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Contents
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Letter to Weekly Worker
on the ISO resignations
Educational standards have fallen to a pitiful level when
basic
arithmetic is beyond the abilities of your correspondents. As an
irregular reader of the Weekly Worker I expect little more than
gossip and an eclectic politics lashed together by the nebulous
conception of partyism. However I do expect your correspondents to be
able to count. Therefore I was amused to note that Cde Marcus Strom
seems to believe that 25 cdes signed a resignation statement from the
International Socialist Organisation in Australia. In fact 21 cdes
signed the document which was published on the 25th of May.
Were this the only error of fact in the article we could pass
it
over with a smile. Yet Marcus also claims that the Socialist
Alternative group is both anarchistic and ultraleft, and consists of
some 90 members based in Melbourne. Happily this is not the case and
SocAlt has recently grown considerably, to some 200 members, due to the
disciplined interventions of its militants in the anti-war movement and
on the campuses. It also engages in some limited work, where able,
within the unions. There is no ultraleftism or anarchism — SocAlt
stands firmly on the Marxist tradition on all questions — in any of
this work. Marcus is clearly either misinformed or does not understand
this organisation and its ideas that he so blithely dismisses.
Marcus also discusses the Democratic Socialist Party, the
largest
tendency in the Australian Socialist Alliance and comments that it has
not fallen for petty nationalism, along the lines it is implied of the
Scottish Socialist Party whose electoral successes it wishes to
emulate, and indeed it has not. No, the DSP is happy to go the whole
hog and has in the recent past embraced imperialist nationalism as when
it backed Australian military intervention in East Timor. Nothing petty
concerning this unprincipled stance, which Marcus passes over in a
fashion I can only describe as curious given that an article appeared
in the pages of the Weekly Worker denouncing this reactionary
capitulation to imperialism at the time. In fact the DSP is a former
Orthodox Trotskyist (sic) grouping, which has adopted many of the
hallmarks of pseudo-Leninism, in fact an ideology fabricated by
Zinoviev that is a left version of Kautskyism, that the Weekly
Worker also espouses.
Marcus sees fit to argue that those comrades who have now left
the
International Socialist Organisation have done so because the formation
of the Socialist Alliance has acted as a "democratic acid" breaking
down the "bureaucratic centralist" sectarianism of the ISO, which is
described as a "micro-control organism" no less! The reaffirmation of
the former ISO comrades to the International Socialism tradition is
also described, obscenely, as comparable to the lip service made to
Stalin by the victims of the Great Purge of the 1930s. This coming from
a journalist on a paper which claims to be that of the Communist Party
of Great Britain, which party supported the purges, is a disgraceful
lie. Despite too many years of political and organisational
degeneration the ISO and the allied Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
remain opposed, formally at least, to the Stalinist politics and method
which the founders of the Weekly Worker have never fully broken from.
The importance of a relatively small number of comrades
leaving
their organisation may not be clear for many socialists living in
Britain, so it is worth explaining why events in the Australian left
should concern us. Briefly the Australian left finds itself in a very
similar situation to that here, although with significant differences.
As here, the Australian left is faced with a bureaucratised Union
movement which is linked to a right-wing Labor Party, although the
formal link with the Unions does not exist in Australia the real
linkages are more alive than here and the Labor Party not quite as
rotten, and as in Britain a decaying milieu of aging Stalinists retains
some influence within the union bureaucracy. Again just as in Britain
the far left finds itself marginal to the workers movement and split
into a multitude of competing groups.
Faced with the impasse of a low level of strike action and
social
struggles the far left has sought ways to break out of its isolation
and as in Britain unity based on the lowest common denominator of
electoral campaigning has appeared attractive to many. Given that the
far left is divided, in Australia as in Britain, into a myriad of
competing groups organisational unity is an attractive prospect for
many. The relative success of the SSP also seems a path forward which
merits emulation in Australia and here. This unity of the assorted left
groups, based on electoral work and little else, should be the
beginnings of a ‘partyist’ project according to Marcus's schema. What
kind of party this needs to be and what the nature of the politics it
should fight for is left vague. As it must be if this sectarian schema
is to gain any audience amongst the existing left. Some token
revolutionary phraseology being confined to the pages of the Weekly
Worker, at best.
In Australia the DSP has long participated in elections to no
discernable effect within the working class and the opportunity to
emulate the perceived success of the SSP provided them with the impetus
needed to launch a Socialist Alliance. Their project was boosted by the
turn of the ISO, the second largest far left group in Australia, to
working in such an alliance. This turn being based on the rather over
optimistic basis that the 1990s was to witness struggles of a similar
magnitude to those of the 1930s. Such a perspective has since been seen
to be as witless as SocAlt and others within the IS Tradition argued it
was. Nonetheless the Socialist Alliance did draw in almost all the
disparate groups and individuals of the far left in Australia and its
success has been as minuscule as the Socialist Alliances in England and
Wales. In short the Socialist Alliance in Australia has been a dismal
failure in its own electoral terms and as a project to construct a new
mass workers party.
None of this has deterred the DSP, which dominates the
Socialist
Alliance in a fashion only marginally more democratic than the
suffocating leadership of the SWP in England and Wales. The Socialist
Alliance is then declared a success (!) and steps are taken to convert
it into a fully fledged party in which the affiliated groups will
become factions. All this at the behest of the DSP and a grouping of
independent members of the Socialist Alliance, who on closer inspection
tun out to be close friends with the DSP and in many cases its former
members. This is what has precipitated the revolt in the ISO as it has
meant that tensions in that group, which arose as a result of the 1930s
in slow motion perspective foisted upon them by our own SWP, has
reached boiling point. Contrary to Marcus's assertion that the comrades
leaving the ISO will work within the Socialist Alliance they have been
united on little beyond opposition to the Socialist Alliance becoming a
fully fledged miniature party. It is not then the "democratic acid" of
the Socialist Alliance, which has produced this rupture but the failure
of the Socialist Alliance to be anything other than an electoral front
for it’s leading faction. This has served to illustrate the failings of
perspective and organisational structure, and it is implied failings of
democratic functioning, within the ISO.
These same failings exist within the Socialist Alliance in
England
and Wales, where the SWP plays the leading role. Despite years of
campaigning the Socialist Alliance has won only a single council seat
in its own name and its largest second component, the Socialist Party,
has left in disgust at its non-democratic structures. In fact it has
had far less impact at elections than the British National Party. But
most importantly the SWP’s rationale for joining the Socialist
Alliance, which was that it would provide a political space for former
Labour Lefts and youthful Anti-Capitalists, has proven a fantasy. Its
one legacy being that the Alliance has campaigned on a platform,
reformist in both form and content, far to the right of those adhered
to by almost all its constituent parts. Politically the Alliance has
proven to be far less than the sum of its parts. Having led the
Socialist Alliance, a parody of the United Front, away from any
meaningful activity apart from electioneering, the SWP now plans to
subsume it into a wider radical alliance with Muslim obscurantists and
via the remnant Communist Party of Britain with that wing of the Trade
Union bureaucracy which reads The Fading Star, a parody if you
like of the Popular Front.
In Australia the course of development is somewhat different
and the Weekly Worker's
schema of turning the Socialist Alliance into a party has been passed.
No doubt when this new party becomes reduced to nothing more than the
present DSP the Weekly Worker will find reasons enough for its
failure. It is possible, however, to indicate today why this putative
party will fail with some degree of certainty. Any party worth its salt
needs must have a united view of the major questions facing it both
nationally and internationally, it must have a single programme which
all accept. This quite simply cannot be achieved in Australia unless
some of the constituent parts of the new party abandon principled
positions in favour of those of the DSP who will form the leading
faction in the party. The only other alternative is compromise and
obfuscation designed to conceal deep-going principled differences. Just
to take a few examples of the questions facing the new party. How will
its militants operate within the unions? Would the new party support
imperialist intervention as the DSP did in East Timor when next
Australia violates the sovereignty of others? How will the Socialist
Alliance Party relate to the Labor Party? What attitude should be
adopted towards Palestine? All of these questions, and more besides,
are probable split questions for at least some of the various
tendencies now trapped into a spurious unity with the DSP.
Where, then, does this leave those comrades who have left the
ISO
and those SWP comrades who still wish to build a revolutionary workers
party? Well, Marcus's suggestion that the best thing the Australian
comrades could do is remain in the Socialist Alliance, reassess their
politics and fight for the SA to become a revolutionary party is an
idiocy. A nonsense indeed when the entire political tradition of these
comrades must mean that they reject the ideas Marcus claims as
revolutionary, ideas that are in fact nothing but Kautskyism given a
left gloss. Better that they do reassess their past, of course, but
collectively outside the ranks of the Socialist Alliance, asking how
and why the IS Tendency has moved away from the politics of
working-class emancipation, socialism from below, and engages in
squalid manoeuvres with groups like the DSP. Better yet they enter into
discussions with SocAlt, who correctly predicted that the Socialist
Alliance was a dead end, in order to resume building a revolutionary
alternative. In Britain the scene is far darker for revolutionaries who
would take their stand on the IS tradition, what is for certain is that
they will need to argue within the SWP to abandon the fruitless petty
electoralism of the Socialist Alliance, leave alone the impending lash
up with a noxious mix of aged Stalinioids and Muslim obscurantists, and
return to the task of building a revolutionary alternative in the
working class and in the colleges.
For Communism,
Mike Pearn
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