Update on the Australian left

Against the backdrop of Labor's cave-in to the right on offshore detention of refugees, the whole political establishment using the September 15 #muslimrage protest to whip up Islamaphobia to a level not seen since the Cronulla roots, and the defeat of equal marriage laws for LGBTIQ couples in the Tasmanian and federal, the Australian left has been making some steps forward that
I think it's worth looking at in a little depth.

The mainstream response to the September 15 Muslim rally in Sydney has been predictably depressing. Even supposedly progressive forces like the Greens have wholeheartedly joined the conservatives in condemning the 'bad Muslims' who protested against the film, Innocence of Muslims. Under duress of raids, arrests and threats to increase charges against protesters, Muslim community leaders have likewise joined in the condemnation, rather than highlighting the reasons Australian Muslim youth feel alienated - racism in our society and our participation in wars of occupation against Muslim peoples.

However, there has been a good raft of left responses to the incident and the resulting Islamaphobia. Both Green Left Weekly and Socialist Alternative have run pieces from eyewitnesses highlighting that it was the police, not the protesters, who initiated the violence. This had been substantiated by an SBS report; however, it didn't stop Queensland senator Brett Mason from attempting to pass a motion to condemn Green Left for reporting it. Green Left TV responded with an in-depth report on the issue, featuring researcher Mohammad Tabaa and activist and independant political candidate from a neighbouring electorate to mine, Rebecca Kaye.

A sign-on statement of progressive community leaders and campaigners has started to pick up steam today. However, I've noticed the popularity of the anti-demonstration liberal responses like Peter FitzSimmons's amongst the secular left in the Arab world. We have to understand the context of struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces to determine what real gains for democratic struggle and the working class will be won from the Arab Spring; the strategy of both the film-makers and imperialists and the political Islam movements winning elections in the last year is to encourage the revolutionaries to be sidelined by the cultural divide, and we must oppose that however we can wherever we are. For us in Australia, that means standing in solidarity with the Muslim community and doing our best to prevent another Cronulla riot from ever happening.

Looking at the left itself, a little bit of sussurus had been sweeping the internet since Jorge Joquera's announcement that he would be joining Socialist Alternative (btw, get a better search function for that website!). Although he is just one activist, the fact that her is a former leader of the DSP, and active in Cuban solidarity when Socialist Alternative subscribes to the theory of state capitalism, means it's been a significant signal.

In the aftermath, there's been some important steps towards the kind of constructive collaboration Dan Dimaggio talked about that I mentioned in my last post on this topic - the Revolutionary Socialist Party is discussing merging with Socialist Alternative, while the Socialist Alliance and Alternative have also announced the possibility of closer collaboration. These groups have slightly different backgrounds; the RSP split from the DSP, the largest group which initiated the Socialist Alliance, over the question of whether or not the DSP should dissolve into the Alliance after other organised left tendencies pulled out. This eventually happened in 2010 (some figures are sceptical of the reality of this, but my answer is myself and probably half of the other leaders of the Alliance were never in the DSP; I wrote more about this in my earlier posts). The RSP argued that an explicitly Marxist organisation was still necessary, rather than an organisation aimed at forming a broad anti-capitalist pole; this seems a little more in line with the goal of the Alternative project, which likewise prioritises the direct importance of winning revolutionaries to Marxist politics on the level of ideas.

The possibility of these groups coming together in some sort of project or around some points of unity (perhaps Socialist Alternative's Marxism 2013 conference) is at the moment in the air, and a lot of figures on the internet and in the broader campaigning left have been asking me about this in recent weeks, whether we are just being recruited by Socialist Alternative or if there's a deeper regroupment going on here. I can't say how genuine or deep any of these moves will run, but for now I'm somewhat optimistic. I think some of the ideas Derwin/Dimaggio outlined seem more likely to come to fruition for us here - joint events at conferences, joint speakers, cross-publications, etc all seem possible right now. Perhaps a broad "organisational" agreement for these groups is possible somewhere in the future, but there's still competing theories about What Is To Be Done being advanced that seem, to me, to preclude that possibility - For The Moment...

The experience of the recent NSW council elections has also been a step forward for the left. Housing Action, a joint ticket between the Communist Party of Australia, Socialist Alliance & independant left activists, achieved a decent showing, forcing incumbent mayor Clover Moore to respond to the issue of investment in and maintenance of public housing. Although I wasn't directly involved in the ticket's decision making, from all reports the process of sitting down and hashing out what policy all involved could agree upon was the easiest part of the project of all. And out in Auburn, the Battler coalition of progressive candidates has gotten Tony Oldfield of the CPA elected on the back of consistent community campaigning against a radioactive waste dump first brought in by Labor.

Lastly, I recently attended the EduFactory conference at the ANU in Canberra. One participant described it as the largest gathering of the anti capitalist student left she'd seen in around a decade - with all of the 100+ conference participants (who spoke at least) articulating that the neoliberal drive for cuts, rationalisations and restructures on campus must be opposed. Plans have been established to further link up the different campus struggles and potentially launch national campaigns around future attacks on our education.

We live in interesting times...

On Revolutionary Organisations Today

The following piece is my thoughts on the nature of revolutionary organisations in Australia today; they are mine alone. I am a member of the Socialist Alliance and of SA's youth organisation, Resistance; in the 2011 NSW state election I was a candidate on Socialist Alliance's upper house ticket. My criticisms of any groups or parties in Australia or abroad, including those I am part of, are in not in any way meant to belittle the noble efforts of those who are part of them. Normally I would have sent this article to someone whose opinion I respect before posting it, but this is my raw opinion on the subject, and I'd love to see debate and criticism of it in the comments below.

An activist from Socialist Alternative, with whom I was discussing my decision to leave that group after some months of membership in 2006 and my later decision to join Resistance in 2007, asked me something along the lines of "surely the question of how we organise can't be the reason why you left?" He is an activist for whom I have a lot of respect; although we'd read each others emails on e-lists, we first met at Australia's first national BDS conference, and he is a leading activist in Palestinian solidarity in his home city. We were both in Sydney for the ALP's national conference, at which there were two major protests to support equal marriage rights and against mistreatment of asylum seekers (my photos to follow soon). Yet despite the fact that we were marching side by side, presenting almost identical demands on these two issues, the thing that seemed the most important to him was whether we agreed on the theory of state capitalism and, thus, Cuba's revolution.

In late 2011 I travelled to the Middle East, largely to try and gain insight on (& show solidarity to) the revolutionary struggle being waged there in the last year, so I am someone who thinks a real understanding of the nature of imperialism is important. Yet to me, the far more important difference is Socialist Alternative's differentiation between propaganda groups and mass parties, and thus their attitude towards organising in Australia today.

The number one sign of a group that has grown too inward-looking is elevation of doctrine and theoretical correctness ahead of the kind of invaluable experience earned in struggle, which is the only way that an activist can truly put their theory & assessments to the test. Despite making obligatory statements against it, this assessment of "The nature & tasks of a small socialist group in Australia today", recently reposted by John Passant, displays exactly that dogmatic approach. This idea of marxism as a static and rigid formula that one can simply read and then apply to everything goes hand in hand with a perspective that one's own group is the only one with the correct theoretical line, and all others are practicing some perversion of marxism. To me, this attitude is ultimately counter-productive to real marxist thought.

If our primary goal is "arguing our ideas – selling our magazine, running information stalls, holding meetings, talking to individuals, organising study groups, selling books – not agitating for mass action or running for parliament", then having arguments over differences in marxist thought and ensuring that we all get on the same page theoretically is the only useful task during a period of little sustained struggle against capitalism. Thus, I can see why the comrade I was speaking to would place such significance on what I see to be a relatively small point of theoretical difference – important, but not hugely relevant to our understanding of the nature of modern Australian capital or the best strategy for revolutionary Australian socialists to work towards overthrowing it.

The fact that small-scale struggles often break out locally, or that there has been some exciting openings in campaigns relating to mass audiences in recent years, such the movement against coal seam gas mining or the one for equal marriage rights, thus only presents a new audience with whom to have such arguments; those who agree with you or can be won to your position, you recruit, and the rest you attempt to get behind your banner or condemn as "liberal". Bearing such a "sectarian" attitude is a complaint commonly thrown against any socialists attempting to work in such movements, including myself; most of the time it is pure red-baiting by those who either ideologically or personally see socialists within movements as a threat. Yet the organisational approach of SAlt argued in this document to me seems prone to such a counter-productive attitude, or, at the very least, unconcerned with the potential for activists to fall into such an approach.

I don't mean to undermine or belittle the hard work that a great many SAlt comrades do in supporting such campaigns, nor suggest that all of their members behave in this fashion (all socialists can become prone to falling into such traps of thought, after all); but to me the organisational approach of limiting a revolutionary organisation's work to propagandising and recruiting new members, and abstaining from seeking to win leadership of what struggles are being fought in the here and now, not only risks condemnation for "sectarianism", but will ultimately stifle the development of leaders and sabotage any potential to impact the political climate and move forward to a future in which we can realistically talk about an Australian revolution.

For example, the following list of tasks:

"We need to be able to confidently answer [the mileu's] concrete questions about the issues of the day and to refute the arguments of the right wing and the reformists. We participate in these movements to argue how they can win – for the need for mass action rather than relying on the ALP - and to explain how the drive to imperialist war and the attacks on workers’ living standards are all the product of a capitalist system in which a wealthy minority lives off the labour of the mass of workers. In other words, we intervene to argue ideas – to make concrete propaganda - to try to win people radicalised by these protests to a socialist standpoint. We also see intervening in these movements as vital training. It is a way to test our analysis and arguments about capitalism today. It is a way to hone the arguments of our existing members so that they can intervene more effectively and cohere a layer of people around us. It is a way to integrate new members recruited from these movements, as they have to go out and try to convince other people of our arguments about the road forward. It is a means to educate ourselves so that we can actually play a central leading role in the future, when we have accumulated more forces."

The list of tasks makes no mention of the real work of leadership, beyond providing ideological and practical direction; learning how to comprimise, build consensus behind your proposals (and find the ways to democratically move forward when consensus cannot be found), and inclusively build a campaign, network or movement. This is a vitally important question for training cadre; is is only through testing out ideas in struggle, whether practical ones about the most effective means to organise or theoretical ones about the correctness or strength of certain arguments, that we can actually see which ones work most effectively. It's not just about about seeing which ideas win arguments, but which ones win campaigns and struggles. Thus, the revolutionaries of Tunisia & Egypt did not come away from their respective episodes of workplace-based struggle in 2008 thinking that workers would not play the leading role in a struggle against the regime; instead, they sought out new ways to reach a mass audience and for the working class to provide leadership to the millions suffering from the capitalist order.

The fair and honest assessment of the weakness of the left in Australia & other similar areas of the western world today that this article gives is used to justify, most significantly, a sectarian approach to leadership of mass struggles. This is summed up in the sentence "Socialists have to learn to lead, i.e. how to convince others of ideas they initially don’t totally agree with." Even on the basic level of education & leadership within the party, such an approach, resting upon a notion of a leader as the one who is correct and should be obeyed, is a product of capitalist ideology and against any real spirit of revolution. To take such an attitude into working with others in campaigns, who may or may not be revolutionary socialists, will inevitably lead to alienation; perhaps a few who agree with you will be joined to the group, as the above quote assumes, but with such an attitude it's hard to see how healthy and productive working relationships within campaigns will be developed, and thus how those campaigns could ever win their demands.

This, ultimately, is the most important things that revolutionary socialists can bring to a struggle; an understanding of the reasons why sexism, homophobia, abuse of workers, etc exist today, and thus the clearest understanding of how we can fight back against the constant assault of capital, and perchance then to win these struggles. And ultimately, putting big wins on the board for little campaigns like these has a flow-on effect for the working class and the rest of the 99% as a whole, which becomes to realise that changing the way things work is possible and, when the next crisis of capitalism comes along, is far more ready to rise up against it. Thus the success of the mass movement against Mubarak has spurred on a whole variety of activists in Egypt, from the Coptic minority to feminist bloggers to workers. If building the party comes at the expense of building mass sentiment like that, then we're no closer to winning anything real at all.

After that, it was somewhat refreshing to read Dan DiMaggio's article Road Maps, Dead Ends, and the Search for Fresh Ground: How Can We Build the Socialist Movement in the 21st Century? on LINKS. For me, it does a far better job of outlining the real limitations and tasks for revolutionary socialist organisations in the West in this period than the artificially limited definition of a "propaganda group". For example:

"Even if it is the case that “micro-sects” are all that can be built now, then let them be less pretentious, less sectarian, more open to working with one another, and more aware of their own inherent weaknesses (not to demoralize them but rather to help better understand the role they might play). Let them critically evaluate all their methods, search out more effective forms, and really ask if they are preparing the way toward something better in the future."

Certainly to trick ourselves into thinking we are on the verge of winning revolutionary change here in Australia if only the organised left could get its act together is going to lead us to inevitable demoralisation. But to likewise condemn ourselves to banging our head against a wall because of the limitations of the objective conditions of society will do the same. Of course, there are many admirable people amongst the organised left who are willing to sacrifice their time, energy and health because they are ideologically and morally convinced to do so; but I don't like to count myself amongst their ranks. Thus, when a party has a line that greater unity & political collaboration is the goal, yet at every conference the same organisational and political tactics are proposed in order to reach that goal even though there have been limited successes (and I'm talking here about my own party, at least on certain aspects such as membership) – it's time for some changes. Experiences like the 2011 NSW state elections, in which the upper house ticket included a broad variety of leftists (some who quit the ALP in protest to join it), though, are important steps forward; but in the absence of a mass revolutionary party or layer, I don't think there is the capacity for them to form without a "micro-sect" party to initiate them.

DiMaggio's list of things to attempt on page 47-48 is an interesting example of creative ideas for organisation, and I think many of them are initiatives that could be pursued, either through direct communication between left organisations or through left unity forums such as Broad Left in Wollongong or Left Unity in Adelaide. But the question of "A common website, newspaper, and/or journal, with the aim of posting important news, reports on struggles, socialist and radical analysis, and serving as a forum for debate and organizing ideas" is one where there are limitations to what can be done in the absence of an organisation. Any paper hoping to pay the bills for production simply on donations or even sales will inevitably struggle; even corporate newpapers are experiening difficulty in this way. However, I think a project like Green Left Weekly, which is supported by a group (the Socialist Alliance distributes papers throughout the country, both through subscriptions as well as selling in the traditional "annoying" sense at rallies and events) but constantly aims towards left regroupment, encouraging contribution from a broad range of activists, can provide this need for a revolutionary media project; this is the kind of direction I'd like to see Green Left move in order to become a real rival to resources like Counterpunch and Znet, the two mentioned by DiMaggio, as well as Australian left media outlets like New Matilda.