George Weissman's life remembered
1985Cliff Conner 1985-07Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 19 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 19
NEW YORK-More than 130 people gathered at the New York Marxist School on May 25 to pay tribute to veteran SWP leader and activist George Lavan Weissman.
The memorial meeting was organized by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (F.I.T.), which asked other organizations to send speakers and messages. Representatives of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and of the Socialist Workers Collective of Toronto addressed the gathering. I spoke on behalf of Socialist Action.
Other speakers included Seva Volkov (Leon Trotsky's grandson), the well-known Marxist scholar Annette Rubenstein, and George's stepson, Timothy Harding. Personal reminiscences were presented by George Saunders, Paul Siegel, and Augusta Trainor.
The most moving tribute, in my opinion, was by Mary Scully, who described George's uncommon ability to use his immense erudition to educate young socialists without patronizing them.
The only sour note of the evening was the absence of the Socialist Workers Party, the organization that George had help to found and had spent most of his life building. Although invited to participate, the SWP chose not to. Many SWP members who knew George well live in the New York area, but not a single one attended the meeting.
George Breitman, a representative of the F.I.T. and a friend of Weissman for 40 years, condemned the SWP leaders' boycott of the meeting as well as The Militant's hypocritical obituary of its former editor. According to The Militant, George Weissman "left" the SWP in 1984. In fact, he was undemocratically expelled from the SWP, along with scores of other loyal party members.
To say that he "left" the party, Breitman remarked, is like those newspaper reports of Black and labor activists who "fell" to their deaths from the upper stories of police buildings. It's a dishonest way to avoid saying whether they jumped or were pushed.
Breitman went on to say:
"The Militant's lie is all the more repugnant because it is so blatant, so easy to check and disprove. That is what the recent world congress of the Fourth International did in the month before George's death, when it received the appeals for reinstatement in the SWP by George and other members of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and