Comment:
As to CAN, if not remission, then how about "a state of suspended
animation"? But I should point out that CAN has a website that is
very much alive
< http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379 >
The Bad Days Will End may indeed be councilist, but how do we know
unless the journal so describes itself? In fact, identifying
councilists and councilism is a major problem in non-market
socialist taxonomy. So far as I know there are no councilist
articles of faith, and so we can't use the Biblical injunction,
"By their works shall ye know them."
This is part of the problem I had with the Martin Glaberman
interview. With all due respect to Glaberman, unlike
councilists-as I understand them-- he was certainly an
organization man as his political progression testifies: from
social democratic Socialist Party (U.S.) to the Trotskyist U.S.
Socialist Workers Party and on through Trot organizational splits
described in the brief 1/3 page review in DB108. Nor was the
Johnson-Forest Tendency anything but Trotskyist when I was picking
up its journal Correspondence occasionally in Detroit in the
mid-fifties. One of the group's objectives, as I recall, was a
"workers' state." I think that where my review falls short is its
failure to emphasize sufficiently Glaberman's continued confidence
in our class and its revolutionary potential. In part I may have
been put off by what appears to be his continued support for the
UAW version of capitalist unionism.
- Frank Girard
