70s waned, that at some level Robertson realized that, for this period anyway, the upsurge we experienced in the 1960s was over,
and that he would not see a large change in the circumstances of the organization in his lifetime. Thus the retirement to California, and not to a modest flat either.
There is no word to describe the SL: not a cult, although partaking of features of a cult.
A sect, but not a sect that
wanted to be a sect, so to speak.
Reality is more complex than vocabulary, and,
viz Alfred Korzybski, we always have to be careful when using the 'to be ' verb.
Of course, we are still in the Dark Ages so far as a scientific undestanding of human psychology is concerned, but I believe that most of the people who joined and remained in the SL had the
same motives I had.
While the rest of the Left cheered the victory of Islamic reaction in Iran, only the SL -- ONLY the SL -- had the insight and the guts to proclaim what was coming.
Good for them! And shame on all the fools who thought that the mullahs in power would be as opportunist as they were.
All human life was there in the SL, as in any organization, Left or Right, but by and large I recall my former comrades as very decent, well-motivated people.
Terribly misguided, as I now believe, but
why they wanted socialism is completely understandable. Their motives were entirely honorable.
It's a cruel world, unbridled capitalism is very ugly, the strong eat the weak, and any decent person must feel revulsion at what he or she sees daily on TV.
(Why don't the civilized powers of the world find a way to accommodate those desperate refugees risking their lives to get away from the horrors of their own horrible countries?)
I don't think goverment ownership of the economy is the right solution, even if you tack the meaningless phrase "under workers control" to it,
although
some government ownership and regulatory intervention is a good idea. But that's a different topic: how to keep dragging our nasty species forward.
Anyway, anyone who wants to ask me anything, feel free. If you want to know about my current political beliefs, that's fine. "NeoCon" doesn't cover them, although I think
their motives were good, and much of what they had to say abotu domestic issues was, and still is, on target. My politics now are probably closest to being a 1960 FDR/JFK Democrat,
not that my personal beliefs are of any importance.
My central belief, transcending the transient political beliefs we all have, is that we must always seek disconfirming evidence for any factual belief
(as opposed to 'value belief' -- you can't go from 'ought' to 'is', as the man said) , so I'm always happy -- okay, always willing, even with gritted teeth --
to hear view which contradict what I currently believe. I've been wrong before, and therefore am probably wrong now about some things. Life is complex
and humans are fallible.
I was wrong in the past, more than once, so maybe I'm wrong now. [Nope, the good people of Iraq and Afghanistan do
not want Lesbian Outreach Centers in their
coiuntries. Robespierre, of all people, was right when he notied that people do not love missionaries with bayonets. The 82nd Airborne could bring democrfacy to
Arkansas, but not Afghanistan. They'll have to do it on their own, mainly. (Not that we couldn't help a bit, behind the scenes.)
But my 'ought' belliefs haven't change sinced I was a teenager in the late 1950's in Texas, reading
The Bending Cross [ The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs: Ginger, Ray, Davis, Mike: 9781931859400: Amazon.com: Books ] and
Homage to Catalonia. [ Amazon.com: Homage To Catalonia eBook : George Orwell: Kindle Store ]
The point is to change it. The question is how, and what to.