replying to Phil on the IS in Australia was Re: Barnesites,revolutionary parties etc

[Gary Maclennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I echo strongly Phil's sentiments about the personality profile of those
who rose to power in the Zinovievist sects.  It might not be nice of me to
use the term 'ass-hole' instead of 'sociopath', but Phil and I are saying
the same thing.  Does such language prevent us working with these people as
Cde Pearn alleges?  Not at all because the people we are talking about
cannot be worked with. Besides as revolutionaries, we have a commitment to
the truth, do we not?

Phil also asks why I did not join the fusion process between the CL and the
SWP.  Alan will comment differently on this, but the attitude of the SWP
(DSP) to the Civil Liberties was a quiescent one.  As I said in another
post I do not want to get into a flame war on this. Our tactics  I suppose
were at fault at times but we were at least militant and that for me was
and hopefully always will be the key.

During the fusion process there was an internal DSP document circulating
about me being an 'ultra-left lunatic'. This document fell of the back of a
truck as they say here in OZ.  We were never supposed to see it. Alan has
been snide about its content in the past, much to my personal
annoyance.  But the point was not my insanity or otherwise. This document
was a secret one despite the fusion process supposedly being open. Its very
existence was proof of the secretive bureaucratic nature of the SWP (DSP)
leadership.

Ironically a similar thing happened in the ISO split which led to my
expulsion.  After one meeting we found a report which a member of the
ruling clique had written about us dissidents.  She seemingly had been
commissioned to spy on us.  It was full of casual remarks made on informal
occasions.  Really it was part of the dossier that the ass-holes in truly
Stalinist style presented later at our trial.

As for Mick Armstrong, yes he lived by the sword and perished by the sword
when he was purged by the ass-hole he had mentored, Ian Rintoul.  Maybe
there is a god.

regards

Gary











>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.