[Marxism] A balance sheet of the crisis in the DSP

[Ozleft]

By Bob Gould

The DSP is about to hold a decision-making conference on January 3-6. 
Delegates have been elected and the leadership has a majority a little 
larger than last time.

The basic positions of the two contending groups have been made publicly 
available, producing a small flurry of comment on the website Marxmail, 
where Louis Proyect seems more preoccupied with the secondary matter of 
the documents having been made publicly available.

The preoccupation of Louis Proyect with public debate is correct up to a 
point and the major debates in the Bolshevik Party were conducted 
publicly. The practise of keeping key political discussion internal to 
socialist groups is a product of the Stalinisation of the Comintern.

Nevertheless, I think it is quite unsound to insist that every detail of 
an internal discussion such as this one should be made public. The 
rather extravagant organisational chop-chop and personal abuse that 
takes place internally in propaganda groups largely isolated from the 
labour movement, the working class and the class struggle, ought not to 
be made public.

In all our comments on Ozleft on the internal battle in the DSP we've 
been at pains to deal with the political essentials and not broadcast 
some of the internal chop-chop, even when it has been available.

Small groups have a certain right to privacy in their internal 
arrangements, and a distinction should be made between the political 
issues in dispute, which should be public, and other matters, most of 
which should be private. We have the example before us of the bizarre 
so-called US SWP discussion list associated with Marxmail, much of which 
consists of nasty gossip, particularly the eccentric preoccupation of 
Philip Ferguson from New Zealand with speculation and vindictive gossip 
about who owns the US SWP's assets.

Socialist decency and Marxist good sense should dictate a certain 
discretion in such matters.

A cursory initial reading of the two platforms in the DSP could remind 
one of the rather effective Robert Crumb cartoon, which I (still feeling 
pain from the bitter split with John and Jim Percy and their supporters) 
reprinted in Australia on the back of a Zap comic book I published 
nearly 30 years ago as a commercial venture. It had two identical, 
snarling figures confronting each other, both holding placards. One 
said: Neo-Trotskyist Progressive Socialist Radical Action Club for 
International Peace, and the other said: Socialist Progressive Club for 
International Democracy Thru Radical Prototrotskyist Action.

One is also reminded, a bit, of the split chapter in Earl Birney's 
novel, Down the Long Table, which is reproduced on Ozleft.

Despite the similarities in the political positions of the two groups on 
a lot of questions, the DSP seems to be heading towards a split, which I 
regard as undesirable, in the current conditions of a declining, 
stagnating socialist left.

The two groups have in common a rather exaggerated emphasis on what they 
view as the enormous impact of the activities of Chavez in Venezuela for 
the prospects of the Australian left. I don't want to be misunderstood 
on this.

I have considerable regard for Chavez as the leader of a leftward-moving 
national movement with a strongly socialist aspect. Any socialist has to 
consider a revolutionary nationalist figure who quotes Trotsky, calls 
Bush the devil and pushes along a revolutionary process in Venezuela, as 
a progressive figure in current global politics. Socialists who can't 
see that aspect of Chavez are both brain-dead and totally lacking in 
socialist passion.

In addition to that, Venezuela is sitting on the biggest oilfields 
outside the Middle East, which gives it some clout in the world, and 
Chavez so far has resisted the temptation to crush opposition by 
bureaucratic means.

It's not entirely clear to me whether the process in Venezuela has 
clearly entered a socialist phase but I'm respectful and 
enthusiastically supportive of Chavez and the Venezuelan masses and I 
follow the events in Venezuela with enormous interest.

Even so, the idea implicit in both platforms that the process in 
Venezuela is some kind of magic bullet for building the socialist 
movement in Australia is totally nuts from a Marxist point of view.

When I first got involves in Marxist politics, Michel Pablo waxed 
enthusiastic about the revolutionary process in the Third World as a 
kind of magic bullet. The ethos of that kind of debate in the Marxist 
movement is captured by Trevor Griffith in his play, The Party, in which 
Gerry Healy and Robin Blackburn battle it out, Healy emphasising the 
European working class and Blackburn holding Pablo's view. (That didn't 
stop Healy going on to develop his own version of the same kind of 
thing, in looking to Qaddaffi's Libya and Saddam's Iraq as the magic 
bullet for the socialist revolution in the West.)

Somewhat later, the DSP at the initiative of Jim Percy, and initially 
the US SWP, waxed lyrical about the revolutions in Grenada and 
Nicaragua. At Jim Percy's initiative, the DSP even published a pamphlet 
about Nicaragua called The Cuban Revolution and its Extension, another 
variant on the magic bullet perspective.

There's no doubt that the colonial revolts over many years since the 
1940s, and their most radical moments, have had a progressive impact to 
some extent on the consciousness of the working class in the West, but 
it's thoroughly fanciful, and a genuine triumph of hope over experience, 
to translate that into some notion, which is implicit in both platforms, 
that an energising influence from Venezuela can revive the socialist 
movement in Australia.

Socialists in Western countries have a moral obligation to solidarise 
with revolutionary movements in the Third World, particularly those such 
as the one in Venezuela that have a socialist aspect, but the idea that 
this will solve the problems of the socialist movement in Australia is 
basically an attempt to avoid developing an effective strategy for the 
revival of the socialist movement.

I don't say this with any degree of triumphalism, because working out a 
real perspective is a major task and I don't have any automatic schemas, 
but clutching on to overseas models in this way is a major factor in the 
isolation of Marxists, and their removal from reality, in imperialist 
countries.

On other matters in dispute between the two platforms, the minority is 
more realistic than the cobbled-together majority led by Peter Boyle. 
The minority makes mincemeat of the fantastic pretensions of the 
majority, which it quite accurately refers to as “clowning”.

The minority raises a question that's a central part of the problem 
facing socialists: the drop in the cultural level of Marxists, and 
specifically the members of the DSP. In my view, this applies with 
considerable force to most of the far left. The minority proposes for 
the DSP a forced march in Marxist education, and it is correct on the 
need for that, up to a point.

Again, while it's necessary to try hard to get serious education going, 
the problems of doing so are considerable. There are things happening in 
the world of education and information that make serious study and 
Marxist development more accessible in one way, in that many things are 
on the internet, but more difficult in another, because current 
education arrangements tend to undermine sustained effort in 
self-education. Again, this is an area in which I don't have a magic 
bullet, but the emphasis of the DSP minority in trying to counteract the 
dropping interest in Marxism is very important.

While I generally regard the sterile propaganda group emphasis of 
Socialist Alternative as a political obstacle to socialist development, 
there's one good thing about Socialist Alternative: its central leader 
runs a quite wide-ranging personal bookstall at Socialist Alternative 
events in Melbourne and makes a strenuous effort to get the adherents of 
that group to read, albeit in within certain limits.

Another feature the two groups in the DSP have in common is a certain 
visceral hostility not just to the betrayals of Labor leaderships and 
the potential political betrayals of Green leaderships, but also a 
certain aristocratic contempt for the implied “stupidity” of the 99.9 
per cent of the left half of Australian society who look to those 
leaderships.

In my view, back in 1986 or thereabouts, the DSP made a catastrophic 
political mistake in ditching the previous criterion in the Marxist 
movement for assessing the class character of existing workers' 
organisations. The DSP decided then that the previous Marxist position 
was wrong in giving greater weight tactically to the class composition, 
the sociology, of labour parties and trade unions, than it did to the 
ostensible politics of their leaders.

The DSP has since been joined in that kind of analysis by the Taafites 
of the CWI (the Socialist Party in Australia) and even more 
extravagantly so, by the Socialist Equality Party and its associated 
World Socialist Web Site, which says all existing workers' organisations 
are counter-revolutionary and the only political task of importance is 
to build the SEP as a separate socialist organisation (presumably in 
cyberspace, where they are mainly located).

This fundamentally flawed analysis, which basically dumps the sociology 
of mass organisations such as the Labor Party, the trade unions and the 
Greens in favour of unceasing polemics against the leaders of these 
organisations, is in my view a decisive and almost total, obstacle to 
elaborating a realistic perspective in Australian conditions.

Such a perspective must involve a concrete orientation to the masses on 
the left side of Australian society, who look to the existing 
organisations and leaders.

The strategic orientation, most boldly expressed in the DSP by the Boyle 
majority, is that bootstrap-lifting activity of the DSP, which 
pretentiously and without any rational justification calls itself an 
alliance, can achieve a big political shift in the relatively short 
term. Ratbag Radio Riley is the crudest exponent of this view, but this 
view pervades the whole of the majority platform.

The bad political consequences of this kind of orientation are 
demonstrated by the rather unusual people who go into print on the Green 
Left discussion site in defence of Boyle and co, such as the 
aforementioned Riley, the good-hearted enthusiast Luke (who has, 
however, a basically religious approach to politics, with a kind of 
emphasis on political conversion as a strategy), another bloke, a 
strange pro-Stalinist who libelled me some months ago as an agent 
provocateur because I was critical of Stalinist regimes, and who 
specialises in attacking trade union militants who are Labor Party 
members, such as Harkins in Tasmania, and attacking anyone who surfaces 
in the Labor Party in struggle on the left, as stooges of the Labor 
Party bureaucracy, and now Jeff Richards, a bloke of rather ultraleft 
inclination who has been around the left for donkey's years and appears 
to base his political perspectives on long-standing grievances with the 
Percy bunch.

In my experience of socialist politics, you're unlikely to build 
anything, even in the medium term, around people like that, particularly 
in the difficult conditions facing Marxists now.

It's hardly surprising that many of the public supporters of the Boyle 
group are such extravagant voluntarists, because the whole Boyle 
political program, as demonstrated by their document made public on the 
web, is shot through with metaphysical and idealist voluntarism.

It focuses in a one-sided way on the prospects of the DSP as an 
organisation. It takes little account of the actual political 
conjuncture and the social circumstances in Australian society. Once 
again, I don't claim to have any philosopher's stone on programmatic and 
strategic questions, but a long life on the left has drummed into me, 
often through negative experience, the general point that it's necessary 
to have both a bit of a picture of the dynamics at work in society, the 
working class and the ruling class, and flowing from that Marxists 
should elaborate a strategic orientation based on such an attempt at 
understanding and analysis.

Crazed voluntarism is the oldest and most enduring political illness in 
the Marxist movement. Riley is the most extreme and incautious exponent 
of voluntarism, but Peter Boyle isn't far behind.

There are two aspects to the majority view. One is the proposition that 
they have some kind of finished program and the second is that with 
enough activism, noise and denunciation of all and sundry, the masses 
will turn to them. This sort of approach was always pernicious, but it 
verges on being barking mad in Australian society in 2008.

The constant refrain of the Boyleites is that if the DSP only pushes 
harder the masses will turn to it, is metaphysics, and it's at the core 
of all the thinking of the DSP majority leadership.

One of the problems with this sort of voluntarism for a socialist 
propaganda group is that the gap between this kind of politics and the 
external world widens the political gap between theory and practice to 
the point that many people starting with the best intentions pass 
through the propaganda groups fairly rapidly after a year or two of 
bootstrap-lifting activity, because it appears to achieve little, and 
come out the other side innoculated against what they think is Marxism, 
and cured in many cases, unfortunately, of radical politics entirely.

Lenin and his associates had an utterly different and more dialectical 
approach to politics. As serendipity would have it, for the past couple 
of weeks I've been reading Rick Kuhn's moving and useful book, Henryk 
Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. The last part, dealing with the 
evolution of Grossman's ideas on Marxist economics, is extremely 
worthwhile, although it is heavy going.

The earlier part, describing Grossman's leadership of a substantial 
Marxist organisation of the Jewish working class in Galicia before World 
War I, is easier to read and very moving and interesting.

After splitting from the Polish Marxist party, which had a chauvinist 
aspect and didn't take seriously the organisation of the Jewish working 
class, Grossman's organisation summed up its experiences in the 
following paragraph, which states extremely well the relationship 
between the socialist program and socialist organisation.

The following is from the new party's founding document, on page 65 of 
Rick Kuhn's book.

“Recognition, based on scientific socialism, that all forms of social 
consciousness are to be explained in terms of _class_ and group 
interests, is of great practical significance in the assessment of a 
proletarian party, ie social democracy. This is also significant to the 
extent that it is true in _reverse, _that is, the class interests of the 
proletariat find their expression in party consciousness (in the form of 
a program); party consciousness is the multi-faceted expression of the 
proletariat's class interests and the most far-reaching interpretation 
of conclusions drawn from the objective trends of real social 
development. Workers' parties do not always fulfill this requirement (as 
evidenced by the PPSD). Both the character and the contents of 
collective party thought remain _directly dependent on the particular 
party's adjustment to the very working class_ whose expression it should be.

“... The closest possible adaptation of the party's organisation to the 
historical forms of the Jewish proletariat's condition ... could only be 
achieved through the mutual organic growth of the party's organisation 
and the workers' movement itself, just as the latter has grown out of 
capitalist society.”

This small statement by Grossman's new organisation is strikingly in 
accord with the approach adopted by Lenin throughout his political 
activities as they evolved. The program can only be seen as an organic 
part of the life of the socialist organisation, which has a very large 
tactical and class aspect, which is always concrete.

Belting out a program, as the Boyleites do, and inviting the masses to 
come along and submit to it, is the antithesis of the Leninist method of 
politics, in my view, and it usually leads to left-talking opportunism 
in practice.

Many of the issues raised in the two DSP documents require careful 
investigation and analysis, but the unscientific and rather destructive 
Boyle view will be rammed through at the DSP convention by a mechanical 
majority. The Boyle group will then be in a position to force the 
minority out of the DSP if it so wishes.

If the Boyle supporters decide to take that course they will obviously 
rely heavily on a crude and out-of-context reading of the Jim Cannon of 
his middle years and Zinoviev's deeply flawed History of the Bolshevik 
Party. They will also, obviously, argue that the situation of permanent 
factions is a great obstacle to the development of the DSP and that 
removing the opposition will enable the DSP to leap forward.

That view is nonsense. With its deeply flawed political perspective the 
DSP will go nowhere. Just in the past day or two a respected old hand in 
the DSP, Max Lane, a minority supporter, has very carefully and 
cautiously put some of the views of the minority on Marxmail. While 
there's something in the Boyle view that three years of factional 
warfare is debilitating (I can't imagine the stresses and tensions that 
must exist. Factional disputes that I've been involved in have usually 
lasted about a year before a split. After three years the internal 
atmosphere must stressful and debilitating to both factions.) 
Nevertheless, further terminal splits in small socialist groups are 
deeply undesirable.

Max Lane's modest contribution is a bit of an indication of a possible 
alternative line of development. Public discussion of strategy and 
perspectives on the far left could involve both the contending groups in 
the DSP and other far left groups and individuals, with an emphasis on 
political discussion rather than invective and abuse, and the suspension 
of all organisational manoeuvres and arbitrary actions while such a 
debate proceeds.

PS. Best of Irish and Marxist luck to all participants in the DSP event. 
Retain a sense of humour. Happy new year.