[Marxism] Some questions for the ideological leaders of the Marxmail club

[Ozleft]

Some serious questions to the ideological leaders of the Marxmail club 
in the light of the sweeping defeat of the conservative government in 
Australia and the election of a Labor government

By Bob Gould

By now you all may be aware, although you have not commented at any 
length on, the defeat of Bush's surviving Iraq war ally, John Howard, 
the conservative prime minister of Australia, and his xenophobic, 
racist, anti-trade-union Liberal Party.

Surely this development is worthy of comment.

My first question is to the ideological pacemaker of Marxmail, Joaquin 
Bustello.

How does this development in Australia square with the core tenets of 
your rapidly developing alternative ideology to Marxism? Insofar as I 
understand it, you've developed the view that the working class in 
advanced capitalist countries either never existed, or at least never 
existed as a class for itself, even momentarily, and as a result of your 
new ideological construction, the modern trade union movement is at best 
irrelevant, but more usually in your writings, a major vehicle for 
imperialism.

The Australian developments seem to refute that general approach. It's 
universally accepted in Australia that the legislative attacks of the 
Howard government on the right of trade unions to organise and on the 
right of workers to collectively bargain was the main factor in the 
defeat of the government.

The subjective factor in this defeat was a major mobilisation initiated 
by the trade unions, even in their relatively weakened state, of tens of 
thousands of workers in demonstrations and electoral campaigning in 
marginal seats, culminating on election day in a mobilisation of about 
100,000 on polling booths, of whom about half were workers by hand and 
brain, many thousands of them trade unionists.

It's also worth noting in this context that a large and vital section of 
the mobilisation through the vehicle of the trade unions and the Labor 
Party were migrants of non-English-speaking background or their 
children, and Aboriginal Australians.

Due largely to compulsory voting, perhaps 95 per cent of Aboriginal 
people voted, and they voted 90 per cent for the Labor Party. The 
Aboriginal vote, in particular, was mobilised by sections of the labour 
movement opposed to the bad aspects of the Howard government's military 
style intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

I've noted, Joaquin, that you've made extensive comment on developments 
in Britain, arguing from afar, it must be said, that some kind of 
nationalist movement of people of colour should be developed in Britain. 
I don't quite understand how you're so confident about your 
constructions about Britain, but by implication it seems to me that you 
may favour some kind of Third World nationalist movement of this sort in 
Australia.

I might say, in relation to this, that there's no evidence at all in 
Australia of any objective basis for such a metaphysical schema. People 
of migrant background, migrants of colour, and Aboriginal people, now 
make up almost half of the Australian population, and they're rapidly 
becoming politicised, partly in defensive response to the racism of the 
conservatives, and of some people in the more conservative sections of 
the labour movement.

Migrants from 162 countries now make up the largest proportion of the 
organised working class in Australia (the very notion of the organised 
working class may be anathema to you in view of your writing in recent 
times). It must be said that the overwhelming majority of people of 
colour, both migrant and Aboriginal, on the left side of Australian 
society, find the vehicle for their current political expression in the 
Labor Party and the trade unions.

How does any of this square with your rapidly developing thesis, shared 
in a way by conservative ideologues, that the working class is no longer 
the significant force it once was?

A question for Louis Proyect.

As you know from lengthy things I've written over the past few years, I 
share your interest in what you originally termed Zinovievism, and have 
views about that question at an historical level. My understanding is 
that Zinovievism, or the over-centralisation of Marxist and socialist 
groups, flowed from the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union that 
set in after the death of Lenin.

My view on those questions is that the aim, through stubborn attempts at 
discussion, conflict and collaboration, with relatively young members of 
a number of the existing Marxist groups, the aim should be the 
development of a better model of socialist organisation without the 
ultra-centralisation expressed in the Stalinist degeneration that gave 
rise to Zinovievism.

As an exasperated watcher of discussion on Marxmail, I'm fascinated that 
adult socialists on your associated SWP list should spend so much time, 
at least literary time, on vindictive, stupid and apolitical 
incantations and gossip about the US SWP and other socialist groups.

I'm no pacifist in polemical matters, as many people know, but I see 
little point in constant trivial and poorly developed railing against 
one's perceived enemies. The contributions in Australia of Ratbag Radio 
Riley, and on the SWP list particularly of Phillip Ferguson the academic 
from New Zealand, seem to me to fall over the edge from rational polemic 
into what Belloc, or was it Chesterton, called the higher lunacy.

For what it's worth, I regard the members, and even the leaders, of the 
various Marxist groups in the Trotskyist tradition as, up to a point, my 
comrades. The point of arguing with them or commenting on them is to try 
to crack open their often severely developed hard shells with the aim of 
prompting discussion about what to do next.

Based on my 55 years of political activity, I can only conclude that the 
tone, style and content of the SWP list is barking mad, from a Marxist 
point of view. Trying to sift through the entrails of the Barnes outfit 
to find auguries about its degeneration resembles, to me, the 
preoccupation of medieval theologians with how many angels could cavort 
on the head of a pin, and it's about as useful.

Concerning the problems of discussion among socialist groups in 
Australia, I draw your attention, Louis, to the question of the Greens. 
This recent election has defined the shape of political development in 
Australia for quite a while to come. The Labor vote has revived 
dramatically, particularly in poorer areas with lower incomes, and 
particularly among NESB migrants, as bourgeois journalists such as 
George Megalogenis are now noting. He has just produced an analysis 
pointing out that Labor won 30 of the 31 electorates with the highest 
concentration of non-English-speaking-background migrants. Of those 
seats, the ones with the most exploited sections of the working class 
were won by Labor with about 70 per cent of the vote.

Everything about this election reinforces the reality, in Australia at 
least, that election results are mostly a matter of class, which is 
something that can be absorbed cursorily by looking at a map of 
electoral outcomes in all the major Australian cities. There's a big 
core difference in Australia between the primary electoral votes of 
Labor and the Liberals and class divisions are clearly the major part of 
this.

The Greens in Australia are a broadly leftist political formation with 
their primary vote in the new social layers of tertiary educated and 
technically trained workers, and to some extent among youth. Their vote 
is rather more Anglo and European than the Labor vote.

The Green vote increased in this election and now nudges 10 per cent 
nationally. That's a figure around which, in my opinion, it will remain 
stable for the foreseeable future. The Greens are now a small mass 
party, with probably after this election, 10,000 to 15,000 members 
nationally.

In this election, despite conflict on some questions, a comprehensive 
preference agreement was achieved by Labor and the Greens, and it held 
up. Without Greens preferences it would have been very hard for Labor to 
win the election.

In my view we face a time in which a broad labour movement, consisting 
mainly at the political level of Labor and the Greens, is the obvious 
arena for agitation and intervention by organised socialists. Some 
socialist groups have recognised that in a rational way, and three of 
them – Solidarity, the ISO and a smaller group in Brisbane – made a 
tactical turn towards the Greens.

They learned a lot during the election campaign, got themselves a bit of 
an audience on the left, and incidentally seem highly likely to form a 
united organisation between the three of them in the fairly near future.

It's also worth observing that those three groups have evolved a style 
of conducting tactical discussion pretty publicly, and they seem to be 
in the process of ditching the exaggerated Zinovievism that both Proyect 
and Gould have commented on over the past few years. They haven't 
relinquished, and nor should they, the general aim of socialist activity 
and intervention.

By way of contrast, the two slightly bigger propaganda groups, the DSP 
majority and Socialist Alternative, have retreated into their 
Zinovievist shells, like turtles, so to speak.

The worst example of the turtle sickness is the DSP majority, whose 
pretensions to be the organising centre of some kind of alliance as a 
major influence in the workers movement have been punctured by the 
election results. They are flailing around accusing assorted opponents 
of betrayal. The people they mainly accuse are the different socialist 
groups that don't accept the DSP's strategic pretensions.

The DSP majority has turned up the pressure on the DSP minority in 
defence of the majority's bankrupt perspective. Given the way these 
things tend to go, it seems likely that the logic of the majority's 
pretensions will be eventually to force the minority out.

I don't favour further splits, given the relatively weak state of the 
socialist movement, but such a division may occur. A straw in the wind 
is that in the internal material of the DSP, I'm told on good authority, 
the leadership is lashing out at assorted members of the Socialist 
Alliance in a verbal way for not working hard enough on the exotic, 
totally voluntarist and quite unsuccessful Socialist Alliance election 
campaign. Particular targets of this treatment are some Socialist 
Alliance members who've recently departed from the DSP .

Finding scapegoats for objective defeats is a very old practice in small 
Marxist groups. The Healy organisations, when I was familiar with them, 
were past masters at that kind of thing, and nothing good ever came of 
it. The bankrupt perspectives usually become even more disastrous as the 
leaders attempt to defend them, in my observation,.

The increasing crisis of perspective facing the DSP majority is 
demonstrated pretty clearly by the semi-coherent ravings of Ratbag Radio 
Riley and the rather vindictive comments on Marxmail of the usually 
careful and mild-mannered Nick Fredman. Underlying their comments and 
the election analysis of Dick Nichols in Green Left Weekly are the 
obviously false implication that the Socialist Alliance did pretty well 
in the election, and the voluntarist and un-Marxist implication that if 
we really just worked a little harder and those other pesky socialist 
groups stopped obstructing us, the Alliance would blossom as the 
necessary, all-encompassing centre of the fightback. Pigs might fly.

A rather ugly note emerges in Nick Fredman's comment on the ISO's 
support for the Greens in the recent election. Fredman argues that any 
orientation of such groups towards the Greens is unprincipled unless 
these groups adopt the DSP's Third Period, united-front-from-below 
strategy, demanding that if these groups consider joining the Greens 
they should demand public rights to be a separate political formation as 
well. He's jumping the gun a bit, because there's no evidence that these 
groups want to join the Greens. If they did, the last thing they should 
even consider is adopting a DSP-style clamorous demand to be a separate 
political outfit in the Greens. Many people in the Greens have extremely 
bad memories of the DSP's operations in and around the Greens years ago 
and their equally clamorous intervention in the Nuclear Disarmament 
Party. The last thing any socialists in and around the Greens should do 
is adopt DSP-style clamorous super-interventionist styles of work.

The obvious question that everyone on the far left in Australia is 
asking in their own different ways, often with their own organisational 
axes to grind, is what do we do now in Australia.

I'd be very interested in the views of the ideological leaders of the 
Marxmail club on that question. Joaquin, in particular, seems to have 
plenty of ideas about Britain. For my part, I don't claim to have all 
the answers, but a number of things seem quite obvious.

There are certainly battles to come, and agitations of all sorts are 
likely to develop once the sheer delight of the left side of society at 
doing in the conservatives has been savoured for a while.

The exposure politics of some of the socialist groups is clearly 
bankrupt, and even counterproductive. In the sphere of the politicised 
mass movements the obvious arenas of activity are still the trade 
unions, the Labor Party and now the Greens small mass party, as well as 
the substantial social movements that exist.

There's also a very pressing need in the short term for Marxist study 
and historical and theoretical training in a bit of a forced march to 
raise the political level of the new forces being brought into activity.

It seems to me that the relatively conservative character of the new 
Labor government is not an absolute obstacle to a leftist mobilisation. 
The conditions, however, for such a mobilisation are a recognition of 
the present state of play in the workers movement and society at large.

There's a mood of what I would characterise as defensive militancy in 
the trade unions. There are some expectations in society at large about 
the need for progressive actions by the incoming Labor government. For 
quite a while, however, Rudd and his team will have the political 
authority on the left side of society, which politicians get from an 
electoral victory, particularly one that brings downed a Tory government 
that seemed often to be impregnable.

We need a rapid discussion of a sensible leftist minimum program on all 
the obvious questions of the day. The kind of program on which it might 
just be possible to get broad agreement in the trade union movement, the 
progressive social movements and the Labor Party and Green mass 
political organisations, as well as the left side of society at large.

We should seize the day in a non-sectarian spirit, using careful 
language in the mass movement, which takes into account the existing and 
long-term needs of the labour movement, the Green mass movement, and all 
components of both. In these conditions we should generalise our 
agitation on a broad range of questions, eschewing like the plague 
Byzantine left talk attacking the existing leaders of the various mass 
movements, and political organisations on the left side of society.

I'm genuinely interested in comments on perspectives on these 
developments in Australia from the ideological leaders of the Marxmail club.