Peter Boyle's hare

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Boyle led the discussion on the usefulness of the party/sect a merry
dance with his introduction of the term revolutionary factionalism.
Sometimes when a fox is pursued by a pack of hounds it will cross the trail
of a hare and the hounds will go off after the hare.
Tell us, Peter, is "revolutionary factionalism" a bit like "propaganda
work" -- like, perhaps, doing what the DSP has always done, but with a
different name? That won't cut it, just as the DSP's approach hasn't cut it
for the past 35 years.
By the mid-1980s the DSP recognised that space had opened up on the left
with the crisis of Stalinism and Social Democracy, and we did out damndest
to move into that space. We couldn't do it, and it wasn't because of lack of
resources, small size, wrong objective conditions or any of the other
excuses we hear from the DSP.
By that time the DSP had plenty of resources. It owned buildings, had
several hundred well-trained cadres (respectably large in the Australian
context), had a well-established and widely recognised weekly newspaper and
had an impressive publishing program as well. It was as well-placed as it
ever will be to become a much larger organisation with a lot more political
influence, and the political space was there, waiting to be occupied.
The DSP didn't take that opportunity, and not only didn't, but couldn't. It
failed the test of practice, and the Greens emerged to fill the space.
It wasn't a matter of theory for the people who built the Greens, but of
urgent necessity. They had things they wanted to defend and were looking for
ways to do that. The Greens emerged in the way that they did because the
left failed, or at least the model offered by the DSP and similar groups,
failed.
People who wanted to defend themselves politically, here and now, knew about
the DSP's program and decided it wasn't what they needed.
This was partly a matter of experience: some had been there and done that in
the CPA, DSP, etc. Plenty of people from the labour movement found their way
into the Greens. This is reflected now in their parliamentary
representation. Lee Rhiannon, now in the NSW Upper House, has a long history
in the labour and feminist movements. The most exacting Marxist would be
hard-pressed find an example of Lee having put a foot wrong since she has
been in parliament, but you'll read Green Left Weekly for a long time before
you'll find her mentioned, even to offer critical support. Sylvia Hale,
long-time Labor Party member who some will also remember from the early days
of the SWL/SWP/DSP will be on the Greens ticket for the next NSW elections,
and there are plenty more.
But some might disagree with my assessment of the past 15 years or so, and
there's another test of practice taking place now. The left is trying a new
electoral tactic: the Socialist Alliance. How is it going?
Here's an assessment from Bob Gould, a long-time Trotskyist and Labor Party
member, from an open letter  to the DSP written earlier this year. I don't
agree with Bob on everything: for a start, he's in the Labor Party and I'm
in the Greens, but he makes some interesting points.
"In the federal election, which was dominated by the capitulation of the ALP
leadership to the right-wing populist demagoguery of the Tories on the
asylum-seeker question, there was a small swing against Labor, a bit over 1
per cent in two-party preferred terms. Labor retained the overwhelming
support of the the organised working class, though there was a significant
swing of backward workers from One Nation to the Liberals and an even more
pronounced swing among sections of the progressive middle class from the ALP
to the Greens in revulsion against the ALP's policy on refugees. The
DSP-supported electoral formation, the Socialist Alliance, did very badly in
the elections, getting approximately 1 per cent, where it stood, and the
left protest vote went to the Greens, who are now clearly established as the
electoral party to the left of Labor. The possibility of the Socialist
Alliance establishing itself as an electoral force is now extinguished (if
it ever existed). This is underlined by the recent state election result in
South Australia."
Later, Bob continues:
"In the South Australian election, the Socialist Alliance stood in one seat,
the inner-city seat of Adelaide, where many of SA's most progressive
middle-class live. Jane Lomax-Smith, the ALP candidate in this swinging
seat, achieved a 2.5 per cent swing in the preferred vote, and won the seat
from the Liberals. She got 6764 votes ... The Green, Jack Bugden, got a
respectable 851 votes (5 per cent). The Socialist Alliance candidate, Tom
Bertuleit, listed as an independent on the ballot paper, got 48 votes, or
0.28 per cent of the 17,078 votes counted at that stage. In mathematical
electoral terms, 48 votes is almost the equivalent of zero if you allow for
the random factor and the fact that a significant number of protest voters
look for independents on the voting paper, and Bertuleit was the only
independent. In this electorate of Adelaide ... the Socialist Alliance got
as close to zero as it is possible to get in any election. The South
Australian election was held after the right-wing Tory populism about
asylum-seekers had abated a bit. 'Normal' trends and class forces had begun
to reassert themselves. This SA election result for the Socialist Alliance
dramatically underlines the fact that this formation has little future
electorally.
"A modest 1 per cent two-party preferred swing against Labor, which got
nearly 50 per cent of the preferred vote anyway, has caused the ALP, which
is a pretty serious electoral formation, to engage in several fully fledged
inquiries into its electoral performance in the last federal elections. The
DSP leadership, on the other hand, passes over the fact that the Socialist
Alliance got almost a zero vote in South Australia in almost complete
silence. This is a bit of a commentary on the lack of seriousness of the DSP
leadership in its propagandistic and sterile approach to electoral
politics."
Bob, now in his sixties, has been a member of the Labor Party since he was
16 and is very well-educated in Marxism and Trotskyism. I don't always agree
with him, but he's a keen and perceptive observer of the left, and I think
he has a point here.
There's a lot more to Bob's Open Letter, and if anyone wants to read the
whole thing, contact me off list and I'll try to get it to you. Bob prefers
paper as his medium of discussion, but he tells me there is an electronic
copy.
Steve Painter


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