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 Thursday February 28, 2002 13:04 by Gino - SWP
 from Mike Davis, author of Prisoners of the American Dream and Ecology of Fear Letter requesting financial assistance for Left Turn, an anti-capitalist magazine based in the USA Forwarded from Left Turn in the States: Dear Friend, Left Turn magazine is the fruit of the renewal of activism and critical thought that began with the Seattle protests several years ago. Explicitly committed to the development of a popular anti-capitalist politics, it provides a lively and non-sectarian forum for all viewpoints - socialist, anarchist and green - within the broader global justice movement. It acts as a bridge between the post-Seattle movement and explicitly anti-imperialist perspectives. It's also a unique collaboration between movement activists and veteran writer/scholars. In addition to street-level coverage of the major anticapitalist protests around the world, Left Turn provides in-depth briefings on such issues as U.S. participation in the dirty war in Colombia, the current global recession, the burgeoning "prison-industrial complex," and the post-9.11 police state. Most impressively, it has taken bold positions on Palestine, immigrant rights and Bush's "Crusade Against Terrorism." It has been one of the most outspoken magazines on the need to make justice for the Palestinian people a central demand of the anti-globalization movement. In my opinion, however, what is really exceptional about the magazine is that it is edited by frontline activists, many of them people of color, and thus expresses all the urgency of struggle and the need for unity. Left Turn is a movement-building tool committed, first and above all, to serious resistance and effective solidarity. Left Turn is produced on a shoestring and lives from crisis to crisis. Please join me in making a generous, sustaining contribution that will allow this gutsy little magazine to continue to fight the power. Checks/money orders can be made out to Left Turn and sent to Left Turn You can contact them at [email protected]. Many thanks. Mike Davis |
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Comments (8 of 8)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8Why would we give money to the American SWP? It isn't as if many of us would give money to our local version.
surely the author of city of quartz, a brilliant book on l.a. and its pychogeography is not a member of the sister organisation of the s.w.p illusions shattered!
A few points:
(A) Davis' letter doesn't imply that he is a member of Left Turn, just that he likes the magazine.
(B) The exact status of Left Turn as the sister organisation of our own SWP is open to some doubt.
Basically, Left Turn was set up by six people expelled from the ISO, which was then the sister organisation of the SWP. A little later the British SWP fucked the ISO out of their toy international for not doing what they were told fast enough (the actual issue was a genuinely bizarre squabble over the anti-capitalist movement). Our own SWP leadership, ever ready to lick the arse of their London mothership, cut off all relations with the ISO without bothering to consult their members until their conference some months later. Not unusual in the SWP, I realise, but still pretty shocking for the rest of us.
The British SWP, and its Irish sidekick, then recognised Left Turn as its American operation.
The problem with that move is that Left Turn by this stage had picked up some members who had nothing to do with the ISO or SWP. In fact they include people affiliated to the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire and even some Stalinists.
So Left Turn never talks about being the sister party of the SWP and has all kinds of folk as members, but the SWP considers Left Turn to be its American operation.
Confused? It's about to get worse. The German sister organisation of the SWP, Linksruck has just split almost down the middle. The smaller faction (calling itself "Seattle Bolshevik" in hilarious SWP style) believed all the SWP nonsense about anti-capitalism needing new forms of operation and organisation, and forgot that for the SWP talk is cheap, its only recruitment that matters.
The bigger faction knew what being in the SWP is really all about though - selling papers and recruiting. So they got the support of their London masters. The interesting thing about the split, though, is that the minority group were apparantly selling Left Turn and talking about it as the kind of path which they should all be taking.
I met Mike and his partner, Mexican muralist Allesandra Moctezuma (who hel in New Zealand, we organised a tour of Maori maraes, trade union halls and student unions promoting his new book "Late Victorian Holocausts". Mike is a pretty impressive guy, worked with Friends of the Panthers in California in the late 60s and spent a while in Belfast in the 70s. Mike and Allesandra joined Left Turn about nine months ago-
they found that the ISO's practice was sectarian and was not taking seriously the anti capitalist movement. City of Quartz is a brilliant social history of LA, and he is also on the editorial board of the New Left Review. Mike also had no time for sectarian bollox, unlike some people above!
Mike Davis is indeed an interesting writer. If I want to discuss Latin American immigration to California I would regard his testimony as valuable and important. I'm not so sure about his testimony for Left Turn.
It isn't sectarian to think of the SWP as a sect. Neither is it sectarian to laugh at the soap opera politics of their toy international. Socialism is too important to be left to a pack of idiot students.
that ugly arguement rears it's head
by extremes of social movements
i thought the arguement was now dead
but your all just finding new ones
if we are to mount a challenge
to the tyrannists who control us
then we'd better stick together
or they will divide us and control us
now i don't know about you lot
but there is work for all to do
it matters not your method
if your objectives they are true
so lets all come together now
and rise up to face our masters
prevent the world from further suffering
and humanitarian disasters
so all you anarchists and lefties
communists and greens
lets pull together numbers
and create a protest not yet seen
for there is strength in numbers
no longer scattered and isolated
rise up for our children
before our earth is desecrated
instead of arguing about the methods
or disagreeing about who's right and wrong
come together to fight
for what is right
before this whole world we know is gone
written by nuggett
(spur of moment)after all your incessant bickering
When the world
is going over the brink
those whose red
is a boiled pig-snout pink
wreck trust
with a nod and a wink
and fling shit
to hide their own stink
so should be left
in their slurry to sink
http://www.clubi.ie/swp/
Predictably the defenders of a sect shout "sectarian" at its critics. Let's get this clear: Sectarianism is the placing of the interests of your own little organisation over the interests of the working class.
That is a better description of the SWP than of any of its opponents.
For decades the SWP has existed to sell papers and recruit - party building for the sake of party building. Every campaign, every issue is just a way of picking up some recruits. Front after front is set up, never given any democratic life of its own, and then shut down again as bigger organisational gains are scented elsewhere. Never once has the SWP usefully participated in a working class struggle.
Instead a delusion is born: keep recruiting and when we unfurl the red flag the working class will come running. There is no need to earn the trust of working class people because somehow they are always just on the edge of a "radicalisation", which always translates as coming to support the SWP.
The fact that the SWP is run in a spectacularly undemocratic manner is almost a side issue.
Anyway, you keep churning out your little self-satisfied rhymes. When your organisation finally contributes even a little to the cause of the working class I might even start to listen to you.