Australian politics and campaigns
By Iggy Kim, 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 5 full NC members in favour, 22 against, with 0 abstentions, and 3 candidate members in favour, 10 against, with 0 abstentions.]
The question of the party is the most urgent question for any analysis of the Australian political situation and campaigns perspectives. We’ve reached a point where no proper consideration can be given to our campaign priorities, tactics and proposals, without first dealing with the most fundamental problem – the elevation of Socialist Alliance as our public party project and the refusal to resurface the DSP.
Let’s then look at the campaign opening that, from late 2005, was presented by the NC majority as tailor-made for a broad left, new party project such as SA.
WorkChoices and our ‘record of action’
In a post to the GL Discussion List on April 12 this year, Peter Boyle boasted about Socialist Alliance’s anti-WorkChoices campaign: “We are not just talking about Socialist Alliance propaganda here but a record of action” (without which the four national IR mobilisations would supposedly not have happened).
Taking this claim at face value, it seems this “record of action” has steadily lost ground in the last two years. From the high of November 15, 2005, this “record of action” has given way to an expensive advertising campaign, a push to mass-email Kevin Rudd, and a festive “family day” in Melbourne on April 22. In Perth, there wasn’t even a mobilisation on that date. And yet, Melbourne and Perth were the two cities where SA held so much promise because of the militant union groupings that were the pretext for a “new party project”.
By contrast, Sydney actually held a march even though the city registers next to no Socialist Alliance influence in the unions, lacks independent class-struggle forces like Workers First (at least in its heyday) and the WA MUA Rank-and-File, and is dominated by a more conservative union leadership.
Sydney’s contrast has more to do with the NSW ALP’s bolstered confidence after its state election victory, and the subsequent shift of initiative to those Laborites who want to switch on the mass action tap a touch more, cocksure that it won’t bust out of the straitjacket of parliamentarism.
Capitalist boom
To be sure, this “record of action” was allegedly a partnership between SA and militant union leaders such as Chris Cain and Craig Johnston. However, this is a disingenuous use of those leaders to prop up our desperate hype and bluster. For I’m sure they would be the first to admit that a mass fightback isn’t going to materialise today out of the sheer will of their leadership.
Leadership is not a one-way street. Leadership works in conjunction with those who are led, much like the relationship between a piston and steam, to use Trotsky’s analogy. The scope of action of even principled and authoritative leaders such as Chris Cain is sharply limited by complex subjective factors among the rank and file, such as their level of class consciousness, combativity and confidence; accumulated struggle experience; breadth of membership activism; broader social struggle; and the strength of their class-collaborationist opponents, all of which in turn are shaped by the acuity of objective class antagonisms and contradictions.
Today, these subjective factors are powerfully conditioned by Australia’s capitalist boom. Profit growth continues to remain steady, riding on the back of buoyant primary commodity prices and exports to Asia. The monetary value of Australia’s exports rose 20.1% in the year to Nov 2006; GDP grew 2.8% in 2005-06; and growth in 2007 is forecast at 3.5% despite anticipated slowdown in the rest of the OECD.
This boom allows the bosses a wider field of action, including a manipulative and uneven implementation of WorkChoices. Thus, there are highly sought-after skilled workers in profitable industries who are on lucrative AWAs, such as in mining. There is another section of workers still under union-led enterprise agreements. State public sector workers in certain states are presently sheltered from WorkChoices altogether. Hence the absence of organised contingents from NSW teachers and nurses on April 22, as their unions basked in relief at the return of a state Labor government. Then there are large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled workers fully exposed to the ravages of Work Choices. This sort of stratification deepens divisions and passivity in the organised working class.
ALP’s bourgeois leadership
Such boom times also provide enough fat on the land for extra tactical manoeuvring and shadow boxing among the different shades of Laborites, thereby allowing four national mobilisations but spaced well apart – over a period of two years!
SA’s so-called “record of action” was overshadowed and absorbed by this tactical wrangle within the ACTU over when, and how much, to turn the mass action tap on and off for the benefit of the ALP’s electoral chances.
This tussle among the Laborites has now borne cynical fruit. On the one hand, Greg Combet looks poised to parachute into federal parliament, as reward for his “record of action” in stage-managing the IR campaign and haggling the union bureaucracies into accepting Kevin Rudd’s WorkChoices Lite. On the other hand, Doug Cameron is setting himself up as the ALP’s “good cop” on industrial relations. While feigning disgust at aspects of Rudd’s IR policy, Cameron reassured The Age newspaper on April 17 that “The Labor industrial policy will be miles better for working people”.
Such cynical shadow boxing between the ALP “Left” and “Right” has historically served to beguile and corral workers in behind the ALP as a whole. It reinforces a fatalistic lesser-evilism among workers. It weakens their confidence in independent self-activity and organisation.
By kidding ourselves that “we are not just talking about Socialist Alliance propaganda here but a record of action”, our propaganda and intervention in the IR campaign have neglected to explain the ALP’s bourgeois role in the unions.
Rather than being cheer-squads for anyone who supports any mass demonstration, we should be clearly revealing “who the friends of the people” really are. For Green Left’s cover story in issue 664 (12 April 2006), Sue Bolton wrote:
Fortunately for Australia’s working people, a section of the union movement does want to take Howard on. This group of unions initiated the two national days of action last year, on June 30-July 1 and November 15. The same unions have now convinced the ACTU to call the June 28 protests, although some of the more conservative union leaderships are trying to scuttle plans for a national mobilisation on that day.
Even though we’d recognised in January 2006 that “the ACTU executive wasn’t going to call any more mass protests until mid-2006” (The Activist, Vol. 15, No. 1, p. 17), by April that year we’d smudged over this fact and June 28 became the new touchstone of union militancy. Any Laborite union leader who wanted to turn on the mass-action tap a little more was now seamlessly among the ranks of militant unionism. Sue Bolton’s cover story made no mention – not a single word – of SA’s original push for a March work stoppage.
No one opposes making tactical compromises. However, let’s recognise them for what they are – concessions forced on us by our still low influence and the generally unfavourable balance of forces. But there was no analysis of this, no explanation of why a March stoppage could not get off the ground last year; certainly not to the wider Green Left readership, nor to the DSP periphery, and not even to the DSP members.
Instead, keen to bluff and grandstand about our “record of action”, Sue Bolton hailed this concession as “a victory because it had to be won against entrenched opposition from the bureaucracy” (The Activist, Vol. 16, No. 5, p. 8). But who within the bureaucracy? And what about those union fat-cats who did come behind June 28? What were their political motives?
There’s mass action and mass action
No one is poo-poohing mass demonstrations and national days of action. Yes, they do open the potential for raising working people’s self-confidence as a social force. But mass demonstrations are also open to contestation between opposing class forces and parties. At times, competing reformist forces may even call mass protests, precisely to ensure they are nothing more than safety valves – an exercise in reinforcing the line, “Elect us and we’ll do it for you”.
Even the bourgeoisie resorts to street actions when they’re deemed necessary. Think pro-logging forestry worker demos organised and funded by the pulp-mill bosses. Think anti-Chavez demos in the early days of the Venezuelan revolution.
Therefore, drawing a line of division simply between those for and against June 28, and thereby seeing only the latter as our political opponents, is tantamount to tailing the soft Laborites.
Just consider this. Even as the four national IR mobilisations were unfolding – at the instigation of SA’s “record of action” – the union movement was being further sapped of its strength. Even as the four mobilisations were gently bobbing up and down over a two-year period, the bosses were gloating over how well WorkChoices had muffled industrial disputes. In the December quarter of 2006, only 0.2 workdays were lost per 1000 employees in coal mining, 0.1 in other mining, 11.3 in metal industry, 6.1 in construction and 1.0 in transport. This was hailed as an “all-time low” by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Furthermore, union membership fell by 125,900 (6.6%) between August 2005 and August 20061. And now, the ALP wants to dilute union culture and strength even further by outlawing strikes without a secret ballot!
For principled united fronts
Lest the LPF be accused of wanting to abstain from real struggle and merely hurl invectives against the reformists from the sidelines, what we are actually saying is this: Getting tactical agreement among the broadest range of forces for any particular mass action shouldn’t mean holding back on explaining the motives of tried-and-tested labour-fakers.
It is precisely through such propaganda – in the course of actively building campaigns – that we win and convince the genuine class-struggle militants and radicalising people to our politics. And it is precisely through such propaganda, alongside actual collaboration and practical work, that we continue to defend and keep alive the authentic revolutionary strategy of consistent, rank-and-file-driven mass action, the sort of mass action that can open the road to grassroots self-organisation and mass activism, the sort of mass action that topples governments and makes revolutions.
Clear, principled propaganda need not be at the expense of rolling up our sleeves in practical campaigning. And vice versa. This will often mean tactical united fronts with conservative and bureaucratic forces, but the essence of the united front is to preserve our political independence.
And in activating the widest range of people and organizations, we must also not forget our strategic duty to build up and consolidate the radicalising left-wing of any given campaign and to reach out to, and activate, radicalising elements outside of organised campaigns.
This dynamic tension between movement-building and party-building, between striving to win immediate reforms and promoting revolutionary change, between being the best movement activists as well as recruiters of revolutionary cadre, has been the wellspring for our healthy living Leninism.
Our real weight
Furthermore, lest the LPF be accused of “gloating” over the present objective situation, let me be explicit. No one wished for the anti-WorkChoices mobilisations to wind down into an ALP election campaign. We do not celebrate the lack of industrial and political confidence and independence among Australian workers. We do not enjoy the continued isolation of revolutionary socialists from the mass of the working class.
In late 2005, the NC minority was accused of being “defeatist” and “pessimist”. Why? For simply pointing out that the DSP and SA did not yet have the influence to combat the ACTU and ALP misleadership of the IR campaign. By contrast, not only did the SA-or-Bust camp wail down this supposed “pessimism”; they abstained from making the necessary analysis that could have opened their eyes to the real balance of forces. The drive to justify the permanent tactic of SA-or-Bust, the need to huff and bluff about some “record of action”, led the SA fetishists to abandon this basic task of recognising objective reality.
However, the winding down of the IR campaign at the hands of the ALP is now a straightforward fact. And we must confront this fact in order to reach the right political conclusions, lessons and decisions.
We in the DSP do not yet have the industrial or political weight to alter the present course of class conflict. Even in partnership with certain class struggle union leaders, there is not yet the conditions for a mass counter-offensive. Militant leaders such as Chris Cain are themselves fighting to defend and reactivate their unions in the face of pressures toward membership passivity as well as direct government and employer attacks (these pressures and attacks are, of course, interrelated).
But that’s not all there is to the state of class conflict in Australia. To dwell on the current passivity of the mass, the majority of the working class, would be a one-sided error, leading towards either giving up or merely focusing on the shifting sands of what seems immediately achievable (or “palpable”, as the Mensheviks used to say), thereby quietly lowering your criterion of union militancy from one national day of action to another.
Working class consciousness and stratification are far more complex than that. Therefore, armed with a firm conviction that nothing is more constant than change, and recognising our present size and influence, it is critical that we better comprehend the state of radicalisation in this country today and urgently orient towards it if we are to prepare our party for future mass breaks and openings in class struggle.
Radicalisation is relentless
All the calculations and manoeuvres of the bourgeois parties/governments and their lieutenants in the union bureaucracy do nothing to answer the many social and political questions nagging at Australian class society. World politics – especially war and other forms of imperialist oppression – and the global environment remain pressing questions, even if at present they are not actively expressed in social struggle.
Despite the Howard government’s campaign to reinforce an old-style (i.e., pre-1970s) Australian nationalism, there is a persistent and growing progressive consciousness among large swathes of working people. This is shown in various sociological data: the 2003 and 2005 Survey on Social Attitudes, the 2006 survey on attitudes to international politics by the Lowy Institute, the annual youth surveys by the Democrats, as well as a host of single-issue opinion polls.
Even though there is not yet large-scale social struggle, there are many radicalising people out there, politically questioning the status quo, people who can be won to revolutionary socialist ideas and activity. Many, if not most, are young people.
We must devote substantially more time to collectively analyse and discuss the state of radicalisation in Australia today. This was something we used to do in our reports on Australian politics and party-building, in a previous time when we were clearly focused on understanding, reaching out to and winning the radicalising sector of Australian society.
Meaning of propaganda
Such a battle of ideas, the battle to convince radicalising people of the relevance and correctness of socialist solutions and the mass action strategy, is more urgent than ever. Our role today is essentially propagandistic. But this has to be correctly and properly understood, according to our Leninist tradition. Propaganda for us is an active and outward-oriented battle of ideas, politics and struggle-methods.
Sadly, Peter Boyle revealed a confused misunderstanding of propaganda in that April 12 GL Discussion List post, when he wrote, “we are not just talking about Socialist Alliance propaganda here but a record of action”. He thinks propaganda is sloganeering, passive finger-wagging from the sidelines. For our record-keeper of action, propaganda and propagandistic parties must all be “Spart-like”.
No, we’ve never had that approach. For Leninists, propaganda has always been an interventionist form of activism. It’s always been about reaching out, instigating wider initiatives, building campaigns – but without the delusion that we’re more influential than we actually are, and with a clear and unabashed focus on that (as yet) minority of people who are radicalising.
This is a period when we can really study and test a variety of ways to better convince such people of Marxism, a period to learn to better communicate our politics, to better advance our ideas and tactics in the movements, to better recruit and organise radicalising people into an openly Marxist party. This was our approach to propaganda – before we got drugged on SA and started hallucinating about turning the tide with some delusional “record of action”.
Before this expensive drug habit, we engaged with broader radicalising and activist forces with a clear head and a host of creative, flexible tools and tactics: Green Left Weekly, broad left conferences, international solidarity organizations, media stunts, high school walkouts and many other initiatives. We jumped into a whole range of movement openings and helped build activist campaign committees from the ground up. We also embraced and tried to join in with a variety of left regroupment efforts.
We didn’t develop an unhealthy dependence on any permanent tactic. We understood that the success of any tactic depended on the recruitment and development of cadre who were absolutely clear and convinced on the revolutionary party project. We openly built such a party while engaging in real dialogue and joint activity with wider forces. We did not equivocate behind a permanent halfway house and tremble with the fear that it’s SA or nothing.
And this was precisely the sort of party that won respect from movement leaders with broader authority. Our collaboration with Chris Cain, Craig Johnston and Sam Watson predates the permanent tactic of SA. We enjoyed similar long-term collaboration with other leaders too, such as the late Clarrie Isaacs, with whom we ran a joint election ticket on an anti-racism platform.
Since the mid-1980s, we’ve been on the lookout for regroupment openings, but not at all costs and certainly not burrowing away at those openings when the objective situation has sharply narrowed them down into a DSP-and-periphery by any other name. We’ve always been poised to regroup when the broader forces and partners are there.
When they’re not, we’ve recognised the centrality of building the cadre – openly and publicly – that will influence any genuine regroupment opportunity when it does open up. Revolutionary cadre, armed with an outreach tool such as Green Left, trained as campaigning propagandists and organisers, are our bridge to being relevant when the objective conditions become more favourable, not some sickly white elephant such as SA.
A historical comparison
I draw on our history in the 1990s because the basic balance of class forces and dynamic of class conflict have not fundamentally changed since then. By drawing on our history before SA, we can compare life before and after SA on the basis of similar objective conditions. These shared conditions exert a “control” element on the SA/pre-SA variable.
Let’s look at a specific comparison. In 1994, against a backdrop of retreat and anti-party pressures within the social movements – the fallout from the disbanding of the Communist Party and the collapse of the Soviet Union – certain party leaders in Perth began adapting to these pressures. The sharp internal debate that ensued can be read in full in The Activists of that year, but I want to quote at length from one document of the dispute, the “NE Standing Committee Report to Perth Branch” (The Activist, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 1994). This report contains some home truths about the current political climate vis-à-vis a broad party:
Now we come to the most interesting issue: what is generating the discussion?…
The first pressure upon is the feeling that we’re isolated…. So we think: isn’t there some way we could be less isolated, some change we could introduce to draw more people into our ranks?
The second pressure upon us is the all-pervasive skepticism about the socialist cause….
A third pressure upon us is the very success of center-left or left social-democratic parties like the New Labour-Alliance in New Zealand, the Brazilian PT or Causa R in Venezuela. Over the past period these parties have seemed to spring from nothing to the point where they’re challenging for government. Couldn’t we do the same thing here if we just altered our operation a little?…
But we can’t replicate the objective and subjective conditions that gave rise to these formations at will. Any attempt to do that would lead us to produce bizarre, aborted little parodies of the original. We could call ourselves “New Labour” (or find five or 10 half-decent leftists to join us in forming a “New Labour”) but it could only be a sad little bonsai version of New Zealand New Labour…. [For the contemporary equivalent, just replace “New Labour” with “Scottish Socialist Party” or “multi-tendency socialist party” – IK]
We need to be frank here…. There are more people than ever who, rejecting this or that aspect of the status quo, will try us out, even take up provisional membership, but – once they realize that we’re about seriously organizing to overturn the system – not want to get involved in that sort of thing just yet. We operate our politics today with a larger periphery than we’ve ever had. That’s a source of pressure to adapt to a mass-movementist level of consciousness and to turn the party into a collection of movement activists.
The more talented such people are, the more they could bring to the party if they decided to join, the greater this pressure is. We’re also talking here about the I’d-join-you-if-only-you-were-bigger brigade who’ll work with us in campaigns and the unions, come to our dinner dances, even throw us a quid or two. But we won’t get bigger by trying to adapt to their level: instead we should be arguing with them to get involved with us as we are… (The Activist, Vol. 4, No. 6, pp. 31-33, italics added)
Ironically, this report was given by Dick Nichols, now the most feverish defender of the SA-or-nothing dream.
Anyway, that was our assessment of the prospects for a broad party back in the mid-1990s. More saliently, this dispute centred on Perth, where there were two nationally significant political developments to the left of Labor.
First, the two Greens’ WA senators, Dee Margetts and Christabel Chamarette, had shown signs of shaking up the two-party system from within the confines of federal parliament, including the threat of blocking supply. This had helped slow down the retreat of the political left in WA. It played a part in inspiring a number of independent activists in the East Timor solidarity struggle, a broad land-rights resistance to the Swan Brewery redevelopment, anti-logging actions, and the opposition to French nuclear testing, to name a few.
Hand in hand with this development was a radical union leadership independent of, or sharply oppositional within, the Labor Party, including a sizable chunk of former Marxists: Bill Ethell and Di McTiernan of the CFMEU, Vince George of the CEPU, Glen Ferguson and Graham Haynes of the AMIEU, and Mick Houlbrook and Ian Bolas of the SSTU, to name just a few of our closest collaborators at that time. These leaders were participants in wider social struggles. For instance, the CFMEU, under Bill Ethell’s secretaryship, was crucial to the Swan Brewery land rights resistance. The union imposed what was effectively Australia’s last Green Ban on the WA Labor government’s corrupt redevelopment plans.
These two developments combined into a dynamic, broader left-of-ALP political landscape. Nevertheless, we soberly concluded that a broad party project was not yet on the cards. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the Greens WA and the left unions essentially represented a defensive pit-stop on a trajectory away from any revolutionary project. Of course, they were still important to relate to and collaborate with, and we did just that – admirably as an open, public Leninist party. However, at the time, these openings held the illusory promise of something bigger and dangerously seduced some Perth comrades, including a national leader, into an impatient search for shortcuts.
Same pressures today
We are still feeling those same pressures today, perhaps more acutely with the passing of time. Faced with the daily difficulties of building a revolutionary party in Australia, we wonder whether we could be shifting gear to get us more quickly onto the road of mass influence. We hide the DSP behind a broader socialist front which – with a sigh of relief – shoves aside certain norms, organisational principles and openly revolutionary aims; shoves aside an open identification with certain bearded Germans and Russians. We wonder whether this might make us more worker-friendly. We feebly trade on an image of left unity, even when the forces for such unity, and the very unity itself, have long gone with the wind. And what do we do when others on the left point this out on the GL Discussion List? We unashamedly shut down the debate with terse diktats, signed off with the now Orwellian-sounding formality of “comradely “. Perhaps junking all that theoretical squabble and interminable political debate will prove our solid “record of action”.
We saw through and rode out those pressures back in 1994. By contrast, those same pressures are now embodied in the party we’re publicly building today, the Socialist Alliance. Remember, today’s SA fetishists acknowledged this before the current dispute. Peter Boyle in July 2003: “There is an actual pressure within the Socialist Alliance as it currently exists to step back from activism, to retreat to more economistic political interventions, organisational liquidationism…” (The Activist, Vol. 13, No. 6, p. 6).
But the future is not so bleak that we must have the party we ultimately want now, at all costs, even in a grotesquely stunted-down bonsai version of what the real thing will be like. The SA-or-nothing fetishists are fooled by the deceptive air of permanency that blankets our immediate conjuncture, by the seemingly unchanging nature of the immediate objective situation.
Revolutionary breakthrough
But change is the rule, not the exception. We live in a world driven by deep, deep class and other social antagonisms. Capitalism, even in its imperialist heartlands, just cannot contain all its myriad contradictions and the mass social, political unrest that will be inevitably thrown up. Crowning this will be the deepening, sharpening antagonism between the whole of global capitalist society and the ecological preconditions of our very existence.
This is a conviction borne of the scientific method of Marxism, of understanding the laws of development that govern a world of irreconcilable contradictions. We do still live in an epoch of wars and revolutions. Times are stormy. The Venezuelan revolution continues to advance, opening a new stage with the initiation of a united mass party of the revolution. The Venezuelans are taking advantage of the stalemating of US imperialism by the Iraqi resistance.
While class conflict remains sporadic, localised and diffuse in this country, we must concentrate on organising and influencing the radicalising elements, to bring together and cohere them into a cadre. Central to this is relating to the real revolutionary breakthroughs around the world. As Peter Boyle stated as recently as January 2003, “Recognising and relating correctly to real revolutionary movements was a powerful offset to our enforced isolation from the working class movement in this country”.
This opportunity is there for the taking in the Venezuelan revolution, which presents an exciting basis for promoting and solidarising with actually existing socialism, but one free of the grotesque birthmarks of the Cold War and the Stalinist camp. As such, it offers an enormous richness of real revolutionary experience to study, as well as boundless material with which to sculpt and hone our creativity as Marxist communicators and campaigners, to learn to become more dynamic exponents of socialism in this country, even as we battle alongside people of all levels of consciousness.
Party question: an objective imperative
The question of the party is a most pertinent, a most urgent question for any analysis of the Australian political situation and campaigns perspectives. We’ve reached a point where no proper consideration can be given to our campaign priorities, tactics and proposals, without first dealing with this gaping wound in our midst – the refusal of the SA-or-Bust camp to publicly rebuild the Democratic Socialist Party and relegate SA to a tactic, rather than a permanent strategy.
Resurfacing the DSP is the most critical question when it comes to working out how best to intervene in broader politics.
Summary
To deride the essential point raised in the counter-report as being inappropriate to campaigns and Australian politics is fudging the fundamental question: Does the objective situation justify an approach to the party question that is so sharply at odds with our history? Does the objective situation justify the building of a non-revolutionary front and the burial of the DSP, the continued refusal to resurface it? If it’s not a permanent tactic, why is there such an objection to resurfacing the DSP? To claim it’s just about a name-change is a parody. Resurfacing the DSP will entail a whole lot of political changes, to be detailed in Marce’s party-building counter-report.
The accusation of “abstention”, levelled at the LPF, rears its head again and again, despite the specific reiterations in the counter-report. I’ll just read from the report again:
Lest the LPF be accused of wanting to abstain from real struggle and merely hurl invectives against the reformists from the sidelines, what we are actually saying is this: Getting tactical agreement among the broadest range of forces for any particular mass action shouldn’t mean holding back on explaining the motives of tried-and-tested labour-fakers. It is precisely through such propaganda – in the course of actively building campaigns – that we win and convince the genuine class-struggle militants and radicalising people to our politics.
We can do both. We can engage, intervene, as well as have a critical approach of fully explaining our views and ideas. When was the last time we publicly, as the DSP, explained the class character and role of the ALP – that it is a bosses’ party, a liberal bourgeois party with a specific role for the Australian ruling class? There’s nothing like that in the SA statement on Kevin Rudd’s IR policy. It’s almost a how-dare-you-betray-us statement. And this, Dick Nichols’ post on the “Time’s Up, Howard” blog [http://timesuphoward.blogspot.com/]:
Every time we came out, the ALP went up in the polls, and it’s the underlying reason why Labor is still riding high. It’s also why a tired, bungling and semi-corrupt government like Morris Iemma’s could sell its smelly fish to NSW voters – the Coalition’s fish stank even more.
It’s why every ALP election victory since 2005 has been bigger than predicted, irrespective of all other issues.
No doubt you think that, once again, you’ll find the right combination of bribes and scare tactics to wedge and defeat Labor.
That’s possible only if Labor helps you – if it caves in to corporate pressure and dilutes the commitment to rip up Work Choices and ban Australian Workplace Agreements.
The more it retreats here, the closer Labor’s real position on industrial relations will be to yours and the less reason undecided voters will have to vote for it.
Which is precisely why you and your spin doctors have been so busy saying that Work Choices wasn’t an issue in the NSW elections.
Of course, we shouldn’t underestimate Labor’s capacity to mess up a winning position. No doubt some “brilliant” back-roomers are even now trying to persuade Rudd to soft pedal on industrial relations.
The best response to this nonsense is what the Socialist Alliance and militant unionists have been pushing ever since the Work Choices nightmare loomed on the horizon: ongoing national mobilisations and protests, and support for all workers who come under attack.
That’s what has put Labor ahead in the polls. It is what will keep it there and what will bring about your richly deserved demise.
Time’s up, Howard.
This is peddled as socialist propaganda now. It’s just about backroom deals and bad leadership, not the ALP’s basic class character.
This is a consequence of the fundamental issue at stake: the party question. The party question is an issue for the objective political situation and how we intervene into it. The central problem is, we are no longer publicly championing and defending the need for a revolutionary party. And that is what we mean about resurfacing the DSP. This is the substantive political problem of our intervention perspectives at the moment, the substantive problem when we no longer acknowledge the liquidationist pressures of SA. And that’s not the LPF raising the “liquidationist” charge – this goes back to reports before the dispute. As Peter Boyle said at the October 2003 NC, Socialist Alliance has “spread illusions in a softer, non-Leninist road, and created new pressures on DSP comrades” (The Activist, Vol. 13, No. 10, p. 21).
These pressures are still very real, but we don’t hear much warnings about them anymore, except from the LPF. Instead, some comrades are much too fond of throwing around the Marx quote about every step of real movement being more important than a dozen programs. This somehow justifies the pragmatic downgrading of revolutionary party-building.
But just remember what Lenin said about throwing around Marx’s words out of context.
To repeat these words in a period of theoretical disorder is like wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day. Moreover, these words of Marx are taken from his letter on the Gotha Program, in which he sharply condemns eclecticism in the formulation of principles…. This was Marx’s idea, and yet there are people among us who seek – in his name – to belittle the significance of theory!
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.
And the theoretical disorder that reigns among us today is shown by the sort of pressure-the-ALP gingering in the “Time’s Up, Johnny” blog posting.
This theoretical disorder also allows major issues to just quietly slip away, such as whatever happened to Workers First in the Victorian AMWU? And yet this was one of the militant union currents that we latched all our SA hopes onto. It hasn’t been assessed at all in this discussion or report today, despite the criticism I raised about the unexplained slide from the failed March 2006 work stoppage to the June 28 protests.
But, again, this theoretical disorder all comes back to the sort of party we publicly project and build – it affects our political clarity in understanding and orienting to broader politics. So the party question is the all-important question for the Australian political situation and how we intervene into it.l