[ "The Barnes group and the decline and fall of the Socialist Workers Party " ] An excellent lecture by SEP member Patrick Martin !

This video impresses me as fundamentally honest . I always share SEP videos and World World Socialist Website articles on my blog and Facebook page . But I do so as a permanently independent democratic socialist . I wonder how much " democratic centralism " is evident in David North's Socialist Equality Party . The true story of the moral and intellectual degeneration of the SWP is a tragedy in the history of socialism . But what stands out for me - and there is little explanation for it - is the SWP's now slobbering over Zionist APARTHEID Israel as righteous " refuge " for eternally persecuted Jews- invariably ZIONIST Jews. Thank you , Patrick Martin for this illuminating lecture ! [ For what it is worth , although a non-member of the SWP , I served as presidential elector here in Rhode Island for their Peter Camejo candidate . Again in 1980 with a woman named A . Gagne . It came clear to me, after 1980, everything that Patrick Martin is talking about in the video above. But I realized the degeneration of the Jack Barnes led Socialist Workers Party had been going on for a long time. And their Young Socialist Alliance was hopelessly attached to petty bourgeois college students . My working class close friend Ron Marshall was a high school drop out factory worker. We would attend YSA lectures on the Brown University campus circa 1970 . After lecturing us on Marx's labor theory of value, a college kid YSA member would drive away in his expensive jaguar and friend Ron would return to Providence jewelry factor early the next morning . Yes, HISTORY can be very ironic indeed ! Reply @ronruggieri9817 20 hours ago Some weird headlines in " The Militant " this week : "SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY NATIONAL COMMITTEE STATEMENT Defend Israel’s battle to prevent another Holocaust! US troops, bases and warships out of the Mideast! "] Editorial The fight against Jew-hatred crucial for workers’ struggles Vol. 90/No. 17 May 4, 2026 [ Assaults against Jews have spread worldwide since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel, underscoring the fact that Jew-hatred is an integral feature of the imperialist epoch we live in. ] If the vast majority of American Jews and Israeli Jews support ZIONISM , support American imperialism and Israeli Zionism together forever in crimes against humanity , then why be so neurotic sensitive over real or imagined INEVITABLE incidents of anti-Semitism ? If the majority of Jews in the world are smugly pro-capitalist , pro-American imperialist , pro Israeli Zionist , with ZERO working class consciousness , should they not be written off by SOCIALIST parties ? Are they not in effect CLASS enemies ? NOTE : Does not the Socialist Equality Party downplay the EVIL of Zionism as quite apart from American imperialism . A longtime independent democratic socialist myself I always describe the Trump White House as the " Neo-Nazi ZIONIST Jew New Regime of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and special guest star Benjamin Netanyahu . What can any honest Marxist socialist think when a while back the whole US Congress was slobbering over and giving him standing ovations the world proclaimed war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu of APARTHEID Israel ? How can any honest Left wing party talk about American imperialism as if it were alone running the bloody show in the Middle East ( with Israel as a " client state " ) ? Since Leon Trotsky has been dead ( assassinated ) since 1940 , he never experienced World War II ( only the beginning ) ; he never experienced the beginning of the atomic age , never experienced the collapse of the " degenerated workers state " ( ? ) that was the Soviet Union . So is Trotsky not rather fossilized as a guide to socialist revolution in the 21st century ? And since early in the 20th century where and when has any Marxist " vanguard party " experienced exponential growth ?