A week of venom and slaying Social Democracy on the Green Left list

By Bob Gould

The last 10 days or so of discussion on the Green Left list have
genuinely been "passing strange", so to speak. The discussion has
demonstrated the strategic bankruptcy of the DSP leadership's
tactics towards the labour movement.

This cycle started with an eccentric and nasty press release by the
convenors of the Socialist Alliance, ostensibly directed at members
of the Labor Party. This ostensible press release pissed on the
20,000-30,000 real members of the Labor Party from a great height.

It purported to commiserate with them about the lamentable choice
they faced in deciding whether to support Beazley or Latham, gave
them a rather pompous lecture about what political fools they were to
be still hanging around in the Labor Party and ended with the
obligatory declaration that if they were halfway decent socialists
they would vote for or join the Socialist Alliance.

It would be difficult to caricature this approach, particularly its
eccentric, arrogant tone: the three convenors of a tiny socialist
cadre group who reckon they've got all the answers, delivering a kind
of political ultimatum to all the members of the ALP and all the tens
of thousands of socialists and social and political activists in
unions and community groups who are in the orbit of the ALP, that
they have to immediately ditch their longtime political associations,
snap to attention and join this absolutely decisive political
formation, the Socialist Alliance.

The only thing that can be said about this strange and insulting
press release is that if it were actually read by any of the tens of
thousands of people in the orbit of the Labor Party it would probably
have the opposite effect to the one ostensibly desired by the
writers. Laborites would either scratch their heads in curiosity or
react with intense resentment to some tiny socialist group giving
them such instructions.

If they were to see it, the impact of this press release on the
overwhelming majority of the left of Australian society who are in
the orbit of the ALP would be generally negative. It's obviously
written for a different purpose, which is to whip up hysteria against
ordinary Laborites among the few hundred activists and followers of
the Socialist Alliance. Nothing to do with Laborism really, but a
kind of eccentric bugle call to the 300-400 activists of the
Socialist Alliance.

The discussion on the Green Left list through the week of Latham's
election continued in the same spirit, with Peter Boyle, the
Paperclayman committee and others in overdrive. The striking thing
about the discussion of Latham's election and the developments in the
Labor Party was the petty, hysterical and vindictive tone towards
Laborites, Laborism and all its works.

Dave Riley insisted that people could join the Greens, socialists
could regroup, the only principle was that it had to happen outside
the Labor Party. Paperclayman asserted his hatred of the Labor Party,
a pretty strange assertion. He might as well say he hated the Murray
River or the rabbit-proof fence. Hatred of durable institutions with
a proletarian aspect seems to me a dangerous guide to politics and an
extraordinary piece of eccentricity.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks, while they certainly did hate the
conservative misleaders of the labour movement, didn't devote a lot
of verbal effort to asserting that hatred. In the early 1920s in the
debate about strategy towards mass Social Democratic parties of the
day warned the Paperclaymen of that time against "scolding
scoundrels" and spelled out some careful strategic notions about how
to take on the historic task of displacing the bureaucracies of the
workers' movement. Their primary emphasis in this debate was the
united front tactic. None of that for Boyle, the Paperclayman
committee or Riley, Kerrvert, et al, just the hate, or even more
eccentric, supercilious condescension displayed towards ordinary
Laborites and their concerns.

In the course of the week, an indigenous Laborite, Tristan Ewins,
entered the discussion, putting forward some strategic ideas about
rebuilding the left in the ALP. He got pretty much the same
treatment, although the tone with him was a bit more circumspect than
the intensely hostile tone adopted towards Bob Gould and Ed Lewis.

Boyle and the nom-de-plume chorus spent most of the week digging out
of the archives Latham's past right-wing statements, in a strikingly
parallel way to the way the Liberals and the Murdoch press spent the
week digging out his past left-wing statements.

Boyle plays a similar role for the DSP leadership to the one played
for the Liberal leadership by Tony Abbott. He's the brawler and the
bloke who dishes out the verbal aggression. At the end of the week,
he even made light of this role by asserting that he'd been having a
little fun. Strange fun!

Two questions arise from all this hysterical anti-Laborite static and
babble on the Green Left list. The first question is: why do Boyle
and the others find it so difficult to address the substantial
strategic problems posed by myself and others? Boyle tried the
statistical approach, trying to establish that the Labor vote is
dropping. All that Boyle succeeded in establishing is that the Labor
vote fluctuated within a range over the past four elections. The
range being between 35 and 43 per cent, in a period in which the
Greens vote, in addition to the Labor vote, is consolidating between
6 and 11 per cent.

To confuse things even further, Paul Oboohov got to work on his
computer and to his own satisfaction established a mathematical model
in which the Labor vote would dwindle away to very little. The
problem with that is that voting behaviour is social, political, and
in that sense dialectical, and tends not to follow oversimplified
mathematical models.

Boyle, Oboohov and the others are frantic to believe the story of the
bourgeoisie, that the Labor vote is fading away, but that's
manifestly not the case, and even if it were to fade away, it's
absolutely clear that the Socialist Alliance would not be the
electoral beneficiary of any fading away. However, with Latham's
election, it seems that the Labor vote is bouncing back, while the
Green vote is holding on in the 6-11 per cent range.

Boyle et al studiously avoid addressing my core demographic
proposition: that the Labor vote of 35-42 per cent and the Green vote
of 6-11 per cent between them occupy the territory of the whole left
of Australian society: the organised working class, the more plebian
section of the migrant communities, and the leftist-leaning sections
of the middle class and the new social layers.

Election results are important in that they give an indication of the
political location of social forces, and if you judge by electoral
results, the left of society is overwhelmingly located in the camp of
Laborism and the Greens. From this set of circumstance stems the need
for socialists to adopt a united front strategy towards Laborites and
the Greens if they are to have any influence.

From that point of view, the hysterical, abusive demeanour of the DSP
leadership towards Laborism, and rank and file Laborites in
particular, is a sectarian strategic error of enormous magnitude.

A feature of the week was the appearance on the list of an energetic
Laborite, Tristan Ewins, who lives in Melbourne. He spelled out a
series of ideas about remobilising the left in Australia, and also
outlined a project for two email lists he's associated, one to
involve Laborites, Greens, anarchists and other leftists in
discussion and another to help reorganise the Labor left.

He got the usual lecture about not wasting his time in the ALP,
although in more cautious language than the language used by the DSP
about Gould and Ed Lewis. Then a discussion began to develop on the
list, probably not entirely anticipated by Boyle and co, about what
socialists might actually do in their various situations. This was
precipitated by the response to Tristan Ewins and to a post by Allan
Bradley in Toowoomba.

Bradley is an ex-member of the DSP, who generally supports them
politically and defends them strenuously. He spelled out, however, in
fairly firm tones that in his situation in Towoomba he didn't see
much scope for developing a Socialist Alliance branch, so he had
joined the Greens. He presented this in a considered and careful way,
but without surrendering his general political friendship towards the
DSP he stuck to his guns about joining the Greens and his reasons for
doing so. He got a bit of a lecture from Marcel Cameron, DSP
organiser in Brisbane, about the things he might do if he returned to
the fold and decided to start a Socialist Alliance branch.

These were fairly routine propositions about setting up stalls and
showing Michael Moore's movie. This triggered off Dave Riley, who
developed this theme a bit further and gave us warning that he's
about to prepare a handbook on how to run stalls, and other
organisational matters within a Socialist Alliance framework. (I'm
often a little cautious about generalised organisational schemes and
schemas. I vividly remember the little pamphlet, Stalin on
Organisation, so popular in the old CPA, of which there are still a
copies up there in the Stalin section of my bookshop. The central
theme is Stalin's one contribution to Marxist organisational
theory: "check up on the fulfilment of decisions".)

I look forward to Dave Riley's little handbook on organisation with
genuine interest, because what socialists can do in modern conditions
to build a socialist movement is at the centre of many of our
problems. An amusing sideline on this discussion was that a new
voice, Karen, who is possibly a DSP old hand who has been overseas
for a while, waded in with an assault on Tristan Ewins, painting a
stark picture of the boring, soulless activity that must be his lot
in the ALP, organising sausage sizzles and fund-raising for
reactionaries, at the same time as Marcel Cameron and Dave Riley were
advocating a not-too-dissimilar program of activity to Allan Bradley,
that he should carry out to establish a Socialist Alliance branch.

In several later posts, Karen went on at length about the terrible
prison in which members of the ALP reside. (I'd say to Karen, in the
world of socialist and left politics there are several structures
that are considerably more prison-like and rigid than the ALP. Karen
might reflect on that a bit.)

Karen will probably say, of course, that the activities of the
Socialist Alliance and the ALP may be similar but it's the ends to
which they're directed that are important. This discussion petered
out, which is a pity, because it was the beginning of something
important and serious.

At this point I must register a bit of a difference with my close
mate and Ozleft collaborator, Ed Lewis, who in one of his very
effective posts made a throwaway comment with which I disagree, which
could be taken to disparage attempts by the Socialist Alliance to
trailblaze in difficult regions. Boyle made the predictable and not
unreasonable reply that this trailblazing is a good thing, not a bad
thing, and on this I agree with Boyle and not with Ed Lewis.

But the questions of effective public activity, raised by Alan
Bradley, Shane Hopkinson, Tristan Ewins and Dave Riley throw into
bold relief another aspect of the problems facing socialists of all
stripes, whether they're active in the ALP, the Greens, the Socialist
Alliance or other groups. Forms of public propaganda activity are now
longer as obvious as they once may have appeared.

The bourgeois media and popular sociology books are full of empirical
observations about a massive decline in civil society: the number of
people active in political parties has dropped, but also the number
of people active in traditional voluntary organisations has also
dropped: social, clubs, sporting clubs,etc. (After I wrote this, this
afternoon Dave Riley put up an extremely interesting article on this
general problem. He blames the Laborites for it, of course, which is
inaccurate, but nevertheless he raises important questions in this
post.)

Trade union density is down, and the network of shop stewards and
delegates has declined. Socialist paper sellers clearly get a more
modest response than they used to. If you took a slice through the
far left in Australia in, say, 1978, there was at that time Direct
Action, Tribune (the CPA's paper) and the twice-weekly Workers News,
and their combined weekly sales would probably have been 10,000-
15,000. The last newpaper seriously standing, so to speak, is Green
Left Weekly, the technology of which is now far superior to the
papers of 1978, but its sale is only a fraction of 1978 and the other
papers have disappeared.

Even the bourgeois press, and bourgeois magazine circulation, has
also declined. The obvious background to this is personal
privatisation of social activity. People tend to do much more in
their homes. They watch television, videos and DVD, and more and more
they communicate by computer. Socialists involved in any kind of
ongoing public propaganda activity are operating in a much tougher
environment than 20 years ago.

In my view, simple propositions about purely propaganda activities of
a general sort, literature stalls around general propaganda for
socialism, are less likely to get a response than the have in the
past.

This is the background against which people like Bradley and others
like him in smaller centres are a bit sceptical about a simple
formula of stalls, etc. They're probably right. I'm in favour of
socialists maintaining a fair amount of public propaganda activity,
but it has to be more carefully thought out than in the past. Over-
generalised socialist public propaganda activities are not likely to
be carried out for very long by anyone, no matter how dedicated they
are, and no matter how many organisational manuals they study.

Militants and activists are likely to throw themselves into concrete
agitations about immediate issues, and the agitation against the Iraq
was a classic example of a concrete immediate issue, but there are a
multitude of others on all kinds of questions, and those agitations
generate a certain momentum. Carefully thought-out socialist activity
and leadership is of great value in many spheres of activity, but
it's carried out in different ways by left-wingers in all sorts of
frameworks.

It's to be hoped that the beginnings of a serious discussion about
how to engage in socialist propaganda activity and other activity
will continue in a calm way in a number of arenas, including the
Green Left list and the Broad Left list
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/broadleft/

But this all gets us back to the over-riding question of the united
front. The DSP leadership should bury its assorted ultimatums to the
ALP, Greens and others and get down to a serious discussion with
other socialists, including the many thousands in and around the ALP
and the Greens.

I hope to take up this discussion of the concrete forms of various
groups' socialist activities in later posts. It's as hot as Hades
tonight, and I'm tired. I'll leave that for another time. Merry
Christmas everyone on the Green Left list.

PS. I've absorbed the point made forcefully by Simon Butler. I now
accept the proposition that Peter Boyle and Kerrvert are different
people, and I apologise to them both for merging them together.

PPS. To Michael Berrell. Your personal apologia is very interesting.
I still can't quite place you, but stick your nose in and say hello.

You don't try to answer my questions as to what are your concrete
proposals for socialist activity after your departure from the ALP.
I'm genuinely interested in what proposals you might advance. I'd say
this to you: we all make our own estimates of when to join and when
to leave political organisations. I respect your decision to leave
the ALP, but that does not resolve the question of the ALP.

Individuals come and go, buy there's no sign at all that the grip of
the Labor Party and the Greens on the left side of society has been
fundamentally shaken by any recent developments. If anything, the
trend, or the movement, as the DSP likes to put it, is a bit the
other way at this moment. Whether individual socialists like you or
me leave the ALP or stay doesn't resolve the queston, which is why I
spend so much time arguing with socialists like the DSP leadership,
and now yourself, who are outside the ALP, about the united front
tactic. What's your set of propositions as to how the obvious crisis
of leadership in the workers movement can be resolved?

That's a genuine question, and I await your answer. I don't expect
anyone these days to be able to present me with ironclad declarations
ex cathedra, so to speak, on how these problems can be resolved, but
I'm genuinely interested in what your current ideas might be on this
problem. The truth is always concrete, and the issue is always what
to do next.