Revolution

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My copy of Revolution arrived the other day.  Initially I took out a
subscription for it only with the greatest of reluctance because I have too
much too read and am generally too demoralised about the state of the world
in general and the Left in particular.  But now I have come too look
forward to its arrival and I whinge if it is not out on time.  The latest
issue is a particularly good one with articles on important subjects,
especially to do with New Zealand, which you cannot access at all in the
Australian media.

At some stage I will try and give some serious thought to the relationship
between Australian and New Zealand politics.  Do they effect each
other?  At times they appear to do.  The wonderfully brave New Zealand
campaign in the early 80s against the racially selected South African rugby
team galvanised a dying Left here in Australia and almost seemed to breathe
life into it. On the dark side, the neo-liberal onslaught of the 80s and
nineties led by New Zealand Labour and National Parties was regularly held
up in the bourgeois media as an example to us of the way to go. There is
somewhat less of that today.

I do detect though at the moment the faintest whiff of the beginning of
admiration for Helen Clark in Australian Labor Party circles. It is here
that Phil Ferguson's articles are of the utmost value.  In the latest issue
he has a fairly savage piece on Clark, that makes great reading. Hatred
seems to hover about every sentence.  I am Irish and I love that kind of
Swiftian invective.  Can't get enough of it.

The article Mainstream politics - a sorry affair (Revolution, June/August
2002, p5) does contain though an area of disagreement between Phil and
myself.  Or to be more accurate an area where I am struggling against his
influence.  This I freely admit has been very strong on my politics.  In
particular Phil has taught me that the nature of imperialism has changed
away for dependency on dictatorships towards "democratic elected"
governments in the Third World. I have also come to learn from Phil that
movement politics in particular gay politics may have reached their
Hegelian end.  Here Fukayama's thesis may actually be correct.

Here I was interested in  Donna Deitch's film Common Ground (2000).  It
contained a 3 short episodes one of which was written by Harvey Fierstein
and dealt with a gay wedding.  The film overall looked at changing
attitudes towards gays in a New England hamlet. Fierstein is a fine writer
but he struggled to inject some drama into the wedding.  Overall there was
the feeling of "so what?" and that the battle had moved elsewhere. Let me
be clear here. As a gay male, I am very aware of gay oppression and the
continued brutality inflicted on gays.  However within the imaginary
metropolis, depicted in Common Ground, the end of gay history had arrived.
This was liberation so called and for Fierstein it seems to be a
bewildering and disorienting experience.

However my purpose in this post is not to go into gay politics though of
course I will if any one wishes to begin a dialogue here.  What I
specifically wanted to address was the whole question of saying
"sorry".  Phil's article savages Clark for suffering from "sorry
mania".  Thus she has apologised to gays, Samoans and Chinese New
Zealanders.  Phil scorns such politics as insincere. He is correct in this
of course.  But I would like to register some disagreement.  If we employ
the base superstructure metaphor we can see that the sorry business belongs
to the superstructure.  Here it acts as slops and sops thrown to us to
compensate for or to distract us from noticing how the working class is
being savagely exploited in the economic base. I think this would be a fair
characterisation of Phil's position.

My objection however is that the superstructure is still a vital arena of
struggle. If we move to the Australian Aborigine instance the battle to get
an apology from the Federal government has consumed a great deal of the
energy of black activists and their supporters. They want that apology and
the government led by John Howard has consistently refused to give one.  If
Phil is correct, then this aspect of the politics of Aboriginal Australians
is misguided.  In other words there should be no demand or struggle for an
apology.

I cannot agree here.  Now it may be true that it is Howard's stubborn
refusal, which alone gives the demand for an apology some political
purchase. But I am inclined to believe that an apology to indigenous
Australians is a vital cog in the on going struggle to restructure white
attitudes towards Aborigines. To repeat, the superstructure matters, and
apologies for past wrongs may be one of the ways in which it does.

regards

Gary


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