Rather long article on Sawant by WP-US........

[socialist_n_TN]

http://www.workerspower.net/tasks-facing-socialists-after-the-election-of-sawant-and-12-members-of-the-independent-labor-party-of-ohio

[OutNow]

1. Oh really?

FWIW, I really liked the fighting spirit of the successful election campaign that led to Sawant's Seattle City Council race victory. I supported her campaign. I also know that it is much harder to be a part of the Seattle city government than it is to be a vocal critic of it.

So Worker's Power has laid out, in the article above, a warning to Sawant and the Socialist Alternative party that she belongs to. It's a "we'll be watching you to see if/when you really screw things up because we know you're not really a genuine revolutionary socialist group like we are".

So I looked around the Worker's Power web site to better understand the basis for their criticism. I am puzzled. There are no names of actual people involved in the group and no indications if they have 1 member or 10,000 members. There are no locations listed where they have chapters. Are they active in 1 city, 10, 100? In my 40 years of experience in left of center political activity I am skeptical of anonymous criticism of progressives and socialists.

[socialist_n_TN]

2. Look up League for a Fifth International......

That's the international group we are a section of.

And SAlt is subjectively Trotskyist, ergo they call themselves revolutionaries and not reformists because that's what Trotsky was. If they act like reformists, they need to drop the "Trotskyist" label and become left Democrats. Or Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists. THAT'S what this article is all about.

And if you perused the web site, then you would have found out what our politics are. We don't hide a REVOLUTIONARY socialist agenda under the guise of "socialist transformation".

[socialist_n_TN]

3. BTW.............

In all that vast "...experience in left of center political activity...", I'm surprised that you've never run across polemics. This was something of a mildly polemical article. WP-US also supported Sawant's campaign, but as with any truly Trotskyist organization, we reserved the right to be critical if called for. We merely pointed out some things we felt that folks should look out for as she, and by extension SAlt, governed.

We are not as prone to polemics as many groups and our polemics are not offered out of ego and are usually pretty mild. Some of these polemical battles have been fought for decades and in some cases, for over a century. One of the original battles was the one between reform and revolution. Lenin and Trotsky and the League agreed with the revolutionists in this battle, NOT the reformists. Because we consider SAlt a "centrist" organization (vacillating BETWEEN reform and revolution) in the way that Lenin and Trotsky understood the term, we felt that these differences should be spelled out explicitly.