Yeah, I knew that about the IMT. Interestingly, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with them about the necessity or usefulness of working within the British Labour Party. Kind of like trade unions, the Labour Party in the UK is at least a partial victory for the working class insofar as it was formed to promote independent working class political action. However, the IMT gets in wrong in that they try to export that perspective in every country that they work in, so you get in the United States an attempt to build a "labor party" as a reformist/halfway house-ish party as the strategy. This also, in my view, misreads the early history of the Labour Party as more left wing than it actually was, so they don't see that the Labour Party was a means to head off the creation of a Marxist party a la the SPD.
I met up with a few members of the WIL recently. Their political strategy differs quite a bit from ours. That ended up being my primary disagreement with them. The Chavez thing isn't a huge deal. If you didn't already know, they are really fond of hijacking "traditional mass labor" organizations like the UK Labour Party, the French Communist Party, SYRIZA, etc. Although this is a flawed strategy in my opinion, the WIL are still good, dedicated Marxists. It's also worth mentioning that they don't endorse entry into any US political party. They support an entirely new party.
Yeah, by all means do it. I'd be interested to hear about your experiences working with them.
Well the mainstream of the party is too fond of Hugo Chávez for my liking. I do however suspect that the more local currents aren't as crazy about Chávez as the party leadership is. At this point I'm okay with a Marxist, non-Stalinist party. I'll let you know how they are once I start to get more involved.
(split because of character limits) What do you think about the WILs politics? I'm kind of an ex-Trotskyist, though I've never been in an organisation that's called itself Trotskyist, so I tend to be more sympathetic to the Trotskyist-descended left than the Maoist-descended left in the US. The WIL though I think is very Labourite and British, and is more interested in replicating what it sees as the golden days of its former tendency in the UK than actually building an independent workers movement with socialist politics, so I'd be interested to hear what your take on them is.
If it were somewhere between 2007-2010, I'd say it's worth joining the Socialist Party even if it isn't explicitly revolutionary because there's a growing revolutionary wing within it. That's not nearly the case anymore, because the right wing has stonewalled basically everything the left has put forward and refuses to engage in political discussion, that much of the left has just given up (some of whom formed Revolutionary Unity, as I mentioned.) My plan for the moment is to stick it out until the next convention in 2013, but I'm trying to make RU my main area of political activity at the moment, particularly building up a "CPGB-ist" trend within it.
Yeah, the CPGB is the only party out there that I agree with. I'm thinking of getting involved with the IMT (really Workers International League) since they have a branch where I live, but they have some views I don't agree with. Plus I'm not too crazy about Trotskyism. I've considered the SPUSA, but I just don't see the point in joining a non-revolutionary organization.
It's good to see another person in NJ who's interested in Kautsky and the CPGB. I'm actually going to Communist University next week, so I'll try to write up my experiences for folks here who may be interested.
I'm an increasingly disgruntled member of the SP-USA, and I'm also involved with a group called Revolutionary Unity, which is kind of a soft split from the former: http://www.revunity.org/
Thanks for the friend request. I'm in New Jersey as well. Are you involved with a political party here?
