Dear Robert: Great to hear from you. Yes many of the Toronto people involved in the Toronto Branch Working Group became members of Tendency Z but the Tendency also included members in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal and other places and they were different political formations. The way the turn to industry was applied seemed designed to drive us our of the organization and Tendency Z was denounced by supporters of the ‘industrial turn’ as “petite-bourgeois life-stylists” and the gay/lesbian movements were marginalized as “peripheral” and “lacking in social weight.”

In solidarity,

Gary Kinsman

Tendency Z emerged out of the Toronto Branch Working Group. I had great respect for Gary Kinsman. He and his comrades were doing very good work. They did practical things like work with real people around real issues, in the street, so to speak. Though they were no slouches at the theory end of matters. The Turn to Industry was designed to make the RWL an unwelcome place for them. It worked. Sadly

Thanks for this. My recollections as a member of the YS and then the RMG and the RWL is rather different. I was a member of Tendency Z in the RWL which fought for the integration of lesbian/gay liberation into the organization. When it was clear the RWL was refusing to discuss our position a number of us left the RWL on March 8, 1980. There are some documents relating to this on the Left History site linked to an interview Deborah Brock did with me called “Workers of the World Caress.” One piece of writing I have done that relates to some of this on the lesbian/gay liberation questions and the fusion. Please see Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers, National Security as Sexual Regulation, UBC Press, 2010, pp. 280-286.

In solidarity,

Gary Kinsman

The decisive factor was the situation in the International.

At the time, it seemed clear that the minority aligned with Mandel, Krivine, etc. in Europe – that is, the RCT who were in agreement with the United Secretariat majority — were convinced that a split in the International was imminent and unavoidable, and were acting to position themselves for recognition as the new Canadian section.

What was the thinking in that minority? It would be helpful to hear something from one of its leaders. I am not aware of any participant’s account of the RMG experience by a participant.

What was needed to turn that situation around in 1973 was a united intervention at the convention by a United Secretariat delegation including the SWP and an authoritative comrade from Europe. I still think that could have forestalled the split.

I do take issue with your recollections vis a vis the SWP leadership interventions. In the period leading up to the original split which really occurred at the 1973 convention in Toronto, the work of Joe Hansen was visably evident ; stopping the convention and then unilaterally declaring the opposition RCT a faction. The hand of Mandel and Maitan, while less obvious, were there as well.

There is an element to the whole process which I believe needs emphasis, and that is the political immaturity of most of the leaderships of the unifying groups. We were young, without the stabilizing hands of experienced leaders interested in an authentic process of reunification based on the overall political context of the existing class struggle and the changing demographics of the membership cadre, moving from students to workplaces based on their chosen career paths, not an artificial implantation cocooned in the slogan of becoming Worker-Bolsheviks.”

The above comment was originally posted on FB and as befits the media, was by necessity overly short and synthetic. To explicate further:

1. The notion of political immaturity is not a personal reflection on any individual short coming, but an analysis of a very complex process involving hundreds of people which had never been faced by either of the leaderships of the LSA/LSO/YS (which I had been an organizer for) or the RMG/GMR (of which I became a member). It is precisely in a process like this that the greatest care needed to be taken to make all cadre feel “at home” so to speak.

The experienced hands(George Novak and Ernest Mandel) failed us in this process, not because of any inability (at least theoretically) to do so, but because of the over determining dynamics of the international factional situation on the one hand, and the internal dynamics underway within the SWP, as John points out.

2. The international factional situation was a symptom of a much deeper problem: the failure of the United Secretariate to build a truly functioning international leadership because of the eclectic and empericist theoretical functioning on the part of its best known leaders; Mandel, Maitan, Krivine; Rousett et al. The zigs-zags of line which led to s series of splits in 1953 and 1973 were never examined for the underlying methodollogical problems, and this was reflected to the way in which the Pablo-Mandel leadership organized the splits in national sections (in the French section in 1953 and in the Canadian section -and others- in 1973.) In essence, it produced weak political leaders who were unable to rise above their factional concerns, or to oppose the SWP’s proposal for an “international turn to industry”, or to confront the Barnes creeping coup within the SWP. Their factional manuverings had poisioned their reputations too badly to do so.

I also appreciate your linking today’s Socialist Action with the legacy of the LSA/LSO. Some of us are now the greybeards who will be dealing with the process of building a revolutionary workers international with the PTS (Socialist Workers Party) of Argentina and its co-thinkers in Latin America and Europe, as well as strengthening ties to the organizations adhering to the Platform for a Revolutionary International. That will be the test of our political maturity.