From Worker's Power- a followup on Seattle and SALT........

[socialist_n_TN]

http://www.workerspower.net/lessons-of-seattle-15-an-hour-and-socialist-alterantive

I wrote the basic draft, another comrade organized and added to, and a third did the final edits. A rather torturous editing process to be sure , but we usually come up with some good analyses.

[Odin2005]

1. The success they are having in Seattle is what convinced me to join SA.

[socialist_n_TN]

2. That's generally true. But the thing about leadership is that you have to lead........

Which means analyzing a situation, setting a strategy, then finding tactics that support the winning of that strategic goal. Now, you don't necessarily have to actually WIN that strategic goal, but you must put it out there. Just from looking at the Seattle situation, it appeared to us that SALT confused strategy with tactics and made the minimum goal (a reformist demand for a higher minimum wage) into the strategic goal. Further they seemed to be unprepared for the capitalist push back against this entirely reasonable minimum goal. It's like they stopped preparing to win the demand at the election of Sawant and the ensuing rise in SALT popularity and the popularity of the proposal itself.

As we stated in the article, this doesn't mean that we expected a socialist revolution out of SALT in Seattle considering the circumstances of class consciousness and class struggle even in a left leaning locale like Seattle. It just means that more needed to be done to prepare their supporters for what was to come. One of the definitions of leadership is this preparation for future struggles. The economic demands of Trotsky's Transitional Program SHOULD have been used to show what a true socialist vision for a transition to a worker's state looked like. And SALT set itself up for critique when it took the mantle of leadership in Seattle.

Many people, and not just in the far Left, have asked the question of SALT's positions in these elections and the positions that they take on issues as to "What is 'socialist' about SALT's positions? How is it different from any left Democratic Party position?". The answer to this question is that the demands are NOT "socialist", they are merely left reformist. As a group that's claiming the mantle of leadership of socialism in the USA, there is much more required than merely fighting for left reformist demands that any left Democrat could support. Even if you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of it actually happening, you still must put actual socialist goals and tactics in front of the working class to prepare them for future struggles. Not doing this runs the risk of causing people to think that "socialism" has failed when it's actually reformism that has failed.

[ctsnowman]

3. K & R

Thanks for your work.

[daleanime]

4. bookmarked