Re: Forwarded from Tom O'Lincoln

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Damn It all I was not going to reply to this but I will.  Reading it again
has made me so angry.  The point that  O'Lincoln cannot grasp is that he
and 'leaders' like him throughout the Trotskyist movement have poured shit
on the rank and file and that we will not forget it.

We are real people. If you prick us do we not bleed?... and if you wrong us
shall we not revenge? Now it is true that my heart is to an extent bitter,
but it is also pure and far from bestial. I joined ISO with the best of
intentions.  I have always been a committed revolutionary but I was labeled
by Brisbane IS as a 'right wing opportunist' and driven out.  O'Lincoln did
not vote for this as he did not have a vote in our branch but he and the
rest of the national leadership worked for weeks to bring me and my friends
down.

He also sat beside a future leader, a true idiot, who got up and denounced
us as the kind of 'people who read Marxist poetry'.  That gives you some
idea of the alliances the very cultured Mr. O"Lincoln was prepared to build
to defeat us.

O'Lincoln himself got up and sneered at us as the 'incredibly shrinking
faction'.


I will also correct something about the arrests.  I did not compete with
Carole Ferrier or anyone to see how many times I could get arrested.  Alan
was not there.  Nor was O'Lincoln.  He was never around in Brisbane when
the police moved in. So he has no idea what it was like.  Nor does Alan.

The truth is that the police had a high arrest policy.  The special branch
would form flying wedges and head for those they considered the leaders of
the marches.  I tried everything I could to hide in the middle of the
marches from them but it was no use.  They targeted me and they got me
often.  Ditto for Carole.  Alan and O'Lincoln might find this hard to
credit but I never enjoyed getting dragged off nor did I enjoy getting
kicked in the middle of the street or the times they twisted my arms and
fingers. Nor did I enjoy having to pay the thousands of dollars in fines.
The truth is that by the end of the Civil Liberties campaign I was very
close to being broken by the constant police harassment.

I am not a particularly brave or heroic person. I do not want to give the
impression that somehow we in Brisbane were great revolutionary militants.
Generally we never faced more than a fairly mild beating.  There were of
course attempts to get me sacked but that is another story. But within the
context of Australian politics we were at the forefront of confronting a
very right wing government. There was nothing opportunistic about my or my
comrades' politics throughout this period.  Whatever their limitation they
deserve something better than the suggestions by O'Lincoln that we were
naively seeking to get arrested.

regards

Gary


At 09:16  13/09/00 -0400, you wrote:
>In the desert
>I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
>Who, squatting upon the ground,
>Held his heart in his hands,
>And ate of it.
>I said, "Is it good, friend?"
>"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
>"But I like it
>"Because it is bitter,
>"And because it is my heart."
>                                    -Stepen Crane
>
>What a shame so many leftists are like this! But I guess I can't cheer Gary
>up, so enough on that subject. However there may be some value in explaining
>where the Australian ISO *actually* came from.
>
>At the end of 1971 Janey Stone and I came to Melbourne (her original home)
>from Berkeley, where we had been members of the International Socialists.
>The American I.S. had "Shachtmanite" origins, but was in an alliance with
>the British I.S.  In Melbourne we joined a loose outfit called Marxist
>Workers' Group, which contained Trotskyists, anarchists (yes) and others. We
>found common ground with some of the Trotskyists, whom we convinced of our
>general politics. A British ISer arrived a year later. The MWG polarised and
>many people left; we ended up with a small group heading toward I.S.
>politics. MWG later changed its named to Socialist Workers' Action Group.
>
>In 1974 we grew a bit after leading an occupation at Monash University, then
>grew a bit more after intervening in the 1975 Constitutional Crisis (sacking
>of the Whitlam Labor government). We became the International Socialists,
>set up a Sydney branch, recruited a small group of activists in Canberra,
>and met up with two key people in Brisbane: Graeme Grassie whom Gary
>mentions, and Carole Ferrier.
>
>At this time the group was not entirely "Cliffite". The original Melbourne
>base still had some Shachtmanite views, but the new recruits outside
>Melbourne generally preferred the British line. Some of them also didn't
>like being called "Trotskyist"  -- this reflected their "new left"
>background. However it should be noted that the British organisation itself
>also avoided the term, because of its association with "Orthodox Trotskyism"
>   and of course Healeyism.  Nevertheless, the official position of the
>Australian group was that it was in the tradition of the Left Opposition,
>and its first campus bulletins had Trotsky's picture on them.
>
>The Brisbane branch then attracted some elements from the Self Management
>Group (most notably John Minns and Ian Rintoul). Then came the big Civil
>Liberties struggle, out of which it grew rapidly -- all too rapidly. The
>1981 Brisbane split has to be understood partly in terms of the instability
>of a large, new branch without an established cadre, common traditions and
>the like. If you're into moralising instead of analysis, you can blame it on
>"the downright deranged, the sociopathic, the moronic, the flunkeyist"  --
>hi Phil :-)  --  but that doesn't explain why it happened specifically in
>Brisbane, and at that specific time.
>
>On the civil liberties marches, Alan writes:
>
> >the SWP position was essentially correct.  The
> >Civil Liberties movement, that is, the
> >Brisbane Left, came to fetishise the
> >tactics of civil disobedience, to a point
> >where it became seen as a
> >desirable goal for militants to be arrested.
> >... This Left was smashed.
>
>It's true that some young romantics competed for the highest arrest totals
>-- Gary and Carole were amongst them. This was silly, though hardly unusual
>on the left anywhere, anytime. However Alan's wider argument won't wash. OK,
>the SWP line had some credibility when there were just a few hundred
>students in the streets. But by the end, we had Labor MPs and trade
>unionists -- including that classic rightwing union bureaucrat John Ducker
>-- being arrested. The Seamen's Union was heavily into it. At this point the
>SWP were definitely the ones who looked foolish, standing there on the
>sidewalks with folded arms. And far from being smashed, the I.S. grew
>dramatically from its role. (The CL was falling apart anyway.) Gary is
>wrong, though, to say the SWP line was "opportunistic". They bravely stuck
>to it and paid a high price, as most young militant activists looked askance
>at them.
>
>Gary writes:
>
> >It was not, as O'Lincoln tries to put it,
> >a matter of us all behaving badly.  I tried to argue in my post that
> >it was a question that the leadership chose to follow Cliff
> >in the "Leninisation" of the ISO.
>
>Cliff was probably not even aware of us in 1981, and there was no
>"Leninisation" process. The group was Leninist once the anarchists left, and
>the British organisation had been Leninist since 1968-70. Cliff's first
>volume on Lenin appeared well before we met Gary, and was uncontroversial in
>our group.  If Gary joined thinking the group was "Luxemburgist
>spontaneist", it's no wonder he was disappointed later on. He should have
>read the paper he was selling.
>
> >The sad irony was that in the great
> >Electricity Worker strike of 1985 the leader of IS, Ian Rintoul, was to
> >forbid
> >his members to attend strike
>
>That is quite true (though as usual in real life, there was a bit more to
>it). Some of us opposed this sectarianism and there was a split over it; but
>it wouldn't fit Gary's demonology to bring up that side of Tom O'Lincoln.
>During the split I was on the receiving end of a lot of leadership "asshole"
>treatment. I guess it served me right!
>
>More importantly, though, it did  not stop me looking for ways to
>collaborate with the same people, once history had taken a couple more
>turns. There have been some constructive outcomes, like the Marxist
>Interventions website. It's not healthy to go on eating your heart.
>
>
>Marxist Interventions:
>http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/
>
>East Timor, Indonesia and Australia:
>http://easttimor.alphalink.com.au/
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org