Socialist Scholars Archive May 7, 1992 (from R. L. Norman) Bogdan:
In your unwillingness to be an asshole like [Max] Schactman, you've gone too far in the other direction. Ninty-five percent of the people around the DSA club are unwilling to take responsibility for anything more than occasionally showing up. Part of the problem is that most people most of the time take no responsibility for anything, anywhere. It seems to be the human condition. Yet compounding the situation, is the view of most club hangers-on, that there is no penalty for promising you to do something, whether or not they have the ability or intention of doing it and they get a great deal of positive feedback for making grandiose public promises. Most of the time it really doesn't make a rats ass either way. When Agustin suggested last fall that he would create a second conference after the SSC, I didn't think that he would do it, since most people in our meetings don't follow up on anything. Long ago I learned that. That is why I have developed the habit of doing myself those things which absolutely must be done for the organization to survive, especially the conference. So if he followed up and did a small meeting, well and good, if not, it didn't matter. When Wayne promised to call Dennis Rivera to speak, I didn't worry much. I figured that he wouldn't do it, since Wayne never does anything. I finally got through to Moe Foner and got Rivera to speak. Yet on several occasions, this slipshod method has cost us. The first problem was in the 1984 shift to BMCC. After your heart attack, I contacted all sorts of people, trying to find someone at the school who knew something. I wandered about the city a whole day trying to figure it out. Then our friend Jan Rosenberg was going to check on child care for the 1984 conference. She told me personally that it would be okay. Came the conference, it wasn't okay. She hadn't even contacted the miserable little creep who ran child care. Thus we ran a huge financial risk in doing our own child care… [ For years I needlessly blamed Jan R for something which was probably not her fault. Possibly Denitch may have casually mentioned the child care to her and then never followed up. It was his pattern of ‘leadership’ , but in the early 1980s, it was not clear to me.]
|