On top of everything else, Jack Barnes is boring

I'm afraid I'm writing this without consulting my notes on the event, so there are probably going to be a few slips here and there, but I'm confident about the basics. Yesterday I went to a big meeting with Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters of the Socialist Workers Party. As a mentioned a few posts back I decided to go partly out of morbid interest, and I got about what I expected.

There were about 300 people there, and I suspect that I was the only one there who wasn't an SWP member or fellow traveler, I certainly got that vibe in all of the conversations I had and from how Barnes was talking. It was pretty nearly a national mobilization; most of the people I talked to had come from the Midwest. CPUSA = Communist Party USA; ISO = International Socialist Organization; YS = Young Socialists, the youth of the SWP. The mean age was probably about 40 (in between what it would have been for the CPUSA and for the ISO); that is, mostly it would have been people who joined the SWP in the time since Barnes was solidly running the party. For that, it was a surprisingly subdued audience. The chair seemed to think that it was worth mentioning from the podium that one person had joined the YS at the march in Washington.

Incidentally, Waters is entirely unable to pronounce Hugo Chavez' name correctly; she pronounces it CHAY-vez. Does anyone have any idea where she could have picked that up? Mary-Alice Waters was mostly talking about a book launch - a new edition of the first two declarations of Havana - and really didn't say anything interesting besides an anecdote which, as far as I could tell, seemed to be implying that there is no cult of personality around Fidel in Cuba, but sounded to me like a Cuban version of Anthony offering a crown to Caesar.

Barnes was not nearly as engaging a speaker as I would have expected, but perhaps part of that was that he didn't have very good material to work with. Even so - say what you will about Ahmed Shawki (and I've said plenty), but at least he knows how to get people fired up.

The speech was in a fairly conventional form, with a first part about global perspectives, and a second part about a reorientation the SWP is making. Most of the global perspectives part was fairly commonplace, but he did not disappoint entirely in the inflatedness department. Apparently the appointment of General Petraeus is a big step towards Bonapartism in the US, he and the Democrats are taking Bush out of the loop, and Bonapartism is on the march around the world.

He did not say a single thing during his speech proper about the antiwar movement, and only mentioned the immigrants' rights movement tangentially. This probably has something to do with the perspective he was talking about in the second part.

The short version is that the SWP is making a big turn towards "study", centered around what he called an "unprecedented" effort to - wait for it - add indices and introductions to all of Pathfinder's back catalog. In passing he mentioned that no one should so much as reschedule a study group without permission from the Political Committee, and that people could be expelled for missing study groups.

In the discussion he did come around to the antiwar movement, and I can absolutely confirm that the SWP has not gotten even slightly less sectarian about the antiwar movement. Among other things he accused UFPJ of blatantly lying about the size of the protest over the weekend. He then followed that up with an almost incoherent rant about Noam Chomsky. The thought that Hugo Chavez complemented Chomsky when he could have quoted from the minutes of the Tricontinental Congress or god knows what seems to send Barnes into a rage.

It's always fun having one's prejudices confirmed, and I guess like everyone else there that's the main thing I got out of the event.