Re: [Marxism] Galloway faction splits from Respect:

[Nick Fredman <srcsra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect:

> Comrades should understand that Alan's group (or the group he cheers
> for--I can't remember honestly) had the same kind of controversies in
> Australia ... These brilliant Leninists remind me of
> managers I have run into since 1968 in the business world

Comrades should further understand that Louis Proyect's "analysis" of these
matters is grossly Anglophone-centric, i.e. apart from being wrong in
important respect (like the debate about Green Left in Australia) regarding
the examples he actually mentions, he says nothing about the role of
revolutionaries in generally successful broad left formations in Portugal,
Spain, Germany and the Nordic countries. I don't know much about these
examples myself, but then I don't presume to make global pronouncements
about the intervention of Leninist groups into broader formations. Of course
some such interventions or aspects thereof may be problematic, but it¹s
useless abstentionism to paint errors as being due to a genetic
predisposition to sectarianism.

Or it might be worse than useless. Given this alleged predisposition of all
Leninists at all times, cde LP presumably would have cheered on the right
wing clique that purged the DSP from the embryonic Australian Greens in
1992. His arguments about sinister groupings pre-deciding everything before
meetings certainly mirrors the demagogy of those hippy bureaucrats. I was
still pretty new to it all when I got my expulsion letter from the South
Sydney Greens but it was clear to me, after doing nothing except loyally
build the Greens for a couple of years (about a year longer than I had been
in the DSP), who were the real factional machinators manipulating electoral
laws and organising exclusive conferences to expel those not invited.
Whether or not there was any sort of witch-hunt in Respect, there certainly
was in our case.  

One could argue that the purge of any socialists who wanted to organise
together helped the Greens, at least after a few years of stumbling, grow
strongly from the late 90s, and didn't stop them, at least gradually, adopt
leftist positions on social and economic questions. One could also argue
that the early presence of socialists helped put the Greens on a left path,
and a later presence could have prevented the Greens from supporting a
minority conservative territory government in at least one instance, giving
their vote preferences to conservatives in other instances, adopting a
positions that representative could vote how they liked regardless of party
policy, not even thinking that representatives shouldn't be paid double or
triple the median wage, supporting the invasion and occupation of
Afghanistan, usually forgetting to say anything about their own policies on
defending jobs when talking about saving forests, and taking nearly two
decades to have much of a relationship with any unions.



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