Talk:Proletarian Orientation Tendency

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It was the Communist Tendency (CT)--not the Leninist Tendency, and I, David Fender, was the CT delegate at the 1971 SWP convention. In the beginning I tried to work with the POT as a minority--in Boston--on the basis of agreeing with the POT's major platform--the tactical orientation to the working class--but I had political disagreements with the SWP on every issue many of which had been delineated in my documents that had been written for the previous two conventions and for which the POT leaders had previously expressed sympathy. Nevertheless, the POT leadership wanted to keep these differences under the rug in order to build and maintain as large a tendency as possible which amounted to building an unprincipled bloc--a potpourri of the most divergent political tendencies--and therefore, in order to save this unsavory political concoction they had to squash with arbitrary and organizational means all political discussion in the POT that might have scared off participants, and thus I was unceremoniously declared persona non grata. A group of younger critical comrades coalesced around me in the process which later became the core of the CT. The SWP leadership were not fooled, however, and they hounded the POT on where they stood on the political issues, finally driving the POT into a corner, and in order to hold the tendency together, they had to formally declare that they supported the SWP on all the crucial questions. The question thus arose: "Why a tendency?" The CT then wrote in one of its documents: "The formal declaration of the 'Proletarian Orientation' tendency, which states that the documents around which the tendency will be formed 'clearly suport the positions of the SWP on the developing mass movements,' reveals what we had feared since we first read their original document: that the tendency as a whole, and especially its self-created leadership, share the underlying assumptions which govern the policies of the party leadership. It has become clear from the subsequent documents, and the pre-convention discussion, as well as from their high-handed and elitist attitude towards political discussion, that the leaders and members of the tendency were only in a relative sense 'left' of the party leaders. Just as the party's positions can be characterized as right-centrist, slipping and sliding rapidly towards reformism, all the while quoting Trotsky, so can the politics of the 'Proletarian Orientation' tendency which either cannot or will not make a qualitative break with the revisionism dominant in our movement, be justly named left-centrist."~~David Fender

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