The Real Lessons from the Vietnam Anti-war Movement in Australia

["Gould's Book Arcade" <ggouldsb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Real Lessons from the Vietnam Anti-war Movement in Australia

I would like to thank the Editorial Board of Green Left and the DSP for
running my piece on the Johnson demonstration and for the careful way it was
edited and the sensible juxtaposition of it with a smaller article, and with
some pictures, and with the two-page spread by Doug Lorimer in the middle
pages, giving the DSP leadership's version of the first part of the history
of the Vietnam anti war movement.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/558/558p13.htm
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/558/558p14.htm
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/559/559p12.htm

Lorimer's narative, which is an updated version of his and John Percy's
account of the anti war movement and, to some extent the origins of the DSP,
has some substantial defects by omission. The DSP leadership's present,
evolved, conception of the DSP and its predecessors is used as Lorimer's
starting point. This ahistorical perspective, which gives too much weight to
the DSP and Resistance Tendency, as a self-conscious entity, is extrapolated
back into time, in this case to 1965, as if the development of Resistance
and the DSP in their present form, was a globally significant political
development totally contained in embryo, in the initial struggles of the two
Percys.

John Percy has been giving this DSP-centric version of the events for years,
in his potted lectures on the history of the DSP. Some of the questions
raised by Doug Lorimer's and John's slant on these historical questions are
also relevant to Lorimer's new substantial article about Zinovievism,
polemicising with Louis Proyect. This current Links article by Doug is
useful and timely, because it codifies the DSP leadership's view and it has
got to be taken in conjunction with Lorimer's account of events in the anti
war movement. I'm working on a longer piece about these organisational
questions. Doug Lorimer's account of the history of the anti war movement is
relevant to this broader discussion.

I observe here, as I'll observe at greater length in a forthcoming article,
that the John Percy / Doug Lorimer school of historiography owes almost
everything to the Zinoviev / Jim Cannon school of history, the high points
of which were Zinoviev's "History of the Bolshevik Party"  and Jim Cannon's
"History of American Trotskyism", both of which started out as series of
lectures, like John Percy's. The great weakness of this school is that,
trawling back into the history of the movement, it attempts to codify a
schema about the origins of the Bolshevik Party (Zinoviev), the American SWP
(Cannon), and the origins of the DSP (Percy), which asserts that the evolved
form of the organisations, at the point of writing, represents a deliberate
evolution, that had been taking place self-consciously since the foundation
of the group.

This approach in the first two cases, was a mystification and is even more a
mystification in the case of the DSP, and Doug Lorimer incorporates this
kind of mystification into his history of the anti war movement.

For a start, the Vietnam Action Committee, when it was founded in 1965,
included, as leading personalities me, the late Mary Greenland (Hall
Greenland's mother), Rod Webb and John Percy, not just me and John. At that
point, John's main sphere of activity actually was the Sydney University
Labor Club where he worked, along with Hayden Thompson, Col Waddy, Russ
Darnley, and members of the CP like Anne and Jean Curthoys and others.

The early period was more complex and contradictory than the DSP narrative
suggests. It is true to say that we were powerfully influenced by
"Intercontinental Press" and the American SWP, and that we fought hard for
the "Withdrawal of all Imperialist Troops" slogan to be the central focus of
our agitation. However, in Australia, we had a more mixed attitude to civil
disobedience and even to slogans like "Victory to the VietCong". We weren't
as absolutely flatfooted as the American SWP in opposing all civil
disobedience, and in opposing the slogan "Victory to the VietCong". While
our emphasis was mainly on mass action for withdrawal, we occasionally,
ourselves initiated a bit of creative civil disobedience to get publicity,
for instance, the initiating  sit down in Canberra in May 1965, the sit down
demonstration in Pitt Street in October 1965, and the blocking of Johnson's
cavalcade in October 1966. In analagous circumstances, the US SWP totally
opposed all civil disobedience, in my understanding of their history.

Later on, when draft resistance, which was a kind of civil disobedience,
commenced, we gave it critical support. However, we also tried to raise the
notion of resistance inside the Army. When other forces in the movement
raised the "Victory to the VietCong" slogan, we fought hard to continue the
main emphasis of the Vietnam Action Committee on the withdrawal of
Australian and American troops, but we didn't object to other groups
carrying "Victory to the VietCong" placards in our demonstrations.

We were heavily influenced by the very practical initiatives of the American
SWP in the US anti war movement, but we weren't in any sense simply clones
of the US SWP, of which some people, particularly the Stalinists, accused
us.

In his account, Lorimer makes an overly quick leap from the early phase of
the Vietnam Action Committee to the struggle in the mobilisation committees,
for a withdrawal policy in the Moratoriums. He tends to focus his account
entirely on the role of the Percy Resistance groups in this development,
which is a self serving historical nonsense.

If readers go to the open letter to Moratorium sponsors, which we put up a
couple of months ago on the Ozleft web site, they will find that document,
which initiated the successful struggle to give the youth and the left equal
say in the running of the Moratorium, was a bloc of all the youth and
far-left organisations that were around at the time. In particular, the bloc
was spearheaded by the two wings into which the old VAC and Resistance had
split. The main personalities in both groups are there with signatures on
the open letter, along with a very significant range of others. In the
practical day to day running of both Moratoriums, this bloc of the left
forced not only Jim Percy, but also a number of other of the signatories to
the open letter, on to the Steering Committee of the Moratoriums at various
stages. At the staff level, in the Moratorium office, representatives of the
militant bloc included Ros Cheney, Rod Webb's then companion, who was for a
while in the DSP, but later left it, a woman from Workers Action whose name
I now forget, and other militants. If you look study the list of signatories
to the open letter, all of whom were significant leaders in the antiwar
movement, three of them were members of the Percy faction (one of whom, Tony
Dewberry, is now a member of Socialist Democracy in Melbourne), five of them
were broadly members of Phil Sandford's Workers Action group, and seven of
them were people who sided with Gould at the time of the split in
Resistance. At that stage in developments, the Percy group was a smaller
influence than the other groupings, in the general revolt of the left of the
movement against total Stalinist dominance in the antiwar movement.

In the same timeframe, the 1971 Socialist Left in the ALP was mainly an
insurrection of all kinds of indigenous ALP rebels. All the non Stalinist
socialist groups, including Phil Sandford's group and also the two wings
into which Resistance had split, also joined it. Despite the split in
Resistance, all the socialist groups, including my opponents, the Percy's,
voted for me for Federal Conference Delegate against Frank Walker MLA, at
the vital SL preselection meeting for the 1971 ALP Conference. I beat Walker
by 90 votes to 10 at this preselection meeting. Obviously the split in
Resistance hadn't become as fixed and frozen as it did later.

All this was possible because, at this stage, the hardened split between the
then embryonic DSP and the group around me, (most of whom went on to have a
fit of party building enthusiasm ourselves, when most of us at different
times moved into the orbit of the also recently founded SLL.) had not become
completely fixed.

It was only after the 1971 ALP State Conference, and the Federal Conference
to which I got elected by half a vote, that the differences between the
groups hardened rapidly. After the high point of the two conferences, some
of the technocratic indigenous laborites quickly lost interest in the
Socialist Left, and the DSP forces, decided to push to take it over, and by
marshalling Resistance youth, a number of whom weren't even at that stage
members of the ALP, they managed to get the numbers at a Socialist Left
conference, against a coalition of George Petersen, myself, some indigenous
ALP activists and Workers' Action. The issues in dispute were a bit arcane
and focused around two alternative formulations of a programme for the
Socialist Left, but the substantial outcome was the Percy group's successful
capture of the committee of the Socialist Left. The Percy group's capture of
the committee was overshadowed by another development, the main
personalities leading the Percy group's activities in the ALP were Roger
Barnes and his subgroup of the Percy organisation. As the first celebrated,
significant incident of the Cannonisation of the Percy group, the Barnes
group was deliberately driven out (by organisational means) of the
developing Percy organisation, with the aim of homogenising the Percy group.
Immediately after this, the Percy group ditched ALP work for a year or two,
though they came back into the ALP at a later stage. Having captured the
1971 Socialist Left, they therefore promptly liquidated it. This is all
described in some detail in the section of George Petersen's autobiography
on the question, which is on OzLeft.

These circumstances get us to the problem of John Percy's and Doug Lorimer's
party model, extended onwards through the last 30 years of the 20th century.
All the Leninist party building exercises of the late 1960s and the 1970s
and the 1980s, into the 1990s, including the DSP and the SLL, took over a
Zinovievest "party building" formula. The main features of this formula were
a hermetically sealed internal life, with an all powerful "leadership",
however ill qualified, that resolves all political questions at the
leadership level, and preserves a kind of cabinet solidarity in relation to
the membership of the organisation. In general, differences within the
leaderships are resolved before they are taken to the memberships, and
members of these leaderships are expected not to campaign among the members
for their point of view, outside of strictly limited pre-conference periods,
with an obligation to form a faction, and start a war, if serious
differences arise. This leads either to the strangulation of political
developments or to unnecessary splits. When you get a situation, as you have
now in almost every country, of a proliferation of socialist organisations
with this kind of internal regime, each organisation has particular
shibboleths and obsessions, which have been produced by their specific
political evolution, mainly inside the leadership of the organisations.

In the external world, you then arrive at the situation we have now. A
number of revolutionary socialist groups face each other off, in the spirit
of the analogy that I use about ant colonies and bee colonies, all with some
variant of the frozen-in-time Zinovievist party model. Even in an
organisation like the Socialist Alliance, which is ostensibly a vehicle for
socialist unity and regroupment, the problem of the Zinovievist model of
organisation,  clearly persists. The main organisations, particularly the
DSP, operate within this Zinovievest framework, even in the Alliance, which
clearly gives the DSP leadership enormous practical weight, both in relation
to any opposition forces in the DSP, and particuarly in relation to the
smaller groups in the Alliance. Any serious tactical or political discussion
takes place first in the DSP leadership. It is then transmitted downward
into the DSP, and the DSP leadership, who run the largest group, have no
difficulty in getting the Alliance to do whatever the DSP leadership
requires. Despite the presence of a number of different organisations in the
Alliance, very little frank horizontal political debate takes place between
the members of the various socialist groups, because they all have a
similar, Zinovievest, structure, which acts as a bulwark against serious
discussion. That is an enormous political problem.

One feature of Doug Lorimer's narrative about the history of the Vietnam
anti war movement that underlines its mechanical, retrospective, Zinovievest
character, is when he uses the royal plural for the DSP and Resistance,
extrapolated back to 1965. Well that is a royal plural, used by him, to
create an ideal model of an organisation and current, seven or eight years
before he appeared on the scene. It gives the notion more magisterium, but
it's politically very misleading. The present political organisations of the
far left evolved over time, and their present finished form bears little
resemblance to how they started out.

How they started out had some negative features, as John Percy will tell you
at length, but in my view it also had some positive features which, in due
course, I will describe at length. It's not much use, however, to tell the
story in the way Doug does, tidying up the history to suit his present point
of view. This approach to historical questions is common to most groups that
think they are "Leninists", and it tends to miseducate members badly. Air
brushing out of history all the contradictory and complex individuals and
developments that don't fit your view, and replacing them with an idealised
narrative, is a bad way to proceed, both historically and politically. Doug'
s little bit of air brushing, of course, is tiny compared to the massive
falsifications of history that we've seen in the 20th century, particularly
the Stalinist falsification of history, which was on a gigantic scale,
backed up by an enormous state apparatus. Nevertheless, Doug's little bit of
air brushing contains within it a possibly embryo of the monstrous greater
historical falsifications with which we are all familiar. When writing
history, Marxists ought always keep these issues in the forefront of their
minds and give coverage and weight to all the elements and individuals in
the historical situations that they are discussing. That is a much better
way of writing history from a Marxist point of view than some one-eyed
narrative, usually written to serve a narrow political purpose. Such
narratives can usually be refuted with a certain amount of effort. So why
bother writing one-eyed narratives in the first place!

PS. I've just read Doug Lorimer's second piece in today's Green Left.
Lorimer reduces the whole of the political struggle in the movement against
the Vietnam War to a struggle against Stalinism and laborism, personalised
as a struggle against the Stalinists and the Laborites by his
retrospectively idealised political tendency. Politically this is a very
dangerous nonsense. The struggle about the Vietnam War proceeded within the
broad labour movement, and within the ALP, and for most of the period, the
bulk of the labour movement, and many of its significant leaders,
particularly the courageous Arthur Calwell, led that struggle. That was also
how all of us in Sydney, in the Trotskyist tradition, including the Percy's,
viewed it at the time, and formed the framework for how we participated in
this process. In the case of the Percy's, it formed the basis of how they
participated in it right to the end of the struggle against the Vietnam War
in 1975. It wasn't until their dramatic change in political orientation in
about 1985 that their view of those questions changed. I own a set of the
first 76 issues of Direct Action, and the totally different orientation of
the DSP current towards laborism is absolutely clear in them. Rewriting your
own history in the dramatic way that Doug Lorimer does on the Labor Party
question is right at the heart of the problem of Zinovievism in the writing
of socialist history.

- Bob Gould, October 2003

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

***********************
An open letter to all Moratorium sponsors

At the beginning of the renewed Vietnam Moratorium Campaign the framework
must be set up for its successful organisational functioning, and many
lessons can be learned from the last one. To a large extent the
organisational framework sets the tone of the movement, and inadequacies of
the previous campaign should be recognised and remedied.

The Moratorium is a mass campaign that is united around the common demands
of immediate withdrawal of all allied troops from Indochina and an immediate
end to conscription. But its various organising committees are coalitions of
antiwar groups that necessarily differ widely in their views of society, the
war and the peace movement.

The Moratorium office
One of the first decisions of the sponsors in the last campaign was to set
up a Moratorium office on politically neutral grounds to administer the
decisions of the meetings. Susan Fialkin was appointed to act as full-time
administrative officer. The office was equipped with one duplicator, one
typewriter and one telephone. This was adequate in the first stages of the
campaign, but when the volume of work began to increase no action was taken
to extend the facilities to cope with it. Members of AICD who had been
assisting Susan Fialkin, in fact found it necessary to work almost full-time
on the Moratorium in the AICD premises.

When Susan Fialkin resigned and Deidre Jones and Susan Thornton were hired
to replace her, a large amount of work was still being done in the office.
But due to the lack of staff and equipment, even more work was done by AICD
although this was never requested by the office staff, or discussed at the
meetings of the secretariat, committee or sponsors. For example, inquiries
began to be directed to the AICD premises, publicity material was delivered
there for distribution, newsletters and reports were written and roneod
there. In the final stages of the campaign, even small, routine
organisational meetings were held in the AICD library, in the BWIU hall, and
in the Boilermakers and Blacksmiths' hall. This arbitrary and abrupt
changing of meeting places caused unnecessary confusion and resulted in poor
attendance of meetings.

Members of the secretariat voiced their opposition to this but the majority
of full-time workers on the secretariat were also full-time workers of AICD.
This came about as AICD decided to pay five of their own staff to work for
the campaign - although they have now claimed $2000 of their expenses from
the Moratorium funds.

Although Susan Thornton and Deidre Jones were in the Moratorium office
full-time and attended most secretariat meetings they found they were
becoming increasingly unaware of day-to-day events and decisions. For
example, Ros Cheney was appointed as publicity officer and had been working
from AICD for some time before Deidre, Susan and some other members of the
secretariat found out. Also, Ken O'Hara, who had offered to take on the
difficult task of ordering and distributing publicity material, did this
from AICD and deliveries were made to those premises. People had to be
increasingly directed there to order and collect material.

It finally reached the stage where AICD was working flat out for the
Moratorium and the Moratorium office itself was practically non-functioning.
In other words, due to its inadequacy the Moratorium office became an
adjunct of AICD.

The secretariat
The functioning of the secretariat should also be looked at in relation to
the running of the office. The role of the secretariat is to carry out
decisions made by the sponsors. The original secretariat of seven was
enlarged to 13 due to the general lack of activity by most people involved.
It became obvious that a secretariat member, to carry out his role
adequately, had to spend most of his time on Moratorium work, and this was
only possible for those who did not have other job commitments.

Proposals for the coming Vietnam Moratorium campaign
We see the need for the following measures in this campaign:



That an independent Moratorium office with at least two separate rooms be
set up on politically neutral grounds adequately equipped with a
switchboard, filing cabinets, several typewriters and duplicators, etc
(these could be borrowed or hired).


That the Moratorium office be staffed with at least eight full-time people,
administering all areas of publicity, finance, organising trade unions, on
campus, etc.


That the office staff should be co-opted to the secretariat and receive
equal pay (we suggest a figure around $40 per week.


That this staff be drawn in a representative way from all sections of the
antiwar movement. This would avoid political bias.


That the staff and facilities of the Moratorium office be enlarged at any
time necessary, and that the principle of representation apply to new people
employed.

The two principles that we wish to stress are non-imposition of any
political line on the Moratorium, and the non-exclusion of any sponsoring
organisations from its decision-making. That presupposes a completely
independent central base.

The duties of the secretariat members - carrying out sponsor decisions,
investigating recommendations and implementing general organisational work -
is a full-time occupation. On previous experience it is obvious that at
least eight people will be required to work full-time at the height of the
campaign. To do this adequately, these people need to work from one base and
be in constant communication with each other.

Deidre Jones, Moratorium office; Susan Thornton, Moratorium office and
secretariat; Phil Sandford, secretariat; Sandra Hawker, secretariat; Jim
Percy, secretariat; Haydn Thompson, secretariat; Jim Mulgrew, secretariat;
Tony Dewberry, Resistance; Peter Burnett, Barricades; Helen Voysey, Student
Underground; Warwick Donley, Sutherland Moratorium Youth Group; Stephen
Bock, Glebe Moratorium; Jeni Thornley, Balmain Moratorium; Hall Greenland,
Sydney University Labour Club; Barry Robinson, Sydney University Student
Representative Council president; Deidre Ferguson, Sydney University
Staff-Student Moratorium Committee; Barbara Levy, Womens Liberation; John
Geaki, University of NSW Student Representative Council president; Robynne
Murphy, University of NSW Student Youth Mobilisation Committee; Mel Bloom,
editor, Honi Soit; Joanne Horniman, Macquarie University Women's Liberation
Group; Peter Voysey, Macquarie University Student Mobilisation Committee




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