Labour parties

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

Bob Gould responds to Nick Fredman and Ben Courtice on the Australian Greens
and the Labor Party

It's pleasing to see Nick Fredman's Damascus-road conversion to one half of
my tactical propositions, the half that says Marxists should adopt a united
front strategy towards the rapidly developing Green movement. Even on the
second part of my tactical approach - the idea that Marxists should adopt a
united front strategy towards the bigger and more entrenched aspect of class
politics in Australia, what I describe as the ALP-trade union continuum -
Fredman has softened a bit. He no longer rejects this as out of the
question, but says now is not the time. That's an improvement, too.

These are very serious and important questions. It's clear that Fredman's
new view is not universal in the DSP. One of two contributors in the DSP's
pre-conference discussion in The Activist, no. 13 (October), who is clearly
an enthusiastic supporter of the current line of the "team leadership", says
about the question of the Greens: "Our orientation towards grass roots
activists in the Greens also needs to be carefully though through when the
differentiation between politicians and the party's activist base becomes
further exposed, as has historically occurred. At the moment Greens Senator
Kerry Nettle still gives the appearance to all and sundry of being squeaky
clean and not ambitious - and oriented to grass roots activism."

This acid comment is a snapshot, a distillation, of the sectarian mentality
current in the DSP, encouraged by the "team leadership". It's a political
cast of mind that involves an a priori assumption that all the DSP's
significant political opponents on  the left will inevitably betray. It's
pretty stupid, in relation to the rapidly developing Green formation, which
is now much, much bigger than the DSP nationally, with perhaps 5000
adherents compared with the DSP's 350.

Most of the major figures who've emerged in the Green movement, although not
all by any means, are, by any rational standard, fairly serious
left-wingers. The bald assertion that the Australian Greens will go the same
way as the German Greens, is by no means obvious to anyone except the "team
leadership" of the DSP.

Take Kerry Nettle: she's perhaps a bit on the dour side - every bit as dour,
in fact, as the person in the DSP who writes her off so easily. But anyone
who has encountered Ms Nettle who hasn't noticed that she's a forceful,
committed, thoughtful left-winger on major political questions, is not very
observant.

Similar considerations apply to many of the prominent figures who have
emerged nationally in the Greens. A number of them are quite convinced
socialists and left-wingers. It's a bit eccentric that Nick Fredman  says
"every Green in parliament (15 now federal and state?) is a lever for
working people to fight the ruling class, though a socialist parliamentarian
would be a better lever". What a DSP-centred piece of pretentious nonsense.
Quite a number of the prominent Green personalities ARE SOCIALISTS by any
reasonable understanding of the word -- they're just not members of the DSP.

There is a certain political problem within the Green movement, in my
opinion, from a Marxist point of view. That problem is the presence of a
certain hostility to modern life, industrial production, migration, etc,
that stems in part from the overall concern with the environment that's a
major impulse for Green politics.

But even to a rather jaundiced sceptic in such matters, like myself, the
surprising thing is how little this underlying attitude seems to affect
day-to-day Green politics. The nitty gritty of that kind of problem is, of
course, the question of large-scale continuing migration to Australia. The
interesting and heartening thing about the contemporary Green political
movement is that, despite perceived problems with the environment, opponents
of substantial migration to Australia seem to be a tiny minority in the
Greens.

In the day-to-day struggle, the Greens have been extremely forthright and
humane in their defence of refugees, which is a kind of implicit rejection
of fears about mass migration. The way the Green movement has evolved, is
that a very large number of socialists and left-wingers of all sorts have
flocked into the Greens, and that movement of left-wingers into the Greens
will obviously explode after the Cunningham by-election result. Predictions
about the Australian Greens inevitable development in the same direction as
the German Greens seem to me to be largely based on DSP "team leadership"
resentment of the obvious fact that the Green formation now, for practical
purposes, occupies all the electoral space to the left of the ALP-union
continuum, and much of the other space to the left of the ALP.

THE DSP AND THE REVIVAL OF THE LABOR LEFT

The most significant development in the ALP-trade union continuum in the
past year has been the revival of a cross-factional left after a long period
of quiescence. The main new example of this, has been the rapid development
of Labor for Refugees in a number of states, with a new generation of young
activists spearheading it, and the emergence of a certain militancy and even
"leftism" in the trade union base of the Labor Council of NSW, which was in
a previous generation the intellectual powerhouse of the Labor right.

The same supporter of the DSP "team leadership" dismisses Labor for
Refugees, in the same contribution to the DSP internal bulletin, in a
similar sweeping and DSP-self-interested way as she dismisses Kerry Nettle.
"The proposal to set up an MP/rank-and-file committee to develop a policy
for endorsement later is nothing more than a stalling, diversionary tactic;
not to mention redundant given the given the submissions to the inquiry by
former ALP premier Neville Wran and former prime minister Bob Hawke and the
endorsement of Labor for Refugees at the majority of state conferences
earlier this year. The Labor for Refugees leadership are misleading the
ranks. Rather than taking up the fight to change ALP national policy, the
Labor for Refugees leadership is leading the retreat."

Same story as the Greens: not being the DSP, the Labor for Refugees
activists will, of course, inevitably betray. What sectarian rubbish that
view of the world is. Like most stupidities, this view contains an element
of truth. From the point of view of the section of the ALP leadership
strenuously defending the backward refugee policy, setting up the committee
is a delaying tactic, although it must be noted that some parts of the ALP
right, such as Senator Robert Ray, were strenuously opposed to setting up
such a committee, regarding it as too much of a concession by Crean to the
movement in support of refugees.

>From the point of view, however, of the Labor for Refugees activists, from a
number of states, the setting up of the committee, with a major focus on a
further public policy discussion, was a considerable political victory in
the ALP, and gives scope for the continuance and expansion of the refugee
agitation.

Labor for Refugees conducts a struggle inside the ALP on the refugee
question and participates vigorously in the external public agitation about
refugees as well. One result of the Cunningham by-election will be to give a
bit of a fillip to the agitation of Labor for Refugees, both inside and
outside the ALP, and stiffen up or change the attitude of anyone in the ALP
who was confused on the refugee question.

This DSP member's embittered assertion that the Labor for Refugees
leadership will inevitably betray is just another example of how the DSP
"team leadership" tends to regard the world of politics as focussing around
the sun of the DSP, and to encourage that view in the DSP ranks.

Ben Courtice and Nick Fredman, in a number of posts, make scathing comments
about large numbers of individual ALP leftists they've encountered. Ben
makes some throwaway remark about the unpleasantness of having worked with
some Laborites, which raises the question of what the assorted Laborites, so
easily demonised, thought of working with Nick or Ben.

That approach to working-class politics at the personal level is pretty
short-sighted. Over nearly 50 years of activity on the extreme left of Labor
movement politics, I have personally collided with thousands of people,
usually to my right, and sometimes to my sectarian left, but it's a
completely false approach to politics to write off so easily the people with
whom one collides.

I have no illusions at all, on the basis of personal experience, about many
people who form part of the ALP left, even quite a few of the younger ones.
Courtice and Fredman's constant "scolding of scoundrels", to use Lenin's
phrase, isn't much help. There is constant bureaucratic pressure in the
apparatuses of the workers' movement, but there are also constant forces of
renewal from the base of the class struggle, which is the force on which a
socialist agitator should usually base himself or herself.

The power of any bureaucracy is rarely total. A cast of mind in which you
manufacture categories, in which the bulk of the people on the left of the
labour movement, with whom Marxists sometimes collide, don't form part of
the left, because of your collision with them, is just a form of
mystification, and self-defeating mystification at that.

Serious Marxists sometimes have to collide with other people on the left on
points of principle, and on other occasions they have conflicts of practical
day-to-day interests with others. It's the height of dopiness to elevate
such collisions to a level where, by definition, one's opponents no longer
form part of the left.

This particularly applies to the left individuals and forces in the
ALP-union continuum. As loyal supporters of the DSP "team leadership" and
its current strategic orientation, Fredman and Courtice have to say there's
something crook about most ALP leftists, because in the final analysis,
according to the DSP, they carry the "vicious germ of Laborism" from the
"second party of capitalism" into everything they touch.

That's a rather fantastic view, which stems from a false theoretical
construction, and it leaves out of the equation, the aspect of the ALP as a
bourgeois workers' party  -- which includes the relationship with the trade
unions and the organised working class.

Many Marxists have a fantasised view of the way capitalist society works in
general. They write and talk, as if there's a kind of executive committee of
the international capitalist ruling class, that dominates the world. At its
most extreme, this kind of primitive Marxist view verges on conspiracy
theory.

The DSP's view of Laborism has similar qualities to this primitive Marxist
view of the nature of the ruling class in capitalist society. The DSP "team
leadership" write and talk, as if there's some demonic self-conscious force
at the head of Laborism, carrying the instructions of the ruling class into
the working class and the labour movement.

Well, there are some moments in Labor history that do look a bit like that,
such as the early Accord period in Australia, and the moment of Blairism in
Britain. Even at such moments, this view of how thing actually work in mass
labour parties, bourgeois workers parties, is a bit mystical, and tends to
ignore the fact that a large part of mass workers parties are bureaucracies,
that balance between the workers who elect them, and the political pressures
that bear down on them from the bourgeoisie, who dominate society.

In bourgeois workers' parties such as the ALP, in most periods, the idea of
a systematic, deliberate, self-conscious, Laborist program of betrayal is a
bit of a fantasy. In most periods, including the current one in Australia,
the ALP is a mass labour movement organisation, a bourgeois workers party,
in which there are many contradictory forces and influences, a significant
part of which come up from the base of the workers' movement, particularly
the trade unions. The unions are frequently in implicit or explicit conflict
with the economic pressures exerted by the bourgeoisie, which pressures are
often, it's true, exerted through sections of the Labor leadership.

Nevertheless the outcomes of conflicts, derive from an interplay between all
these forces. Sometimes, in the recent period, there have been defensive
victories, such as the defeat of electricity privatisation in NSW, and the
fact that the federal Labor caucus has been forced to oppose the further
privatisation of Telstra.

Another force at work in the Labor Party is the subjective sentiments of the
membership. Most ALP members, despite many reformist illusions, and a long
period of betrayals and defeats, are nevertheless solidly on the left of
society, and many regard themselves as socialists.

I find the Ben Courtice, Nick Fredman view of individual ALP members they've
encountered ridiculous, pretentious and politically rather stupid. What use
is that. It's not even "scolding scoundrels" as Lenin used to say, about
ritual incantations by Marxists against treacherous Labor leaders, it's
ritual abuse of the rank and file of a large part of the organised workers'
movement, and that is a really mad posture for members of a tiny Marxist
minority to adopt.

Ritual pomposity towards the bulk of the left of the labour movement has
become the trademark of the DSP, and it's a damaging trademark.

Ben Courtice and Peter Boyle, in a number of posts, attack me with the
assertion that I'm trying to divert the energies of socialists into
fruitless activity in ALP branches, and in passing they mystify ALP branches
and structures. The ALP-trade union continuum is a heterogeneous, large,
diverse, popular movement. In practice, in Australia, the activity of this
political microcosm mainly focuses in the individual states and regions.
Each state has a diversity of factions, interest groups and forces and
cultural influences at work in the labour cosmos.

I've lived through a number of upsurges of radicalism in this heterogeneous
movement, and a number of ebb tides of defeated radicalism. My
apprenticeship in labour politics was in the early 1950s during the great
upsurge in which the grip of the Catholic Action Groupers on the ALP and the
unions was broken by a leftist upsurge, in which I was one of the foot
soldiers - the grunts.

A little later, having served my apprenticeship, and being part of a small
revolutionary socialist group, I started to appear at ALP state conferences
as a noisy, young leftist agitator and in the mid-1960s. When the Vietnam
War unfolded I was the main initiator in Sydney of the most militant, and
for a period the most popular wing of the movement against the Vietnam War,
and there was no Chinese Wall between my internal activities in the ALP and
the mass agitation that I helped lead in society against the war. In fact,
my modest niche in ALP politics was of great assistance in developing the
mass movement against the war in the streets, in the context in which the
ALP parliamentary leader, Arthur Calwell, to his great credit, took a strong
stand against the war.

During this period there was a vast "Vietnam levy" right across the country,
pouring into ALP branches and transforming them. This period culminated in
the election of the Whitlam Labor government. Despite disillusionment with
the conservative policies, on many questions, of the Whitlam government,
there was a further "Whitlam levy" into the ALP due to the anger in the
population about Governor General Kerr's dismissal of the Whitlam
government.

This generation dominated the ALP into the late 1980s and was, among other
things, the popular base of the mid-1980s Labor Against Uranium movement.
There were all kinds of ups and downs during this period. There was a 1971
Socialist Left faction that emerged in NSW that managed among many other
things to elect me as its only delegate to the 1971 ALP federal conference,
where the left defeated Clyde Cameron's proposals for a wage and price
freeze (an Accord-type arrangement between the ALP and the unions), and at
which I moved a resolution for the abolition of ASIO (the political police)
which was almost carried.

After that conference the DSP asserted itself in this 1971 ALP Socialist
Left, captured organisational control of it, and then acquiesced in its
liquidation after all the independent forces in it, including myself and
South Coast Marxist Labor MP George Petersen had departed. For an account of
the ups and downs of battles in the ALP in this period, see George Petersen'
s self-published autobiography, "George Petersen Remembers", and "Red Hot"
the biography of Nick Origlass, by Hall Greenland.

Even at the start of the Accord period, in the 1980s, there was a certain
mobilisation in the ALP, in which the left, led by energetic factionalists,
such as Peter Baldwin, wrenched hegemony from the right wing in inner-Sydney
ALP branches. In the same period in the early 1980s, socialists associated
with me conducted a big battle at a series of ALP conferences, particularly
on the question of hospital closures and psychiatric hospital closures and
the Richmond Report, which was associated with a big industrial agitation in
the community by the nurses' union against hospital closures and the
Richmond proposals.

As the Accord period commenced and wore on, internal life in the ALP became
more quiescent, and scope for socialist agitation in the ALP-trade union
continuum narrowed, such agitation became more difficult. Many leftist
members drifted out of the ALP. Nevertheless, most real members of the ALP
remain to some extent on the left of society, and any new events that throw
up leftist rebellion, in society at large inevitable throw up leftist
rebellion first in the unions, and then in the ALP.

It's from these circumstances that the need for a strategic united front
towards Laborism derives.

KERBS AND GUTTERS

Over many years, I've often encountered the shock felt by a lot of leftists
with their minds on higher things, who join an ALP branch, and discover the
awful reality that for a lot of the time ALP branches, being real
organisations existing in their communities, seem to be dominated by
municipal preoccupations, such as kerbs and gutters.

I've encountered not a few leftists who claim to have run away from the ALP
in shock at such pedestrian preoccupations. A sensible Marxist socialist
obviously doesn't spend most of their time on such questions, but it's smart
to have a realistic interest, in such matters because, after all, they
affect the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

In the real life of a contradictory, heterogeneous bourgeois workers party
such as the ALP, seemingly pedestrian human interests, are a big part of the
internal life of the organisation. In my experience, as a socialist agitator
who has operated in the ALP one way or another for large parts of my
political life I've found an engaged approach to such local questions,
covers you for a multitude of political sins, such as vigorous advocacy of
socialist and anti-imperialist politics.

For many years from the 1950s to the 1980s, and now again at the present
time, I've found that a bit of energy on local issues was sufficient to
persuade often quite conservative members of the ALP, to elect you to state
conference, the big parliament of the labour movement, where all the big
political questions are fought out and where I and others played a vocal
role as socialist agitators at many conference. Socialists in Labor politics
ought not be too contemptuous of kerbs and gutters.

As we speak, a big, local issue has erupted in the community and the Labor
Party in South Sydney, where I live and operate my bookshop. With the
apparent acquiescence of the housing minister a major developer has proposed
to redevelop the Erskineville housing estate. This estate is an old state
Housing Commission community with quite a lot of open space and the
developer proposes what is now called a private-public venture in which a
large high-rise development of flats to be sold in the private marketplace
would be the dominant feature, increasing the housing density dramatically
and effectively displacing the existing community, many of whom are retired
pensioners.

This proposal that the Housing Commission should sell this old and stable
example of community housing development has produced enormous local
opposition. There have been several noisy and boisterous community meetings
on this issue, at one of which I spoke and got an enthusiastic reception.
The ALP branches in the area are mobilising mightily to light a fire under
the state Labor government in defence of the Erskineville estate against the
threat of this kind of mad, capitalist modernisation.

A significant socialist presence in the ALP is a very useful thing in these
kinds of battles.

The reality of the ALP-union continuum as a mass movement, a bourgeois
workers party, is that levels of interest and involvement wax and wane.
There are upsurges and ebb tides. Socialist politics isn't religion. In some
periods of downswing most socialists, including me, don't spend a lot of
time on the detail of ALP internal manoeuvring. What matters, however, is
identifying openings in periods of upsurge, even small upsurges, such as the
one that exists right now.

>From that point of view a Marxism that can't comprehend the need for a
strategic and practical united front, towards the ALP-trade union continuum,
is a useless Marxism, for any practical purpose.


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