Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I thought Marv Gandall's post was very interesting.  It's good to see that
there are still a number of people floating around who maintain a
commitment to Marxism, after having gone thorugh the crap that many of us
did in Trotskyist groups and various kinds of Maoist and Stalinist
formations.

One of the sad things about New Zealand is that, apart from myself,
scarcely anyone who went through the NZ section is still an active Marxist.
That's a lot of people who were destroyed!  (The only person I can think of
is Mike Gourley, who was won to the SAL from the Labour Party and who broke
with the Barnesites in the early 80s and has been involved for the past 15
years with the IBT sect.)

A few ex-SALers are still around in mainstream/liberal-left politics.

Matt Robson, who was in the SAL in the early 70s and an alternate NC member
for a few years, is now a cabinet minister (minister of coorections) in the
current Labour/Alliance government.  He's a leading figure in the Alliance.


There's also Keith Locke, who was the editor of Socialist Action in the
1970s and later a leader of the 'turn to industry', and one of the very
'best builders' of the SAL in industry and among Maori and Pacific Island
youth, was marginalised by the Barnesite machine here and driven out (Keith
had the awful habit of thinking for himself and saying something if he
wasn't convinced of a line).  Keith was later a leader of the NLP/Alliance
but left the Alliance with the Greens and is now a Green MP.

Several other ex-SALers, most notably Mike Treen, who was an SAL leader for
quite a while, are mid-ranking figures in the Alliance.

But all this is a long way from Marxism.

In the mid-1980s, before becoming totally swamped by the madness emanating
from new York, the SAL had about 100 people, a fortnightly paper with a
circulation of over 3,000, and a youth group of probably about 100 people,
with a very substantial Pacific Island and Maori membership.

Under the direction (ie total control) of the Great Helmsman in New York,
they now have no paper (they stand on NZ streets and on campuses and
outside factories selling 'the Militant'!), no youth organisation and about
24 people in the organisation, of which pretty much all of them would be
white these days and the average age is probably about 40-45.

Is this all due to objective factors?

I certainly think Marv is right to focus on objective factors as
significant.  But to suggest no other outcome was possible seems unduly
pessimistic and determinist to me.  Third World revolutionary movements
have faced downturns and unfavourable objective circumstances and yet,
without the (dubious) benefits of Trotskyist brilliance, managed not only
to survive but prosper and make revolutions.  I actually don't believe that
it was all that much easier - objectively - for revolutionaries in Vietnam,
Cuba or Nicaragua.  Oppression and misery, which Marv suggests the working
class in the West has to go through before socialists will have a shot, is
just as likely to breed apathy and demoralisation as to breed militancy.

Looking back at the period since the 1960s I just cannot believe that all
that it was possible to build are the array of miserable sects which litter
the left.  There are a few left groups which I have some time and respect
for and which show at least some inclination to try to build something more
than sects.  But most of what has come out of the FI is pretty miserable -
the Europeans have diluted their Marxism to the point where it is difficult
to see why they bother existing any more, while those that made up the LTF
have either gone mad and imploded (the Morenoites) or gone mad and
degenerated into a cult which seems determined to decay for a longtime
before finally ceasing to exist altogether (the Barnesites).

There is a very interesting little book written about the British SWP by
one of its 1960s/early 70s leaders, a working class militant called Jim
Higgins.  Jim was national secretary of the IS in Britain in 1971-73,
before Cliff decided to 'reorient' it into a dead-end sect (and then impose
the British model on the rest of the IS groups, like Australia).  The book,
'More Years for the Locust' (neat title!), looks at the objective
possibilities for building a revolutionary movement in Britain in the late
60s and the decade following.  They were actually substantial.

In fact, I would say that if you add up all the people who went through the
British far left (overwhelmingly Trot groups) from say 1965-1985 - from the
start of Vietnam protests to the end of the miners' strike - you are
probably talking about a couple of hundred thousand people.  Even if some
of these were strays who were never going to be in it for 'the long haul',
that is still a bloody huge amount of people.  Most of them, surely, joined
these groups because they genuinely wanted to get rid of capitalism and
fight for a free, socialist society.

What they got was a rat's ass.  They got screwed over by 'leaderships'
composed of the socially dysfunctional, the mean-spirited, often the
downright deranged, the sociopathic, the moronic, the flunkeyist, and
various combinations of all these.

Although I'm usually against psychological explanations, I think a great
deal of the leadership of the left were very fucked up people.  The
organisational form of the left groups - Zinovievism rather than Leninism,
as Lou Proyect would say - allowed these people to rise to the top and
screw everyone else.

The solution, it seems to me, is to build in a different way.  We need a
hard Marxism, but it needs to be presented and organised in a flexible way.
Everyone in an organisation needs to be plitically educated - through both
collective and individual means - to the highest level possible, so that no
*great leader* can pull a fast one on the ranks.  There needs to be an open
internal atmosphere, where anyone and everyone can say whatever they like
and not fear the consequences, let alone find themselves being biffed out.
There needs to be a new political culture created, one which attracts
normal people and repels the psychos that the left has attracted (and
promoted) for way too long.


Marv writes:
>If
>there is currently no constituency for socialism, it is because capitalism has
>quite evidently not yet exhausted its potential to improve productivity,
>growth,
>jobs and income. This material underpinning is the rock on which every left
>organization has been shattered, and to continue to attribute the epochal
>demise
>of the left to false consciousness, leadership betrayals, or programmatic
>confusion is, it seems to me, an idealist error.


I think this was true for the period from the late 40s until the early 70s.

But, ironically, it was precisely when the postwar boom came to an end and
the crisis hit in the 70s - when for the first time since the 30s, the
opportunity opened up to build a revolutionary *workers* party in the
advanced capitalist world - that all these organisations went into nosedive.

Capitalism from the 1970s on has survived not because of any inherent
strength - there has been no return to protracted boom conditions, for
instance, in any of the advanced capitalist countries - but because of the
inadequacy of the opposition.  The Trots who held to the notion that Labour
parties were still social-democratic failed to appreciate the role that
such parties would play in smashing the working class.  In New Zealand, for
instance, it was not the Tories, but the fourth Labur government, which
went for the jugular of the working class with extreme free market reforms,
something the SAL never in a million years expected (and they are such
idiots that they haven't learned any lessons from it and still think Labour
is a workers' party even though it only has about 10,000 members,
overwhelmingly middle class and scarcely any working class members).  The
Trots who simply denounced Labour without figuring out what to do about
reformism ended up equally disoriented.

The Maoists in Europe and N America, who contained thousands of
subjectively revolutionary members, were thrown by the increasing
rapprochmenet of Peking with Washington and events in Kampuchea etc.

So, the far left had its shot.  And its best shot was nowhere near good enough.

It is the failure of the radical left and the demoralising effects of the
demise of the Soviet bloc and old-style social democracy that we are
confronted with today, not the super-strength of capitalism.


> Every organization based on a program
>aiming at the overthrow, rather than the reform, of capitalism was destined to
>fail because the constituency for such a program no longer existed, no matter
>how creatively it was crafted by the likes of Proyect and others.


Well, every organisation with a programme for reforming capitalism suffered
massively as well.  It is not as if reformism surged forward.  Labour
parties dumped any remaining adherence to old-fashioned social democratic
reformism.  You can hardly say, for instance, that Labour parties in
Britain, Australia and New Zealand (nor, I suspect, Canada) continued to
want to even reform capitalism.  Blair in Britain and Clark in NZ aren't
social democrats.  The Mensheviks would never recognise them as their
heirs.  They are liberal-bourgeois.

There may not currently be a constituency of much size for revolutionary
politics, but there isn't a constituency for reformism either.  In fact, I
would go so far as to say there isn't much of a constituency even for
capitalism itself in much of the West.  It's hard to find many people who
will extol the virtues of the market these days.  The dominant atitude in
the population at large is one of resignation - that this may not be the
best of all possible, worlds *imaginable* but it is the only one possible
in *practice*.  Capitalist triumphalism didn't outlive the demise of the SU
by very long.  It's the 'There Is No Alternative' idea, rather than
ebullience about the wonders of the market, which holds sway.


Gary writes:
>My knowledge of the Australian DSP was then SWP is very sketchy as I
>refused to join the fusion process at the end of the 70s. So I cannot
>really comment on the parallels and differences in Australia between Barnes
>and Percy's 'turn to industry'.

Why did you refuse to join the fusion process?

Actually, the Ausrtalian case is kinda weird.  Because the Australian
subordinates of the US SWP rebelled and broke with New York, whereas it is
the Australian former 'Mandelites' (Ron Paulsen, Lee Walkington, Lynda
Boland etc) who ended up as the staunchest Aussie Barnesites.


>But the point of this post is to wonder what 'The speech that Tony Cliff
>should have made' would read like.  My own opinion here is that Cliff was
>much brighter than Barnes and Percy.


Yes, I don't think there is much doubt about that.  However, I would say
that Percy, ironically, left much more of a collective leadership behind,
than Cliff or than Barnes is likely to.  Barnes is probably the least
bright of the three, in a formal sense, but the most dictatorial.  He's
certainly the least successful.



>(Cliff) picked the down turn in the
>working class struggle, while they, as you pointed out, did not. Still I am
>convinced that Cliff's response to the correct analysis was deeply
>wrong.  I think that he decided to isolate his cadre from the deteriorating
>national and international climate.  When the working class were going into
>quiescence, Cliff decided to purify/Bolshevize his organisation.  He
>dropped slogans such as 'Luxembourg is greater than Lenin' and proceeded to
>reorganise the movement along Zinovievist lines.

Higgins makes this point very strongly in 'More Years for the Locust'.

It's quite strange to read of how in the early 70s IS could be instrumental
in getting 4000 Dagenham car workers to hear Bernadette Devlin speak.  That
period, when there was a powerful national liberation movement in Ireland
challenging the British state and a massive working class upsurge in
Britain itself was about as favourable an objective situation as I can
imagine.  The far left (ie the Trots) had thousands upon thousands of
members.  The far left fucked it up.  Totally.




>The alternative was to 'hang loose' along the lines suggested in Lou's
>original post. Some of  us in IS were groping towards just that kind of
>position, but ass holes like Tom O'Lincoln and John Minns and Mick
>Armstrong mobilised against us. The rest is, as they say, history.

Well, Mick Armstrong got his, as they say.  because he was later opurged
himself, was he not?


>In Britain the ISO is just now desperately seeking to find a way out of the
>sectarian cul de sac that Cliff shepherded it into.  Of course in Australia
>the loony that the British helped to the Australian national leadership
>i.e. Ian Rintoul, cannot be shifted.  His is now a true cult and sect and
>the few genuinely talented revolutionaries in the ISO tendency have to
>remain locked out in the Socialist Action grouping.

I assume you mean Socialist Alternative.  I went to a branch meeting of
theirs in Melbourne in July and was quite impressed.  They seem to have
learned something from their experience in the IST and now are trying to
organise differently.  Hope so.  Although other Melbourne friends of mine,
who were victims of the earlier purge, seem sceptical.


Philip Ferguson