Political situation counter-report and summary
By Marce Cameron, on behalf of the LPF
[The general line of the following report and summary was rejected by the national committee. The vote for adopting the report was 7 full NC members in favour, 23 against, with no abstentions, and 3 candidate members in favour, 11 against, with no abstentions and two no-votes.]
Comrades, at our DSP congress in January the majority of delegates voted in favour of us continuing to try to build SA as our new party in formation, albeit more gradually than before.
To advance any project for a new left party, we need sufficient numbers of active, willing partners with whom we can unite in taking concrete steps towards the creation of such a new party. Otherwise, it’s just an exercise in crude re-badging, which is precisely what SA has become for us.
By the end of 2005, four and a half years after its launch in May 2001, the other affiliates had all but withdrawn from active participation. SA was just the DSP and a thin layer of unaffiliated members scattered across the country who could be said to be active SA-builders.
The hope and the expectation of the congress majority was that an emerging fightback against the implementation of Howard’s Work Choices legislation in 2006 would create a bigger pool of class-struggle partners – militant unionists – that could enable us to breathe new life into SA as a new party in formation.
Four months into the new year, it’s obvious that these hopes and expectations have not materialised, and there’s no reason to believe that they will.
IR campaign: myth and reality
In desperately seeking a new justification to continue with our misguided and failed attempt to build SA as a new party in formation, the DSP leadership majority gambled on the hope that the militant trade union current – led by the Socialist Alliance – could break the campaign against Work Choices out of the class-collaborationist, elect-Labor-at-the next-federal-election strategy of the ALP-ACTU bureaucracy.
In doing so, comrades grossly misjudged three things: the political character and inherent limitations of the campaign against Work Choices; the balance of forces between the militant union current and the ALP-ACTU bureaucracy; and the ability of our own small cadre force, with the help of a handful of SA collaborators, to affect the broad outlines of the class struggle.
It’s as if comrades were looking through one of those toy kaleidoscopes and seeing multiple images of SA here, there and everywhere.
Take, for example, the myth that it was a Socialist-Alliance initiated petition campaign that pressured the ACTU into endorsing a national day of action against Work Choices on June 28 this year.
In reality, the ACTU had been contemplating a national day of action in mid-2006 as early as January. This was acknowledged in the Australian Politics and Campaigns report presented to the DSP congress on behalf of the NE majority.
The report noted that the petition campaign “was an initiative of the Socialist Alliance national trade union committee once we realised that the ACTU executive wasn’t going to call any more mass protests until mid-2006. The initial petition was modified and made stronger once we made contact with union organisers in Victoria who wanted to run on a petition calling for a national stoppage on the day the legislation is enacted. The petition calls for the ACTU executive to meet earlier than February to organise the national stoppage [emphasis added].”
Having failed to petition to the ACTU to call a national stoppage to coincide with the enactment of the legislation in March, we then changed the date of the petition, several times, finally settling on June, to lobby the ACTU to come behind AMWU national secretary Doug Cameron’s call for nationally coordinated protests on June 28. Our petition campaign called for a 24 hour stoppage. The much-touted “victory” of June 28 conveniently forgets this.
In the end, the ACTU merely “noted” Cameron’s initiative as part of a national week of activities. It didn’t take a Socialist Alliance petition campaign to achieve this, unless we want to re-write history so that SA appears as a big “player” on the stage of the class struggle. Meanwhile, the ACTU has still to officially endorse June 28, and they’re doing nothing to build it.
This farce is symptomatic of how our whole approach to trade union work has drifted into a single-minded preoccupation with getting the ACTU to call another national day of action. In the words of Comrade Andrew Jameison, the DSP comrade with the most trade union experience, “our union intervention is becoming patently sectarian, substituting ‘SA’ for genuine united front work. This is a result of us misunderstanding the defeats we are experiencing, and thinking we can turn everything around with convenient sloganeering and harping from the sidelines.”
The Socialist Alliance tactic was supposed to allow us to work more effectively with broader forces in the trade unions and in the other social movements and campaigns.
In reality, the very opposite is beginning to happen. We’re increasingly cutting ourselves off from broader forces, as we run around propping up the fiction of SA with sectarian blinkers on. The positive dynamic of greater left collaboration via SA has turned into its opposite. We’ve started to view our campaign interventions through the narrow prism of the ALP-ACTU’s IR campaign to get Beazley elected, and the attempt to substitute SA for genuine united front work with broader forces.
Two clear examples of this are the failure of the DSP, masquerading as SA, to adequately intervene in and help build the local union defense committees which have sprung up in Melbourne, the best of which are genuine united fronts involving ALP and Greens members, trade union and community activists; and an orientation to the civil liberties campaign in Melbourne that can only be described as dismissive, opportunist and sectarian.
The Civil Rights Defence group is non-sectarian, open to ideas and extremely active and outward looking. It has organised three events in recent weeks all of which have attracted over 100 people, most of them young people. What a contrast to the so-called young workers campaign, yet where is Resistance? For five weeks now Comrade Kim Bullimore, who has been leading our intervention into the CRD, has been asking in vain to be allowed to report to the Melbourne DSP executive on our civil liberties work.
Here’s another example of how our attachment to a failed left regroupment tactic is giving us a warped view of reality. In the final paragraph of Comrade Dick Nichols’ comment piece “Work Choices: now the fight gets serious” in GLW #652, the last issue for 2005.
“The message we should draw from the Howard government’s arrogant ramming through parliament of Work Choices, and the ‘anti-terror’ and ‘work-to-welfare’ laws, is clear: they have to act like the lords and masters of politics precisely because they are beginning to worry about the threat of our power.”
You’d think Comrade Nichols was writing from the barricades in Paris last month.
So, Howard enacts legislation for the most vicious attacks on workers’ rights in a century, with only symbolic opposition from the ACTU. And what does this tell us, according to Comrade Nichols? It tells us that contrary to how politicians usually behave when they’re really scared of the masses – they make some concessions and retreat – Howard acts like the arrogant bastard that he is because he’s “beginning to worry about the threat of our power”. So worried, it seems, that he “rammed through” his raft of anti-worker legislation almost unamended!
In one of her PCD contributions, Comrade Sue Bolton claimed there was an “emerging mass movement” against Work Choices.
It’s true that there have been some spectacular protests – November 15 was the largest-ever demonstration for workers’ rights in Australia. There are already sporadic outbreaks of defensive struggles as individual unions and workplaces take action against bosses who seek to take advantage of the new laws. In Melbourne, half a dozen trade union solidarity committees have sprung up in the suburbs to organise public meetings, mass leafleting and picket line solidarity.
But these campaign activities do not have the character and dynamic of a genuine mass social movement. It would be far more accurate to say that we have, on the one hand, an ACTU-led campaign to elect the Labor Party at the next federal election and, on the other, isolated flare-ups of defensive struggle as workers and individual unions resist the implementation of Work Choices.
While there’s a strong sentiment among union ranks for more action, there’s no political radicalisation, no significant layer of unionists or officials breaking with the class-collaborationist politics of the ALP.
Does this mean that there won’t be any more big protest rallies? Not at all. There’ll be protests in some cities on June 28 – although the combined mobilisation will be smaller, not larger, than November 15 – and the ACTU is projecting a national day of action around November 30. There will probably be one or two more after that, every six months or so until the federal election in 2007.
The Greg Combet wing of the union bureaucracy doesn’t believe that more mass protests are desirable or necessary. But as happened with November 15 and June 28, Combet may have to compromise with the Doug Cameron “left” wing of the bureaucracy which thinks that staged-managed mass rallies every now and again will help to get Beazley elected, will pressure the ALP into throwing a few more crumbs if elected, and gives officials like Cameron a bit of left cover.
Does the absence of a mass movement mean that there will be no resistance by workers and unions to the implementation of Work Choices? Some workers and some unions are already resisting. Given the very nature of these draconian laws and the determination of many workers and some unions to fight, there will be plenty of small, relatively isolated skirmishes and potentially, sooner or later, one or more big battles like the historic 1998 MUA dispute.
What is clear, however, is that the actually-existing campaign against Work Choices is not creating the necessary class struggle forces that could allow us to advance a viable project for a new left party, a working class political alternative to the ALP and the Greens.
Any comrades who doubt this should count on one hand how many militant trade unionists, other than DSP members, turned up to the last Socialist Alliance trade union caucus in your city. In Sydney, just before May Day, there were two: Comrades Raul Bassi and Beatrice Bassi, and this was a typical caucus meeting.
Partners for a new party?
What would have to happen for the campaign against Work Choices to begin to throw up a broader layer of politically clear and confident class-struggle militants, who might look to joining and building a new left party with us?
There’d have to be a qualitative revitalization and strengthening of the militant trade union current. In today’s conditions, such a revitalization might happen in one of two ways.
If the militant union current were of sufficient size, strength and political confidence so as to be able to directly challenge the ALP-ACTU bureaucracy for leadership of the campaign against Work Choices, then this current could grow rapidly through leading the kind of mass revolt that we saw in France recently. But if this were possible, it would already be happening.
Paragraph 17 of the resolution submitted by the Leninist Party Faction makes the realistic assessment that “while the militant union current in Victoria and WA has been able to exert some pressure on more conservative union leaderships to take some action, it has been forced onto the defensive and remains too small and too isolated to be able to compel the class-collaborationist ALP-ACTU bureaucracy to launch a campaign of sustained industrial action and mass mobilizations capable of compelling the Howard government and the bosses to retreat from the implementation of Work Choices.”
The second possibility is that the militant current could grow in size and strength more gradually, out of a whole series of interconnected skirmishes and bigger battles which develop unevenly over a more extended period in the years ahead.
If such a period of defensive struggles and patient rebuilding of the militant current were to extend into the first term of an incoming ALP federal government, then Labor’s failure to do anything more than blunt the edges of Work Choices would create more favourable conditions for a significant layer of militant unionists to begin to break politically from the ALP, and to look to joining and building a working class political alternative.
But for now, there’s no sign of any significant section of the trade union leadership being prepared to break politically from the ALP. If anything, unionists and union leaders increasingly see the election of a federal Labor government as the most realistic and achievable outcome of the present fight against Work Choices.
Incidentally, this answers the objection that the “political space” for SA must be opening up, because the ALP is so discredited. Aside from the dubious value of such a nebulous concept as “political space”, growing disillusionment with the ALP does not mechanically translate into more people wanting to roll up their sleeves and build a new left party.
This brings us back to our starting point: the inability of the present campaign against Work Choices to deliver us the partners we would need to revive SA as a viable left regroupment project.
Unless we want to play silly games masquerading as the Socialist Alliance, a “party” which amounts to little more than the public face of the DSP, it’s high time that we re-emerged the DSP as our public Marxist party, “the party we build today”. This political logic is as hard as diamond.
It’s as a publicly-functioning Marxist party that we need to relate to the actually-existing campaign against Work Choices and to the openings for solidarity, propaganda and recruitment created by flare-ups of defensive struggle by individual unions and workplaces.
There will be many more opportunities to build solidarity with unions and workers under attack in the period ahead. How the DSP should relate to these openings is taken up in paragraphs 18 and 19 of the LPF resolution.
Political situation and party-building
Having spent years hiding behind the Socialist Alliance and getting hopelessly lost in this failed regroupment tactic, comrades might wonder: is it really possible to build the DSP as a public Marxist party today?
Since SA is dead as a genuine left regroupment project – as dead as the dinosaurs, unless you think Jurassic Park was real – there’s simply no other party we can build today, unless we want to build a kind of SA-DSP hybrid, a pale imitation of the real thing, a step along the road to the liquidation of the revolutionary party.
Now, nobody in this room wants to go down this path. What we’re discussing here at this NC is, as always, how best to build the revolutionary party.
So let’s think about the challenges and opportunities before us.
The broad outlines of the Australian political situation are much the same today as they were when we launched SA back in May 2001, almost exactly five years ago.
There’s still the ongoing retreat of the working class in the face of the capitalist neoliberal offensive, punctuated by sporadic outbursts of active dissent and dispersed defensive struggles which then, as now, sustain a broad progressive dissenting constituency, which we might call the SCPP – the Stable Constituency of Pissed-off People.
Today, it’s probably accurate to say that no social movements are really growing. Take, for example, the anti-war movement, which is hunkered down in tiny, narrow committees dominated by the far left, plus a scattering of local peace groups in a few of the bigger cities. Much the same could be said of the refugee rights movement, although Howard’s response to the West Papua asylum seeker issue could spark a revival of this movement.
There are large trade union protests from time to time, firmly locked in the political framework of electing the ALP, and there are many smaller openings to build solidarity with unions and workers who are fighting back. In Melbourne, there is some ongoing campaigning in defense of civil liberties, and there are campaign openings around uranium mining and global warming.
This low-level “background noise” of active resistance draws in the Stable Constituency of Pissed-off People in sporadic ways, and reaches out to broader layers like ripples in a pond.
Something that has changed over the past five years is that among this SCPP there’s a greater and growing receptivity to radical ideas and explanations, a “search for answers”. The Mike Moore phenomenon, the steady growth in traffic to the Green Left website, even how the word “imperialism” has found its way back into common usage – these are all indicators of this growing receptivity, of this growing awareness.
As we note in paragraph 30 of the resolution, “The moral, political and ideological bankruptcy of the capitalist ruling class – and not any immediate possibility for formalised left regroupment – is the biggest political opening for revolutionaries in Australia today. The challenge for the DSP is how to engage most effectively in what Comrade Fidel Castro calls ‘the battle of ideas’, to gain a bigger audience for our Marxist ideas and explanations and to win new recruits to Resistance and the DSP.”
How we should relate to this opening as the DSP is taken up in the points in the LPF resolution on Green Left Weekly, on regular weekly or fortnightly Green Left public forums in the branches, and on the need for us to make the April 2007 Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference – in the lead-up to the anti-Bush protests to coincide with the APEC summit in Sydney in September – the largest-ever gathering of revolutionary and left parties in Australia from the region and beyond.
Along with the growing “thirst for answers”, there’s something else which we didn’t have five years ago: the opening of the conscious battle for socialism in Venezuela, of the Bolivarian socialist revolution.
The Venezuelan revolution gives us a big opening to convince more people that a working-class revolution and the socialist transformation of Australian society is possible, realistic and necessary. Not as an immediate possibility, but as something which can happen in our lifetimes, and which we should do something about today, by joining and building the seed of a party capable of leading a revolution.
Venezuela solidarity
Paragraph 20 of the LPF resolution says that “the Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is capturing the imagination of growing numbers of radical and progressive youth on every continent, re-inspiring an older generation of radicals and leftists, and reopening the debate about socialism. This revolutionary resurgence is political gold, a ‘gift’ that must not be squandered. The over-arching and unifying campaign priority for the DSP and Resistance is to help build and lead a broad-based solidarity movement with the unfolding socialist revolution in Venezuela, and with socialist Cuba.”
Paragraph 23 says that “Resistance, politically guided and supported by the DSP, must play a leading role in this solidarity and cadre-building work. We need to educate and train a new generation of youth cadres through immersion in building a Venezuela-Cuba solidarity movement in a DSP political framework.”
To dare to suggest that Venezuela solidarity should be the campaign priority for the DSP and Resistance is something of a heresy.
Perhaps this is a sign of how far, and how fast, the DSP has drifted away from its internationalist roots, and from that wonderful burst of youthful enthusiasm which accompanied the preparations for our first Venezuela solidarity brigade just 12 months ago.
Majority leaders are now starting to make the same argument against us prioritising Venezuela solidarity work which the ISO used to bait us with, an argument which I never thought I’d hear in the DSP: that we want to turn the DSP into “a cheer squad for the Venezuelan revolution”.
Sadly, Resistance comrades’ enthusiasm for Venezuela solidarity is being burnt out of them, thanks to the majority leadership’s real line on Venezuela. Resistance is doing less, not more, Venezuela solidarity work than it did a year ago, despite the brigades and all our other solidarity initiatives, and the establishment of AVSN committees in some cities.
Even with Resistance dragging its feet on this solidarity work, Venezuela – a living, breathing socialist revolution – is still a far more powerful and compelling radical youth magnet for us than flag burning stunts, Work Choices, student strikes or anything else.
Yet in the new DSP, Resistance making Venezuela solidarity its priority and rebuilding itself out of this would supposedly mean Resistance “abstaining from Australian politics”. How ridiculous! Did we ever say that about Nicaragua? About East Timor?
Let’s remember what radicalised the first generation of Resistance activists. It wasn’t just Australia’s intervention in the Vietnam War, conscription and the anti-war movement. It was something else too: the inspiration of the Vietnamese revolution, of a heroic people fighting Yankee imperialism to a standstill in bare feet and straw hats.
In Sydney alone there are more than 20 DSP and Resistance members who’ve been to Venezuela in the past 18 months. How many of these comrades have simply gone around and told the inspiring story of this revolution to anyone who will listen, to as many different constituencies as possible, leaving behind a trail of Green Left Weekly subscribers, Resistance joiners and AVSN contacts? Not many. The potential for this kind of revolutionary solidarity and outreach work is almost limitless, yet we’ve barely scratched the surface.
And if this doesn’t stir the communist fire in our chests, what will? Another round of Sky Channel meetings?
Just in Sydney, 203 people came to hear Comrade Carolus Wimmer speak; 90 attended a Venezuela solidarity fiesta built by a handful of comrades in less than two weeks, at which three people joined Resistance; the Sydney ACFS has decided to donate $400 to the May 20 international day of solidarity; seven AVSN contacts helped out with May 20 leafleting at May Day; 240 people packed out the ACFS dinner on April 2 to celebrate the Cuba-Venezuela axis of solidarity. Perhaps this too was an “LPF conspiracy”?
Let’s not squander the political investment we’ve made in the brigades, in the Caracas bureau, in the speaking tours, in the promising work we’re starting to do with broader forces to build the beginnings of a genuine united front solidarity movement. Let’s not rebadge this solidarity work as “SA” in our desperation to keep up appearances for a failed regroupment tactic.
Let’s give this work the cadre-building priority it deserves. This is the natural growth path for Resistance, and for a bigger, stronger Democratic Socialist Party. We have to seize it with both hands.
Summary
Comrades, Tim Gooden said that the resolution presented by the LPF says a whole lot of things which are obvious, that go without saying. Well, I’d like to ask Tim a question: is the IR campaign generating, or not generating – as the LPF is saying – the leaders and forces we need to revive SA and build it towards a new left party? Is this also stating the obvious?
Now, comrades can’t dodge this question. Sue needs to take it up in her summary on behalf of the majority. There are three possible answers to this question: yes, no or maybe. What’s your position, comrades? Or are we going to be like ostriches, burying our heads in the sand, just caught up in the movement?
The whole point of discussing the Australian political situation and our campaigns is to understand how best to build our party – the Democratic Socialist Party, as the LPF is suggesting, or an SA-DSP hybrid, or some other kind of party.
Now, the LPF is not saying that we should abstain from the fightback that is happening. This is taken up in the LPF resolution. All this rhetorical stuff from Paul Benedek about “there’s a third alternative, it’s to throw ourselves in and lead the struggle”, well, read the resolution comrades. It says that we should respond to the real opportunities to build solidarity with people who are fighting, and not get fixated on lobbying the ACTU to have another national day of action.
The question is not “do we, or don’t we, try to lead?” The question is always: lead what, how, and with whom? And, most importantly of all, in what political framework?
It’s a myth that the ALP and the ACTU don’t want to organise any protests. What was Brisbane Labour Day? It was the state Labor government organising a big, whopping protest march. These forces do want to organise protests, as long as it’s in the framework of electing the ALP at the next federal election.
Secondly, the idea that the ACTU feared losing control of the IR campaign if it didn’t concede to a national week of activities around June 28. Losing control to who? To the militant trade union current? This current wasn’t even mentioned in Sue’s report, we don’t talk about it any more. This was supposed to be the key force with which we’re going to build this new party. Would they lose the initiative to the Victorian Trades Hall Council? To Doug Cameron? But this is just another wing of the ALP, by and large. This is essentially a struggle between two wings of the ALP.
The point of raising Venezuela solidarity is to motivate the idea that this should be the overarching, unifying campaign priority for the DSP and Resistance. I was careful in the report not to say that in every Resistance branch comrades are doing less Venezuela solidarity this year compared with this time last year. But as a generalisation, it’s true. The overwhelming, single-minded focus of Resistance is the June 1 student strike. Let’s just be honest about this.
Now, Paul Benedek says there are people around SA. Sure, but that’s not the point. What we’re saying is that SA is dead as a viable left regroupment project, which involves building towards a new party with other, substantial, class struggle forces. Sure there are still people around, people who help us sell Green Left, people who identify as SA activists. But we had this kind of thing before SA came along. We had an active periphery we could engage here and there.
So yes, SA is still “alive” in some places as a sort of loose supporters’ organisation, and we may be able to salvage it as an electoral organisation, but this is not a left regroupment project. For goodness sake, all the affiliates have left or are doing nothing and the militant union current doesn’t even rate a mention in Sue’s report, so let’s get a sense of perspective and stop behaving like ostriches.
It’s not that Venezuela solidarity is inspiring for us which is the primary reason why we need to make it our campaign priority, although this is not unimportant, because if you try to get comrades really fired up about things like Sky Channel meetings where they play the Australian national anthem and Kim Beazley speaks, it’s not that inspiring, it’s deadening for revolutionaries. Yes, we have to help build them, but this shouldn’t be our campaign priority.
Building solidarity with defensive struggles that break out is where we’ll get the new leaders and forces emerging that we can draw around us, that we can work alongside and win some of them to our Marxist ideas.
The point is that Venezuela solidarity is what will allow us to reach out with our revolutionary ideas and explanations, what will help us to build our party, our Marxist party which is still here comrades, it’s just that it’s buried and we’re masquerading as something else. We’re in denial.
We’ve gone way off course here. We’re waiting for the next ACTU action, and we have to lobby and petition them. Comrades, this is the priority of the majority’s party building line, and it’s wrong. It’s dead wrong.
Venezuela solidarity should be the number one campaign priority for the DSP and Resistance. Do you agree with this or not? You can’t just say in your report, “the IR campaign and Venezuela and anti-war, they’re all priorities” and then spend 90% of the report talking about nothing but the IR campaign, as happened in the report to the DSP congress.
We’ve done some very good Venezuela solidarity work, but to really allow this solidarity work to fulfill its potential to build our party, we have to make it our priority.