Gurus

[Jurriaan Bendien <j.bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Phil,

When Geoff said he needed a "guru", he was of course joking. He just felt
that the academics at our university didn't have the kind of knowledge that
he sought, and he was looking for a Marxist thinker who really had the
practical experience and knowledge. He felt at the time that his own
teachers made many claims about Marxism, but really didn't know very much
about it. It was the difference between Marxism as a sociology and Marxism
as a political stance or a way of life.

I think we benefited from contact with Mandel, who made us aware of ideas
and people that we wouldn't have come across otherwise. But it would be
wrong to say we were serious "Mandelites". Mandel acknowledged frankly that
he knew very little about New Zealand anyway. Indeed he told me straight
off that his knowledge was limited, and that he knew most about Europe,
where he lived. He said it was impossible for him to keep up with the world
Marxist literature these days anyway (this was 1984). He had talked with
Russell Johnson, then leader of the NZ section of the FI, but Mandel said
"it's always monologues", he couldn't get a real dialogue or debate going
with him he said.

We clashed with Mandel about the Labour Party, mainly because Mandel could
not really conceive of the NZ Labour Party implementing extreme neo-liberal
policies at the time. He allowed for the possibility, but he was very
skeptical about it. Most of all, he was concerned that we should avoid
condemning ourselves to sectarian isolation. Probably, he was basing
himself on the experience of Britain, where you had oodles of Trotskyist
sects with only a tenuous connection to political reality. Geoff clashed
again with Mandel later, amongst other things over Mandel's theory of gold
and money. Once Geoff had met a number of Marxist "authorities" personally,
he was much more confident about his own idea and just went ahead and did
his own thing.

If things went "downhill" with respect to party-building, that was because
Geoff refused to build a political group with politically inexperienced
students lacking stable working lives. He considered that this would only
produce the umpteenth little sect. He concentrated on his trade union work
and, following Hal Draper's idea, on maintaining a political centre,
arguing that it would take a long time to build up all the contacts we
needed to form a workingclass party in our community in future.

If the group around the NZ magazine "Revolution" can do a better job, good
on 'em !

Regards

Jurriaan





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