Why doesn´t Harry Ring count?

"The Socialist Workers Party: An obituary" is a short pamphlet published in 1984 by the Spartacist League, a small and frequently erratic left-wing group based in New York City. The pamphlet deals with a faction fight in the somewhat lager Socialist Workers Party, also based in New York.

The SWP's leader, Jack Barnes, had repudiated Trotskyism in favour of a more traditional Communist message. SWP members who opposed the new course were unceremoniously expelled. The Spartacist League, themselves the result of an earlier split in the SWP, feigns sympathy with one group of expellees (the FIC), while gloating over the fate of another (Nat Weinstein's group). The pamphlet even reprints (without permission) FIC-er George Breitman's appeal against the expulsions. As for Jack Barnes, the Spartacists compare him to both Joseph Stalin and Bernard Coard - the latter a particularly potent insult, since the SWP supported Maurice Bishop! Of course, the Spartacists are completely hypocritical, since they, too, purged dissidents on a semi-regular basis. And yes, somehow *that* particular observation seems redundant in the extreme...

The main article in this pamphlet is essentially a long-winding vituperation against poor Barnes, probably penned by James Robertson himself (the Spartacist leader). It does have a certain entertainment value. It even contains a Freudian slip, since Robertson refers to his organization as "ostensible Trotskyists". The second article contains the standard defence of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. On one point, however, the Spartacist League goes one step further than most other ostensible Trotskyists: they claim that Lenin was originally a "revolutionary Social Democrat" and became a Communist only in April 1917. (What was Trotsky before 1917, I wonder?) The third item in the pamphlet is the previously mentioned reprint of Breitman's appeal against the SWP expulsions (Breitman was a long-time veteran member of the SWP).

And yes, I'm reviewing this weird, nasty little pamphlet mostly to entertain myself. I don't support any of the groups mentioned in "The SWP: An obituary", but if forced to choose, I probably take my chances with Breitman and the FIC. (I still remember the MUR episode, Nat!)

Not sure how to rate this, but three stars seems reasonable.

One question remains, however, a question never answered by the obituary. Why doesn't Harry Ring count? LOL.