[D66] 'The working class hates hippies, faggots and women’s libbers, and so do we!'

[A.O.]

http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no30/no30-GRPI-WSWS.html

Northites Inc.: Toeing the Bottom Line
Being Determines Consciousness

"For decades the IC has tended to cater to the backward consciousness of
the more privileged sections of the working class and to show little
interest in questions of special oppression. Those who insist on the
importance of Marxists addressing such questions are attacked for
“hating the working class” or being motivated by black-nationalist,
bourgeois-feminist or other alien class ideologies. Tim Wohlforth, while
still leader of the Workers League, spelled this out with his infamous
comment that “The working class hates hippies, faggots and women’s
libbers, and so do we!” While far less crude today, the WSWS coverage of
the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, for example, was
profoundly flawed by the tendency to ignore the blatant racism that
characterized capitalist officialdom’s response to the crisis."

The cadres who produce the WSWS can certainly not be faulted for their
work ethic—it is an impressive achievement for such a small group to
have sustained such a venture for so long. But the value of such a
project, from a revolutionary point of view, depends on the political
program it advances. The profound revisionism of the SEP on the social
revolutions that produced the Cuban and Chinese deformed workers’
states, its support to capitalist restorationists in the Soviet bloc,
its defeatist and reactionary position on the trade unions, its historic
tendency toward indifference to issues of special oppression and its
abandonment of the Bolshevik position of “revolutionary defeatism” in
imperialist wars, negates any value the WSWS might have as an instrument
for socialist propaganda.