[Marxism] Sydney Rally and March Against the Occupation of Iraq a modest, but significant, success.

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

Sydney Rally and March Against the Occupation of Iraq a modest, but
significant, success.
By Bob Gould

Media estimates of the size of the demonstration varied widely. The very
generous ABC TV News, said 8000. The less generous Sydney Morning Herald
said 2000. My rather rough attempt at counting suggests to me somewhere
between two and half, and four thousand, which is in the same estimate range
as the organisers. The march was vigorous and militant in mood, with several
groups of leftist youth with red flags. The organising of the event mainly
fell to the far left, the DSP and the ISO, who made a respectable job of
preparing the event, in rather adverse circumstances, dictated by the split
of the conservative and Stalinist forces away from the broad antiwar
committee, six months ago. An alternative event organised by the Stalinist
and religious groups before the main march was stillborn, and only attended
by a tiny handful of people.

The organisers of the rally relied on big name speakers, John Pilger, the
actress Judy Davis, and the courageous dissident 'intelligence professional'
, Andrew Wilkie to get publicity, and this was quite successful as there was
a fair amount of media publicity before the event, mainly of the viscerally
hostile sort that's become routine for the Murdoch Press, the broad-sheet
Australian, and the tabloid Daily Telegraph. This hostile publicity actually
built the demonstration.

I was actually in a rather good position to get a bit of a picture of the
composition of the demonstration as I systematically leafleted the two
meetings, the one before and the one after, with my bookshop labor movement
book list, and the OzLeft website flyer. I gave away about a thousand copies
of both, which is one of the ways I get an estimate of 2500-4000 actual
participants, because for obvious reasons I don't waste the flyers and I
usually average one flyer for about every three to four participants. On
this occasion, there were almost no Laborites in the Sydney demonstration,
and comparatively few Greens or other organised politicals, because this
Saturday was one week before the municipal elections all over the Sydney
region, and almost anyone involved in any mainstream political structure is
flat out campaigning on the last Saturday before the elections. If it had
not been for the municipal elections, the demonstration might have been 50%
larger. Coincident with this, this weekend happened to coincide with the
city-wide closedown of the rail network for routine maintenance, making it
virtually impossible to get to central Sydney by train.

The interesting thing about the composition of the rally, was that on the
basis of my leafleting experience, a) despite its relatively small size, it
included a relatively large number of young people, who don't appear to have
been to anything like that before, or even to such things as the recent
large Pilger and Tariq Ali meetings, because they hadn't previously seen my
leaflets, b) a fairly large number of old labor movement and Stalinist
people, quite a few of whom I know, but I've not seen for some time, and who
appeared to be there despite the fact that their leaders had absented
themselves from the organising committee, and who often greeted me like a
long lost brother, despite past disagreements and took the leaflets, & c)
quite a few of the rank-and-file and middle layer members in the Stalinist
groups who'd split away from the committee, who were a bit shy and awkward,
did not take my leaflets because they'd seen them before, but were at least
at the demo.

In all the circumstances, the demonstration has got to be considered a
success, and to give credit where credit is genuinely due, this was an
occasion when the rudimentary organising apparatus of the far left,
particularly in reality the DSP, played an extremely useful role in rather
adverse circumstances. Two and a half, to four thousand people, isn't a vast
number, compared with the 500,000 of 12 months ago, but it is back to the
realms of the respectable sized demonstrations of past years of ebb, with
the difference that the unnecessary split perpetrated by the Stalinist
groups and the official left in the labor movement, has actually led to
their self isolation on this issue. The lessons of the modest success of the
event should be pressed on the people who split the antiwar organisation six
months ago, to find some formula for reestablishing a broad committee for
future demonstrations. Despite their lack of success in organising anything
themselves, their presence in a broader group would lay the basis for
something like the much bigger mobilisations that took place before and
after the Iraq war last year.

Note:
In other Australian cities, where the municipal elections weren't in the
way, it appears that ALP figures and activists were present in many of the
demonstrations. For instance, the now federal president of the ALP, the
energetic Carmen Lawrence addressed the Brisbane rally, which had possibly
1000 people at it.

Gould's Book Arcade
32 King St, Newtown, NSW
Ph: 9519-8947
Fax: 9550-5924
Email: bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: www.gouldsbooks.com.au



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