Re: Green Left Weekly article on WA union elections

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DSP DUMPS BILL GAME: A RESPONSE TO PETER BOYLE ON THE WA ETU

By Bob Gould

Peter Boyle's reply (of 14/8/03) on Marxmail, makes the issues a lot
clearer, as does the article from the Militant Group's paper, The Socialist,
posted by David Murray on the Green Left list (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/2024 ), and the
quick response by Ben Courtice (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/2026 ) on GL.

The first thing that strikes me about this is the DSP's attempt to divert
the discussion onto relatively inessential questions. I hereby apologise for
my error in not noticing that there had been a gritted teeth article in
support of Sutton in GLW. These days, I access GLW on the Web, which is
probably a mistake, because one sometimes overlooks things that one wouldn't
overlook in the systematic way one tends to read hard-copy socialist
newspapers.

What fascinates me is that the only person to respond to me has been Peter
Boyle (
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2003w32/msg00242.htm ), no
one, so far, from Western Australia, and the response from anyone else in
the DSP has consisted only in several postings of the Sutton article on the
GLW site and on Leftist Trainspotters.

Similarly, the important article and interview with Bill Game, in The
Socialist evokes an immediate response from Ben Courtice about its excited,
fawning tone. I share Courtice's view and am often irritated by the
sycophantic style of interviews in The Socialist, but surely the point in
this instance is not the tone of The Socialist, but what the article reveals
about Bill Game's general political and industrial outlook and activities.

I'm told by people who know him that the interview is a fair, and almost
vintage, representation of Game's general industrial and political outlook,
ultraleft towards the ALP at the political level, but consistently socialist
and industrially militant.

Despite the tone of the interview, at least The Socialist did interview Game
to get his point of view. This sure beats the hell out of the Green Left
Weekly standard of journalism.

The article in Green Left Weekly, which initially set off alarm bells for
me, is presented as if it included interviewing Game. I'm now reliably
informed that Chris Latham, the author, did not interview Game at all. The
information in his article must have been third-hand, maybe from Les
McLaughlan or Anthony Benbow. It's even bad bourgeois journalism to present
an account of a conflict situation like this, as if you are getting the
point of view of both parties, when in fact, you've only interviewed one
side.

It's much worse for a socialist newspaper to report events in mildly
deceptive way, about what it says is a conflict between two left wingers for
General Secretary of a union.

I ask this question of Peter Boyle and Chris Latham. Did Latham interview
Game to get his point of view? If not, why not? Why give the reader the
impression that you did interview Game?

Over the last four days, I've joined a lot of the dots in this situation, by
talking to left wingers of my acquaintance in the West, and others.

Bill Game is a well known leftist maverick in WA. He's been a full time
official of the union for a considerable number of years. He's now
completing his third four-year term as Secretary.

The views quoted in The Socialist interview certainly are vintage Bill Game.
He has been talking and behaving that way for many years. He took the
initiative in disaffiliating the ETU from the ALP in 1991, and he has been
using, by my standards, rather ultraleft rhetoric about immediately forming
a new workers party for quite a number of years. For instance, he's the only
full time union official who has been willing to address the Socialist
Alliance on that kind of question. He has also been well-known as the most
prominent full-time union official in WA to make repeated public statements
attacking the late, unlamented Wages and Incomes Accord between unions and
the Hawke Labor Government, and to criticise too close an association
between union leaderships and government.

All this has been very public and Game has made a number of powerful enemies
in the labour movement because of his attitude on these matters.

Eight years ago he faced a fairly vigorous electoral challenge to his
leadership and he claims that Anthony Benbow, the DSP bloke, supported that
challenge as well. Is that true? It does not clearly emerge from Latham's
article, where it is obscured by Latham's assertion that Benbow was a
supporter of Game in the last election, four years ago.

Game claims that he has devoted a substantial amount of union resources to
the campaign by his union to maintain Electrical Trade Union coverage,
representation and membership at the Hamersley Mine site in the north, in
the face of the brutally anti-union attacks of that employer and the federal
Liberal Government. He asserts that this has been very costly and that the
cost of it is being highlighted by his electoral opponents, as part of their
campaign against him. Is there any truth in the assertion that his opponents
are attempting to exploit that situation?

Other observers in Western Australia that I've consulted, say that it's
pretty clear, in their view, that Kevin Reynolds is supporting the
opposition to Game. I'm told that Game's electoral propaganda contains
endorsements from a large number of delegates in the industry, and that his
opponents propaganda doesn't contain many such endorsements. For instance,
is Anthony Benbow, who represents the DSP interest in this situation, and
whom we are told is an activist in the union over many years, a union
delegate?

I'm also reliably informed that the Game camp consists of Game himself, two
full-time organisers, and two industrial officers, as well as widespread
support among the delegates; and that the McLaughlan camp consists of three
full-time organisers, including McLaughlan himself, who is challenging Game
for the Secretary's job.

I'm reliably informed also, that the Game camp, for circumstantial reasons,
mainly financial, is of necessity conducting their campaign on the cheap, so
to speak, in the traditional way, mailing their how-to-vote ticket, etc, and
phoning delegates. My WA informants tell me that the other side seems to be
able to afford the new, extremely expensive type of campaigning, embodied in
phonng every individual member. In many union elections this method of
phoning every member verges on push polling.

Responding to my probing, Peter Boyle says that both leading candidates are
left wingers and "Green Left" was remiss in not clearly spelling that out. I
'm informed that there's an element of truth in this, in that Les McLaughlan
is not regarded by anybody as an extreme right-winger, that he is an
energetic career union official who has chosen to make his run against Game
on the basis that he thinks Game is vulnerable to challenge. Part of Game's
vulnerability obviously consists in his belligerent avowal of unpopular
causes on the left.

The problem with supporting McLaughlan is that he's a much less sharply
defined political figure than Game.

In the course of his challenge, McLaughlan is getting support wherever he
can, and in this context, the McLaughlan camp's apparent support for
reaffiliation to the ALP suggests the likelihood that if he is victorious,
as a significantly less political animal than Game he is likely to be drawn
into the orbit of Kevin Reynolds' centre-right political machine in the ALP.
The scientific saying is, nature abhors a vacuum, and the general tendency
in trade unions, labour movement politics and the ALP is for active trade
unionists to be drawn into one faction or another.

No one has asserted that McLaughlan has any allegiance to the Socialist
Alliance, and if he has received significant support from the Reynolds
machine what force is likely to draw him away from Reynolds' grouping in the
labour movement? Certainly not the DSP, which despite its pretensions is
relatively marginal to labour movement industrial activities and politics.

Considerations of that sort obviously don't rate very highly with the DSP,
because their artificially constructed cosmology about the ALP just being
the second party of capitalism, makes such considerations unimportant to
them. But in the real world of the industrial and political life of Western
Australia, such considerations are, in fact, extremely important.

I can envisage a situation where the DSP may well be saying, privately,
something like this: Look, Bill Game isn't a bad bloke. He has been an
honest socialist militant, but he has lost the plot because of his
ultraleftism. He's going to be beaten by the other bloke. We've got to cut
our losses and go with the other bloke, because we may be able to influence
events to the left, under the new regime, if we are seen to be supporters of
Les McLaughlan's push for power, and that will also be good for relations
with Kevin Reynolds and his industrial/political machine.

The DSP, however, doesn't say anything like that publicly. It prefers to
maintain the argument on the plane of rather high-flown abstractions, such
as Peter Boyle taking responsibility for the judgement that McLaughlan's
leadership will be better for the ETU.

Having acquired as much information as I can about the situation in the
West, I have reached the provisional view that the behaviour of the DSP in
this situation is pretty unprincipled.

The electoral defeat of such a noisy public figure, identified with leftist
and socialist trade unionism, will actually set the political atmosphere
back significantly in Perth and Western Australia. It would be more
honourable and sensible to give critical support to Game, despite his
ultraleftism towards the ALP.

Several of my contacts in Western Australia say that it's still by no means
a foregone conclusion that Game will be beaten. They tell me that he has a
significant reservoir of support on the basis of his energetic industrial
activities over a very long period, and that he could still survive, even
despite the impact of the considerable financial resources being thrown in
behind his opponents.

It seems to me that the DSP leadership has a chronic lack of any sense of
proportion in trade union matters. They veer between viewing concrete,
protracted, patient trade union interventions as relatively unimportant and
overstating possibilities and developments in the unions on the basis of
some limited conjunctural event. My alarm bells also started ringing when
John Percy made a fiery speech at a recent Socialist Alliance meeting on
trade union matters in Sydney, in which, taking as his point of departure a
good vote for a DSP candidate in the Sydney MUA and a good vote for the
Chris Cain group in WA, he canvassed the imminent probability of enormous
new openings in the unions.

Not having a lot of confidence in John's judgement in these matters, I
wondered at the time what possibly might be in the works, and it seems to me
that the DSP's intervention in the WA electrical union is one by-product of
John Percy's excited impressionism.

The DSP leadership should step back a bit and try to get a sense of
proportion. The victory of Chris Cain's militant group in the MUA in WA is a
very significant step forward. Nevertheless, the much-reduced WA waterfront
union has only about 1000 members. The also much-reduced ETU still has more
than 4000 members in WA. These days it's a rather more significant union
than the MUA. It would be a considerable tragedy from the socialist point of
view if the victory of the militant left in the wharfies' union was
immediately followed by the overthrow of the one other noisy militant
socialist in the WA trade unions, and his replacement by a new leadership
that is quite likely in the current industrial climate to be significantly
to the right of Bill Game in practice.

The Militant Group's (Socialist Party's) last-minute intervention.

I'm anything but impressed by the Militant Group's new adventure (see
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/2033 ). The
Militant Group is tiny, with about five members at most in WA. They bounce
up to Bill Game right in the middle of his hotly contested electoral battle
for industrial survival and solicit his support for proclaiming some sort of
committee for a new workers or socialist party. It seems to me that in the
middle of a hotly contested union election battle like this Bill Game needs
that kind of initiative plonked on his plate like a hole in the head.

Surely what Game needs is concrete support in his electoral battle, not new
political initiatives, which, if they are valid or desirable from his point
of view could well be postponed for a week or two until his union electoral
battle is concluded.

Peter Boyle's speedy response on the web on Saturday evening, taking up the
minutiae of the rivalry between his group's project and the Militant's
project does, however, give the flavour of some of the issues involved from
the point of view of both the DSP leadership and the Socialist Party.

Which side is supported in the ETU battle begins to have the dimensions of
the well-known Monty Python sketch in the Life of Brian about the conflict
between the People's Liberation Front of Judea and the Liberation People's
Front of Judea, or whatever. Unfortunately for Bill Game and his members,
Game's courageous leadership of the ETU seems to be caught in this
cross-fire.

>From where I sit, it's becoming a little clearer what some of the
crosscurrents are. The DSP has a sectarian attitude towards Bill Game
because he is a publicly identified militant socialist who doesn't
automatically support every detail of their particular Socialist Alliance
project. The Socialist Party is equally sectarian. Its primary interest
seems to be getting Bill Game to endorse its political project, without
overmuch concern as to whether he wins or loses.

The DSP's attitude seems to be to be both sectarian and opportunist in the
sense that it is prepared to underwrite the election of a new leadership in
the ETU, which may quite probably be drawn to the right by the logic of the
situation, and the still-continuing rather conservative social and political
atmosphere.

>From where I sit the overwhelming consideration ought to be support for Bill
Game's survival in the ETU elections.

I would ask the following questions of Peter Boyle and Anthony Benbow.

Question 1: Was it at any stage possible to avert a bitter electoral
conflict in the ETU between two personalities you say are both left-wingers
and their two small industrial machines? Did you make any effort to mediate
the conflict? (Obviously in this situation, such mediation would more or
less necessarily have had to involve accepting that Game, the senior bloke
so publicly identified with leftism in Perth, would continue as General
Secretary.)

Question 2: Did you ever consider going with the Game camp?

Question 3. Did you ever consider remaining neutral in the ETU elections?

Question 4: What were the general social and political criteria, in and
outside the ETU, that brought you to the conclusion that Les McLaughlan's
leadership of the ETU would be better for the socialist and labour movement?

Question 5: What is the character of the election propaganda on both sides?
The printed propaganda used by competing factions in union ballots is
usually pretty revealing about the two groups of candidates. Would you be
prepared to put up on the Green Left website, for careful consideration, the
printed material of both sides, including the "shit sheets" that are
circulating, attacking Bill Game. I'm getting them from WA, but you may
already have them. Why not put them up on the Green Left website to
strengthen your case? Also, would you be willing to try to acquire, for
publication on the web, the script being used by the people phoning every
member of the ETU attacking the Bill Game team? The character of that script
would be of some interest, obviously.

I will leave a discussion of the DSP's assessment of the conflict between
the Victorian and Western Australian leaderships of the CFMEU and the NSW
leadership for another post, because that question, also, requires careful
consideration. I will also leave for another post a further discussion of
the methodological issues involved in the "labour aristocracy" question that
Peter Boyle so resents being included in this discussion.

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