On leftist parties.

• Author: Glick, Ted
• Position: Workers World Party

There's been a fair amount of discussion recently on several email lists I'm on regarding Workers World Party. WWP is the group without which there would be no International ANSWER, the coalition which organized the hugely successful January 18 peace demonstrations in Washington, DC and San Francisco.

Some people whom I respect have no use for WWP. One such person described them, to paraphrase, as an "ultra-left, sectarian, marginal group." Others are critical of them for their unwillingness to be publicly critical of the Soviet Union, China, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, North Korea, Hamas or just about any country or Third World leader or movement in opposition to the United States government.

Up until last year. I had very few direct dealings with WWP since a very negative experience working with them in a coalition that organized a major national demonstration in DC in the spring of 1981. I was not unhappy that for over 20 years our paths rarely crossed, except for an occasional contact at a meeting or a demonstration.

The interactions last year were in connection with the April 20 demonstration in Washington, DC. There was a lot of "deja vu-ness" to the experience, harkening back to the spring of 1981. Among the problems coming from ANSWER:

* publicly announcing to the world via email a "unity agreement" between ANSWER and the coalition I was part of, the April 20 United We March Mobilization (A2OUWMM), when there wasn't one, in no way at all, totally short-circuiting and undercutting a process of discussion that was just beginning;

* disregarding a decision that was agreed to, once an overall unity agreement was finally reached, that the youth-student groups from within both the A2OUWMM and ANSWER would head up a unified march down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead of ANSWER youth and students at the front of their side of the march, Palestinians and Arabs were at the front. Most likely, since there had been agreement to prioritize the Palestinian issue given what was happening at the time on the West Bank, if ANSWER had proposed this it would have been agreed to in the negotiations in the last week leading up to the march, but they didn't do so.

* disregarding decisions that had been painstakingly arrived at regarding the speakers at the joint rally held in front of the Capitol. The Palestinian woman proposed by ANSWER who had been agreed to as a co-chair brought to the microphone speakers who had not been agreed to, one of whom said...