Socialist Scholars' Split Cancels Confab

NY Sun ^ | April 13, 2005 | JEREMY SMERD

[Monitor]

For 23 years, the Socialist Scholars Conference was a big tent under which leftist activists and academics took shelter in an increasingly conservative America. Last June, however, seven of the group's 16 board members resigned, "in protest of the lack of democratic and participatory governance procedures."

As a result of the split, the group's annual conference has been canceled, at least for this year. Meanwhile, the seven who quit the board quickly formed a new organization, the 2005 Left Forum, which has scheduled its debut conference for this weekend at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan.

The new group grew in large part out of a desire by dissidents to broaden the socialist conference's scope to include more activists. Though it preceded the November presidential election, observers said the split also reflects internal tension simmering within the broadly defined but fractured "left," which has not been able to respond en masse to the rightward shift in American politics in recent years. Specifically, the resignations were a referendum, those who handed them in said, on the Socialist Scholars Conference's ability to reflect the ideals of inclusion and consensus building that they had sought to foster in the world at large.

"We did not want to be part of an organization where we felt people were violating their own principles," a board member who resigned, Stanley Aronowitz, said. Mr. Aronowitz, who is a sociology professor at CUNY, also is a founder of the new forum.

[concerned about politics]

Socialist Scholars Conference

If they were truly intelligent people, they wouldn't be Socialists. Socialism always fails.
"By their fruits ye will know them."

This is more like a "Socialist Useful Idiots Conference."

[ClearCase_guy]

Historically, the collectivists have always been at each others' throats. The French Revolution is mostly a tale of collectivists fighting and killing other collectivists. Years later, we see that Marx was also always fighting with other collectivists.

Once Lenin seized power in Russia, there seemed to be a dominant colectivist ideology -- but not right away. The Left in Germany still fought amongst themselves for a few decades, until the National Socialist German Workers Party achieved dominance.

But then the German collectivists attacked the Russian collectivists. It was only after 1945, when the Soviet collectivists were the only real game in town that the Left seemed unified and ascendant. But that period is obviously over. The collectivists are once again fighting like junkyard dogs.

It is as it should be.

[longtermmemmory]

We can only hope this collapse is a model the democrats will soon be following.

[Tacis]

This is a point about these ultra-left wingers that I never understood; they obsess and disagree violently over trivial items of dogma. Of course, it is a weakness that we should exploit but seldom do. The lefties use and appreciate language far better than we. They spin things, assigned simple and loaded labels to cover complex issues and often mislabel things. We do win a few now and then. Switching "death tax" for "estate tax" is such an example.

But, here the splinter group is just as anti-America as the whole; they just feel some trivial detail is important.