Blogging, Democracy and Revolution

I came across this well-written piece on the role of social media in social change, written by Jesse McLaren. I've often thought that the role of new media, social media etc etc has been under-theorized by Marxists. You tend to see stuff that goes in one of two directions: either an uncritical boosterism about social media as the motor of revolutions or completely dismissive and contemptuous. Jesse has a nice balance, pointing to the contradictions - the corporate dominance of the internet, on the one hand combined with the internet's ability to spread information rapidly; the fact that social media is nothing without the mobilization of actual people combined with the equally relevant fact that social media can provide a powerful mobilization tool, broadening and deepening activist networks, etc. As he concludes:

To make the most of social media we need to see it in context: as a communication tool that can magnify resistance movements, and whose online potential is related to its connections offline.

In all those senses it is a welcome tonic to the one-sidedness that has dominated most discussions I've come across. On the other hand I did feel like it missed some key points that were worth exploring. For instance, Jesse says the following about the mixed nature of ideas:

Social media doesn’t inherently “erode normal human relations” any more than it has magical powers. It simply reflects the ruling ideas, and as the German socialist Karl Marx argued: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” These ruling class ideas don’t completely dominate: most people have contradictory consciousness—and the experience of collective struggle can expose the contradiction and through the process people’s ideas can change.

But this isn't just that people accept living under capitalist relations and therefore the online ideas reflect that. It's like the film industry. It's not just that people like right wing action movies or celebrity-worshipping superhero blockbusters because they reinforce the experience that workers have every day. It is a much more active process: Hollywood will spend upwards of $100 million on marketing alone to get that $100 million superhero movie on the lips of everyone in North America, Europe and, increasingly, China. The same thing applies to the internet. Perform a search for any particular product or service you might want, or for an artist whose work you love. You will be met first and foremost by a series of "sponsored search results" courtesy of Google's adwords program. Those who pay more are more likely to end up at the top of search results.

Secondly, the internet fits into the web of media that provides global advertising and ideological coverage to reinforce the dominant players. Some of that $100 million blockbuster marketing budget goes into banner ads, sponsored twitter campaigns, Facebook campaigns, cross-platform marketing campaigns (including complementary video games, youtube videos with sponsored ranking and banner ads), pinterest campaigns. You name it, the big players have that social media covered.

Thirdly, the dominance of the big players also applies to news and the message that gets out about domestic and international events of any importance. I may write this blog on what happened in the Middle East this week or last but when you check the news in your Google search it won't be my blog that provides the top hit. Not to mention that while it's great to get news instantaneously, most news content is now written by a few large newswire services like Reuters. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Globe & Mail use the newswires for their stories, ensuring a nearly homogenous worldview is conveyed by the big media players.

Fourth, the internet seems to exist in the ether: I just type an e-mail and it ends up in your inbox, like magic. But it doesn't. It requires a lot of physical infrastructure to make it work and that infrastructure is easily monitored - as we've seen with Snowdon's revelations about the NSA's global data-mining of innocent people - and easily disrupted. During the Arab Spring governments regularly shut down the internet in their own countries. In Egypt, of course, they discovered that the revolution wasn't really on Twitter after all because even shutting down the internet didn't stop Egyptians from overthrowing Mubarak. Here in Canada, effectively all of the internet infrastructure to homes is owned by a few companies like Rogers and Bell. Even the smaller, "independent" ISPs rely upon renting infrastructure belonging to one of the big players.

All that said - and the above discussion could be deepened and expanded much further - the internet is overall a positive thing. Just like the printing press allowed capitalists to more efficiently produce propaganda to win support for, say, an unjust war - so too did the printing press allow the workers movement to organize and share ideas and experiences. The internet takes the printing press, makes it instantaneous and international. It allows us to perform research into, for instance, the historical economic data on the USA going back to the 19th century - without having to pay the outrageous sums demanded by university libraries if you aren't faculty or a student there. In Toronto recently, the internet met smartphone tech to demonstrate brilliantly that while there is increased surveillance (watching from above) there is also increased sousveillance (watching from below). When the cops shot and killed 18-year old Sammy Yatim, the sheer brutality of the response was known by tens of thousands within a few hours because people nearby filmed it on their cellphones and then uploaded it to YouTube. That helped to generate the response that brought thousands of protestors on the streets within 24-hours and put the police on the back foot.

But these points really only expand upon what Jesse wrote in his piece. The bigger absence, the elephant in the room if I may, is the lack of discussion of blogs and the blogosphere. Blogs basically fit into the overall discussion about the relationship of social media to progress, social change, freedom, etc. However, there is a significant debate in some socialist organizations - in particular, in the socialist Tendency of which Jesse is a part, the International Socialist Tendency - about the role that blogs can play in relationship to debates in the party, in the movements, etc. The general view has been that individual blogs are OK, if unimportant, when they comment on the broader world. But they are to be shunned as tools to further debate and clarity inside of socialist organizations. They are deemed "unaccountable", "elitist", "undemocratic", et al. because they are the preserve of unaccountable individuals, not to mention being subjected to the same sorts of selection pressures as discussed above (though a discussion about how items and blogs and videos go viral is in order, as it provides an exception to the rule of big money dominating the internet).

However, the flip side of this is that the internet can provide a means to encourage and spur spontaneous and horizontal engagement and activism. It may be chaotic and inconvenient but surely we want our members and activists debating with each other in each and every forum possible. This can lead to problems - like substituting internalized debate that isn't tested in practice in the outside world for the kinds of activism that can help clarify ideas. It can lead to expanding small differences into large ones. And, of course, anybody can write anything - a lie, etc. and might not have to fear suffering the consequences. But all these things apply to all forms or media and all forms of organization. Even without social media socialist and activist organizations were quite able to end up in unproductive infighting, with people making defamatory claims and counter-claims against each other. In the 1980s ACT-UP, an AIDS activist group that had some explosive growth as the AIDS crisis radicalized tens of thousands of LGBTQs, imploded a few years later as it turned inward. Similar things have happened to other movements in the last 30+ years. It happens. Avoiding debate is not the way to deal with it. Better is to build an organization of outward looking cadre with strong and clear politics, unafraid to grapple with debate and challenges because they are confident in their politics.

What's more blogs and other forms of social engagement - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et al - offer the opportunity for people who never get published to have their say. They don't have to have perfect grammar or a university degree. There is much less pressure to be perfect because the stakes are lower - there's no printing bill to pay, no need to organize distribution via physical shipping, etc. It allows for spontaneous and ad hoc groupings of radicals and activists to unite around a virtual publication, engage in debate and then, once the struggle has passed or the moment of crisis that generated the flurry, the publication can shut down. It can re-emerge later in a new form, with a new collective, etc. Counterposing formal structures of accountability to this kind of dynamic and fluid method for engagement is conservative and bureaucratic in its impetus. Of course our movements need structures but debates, crises, and upsurges don't wait for approved structures to emerge and take account of them. They emerge already in motion and our structures must adjust to meet them and engage with them. Structures and structural traditions can help to shape such insurgencies into accountable forums. And insurgencies are the lifeblood that make structures relevant and renewed.

Deflected Marxism: The Poison Of The Intelligentsia

I was thinking recently of an apocryphal story that was told to me many years ago as I sat in a dank basement drinking from a keg of beer. Apparently Lenin was listening to Beethoven with the Russian novelist Gorky and commented something along the lines: “ah, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. Sometimes they produce such beauty that one wants to reach out and pat them on the head. But you mustn’t, they must be beaten with a stick.” This also reminded me of Marx’s irreverence towards the German intellectuals, in particular the Young Hegelians, and his response to Bruno Bauer known as “A Critique of Critical Criticism” (or The Holy Family). What these recollections stirred in me was that true Marxism has at its root a disdain of the intelligentsia with their high falutin ways.

This has current relevance because the lack of working class radicalization and mobilization in the English-speaking world means that Marxism has largely become the preserve of academics. Marxism is no longer the ideology of the leading edge of the working class movement. On the one hand it is important that someone keeps alive the ideas of working class revolution and the powerful critical and theoretical tools of Marxism to analyze capitalism. On the other hand the dominance of intellectuals has a high cost.

I have seen over the years a number of arguments about how professors (and teachers) have become proletarianized, their control over their conditions of work eroded. There has been much discussion and analysis of how they face job instability and a curriculum, particularly amongst teachers in elementary and secondary education, that is more tightly controlled by the state. For sure neo-liberalism has eroded the conditions of work of teachers and professors. But, nonetheless, they continue to enjoy privileges and conditions of work that make them unique from other workers and this shapes both their consciousness and practice to the detriment of Marxism. I want to focus on professors here though a lot of this – other than ideological/theoretical production and its impact on consciousness – can also be said about teachers. The first thing that ought to be apparent is that teachers and professors are supervisors. They have a power over their students as the object of their work that is unique amongst workers. They develop a habit of speaking and being listened to, of disciplining others with deadlines, threats of punishment (even if they choose not to use that power), and grades that can determine the future success of their students. For most workers, their day-to-day work lives are about evading power, resisting discipline and even cheating the grading process. They have power over no one, except insofar as they bond together to resist their managers through implied or actual threats of strike action, workplace slowdowns, etc. To say that this doesn’t effect consciousness is to deny material reality.

It is true that the conditions of work of academics have been undermined with tenure becoming more difficult to attain as neoliberalism (and now with Massive Online Open Courses gaining popularity). But the irony of this increased competition for the privilege of a job for life is that it is likely to make academics more subservient to the more odious aspects of academic life, in particular the tendency towards splits over minutiae as well as the tendency to sycophancy towards those with tenure.

The tendency of Marxist organizations led by professors to split and fracture is a direct result of the fact that professors prove their merit at work by demonstrating the novelty of their ideas. You are expected to specialize to the point of spending your life exploring a niche discipline that is usually utterly obscure to the broader population. And you become successful insofar as you can generate some original idea that sets you apart from other academics. The easiest way to do this is not to use an existing methodology to more profoundly understand society so that the masses can more effectively win change. Rather, like the perpetual cycle of the fashion and consumer-products industry, you must come up with something unique – a fusion of this and that thinker, finding the fault in some elevated member of a canon or another professor who is respected in your own field. This leads to a pressure to seek out difference as an end in itself. Novelty sells books, gets you on panels at academic conferences and, ultimately, is how you get to be the head of your department, get tenure, junkets, sabbaticals, etc. For workers, being different and challenging the company’s methods gets you fired. In a similar vein, professors are rewarded for individual effort and work. If they can increase their output of books, papers and placement on prestigious academic panels, they are more likely to receive significant material rewards. For most workers, while some might be promoted to management, rewards accrue to the degree that workers can come together collectively to resist the discipline and conditions of the workplace. You want a raise – you go on strike or form a union. Professors want a raise – publish a book.

Professors have prestige. It may be more difficult to get a full appointment now than it was in the 1980s but the goal of every academic is that position in which people look to you for your ideas. Most workers have no illusion that doing their job well will get them listened to in anything more than the most cursory, tokenistic way (I remember well the suggestion box at Kodak Canada – you dropped in your ideas and never heard from them again). And, of course, it isn’t the sessional professors with unstable employment who, by and large, provide the modern ideological development of Marxism – it is the tenured professors with prestige and job stability.

And those professors have far more free time than do workers. Teachers get two months off every summer and professors get upwards of four months with a year off out of every five to pursue their field and publish a book. Most workers get two to three weeks off if they’re lucky. That has an impact, combined with the pressure to differentiate, in allowing academics to play a destructive role. Literally, they have more time to muck about.

Of course, I’m not the first person to notice this pattern. Besides Lenin, assuming the apocryphal story is true, Tony Cliff also wrote about the role of the intelligentsia in the context of third world revolutions as a critique and updating of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. This relatively recent article described Cliff’s argument about the intelligentsia as follows:

“The desire of this group is always to rise above society. These tendencies can be checked when the intelligentsia are involved in mass politics, but when they are free of the constraints and discipline of a wider movement, ‘they show clearer and much more extreme tendencies towards elitism, arbitrariness, as towards vacillation and splits’.”

As this quote suggests, it is not to say that professors (and teachers) can’t be useful participants and even leaders in the socialist movement. They have the luxury of developing ideas and analysis, with access to research assistants and other forms of resources, which are out of reach for the vast majority of workers. But their habits of domination and elitism, deriving from their day-to-day practice are a strong pull and leads them towards practices that are destructive to the socialist movement. They must be held to account in a profoundly sharp way. Like union officials – and the reality is that the most activist-inclined leftist or Marxist professors have a relationship to the workers movement that is mediated through the union bureaucracy – they are prone to high-handed methods and unused to democratic accountability. Challenge your professor and you’re likely to get a failing grade.

Insofar as they are allowed to hold offices of responsibility in the socialist movement they must be disciplined by the workers and not the other way around. Their habits of unquestioned authority from students who are desperate for good marks, especially grad students who hope to be the next in line for these positions, must be constantly challenged. The only real way to challenge the bad habits of intellectuals – the tendency to splitting over personal slights elevated to the level of theory, to authoritarianism and command rule, etc. – is a mobilized and confident working class with an organized leadership of worker-intellectuals, whose authority comes not from social power but from the respect of leading collective struggles. I’m often reminded of a story told to me by a postal worker militant who reminisced about my grandfather, also a militant. In the 1970s, when the postal workers were a powerful and leading edge of the Canadian working class, wildcat strikes were a regular occurrence. They would keep their bosses in line by having one of them pick a fight with a supervisor and when the supervisor lost their temper and disciplined them, the whole workplace would walk out (and go sit on a patio and drink beer). Workers who will risk their jobs to challenge people who have real social power over them will also challenge the pretensions of professors who want to provide ideological leadership to the movement.

And that brings us to the problem of today: the working class is not confident and mobilized. There are no significant rank-and-file movements in the English-speaking world, outside of a few pockets. The passivity of the working class has left Marxism to be the preserve of a few workers, students and academics, which gives the academics greater weight inside of Marxist organizations. That leads those organizations to becoming sclerotic and bureaucratized, to become inculcated in habits of deference and prestige mongering, where the brilliance of this or that individual is valued over the collective experience of the worker-members. And, of course, where individual “brilliance” and “achievement” become more highly valued, these traits tend to accrue to those from higher social classes, who have the confidence to dominate through wit and rhetoric. It isn’t an accident that few people from working class backgrounds become professors and where they do it usually is the result of “fitting in” to the predominant modes of advancement and recognition. From being the servants of the workers’ movement, giving it ideological strength and depth, they become more like a form of gout, weakening and hobbling the movement further, causing splits, acrimony and cliqueism (after all, in academia, currying favour, aka brown-nosing, is the next best thing to splitting hairs when it comes to winning personal advancement).

A quick survey of most Marxist organizations in the western world will illustrate this point. Until the working class begins to move in a serious way the tyranny of the intelligentsia will continue to make Marxism a form of career advancing rhetoric that lacks the kind of life that is necessary if it is to be a vital movement. Like my previous discussion of revolutionary bureaucracy, the lack of struggle can only lead to the dead hand of orthodoxy and cliqueism. To be a vital and revolutionary ideology, Marxism will have to smash the domination of what Lenin called the “committee men” and academics, whose experience tends to lead them towards a natural alliance. They will have to fear and revere the working class more than the dean of their department, the heads of the academic publishing houses or, indeed, the full-time leadership of revolutionary organizations.

Is The SWP A Dead Duck: Part 2

It isn’t only in the nations, like the former USSR, that bureaucracy can use its control of wealth and power to defeat grassroots challengers. What happened with the rise of Stalinism was an historically profound human tragedy. But the process of bureaucracy developing independence from its original base can occur on a much smaller scale and this holds lessons for revolutionaries grappling with events in the SWP.

In the case of the US-SWP it is likely that the material wealth of the party machine – benefiting from copyrights on Trotsky’s works, the bequeathments of generations of members, et al - made the correction of political errors more or less impossible as the leadership could simply dispense with the membership without harming their own material position. I’ve seen some claim that the British SWP is in a similar position with ample resources to survive without the membership. I’ve not done a forensic audit of the party’s finances but certainly it was the case a number of years ago that the party had to sell off its printing press in order to cover debts (at least that was the claim at the time and I haven’t seen any argument that counters that). And while the apparatus of full-timers has been estimated by Soviet Goon Boy at 3-5 percent of the membership this is nothing compared to the 20 percent of the US-SWP membership who were fulltimers. That isn’t to underestimate the impact of the apparatus but to keep it in perspective.

Nonetheless, while the impact of the SWP (UK) apparatus has clearly had an impact on the democratic functioning of the party, it is important to keep in mind that the question of bureaucracy and democracy must also be understood culturally. That is, we can’t simply reduce the victory of bureaucracy to an accounting problem and once a certain threshold has been crossed a party is lost to its original cause. This cuts both ways, of course. The prolonged practice of substitutionism in the SWP, just as in a trade union, has not only affected the consciousness of the party machine and the leadership. A significant portion of the membership also comes to view the machine as the party and seeks to protect it, sometimes to the exclusion of principle as in the present crisis. However, the culture and politics of an organization can also provide energy and a cadre who can resist bureaucratism even when that bureaucracy can in theory dispense materially with the troublesome membership. That is, it can set at least a temporary limit to how far the bureaucracy itself is willing to go. For instance, the CC of the SWP may be able to sustain the present machinery for years or decades with a much-reduced membership. But it may not yet have become conscious of this fact and to have internalized it as an acceptable “sacrifice” to “save the party.” Like the US-SWP it may well end up in this position but it requires a contested, crisis-ridden process of pushing the boundaries, finding new levels of acceptable “sacrifices” even after the material conditions have been met to survive without the bulk of the members.

In terms of the members a similar process of erratic and partial consciousness can also develop. It is indubitable that while the Rees-German leadership of the party were delivering real results in the outside world, the bulk of the cadre of the party were willing to accept “excesses” and arrogance from the leadership and their fulltime apparatus. But as the party has entered into a series of crises (four splits in five years) this has undermined the prestige of the leadership and its methods, step by step through, to use Trotsky’s formula, a series of progressive approximations. With the formation of the In Defense Of Our Party Faction we see that a significant portion of the cadre and membership of the organization, perhaps approaching a majority, have matured a much more thoroughgoing critique of the methods of the leadership. Given a certain level of confidence by the membership and a crisis of confidence within the leadership this can lead to the defeat of the bureaucracy even when it could theoretically have dispensed with a large portion of the members.

That reason alone explains why it is a tragedy that the comrades around the so-called Sino-Seymourite axis, aka the Democratic Renewal Platform (DRP), have split from the party. While I don’t agree with all their formulations, it was their courage to stand up in the face of a bureaucratic onslaught of lies and calumny that pushed the mainstream of the party into revolt. Their departure – engineered by the CC and the apparatus with the utmost vigour, including open threats and dark whispers about MI5 agents and more – likely weakened, at least temporarily, the struggle against the party bureaucracy. Their departure is, of course, understandable and I don’t wish to malign the comrades for feeling that the space inside the party had closed but I respectfully disagree. It is worth noting that the departure of comrades in other parts of the Tendency deserves less sympathy. There was the resignation of the Serbian section, on the one hand, which seemed like it was a long time coming and just needed this crisis as an excuse. And I have today seen a resignation letter from a handful of IS Canada members that is both similar to the Serbians in using the present crisis as an excuse to leave, as well as being unimpressive for other reasons. For one, they made only one attempt to win the membership to their perspective at the recent convention when most would have heard about the whole farrago for the very first time. Having made that half-hearted attempt, they then didn’t try to continue the argument even though the IS made no move to silence them through either formal or informal channels (Paul K’s critique on his personal blog was linked to in the Internal Bulletin, for instance). This isn’t the action of a principled opposition but rather a clique with contempt for the rest of the membership who aren’t part of their in-group. If my view contains a certain level of vitriol it is because, unlike the DRP, they never demonstrated a concern to fight to win a better IST and have carelessly damaged the struggle to achieve that goal for their own personal prestige.* Ironically, part of the problem with bureaucracy is that its increasingly narrow membership leads it to clique methods – making decisions without consulting the membership and only valuing the opinions of the in-group. Not a good omen in a group who want to form a more accountable alternative to the present set-up.

But I digress.

Tragedy or not, the DRP have left the building with obvious justification. However, there are still hundreds of SWP members who remain committed to the party and who have now been awoken to the need to challenge the present operation of the party machinery and its leadership. The leadership may have won a rigged conference and wound up the loyalist members – who will, in the majority, be members who are good socialists, activists and trade unionists but who accepted the leadership’s claims that the party was under threat – but they can’t be in the branches and fractions and coalitions week in and week out. In Glasgow somewhere around 40 percent of members at the aggregate voted for the faction, for instance. Even the party fulltimers can’t be everywhere all the time, nor will they all even be utterly loyalist or impervious to influence. Many will have simply kept their heads down in fear of their jobs – having seen the employment shake-up at head office. And the loyalists and factionists will have to face each other in the light of day, outside of the manufactured crisis (as opposed to the real one) and together grapple with the problems of building the struggle and the party after this latest debacle. Between now and the next conference is a long time in which lies and distortions can be unwound by calm argument and the failings of the leadership can be exposed by their own illogic. But even without a continuing molecular degeneration of the culture of hand-raising and auto-support for the CC, the already-awakened members, including cadre with decades of experience and prestige within the party and movements, will be less likely to accept future claims by the leadership without question. The CC may have won a rigged conference but it will now have to deliver before the open eyes of the membership.

Does this mean that this crisis presages a renaissance in the SWP and its internal democratic culture. Not at all. If anything the dice are probably stacked against such an outcome – barring a major explosion of struggle in Britain (and even then…). But it does mean that the parrot still has life and could for some time – and I don’t mean the zombie life of the US-SWP. The fight for democracy and against bureaucracy isn’t a one-off. One doesn’t undo a process that has developed practices, ideological justifications and structures over an entire generation (it’s worth noting that nobody ever expected that it would take so long – the Bolsheviks, after all, only existed for less than 15 years before they led a revolution, the SWP has been around for, what, 40 years?). What has changed is that the process is unlikely to continue to be as one-sided as it has in the past. And future splits, where victory isn’t possible, are likely to be more conscious than past ones where the apparats of yesteryear repudiate nothing and only bemoan their own maltreatment, perhaps with a veneer of self-serving political differentiation, like some pathetic repetition of the Lovestoneites (for all you sectarian geeks). The future has yet to be written.

But what will be required to revitalize the SWP as a vital, revolutionary organization? It may be a cop-out but I’m not really in a position to make that judgment, nor is there one road, in my opinion. But, since I’ve come this far I might as well stick my nose in and offer my own thoughts on what a democratic renewal process might look like. I think, as I’ve stated before, that the tradition of electing the CC by slate in order to provide stability has been demonstrated to be ineffective and obsolete. A little constructive instability in the leadership, as a result of democratic pressure, is in order. Likely the fulltime apparatus ought to be examined seriously by a committee of lay members and a (substantially) new leadership with an eye to pruning it back, devolving more responsibility on the membership, etc. Those organizers who remain in districts ought to be elected from the membership themselves (hell, if a labour lawyer friend of mine could be elected by a council of shop floor leaders at the union where he works, including voting on his salary, surely a revolutionary party can democratically elect their organizers). This will reverse some of the one-way pressure from above and help to empower the members. It’s clear that there also needs to be measures put in place to involve the membership in more detailed strategic and tactical discussions, rather than simply rubber-stamping extremely general and platitudinous “perspectives” that allow the leadership a totally free hand to set up new national united fronts – even where these are out of synch with what is needed. Bringing in membership input might have helped to overcome, for instance, the existence of multiple, nearly indistinguishable, national anti-austerity coalitions. It almost certainly would have prevented the Respect debacle. And it will shatter the model of secrecy – keeping the membership in the dark as to debates amongst the official leadership. Speaking of secrecy, it ought to be obvious that the party needs to come to grips with the interweb. Paranoia and bureaucratic clampdowns just won’t cut it when someone can record conference discussions with a smartphone and post the minutes a few hours later. It won’t be long until someone live-streams the conference with a looxcie camera clipped to their hat. Better that the party drive forward the power of information dissemination than retreating inwards as though you can resist horseless carriages, I mean, the internet. There are other ideas that come to mind – and many that I haven’t considered – but those are some of the larger ones. Were I an optimist I’d suggest that from this disaster something better might be born. It so happens that I’m not an optimist but I’m not such a curmudgeon that I don’t think it’s possible. The next couple of years will tell which way things go, I hope the comrades who remain in the party have the courage for the long haul.

*Mea culpa: I recently left the IS though I haven’t published a “resignation letter” and I am not counseling members to resign or to set up another tiny socialist sect or to wreck the organization I left behind. If that makes me a dilettante, I accept that. This series has been the contribution I am able/willing to make given my current life priorities. C’est la vie. You may now return to your regularly scheduled faction fight. :)