mehr aus der Serie Trotzkistische Musik: Nicht nur die KPD/ML hatte Probleme mit Langhaarigen, wie dem unbedingt lesenswerten Artikel Cannonite Bohemians After World War II (als erweiterte pdf-Fassung hier) von Alan Wald in der aktuellen Against the Current zu entnehmen ist, gab es eine vergleichbare Herangehensweise in der trotzkistischen SWP, deren Mitglieder auf Grund ihres dezent-konservativen Outfits zuweilen auch heute noch mit Mormonen-Missionaren verwechselt werden:
„An example of the SWP’s earlier concern about the danger of alienating potential workers can be found in the 1940 book The History of American Trotskyism, which became required reading for members and sympathizers. In a noted passage, party leader James P. Cannon (1890-1974) describes how he opposed admission to the SWP of a long-haired man who walked around Greenwich Village with unusual clothes and a curious mustache: “I said, people of this type are not going to be suitable for approaching the ordinary American worker. They are going to mark our organization as something freakish, abnormal, exotic: something that has nothing to do with the normal life of the American worker.”
SWP members, like participants in most organized socialist groups, became known for a conservative appearance and a “clean-cut” look, reflected in the photographs of activists as well as cartoon drawings of the “working man” that appeared in its press. Yet as this essay will show, conventional behavior in one’s personal life, or in artistic and cultural affinities, was an entirely different matter.“
dennoch gelang es der SWP auch Persönlichkeiten der künstlerischen Avantgarde anzuziehen, der Artikel von Wald nennt hier Laura Slobe, Peter Rafael Bloch und George Perle, von letzterem einige Kompositionen:
Entdinglichung 