We must continue the fight on their behalves, as well as ours.

Camejo, in fact, spent some 25 years inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) ...

Camejo ... joined the SWP when it was breaking with Trotskyism. He solidarized himself with the tendency within the Trotskyist movement known as Pabloism. In 1953, as a sympathizing section of the Fourth International, the SWP had broken with the tendency, led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which rejected the fight to build an independent revolutionary party based on the working class and instead adapted itself opportunistically to the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its satellite "Communist" parties, as well as to the social democratic parties and the bourgeois nationalist leaderships in the former colonial and economically backward countries of the so-called Third World. The SWP played a critical role in the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which upheld the international socialist program and Marxist principles of the movement founded by Trotsky.

By the early 1960s, however, the SWP was moving toward an unprincipled reunification with the Pablo/Mandel group. Camejo, who had just joined the party, rose to prominence within the organization as it embraced Castroism, student power and protest politics, black nationalism, feminism and other forms of identity politics. By the time he ran as the SWP's presidential candidate, the party had abandoned any struggle for the political independence of the working class and joined the middle-class radical milieu on the fringes of the Democratic Party.

Camejo's current role was thus prepared by his tenure in the SWP and reflects the political degeneration of that party, as well as a broader layer of ex-radicals who have discovered the virtues and rewards of "working within the system."

By the early 1980s Camejo was ready to move on, dropping his earlier socialist pretensions. He became a stockbroker, founding Progressive Asset Management and presiding over the growth of this firm, which is dedicated to "socially responsible investing" and today manages nearly $1 billion in investments.

I look at them as the keeper of the flame.  It takes courage to fight for your principles within the belly of the beast.