Dave Riley's Comments

Dialectical Materialism

2011-01-01T17:10:00.000-08:00

Dave Riley December 29, 2010 at 3:32pm

Dialectical materialism is Marxist philosophy which Marx and Engels developed by extending Hegel's dialectics.It's all about matter and motion which Marx later applied to understanding history but that was one branch of what was essentially a method of science.Engels explored it in regard to physics and biology in his work, "Dialectics of Nature" and in effect Dialectical Materialism is a holistic rather than reductionist method of understanding causation and how things relate to one another. So it is the science of relationships between things rather than just considering things as separate and self contained driven by singular elements.

In fact, as I recall, the term 'ecology' was invented by a Marxist so schooled but there has been a rich school of Diamat in biology and also in psychology (which interests me)-- such as with Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria (the mentor of Oliver Sachs) ..as in sociology and anthropology , etc.

In medicine and physiology it of course is very cogent in regard to neurology, and the marriage between pathology and lifestyle; poverty and disease. (eg: see Mike Davis, "The Monster at the Door" about bird flu)

I history there is a swag of historians who have been historical materialists. And Marx embraced Darwins work as an example of dialectical materialism-- and later lenin saw Einstein has similarly enriching the science of dialectical materialism.

Primarily it is materialist rather than idealist -- in that change, history and such are features of the real identifiable concrete world rather than what may be considered not part of everyday reality -- such as emanating from gods and ideas or will.

So I like to refer to myself as a dialectical materialist rather than a Marxist because I think there is but one science which can be applied across the board. In the work of John Bellamy Foster there is an attempt to explain how much of what Marx wrote was a true ecology rather than simply an economistic comprehension of capitalism.

My favorite quote in regard to the method is this from Luria:
http://leftclickblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/romantic-science.html
LURIA:I have always admired Lenin's observation that a glass, as an object of science, can be understood only when it is viewed from many perspectives. With respect to the material of which it is made, it becomes an object of physics; with respect to its value, an object of economics; and with respect to its form, an object of aesthetics. The more we single out important relations during our description, the closer we come to the essence of the object, to an understanding of its qualities and the rules of its existence. And the more we preserve the whole wealth of its qualities, the closer we come to the inner laws that determine its existence. It was this perspective which led Karl Marx to describe the process of scientific description with the strange-sounding expression, “ascending to the concrete.”

In philosophy historically there has been a ongoing war between materialsim and idealism that goes back to the Ancient greeks.Hegel, for instance, was an idealist philosophy with some very strange religious notions but who explored the dialectical method which is similar in impulse to the i ching: ie: change is constant and relentless. As one jingle goes (from 'Dialectics the Musical'):"everything changes bit by bit; until you get the opposite."

I consider diamat in regard to brain plasticity here:
http://leftclickblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/brainthe-power-of-plasticity.html

and here I review Lewontin on genetics:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/6765

LeftClick : Dave Riley [Politics]: Romantic Science

leftclickblog.blogspot.com

December 29, 2010 at 8:25pm Right I have a clue- thanks for that very comprehensive explanation and links. :)

Dave Riley December 29, 2010 at 9:32pm

Comprehensive? Merely scratching the surface. It aint an easy access except of course if you actually look at the world of everything around you and try to understand how it came into being and what causes it to change. That's a different approach from abstracting a theory and imposing it as a template on the world.It's also about humility -- of recognising that nothing can be ruled upon as set because it is so tenuous and en route to becoming something else.

December 30, 2010 at 12:24ammm I`m no ideologue; more an instinctive Lefty :)Nonetheless it`s interesting and useful in informing pragmatic politics, perhaps ?

Dave Riley December 30, 2010 at 1:24am

As the rule book says -- or should say : "grey is every theory but ever green is the tree of life." Ideology can be a handicap a lot of the time.Look at the far left and its preference often for dogma and shibboleths. But I appreciate the whole dialectical materialism thing -- not because it is a set POV but because it is a method of exploring the world around me. A habit, I'd hope. A 'way of seeing.' So its not so much about being 'left' but of considering how things relate . Look at global warming. In can only be comprehended as a holistic, dialectical relationship of material things/events relating over and over with one another, altering one another in strong synergy. You don't have to be 'left' to comprehend it but the question of then what? -- what do you do about it?-- becomes a bit of an imperative. So you have to look at carbon and how that chain relates to any number of physical changes that are constantly happening. These are of course natural phenomena. But surprize surprize we cannot separate the future course of these supposed natural phenomena -- melting ice caps, ocean rise, current changes, etc -- from the social and economic conditions that we are all part of. AND we have to change those BEFORE we can impact on the other. Thats' not ideological but common sense -- and that in fact is the logic of dialectical materialism . We cannot comprehend whats' happening or decide what needs to be done unless we consider ALL the relationships that contribute to temperature rise.So it's not pragmatic at all really -- it's almost survival 101. If you ONLY consider a few factors even though many other relating factors are in play then you are indeed being pragmatic. And most standardly sanctioned thinking in our society anytime is always pragmatic. Fiddle with the presumed reality. Dance around the edges. Ignore it. Bargain. Fall back on notions of hope and trust in somebody's good will.

It's like any ecosystem in nature. Always changing, under threat, mutually dependency between species and the earth, and solar system etc...you cannot divorce one creature from it and look at it in isolation from the overall conditions of its existence. Thats' dialectical materialism too. And if the ecosystem is invaded by a new species -- such as humans with sheep and barbed wire -- then that too is part of the changes as 'natural' as the onset of the last ice age or the spread of the dingo or an El Nino Ocillation in the South pacific or whatever.

There is no real separation between the natural world and us and as Engels pointed out , we may assume we have conquered nature -- but more fool us, right? So the question is how to achieve -- not so much a harmony as that is not real for any creature (creatures populate and die out all the time)-- but a sustainable coexistence that we'd very much prefer to decide collectively about.

It's our choice.thats' want we really want as humans. To control our destiny as a species and have a say in what sort of world we want to live and the creatures who'll share it with us.

And that process of choosing is the business of socialism. And the process of understanding what needs to be done is only possible by actually working at the coal face of change. So unless you work for change you can't begin to understand what (further)changes need to be made. To start that journey without a totally open agenda is pragmatism but to give yourself up to all the imperatives demanded of change is dialectics.

The fall of Tommy Sheridan

2010-12-24T22:12:00.000-08:00

Some of the online comment has been to the point and some has been a broken record reprise. As this farce unfolded into political tragedy I think the SSP has done its best to keep working at the coal face and try to recover from the damage to the credibility of their ongoing work.

Nonetheless, i think it is a mistake to merge Sheridan with Healy as Sheridan's profile was closer to your usual bourgeois politician than that of any stereotype you may have of a sect leader. That was the contradiction -- he was at the time this all began another member of parliament under media scrutiny 'caught with his pants' down' who tried to lie his way back to personal --as distinct from political -- credibility.

That he tried to enlist support from his comrades in that quest only worsened the consequences in my estimation and fostered a much deeper tragedy that was more than simply personal.
But the episode is indeed food for thought and if you have been following the SSP as I have you'll see how much the party has tried to address some of the bitter lessons that the experience has offered.
For the SSP membership the horrors of the past 6 years can now be put behind them as they move out of the headlines.

While I can recognize where many of Sheridan's supporters In Scotland may be coming from -- esp in deference to his history as a leading activist -- I cannot extend the same consideration to his far left backers in London who have exploited the disaster to opportunistically try to undermine the political significance of the SSP.

DISCUSSION: Socialist Alliance candidate for Altona by election

2010-02-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "merl.musser" wrote:

> And they also didn't say anything I could see about how to get socialism. It was just vote for me. As if that would be enough.

Merl makes some interesting points and raises a few questions about what we should do and how we should do it.

I think there are a lot of ways to do this and I'm not going to be for one way or another -- or one piece of text or another --as I'm not sure what constitutes the best of all possible platforms at the local or state level of election campaigning. Nonetheless, the material has to be viewed in the context of an already existing SA presence in these two locales.
http://socialistalliancemelbourne.blogspot.com/
And the momentum is very definitely about winning voter support and if at all possible getting elected.It's not just about propaganda.
So its tied to an approach that is about interacting with and mobilising people -- not laying down a program for the future socialist transition of society.
So it's not going to say anything special "about how to get socialism". That's not the primary point in and of itself for the exercise.
There's a myth about socialist editorialising on the left which presumes that everything you say or do has to rachett itself up to include the full rationale for socialism and the road map to get there.
The corollary of this is that you can say a more or less what you like in your literature but at the end you are morally compelled to say "we believe in socialism" as though the name of your party and all the stuff you do in the area is totally irrelevant to your presence on the ballot paper.
On the other hand, what the SA is trying to do is embed itself in the active mobilisation not only of singe issue campaigns -- which is a left standard -- but also of whole communities. And a good part of that is exploring what we can do by using elections -- esp, local government elections.

In the case of Altona ( a state seat), the push is tied to the SA's ongoing public transport campaign and the literature says quite clearly: free, frequent and expanded
http://socialistalliancemelbourne.blogspot.com/2010/01/margarita-windisch-for-altona.html
In the case of Cowie there is the same argument made about public transport -- and in general the platform is a mix of elements that challenge capitalism and items that 'reform' it but inasmuch as there is a theme, the general impetus is toward generating greater community participation in the running of peoples lives.
And "the councillor" is advanced as an organising weapon in that advocacy but also as a focus to generate topics that should be of concern even at the local level: climate change, workers rights, community housing, etc
On the broader question of the "state" -- at the level of council I personally consider local government as not constituting the "body of armed men" scenario.(Even here in Brisbane where I live and the council has a huge budget and large area coverage)
I think a parallel could be the example of socialists winning governing office in an on campus student union which in many instances in the past at least has r administered huge budgets and employed many people in service enterprises.
I think at local level there is a major challenge for socialists to generate a program that is orientated to a struggle perspective and utilizes any elected councillor, or any ewlection campaign, as a impetus for mobilisation and social change.
Given that politics at that level is geared toward making campaigning non party and apolitical -- then of course we have our hands full re-orienting that agenda.= and by dint of experiment, success and mistakes we learn as we go.
It's no good talking up the example of "Red Ken (Linvingstone)" in London in the eighties/nineties or Liverpool Council when it was won by the Militant tendency in the BLP, and then turning around and say those examples of leadership and new politics have nothing whatsoever to do with what socialists say or do when they come to running in elections. You are not there to make yourself too pure to be elected.
Nor, are you there to make yourself a lackey of capitalism.Theres' an important discussion here which the left in Australia has never dealt with because it never stood any chance in the past whatsoever of winning elected office.(Except in the fifties when Doug Jordan tells us the CPA ad maybe 20 councillors elected.)
Generally though I am totally disdainful of the infantile attitude on the left that wants to invest every item of literature as an standalone editorial for socialism.You cannot build support for socialism without generating the mobilisation and engagement of masses of millions of people. And "socialism" is not an intellectural exercise whose cogency rises or falls on the strength of text on a page.

dave riley

Back to Socialist Alliance candidate for Altona by election

I meant to write Ken Livingstone who for some time left the British Labour Party only later to rejoin it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Livingstone

The whole question about standing for -- and winning maybe even -- elected office is a novel experience for us.

And I'm sure there are many more pitfalls than we can imagine even now. There is a festering debate on the left in Britain and a much sharper one in France in regard to the NPA about entering coalition governments with other forces. The same debate has broken out in Germany among the membership of Die Linke over the same question.

That's going to confront us one day I guess but that day is not today.

On the other hand, after four members of the Scottish Socialist Party were elected as MSP's to the new Scottish parliament, the SSP shepherded a lot of its energy into servicing that political tool and harvesting some of the perks to help extend the party's extra parliamentary work.

I really think they did a good job at it too, given the limits of what any one can do with parliament.

However, as Alan McCombes has pointed out, once the 4 were elected there was an attitude among a layer in the the party membership to say -- "well thats' it then. They can do the work now. We'll sit at home."

So the very succesful result -- due mainly through their key work mobilising people against the poll tax -- had a contrary impact on the dynamic of the SSP.It wasn't because the MSPs were advocating socialism though parliament. Rather that the way we are encouraged to view elections had its impact on the SSP itself.

So what do you do? Win your seat and refuse to take it up like SinnFein has so often done when elected to the British parliament? Or do you do, what Bernadette Devlin did, and use parliament as a powerful rostrum for Irish independence and socialism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadette_Devlin

Before, I mentioned the work of the Militant Tendency in Liverpool Council. Heres' some background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militant_tendency#The_Militant_tendency_in_Liverpool
So I'd really wish the whole question was as simple as mentioning socialism or not. But let's get it clear that being a socialist and being popular is not a contradiction.
I for one am not gonna to argue that you need to draw some line in the sand and say you can't cross over that.

For instance, in local council would the SA enter a coalition with the Greens? Not at all? Not ever? Would the SA enter coalition at all ? Not even with some Greens? Or some independents? Not even with anyone?...

Hypothetical questions for now...fortunately.

dave riley

Back to Socialist Alliance candidate for Altona by election

The Death of the DSP means the birth of 21st century socialism!

2010-01-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

Yes it is tragic that Peter Camejo is not still alive especially as an Australian tour by him was being considered for 2010.However, despite the ongoing partnership the DSP had with Peter over so many years I think his perspective did differ often from the route the DSP navigated. And again it differs from that of Louis Proyect.

Nonetheless, with the role Peter was playing in the last few years of his life, with his active orientation to the US ISO, to my mind, suggested that there was much less divergence than was indicated in the second half of the nineties. It also seems to me that Peter’s tactical orientation to the US Greens failed to deliver the left convergence he strived for.

But Louis also makes the regroupment trajectory of the DSP shallower than it actually is as that orientation goes way back to 1984 and the DSP’s role in the Nuclear Disarmament Party and later a series of clinches– with an eye to marriage – with other left parties (such as the Communist Party) and an active role in the various currents that came together to form the Greens in the early nineties. As I understand it, some elements of the present Greens constitution, for instance, were drafted by DSP members.

And if there had not been a proscription clause undemocratically imposed on the new party, the DSP would have likely joined the Greens as a left current from day one of their inception.

A similar course was pursued in the greening of the DSP which was absolutely underway from 1984 and quickened with the launching of Green Left Weekly in 1991. The party was “ecosocialist” long before the term was invented.

At the same time as this, the DSP dropped any shackles that may impinge on its ability to relate to other left currents especially internationally. It pulled out of the 4th International in 1986, stopped calling itself a “Trotskyist” party and spent a lot of energy collectively reviewing Marxist theory — such that it also dropped adhering to the Trotskyist shibboleth, permanent revolution.

From the 1979 Nicaraguan and Grenadan revolutions through the Salvadoran struggles of the eighties and nineties to today with the Venezuelan revolution, the DSP has been keenly engaged with these processes — generating solidarity and seeking to learn. Even today, GLW keeps a bureau in Caracas and through its solidarity work, around 3 solidarity brigades leave Australia for Venezuela each year.

So these last 30 years it is impossible to separate the DSP from the struggles in Latin America – and in the same internationalist way the party has actively engaged with left parties in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Indonesia, etc regardless of political tradition and in conjunction with these have organised a series of international solidarity conferences. Reps from the Philippines, New Zealand (NZ Socialist Worker – an IST affiliate) ,and Malaysia attended and addressed the SA conference. (In a similar vein the DSP had regularly bought to Australia reps from the German PDS — later to form Die Linke — and has kept engaged with many European 4th International sections, monitoring and learning from their regroupment work.)

So it has been a complex journey that has led the party to cease to exist and merge with the Socialist Alliance this month. It is true that a new political perspective is driving this — an open, nuanced approach to political activity which I think is difficult to characterize. Louis perhaps is right to call it “open, transparent and nonsectarian” but that doesn’t mean that it’s not Marxist or that it is ‘reformist’.

Comment by Dave Riley — 17 January, 2010 @ 3:18 am

Comrade Pangloss says… that my personal detractors are missing the point by a considered indulgence in obscurantism.My argument was by dint of chronology to point out that the business of negotiating a regroupment agenda goes back some years in Australia (and New Zealand).This is, I suggest, a undeniable and historical fact.It is not because Louis Proyect took out a patent on it ten years ago and the DSP (or the NZ SW )has had a sudden epiphany — but there has been a lot of at times bitter experience of trying to negotiate that agenda.

As for Neil (whoever) from (I assume) the Socialist Party I fear he is trying to mark me down for my run of comments on , among other sites,the A Very Public Sociologist blog where Phil BC (a SP member and very astute political commentator who’s opinion I greatly value) wrote only a few days ago in regard to the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition:

What makes this really frustrating is that after 15 years of regroupment projects, this is where the far left is at. Opportunities to lay the foundations for something lasting and with wider support has been squandered by sectarian interests, egos and petty control freakery, and each and every principal organisation of the far left shoulders a share of the blame. The lasting feature of our procession of unity initiatives has been the sinking of new wells of resentment - so much for the Marxist left being the socialist society of the future in embryo.
The window of opportunity the far left has had to make an impact outside its ghetto is closing. The Labour party is, once again, starting to look like the place where the issue of working class representation will be debated and contested in the coming years - despite the stranglehold of the apparatus and lack of meaningful democracy. This means TUSC’s prospects, even if it becomes something more than an alliance of convenience, are probably very limited.
The Socialist Alliance experience here in Australia is only an example of an alternative option. Nothing more. Nothing less.

However, to insist as “Neil” does that I’m promoting a “liquidationist” course is a bit much as he doesn’t back up the epithet. If the DSP’s process of merging into the Socialist Alliance is “liquidationist” then the exact same “liquidationist” course was followed by Scottish Militant when it merged into the SSP and the LCR into the NPA . So let’s get some broader perspective on this shall we? It is not only the DSP who is guilty of the horrendous crime of being committed to a socialist unity agenda. It’s not about catching a ride.

I’m sure this was an accusation bandied about when the Scottish Militant left the CWI for the Scottish Socialist Alliance — as it was a major topic of dispute for three very long years in the DSP debating with its own in house Leninist Party Faction. So it’s nothing new. It’s surely stock polemic.

So, Comrade Neil: been there/argued that. Had it up to pussy’s bow, in fact. If you can prove that what the SA does day to day registers a major liquidation/degradation of class struggle poilitics I’m all ears.

The other point Neil raises — the horrid DSP bogeyman — has to deal with the complication of : what DSP? Didn’t it just “liquidate” itself? And besides, he should check his sources for veracity, as the CWI’s ” comrades in Australia” supported and worked for our local election campaign in Fremantle recently ( which saw Sam Wainwright elected) — as did the Communist Party. They even addressed our state conference in Western Australia — as did the Communist Party. So if the Alliance is supposedly inhabited by bogeys why is this expression of left unity and solidarity possible?

If only such a level of distrust could be replicated in Ol Blighty, eh?
Comment by Dave Riley — 18 January, 2010 @ 9:34 am
Regarding bitter experience… After the spate of regroupment initiatives failed in Australia through the eighties and into the early nineties, the DSP lost a layer of members, even some leading comrades — including “Ben” (commenting here) who I thought joined the NSW Greens for a time.But he wasn’t alone.

There were no other unity options on the agenda thereafter primarily because the organisations of the far left were not interested one iota in left unity. However, when the UK Socialist Alliance experiences were given the blessing by London that changed and a new possibility unfolded. I was out of the DSP at the time and the quickening that occurred from 2003 (actually November 2002) when the DSP signaled its unconditional willingness to commit to the project, drew me into the SA fray. The DSP’s commitment also changed the trajectory of the SA away from a electoral coalition contained by a unelected senate of far left orgs, towards trying to become a multi tendency socialist party (MTSP).

The recent events registers but one further stage in that process.

Comment by Dave Riley — 18 January, 2010 @ 9:49 am

Fleabite seems to have missed a key element driving this exchange. On January 2nd this year the DSP dissolved and no structural form now remains to direct these ex members and bind their SA activities together.

While the DSP did not make a habit of caucusing for its work in the SA, its ongoing autonomy led to some complications especially the festering conundrum of trying to build two parties at the same time. As I wrote on LeftClick about the SA conference:

“Putting the DSP down” (so to speak) and moving on politically was an essential first step toward broadening the collaboration and opening up to a deepening of the partnerships that sustain the SA…. The ex-DSP membership — now no longer made up of DSP members – seemed, to me anyway, to embrace the SA conference as bona fide political activists without the personal complication of a previously composed agenda. The niggling secondary loyalty that decreed a certain hesitancy of engagement — and even a reluctance in political confidence — was sidelined by a direct and absolute focus on the politics to hand.

I think it is important to stress here that what the DSP now bequeaths to the Alliance is the skill, activism, training and political outlook of its membership and the wherewithall to grow more cadre. Obviously this isn’t about preserving each chapter and verse of a finely tuned political program composed over many years and covering the minutae of historical materialism. It’s not about super precious ideas. It is about doing politics in real time and relying on Marxist activists to sustain and deepen a sort of revolutionary continuity.It is an expression of absolute confidence in these once-upon-a-time ranks .

It also raises a few very uncomfortable questions I think that need to be confronted. Is what we do as Marxists all about sustaining an idealised program that exists separate from — and above — the rigors of everyday struggle but nonetheless serves to mark each band off from one another in a political pissing competition? Or is it, as James P Cannon argued, the everyday challenge of deciding what to do next? Similarly, is our activity dependent upon an iron discipline imposed upon the ranks who voluntarily sign on to do a leadership’s bidding within what we tend to assume are hostile environments (such as that of the Socialist Alliance)?

The alternative view is that the only way to make “true revolutionaries” is through a tick box program and the desire to make propaganda at every available opportunity. Marx’s precept that politics is not about interpreting the world in various ways, but changing it seems to be lost in this approach.

Smug use of the “liquidationist” epiphet can in no way accommodate the complexity of that transition nor for that matter the sheer guts required to negotiate it. But after 9 years at the Alliance coal face, 3 years of bitter internal strife, and functioning outside local DSP organisational structures for six months in the lead up to conference, the DSP membership signed onto this at its final conference one hundred percent.

I don’t think that’s an imperative but it did flow out of the trajectory the DSP was pursuing.Whether the investment pays off or not remains to be seen. Obviously this is not a formula but if you seek to work a regroupment agenda you have to be willing to make the hard decisions.

Comment by Dave Riley — 19 January, 2010 @ 12:16 am

Of course the obverse approach is that left unity is a fool’s errand.And that’s the drill — not just that the SA is lacklustre in that regard but that it has no hope in Hades of making a collective impression. So that’s the spin — Wrong Way! Go back! (Oops! Too late for that!) And that the membership of the DSP are a bunch of submissive sheep tricked into jumping off the precipice by a manipulative leadership of bogeyman and bogeywoman.
You can read the summary drill here from Alen Myers: The sad end of the DSP
In the case of the DSP the minority faction began life with x number of members and after more than two years of intense disputation fronted the next DSP conference with slightly fewer delegates, making no impression , aside from sowing bitterness, on the majority of the DSP membership. And this year it ran its own national conference in the same city and over the same days as the SA’s one and…well, maybe Ben can give us a report on that.
Either these other DSPers were intellectually challenged, deaf to any amount of cogent argumentation or possessed by the obligation of committing the heinous act of ‘liquidation’.
And if you step out of the oppressive circle which the RSP inhabits and festers within — still and will likely to be perpetually obsessed with the DSP — the story doesn’t get much better as one after another of voices from the rest of the Australian left zoo will find similar cause to rile against the Alliance in order to prick its balloon and denigrate its membership.
So instead of being an exercise in left unity all the Socialist Alliance supposedly has accomplished is a bull-in-a-china-shop episode of mayhem. And similarly we can accuse the SSP of the same consequences, and the English Socialist Alliance and Respect… All of which only served to pit the feuding elements on the left more bitterly against each other.
That’s true isn’t it? The left is England is farther away today from a unity perspective, as Phil BC reminds us, than it was 10 years ago. Similarly a member of Ben’s own party ,Liam Macuaid of Socialist Resistance, wrote just two weeks ago – Left Unity – surveying the wreckage –

The workers’ movement in Britain has faced a crisis of working class representation since the rise of New Labour in the mid-1990s and it has been becoming more acute ever since. This backdrop put left unity at the centre of the political agenda. The rise of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and the Socialist Alliance (SA) were the first organisational expressions of this necessary process. A critical look at the last decade is essential if we are not to make the same mistakes – those who do not learn from history are pretty likely to make the same ones all over again.
Ten years the depressing reality is that the left, other than the Green Party, is weaker and left unity further away than at any time during that period. And there is little sign that this is about to change.

So lets’ get the charge sheet written out clearly, shall we? The DSP’s real crime is that it was absolutely committed to a regroupment agenda and persevered when other Marxist elements , including members of its own party, passed on the option.
That’s the core objection. Regardless of disputes over how broad or how deep the SA is, or how rah rah revolutionary its politics, that’s the main problem. The DSP’s politcal burden is that it is giving this project its best shot — and will, I need to point out, be wearing the consequences.
I was talking with a SA member here , Dave Kerin, at the conference, about what he calls the “religious left” and he argues that it will take a period of years to talk this issue through with these other left orgs. I think he is dead right. The Socialist Alliance may be a little step out of the left ghetto but for now even that little step is done alone and with great difficulty.
What that means for the UK — as we inhabit the same left zoo — isn’t very appealing.
Comment by Dave Riley — 19 January, 2010 @ 11:45 am

Back to:The Death of the DSP means the birth of 21st century socialism!

Left Unity – surveying the wreckage

2010-01-18T03:12:00.000-08:00

Left Unity – surveying the wreckage

Dave Riley, on January 13th, 2010 at 8:08 am Said:

We may not be in the apex of the world revolution but the process of rethinking the left regroupment agenda here in Australia has led to this: DSP merges into Socialist Alliance Speech to the opening rally of the 7th national conference of the Socialist Alliance on January 2, 2010, by Peter Boyle, former national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective.

Green Left Weekly will run reports on the conference and process engaged with between the Alliance partners.

The DSP and SA conferences were held back to back and the one day DSP event was mainly taken up with discussing a (very small) minority position that the DSP continue to exist in some public form as well as continuing with the SA merger.

This very broad endorsement of the broad party perspective follows after nine years of SA activity and occurs following intense debate in the DSP about its SA orientation — especially since 2003 – which included an almost three year long factional dispute (2005-2008) in the party.
These comments — Vox pops from Socialist Alliance’s 7th National Conference — will give you a sense of the verve and feeling of expectancy that was generated.

Dave Riley, on January 13th, 2010 at 2:58 pm Said:

“Barnacle Pumpkin” should allow people to make up their own minds about events in Australia. I did in fact refer to the outcomes there as “the process of rethinking the left regroupment agenda”.

Our’s is one way of proceeding which we’re exploring.

RSP comrades will standardly attack the SA for being a sham unity exercise and a total political failure — but then when it registers successes will turn around and denigrate it for being a reformist swill and it is only by being so politically liquidated is it able to succeed.

Just on the Respect comparison: The Socialist Alliance began as an Antipodean copy of the English Socialist Alliance with the difference that we survived the factionalism of the competing affiliates, who, just as they did in England, in the main abandoned the project. Since the English SA was so short lived it is hard to envisage its potential trajectory. Nonetheless since we did survive how do we differ from Respect?

While “Barnacle Pumpkin” suggests that if he had his druthers he much prefers the Respect template to the way the Australian Alliance does its work. I think there are some key differences between the two projects that are worth teasing out:

(1) We are unashamedly a socialist party– an alliance of socialists – and that formats what we say and what we do. The SA isn’t any one form of socialism in the way the far left orgs may patent their shibboleths, but we nonetheless are an ideological current in regard to that broad church perspective of aspiring for 21st century socialism
(2) We are not primarily an electoral party. We stand in elections of course but we function more like an organising activist party which is dedicated to campaigning outside election periods. We nonetheless have begun to record some electoral successes– with an elected local councilor in Perth, Western Australia and some good returns — up to 18% — at the last Melbourne round of local government elections in 2008.Nonetheless, more so than in the UK, any advance that we may obtain is still blocked by the strong electoral presence of the Greens who soak up most of the alternative vote left of the Labor Party.
(3) For good or ill we are no one’s party. We don’t have a George Galloway or a Salma Yaqoob speaking for or leading us. In fact “leadership” in the Alliance is very loose and decisions arrived at by either national gatherings or national leaderships are not binding on locality branches.This means that the SA aspires to a working consensus in regard to what it decides to do.
(4) We are committed to an ongoing perspective of left regroupment which we see as an open process of consolidating partnerships where we can forge them. Just as in the UK the far left franchises here have now passed on the SA (or any regroupment) option but the door is always going to be open to them if they may decide to re-engage with the SA project. However, we have worked up a partnership with a section of the left Greens and we work productively together especially in the climate change movement and Greens members attend our conferences, address,and give workshops at them and the like. So what is blocked in regard to the Marxist groups is still quite fluid in regard to green politics. I’d also hope that the support that the Communist Party and the (CWI aligned) Socialist Party gave us in the Perth campaign recently can built upon over the coming months.
(5) Unlike the present Respect we have had our own in house engine room — the DSP. As events suggest the DSP has been so committed to the Alliance project that it has now merged with the SA and is in the process of transiting its assets across to the Alliance. This resource injection should boost the SA somewhat in the time ahead as there will be no countervailing loyalty for a significant sector of the SA membership.Among those resources that have facilitated the project is Green Left Weekly , a national network of “Resistance Centres” and bookshops,and the organisational skills and professionalism that has marked the DSP since its inception.
(6) Furthermore unlike Respect, , the SA has decided that it will take socialist education seriously and will put in place an ongoing pluralist program of classes, socialist ideas conferences, debates and discussions which seek to deepen our collective understanding and agreement while also availing ourselves of the already existing educational resources of the DSP.
(7) Unlike Respect, the SA has at its disposal a major reach out asset in the form of Green Left Weekly which is a national newspaper strongly associated with the Alliance.

Dave Riley, on January 14th, 2010 at 1:17 am Said:

Duncan:But “every other tendency” in the UK has ended up outside regroupment projects there except your own. Perhaps there is a message embedded in that fact. Your own tendency, SR, rails against the rest of the left (eg: the above blog post)on this very point and marks down these outfits for the very same reasons they , in the main , exited here. In part that’s why I am so interested in the English far left because the same tactics and approaches to unity are engineered in downtown London and replicated here.

Chapter and verse…

These same tendencies also tried to destroy the SSP … Our advantage is, to put it bluntly, that we survived all this as the SSP has done.

The problem you are not dealing with – nor the broader left regroupment trajectory — there is the fact that for now much of the far left in the English speaking countries of Australia, England, Ireland (perhaps?)and the USA are not interested in instigating unity projects. So what does that mean? That left unity is passe and no longer possible? That it was a fool’s errand in the first place?

The ex SA tendencies here cannot accept, and could never accept, that regroupment exists and is a viable project outside the narrowly proscribed world of the groupuscules. I don’t advocate it — of course — but I point out that it is a sustainable political option.

The complication being that if you are not pluralist and seen to be pluralist — you won’t get to first base with a “non aligned” membership. And despite the rigors of the last 4 years, the SA membership outside the DSP has remained loyal to the exercise.

This recent SA conference was in effect a rebooting and relaunching of the SA after the years of factionalism in the SA and the DSP.

The DSP’s “former minority” wanted to re-engineer the SA and make it just an electoral front for a very Marxist DSP regardless of the wishes of the SA membership. How pluralist is that? End result= destroy the SA.

Of course the present complication is that the DSP has been “put down” as of January 2nd and there are formally no tendencies in the SA at present — and no DSP. Is that for real or some smart scam?

in effect we are pursuing the course followed by Scottish Militant in regard to the Scottish Socialist Alliance and the LCR in regard to the NPA. (and one I assume SR is willing to follow). So Duncan do you want to argue that that approach is kosher in Scotland and France but problematical in Australia and that while you can trust the LCR and Militant exers you cannot rely on the ex DSP membership to be respectful of democratic form?

I outlined the comparison with Respect in order to stress that the SA’s engineering is different from Respect and akin to the SSP and the NPA. In effect we have to deal with the same challenges of transition and the same complex arrangements of democratic process and accountability.

Should we have killed off the SA after 2006 and waited for the far left orgs to change their minds and sign up again to a new project ( and a new project, other than and including the SA, is not being ruled out)– whenever? Should we have swallowed the argument that you get one chance and that’s it ? But that’s not what Liam is arguing is it? Nor has it been the approach of the SA partners.

We have always said that the SA was an initial first step, a political asset, towards a broader regroupment agenda. I’m sure you consider Respect in the same light.

The problem with regroupment politics, in my experience, is that they don’t run to rule — or schema — especially schema..However, I think we nonetheless get presented choices and options en route as we negotiate the journey.

The fact is that we– the SA — kept the far left orgs in the SA much longer than your experience in England. In effect they finally left primarily because it failed to prosper electorally and what they wanted was an ‘electoral front of a very special kind’.

Those moves to advance the SA towards becoming a multi tendency socialist party were enthusiastically endorsed by a succession of conferences — by approx 70-75% of the vote — with the smaller affiliates in determined opposition. Should the SA membership have reconsidered and said since you are holding us to ransom, we won’t advance the project and instead do your bidding? Is that supposedly how “pluralism” works?

If these affiliates had indeed prevailed I think the SA would now be no more than a few inner city urban left branches in three –maybe two — capital cities.Between polling days they’d more or less shut up shop which the Greens tend to do..

Similarly there is no space here for a Respect option as the Greens have occupied so much electoral — ‘non socialist’ –space. and there is no move whatsoever among the left orgs to come together outside the SA and foster a separate electoral coalition among themselves. That’s why they mostly now orientate towards the Greens at polls and vigorously ignore the SA. (Although the Healyite rump and the Communist Party are now registered electorally federally)

The Socialist Party replicates the rhetoric of the CWI for a new party of labour but really it has neither the networks, size nor the spread to give that advocacy any substance and the SP stayed away from the SA all together. The associated problem is that the SA occupies what space there is for such a party. The trade union dynamic is nonetheless still quite potent and it is not clear what may happen as more unions reconsider their ALP affiliation. While some now s give campaign donations to the SA , they give more to the Greens. But the SA has a much larger embed in the trade unions than any other tendency on the left — and runs key campaigns in a few unions while sharing leadership roles in a couple.

Dave Riley, on January 14th, 2010 at 2:52 am Said:

By the way of a footnote — the New Zealand Socialist Worker grouping — an IST affiliate — does not agree with the characterisation of the SA advanced by either the IST affiliate here — Solidarity — or the RSP . In fact the SA has a warm comradely relationship with the New Zealanders and they attended and addressed the SA conference. In fact they have attended the last four national SA conferences at least.

Similarly I’m supposed to start work on a website for the Zimbabwe-an ISO — another IST affiliate.

So there is no Chinese Wall necessarily unbreachable between groupings that may necessitate pistols at ten paces despite the presumed political differences..The New Zealanders are absolutely committed to a unity perspective and have similarly embraced Chavez’s call for a 5trh International and requested that the IST unconditionally sign on too.

[That's another difference for the SA vis a vis Respect-- it endorsed the call for the 5th International and was represented at the left gathering in Caracas that instigated the initiative.]

Dave Riley, on January 15th, 2010 at 3:55 am Said:

Jason writes that I didn’t answer my own question — and he is right. But seeking the answer is why I’m habituated to the British left blogosphere.

The answer nonetheless has so much to do I think with the entrenched sectarianism of the British far left which is also propagated internationally through a few toy internationals head quartered in Old Blighty.

Seen from afar this particular penchant seems like a ideological imperialism where “internationalism” is equated with a certain rigid Cominternism that presumes that like God and Dad, the English know best.

I’m not arguing that the British left has a monopoly on sectarianism as all far left groups anywhere in the world are going to be guilty of it by some degree — but in Britain, it is almost viewed among the main groups as not being a problem as though politics should be run according to official Monty Python “Life of Brian” rules.

While that may be the case, how does any group transcend this handicap? The Healyite WRP never did for instance and Arthur Scargill’s little grouping is a prime example of something that is new and still so handicapped.

And no matter how much SR or other commentators may rail against the phenomenon , is change in the offing?

I’ve wondered about this in regard to GB and I think part of the problem is that the British far left in some large measure defers to no one else. There is simply not much humility. Revolutionists may be pushing the socialist envelope in various locales world wide and the British left shows a frank unwillingnes to learn from these other rich experience. That makes the whole show rather closed in and insular.

It’s one thing to insist that you know the way forward but it is another thing to recognise that others offshore (and outside your own official international)may be able to teach you a tactical and strategic thing or two.

I’m not suggesting that I’m offering didactics or a DIY, but you at least have to engage with and consider these other ways and means because there *might be* something useful there.

In the case of the SWP and SP they can’t even raise their eyes to events across the channel and consider what may be useful that can be drawn from the unity experiences on the European left. I find that myopic.Indeed left regroupment is almost given pariah status as soon as it cross the Dover shore.

Part of this failing can be traced back to the British left’s coolness towards the Latin American revolution. If you step back and think about it, the unfolding processes date back to the 1959 Cuban Revolution and since then there have been many examples of insurgent mass work that simply leaves our own shallow political experiences in the shade. I’m not talking about whether Cuba is a workers state or not, I’m talking about generating a certain respect for what has been achieved in various countries on that continent by a truly mass and truly grassroot movement.

The irony is that in terms of a frequent online presence it is Derek Wall of the Green Party who is unconditionally dedicated to embracing the Latin American experience and trying to learn from it.

This preference for insularity I think feeds on itself and narrows the horizons and limits the exchanges had.

Add to this mix the “river of blood” exclusivity of classical Trotskyism which fetishised the “holy program ” and you get a few other ingredients that feed this preference for one’s own party and no one else’s.

Having said all that, I think we need to note that the US ISO has stepped some way out of that circle spirit despite the handicap of speaking English. How far the ISO will go, remains to be seen — but their open ended success is another example of what may be worth learning from. On a broader note, the US left is a useful crucible of other party experiences that in many instances, replicate the British one.So you have to consider what the US may have to offer in way of both good and bad example.

Nonetheless, for sheer variety the range of strategic options being explored in Europe warrant careful study and monitoring. I mean this is what should be debated just as the Scottish Socialist Party offered an example of an alternative way to proceed (but what you got from the SWP and SP was a cynical obscurantism in regard to SSP’s significance.)

However, underlying all this I think on the part of the English left is a certain conservatism, an unwillingness to take political risks over which you may lose control. That lack of gregariousness plays out as a certain relentlessness in the way you operate and campaign. That leads to the preference for the coward’s homily that “our day will come” and all we have to do it wait for it.

Transcending sectarianism is perhaps the most difficult task any group could tackle as it is so hard to overcome it by conscious effort. Just when you start to think you are no longer ’sectarian’ you discover that maybe you are still being ruled by its dead hand. But you are never going to be free of it because politics as Rosa Luxembourg reminded us politics is about waxing and waning between sectarianism and reformism.

But to see it as a problem I guess is the first step to recovery. And in a very real materialist sense even before that epithany you have to recognise one very salient fact:recruiting in ones and twos — “the primitive accumulation of cadre” — is totally insufficient to the task we have set ourselves. This self evident fact is totally ignored by so much of the English speaking left who still more or less believe that their slow party building strategy will deliver the right mix “when our day will come”.

The problem I fear that has set in and in many ways displaced discussing such key points is a brash aspiration for “relevance” and the facts and figures of electoral results. I even note this as a driving force for the SP and SWP *rather than* a dedication to a regroupment agenda. Its’ as though the unity option has been hijacked and cheapened so that it can be drowned in a gung ho electoralism as a substite to keep the troops happy.

I’m not discounting running for elected office — but it has to be part of a broader strategy and the way it gets posted on the left is a sort of either/or option that presumes all that we aspire to in way of revolutionary social change is passe and should for now be put on hold while we prove just how relevant we can be.

Dave Riley, on January 16th, 2010 at 8:05 am Said:

Exploring an alternative way forward which is open and accountable: This vox pop video explores a rich vein of optimism and confidence which also celebrates some small but significant advances out of the left ghetto in Australia. The issue as always is to do something by trying to change the world by best of the any means available to us rather than be hole up in a patented banker or be held hostage to myopia.

Dave Riley, on January 16th, 2010 at 11:07 am Said:

The tragedy — if I can call it that — Alf, is that Britain has a richer and deeper socialist tradition and proportionally larger left than either Australia, Canada or the US. Possibly as Phil Hearse pointed out to me once there is identifiable sectarian trend going back to the days of the Communist Party which was not a mass party (I understand) in GB. What we share nonetheless is the presence of an over bearing Labourism that has warped all radical outbreaks and subsumed them in its corporate embrace.

The abandonment of the Socialist Alliance and the sabotage of the SSP suggests how keen the main players are to preserve a certain status quo on their own turf. I can relate to that as I could share a few nasty anecdotes about how determined local clones were to sabotage the Alliance here.

But all that — he says with gritted teeth — is not important.

I’m not trying to promote the Australian experience as a panacea or formula. On the contrary, it has been a very difficult and rocky road thus far which as been marked — most importantly — by a determination to persevere not just because the idea seemed a good one (or even because it was one of Lenin’s), but because along this path we have registered enough in way of feedback and modest success that we think it is worth forging on.

However, I grant you: piloting blind is a handicap for those who prefer their politics formatted by certainties or want to rule their political lives by schemata. It is similarly of no appeal to this who insist that the only role we can allow ourselves is to play is one of propagandist.

I also need to point out that the regroupment agenda here on the left goes back 15 years and almost as long in New Zealand. So some lessons, I hope, have been learnt en route. It wasn’t just an idea that someone sucked out of their thumb a few years ago. It has been s consciously worked on at available opportunities..

I also need to point out that this regroupment orientation is not absolutely quantatively proven except in those areas — such as Scotland in the 90s and in France more recently — where there has been some degree of militant fightback which has been electorally harvested..

One argument deployed (by the CWI) to explain Scotland away, is to insist that there has to be an upheaval ( such as the Poll Tax fight) to push the left together. I think that’s a mistaken view because we all know that the context is much broader than any one indigenous struggle.( ie: capitalist crisis, collapse of Stalinism, rightward surge of social democracy, etc– and in Scotland, a rise in nationalism).

I also believe that when people will look back at this moment they will rule that it was marked by the ebb tide of the groupuscules — the new left and Trotskyist sects who were driven by a programatic intellectualism and a dedicated preference for exclusivity and isolation.

Nonetheless, the pressure to accommodate to reformism is always going to dog these projects ( eg: The Brazilian Workers Party, Die Linke, the Dutch Socialist Party, etc) but as Luxembourg reminds us, you cannot deal with these challenges in advance. I’m sure there are going to be many mistakes one way or another.

But what we have now is a far left that refuses to make mistakes through cowardice and arrogance (i and besides they never made any mistakes anytime anyway anyhow).

That is our collective handicap. Instead a certain sectarian moralism rules relations between elements on the left and while that prevails we aren’t going to make very good Marxists prefering ideas to action.

Back to Left Unity – surveying the wreckage

How should the left organise?

2009-12-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

Derek Wall (Socialist Unity)Leninism is not what you think it is:

Just been blogging about the SWP crisis, its a wider crisis of a kind of Marxist political organisation that in my view simply does not work. I have never been a Leninist but Lenin may have been very different in his approach to what is normally imagined. The ever excellent Dave Riley let me know about this article, its food for thought, let me know what you think and lets not just use this as an excuse to bash each other. How should the left organise?

If I can add a few comments…

(1)The complication of “Leninist Party” politics is that it is carried out by organisations who believe that they are indeed a “Leninist Party” without any reference to the actual living situation they may be at.They could be 5, 50, or 1500 members but they all presume they are working at Leninist best practice regardless of how embedded they are in the working class.They are “Leninist” because they say so.

(2)What’s happened through the sponsorship of Trotsky and the counterposition of “Trotskyism” to “Stalinism” is that programatic questions have been elevated to a level of some sort of Jungian archetype which only the ordained have access to.This idealist approach — one devoid of the living test of day to day struggle and roots in the class –is totally at odds with the approach of a dedicated Marxist materialism. It only leads to a cottage industry of boutique socialist patents competing with one another.

(3)In my experience of party organisations operating under ‘Leninist’ first principles there is always a sharp tension between being too tight and being too loose. This conundrum is always tied to the question of exclusivity and the overbearing pressure to maintain ‘party’ ‘norms’. I think this is real such that small parties tend to flip and flop between opening up and closing down/reaching out and returning to the bunker. One example I can think of is the response of the SP/CWI when it left the British Labour Party. Thereafter followed a relaxing of approaches to other currents and a dedicated reach out internationally.But in the wake of the loss of most of its Scottish section (which formed the SSP) and a dispute and falling out with its section in Pakistan (The Labour Party of Pakistan) the SP/CWI turned inward and retraced its steps to the bunker. Even the whole rationale of its “united front of a special find” melarky by the English SWP is premised on this tension — that there is a threshold and once passed you dilute/liquidate your politics and cease to be revolutionary. This spectral fear is what haunts almost all the parties of the far left. It is developed as a response to surviving the long haul and counterposing your politics to Stalinism in a position of isolation in the working class. This is, if you like, the conditions and responses that congeal as sectarianism.

(4)After years of surviving the long detour the conditions we now face — with the self evident deference of social democracy to neo liberalism, the world wide collapse of Stalinism in the wake of 1989, the biggest economic crisis capitalism has faced since 1929, and a major ecological catastrophe bearing down on humanity — the conditions under which we operate has changed greatly so that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the comfort of ‘business as usual’ will suffice. Old habits die hard. Old cultures persist. The far left, in fact, becomes entwined in and entrapped by its own rhetoric. While there may indeed be more than one way to proceed, as socialists, Marxists and activists we must know that left unity is our most powerful weapon. But how we proceed to do that — regroup the left — requires not only reach out ways and means but a considerate re-formatting of our own internal perspectives. It is in this context that the study of Lenin has taken another course — away from just referencing his writings into a more considered and broader approach to the actual history of the Bolskevik party; and as Kellog (and Liebman) argues it is not what we may have thought.

(5) What divides the far left today — if we put aside the shibboleths born as they were in the context of the Cold War — are tactical questions.Essentially day to day that’s always tended to be the case.Nonetheless even with those differences in mind what divides us is very small indeed given what unites us. And what specifically unites us is that despite the rigors of the last few decades we collectively enter the 21st century as committed revolutionists with skills and savvy but without the large numbers adhered to our banner.

(6) That doesn’t mean we enter a mea culpa historical moment. What it does mean is that we shift our perspectives and open up our politics like no other time in our historical experience. And, if you like, our task is adapting what we know of “Leninism under Lenin” to the challenges of the here and now. Personally and theoretically this is a major challenge because the new conditions we may choose to embrace don’t lend themselves to easy schemata. NOR is it an excuse to embrace a free fall liquidation of our hard won organisational and political assets. The dialectics of this change are very complex and in each country they are likely to follow different paths as no one size is gonna fit all.We also face the complication that a ruling on early experiments in this new Left politics has not reached a consensus in the way that in the 1920s the far left wanted to replicate the experience of the Bolsheviks and , as Kellog points out, were encouraged to import it as a one size fits all party template.

(7) It is not our role to rejig the politics of social democracy and create a left-of-Labour Labour Party. Some on the left believe that and with the example of Germany and Die Linke as well as the rise of Green Parties internationally in front of us we should junk all the criteria of revolutionary socialism for the sake of a very much broader and very much softer political relevance buoyed up be a dedicated electoralism. But is that what we want — a sort of stage-ist approach to generating revolutionary politics? Marx via the route of practical reformism? A corollary of this perspective is the belief — that today dedicated broad socialist parties cannot be built and win mass support. This is the view of the SWP I’m sure (even if it is not stated)and is no doubt the standard response of most left orgs while en route back to the bunker. But if you check, the approach of Lenin was very different while still adhering to the core goal of socialist revolution. I remember one quote from whoever that tells us so much, ” You all know Lenin forged a great revolutionary socialist party, but you don’t realize what he had to forge it with.” And inherent in the outlook of the far left orgs is a elitist fear that straying too far from programatic purity etc only serves to dumb down our politics.

(8)While we are all familiar with the role of imperialism and the way the reformism gutted the 2nd International but really is that what we should allow to haunt us? The drowning of the 2nd International in competing jingoistic reformist currents occurred in a very precise context of world history. While similar conditions may prevail today, we are here requesting of currents who have survived the political challenges of the last few decades, and remained revolutionary, to lead this new process of broadening out. That’s a big difference. To not see it in those terms only encourages a certain functionalism — a belief that these new parties will arise because the space exists for them to do so. But then, that space can be filled just as ‘functionally’ by outfits like the BNP. So who leads this process is crucial to what sort of party is created.

Comment by Dave Riley — 27 December, 2009 @ 3:23 am

Back to original post on Socialist Unity .
Read the essay:Leninism: it's not what you think

Re: Paul LeBlanc: Why I Am Joining the ISO

2009-10-30T04:26:00.000-07:00

There is a post in this thread on marxmail by Dan Russell
http://www.marxmail.org/msg68867.html
which says in part

[BEGIN QUOTE]
" What appealed to me most about the ISO at the time and what is still its strength were all well outlined by Paul. It is an organization that is very dynamic both in the makeup of its membership, the activity and leadership at the local level, and the discussion of local,
national, and international issues. As Mark notes, the political level of members isn't as uniform/advanced as other groups for a number of reasons, but I think this is a challenge we are ready and working to meet. Having more long-time, dedicated Marxists like Paul will only help accelerate and deepen that process and I hope that others come to the same conclusion he has.

"I radicalized mainly around Che, Cuba, and the Bolivarian Revolution over the past few years and have never taken a stand on the 'state capitalist' question. I mean to do more reading on it as it is an official ISO position, but as Paul pointed out, it is not rigidly enforced and is discussed openly.While I still have an affinity for Che and Cuba (as do many ISO comrades) I think the our critical stance is important both on principle and to differentiate ourselves from more Stalinist groups....

"Around the time I joined the ISO I was also very drawn to the Green Party (having not been political during the 2000-2004 elections where the ISO was involved in both of Nader's campaigns) and interested in the possibility of new formations such as the NPA, SA, RESPECT, and Die Linke.... I am interested in discussing the possibility of new formations and I think comrades in the ISO are as well.Comrade Budgen from the NPA was at our summer conference and there was a fantastic and mostly supportive discussion, though at times heated, around the dissolutionist route the LCR took. The ISO has supported that decision and remains close to all of these groups; comrade Shawki went as far as to say, if I remember correctly, that were we in France we would have made the same decision.

"That said, I don't think the ISO is looking to become a multi-tendency or broader-left organization. I think we want to model ourselves after the Bolsheviks and stay true to a set of revolutionary principles while allowing for democratic debate and differences on certain issues but ultimately being united in action. The ISO has always said that it wants to play a part in forming an explicitly revolutionary vanguard party, but I think that as struggle and resistance in this country heats up there will be a need to think about the
possibility of broad-left alliances or parties or whatever formation makes sense given the developments in the working class and the rest of the left. For me, that is the essence of Bolshevism; democratically and dynamically adapting your organizational methods to the situations at hand so as best to advance existing struggles without allowing revolutionary
principles to fall by the wayside."

[QUOTE ENDS]

While all this may indeed be true -- for a section of left exers to merge with the ISO would carry the US left into a different alignment of forces such that the tactical options available would shift and multiply. I think this is important consideration as regroupment doesn't have to proceed by any one
specific route. Motion occurs only where it can.

The problem with the Marxmailer attitude -- inasmuch as it may be general among such a layer -- is its dedicated shibboleth over organisational questions which in effect amounts to a dogmatic sectarianism which works aggressively AGAINST unity rather than for it.

IF such a coming together -- under the banner of the ISO -- were to occur in the United States the spectrum on the left internationally would shift at this time as the example would challenge all the other groupings who are so dedicated to their narrow mindsets. In Britain this impasse is extremely destructive (eg: in Scotland three socialist orgs are going to run neck to neck in a Glasgow by election) but can only be resolved by one party element having the political guts to break the logjam, and by consciously blinking move the far left
forward, rather than back to the bunker.

I think the ongoing discussion about left regroupment has moved on under the influence of the LCR/NPA decision this year and a very concrete proposition has been pitched before us by the French.

Of course the DSP's response to this challenge has been clear....

This new axis is driving some interesting debates. Even Socialist Unity's Andy Newman has waded in AGAINST the NPA example and has pitched instead for a broad, programatically loose (& tactically very pragmatic) electoralist party formation in the mode of Die Linke that will readily enter coalition governments == as de Linke has done in some German states and the PCF (French Communist Party) has always been willing to do.

I think at its core here are competing perspectives: on the one hand is a desire to fill the political space that seems to exist with a quick-set new party formation so that it can harness the electoral credits that may seem to be begging.(And you fill it by being as politically loosey goosey as you dare.)

On the other hand is a desire to advance the socialist left into this new context without giving up on its core revolutionary perspectives -- in effect generating new alliances and partnerships without falling under the reformist chariot wheel.

Obviously there is going to be a wax and wane about all this. My view is that the first options is,on its own, in terms of core principles, simply
unsustainable primarily because it accepts the capitalist state as a potentially benign force...just as the Green parties do

Of course the question of coalition is not on the cards just yet in the UK* but the debate masks a programatic and tactical preference that suggests that a sort of left social democracy can be rejigged if we only relaxed our principles. I think that sort of confusion obscures what Respect could achieve if it moved more aggressivley in an activist extra parliamentary direction rather than remain so much an electoral coalition.

The key point , however, is that the regroupment challenge -- the political "phase" the left may be going through -- is not finished with yet. To some on the left it may appear to hang around like a bad smell, but ultimately it has to come down to facing up to what may indeed be possible NOW not at some hypothetical later on.

Because as soon as you concede and say "Yes later on we no doubt will come together." you leave yourself open to the rebuttal, "if then why not now?"

dave riley

* The question of coaltion is tactical question in specific circumstances that may present themselves.Deciding to be "for" coalition or "against" coalition is an abstraction without the details of the actual 'opportunity' (and opportunity is the correct word perhaps) being clear. Eg: would the SA enter a coalition at the council/local govt level with the Greens? Possibly. Would the SA enter a coalition at the state or federal level with the Greens (as the Greens did in Tassie)? Probably not.

__________

The enthralling aspect of LeBlanc's POV is that it is unashamedly committed to revolutionary social change rather that a sort of dedicated deference to accommodating to the rigors of isolation. It is not about a withdrawing from a Marxist (and Leninist)perspective at all. In contrast, a layer of sixties exers are in the business of advancing such a distancing rationale and blaming the parties of the far left for their pessimistic 'analysis'.

You need to recognise the sort of spin we've been fed -- maybe for as long as a couple of decades from within our own midst-- which tries to blame 'party building' per se for so much of that which has befallen the socialist movement
.

The complication is, of course, that the socialist parties don't recognize their potential role in making the best use of the here and now, and in a sense, exaggerate the very symptoms that they are marked down for -- the circle spirit, the bunker mentality,the dedication to shibboleths, etc. It's almost a determined negation of the option that presents itself. (Almost? Maybe not...)

What LeBlanc does is cut through the crap and poses a challenge both to the layer he comes from -- as well to the party he has joined.

We know that despite their seeming similarity both in genesis (the 1990s IST purges) and outlook ( the state capitalist template) -- there is a massive world of difference between the American ISO and Socialist Alternative here.

It's like chalk and cheese.

Similarly it would be impossible for anyone to write about SAlt as LeBlanc has written about the ISO in his joining statement.

So LeBlanc -- and I think he has quite consciously done this -- challenges the anti-party sentiment directly by insisting that if you are serious at all this is what you need to do. The days for wanking on are over.

It also suggests, to my mind, that while there may be a party emporia out there to choose from -- not all of them embrace the rigors of political motion as LeBlanc suggests the ISO does.

So this is also about changing the ISO as much as changing the rest of the left. It's not that LeBlanc goes into the ISO wearing entrism sui generis t-shit with a lobbying perspective -- a them vs me approach -- but as a willing partner to the grand party project overall.

There is a very big difference both in the way the party is engaged with and the sort of results that may follow.

dave riley

Correspondance:

IN fact D. I did not mention the Canadian ISO at all. If I were to mention the Australian ISO -- now called Solidarity -- I would not be at all considerate.I was being specific in regard to the US ISO ad I have hardly any background knowledge of the Canadian ISO -- an organisation I do not monitor.

I wasn't talking about all party orgs so much as referring to one and the changes and the success the US ISO has registered warrants deference.

I also posted the message --which was originally posted to the GLW list in Australia -- to the Marxism list which has for years been dedicated to attacking party socialist outfits that ascribe to a Leninist outlook BECAUSE of what they strive to do

I see where you come from the same stable-- that embittered by your party experiences you treat all socialist outfits as a sort of pariah.

Like you I've been in and out of a party org since 1971 and can relate to your experiences such as the Industrial Turn. And similarly I rant against the party orgs I've had to deal for similar reasons as you do especially since they seem to work so hard to caricature themselves in true 'infantile disorder' tradition. My argument was that the US ISO has moved from that modus operandi and now may present as a organisation that is qualitively better than its peers.

This significance could be enriched and broadened if its ranks were enriched with an input of more long term activists of the likes of Paul LeBlanc. The consequences for the movement for socialism would be for the better in the way that a pro party and anti-party divide is not.

It's impact too would be broader than just within the United States.

It's not much use that comrades like those in the Marxmail community try to extrapolate in the abstract the sort of board multi tendency new left party they'd like to see come together and would 'consider' joining if it did -- when it doesn't seem to be happening in the real world and will not happen without the energetic commitment of a driving force to lead it-- such as could be activated by the US ISO.

Marxmailers aren't going to make it happen as Marxmailiers are if anything a forum and theme & not a organising network.

So this crisis that confronts the left -- a very real and very deep crisis that few recognise -- is one of working out what way to next proceed.

I'm being very arrogant and controversial by suggesting that LeBlanc has found a way -- in the United States -- to move forward. In Canada -- I have a little to do with Canadians around the Socialist Project. LeftStreamed and Socialist Voice -- and I'd not offer such an opinion. But since the Marxmailer Americans are so keen to rule on our activities in Australia I think I've got licence in my right of reply.

I in fact belong to one of those far left orgs -- the DSP here in Australia -- which has two months to live before winding up and merging into the Socialist Alliance here.

There hangs a story.

dave riley

SOCIALIST ALLIANCE WINS FIRST COUNCIL SEAT

2009-10-22T01:04:00.000-07:00

t has been all rather quiet in that regard, Derek, here in the antipodes.

I should point out that this result has occurred in the lead up to the 7th National Conference of the Socialist Alliance in January next year which will be marked by the merging of the Democratic Socialist Perspective into the SA.

This parallels the integration pursued by the majority of the Militant section in Scotland into the SSP, and the LCR into the New Anti Capitalist Party in France. Such a merger had been a commitment of the DSP since 2003 but was put on hold by the political environment both inside and outside the DSP.

( The DSP suffered a major split in 2008 over the issue of its commitment to the Socialist Alliance.)

While the SA has affiliate organisations — the Marxist parties who once were in the SA left after 2005 and have since tried to studiously ignore its existence — even at election time.

So despite that neglect we have been working at the coal face and after doing quite well at the Victorian local government elections in 2008 we’ve finally got one of our own up in Perth.

That means that along with Stephen Jolly — a member of the CWI aligned Socialist Party — there are two socialist councillors in Australia. That however needs to be compared to the fact that The Greens have many more than that , including representation at federal and state level (in some states).*

It varies of course. Here, in my state of Queensland, the Greens hold no elected office at any level.

So it needs to be pointed out that the Greens have for some years now soaked up the alternative and protest vote to the left of the ALP — Australian Labor Party. That has been a difficult obstacle for the advancement of the specifically socialist vote as there has been a preferred trend to vote Greens at election time despite alignments as the Greens are seen as having a chance of getting elected (when we’re not).

Similarly after those orgs who were affiliated left the SA, almost all the Marxist organisations in the country have urged that course and have, in the case of some of them, mobilised for the Greens on polling day in the way that once upon a time they religiously called for a primary vote for the ALP.

In their new POV, The Greens are seen as a polarising axis for left politics. But program and platform issues aside, the main problem with the Greens, despite progressive policies, is that they are so cravenly electoralist. And co-membership of other parties is proscribed by the Greens

Inasmuch as the SA has been able to advance electorally — and that includes the SP’s success in Melbourne — The Greens have been found wanting in regard to standing up to neo-Liberalism.So while we weren;t standing directly against Greens candidates in Perth, we do elsewhere, and in the case of local government elections in Victoria last year, began to out poll the Greens in a couple of places.

Another factor in the SA’s presence vis a vis The Greens is a very conscious attempt to work with Greens members where we can. So you’ll find Greens members attending and addressing SA conferences and forums — and , especially in the Climate Change movement, we work very closely with left greens in trying to get a movement mobilised. I mean a real partnership has been established in some centres and campaigns.

But then we do a lot of Environment Movement work — as Derek says we’re “good ecosocialist comrades”.

So, if I can begin to rap up this very long comment, I’ll just make five (short) further points:

(i) Despite the failure of most of the far left organisations to remain on the unity wagon promoted by the SA, the project has survived and has been able to move ahead during what has been difficult times.
(2) Sustaining this exercise has come at some cost — especially to the DSP — but the layer of non DSP members in the SA have remianed loyal to the Alliance.
(3) For the past 6 years especially, the DSP has more or less been investing cadre energy building two parties – the DSP and the SA. This confusing conumdrum is being resolved, much to the advantage of an Alliance focus, in what is likely to be the DSP’s (conference) decision to wind up and merge into the SA. At the moment the details of merging are being worked out.
(4) Since the post 2005 exodus of the Marxian affiliates form the SA no other unity project has been developed in this country. The two wings of the IST franchise — one official, one not — fused after three years of separation — but the Australian far left remains, more or less, outside the SA, a carbon copy of the sort of waring tribalism you experience in the UK.
(5)And finally, I need to point out that the SA is an unashamedly socialist project whose primary activity is not elections and electioneering but movement work, day in day out.
—-
*The Greens have been going for about 17 years but in their coming together relied on the fusion with two independent senators from the old Nuclear Disarmament Party . The NDP was a major break in Australian politics initially over the question of US bases and uranium mining. The NDP’s high profile candidate at the 1984 election was the rock star Peter Garrett who is now the ALP Federal Environment Minister (and administers the ALP’s urnanium mining , woodchipping, etc policies!) Garret split the NDP at its founding conference in 1985 and walked out with its one elected Senator, Jo Valentine. This split formed no new organisation but Garret had stifled the further development of this significant break from Labor by accusing the DSP, which had worked tirelessly to build it, of dominating the NDP. This lead to massive media frenzy which set back the regroupment agenda for years.

_______

By: Dave Riley

by Dave Riley

Daphne is correct — and I’m up to any suggestion — what sort of platform do you stand on at the local level given that , in the case of Fremantle, we do stuff locally and are deferred to because of that? Thats’ always going to be a bugbear with this sort of politics from the POV of Marxist orgs — always always focusing debate over programatic questions and ‘their differences’.. However, none of the affiliates to the SA exited because of questions of program. Not one of them. The closest issue to a program dispute in the SA before 2005/06 was most of the affiliates’ insistence that the SA pass on preferences to the ALP ahead of the Greens. They have all I think changed that position since (and rather aggressively as you see from my last comment).
In fact the ISO’s — local IST franchise, now Solidarity — notification of pulling out of the SA cited the ALP preference question as one of its primary reasons for leaving. It also argued incorrectly that the SA put an equal sign between the ALP and the Liberal National Party coalition (our version of The Tories).
As far as I can gather by dissecting the anti DSP rhetoric , most affiliates left the SA because it failed to prosper electorally in the post 2004 environment of the re-election of Howard government. And since they all operated as a voting block in the SA it was very much a one out all out exit as they all , except one, opposed the SA moving forward as a party formation rather than just an electoral coalition. That was the nub of the dispute 2003-2006.
As for the Socialist Alternative — yes it has done very well on campus and has prospered there. Without denigrating its achievments — yes it did have 700 or whatever to its conference but you see, it snaffled John Pilger as a key speaker which maybe jacked up the attendance figures a smiggin? Pilger always pulls a crowd.(The irony being that the only place Pilger can be regularly read in Australia is in the pages of Green Left Weekly and GLW has sponsored Pilger public meetings in the past.).
SAlt is a spit off from the IST going back to the 1990’s purges and has followed a course of constructing a propaganda grouping and, going on the debate in the DSP over more than 2 years , the RSP comrades are obsessed with Socialist Alternative.
As for who’s got a bigger membership I think the SA is indeed the biggest grouping on the Australian left but I haven’t got the figures to lay out. It’s growth slowed after 2004 but is now beginning to pick up such that I think in Western Australia where this local government election was held, we’ve recently doubled our membership.
But the strength and vitality of the SA varies across the country. And part of the process of DSP merging has been a rejigging of how the SA organises its work at the local level in the lead up to both the DSP and SA conferences in January which will occur back to back.
I’ve been ill and I really cannot rule on how this has gone but what it comprised was a winding down of the DSP and a boosting of the SA focus for DSP comrades. And when I say the DSP is going to merge into the SA — this move while paralleling the SSP and the NPA experience — differs in the fact that the struggle isn’t all that buoyant at the moment in Australia. We’re not riding a massive poll tax revolt nor are we enjoying the fruits of a strong electoral presence.
Thats’ why this election win is a boost for the whole left – the RSP, SALT, Solidarity, FSP, SPO, CPA …not just the SA.

_________

By: Dave Riley

by Dave Riley

Just on Terry’s point and in deference to Keiren’s - and I won’t get into a point-of-clarification debate with him — since the SA still exists and since it still has more or less the same general program, similar shallow federalist structure, and political approach, as it did in 2005 — the door is always open to affiliation or to whatever partnering , I guess, can be negotiated.
But if these other organisations follow the same approach as they did at the last federal poll and ignore the Alliance’s existence all together than it will be their credibility that may suffer.
And after January next year, blaming the DSP for the Alliance’s failures isn’t going to make much sense either.
It may be clear that the SA does indeed have a future and if we do better still in whatever context we are engaged in by dint of being a ‘unity’ exercise (& not a just another socialist org as there is a very big difference between the two ) — then this project will indeed be the first initial steps toward a regroupment of the left, but a left regretably outside the far left organisations.
That may be the SA’s success but it is also its tragedy.
That the DSP couldn’t carry a section of its own membership in this direction (and in this context with this particular vehicle ) suggests how much the left mindset may have to change before the will embrace any exercise like this unconditionally.
However, I think we’ve learnt from experience that at stake is not just “a” question of “a” party organisation, but a broader unity envelope which for us is refracted in such areas as the environment movement,indigenous struggle, migrant politics, in the trade unions, etc. It is a different way of doing political business.And in that sense the SA is not a golden calf. Who knows what forms this trajectoy will take and who will later be on board?
Since this is an UK based blog focused on UK politics I think it may be useful to consider our experiences in Australia and all the POVs because regardless of their nature they’ll reflect something about the unity tasks — and obstacles.

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---------

By: Dave Riley

by Dave Riley

Just a clarification. In making this point I mistakenly squished two separate differences into one episode:”In fact the ISO’s — local IST franchise, now Solidarity — notification of pulling out of the SA cited the ALP preference question as one of its primary reasons for leaving. It also argued incorrectly that the SA put an equal sign between the ALP and the Liberal National Party coalition (our version of The Tories).”
The notification, did not raise the preference question as the letter actually says the following:
http://www.gouldsbooks.com.au/ozleft/isoleavessa.html
“Secondly, there is absolutely no role for sectarianism towards working people who have broken with Labor, considering making the break, or simply unhappy with the party’s direction. Formations that establish unnecessary conditions on the participation of such individuals will remain on the margins of politics. In this regard, the development of the Alliance into an organization that routinely treats the ALP as if it were simply “Another Liberal Party” is inexcusable. This is especially so in the context of Labor’s resurgence under Kevin Rudd. Labor’s challenge to Howard raises a number of difficult questions
that socialists have a duty to relate to, such as the US alliance or the privatisation debate, to name two of the most important examples. But the starting point must be what we have in common with Labor supporters, and an effort on our part to create the possibility of united action. There is no longer any doubt that the internal climate created by the DSP has established insurmountable barriers to the Alliance’s ability to attract any significant number of former or current Labor supporters.”
I think the letter is dated January 2007 but the IS began its withdrawl from the Alliance from 2005.

Back to SOCIALIST ALLIANCE WINS FIRST COUNCIL SEAT

Re: the WSWS on Polanski

2009-10-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

I don't want to extend this thread here but the WSWS has gone on a campaign to defend Polanski with this entry being the most strident in their arsenal:
The sordid coalition pursuing filmmaker Roman Polanski -- By David Walsh
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pola-o08.shtml

I guess I shouldn't ever be surprized at what the WSWS comes up with in way of argument but this rant-- snippets below -- by Walsh is rachet plus.

The complication is that the real scandal is that most rapists -- let alone most pedophiles (go ask the Catholic Church )-- go no where near a jail whether their surname is Polanski or Smith or Senator Bob Collins. Roman is, in effect, simply securing the freedom most rapists enjoy.

As I pointed out before on this list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/64080

"In Australia, the conviction rate in rape trials is 35 per cent ( compared however with over 70 per cent in all other criminal matters).In Australia legal proceedings begin in only a fifth of cases investigated and 40 per cent of cases that go to court are withdrawn."

The conviction rate in England and Wales for rape has fallen to 6.5 per cent! Scotland has an even lower conviction rate at only 2.9 per cent.This is despite that the proportion of false allegations was "extremely low" — ranging from 2 per cent to 9 per cent.

But this forensic fact is totally lost on the WSWS site's Walsh, who writes such twaddle as:

" We are seeing before our eyes, so to speak, the movement of an entire layer of the upper-middle class to the right. There are those in the circles in and around Salon, the Nation and the rest of the liberal media who are merely stupid, to be frank, and easily duped. But there are others who are well aware of what is going on. They welcome the chance to cement relations with reactionary elements.

"Remarkably, the anti-Polanski campaign has become yet another opportunity for liberal and ex-left elements to accommodate themselves to the right and return to the respectable fold.

"In some quarters the campaign against Polanski is given a “left” twist. Some of the letter writers to the WSWS uncritically echo these arguments...." [Oh those stupid, duped, feminist-loving fools who read WSWS!]

"In the past, “feminist liberals” would have been embarrassed by the confluence of their opinions with those of the extreme right, and would perhaps have disavowed their newfound allies. Now they revel in the relationship."

But the WSWS POV has a terrible logic to it . Its' almost textbook schema stuff.

Of course there are political complications with urging the determined pursuit of any one and with any demand that they serve time. The Pedophile frenzy much loved by politicians and tabloid journalists is an example of how that plays out as it is indeed a law and order stalking horse --a sort of knee jerk perenial sure to win support. But what WSWS does in its rush to rage against the capitalist state is conveniently forget that a crime, in anyone's lexicon, was committed -- although Walsh chooses to not use that term preferring instead to call it a "sad affair" .

I hate to say this, but there is a undercurrent within the Marxist left, with strong workerist preferences, to no longer even play lip service to feminism as it did in the seventies and eighties.

Traditionally some currents -- like the WSWS but there were others-- opposed the feminist movement as liberal middle class protest that served only to divide the working class by gender.

If you check back you'll get the measure of its rages around the Tommy Sheridan fracas in the SSP. And in each instance the main argument will usually rest on

(a) the question of the class divide and the unity of the working class
(b) the autocratic power of the bourgeois state

Anything else cannot mitigate these overriding imperatives.

Back to -- Re: the WSWS on Polanski

Re: Why Prison Privatisation Should Be Opposed: Kim Bullimore, Direct Action #15

2009-09-09T17:58:00.000-07:00

I fear that there's an attempt to make an in principle ruling as though that's all there is to it: screws aren't ordinary workers.

And that' supposedly suffices.

If so -- then what does that make workers in the fastest growing sector in the Australian economy, the private security industry?

Un-ordinary too? They do the work of cops, carry arms, use authority and physical violence...

In my experience such as places like Morriset in NSW, Goodna in Queensland and Beechworth in Victoria the primary local employment options over several generations was in the past either the local mental hospital or the local jail. In Beechworth each institution occupies a local hill either end of the main street. In Morisset Hospital they used to run a dandy of a forensic section which really combined the best of both worlds: three rows of fences,electric wire, staff with batons (masquerading as torches), total lock down...scary.

In fact between being locked up in parts of most psychiatric hospitals or incarcerated in a prison there's not a very clear rule of thumb if you wanted to be guided by principle. The tools vary that's all: arms or pharmaceuticals.

The complication in both areas is that those who work there *are* ordinary workers because they share the same impulses for solidarity and mutual support that drive class consciousness and trade union strength in other industries.They are indeed victims or products of socialised labour. The difference being that there's this subordinate other grouping -- the prisoners or patients -- who every day have to wear the ability of the work force to stick together and assert itself --such as at the coroner's inquest. And of course, these *ordinary'* workers are given boss powers --something like the shop floor foreperson. In Queensland the term 'Woogaroo Screw'(justifiably I think) traditionally referred to both prison officers *and* psychiatric nurses working
Wolston Park Hospital or Wacol Jail (now closed).

The same dynamic occurs in the police force and here in Qld the Police Union is without doubt the strongest 'union' in the state wielding massive political power because it rules over so many issues that impact on law and order such as black deaths in custody. So as a 'union' it does extremely well by its members.

But as we've seen with Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, it backs killers in its ranks -- no questions asked.

A similar argument could be extended to professional soldiers -- as Nick suggested. At times of no conscription soldiering is a choice working people make maybe with the presumption that they won't be doing any of the killing and such, but as Iraq and Afghanistan prove, you never know.That's often a complication of doing an apprenticeship by signing up.

So are soldiers un-ordinary workers too? But then the same impulses to back your mates, defend and avenge them are played out not in the trade union meeting or the picket line but on the battle field -- trying to kill others. Nonetheless, the in principle approach on the Marxist left has been to back soldiers and excuse their actions, even when reprehensible, as products of imperialist
aggression.

Of course, soldiery, prison officers, cops are agents of the capitalist state -- no doubt about that,even if they're unconscious of the fact, they're part of the body of armed men (and women) -- that sustains it. I guess you could say the same about many Centrelink workers and ticket inspectors on the rail roads as well except they aren't carrying guns. The state is the state with a pervasive power that is omnipresent under capitalism and can even apply to any number of nerds recruited to monitor us all on CCTV.

The way I understood the military question was that it was not just a question of conscription (of turning workers into soldiers), or class (I think most Russian soldiers in WWI were peasants) but of tactics -- disarming a sector of the state that could be deployed against the revolution by winning over and disarming a key sector of that state's strength. In the same sense, during the Vietnam War, making overtures to the military was not so much a matter of principle but of tactics so that, as did finally occur, the war could no longer be fought with the soldiers the military possessed.( Another example is de Gaulle's use of troops stationed *outside* France to deploy inside the country during May/June 1968 because he could not be sure the army ranks inside France would fire, when ordered to, on French workers).

So I have to wonder that if prison officers aren't *ordinary workers* -- what are they supposed to be? I don't mean that if they may be *ordinary* we have to support them unconditionally every time as the Healyites dogmatically did and the workerists of the CWI argue. But relying on a sort of in principle ruling or special label isn't very helpful either primarily because their *work* emanates not from them as a group of workers but their relationship to the capitalist state, which is a relationship which is more or less out of their hands.

dave riley

Back to discussion thread

Re: Communism in Australia | Links

2009-07-22T05:17:00.000-07:00

The complication of a nucleus, inasmuch as I can recall my Physics and Chemistry, is that it always remains a nucleus.

You can split it of course.....(more easily in political life than you can in nuclear fission.)

The countervailing perspective is the one that over uses the concept of the united front -- just as the English SWP did in regard to Respect: a "united front of a special kind'" -- but that is totally schematic and rigid (especially when you get to the detail).

In the literature, the SA refers to itself as a "campaigning alliance" and I think that's the most useful term and concept for " clusters and clumps of activists and individuals". I also often use the term "partnerships" -- or "intertwining partnerships" to describe the phenomenon in play because I like to point out that one of those many partnerships is with the DSP.

But to capture a useful analogy that maybe stands with Lenin's one of scaffolding for the process engaged when 'constructing' a party is difficult because there's a lot of synergy involved. But "nodes" makes me think of the "nodes of Ranvier" which are the indentations along the myelin sheaves of nerves. However, in botany the meaning is very clear: the small swelling that is the part of a plant stem from which one or more leaves emerge.

So the PROCESS -- the dialectical process -- of *growing* the party has been ill served by some of the terminology we have inherited and casually used. And Lenin's concept of the party was a dialectical and dynamic one through and through -- despite the fact that it has tended to be read and replicated as if it was a static form.

So what Alan argues is much closer to the truth:" A cadre party, in my opinion, would be one largely composed of natural leaders of the working class and the oppressed, capable of mobilising the vanguard layers of the class, and thus leading the class into action... cadres are such by virtue of their relationship to the class as a whole, and not just because they profess allegiance to the holy books."

While this may seem indulgent semantics there is a cogent point to be made I think about what your perspectives are or may be. In the words of Marx --"what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax."[ - Marx, Capital I, p284]

This is not just about replicating past forms hybridised in a new milieu. This is about fostering a different political ecology than what has been the engagement of the socialist left these last 40 years.

So the question of program, to my mind, is one of whether it helps or hinders that process -- not so much because of its content -- such that it becomes a fetish -- but the way that it is applied.

Back to Re:Communism in Australia

Re:Communism in Australia

2009-07-19T03:04:00.000-07:00

--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "red_april65" wrote:

This is why the DSP argumments that "ideology" is not important is wrong and why it leads to liquidationism. Regroupment based around just "doing" stuff, simply regroups people/groups around reformist ideas not revolutionary socialist ones. As I have argued before, revolutioinary socialist/Marxist unity is based on ideological agreement and for Marxists/revolutionary socialists that ideological agreement is based the understanding that working class revolution is what will bring about socialism.

If we can put aside, at least for a moment please, your desire to default to a broken record response and blame the DSP for all the reformist ills you can imagine -- I made it quite clear that I was advancing my own thoughts on the matter.

But that said --and while I did not argue that "ideology" was unimportant -- I appreciate your concise expression of a particular perspective because I think you summarize it in a nutshell.

That being the case then, I have no particular argument with the way you articulate your POV. If "revolutionary socialist/Marxist unity is based on ideological agreement" and for "Marxists/revolutionary socialists that ideological agreement is based the understanding that working class revolution is what will bring about socialism" -- then why hasn't the revolutionary socialist/Marxists " all united given that it is a simple matter of agreeing that "that working class revolution is what will bring about socialism"? They've had 40 years to do so you know.

If "ideology" was all that was at stake and secondary matters of tactics and strategy -- what people do day to day-- are mere side issues -- then I'm wasting bandwidth and simply blowing in the wind.

The irony is, of course, that you chose to advance an argument that suggests the "stuff" being done by comrades who aren't "Marxists/revolutionary socialists" is inherently different and reformist from what you yourself as a *consciously* (that's the head space thing again) Marxists/revolutionary socialist would do.

So that begs the question that as a "Marxist/revolutionary socialist" what do you do day to day that is so inherently revolutionary or so un-reformist that it separates you from these others such that you could never unite with them?

dave riley

Back to Communism in Australia

Re: Communism in Australia

2009-07-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

Obviously I think there's a very large discussion to be had out and about these topics.

In perhaps, true Surrealist stream of consciousness style -- when I walk away from this forum I'm still thinking on the questions posed.

This is no doubt excellent fodder for the DSP's Pre-Conference Discussions which I am fortunate to be a part of. However,there are a few topics that relate to this exchange (Although I'm using it as an excuse to get my own thoughts down in virtual digitization -so I'm my main audience).

The FIRST question that springs to my mind is that of Murray Smith. Smith is a Scot who has more recently been a member of the French LCR. He wrote a few essays on 'multi tendency socialist parties' (MTSP) in relation to the way the SSP experience unfolded.

But when I recall what Smith was on about -- very useful as it was -- and the perspectives of those especially in England who share his outlook -- I think he got it wrong in some aspects, just as these others get it wrong. Not completely, but he was so keen to steer clear of the Lenin challenge that he sort of disemboweled his contributions from much direct reference to it let alone availing himself of using the precedence to enrich his argument. While in the UK Leninism is a dirty word, thanks to parties like the SWP et al, there's not much discussion about Lenin's concepts and how they relate to these new party perspectives -- even if the 'L' label isn't spoken.

What I mean is that while the "vanguard" notion -- especially that of the self proclaimed vanguard -- gets a drubbing the argument shifts I fear, as it has here to some degree, to 'what sort of party' rather that to 'what sort of politics'. And what sort of party is so often about the party that isn't something else -- as though the party envisaged was a mea culpa party.

It's a sort of preference for formal thinking. And what Smith does is deflect much of his advocacy towards the sort of party, it's form, rather than the party's politics -- what it does. (Someone told me how Murray Smith lined up in the LCR in regard to the NPA debate during 2008, but I've forgotten what was his location.)

So in the schema, electoral success aside, the Dutch Socialist Party could be considered as on par with the Scottish Socialist Party or the French NPA...or the German Die Linke -- because of some generic form they seem to be and the niche they occupy, especially electorally.

And all that matters is to engineer the biggest and broadest party to the left of social democracy as quickly as we can because the space exists there to fill while spilling all the left orgs into it.

When you look at it, this concept, shared by many new party adherents, has the ring and huzza of the invention of sliced bread.

But they're as keen as mustard about it -- and aggressively so. Take Louis Proyect for instance. It's supposedly a great idea going begging.

It's a "build it and they will come" approach.

That's one question

The SECOND question, to my mind, has to be that of the Greens. I'm not aware of any thorough political history that may exist of the Greens party experience here in Australia but if we want to comprehend "Communism in Australia" what about "Greens in Australia" -- the very last hesitation to socialism.

What can that tell us about alternative party making and the pressure of opportunism compared to allegiance to a primary goal? In this regard it's worth while noting that the Greens , up until 1997 had no more than around 750 members (according to Bob Brown). But they have now been around for something like 17 years so they're very much a piece of the political furniture.

And in terms of new alternative parties -- they're a success -- assuming we share the same terms of judgement.

But how does the experience of the Greens relate to the history of the Communist Party despite the fact that the Greens weren't handicapped by either international cominternism or too much (bad)theory? Are the Greens, root and branch, unlike the far left orgs, creatures of opportunism?

How much of the Greens experience and history can be held up as a model? If you go ask the state cap currents -- SAlt and Solidarity -- they'll tell you The Greens are the hope for left politics.They're what you work for on polling day and who you chase votes for rather than support the SA..

I don't think it's a mistake to compare the Greens to the Communist Party despite the obvious differences. I mean, when you look at it, by how much has the Greens transcended the role of the Democrats in Australian politics? And has the Greens a hope in hell of bettering the role of the CPA historically? I think there's a qualitatively big difference but where they are similar is where the complications set in.

While it is reasonable to argue that what the Greens are and have become is a product of how they were led these last 17 years, have the Greens anywhere attained the sort of embedded grass roots alignment that the CPA was able to garner in some localities at periods in its existence? I think the answer is no (except for the early No Dams context in Tassie perhaps)because despite their electoral presence their very political engineering ensures that they are a shallow implantation on the Australian political scene.

(I think that point needs to be mulled over: how deep is the Greens implantation in Australian politics -- DESPITE that 8 point percentile?)

I think a probable reason for this , what I think is, seeming shallowness stands out like a sore thumb: the Greens are so cravenly electoralist. Maybe I'm judging them too harshly because of my Queensland experience of them, but I think nonetheless that there is a reason there that maybe electoral success isn't the be all and end all of a better political presence and certainly, political substance.

If you go back and compare the Greens to the Communist Party, the CPA was a electoral midget EXCEPT in Bowen in Far North Queensland where it returned councillors and a local state MP, Fred Paterson.
However, when you consider what sort of implantation the CP had in that district, it leaves all Greens rhetoric of being "grassroots" behind by a verdant mile.

Similarly if you consider how Paterson performed as an elected member of parliament ( or even the SP's Steve Jolley in inner Melbourne council or, for that matter, Nick Origlass in Leichhardt)-- the Greens should be ashamed of themselves in comparison.

This, in my mind also raises the sliding doors prospect of what the Greens would now be like IF the DSP had merged or affiliated with them from the beginning of their existence. No doubt there would have been a longer factional fight than there was , but the party's history would be closer to that of the Green Party of England and Wales which saw the exodus from that party of the right wing after a long running political dispute. Inasmuch as you can suggest anything, I'm certain that the Greens by 1997 would have been very much larger than the 750 members Brown cites AND the Greens would be qualitatively very much more than an electoral vehicle. As for their politics, at least their platform...where would it differ?

As for the continuing strength of their electoral presence that depends on how you call it: that they patent a colour? That they have an iconic figure like Bob Brown in their midst? That they have No Dams and NDP roots? That the space just grew and the Greens happened to be to the left of Labor and filled it by default? That the Greens made the right call with the Iraq invasion and social justice issues? That at the 2007 poll they had the alignment correct and backed YourRights@Work(unlike the Dems)? {Because if they hadn't they would have been courting irrelevance].

dave riley

Back to Communism in Australia

Re: Communism in Australia

2009-07-17T05:25:00.000-07:00

-- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "James Crafti" wrote:
It struck me that the members of World Vision and Amnesty International I know are dedicated to and loyal to it primarily because of what it does.

I don't think my hypothesis is proven wrong by this allusion since I very much doubt that World Vision or Amnesty International share a mass action or a socialist perspective.

To miss my point -- although I'm exaggerating it so I can highlight it -- and try to obscure its relevance is precisely what the far left has been guilty of for yonks.

So don't let *me* stop you.

On the other hand....

"As a current of political thought and as a political party, Bolshevism has existed since 1903. Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up and maintain, under most difficult conditions, the iron discipline needed for the victory of the proletariat.

"The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat's revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the orrectness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement." -- An Essential Condition of the Bolsheviks' Success

I'll spell out the main features of the Lenin quote that may apply , albeit in shallow form, to our current political circumstances:

(1) "The class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism."

There's no argument there.To make a revolution you need revolutionaries. Let's say that all the groupuscules can tick that box. So they get part of the business, and an important part too of course, correct.

(2) By the ability of that vanguard"to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish— merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people."

Lenin's really into verbs in a big way here and what strong verbs they are too: "link up with" and "merge". He also builds on that with the unambiguous phrase "maintain the closest contact with".

There's no talk here specifically about propaganda -- of the 'vanguard' being respected for its innate ability to argue, talk up or write a ideological POV separate from some one else's.

(3)"The correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics..
....(a) provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. "

That's the clincher surely -- "the correctness of its political strategy and tactics" is judged not in terms of competing patents or shibboleths but by the broad masses who have seen " from their own experience" that these "political strategy and tactics" are correct.

(4)And Lenin then offers a legacy to remind the post sSxties left of what they face if they do not work to these principles: He says that "without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning."

It's one thing to say well we haven't had "these conditions" to enjoy as we don't have the same class conditions to work with. But it is another thing altogether to then argue that we will instead seek shelter in propagandizing and that we're not quite up to merging with the masses just yet.

Isn't the standard presumption advanced that in fact the masses need to come to us? You know, when they're ready to finally listen to what we have to say...when our day will come...

Correct me if I'm wrong but Lenin suggests that that's precisely the trap that will foster "phrasemongering and clowning".We know that's so true because we are not idiots and can recognize "phrasemongering and clowning" as a core activity of the maddest of the far left sects.

But *we* are free of it -- how? Because we own a better program than they do ? That's not what Lenin is saying.

He's saying that if you don't want to end up as dribbling phrasemongers you have to

(1)"link up with"
(2)"merge"
(3)"maintain the closest contact with"

...."the broadest masses of the working people"

I'm not suggesting that this is an easy navigation, but we need to face up to the sort of journey we need to negotiate and start to address it rather than defer the stepping out.

This journey I think was explained well by Rosa Luxembourg:

"On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one had, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectic contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.

"It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform....

"... the socialist movement is a mass movement. Its perils are not the product of the insidious machinations of individuals and groups.
[ASIDE: Get that!: "Its perils are NOT the product of the insidious machinations of individuals and groups..." Opportunism is a material development not something sucked form a thumb.]
"They arise out of unavoidable social conditions. We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself – certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice."

Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

The core historical point here is , of course, that the dangers of opportunism that Luxembourg refers to were a major historical phenomenon accompanying the growth of imperialism in the late 19th century which was also the peril that the CPA fell victim to -- especially, I suggest, in the conditions of the Post War Boom.

But she does advise us that we can't get much succour from the fact:"We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation."

Is she differing her POV from Lenin on this point? I don't think so. I mean its' a major issue,isn't it -- one that the Sixties New Left answered by seeking -- or excusing -- ever more intense focus on political differentiation and shibboleth detail to ensure it never fell victim to opportunism.

And the truth is that it did not and it has not. Has any group sold out the struggle..ever? Let's be fair and candid on this point -- despite our polemics.

So lets' award ourselves all a Cupie Doll.

Tactical differences there are aplenty but really has any group done an Eduard Bernstein?

No -- our problem is that we never really allowed ourselves to tack " betwixt and between the two dangers" because we were primarily concerned about protecting ourselves from " the abandonment of (our) goal."

Thereby leaving our everyday existence prone to "the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect."

Back to Re: Communism in Australia

Re: Communism in Australia

2009-07-15T04:46:00.000-07:00

The original work on the Red North is an out of print publication (a Hons thesis)which Jim relied on. But that wasn't my point. If people wanted to explore the experience of the North Queensland Communist Party --I suggested ways they could do it.

In my limited study of the CPA I prefer the analysis proffered by Robin Gollan especially *Revolutionaries and reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1975*

Jonathan Strauss takes up some of that perspective here

It seems to me that if you block the standard Trotskyist knee jerk from your outlook and consider the CPA as it delivered day to day politics -- the Stalinist explanation doesn't fulfil its promise. It certainly helps to explain some of what the party did,such as the alignment during the war and the EuroCommunist period, etc -- but not all.

In the light of subsequent events, the CPA's adaption to ALP corporatism during World War II at the time of the war economy is a crucial development in its trajectory that was absolutely echoed in the party's determined promotion of the Prices and Incomes Accord thirty five years later.

To simply relegate CPA history to an exercise in Stalinism is a crude and shallow exploration.

In fact, Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union while spot on for the degeneration the revolution, doesn't help us across the board when we consider all communist parties world wide.

Sure, some were more Stalinised than others -- especially in circumstances where Moscow appointed or executed national party secretaries -- but to be blinkered by Stalinoid shades only obscures the actual content of any indigenous engagement.

The way the Trotskyists went on, you'd think that Stalinism was a virus that , devoid of material historical content , infected parties by means of a pandemic of nasty ideas.

The Troskyist tradition here was blind to that absolutely and could not -- inasmuch as a couple of dozen people are capable of much feral analysis -- comprehend it. So you got this projection onto the CPA which was an exaggeration of the actual situation.

And while they were decrying Stalinism they sought refuge instead elsewhere -- under the apron, and in the bourgeois arms , of social democracy.

This doesn't matter much in terms of today's challenges, except that if you seek to wipe away the legacies of the CPA experience in Australia you also wipe away any detailed lessons we could draw out of it.

At the same time, the dismissal of the CPA tradition only serves to rationalise the continuing separation and containment of groupuscule politics BECAUSE the ONE JUSTIFICATION for it -- that even Trotsky adhered to -- was that the separation was essential (at least after 1933) because the new formations were *not* Stalinist.

It wasn't about them being dedicated to "socialism from below' or an alternative view of Cuba or that they wrote this great new program in a red book that needs to be followed chapter and verse ...

It was that 'we Trotskyists' were *not Stalinists*.

But what was that supposed to mean, concretely?

I think that's where a lot of confusion and ideation set in.

Talk to the gang and they'll say , "well its about adhering to the theory of Permanent Revolution."

Well, is that right?Go ask SAlt and Solidarity and they'll say that the DSP is Stalinist because they DSP dumped that marker.

And that's enough apparently to allow the divide to fester: name calling and a theory that is only strictly relevant Third World countries.

(But hey let's not have a discussion about it shall we...?)

Are you perhaps picking up on the logic being pursued through all this? While sectarianism and all that is indeed a product of the conditions we do our politics under -- it still is a overbearing fact that the groupuscules set themselves up by pursing an ideas driven , propaganda contained ( & sustained?)existence, and then spent a lot of living energy justifying and rationalising it.

But hey, they do, don't they....?

Back to Re: Communism in Australia

Re:Communism in Ausralia

2009-07-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

This is a rather hypothetical suggestion on my part...but I was at the local Socialist Alliance organising meeting tonight when it struck me that the members of the Alliance I know are dedicated to and loyal to it primarily because of what it *does*.

In contrast, in my experience, a lot of the membership of the small socialist groups line up that way because of what they *say* -- it's very much a 'programatic' alignment.

Its an ideological exercise.

This in part no doubt emanates from the intellectual genesis of these outfits that their impetus was and is so much campus driven. Again, SAlt is almost stereotypical in this regard.

I'm not saying that there's a major black and white dividing line on this point -- but I'm suggesting there is a qualitative difference nonetheless in the way politics is addressed.

In the case of Lenin's Bolsheviks no doubt a good portion of the membership were illiterate. (In Gorky's novel/Brecht's play The Mother there's a back story about the attainment of literacy by members of the party for the sake of the getting of Marxist wisdom).

I'm not trying to deprecate knowledge and study and the day to day business of keeping informed and informing but the rather ideological , well, fetish, of segments of the socialist movement here these past 40 years has tended to obscure that very salient fact of politics.

That people can identify as socialists and seek to engage in political activity without the programatic rationales and justifications of the memberships of the orgs have relied on, seems to have snuck under the collective Marxist radar. It also follows that what gains respect and adherence isn't necessarily an org's ability to string together a programatic sentence or two but its ability to deliver activity -- or in the vernacular, leadership .

When you consider the history of Communism in Australia *if* all that was required was the dissemination of Trotskyist (or a Marxist) critique then these small orgs would have prevailed over the Stalinists and social democrats long ago. But even when the condition changes and the presumed day in the sun comes upon us and there's no Stalinism to fret over and social democracy is on the back foot what are the groupuscules offering?

The same ole same ole -- propaganda and aspirations measured in the primitive accumulation of ones and twos.

This myopia may be justified under the aegis of a revolutionary argument but to not recognize that this isn't the Real McCoy of what the party principle is about is to put your head in the sand * and leave it there*.

I think it's also true that the same orgs in their genuine commitment to revolutionary change and mass action have tended to default their interventions to committee work in the quest for a united front milieu. While this is absolutely necessary as we all are ruled by the movement meeting syndrome -- the presumption that the various campaign committees we engage in has to be the extent and limit of our reach is a gross underestimation of what is actually practicable.

The complication is that when you try to address that prospect , as I think the SA is trying to do, you come up against the complication of : if not now , when; if not us, who?

So in a very real sense -- the far left is under a lot of pressure to deliver much more than rhetoric.

So what does that mean in practice?

Well if you go back and look at the history of the Communist Party the lessons are very self evident.

How did the CPA do its best work? Sitting in a committee somewhere fielding tactical disputes between competing groupuscules?

I don't think so. The scope and scale of their embedment was exemplified, among my enthusiasms, in the party's work during its Red North years here in Queensland.

And I knew some of the people who were involved during that period and if you read such biographies as Carole Ferrier's of Jean Devanney you really do get a feel for a very different political existence than what's been our collective lot on the far left.

The irony is that every time I come to deal with issues like this -- and how we could forge our own measure of such grass roots work -- I have to come back to key Leninist arguments about such attributes as "the paper" as a "collective organiser" NOT JUST as a propaganda tool.

But what does or would that mean in practice -- despite the fact we know all the word drill?

dave riley

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Re: Communism in Australia

2009-07-13T02:36:00.000-07:00

--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "raging_rapid" wrote:

> A real shame.

The breakup of the socialist left in Australia began with the 1961 (?) split in the Communist Party in deference to Mao Zedong which saw the formation of the CPA(ML). Then in 1971(?) the SPA was formed on the grounds of allegiance to Moscow (the party which is now called the CPA).

However, the plethora of groups that now inhabit the far left -- the 'groupuscules' -- are a product of the last 40 years almost in every case as local franchisee of some toy international project.

So in that sense a lot of the initial divisions were imported in the sense that small aggregations of activists went looking for international partners and in so doing also took on the already existing factional alignments and divisions.

That historical divide still exists despite the fact that the long term excuse for it -- an alternative view of the Soviet Union -- no longer exists.Instead, inasmuch as a shibboleth is required, today it's a question of what you think of Cuba as a socialist revo or not.

But in terms of the day to day struggle HERE that matters in the broad scheme of things not one iota -- but you will get a total unwillingness on the part of most of these groups to even discuss the issue.

So let's not. So whats' the continuing rationale for the divisions? In a logical sense not much at all -- at most tactical variations and nuances. One group may think they're revolutionary and the rest aint and if push comes to shove that's what the bottom line is DESPITE the fact that day to day they say and do more or less the same things.

As you say: A real shame.

But then comes, what I think is,the clincher: how do these groups which have now more or less co-existed on Terra Australia for 40 years (although the SPA -- in Melbourne is a very recent toy international aligned import)expect to achieve the grand aims laid out in their various program theses if they are limited to a growth rate of ones and twos with activists' shelf life shortened by the vagaries of movement politics?

That's the conundrum. It isn't a question of being sentimental.Its' a hard headed fact that the divisions are wasted energy and are an anathema to EVERYTHING we know to be the core dynamic of political organising.

Ironic is it not -- that the groups prefer chronic division rather than socialist unity.

One thing I think which is missed in Dave Holmes telling of the history of the Communist Party is the uniting force of the presence of the USSR. While there was an radicalisation towards the end of the Second World War and soon after -- the 23,000 members of the Communist Party in 1947 had the unifying presence of the Soviet Union's fight against Fascism to cement them together (although many left when the Cold War kicked in).

While it is de reguer to refer to the CPA's addiction to international Stalinism the CPA on the ground, day to day, in many areas did excellent political work the likes of which no other New Left outfit has been able to match in terms of grass roots engagement at anytime during the past 40 years.

This marginal existence is the major problem for the future health and sustainability of such party building projects. While it is correct to refer to "revolutionary continuity" if you do that by dint of ideology alone -- as SAlt does absolutely -- then what sort of Marxist are you supposed to be.

What has happened is that a new sophistication has set in which excuses the marginalisation and bunker mentality of the far left as being a product of the shallowness of mass political struggle here.

But is that actually the case, or is that a product of this lefts' failure to actively engage with working people and merge with their struggles. The fact is,I think, we do not as yet know the answer to that question...yet.

If the Socialist Alliance takes off in a big way or embeds itself as a key component of a much larger aggregation we will ALL know the answerer to that question -- AND this other reference, this preference for divisions and shibboleths, will be a historical footnote.

But if any one thinks these standalone competing outfits are going to get the socialist package anywhere special by relying on their own steam -- they're dreamin.

Do Riley and "rapid" think the Trotskyists were being "ineffectual" and should have joined the CPA instead?

That's a historical question of course which I doubt that there's any ready answer in hindsight. Forty years ago I was actually IN the CPA so I'm not being hypothetical in that sense and I came to a Trotskyist perspective while I was IN that party.

While I was selling Tribunes with Mark Taft and George Zangalis and participating in the CPA's new attempt at a youth group with Max Ogden I was also reading my Deutscher.

This brings me to the sort of revolutionary continuity argument that the US SWP advanced in a series of books by Farrel Dobbs as they were headily engaged in their passionate embrace of sectdom.

And you know how they rationalised it? By deploying the continuity argument, of course.

If the Trotskyists were indeed "effectual" maybe that's their legacy? They carried the flame and, as you no doubt appreciate, they (for want of a better word)'preserved' the program.

Much in the way many groups see their role today:preventing it from decaying or spoiling and preparing it for future use

Aside from the disconcerting fact that they were driven out of the CPA I don't have that much problem in the Australian context of these Trotskyists being -- or not being -- in the CPA because it was a problem of being between two political stools and that has been the Trotskyists primary burden.

It's a bargain with history.

But the problem you face when you start to make a ruling on your question is the Bob Gould defence: that is was better to join and be loyal to the liberal bourgeois workers party known as the ALP than to the 'river of blood' Stalinists.

We could then ask:Do Riley and "rapid" think the Trotskyists were being "ineffectual" and should have joined the ALP instead?

Well, then -- there's an easy answer to that question because that's precisely what they did do.

dave riley

Further on a theme. Jim Percy once said as I recall that the CPA was the biggest sect in Australia -- and I think that was probably true.

In my experience it religiously protected its alliances with the ALP lefts and the (small "l") liberal activist fraternity against the encroachment of any element from among the sixties New Left.

However, that wasn't a constant across the board thing and despite the fact that the CPA quite consciously and aggressively tried to turn the DSP into a pariah in the eighties as a response to the CPA's shepherding of the Prices and Incomes Accord into place, it wasn't true to say that the rank and file membership of the party was similarly engaged. This was the case here in Brisbane judging from my experience.

Nonetheless, despite the acres of newsprint generated in criticizing the CPA's politics , correct me if I'm wrong, but in my estimation maybe one (or two?) comrades actually joined the DSP directly from the CPA in a space of 20 years of disputation.

I'm not downgrading polemic -- especially the polemic against the Prices and Incomes Accord -- but I think that that sort of approach is deployed alone has proven to offer very limited rewards for the struggle for socialism.

Even now there is no discussion on the far left in Australia, between far left groups. You can't call some of the sarcasm aired on this list 'political discussion' nor can you ignore the fact that the state capitalist projects in this country run away from having an open debate on any issue you care to mention.

So what sort of political culture is this? I'll tell you: it's a culture of sectarianism through and through because it reflects precisely what *is not happening* day to day.

I don't really care if comrade A abuses comrade B in the most heated way. That's not in itself, sectarianism. They're only words. But where it does matter is that the disputation isn't about trying to work together at all. That's not the premise for the exchange.Its' about justifying your separateness and autonomy...and , of course, how friggin right you are.

Let's be blunt and spell it out: exchange on the far left in Australia is about NOT WORKING WITH ONE ANOTHER and that's a dynamic which has festered for decades because these groups don't know another way to do business.

It's habituation.

And that approach -- that sort of crude interventionist mentality -- is embedded up to pussy's bow in the culture of Trotskyism. That's another legacy from the august "revolutionary continuity".

When I was in Scotland recently and asked around about the Sheridan split in the SSP -- what struck me was how much it was a factor of the pre-existing cultural perspectives comrades bought to the project from their earlier political alignments. The bifurcation was very much a sort of rigid old guard divide versus the willingness of other comrades to deal creatively with the uncertainties, and mistakes, of the SSP present. This was the dead hand of
past sects dispute.

It was very much, in my estimation, especially with its shrill workerist and mysogynist coating, a conservative split off from the SSP -- despite the catalyst of Sheridan's ego and the cult of his personality -- which preferred a cynical autonomy to the vagaries of left unity. I think Sheridan congealed that.

When I consider the present unity discourse that has broken out in the UK I think its so self evidently clear that there's not much substance to it. You either begin with the absolute perspective of engaging on a day to day basis as collectively as you can with a commitment to foster greater levels of united action -- or you are simply pissing in the wind.

This isn't rocket science. You need to want something first before you actually strive to get it. And while 'unity' remains at most a sentimental aspiration which for the present you place in the 'too hard basket' then you aint going to get it.

It's a simple as that.

I see that clearly in the way the Socialist Workers comrades approach their work in New Zealand.We're talking about a qualitatively * different political approach* and way of going about political business. There's that major th eme through their work which is tangible.

Of course en route we have to have discussions about some of the complications of a unity or regroupment perspective that kick in but we do that * en route* as the issues arise -- just as the DSP is now doing.

dave riley

Back to Communism in Australia

"Socialist Activism and Responsibility"

2009-07-06T00:10:00.000-07:00

While I might agree that "With left unity each organisation needs to have a separate identity of its own until there is near full agreement on issues..." I nonetheless think such a perspective is mistaken because it presumes that major differences exist that need to be ironed out before proceeding to another stage.

But concretely what are these "issues"?

Where on the left do festering differences exist? Having different views of the Soviet Union may have been a dividing line for 80 years -- but that's no longer the case. Such alternative views are historical questions today So why should that preferred alignment get in the way of unity? There's a lot of filigree passed off as differences on the left for the sake of preserving organisational separation -- but when push comes to shove, a good part of the time what's all that at stake are tactical differences only.

And in the context of the everyday, tactics are going to be fluid and always open to adjustment and change.

My point was that if you begin with the presumption that major differences exist between orgs -- then you'll spend a lot of energy flushing them out and obsessing over them. But then I think you also do not get my main argument about the handicap that bears down upon us: that the main formations on the left do not want unity.

If they did, then the context we are dealing with would be very different indeed. So in reality, whatever formulation may be projected as a way to proceed -- it is a totally hypothetical exercise unless there are outfits who want to move in the direction of left unity.

This really isn't so hard to comprehend is it? You need to want something before you can get it.

I've been in a few 'unity' pow wows and unity projects over the past 25 years -- with greens, Stalinists, social democrats, and Trotskyist groupuscules -- and inevitably what ever shared activities are engineered have been resounding successes. But as soon as the big question is raised about moving one step closer together, of becoming more politically intimate and making these engagments ongoing and sustainable entities with an open agenda -- there's this reversion back to a rigid autonomy preference and the projects collapse.

If you cast your eye across the far left internationally -- and lets' make this simple and stick to that left in the English speaking countries -- there are very few Marxist organisations who are in fact dedicated to a unity perspective and have the wherewithal and chutzpah to actually do something about it. (eg: Australian DSP, New Zealand Socialist Worker group, English Socialist Resistance, Scottish Militant).

That's the problem! It's not because no route exists for this to happen. It's because the formations do not want to travel down it.

Back to "Socialist Activism and Responsibility"

The ‘I’m-more-Marxist-than-you pissing competition’

2009-07-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

re Q: Who is the SA regrouoing with? I’ve been railing and ranting about the regroupment experience long term and I do go on so stop me if you’ve heard this before.

The irony of the Socialist Alliance exercise in Australia is that the far left orgs as Kieren points out are hostile to the project. The polarised polemic nonetheless has tended to obscure the actual on the ground situation.

The main point to make is that the membership of the SA is twice as large as that of the DSP even today, and even after what has been three years of organisational neglect while the DSP weathered its own internal faction fight.

Among these comrades who are not aligned to the DSP but are SA members are trade union militants, a Sudanese Communist grouping (which publishes The Flame in Arabic , some leading Indigenous figures, Marxist intellecturals, Tamil and Latin American community activists — and (as I like to point out from among my local membership circle) comrades who are also still members of the Labor Party and the Greens. Since we haven’t taken a recent poll it is hard to keep up with the demographics.

But the SA project is uneven across the country so its buoyancy and verve will vary. In regional centres like Geelong and Wollongong it is a major historical asset that has begun to match the halcyon days of the old Communist Party. But in places like Canberra, especially after the factional contest in the DSP, it isn’t very strong.

On top of this are some key alliance building initiatives such as between some trade union leaders and the Alliance in Victoria; with sections of the Indigenous and Tamil communities; between the SA and the left wing of the Greens in South Australia… So it is a complex mix of partnerships within the Alliance itself and outside and beyond it. So in a very real sense I think it needs to be stressed that as well as possessing an organisational form, the Socialist Alliance is essentially a very different (and novel) perspective than what has been the standard attitude to political interventions on the far left.

That’s what the report addresses in way of measuring the Alliance’s potential.

However, it needs to be pointed out that within this political mix is the role that has been played by Green Left Weekly for the past 18 years as a core asset for the left in Australia. GLW is a sort of regroupment package in itself.

That said, the SA isn’t a interventionist milieu as in the way many Marxian outfits would associate with united front work. (This is what Proyect discusses in regard to the ‘French Turn’ and entrism sui generis.) This is not something “other than” the DSP as though it is a foreign or hostile environment. In fact, even members of the Alliance get the DSP and the SA mixed up and its very hard to estimate where the DSP supposedly ends and the Alliance begins.

As well, the DSP would strongly argue against Proyect’s estimation of the exercise as un-Leninist. The DSP would argue that regroupment is at the core of Leninist party building approach and, if you like, the DSP minority’s main objection was that the DSP adopted the SA perspective as a permanent tactic rather than one that should have, according to them, been spent and rejected a few years back.

Without offering details it is also important to note that the DSP has a 25 year history of exploring regroupument mode and left unity: with the Moscow aligned Communist Party in the eighties, with the Euocommunist influenced Communist Party during the same decade, with the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984/85, with the New Labor Party and in the formations that later became The Greens in the early nineties (to name a few episodes). (Aspects of the Greens constitution I gather were actually written by DSP members.)

As well the DSP relates to a loose network of parties and groupings that pursue a regroupment agenda in other countries, especially in Asia, and these experiences are often logged and discussed in the pages of LINKs — an online discussion journal of socialist renewal. Similarly, the DSP has had a long term engagement with the rise of struggle in Latin America and its membership follows the unity experiences in places like El Salvador and Venezuela closely.

So this isn’t an odd development in terms of where the DSP is coming from and while the discussion is still further to be had inside the DSP and with the Alliance membership the DSP is obviously very serious about and committed to the Socialist Alliance vehicle as a locus for a new party dynamic.

Comment by Dave Riley — 6 July, 2009 @ 1:11 am

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"Socialist Activism and Responsibility"

2009-07-04T07:25:00.000-07:00

I think Leftwing Criminologist is a little schematic simply because the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.However it is this comment I want to teke up:"Now obviously, various already existing groups, be it parties, community campaigns etc bring people in, but on a national scale not enough new people will be brought in to counterbalance the already existing parties from a few odd groups - what is needed is a much bigger group either coming from a wave of radicalisation and action or from a large body such as a trade union (which can have similar problems of dominance by one organisation though)"

This is exactly how the left orgs tripped themselves up here. They thought they owned the Alliance despite the fact the majority of the Scoialist Alliance members were non aligned, unaffiliated leftists who had been drawn to the project because of the promise of left unity. That is exactly the situation that is unfoilding in the NPA too. So we're talking both qualitative and quantative growth in numbers beyond the shallow numerical strength of existing orgs. To presume, as No2EU seems to, that the whole shebang can be contained to and ruled by a self appointed senate of a few registered players is a gross mistake, and is no way to forge a new party or the sort of unity we need to foster.

If you go through the DSP NC rept I referenced, you'll see that even after the rough time they've had of it, the majority of Alliance members here are not in the DSP and even when the small affiliates exited the SA this hardly created a blip on the SA's numbers. Doesn't that mean something? While standard malignment argues that the SA is the DSP rebadged -- that this layer of comrades have remained loyal to the project suggests that something is happening which is synergistically broader than what may superficially seem to be one or more Marxist orgs changing their spots.

If you presume that the left unity thing is only about left unity between the already existing orgs then you have a very shallow tactical imagination. No one's saying no to it of course as that's part of the process -- but the real gain is in these others who sign on as partners. And I tell you now that presents a massive political and organistional headache because you then have to share your political agenda with comrades who aren't of your tradition, who more than likely aren't conscious Marxists but who, in the case of the Alliance anyway , identify as socialists. We are , you see, an "alliance of socialists" : the Socialist Alliance.

You can forget all that SWP "united front of a special kind" melarky about reformists and revolutionaries having to live in separate compartments too because what matters isn't so much what's in your head but what you do...collectively. And, if I can mention the friggin obvious: what that means is that if any cadre is worthy of the name then they lead -- not because they are ordained to lead but because they have won due deference and respect through their own commitment to & engagement with the struggle.

If that wasn't happening -- this project would have been moribund long ago. It certainly would not have survived the exodus of the small affiliates who did not want to proceed down a new party route.

I sometimes wonder if those who call themselves Marxists comprehend Dialectics much at all. Regroupment politics may require a form but the process is broader than any one form it may take because getting concrete is about people in motion not just about any one structure or stage. So "unity" isn't just about static unity between Org A and Org B. I think it is a mistake to limit the exchange to that one dialogue because ultimately it's going to be a false discourse of trading points of view: my program versus your program sort of thing. To also do that behind the backs and separate from the rest of the engaged politick, so that they are forced to be onlookers, is also a mistake as it will only serve to perpetuate an autonomos undemocratic caucusing.If your primary loyalty is always going to be to some separate decision making forum , no one is going to trust you because all you'll be offering is a false unity -- one whose integrity is shallow.

These are issues the DSP has had to, deal with -- and still is dealing with.

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"Socialist Activism and Responsibility"

2009-07-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

I do sincerely apologise for the way I do go on but I value the sort of polemical engagement trying to explain my POV to others offers me. I have great respect for the work the SP does and the sort of tactical hardware that may exist within the CWI internationally ...But as the most recent post here -- on the SP NC -- points out the SP has yet to attain a threshold of 2,000 members. And this is in a country of 63 million people.

Of course I can do the sums here for Australia and familiar with the figures for all tendencies including the Labor Party as well as historical figures such as for the Australian Communist Party in its halcyon days. And I'm telling you that if you survive at such low numbers then surviving is what you'll strive to do as it becomes a self fulfilling cycle of maintaining revolutionary continuity and the idealist Trotskyist assumption than propaganda is a more potent tool than it is.

Similarly if the SP/Militant, to its credit, recruited 500 miners during the 80s coal strike -- where are they now? I'm not being disparaging, as I share the exact same experiences, but there's surely something wrong in the mix when a party which sets out to change the world cannot retain working class militants. I know what the cadre regime is like but also, and lets' be very frank in respect to the comrade's interview, it is so friggin wastely of labour. As Lenin said, the revolution is a great consumer of men (sic).

I've been a Marxist for 40 years this year and I've had a lot of experiences over that time in rev orgs. I have also seen the generations of upsurges come and go and while there are some comrades who are still in the struggle from among those who joined it when I did, the reality is that the biggest socialist party in Australia or the UK is the party of exers.

I'm not being liquidationist and saying, "well because they have the numbers, they must be correct and the whole party principle is a wank." No. I'm saying that is a problem we have to address by not just defaulting to bunker mode.

That's the main challenge. We prefer the comfort zone that our party orgs offer us because 'correctness' rules and fosters a dedicated arrogance and an exciting and meaningful life style..at least sometimes.. So maybe some humility is warranted....
So here we have this massive conjuncture bearing down on the working class: economic crisis, the collapse of both the ideological hold of social democracy and neo liberalism; we have a burgeoning environment emergency..(how the heatwave there, eh?)and all the SP can tell its ranks is that we have to wait on the Communist Party to chin wag and maybe reach 2000 members some time soon.

And you know what the complication is if you actually spend the time to ponder and explore it? The complication is that the solution has to be a party solution. No one movement or trade union is going to be able to negotiate through this capitalist mess. No2EU aint gonna get anyone very far because its so closed and proscriptive. It's Scargill Mark II.

On the question: "Do you think this contribution differs materially from what an SWPer might have said?" I guess not --as despite the many copyrighted shibboleths the various orgs subscribe to, the whole cadre experience is very much the same. And lets' get this right: the cadreship is one of the most powerful tools we have to drive the struggle forward as its epitomizes the core dynamic of revolutionary leadership.

I say that, and we here still working that question through.: How do you cadre-ize in these broader left formations? How do you merge, if you like, without spending your all and accommodating to a sort of liquidationism? I don't make light of such a challenge (I knwo the French don't either) -- but my feeling and experience suggests that the party you strive to create has to be another tactical route to your core party building strategy.. which, to be frank, is vanguardist.

So what does that mean in practice? What about the party program? What about democratic centralism? Aren't these core assets that are summarily spent if you jump forth into a pluralist melange?

So that's' what we're discussing now in the DSP in the context of a living new party experience.

I'm sure opinions will vary on this point within the DSP but then we are collectively very aware of the challenges and complications we are up against because we experience them in everyday political activity. So we something others don;t: hard yakker experience in regroupment mode.

My view would be that the "party program" is a false god. It isn't Holy Writ -- that regardless of how correct it may be on historical matters, no program is very useful unless it lives in everyday struggle. It may be intellecturally comforting to have a series of lines on any number of issues but its' only you and a few other comrades who think that way. So if you have a POV in Iran , for instance -- then you need to argue for it. It doesn't suit to simply say, well it's there on page 78 in black and white.That's dogmatism.

But that doesn't mean, well its anything and everything in any new formation. Check with the NPA , go review the sort pf "platform" the Alliance here expounds...these are transitional programs for struggle that do not have a overbearing ideological twist preferencing one particular form of socialism over another. That is something we have to work out when we need to work it out...as this is a very dynamic process which is open ended.

On the question of the way you organise I think democratic centralism is a self evident and very logical organisational means which grows out of struggle requirements. Thats' its inherent dialectic. Any democratic union will fight by deploying such a form.In the DSP, during the recent 3 years of factional struggle, democratic centralism did not function because we were not as centralised as we should have been for the sake of a very indulgent democracy while we wore this long term dispute regardless of what majority votes preferred.

In the Socialist Alliance , we're resourced without regulations and leadership, such as it is as it is still very shallow, relies not on form but on authority to lead and that authority has to be earnt by winning the political confidence of the membership. Otherwise the process simply would not work. So 98 % of decisions made are made through a voted upon consensus . If we can't get agreement we either chat some more or go for another vote after we've..chatted some more. The culture is very different from that which rules in the DSP. There it's decide and do: bang - bang. But really in the end, more often than not, you end up with a richer more nuanced decision to act.

The far left is so obsessed with the politics of difference and separation it cannot relate to a process as involving or as encompassing as that. All our major policy decisions have been enriched by engaging this way.

Similarly the far left habit is the absurdly idealist one that because you may indeed be right then thats' the end of it! No it's not. Of what use is it to the struggle that one small sub set of comrades are correct and the rest of strugglers are mistaken in what they believe or do. Surely that's a political challenge not just a complication of competing lines. As you know theres' the Marxist dictum that has to always rule: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

So why should any ideologically driven Marxist lefty be frightened of debate and the test of practice? Hiding behind a program is...hiding behind a program. And any program that does not apply to real time politics isn't worth much is it?

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"Socialist Activism and Responsibility"

2009-07-03T05:47:00.000-07:00

I don't mean to make light of the practical challenges involved in "merging" formations but really the main game isn't that . The main game is to get it into your/our heads that this is the best, indeed the only, way to proceed if mass workers parties are to be created. It takes a conscious commitment and issues of this and that -- including differences over programatic questions -- are secondary.You work together as often and as collectively as you can with the perspective of building a new party and not of not building it which was the SWP's line on Respect. You deal with differences as they arise in the concrete business of collective struggle.

The recent turn by the DSP towards the Socialist Alliance here is not premised by practical hassles for the moment over assets -- but the DSP has found through 8 years of engagement with this project that it is very difficult, nigh impossible, to actively build two parties at the same time and you either go back to the same ole same ole or you move forward. Whether the DSP replicates the approach of the LCR with the NPA or that of the Scottish section of the Socialist Party in regard to the SSP remains to be seen because this has to be a democratic process.

As the 1990's Scottish dispute in the CWI indicates and the DSP's own 3 year long internal factional struggle suggests, opposition to this can be vociferous -- but I think there is no choice in the matter. But Jon is correct: there has to be 100% commitment by the investing or merging partners. This was not forthcoming from the smaller affiliates in the Alliance here in Australia so they passed on the new party option.Nor was it forthcoming from the same orgs sister franchises in the SSP in Scotland. Nor will it be part of their engagement with the French NPA i suggest-- and that's because these outfits -- and let's name them: the IST and the CWI -- are not interested in forming new socialist parties aside form the ones they've got. (Although the IST comrades in New Zealand have a very different perspective.)

Fine. But how are you going to grow the mass revolutionary socialist workers party (and all the rest) by a growth rate of ones and twos? I'm not being sentimental -- I'm trying to be candid. Regardless of what may be leveled at the SA here there's a deafening silence from the groupuscules about an alternative strategy.

And you know what I pick up -- a pessimistic perspective that all we can hope to build is small propaganda groupings while we wait for our day in the sun to come along. Its' all about sustaining the bunker.

Well the French aren't doing that are they?

I have many difference with the Respect template too. I don't think fostering shallow electoral formations is the only way to proceed and while there was much initial excitement about the growth of Die Linke in Germany, I think as well as deciding to form a new party you also need to decide what sort of party you want to create. So I, for instance, strongly defend the French NPAers in their rejection of the French Communist Party on the grounds of the PCF's preference to run capitalism for the capitalists.

Similarly I wonder how considered is the SP role in No2EU for the simpe reason that I question that formation's democratic credentials. We had the same dispute here: any new party has to be owned by the new party's membership and not run by a Senate of affiliates. That was Respects handicap wasn't it in regard to Galloway and the SWP?

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Socialist Activism and Responsibility

2009-07-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

Re Mick Halls' question:
Lenin mentioned the vanguard, not I in my comment. But I do believe in "the vanguard theory" but not any vanguard that is self appointed. I think that's
banana oil politics and Phil's vox pop comrade falls into that trap completely . Being "the vanguard" is something you have to earn and it cannot be obtained by generating what is assumed to be the very best of all political programs or simply by doing propaganda. That's idealist bullshit and the far left suffer from that disease big time.

You're right to emphasize the crucial role of democracy. In that regard the new democracy movements in Latin America --such as in Venezuela -- are excellent examples of how masses of people are given the responsibility to decide what is to be done --and no "self appointed vanguard" does it for them. But, you see, even there an identifiable "vanguard" exists in the form of Hugo Chavez and the amalgam now coming together under the PSUV. Any process has to be led and Lenin's concept of leadership is the best exploration we've got about forging the sort of leaderships we need to foster. But that leadership is broader and bigger than any one Marxist party -- today or any day. To not recognize that is to not understand Lenin and to assume that the finished product -- his Bolshevik party crica 1917 -- attained its leadership role by dint of some magical template rather than through the very hard yakker my quote explores:" theclosest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with thebroadest masses of the working people.."

Instead these parties which presume to follow Lenin's core concepts rely on a sort of primitive accumulation of cadre approach which , I'm sorry to have to inform them, is foreign to Lenin's party building strategy.

In practical terms here in Australia our challenge is to deploy a Socialist Alliance as such a regroupment vehicle and the DSP here has just made a major commitment to that project. In France the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, is a similar , and much more succesful, example of practical Leninism .; 02 July 2009 23:20
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Socialist Activism and Responsibility

2009-07-02T00:44:00.000-07:00

I actually disagree with this perspective. I know it's the comrade's but i think is about being a SP member but not a socialist because it so sharply defines his political struggle within the narrow confines of the SP shadow. While I recognise absolutely that party membership is all those things: recruiting, education (& self education), leading ..and most definitely about taking responsibility, I also believe that Lenin had the full marker when he wrote about An Essential Condition of the Bolsheviks’ Success:"The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish disciplsaine inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement."
Lenin's also asking how does one stay an activist, stay a Marxist revolutionary, and all the rest that make up the cadre life style. The problem is that if these conditions he defines are not met or at least strived for then even any party member, any individual socialist, no matter how seemingly dedicated lives a warped existence that can be rationalised any way they choose to. Our problem as socialists, as party members is that we cannot switch on a "close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement."
But to not see how much we live an enforced marginalisation and not strenuously seek ways and means to overcome it is to leave ourselves open to "phrasemonging and clowning".; 02 July 2009 11:10
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Let History Judge

2009-06-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

...RE: Iran at the Crosshairs

Dave Riley -- Iran in the crosshairs -- COMMENT

Fortunately John Wright dots many main points in the history post 1979 -=- except that he forgets to mention that a section of the Iranian opposition fought on the side of the Iraqi invading forces during the Iran/Iraq war.

While Bob Morris seems pre-occupied lately on this blog with bagging the far left organisations in the US, I think his POV is substantially correct.

The same sort of argument broke out recently over Zimbabwe and the Mugabe regime internationally

Nonetheless, the obscurantism in play is that the argument gets mixed up with a sort of presumed attitude to Political Islamism and Bob, I’m sure, would want to merge this attitude and rule of thumb to the Iranian government with his take on the government of Palestine in the form of Hamas.

That’s a mistake in my book. We cannot pick the protagonists of history and demand that in each case they fulfil some pre-determined politically correct stereotype. On the same basis, I’m sure Bob would be opposed to the 1789 French revolution on the grounds, like Charles Dickens , of excess…or the North’s savagery during the US Civil War..or the English revolution of the 1600s.

But the world aint so neat and this is especially true of the complications presented by and Iran and while I agree with Bob, John Wright’s argument is more consistently political although he misses the key point that masses of people are mobilising and demanding change.

Bugger me, what a conundrum that is! Masses of people demanding change! (You’ll note in contrast, Bob, how much the Palestinians support Hamas.)

That Chavez is onside with the Iranian government is a complication of world geo politics and the challenge of aggregating the Third World against imperialism. The same has occurred recently over Sri Lanka — and I doubt that Wright will argue that Venezuela is correct there in covering mistakenly for the slaughter. (But hey, thats’ also what this blog has been doing in a sort of liberal mishmash take on Sri Lanka which I so strongly object to. And Bob complains about the far left on Iran!)

Anyway, as Tariq Ali has long argued the Islamist regime in Iran has been on notice for some time and while they should survive this upsurge, their days are now numbered . The people who once organised the largest political upsurge in human history — the 1979 revolution — will again have their day in the sun.

THE POLITICAL FOOTPRINT OF TRADE UNIONS

2009-06-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

I think Andy makes some excellent points about the trajectory of trade unions away from The Party while still sticking with Labourism. This is a key issue I think in Australia as trade unions try to deal with the corporatist surge these last 25 years in the party that is supposed to be the working class.

How that is resolved without a major upheaval within the trade unions themselves and a return to democratic and political unionism is hard to imagine.

In this I guess the spectre of Scargill looms large because how can you have democratic parties (and sharp or radical politics) if the unions are often so foreign to such markers?

So for those who may have a perspective of building new broader left parties -- a "new workers party" -- how is this conundrum negotiated? By kowtowing to a certain workerism? I hope not.

I hate to say this but I suspect that such formations cannot be built in the electoral arena alone. While there may be a certain electoral space to be harnessed, the real challenge of building and creating these new party exercises has to lie in the day to day.

Already here trade unions and the national trade union federation, the ACTU, have chosen , such at the last federal election, not to call for a vote for the Labour Party directly. With our preferential electoral and compulsory voting system that's not as significant as it may at first appear as votes can still flow through to the ALP.

Nonetheless the Greens and the Socialist Alliance have been receiving political donations from some trade union branches.

This reflects a major political shift nonetheless, just as at the ACTU Congress this month, the ALP deputy prime minister was booed and heckled when she attempted to address the delegates on the topic of the building industry.

So there is a definite break but not a split and no union is rushing to disaffiliate form the ALP...yet.

However, I suspect that the RMT/NO2EU formula may be an approach that some unions could explore here. So you support such breaks, of course -- and we already have a preemptive position which we adopted at our last national conference.

But any such development, welcome as it may be, also puts in place tactical challenges of how you then proceed. I don't think any new party process is simply this one or another manoevre. In fact any new party process has to proceed through stages -- and there are going to be set backs and lulls.

That's as true for the French NPA as it may be for our own indigenous engagements. That's why I think it is so important to resolve early on what sort of party you want to bring into being because that will format how you set out to create it.

In this regard the debate in France vis a vis the NPA and Die Linke is such a useful exchange.

If all you set out to do is to create a loose electoral party to the left of the your Labour / our Labor Party then that's what you'll get. That's what I call, the "build it and they will come " approach. Yes, even if you insist on the rider that this party should be a "workers " party.

The labour parties has been masquerading as workers parties for over a century.

In this regard the Greens are so useful because they can show us on the socialist left what can indeed be done by following that route within these twilight days of social democracy. But is that what we want? A Greens party with workerist twists?

This is an important point and it underscores I think a lot of the approach insisted upon by the NPAers in France. They're not just building a party to the left of whatever , but a self consciously anti capitalist party.

We had this debate here of course. It lasted for years. if you set out to create a self consciously anti capitalist party. you're also by default fostering a 'socialist ' party because the programatic debates are inescapable. Of course when you do that you challenge the continuing rationale for the many other socialist varieties that have clubbed together in org mode. It becomes a negation of what has passed for socialist organisiing for so long.

Similarly if you seek to foster a "socialist party" which is first and foremost an electoral one then you won't have much of an anti capitalist trajectory, will you?

So you have to be clear on what you want because the risk is that you may get what you wished for.

(But is that what's needed)

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Why the Left is Not to Blame

2009-06-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

LINK: to comment for Why the Left is Not to Blame

I suspect you live, Phil, in another parallel universe to the sort of political landscape I'm inhabit. Theres' this massive divide on the far left where sectarianism -- albeit generated unconsciously and for ther most genuine of reasons -- is rationalised as the only way to proceed.That Arthur Scargill is impervious to reason is , as far as I can gather, self evidently true.

So? Fuck him.

And herein hangs the conundrum.If an electoral non aggression pact was all that was being aspired to then let's pity the English far left for shallow politics a s it seems to me that considered ignorance of one another's trajectories is the preferred modus operandi. So long as no one invades another's patch we're sweet and really, as far as life on the left is concerned, this is the best of all possible worlds.

And, sotto voce, these same lefts will tell you that anyway this is as probably as good as it is going to get. and all we're into is the primitive accumulation of cadre.

I cannot think of anything so (dare i say it?) unLeninist as that! But here you have any groupuscule you can poke a May pole at , smugly happy to exist under the tribal mode of production. And they have the gall to call it revolutionary socialism!

The EU elections was a very useful exercise is exploring the massive (and one could almost say, criminal)failure of the English far left to negotiate a viable means to move forward collectively. There's this dead hand of all previous existing debates bearing down on the minds of the myopic present.

And the Trots complain that Stalinism failed here and there to transcend its 1930s Third Period politics!

Unity or regroupoment isn't sentimental nicety that some exer wold like to see happen someday this side of the rainbow, but a tactical imperative.

If you check back through my complaints here you'll see I wasn't just focusing on the dedication of people like Scargill or Callincos or Taffe or Grant or Gerry Healey to sustain an alternative copyrighted Marxist perspective but an over riding need to regroup as the core attribute of any way forward.

If it comes to non aggression at election time -- well that's something, but really compared to what's at stake it's a piss in the ocern.

While it's true that for the last 20 years the political drift has been for , not just left forces, but 'progressive' forces to turn to electioneering as their primary area of political engagement. That's not all that's at stake. The international green party phenomenon is the best example of this.

The Dutch SP, Die Linke, GroenLinks and sundry federations in Europe are example of this. But in Great Britain (and Ireland!) we get a left which is still in the Dark Ages -- a left which prefers to ignore the Greens and sustain the circle in a dedicated spirit of one upmanship.

This wouldn't be so tragic if it wasn't for the fact that when this left sneezes all its little franchise clones across the globe catch cold.

You cannot tell me that two of the biggest far left groups in the UK, groups who aren't strangers to creative tactics and interventions over decades, bear some responsibility for this.

It's not Scargill -- he's a symptom! And while I guess all this is a symptom of the long term isolation of Marxism in the workers movement -- we do not make any gains for our class by turning a chronic symptom into a celebrated quality.

Where attempts have been made to foster a regroupment agenda and move the left forward,these same outfits have undermined and sabotaged that trajectory.

Obviously there are a lot of issues at stake. Look at the SWP's recent history: Hoisted by Their Own Petard. But when you look at what they did the key feature of that experience is what they didn't do. Just like what the CWI did not do in Scotland.

And its' not as though I'm talking gobblegook because both the SP and the SWP know what is at stake but refuse to proceed down that road. Thank god for Scargill -- he offers an excuse, a sample of why this left stays where it is; pistols at 10 paces.

I could not have said this before I think with as much credibility, but I think you no longer have a choice. The more you drag your feet on this matter -- of not merely signing onto non aggression pacts but actively and quite consciously regrouping the left - the greater is the chance that you will be marginalised in the context of the new political, economic and environmental crisiis that are pending.

In fact, your -- which is also 'our' - day in the sun will never come....

And we'll get BNPied...

If the left managed whatever at this EU poll -- the Green Party achieved very much more and in doing so, despite Derek Wall's allegiances, proved that they are indeed "the last hesitation to socialism".

Many will be saying: thank god for that because it's no thanks to the English Marxists.

Back to: Why the Left is Not to Blame

THE SWP’s OPEN LETTER TO THE LEFT

2009-06-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

LINK: I think there are two responses separated by the Irish Sea.The SWP argument from London is a knee jerk panic to the electoral success of the BNP. Whereas from Dublin the response is what appears to me to be a sharp analysis where the Irish socialist left is at from the POV of harnessing its promise.

Does any perceived difference matter? It does if you ponder the reasons why the separate SWPs may engage with a unity process because that determines, as Louis suggests, how far they are willing to go.

The complication with regroupment processes, in my experience, is that key point: to what ends do you begin?

In this light these two articles by François Sabado which warrant study:
(1)European election: 60% abstain; gains for the right; revolutionary left wins seats in Portugal and Ireland
(2)France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party: An exchange between Alex Callinicos (British SWP) and François Sabado (LCR)

If the SWP/IST genuinely moved in a unity direction and that motion was also embraced and matched by the CWI/Socialist Party the the state of politics on the far left throughout the English speaking world would shift — because let’s not underestimate how much of a sectarian obstacle to integrating the left the stance of these two outfits has been. In part this is why England especially is such a basket case when it comes to the promise of socialist politics.

So I guess we have to wait and see. Is this merely a manoeuvre designed to assuage the chorus of protest that has arisen in response to the EU results in the UK? Or is this a genuine political change by a formation who has a history of so much pillage to its name?

But the SWP isn’t naive. I’m sure the party knows that if you begin via a truly organic ally and with a open agenda it is very hard thereafter to turn off the dynamic unleashed without wearing the consequences.

In the case of the SWP it would amount to a terrible blow to its political integrity and profile.

Ditto for the SP….

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Comment

2009-06-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

Why the Left is Not to Blame

Phil BC writes:"the biggest barrierto lasting unity are different strategic orientations and modes of political practice. The way to overcome this is to try and work together wherever possible and reach understandings over elections, etc."

I say: So that's the formula?So how come it hasn't been given a test drive? I in fact referenced those points about strategy and modes-- I didn't argue that way myself.However from my POV your phrase is simply a nice way to descirbe entrenched sectarianism.

Here's an anecdote. The Socialist Party -- a local CWI franchise here in Australia-- has historically spurned overtures made to it by the Socialist Alliance in way of shared electoral approach. Today fortunately we have an agreement not to stand against one another. However, the SP , quite rightly, has raised objections to the practice of other groups on the left who refuse to call for a vote for the SP or even recognise the fact that it is standing in elections.( The SA, on the other hand, publicly calls for a Ist preference vote for the SP.) At the last federal poll, for instance, all Australian far left groups, aside form one tiny groupuscule, called for a first preference vote for the Greens and a couple of Neanderthals pitched for the Australian Labor Party.

However, the SP did not publicly call for a vote for the Socialist Alliance either nor did it recognize by name the existence of the Socialist Alliance in its election campaign propaganda.This is silly sectarianism and has not one iota to do with a generous interpretation of "different strategic orientations and modes of political practice."

In fact the exact opposite is the case: I believe that the SP's core objection to the Alliance is that it shares very similar "strategic orientations and modes of political practice" as the SA occupies the political space it thinks it should own.The platforms are similar. The campaigns are similar. And the SA's reach is way beyond what the SP can obtain from inner suburban Melbourne where it has its only viable presence.

Of course you are correct, in that "the way to overcome this is to try and work together wherever possible and reach understandings over elections, etc." and that's happening.

Nonetheless, my regoupment experience is very different to your ruling. The biggest barrier to lasting unity is the strong similarity of strategic orientations and modes of political practice amongs these socialist outfits. And that is what scares the bejeebers out of the them. That's where the panic sets in. If these groupuscules cannot by habit differentiate their copyrighted existence from others on the left, then the very rationale for a totally separate strategic orientation is destroyed.

In the chronology of the Socialist Alliance, the affiliatedsocialist groups pulled back and lost their political nerve when the project proved that the left could indeed work together -- not only during election campaigns but also during other struggles. The question was sharply posed : why remain separate and rigidly autonomous?

There was another issue we encountered which I think may relate to the future of the NO2EU package.Since the SA began as an affiliated body in 2001 -- it was a major struggle to open up the organisation so that non aligned Alliance members could democratically determine activity. This was the crux of the multi tendency socialist party debate because as soon as the affiliates lost veto over the SA then the groundswell for a new party became feral.My view is that these outfits had no concept of the dynamic that the initial regroupment initiative had unleashed among a layer of people who identified as socialist and joined the Alliance -- which still today is a majority of the Alliance membership .The yearning for a unified left was and is very potent.

Our complication has been that the engine room for the project -- the DSP -- has been rent asunder by a faction fight for three long years about the future of the Alliance. This dispute parrallels the divide in the left in regard to strategic autonomy and no doubt reflects the same issues that were in dispute within the SP over the Scottish Socialist Alliance.

However, the Socialist Alliance, ticks over and has sustained a profile and a level of loyalty and identification that transcends what the left has been able to achieve for decades.

The question is :Can the project now be moved forward?

Back to AVPS

TAG SAMPLER

2009-05-12T04:11:00.000-07:00