Re: [Marxism] The DSP's fresh approach to applying democratic centralism

[Ozleft <Ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By Bob Gould

As my name has been mentioned in the discussion on the DSP, I'd make the 
following observations, without prejudice to a longer article I'm 
writing about the two platforms in the dispute in the DSP, which article 
I hope will appear in a day or so.

Firstly, one of the better things about Ozleft is that it's a useful 
venture with a significant audience that proceeds without Ed Lewis and 
myself feeling that it's necessary for us to agree with each other on 
everything under the sun. We have different interests and preoccupations 
within a generally socialist framework. That arrangement seems entirely 
sensible to us. It's a pity that a bit of similar public creative 
diversity, without rancour, couldn't be practised by the inhabitants of 
the socialist propaganda groups, on the affairs of which we comment from 
time to time.

I'd like to say to Richard that I share his irritation with Joaquin 
Bustello and others who insist that all the socialist propaganda groups 
should go out of business. I disagree with that view in principle and 
any comment that I make is directed at trying to knock some tactical and 
strategic sense into the often thick heads of the pretentious leaders of 
some of these groups.

The long-term perspective, from my point of view, is that these groups 
should conduct an internal and external political discussion on 
unresolved strategic and political questions, without the grotesque 
rancour that often passes for public discussion. This is particularly 
the case, it must be said, with the Boyle leadership of the DSP.

The situation we face is that the ostensibly socialist groups are 
unlikely to eclipse each other definitively in the medium term, or even 
in the long term, the way the Bolsheviks eclipsed other groups during 
the process of the Russian Revolution. Even then the Bolsheviks didn't 
so much eclipse the other groups as incorporate the best elements of 
them in the context of an evolving revolutionary process.

My holiday reading has included the very fine book by Rick Kuhn on 
Henrik Grossman, and Tariq Ali's very moving novel of 10 years ago, 
which I somehow missed, about Ludwig, the courageous pre-war Soviet 
agent who broke with Stalin in 1938. You get the flavour from both these 
book of the extraordinary variety of militants from different socialist 
backgrounds that the Bolsheviks incorporated with a minimum of rancour.

I submit to Richard Fidler, who I've met and seems a sane enough bloke, 
that the Boyle bunch are not at all like the Bolsheviks in this respect, 
and that's quite clear from the vicious nature of their public debate 
with anyone who says boo to them on important tactical questions.

It stumps me why Fidler, from such a distance, should accept wholesale 
the Boyle bunch's rather fraudulent prospectus, or bill of goods, about 
themselves and their own role.

This may be due to one of the negative features of cyberspace: that it's 
reasonably possible to build a kind of cyberspace Potemkin Village and 
have halfway sane people somewhere else in the world believe you. A 
striking example of that phenomenon is, of course, the World Socialist 
Web Site, but the Boyle bunch aren't terribly far behind in this line of 
business.

Why does Richard Fidler feel it's necessary to reject wholesale the 
carefully argued critical position of the DSP minority, presumably out 
of some kind of misguided loyalty to his imagined cyberspace version of 
the DSP. The problem with that approach is that nobody at all on the 
socialist left in Australia except the Boyle bunch concurs with this 
version of reality.

A good example of this kind of thing is Boyle's laboured account of the 
size and influence of the Socialist Alliance. The Boyleites talk 
blithely of 500 non-DSP members of the alliance and 700 people working 
on its election campaign. Well, nobody in Australia that I know can see 
anything like that number of independents. It's largely a self-serving 
myth. There may be 50 or 60 such people nationally, but there aren't 
500. The rest are obviously the names of people who signed up out of 
solidarity to get the Socialist Alliance registered for the elections, 
which is entirely reasonable but in saner organisations they'd be 
regarded as contacts, not really members of anything for broader 
political purposes.

Another example of Potemkin Village puffery is the business about trade 
unionists who collaborate with the DSP-Socialist Alliance as a 
deliberate political act. There are probably a few such people 
nationally, but in the past six to nine months the overwhelming majority 
of what the Boyle group previously called the militant trade union 
current, have despite the indirect abuse of the Boyle bunch pursued 
pretty much the same tactic as most other trade unionists concerning the 
elections: gritting their teeth to work for the election of a Labor 
government.

It was very striking that almost no trade unionists in the broad 
militant trade union current responded in any significant way to the 
DSP's expose-Labor rhetoric.

A further example of this puffery is the proposition that Socialist 
Alternative is significantly smaller and less important than the DSP. I 
have some very sharp political disagreements with the sterile 
propagandism of the Socialist Alternative leadership, but even that 
well-known Australian personality, Blind Freddy, can see that Socialist 
Alternative in practical terms is in the same league as the DSP in 
membership, and its membership is overwhelmingly younger than that of 
the DSP.

It's also pretty apparent that the Socialist Alternative members' 
political cultural level, while narrowly focused, is higher than that of 
DSP members. Socialist Alternative has a number of academic members who 
are quite capable of writing useful books from a Marxist point of view, 
which is strikingly not the case with the cobbled-together Boyle 
majority in the DSP.

Richard Fidler waxes lyrical about the publishing activities of the DSP, 
which were at one stage quite significant, but it must be said that 
those activities very largely took place on the watch of what is now the 
DSP minority, and nothing much has happened on the publishing front 
since the Boyle bunch took over.

That brings me back to the point: why is Fidler so confident from such a 
distance that the Boyle version of events in Australia is so accurate? 
It stumps me a bit.

I'm tempted to advance a psychological explanation. Over a long period 
of life in the labour movement and the left I've encountered a 
phenomenon among former members and allies of the Communist Party that 
they doggedly defend the party in all its different transmutations, no 
matter how divorced from reality the current line may be.

Ex-members often have a sort of nostalgic party-nost for the emergence 
of better developments in the group of their initial allegiance or 
friendship. Ex-members or allies from a long time ago aren't confronted 
in a sharp way with the strategic problems facing people who are still 
active. I don't want to be too tough on Fidler about this, as there's a 
streak of that in most of us, but in Fidler's case it seems pretty 
unscientific, and even brutal, of him to wipe off the political views 
of, for instance, the DSP minority, in such a summary way.




________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism