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conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Left Americana about History, I>A, U.S with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government.
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conversations.value: <div>the author, Professor of History at La Roche College, is author of <I>A Short History of the U.S. Working Class</I>; <I>Work and Struggle: Voices of U.S. Labor Radicalism</I>; and Choice Award winner <I>A Freedom Budget for All Americans</I>.</div>
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conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Left Americana
  How could something so good go so wrong? Looming large in both accounts is the figure of Jack Barnes. The rise of Barnes cannot be understood without reviewing some history about, and tracing some tensions within, the US Trotskyist "old guard." Evans gives considerable attention to such matters.
  Back in 1953, the semi-retired founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon—now living on the West Coast, surrounded by like-minded comrades there, and in touch with veteran comrades around the country—pressured the new national leadership of union veterans Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry into a brutal factional dispute with a significant layer of comrades, led by Bert Cochran. The Cochran group, favoring a dramatic curtailment of open SWP activities in the McCarthyite anti-Communist atmosphere generated by the Cold War, had aligned itself with the leadership of the Fourth International headed by Michel Pablo, who was calling for Trotskyists around the world to fold their banners in order to carry out a "deep entry" into Communist and social democratic movements and organizations. Cannon would have none of this, pressuring a reluctant Dobbs and Kerry onto a course of struggle and split. Working closely with Cannon in this effort were a dynamic husband and wife team, Murry Weiss and Myra Tanner Weiss. Once the integrity of the SWP was preserved, and particularly with Stalinism's crisis generated by the Khrushchev revelations of Stalin's crimes, the couple pushed forward (with apparent support from Cannon) in outward-reaching regroupment efforts among the Left. In the process, they developed a substantial influence among recently recruited younger comrades who were involved in forming a new youth group in the late 1950s, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA).
  Believing that they were the rightful leaders of the SWP, Dobbs and Kerry deeply resented Cannon's interventions and had a profound antipathy toward the "Weissites" (Murry, Myra, and anyone associated with them). But the Weissites were not the only forces involved in building up the YSA. Clusters of young comrades around Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson and new recruits Peter Camejo and Barry Sheppard were also helping lead the newly formed youth group. Dobbs and Kerry, seeking to "tighten up" the party regime, increasingly worked to sideline and marginalize the "Weissites"—and when Wohlforth and Robertson moved into increasingly vociferous opposition (around issues of the Cuban Revolution and the reunification of the Fourth International), they found themselves marginalized and finally expelled (with Wohlforth and Robertson going on to form, respectively, the Workers League, associated with Gerry Healy's Socialist Labor League in Britain, and the Spartacist League). This left Camejo and Sheppard (supporters of the SWP's Dobbs-Kerry leadership) to lead the YSA, but in the radical stirrings of the early 1960s new forces were increasingly drawn in. "The real standout was Jack Barnes, a Carleton College graduate who joined the YSA and SWP in Minneapolis," according to Camejo. "Jack helped recruit a group of very capable leaders into the YSA, including Carleton classmates Larry Seigle, Dan Styron, and Mary-Alice Waters; while at graduate school at Northwestern, Jack brought in brothers Joel and Jon Britton, Lew Jones, and several more from the Chicago area."
  By this time, Evans notes, "Jack's standing had risen enormously, from a branch leader in Chicago to the effective head of the party. Farrell Dobbs didn't hand over the post of national secretary until 1972 but it was already clear that Jack and his inner circle were the heirs of the generation of the 1930s. The handful of middle-generation recruits from the late forties and the 1950s, such as Fred Halstead, Dick Garza, Ed Shaw, and Bob Himmel, were subordinate." Yet there were disturbing early signs. An angry dissident from the Bloomington, Indiana, YSA told Evans and his then-wife Kipp Dawson about Barnes's heavy-handedness toward those differing with him, adding: "Jack Barnes is the Stalin of the SWP.... The older comrades are desperate for successors so they blind themselves to it but Barnes is building a machine just like Stalin did. He undermines anyone who isn't part of his clique and gets them out of the way. He doesn't want recruits who know anything, nobody who was ever in any other socialist organization. All he wants is empty vessels he can fill up with his picture of himself as another Lenin." Evans and Dawson decided to reserve judgment. By the late 1960s, Evans observed, "Barnes himself adapted publicly to the standards of conduct of the older generation of party leaders, tough but fair. Still, there were differences and warning signs in private. Unlike any of the older group, Jack routinely said vicious things about people to anyone who happened to be around, which I took as a technique to keep people in line as you knew he would pillory you out of your hearing if you displeased him."
  The national party leadership—in the minds of some of the new comrades—tended to be ranked in a particular way: "Joseph Hansen and George Breitman were theoreticians, the highest superlative, while Tom Kerry and Farrell Dobbs were at best politicians, able to carry out policy but not to formulate it. George Novack ranked lower still, an educator." All were in their sixties, more or less. There was the need for... a Barnes. Even the way he wielded his half-arm "was something of a defiant pose, saying to the world that he was unyielding and wouldn't concede an inch to a physical obstacle. He was the same in politics, hard, ruthless, and unyielding. That was what attracted us to him. The SWP as it existed at the 1963 convention seemed an impossibly weak instrument to rouse and mobilize the millions it would take to turn out the men of property who owned the country. Barnes meant to build a different kind of organization, as hard and mean as himself." Moreover, writes Evans:
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conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A majority of the youthful layer of US Trotskyists—although students and ex-students—were predominantly children of the blue-collar and white-collar working class. But they tended to see themselves, and to be seen, as "middle class" (especially since traditionally, before World War II, it was typically the children of "the upper and middle classes" who went to colleges and universities). Nor was there the broader labor-radical subculture that had existed from the 1860s to the 1940s. The actual working class and its consciousness had been evolving, since the 1950s, mostly without the benefit of such a subculture.
  Just as obviously, however, the realities of the 1960s and 1970s were qualitatively different. The SWP's reasonable self-conceptualization in 1938 could not make the same kind of sense in 1978. It was disconnected from the real world.
  If one was oblivious to how the realities of the past were qualitatively different from those of the present, as so many SWP members were, attempts to apply the old perspectives could be relevant only to the internal universe of a political sect, not to the actual lives of working people living and struggling in the larger society. It is within this framework that the decline of the Socialist Workers Party (as a Trotskyist organization) can best be understood. Within this context the previously discussed factors could assume decisive importance: rigidity in organizational and theoretical conceptions, limitations on critical thinking, growing intolerance toward oppositionists, the nurturing of an ingrown organizational subculture, the susceptibility of comrades to the development of cultism.
  Our present-day reality in 2012 is as different from the 1960s as that decade was from the 1930s. Capitalist globalization has been generating economic and cultural crises and radicalizing discontent, revolutionary ferment, occupations, insurgencies. The decomposed working classes have been recomposing in ways that give new relevance to revolutionary Marxism. A labor-radical subculture has also been in the process of recomposing. New possibilities are emerging. This reality provides the vital context that gives Barry Sheppard's contribution particular resonance. He himself explains it quite well:
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conversations.value: Give me the last two paragraphs.
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conversations.value: World War, First, xx, 2, 4, 9, 21, 31 59, 107; Second, xx, xxiv, 3, 25, 34, 100, 105, 126, 133, 156, 179, 180, 188–89, 214, 219, 221, 230–31, 250
  We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation.