A warning to small Marxist groups ( excerpt from an analysis of the degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party )

The “mean” – that is, the profile of the average small Marxist group – includes these features:

• A conviction that the small group, and it alone, represents the historic interests of the working class.
• A high ideological fence separating members from the ideas and discussions of the broader Marxist movement.
• A hostile relationship to other Marxist currents.
• A haughty attitude to social movements: the group’s interventions, when they occur, focus on self-promotion and recruitment.
• An internal discipline aimed not at fending off blows of the class enemy but at restricting discussion and keeping the members in line.
• A conservative approach to Marxist doctrine, aptly summarized by Marx in 1868: “The sect sees the justification for its existence and its ‘point of honour’ not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it.”

    
an essay by John Riddel ( July 8, 2012 )
           My socialist friends and I made these very same observations of the SWP -led by the eccentric cult leader Jack Barnes-in the early years of the Reagan Era. Only about 6 years ago I finally learned " whatever happened( before he died ) to that fiery and inspiring SWP leader Peter Camejo ? "  I still treasure Camejo's 1968 pamphlet : " How to make a revolution in the United States " .
           The belated criticism of the SWP-from former members- confirmed my self-confidence in my own political " intuition ".  Being drunk with ideology -and with an innate petty bourgeois arrogance- ruins even gifted " radical " leaders long before the " old age of youth " - age 40 . Lenin seemed to suggest that any " revolutionary " should self-retire by age 55. And Lenin himself died at age 53, I recall.
        I myself was never a political " organization man " ( not necessarily a virtue ). But today at age 68 I am just a radical " free thinker ". I mentally flirt even with Catholic metaphysics. Perhaps Aquinas did have some profound insight ?  Perhaps Plato ? ( But Marx absolutely got rotten capitalism right ! )  .
          One constant of my spiritual life I  owe to the reading of Albert Camus : a sense of the Absurd- in a universe with or without God.