DSP, greens and Greens

[Nick Fredman <nfredman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Gould wrote:

>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

Since I was very enthusiatic about the DSP's participation in the 1989 mass
rallies and blockades against logging of the NSW South East forests, in the
early 1990 conference that set up the NSW Green Alliance, and subsequent
major partcipation in the Green Alliance's (GA) March 1990 federal
elections (my first election campaign), and the DSP's 1990 book "Socialism
and Human Survival", and that these things were a major reason for me
joining the DSP, as opposed to other socialist groups (eg ISO) which tended
to dismiss the whole environment movement, let alone electoral expressions
of it, my conversion is hardly recent, Damascas-like or anything to do with
Bob Gould. In the late 80s I was impressed by the DSP's then paper Direct
Action sympathetic yet critical coverage of Brown's Tasmanian Greens, the
German Greens, forest campaigns, debates such as population etc. In 1991 I
helped with the GA NSW campaign, including organising a campus forum for
Ian Cohen, and helping GA score up to 30% in some booths in my then suburb
of Newtown, coincidently the location of Bob's shop (maybe you didn't
notice Bob, it was rapidly developing then). I don't think it's
ultra-Zinoviest-Cannonist party loyalism for me to suggest that the DSP had
quite early on an innovative approach to the environment question. Maybe
mistakes were made in interventions in the environment campaigns and Green
electoral movements, and of course by 1992 the Greens decided, for better
or worse, to become a fully fledged national party proscribing socialist
tendencies, as opposed to the DSP's proposal for a broad left-green
electoral front, but for Gould to suggest engaging with the green movement
is a new idea that he teach the DSP about is rather false, not to say
ego-centric.

>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".

Maybe if Bob paid more attention and wasn't so concerned to crowbar every
comment into hos schemas, he'd have noticed I was putting a positive Gary
McLennan's lament that a socialist wasn't elected. Maybe I should have used
a capital S. Is Gould seriously suggested that a candidate from an
organisation with a clear socialist platform, elected on that basis, would
be preferable to a Green? I think most Greens (and not just Steve Painter
who made a very considered response to this) would think it odd that a
Socialist wouldn't *prefer* a Socialist, just as they would prefer a Green
over a Laborite, and a Laborite over a Liberal, and for Gould to try and
cram this into his
the-DSP-is-the-epitome-of-hysterical-Third-Period-Stalinist-sectarianism is
very boring demagogy.



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