[Marxism] Re: Australia's First Socialists

["Ozleft" <ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Discussion on this thread has been percolating on the Green Left Weekly
list for a week or so.

Anyone interested can follow the links from:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/4072

Below is Bob Gould's latest

I seem to have inadvertently stirred up several hornets' nests at once. I
don't want anyone to lose sight of my initial major point in criticising
Jim McIlroy's pamphlet, which is that the DSP leadership uses labour
history in a very narrow, instrumental, retrospective way to attempt to
ram home several simple, crudified political points.

In the course of this didactic exercise, the DSP leadership narrows the
real history of the Australian workers' movement and of the historiography
about it, and of past debates about this working class historiography.

Peter Boyle's primitive response, in particular, just underlines this
basic point, and no one so far from the DSP leadership has tried seriously
to challenge me on this question. I wish they would, so we could seriously
discuss the issues involved.

The trivial attempts to demonstrate the DSP leadership's interest in
labour history verge on the ridiculous. Since the turn away from the
labour movement and the associated turn away from labour history, in about
1986, there have been nearly 1000 issues of Direct Action and then Green
Left Weekly, a well-edited and in some ways lively weekly paper.

As the attempted defenders of the DSP leadership have themselves
demonstrated, the amount of coverage of labour history in those 1000- odd
issues has been derisory.

Boyle ridicules my "toppling shelves bookshop" and accuses me of
advertising books. Well, I do that, quite a bit, and that's no crime,
particularly when they're the labour movement history books that I've been
talking about in this discussion. For many years, as part of my
bookselling activities I've concentrated rather energetically on building
up a unique collection of about 30,000 books on Marxism, Russian history,
Trotskyism, anarchism, the Australian labour movement, Irish and Latin
American history, women's studies and other matters relevant to the
workers' movement.

I take pleasure and pride in the fact that this unique collection is
available to the radical public at reasonable prices. The shelves
certainly sag a bit, but the political function is obvious, and generation
after generation of rebels have acquired a fair bit of their education
from this collection. (More than 1000 of the leftists books from this
collection are now catalogued on the web and we are we are adding to this
list all the time.)

The problem, from Peter Boyle's point of view, of course, is that the
literature of the workers' movement is far wider than Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Castro and James P. Cannon, although these important
revolutionaries are well represented on my shelves.

At some moments of heightened political tension the leaders of different
Marxist groups with which I'm arguing, particularly the DSP, obviously try
to discourage their members from browsing in my shop, but this always
breaks down over time and, in particular, the young and rebellious are
impossible to keep away from my collection.

One of the things that is pretty noticeable to me from my bookselling
activities is that most of the leaders of the Marxist groups in Sydney are
no longer particularly interested in looking at socialist books or
browsing through leftist material.

Maybe they use the internet a bit, but it's my impression that the
leaderships have mostly settled into a routinist intellectual rut, getting
by with a few texts from the past (mostly texts endorsing the prerogatives
of leaderships) and a cursory surfing of the bourgeois press.

One of the things that, in my view, totally undermines the capacity of
these "leaderships" to lead anything except small sects is the dreary
routine existence into which these leaderships seem to have settled.
Lenin, Trotsky, and Jim Cannon for that matter, weren't like that at all.
(By way of contrast, the people who systematically work their way through
my extensive collection of revolutionary literature tend to be the youth,
students, oppositionists and rebels, and there are a very large number of
them. This circumstance seems to me appropriate to the political purpose
with which I've constructed the collection. Knowledge expands the mind,
and an extensive study of the literature of the workers' movement helps
equip people for effective socialist activity.)

On my shelves are something of the order of 3000 titles on the history of
the Australian labour, Communist, socialist and progressive movements.
About 1000 of these books, on all sorts of aspects of the labour movement,
the trade unions, working-class political parties, labour movement
sociology, etc, have been published in the 19 years since the DSP's turn
away from the labour movement.

Jon Strauss, if he likes, can turn his search engine to finding how many
of these books on labour movement questions have been reviewed, discussed
or argued with in Direct Action or Green Left Weekly. He'll find very
little with his search engine.

Green Left has some good features, but serious coverage of Australian
labour movement history and literature is not one of them.

Peter Boyle asserts that insofar as there may be a weakness in this area,
which he of course doesn't concede, the DSP will do better in the future,
through the Socialist Alliance (without prejudice to the DSP leadership's
insistence that they've done well in the past anyway!).

I put it to Peter Boyle and the DSP leadership that they would be
well-advised to try to set up some seminars and discussions on labour
movement history in collaboration with all the other forces in the labour
and progressive movements.

Something set up for serious discussion on that basis might succeed, and
might even bring some clarity. Narrowly DSP or Socialist Alliance events
on labour history are unlikely to succeed, and they are certainly unlikely
to produce much clarity.

My associate, Ed Lewis, has obviously prodded a very big hornets' nest by
referring to Jim Cannon's well-known and rather unashamed exaggerated
hostility to "petit-bourgeois intellectuals".

I have immense respect for Cannon as a revolutionary agitator and leader.
James P. Cannon was one of my first literary mentors. I believe that the
balancesheet made of Cannon by Tim Wohlforth, in the book that Gerry Healy
suppressed, "The Struggle for Marxism in the United States", was by far
the best book so far on Jim Cannon, although I await with considerable
expectation the redoubtable Canadian Marxist historian Bryan Palmer's
forthcoming political biography of Cannon.

One of Wohlforth's main points is that Cannon frequently tended to resort
to organisational solutions to political problems, and that his
exaggerated hostility to "petit-bourgeois intellectuals" was associated
with this tendency to look for organisational solutions to political
problems, which were often posed by "petit-bourgeois intellectuals".

This weakness in Cannon, while not politically defensible, was
comprehensible in a workers' leader, such as Cannon, given his real
experiences and history. Regurgitated in the year 2004, by a voluble and
opinionated "committeeman" like Peter Boyle, Cannon's political weakness
in this area becomes something approaching farce.

A number of the committeemen (and committeewomen) of the DSP leadership
spend all of their time working in a dedicated and committed way for the
socialist movement. The negative feature of this dedication is that it's
often carried out in one building, where the leaders spend most of their
time with each other, or with other DSP members, which tends to narrows
their horizons dramatically. They tend to know a bit, in a force-fed way,
about "Leninist principles of organisation", Cannon, Zinoviev, Castro and
Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, etc, etc, but their real experience
and knowledge of the Australian labour movement, the workers' movement and
even Australian society in general, remains rather narrow and primitive.

They plead pressure of organising work, journalism etc, when trying to
justify the narrowness of their horizons. For the past 30 years we have
lived through a period of relative capitalist boom and expansion, by and
large, which makes the US boom of the 1920s look like a blip. Jim Cannon
commented on the 1920s boom in the US that it tended to undermine the
development of the revolutionary movement, and to produce a situation
where the members of the small communist movement were swimming against
the stream of the prevailing affluence in society at large. How much more
is the effect of the past 30 years on the cadres of the socialist
movement.

In these difficult conditions, inAustralia, the DSP has been relatively
successful in building and preserving a smallish political apparatus, but
it appears to me that the circumstances in which the DSP leadership works
in this political environment have lowered its political-cultural level in
relation to the world outside, particularly the workers' movement in the
world outside.

In a fairly careful way this morning, before he went off to do the Green
Left stall, Simon Butler quotes Trotsky explaining that from his point of
view the petit-bourgeois characteristics of intellectuals came not really
from their social origins but from where they stood on the party question.

Leaving aside the limitations of this view in relation to intellectuals
who play a progressive role on many questions despite the fact that they
know nothing at all of any party question, this view of Trotsky, which was
valid up to a point, needs closer examination.

If one does a serious overview of the life work and writings of Lenin and
Trotsky, it emerges that, for them, by and large the party question was
intimately tied up with the function of the party as an instrument for
social change and social revolution. Both Lenin and Trotsky broke with and
busted up quite a few parties when they concluded that these parties no
longer fulfilled the necessary revolutionary function.

Towards the end of his life Lenin, in particular, became deeply alarmed by
the negative characteristics emerging in both the Russian party and the
Russian state that he had been largely instrumental in creating, but his
attempts to tackle these problems were, unfortunately, abruptly cut short
by his illness and death.

When a small socialist group freezes into a smug, self-satisfied sect,
with no realistic perspectives for activity in the workers' movement, the
party question tends to turn into its opposite, and the leaders of the
sect tend to become totally obsessed with the organisational aspect of the
party question, particularly with their almost divinely endowed
prerogative to be the leaders of the small sect.

In relation to these problems, I don't claim to have all the answers, but
I'm fiercely aware of where a number of the problems lie, on the basis of
an extensive life experience and a fair amount of study of these
questions. Unfortunately, knowledge and understanding often comes from
negative experience.

It's not so long ago that Peter Boyle was working himself into a lather
about the notion of a "labour aristocracy", which he clawed brutally out
of Zinoviev and Lenin in the different circumstances of 1916 and plonked
in front of us, wriggling, in the totally different circumstances of
Australia in the year 2003.

He does the same thing in his inscrutable, ignorant way, with the notion
of "petit-bourgeois intellectuals", who he crudely pictures as being
directly corrupted by the ideology of the bourgeoisie, and he even paints
crudely exaggerated little pictures for us of these "petit-bourgeois
intellectuals" being directly bribed by the ruling class.

Neither in his overdone and inaccurate current construct of the "labour
aristocracy" nor his equally overdone construct about "petit-bourgeois
intellectuals" does he seem to have even noticed the changes that have
taken place in both the working class, the new social layers and the
petit-bourgeoisie, which can be described both as the proletarianisation
of intellectual labour and the intellectualisation, automation and
computerisation of manual labour.

Junior staff members in universities are forced on to individual
contracts, which is a brutal form of proletarianisation. Wharfies, by and
large sit in little booths pressing buttons to move containers with cranes
and computers. Nursing, perhaps the fastest growing section of the
workforce in advanced societies, combines hard and difficult manual work
such as lifting and moving patients, etc, with detailed and complex
medical procedures, psychology, the use of computers, monitors, etc.

Many students working their way through university, which is necessary
because of the fees, spend their part-time working lives in the ruthless,
super-exploited environment of call centres.

In Australia, constant mass migration from changing sources for nearly the
past 50 years, combined with the changing nature of work and the
workforce, has reconfigured the working class and changed its racial and
educational composition, making it considerably more diverse than in the
past. There has also been a certain political reconfiguration. The broad
split in society expressed politically in the split between the
trade-union-based Labor Party and the conservative parties generally
supported by the big bourgeoisie, has been modified a bit. A new electoral
formation has emerged on the left, the Greens, located almost entirely,
electorally, within the new social layers, while the Labor Party has
retained its electoral grip on the overwhelming majority of the
traditional blue-collar working class a large part of which is now
composed of relatively recent migrants of non-English-speaking background.

Small socialist groups, particularly the DSP, have been now running for a
considerable number of yeas in elections against the big electoral force
of the Labor Party, and now the Greens, with no recognisable impact. The
function of a trained Marxist leadership, the kind of leadership that the
DSP aspires to be, with all their study of Lenin, Cannon and
organisational principles, haven't been capable of elaborating any kind of
realistic perspective to bridge the gap between the situation of the small
socialist groups and the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the
progressive half of the population to Laborism and the Greens.

If the DSP leadership had spent more time studying the concrete details of
the history of the Australian workers' movement than the time they have
spent developing an abstract and crudified "Leninism" they might be a bit
closer to elaborating a serious perspective for Marxists.

Neither of brother Boyle's desperate, archaic intellectual constructions
about either "aristocracies of labour" or "petit- bourgeois intellectuals"
directly bribed by the ruling class are of much use in building a serious
socialist movement in modern conditions, or in elaborating a realistic
perspective towards that end.

In this kind of ideological sphere, Peter Boyle succeeds in sounding like
a very real caricature of New Class theorists such as Paddy McGuinness and
all the right-wing dingbats who prattle about a new class of members of
the petit-bourgeoisie, who they say peddle poisonous "anti-popular" ideas.

Getting back to the question of labour movement history, at the recent
seminar that Boyle talks about, I had a good look at the literature that
had obviously been on sale to the DSP members and the youth who had been
attending the DSP school in the previous week.

The DSP leadership is pretty good at drumming a few basic ideas into
people in an eclectic way in a fairly narrow framework. I was fascinated
to see carefully photocopied large chunks of Cannon almost entirely on
organisational questions, including long chapters from the History of
American Trotskyism, Cannon's entertaining, interesting, but politically
speaking his worst and most self- indulgent book, which embodies the
political weaknesses that I've been discussing above.

In the history of the revolutionary socialist movement, Jim Cannon was a
courageous, important and towering figure, and from where I sit it's very
sad to see his weaknesses and errors being used as a kind of intellectual
club to beat anyone, particularly some of the youth, who dare to question
the organisational conceptions of the DSP leadership.

I'm not saying that a serious and comprehensive knowledge of the Marxists
classics, the works of Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon, etc are not extremely
useful to socialist agitators. They obviously are, and I have the greatest
respect for all those socialist thinkers. In a very real sense we stand on
the shoulders of those who've gone before.

Their legacy, however, has to be reworked and analysed critically. In
particular, it has to be tested and reworked in relation to the
experience, politics and society of one's own country, in this case
Australia.

The old Communist Party tended to create a culture that soaked CP members
in Australian history. This approach had some nationalist defects, but
taken as a whole it was pretty useful, and it was hardly accidental that
the older generation of Marxist labour movement historians developed their
historical knowledge in the CP environment.

Their serious historical knowledge and their critical faculties really
developed more substantially when they broke with and transcended the
Stalinist high culture, but nevertheless the preoccupation in CP circles
with Australian history gave them a serious grounding on which to build,
and their intellectual building necessarily included the negation of
Stalinism.

By way of contrast, the modern neo-Trotskyist groups, particularly the
DSP, have tended to throw out the baby of Australian history with the
bathwater of Stalinism, so you get the grotesque phenomenon of a younger
generation of Australian Marxists who know a great deal about Trotsky,
Zinoviev, Lenin, Cannon and Castro, but very little about the history of
the Australian workers' movement.

To brutally bowdlerise a writer from the past: who knows Jim Cannon who
only Jim Cannon knows?

The vigorous but guarded responses on the Green Left list to Ed Lewis's
observations suggest to me that these questions are a real hornets' nest
in DSP circles.

In due course we'll put up on Ozleft some extracts from Wohlforth's book
appraising the life and work of Jim Cannon, and other relevant material.

(The methodological issues in Australian history, about which I'm
challenging the DSP leadership, are also raised in a systematic way in my
polemic with the historian of the CPA, Stuart MacIntyre
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Dumbing.html )




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