Re: [Marxism] France: New Anti-Capitalist Party `a very exciting initiative'

["Ratbag Media" <ratbagradio@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
> What's sad about Mullen's cluelessness is that it is most certainly
> shared by the Australian DSP that printed this interview in Links. When
> I proposed that the DSP should have dissolved itself as the LCR is now
> planning to do, one of their members (or ex-members, I am not sure)
> shrieked about how I had an answer for everything. I don't have an
> answer for everything, but I am pretty damned sure about the sectarian
> business.

Don't have an answer for everything? I think Louis Proyect is being
far too modest.

But he also misrepresents his shrieker. The charge was that Louis was
"organisationally schematic" which, of course, he is.

There are  all these things happening in regard to new party dynamics
at different paces around the world in very different political
contexts and all Proyect can do is yell from the sidelines --  at some
considerable distance -- "Dissolve ye bastards! Dissolve!"

That's his magic bullet. His one panacea that prevails upon  the
organised Marxist left: get these new projects going (by such  means
he fails totally  to share with us) and once they appear on the
horizon, forthwith dissolve  into them.

The complication  is that no outfit -- Marxist or non -- would commit
to  such projects on the basis that they *had* to dissolve into them.
That's very different from *deciding* to so do .

The question of dissolution is complicated as it is both an
organisational and tactical question in the same way that forming
something is. I doubt the Salvadoran FMLN would have lasted as long as
it has as an aggregating party project if it had been ruled by
organisational precepts as stringent as those that Proyect advances.

There's a word for this complication: politics -- the matter and
motion stuff. And it is politics that has stalled the DSP's own
merging  into the Socialist Alliance.

Proyect also ignores  the history of some of these new party projects.
The formation of the Scottish Socialist Alliance  wasn't so much a
party dissolution issue  but a split in the Scots section  of the CWI.
It was a major tactical divide. With a rise in Scottish nationalism in
the throws of the Poll Tax fight, the ex CWIers threw their all into a
new party project.

In the case of  SWP and Respect , the issue of dissolution didn't
exist because the SWP had this strange schematic view of Respect (and
the English Socialist Alliance before it) as an electoral milk cow
sponsored by a special rendering of the "united front tactic". It was
no good preaching "dissolution" to the SWP as the exercise was
supposed to be an area of  occasional intervention which could be
turned on and off as required rather than a new party project which
would serve only to compete with the SWP for real estate.

So containment was always going to be  the main game.

In the same sense this is why the CWI/SP and  the SWP remained so
implacably hostile to the Scottish  SSP even though they had no option
but to affiliate to it.(And when they aided in the split in that
enterprise, MarxMail cronies  covered for them under guise of doing
the right thing by the class divide.)

The core problem with the SWP wasn't or isn't that it won't dissolve
into Respect. The core problem with the SWP is that it is opposed to
the new left party option.

But lookey yonder how the chickens have come home to roost...

In the wake of this it has been very useful to monitor the
developments in England's small Socialist Resistance grouping  in
regard to Respect. While SR has committed to the Respect project,
having instigated the Respect newspaper, it is also running a
supplementary regroupment agenda with SWP exers and their kin.

Should they also now be immediately dissolving   into Respect because
Louis Proyect has so ruled with his one size fits all precept?

Similarly in Australia, the aggregation pending is much broader than
the Socialist Alliance and it would be a mistake to assume that the
Socialist Alliance was *it.*  even for now (regardless of whether the
DSP was *dissolved* into it or not).What was clear from the discussion
at the SA's conference last month was that  real advance is always
going to be political and strategic -- and that no organisational
schemata will do it for you.

Maybe I should repeat that for Louis' benefit: "no organisational
schemata will do it for you."

Nonethless, I think the  history of the Socialist Alliance has been
the history of competing schemata. The grand daddy among these, (also
presumed by Proyect) is that reliable stalwart: build it and they will
come. Fulfilment is thus  neatly reduced to  a question of  structure.

 This is the new party adherents' version of a sect's "our day will come".

So let's just say that when you are in the regroupment /new party
business day in, day out --  year in  year out -- you pick up a bit of
know how on what to do, and what not to do,  next.You may get it
wrong, of course,  but at least you are trying to locate yourself
where it's all supposedly happening -- rather than, say, just talking
about it.



dave riley



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