I appreciate that Joe Black wants to discuss the platform as a historical text, so I won’t bother him on that thread. There are a couple of questions I would like to ask about ‘Platformism’ today though.
First, and most importantly I would like to ask why people think that the ‘Platformist’ trend has developed to be a collection of groups which share a common position that is pro-trade union work, and soft on national liberation struggles.
As I remember from the Platform, which admittedly I read over twenty years ago, and didn’t see anything remarkable in at the time, there is very little in it about actual politics, and it seemed to concentrate on organisational issues. Why then have the ‘Platformist’ groups gravitated to wards these politics? Is it just a case of shared political evolution? I for one don’t see the impossibility of a ‘Platformist’ group holding a position intransigently against national liberation movements.
Also, just to clarify something on the WSM’s position on union reform, do they see that these demands(7.6.5a in particular) are real achievable objectives, or are they a type of ‘transitional demand’?
Devrim
Yes. There are a number of posters who are platformists who are "intrasigently [weird choice of word Dev, it makes the position sound 'unreasonable'] against national liberation movements."