By Bob Gould

The substitution of personal abuse for political debate seems to be an
unbreakable habit for some members of the DSP leadership and their
loyal echo chambers. Taking his cue from Peter Boyle, Rohan G calls me
an old windbag and whinges that he can't understand why people spend
so much time arguing with me.

Rohan G is obviously a closet reader of the World Socialist Website,
which has recently had a lengthy and quite intelligent piece on the
life and activity of Wilhelm Reich. Rohan G compares me with Reich in
his declining years, which is a pretty strange kind of insult. In his
declining years Reich was known for his rather embittered anti-communism.

Is Rohan G implying that I'm an embittered anti-communist? If so, he
should look at my written material, which is available on Ozleft
(http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Bobgould.html). The
proposition that I'm an embittered anti-communist is refuted by
everything I write, unless you have the psychotic mindset of the DSP
leadership, who clearly believe that anyone who argues with them must
be an embittered anti-communist.

It's also possible that Rohan G is referring to Reich's later
activities, for which he was persecuted by the US Food and Drugs
Administration. Reich built something he called an orgone box. He
believed that if one sat in this device one could extract good vibes
from the ether, improving one's orgiastic potency.

I can assure Rohan G and the DSP leadership that I've never been near
an orgone box in my life, nor tried to build one.

On a more serious note, I don't at all resent being associated with
Wilhelm Reich. Before he went a little mad, Reich made considerable
contributions to psychoanalysis and scientific inquiry into sexuality
from a broadly Marxist point of view.

It seems to me that Rohan G and the DSP leadership might benefit from
reading some of the earlier works of Reich (which I have in my shop),
particularly The Function of the Orgasm. Another book in my shop that
is of some interest is Orson Bean's Me and the Orgone, a Memoir of the
Reichian Movement.

One individual of my acquaintance in the DSP leadership, in
particular, might benefit greatly from studying the early works of
Reich, particularly on character armouring, the authoritarian
personality and general questions of psychological repression. The
early Reich warrants serious study by anyone interested in psychology,
from a Marxist point of view.

Rohan G is a clown and he throws in for polemical purposes, in a
rather nasty way, things about which he clearly knows very little.

Rohan G takes up the theme of Boyle and others in the DSP leadership
that I'm an old windbag or an old fart. That's a pretty dopey line of
argument. Most human cultures have a certain respect for age,
recognising that older people have often acquired knowledge and
experience. It's clearly necessary, from time to time, to revolt
against the old, but nevertheless human culture is transmitted to a
certain extent from the old to the young, and this applies also in the
socialist movement.

The Bolsheviks, for example, were no particular respecters of persons
young or old, but it's unimaginable that Lenin or Trotsky would ever
conduct arguments with the gutter demagogy of a Peter Boyle or, now, a
Rohan G.

Boyle tries to pass off his stupidly barbaric verbal behaviour on the
basis that he's some kind of larrikin. He's not a larrikin at all.
He's a petty bourgeois committeeperson putting on a big act for the
benefit of anyone ignorant enough to take seriously his proffering of
an ostensible larrikin posture as a substitute for debate.

On matters much more serious than the clownishness of Boyle and Rohan
G, Boyle's recent response to Shane Hopkinson is extremely sinister,
politically. Firstly, Boyle passes off the DSP leadership's
authoritarian practices as Leninism. What a nasty, slanderous view of
Lenin is involved in this proposition.

If you look at the practice of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in their
creative formative period, it bears no resemblance at all to the DSP's
structure and practices, as described by Boyle and the DSP leadership.

I've written at length on this question
(http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Lenin1.html), and so have
Louis Proyect
(http://www.columbia.edu/%7Elnp3/mydocs/organization/lenin_in_context.htm)
and a number of others, and Boyle should attempt some response to
these serious contributions to debate before he talks obvious bullshit
about the DSP's claims to Leninism.

In fact, the DSP leadership has refined an authoritarian structure
that squeezes the life out of political debate in a tiny sect of 200
or so members, and which has institutionalised a regime in which no
change of political line is possible unless it comes from the DSP
leadership.

The political line entrenched by this process is exotic and sterile,
and DSP members question it at their peril, as LF discovered when he
was summarily expelled from the DSP this year (see
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2004/08/77884.php), and as many
others have discovered when they have been driven out (see, for example,
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/resignations.html). The
structural arrangements in the DSP are such that its eclectic
political line can't be changed by any process of internal political
discussion. That's physically impossible in the DSP. The only changes
can come from within the leadership.

This organisational set-up is obvious to all on the left, and it's the
main reason why other socialist groups are very cautious about getting
into a too-close political embrace with the DSP leadership.

Boyle's most sinister, outrageous and dangerous implication comes at
the end, when in his ostensibly "larrikin" way he equates debate over
political differences in the socialist movement with what he imagines
-- from his wealth of labour movement experience and reading --
workers do to scabs on picket lines.

There are two very important points at issue here. Firstly, it's
absolutely poisonous, and the beginnings of Stalinism, to equate with
scabs people who hold political disagreements. The implication is that
people who act on their political differences should be treated
physically like scabs. Comrade J.V. Stalin used to talk like that,
with very precise political and physical intentions towards those who
disagreed.

There's a secondary, but also important, aspect to Boyle's stupid,
rhetorical and demagogic implication that oppositionists should be
treated like he thinks workers treat scabs. It's certainly true that
in the history of the labour movement, at certain high points of
mobilisation and struggle, workers have treated scabs very harshly.

Those workers, and their leaderships, however, have usually done such
things in a responsible and careful way. The classic description of
this kind of activity is in Farrell Dobbs' very fine books about the
class struggle in Minneapolis in the 1930s.

In industrial matters, however, it's important to know the ebbs from
the flows, and in Australia at the moment, industrial struggle is in
rather defensive, low-key phase.

Apart from being wrong in principle in equating differences among
socialists with conflict on a picket line, committeeperson Boyle
displays a dangerous and pseudo-romantic approach to serious
industrial matters.

He may not have thought these things through too clearly, because what
he's actually doing is throwing around abuse for his immediate
political purposes, but in industrial matters in Australia for the
past few years, quite dangerous consequences can arise from
misestimating the political situation and the tactics it's wise to
adopt in prevailing circumstances.

Boyle's congenital left talk is of no use to serious socialists in any
sphere, and it's a danger to the movement in some respects.