Green Left Weekly on WA union elections

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A COMMENT ON A GREEN LEFT WEEKLY REPORT ABOUT A UNION ELECTION IN THE
ELECTRICAL TRADES UNION IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

By Bob Gould

Monday's Green Left Weekly (11/8/03) has, more or less out of the blue, a
quite detailed account (http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/549p9.htm) of an
election challenge to Bill Game's leadership in the Electrical Trades Union
section of the EEPTU in Western Australia.

The article is clearly written in support of the group challenging Bill
Game. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I've been aware of Bill
Game as a militant and leftist associate of other left wingers in Western
Australia, whom I know personally. I've also seen him mentioned over the
years, on a number of occasions, in Green Left Weekly and even its
predecessor "Direct Action", as a supporter of leftist causes.

I've since rung a few acquaintances in Western Australia, to get a bit of
background, to try to join the dots, so to speak.

It seems to me that, as a general principle, Marxists have to be careful in
deciding when to themselves run in union elections, and which side they
support in union internal conflicts. This is obviously not a precise
science, but surely certain broad principles apply, though there often arise
complex, grey tactical areas.

The facts seem to be these: there are a couple of political currents and
sub-factions in the labour movement in WA. A rising star in the labour
movement, both industrial and political, is Kevin Reynolds, the powerful and
dominating figure who is the secretary of the CFMEU. He is an old associate
of Norm Gallagher. He consolidated his power base in the CFMEU a few years
ago, after his Builders Laborers Federation amalgamated with the Carpenters
Union. Part of this consolidation involved defeating Bill Ethel, a
courageous leftist who made the industrial mistake of overdoing the use of
green bans in his capacity as secretary of the Carpenters Union.

At the industrial level, Reynolds runs a reasonably militant union setup of
a more or less traditional economist sort, with which one can have no
quarrel, in the difficult current Australian conditions. Reynolds is a bit
of a bete noir to the tories, particularly the tory federal government and
is the subject of constant attacks in which he is accused by the tories of
some kind of corruption, but none of these attacks have ever been made to
stick.

At the political level, Reynolds is a significant and energetic political
power broker in the centre right of the ALP. One of his closest ALP
associates is the right winger, Brian Burke, the former Labor premier, and
Reynolds' influence in the ALP has been rapidly increasing, as has his
influence in the WA Trades and Labor Council.

Obviously Reynolds is a figure whom it would be pretty stupid to
deliberately make an enemy of. I have no difficulty with the fact that the
militants in the Waterfront Union in WA sought Reynolds' support in their
successful campaign to overthrow a bankrupt conservative leadership in the
Maritime Union of Australia, which is demonstrated by the very public toast
to their success made by Kevin Reynolds at the MUA victory party.

I have previously noted, in one of my documents, that the main personality
in the new militant leadership of the MUA, voted at a recent Socialist
Conference in favour of a more cautious approach to the question of ALP
affiliation, than the DSP, and it seems obvious to me that part of the
explanation for this may lie in the alliance with Reynolds. One of the dots
that I have just joined up is new information that I did not then know, that
the brother of the main personality in the WA MUA was, for a number of
years, an organiser with Reynolds in the BLF, and is now an active figure in
another WA union, where he is regarded as a Kevin Reynolds ally.

Being in an alliance with Reynolds, particularly in opposition to the
attacks on him by the ruling class, isn't any sort of original sin. At this
point, I would stress that all these circumstances make the DSP's abstract
left talk about exposing Laborism in the unions, appear as the demagoguery
that it actually is, and underlines the general point about the continuing
grip of Laborism on unionised workers.

I'm conscious of the fact that Perth-Fremantle is a small city of about a
million people, dominating the far flung state of Western Australia, which
is about half the Australian continent, in which the country areas of WA
have another 300,000 people, and which is so isolated that Perth is closer
to Singapore than it is to Sydney. It may seem a little eccentric for me to
even comment on these developments from the distance of Sydney. But,
nevertheless, the fact that Perth-WA is such a small world in itself, a
small town, so to speak, underlines the importance of Marxists being careful
and even a bit cautious, in how they proceed in labor movement matters
there.

The Green Left Weekly article acknowledges that Bill Game makes the
accusation that the group challenging him are industrial and political
allies of Kevin Reynolds, who intend to reaffiliate the ETU to the Labor
Party, thereby, Game implies, advancing the Reynolds faction's political
interests.

Is there any substantial truth in Game's accusation about his internal
opposition? Internal union challenges which, these days, are very costly,
rarely fall out of the sky. I have no particular brief for Bill Game, except
for the fact that, generally speaking, for a long period of time, he's done
his time, so to speak, as part of the industrial and political left. I've
always disagreed, for instance, with his ultra leftism towards the ALP.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that one would have to have a powerful
justification or necessity, in the current climate, to deliberately join and
support a challenge to his leadership, if that challenge was from a group of
union organisers who are part of a centre-right machine in the ALP.

Surely the industrial political location of the challengers is a more or
less factual question that can be ascertained. Limited differences about
organising methods, etc, and different proposals for organising by the
challengers, doesn't overly impress me. Anyone challenging in an internal
union struggle usually comes up with a more detailed set of proposals for
organising than the incumbents. The very limited statement of the
differences in the "Green Left" article underlines my instinct that one has
to work out where the challengers fit in, in the industrial political scheme
of things.

I don't intend to be too categorical and flat-footed about any of this,
because I don't yet know quite enough about all the ins and outs of the
situation, though I'm endeavouring to find out, and I'm certainly not
suggesting that any group of Marxists in Western Australia would be advised
to start a general industrial political war against Kevin Reynolds.
Nevertheless, all other things being equal, it seems to me to be a bit
unwise, and rather unprincipled, to automatically join in throwing out Bill
Game, and dancing on his industrial coffin, so to speak.

Game may well not survive the challenge, in which case the Marxists who
supported the challengers will be locked for a period into their alliance
with whatever industrial and political practices the successful challengers
carry out, and it may not be the case that what they do in practice flows
from their limited written manifesto.

If Game's leadership survives in the ETU, the Marxists who supported the
challengers are in an even worse situation, with an angry relationship with
Game, who is likely to remain a political enemy for quite a period, and who
will probably continue to assert that he was challenged from the right. It
all sounds to me like a bit of a mess.

Another dimension to this is the pronounced tendency in the past year or so
for the DSP to take a rather public factional stand in support of the
Victorian-WA group in the CFMEU in its conflict with the NSW leadership, led
by Andrew Ferguson, and with John Sutton the federal secretary of the CFMEU.

At several Socialist Alliance meetings that I have attended, the DSP
activists have been dishing out factional material against the NSW CFMEU and
national leadership, produced by the Victorians. The strangest instance of
this was a year or so ago at a Socialist Alliance trade union meeting at
Parramatta, which was addressed by the NSW president of the CFMEU, and the
DSP members present were handing out material from the Victorian CFMEU
attacking the NSW CFMEU.

The internal chop-chop in the CFMEU has been going on for a long time and
does not look like being resolved decisively in favour of either group.
Despite the DSP's rhetoric, the industrial differences between the
contending factions are not that great. The critical difference from the
DSP's point of view seems to be that the Victorian leaders are a bit kinder
to the DSP and the Socialist Alliance. Once again, I'm not opposed to
civilised and sensible relations with Martin Kingham and John Cummins. They
are pretty good trade unionists by any standards. Nevertheless, it's a bit
short-sighted to get too deeply involved in their factional chop-chop with
Ferguson and Sutton.

It seemed a bit short-sighted, to me, for Martin Kingham to publicly
criticise Sutton recently, at the time of the witch-hunt against him in the
bourgeois press over his vigorous activities on the Morris McMahon picket
line. It also seemed to me a bit short-sighted of Green Left to not register
critical support for Sutton in his war with the bourgeois press.

The problem with getting too deeply involved in inter-union factional
struggles between conflicting parties who are all ostensible leftists, is
that the consequences are dialectical. Australia is a federation of states
with big cities at a great distance from each other, and labour movement
politics often involves interstate as well as political rivalries. These
days it's almost as if the DSP operates a Melbourne policy and strategy
industrially, which is a bit dopey when it also has to operate in Sydney and
NSW.

It's hardly surprising in this context that the conservatives and Stalinist
relics have managed to rope the CFMEU into the attempt to drive the far left
out of the antiwar movement in NSW. They only have to point to the DSP's
excessive Victorian factionalism to get an attentive hearing from most NSW
unions.

I would refer readers of this to a very useful article by Kim Moody, which
is advertised on the front page of the US Solidarity Group's website. This
useful piece can be accessed at:
http://solidarity.igc.org/TheRankAndFileStrategy.html

In this article, in a discussion of the classic, defining experience of
revolutionary unionism, that of the Trotskyists in Minneapolis, Moody quotes
Farrell Dobbs thus:

"From the outset the building of a broad left wing in the local was rooted
in the programmatic concepts essential to a policy of militant struggle
against the employers. Although this perspective entailed an ultimate clash
with conservative union officials, their removal from office was not
projected at the start as an immediate aim. That could have given the
mistaken impression that the Trotskyist militants were interested primarily
in winning union posts. To avoid such a misconception a flanking tactic was
developed. Instead of calling for a quick formal change in the local's
leadership, the incumbent officials were pressed to alter their policies to
meet the workers needs."

At a DSP Conference session that I attended several years ago, Sue Bull gave
a very long presentation (over an hour) about half of which was devoted to a
euphoric recounting of the Minneapolis events and the other half to an
equally euphoric defence of the DSP's disastrous adventure in the Wollongong
Ironworkers in the early 1980s. This adventure is discussed in some detail
in George Petersen's autobiography (see
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Petersen.html for extract) and in
Bob Gould's Open Letter to Members of the DSP
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/DSP%20Letter.html

It seems to me, however, that the DSP leadership has great difficulty in
assimilating the dialectical complexity of the extraordinarily rich and
complex Minneapolis experience, because the section that Kim Moody quotes
above, often so sharply contradicts the DSP's actual practice, like the 1982
Wollongong adventure, and several other of their industrial interventions.

Another methodological question arises. The DSP is a very tightly
centralised organisation in the Zinovievist tradition. How are the decisions
made on such things as the decision to support a challenge to Game in the
ETU in Western Australia. Was that decision made primarily at a national
leadership level, on the basis of over riding political considerations like
the alliance in the Socialist Alliance with the new leadership of the MUA.
It would be nice to know the answer to that question.

A METHODOLOGICAL POSTSCRIPT

Over the last year, a rather protracted discussion has proceeded between me
and Peter Boyle and other DSPers, on the issue of whether the concept of the
predominance of an aristocracy of labor in advanced capitalist countries, is
a useful and valid current political concept. I argued that it isn't. Boyle
et al argued that it is. (See
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w43/msg00122.htm and
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w45/msg00146.htm)

The methodological question arises: are the membership of the ETU and EEPTU
in Western Australia, electricians and plumbers, in any meaningful way,
significant parts of a labor aristocracy, and if they are, how does this
affect industrial and union strategy in the ETU?

Gould's Book Arcade 32 King St, Newtown, NSW. Ph: (02) 9519 8947 Fax: (02)
9550 5924