If so, you’ll be interested to hear that the Democratic Socialist Party has expelled a minority faction calling itself the “Leninist Party Faction”.
The LPF has its own website on which it has posted the relevant internal DSP/Resistance and LPF documents. On a cursory examination it would appear that the procedure by which the LPF has been purged shows the kind of disdain for “bourgeois prejudices” such as due process which one has long since come to expect from the Stupid Cult of Cuba. As one of the purgees notes:
Hi comrades,
Just re-read the charge list again and they don’t actually state in any of the individual charges against the LPF 5 (free them now, free them now!) or the LPF as a whole how, or in relation to what, we supposedly broke DSP discipline and violated the DSP constitution. That is, they don’t state that it is in relation to the AVSN. Instead it’s some generic charge that could relate to just about anything. Will we bother to point this out to them or not?
Comradely, Kim
PS: What idiots, they can’t even draw up a charge sheet frigging properly. Thank Marx, these idiots are not going to the vanguard of any frigging revolution, we would all be f*cked.
However what makes the DSP’s latest purge noteworthy is that those on the receiving end of its “revolutionary justice” include several long-standing and prominent leaders and former leaders of the DSP, including the party’s co-founder John Percy (brother of late DSP leader and co-founder Jim Percy), Allen Myers, Helen Jarvis, Lynda Hansen, Jorge Jorquera, Kim Bullimore, Ray Fulcher, Roberto Jorquera, Doug Lorimer and Max Lane. Also purged is an old friend of mine, Bob Lewis, who I got to know almost thirty years ago in Melbourne when I was a young anarchist and he was a member of the DSP in its then guise as the Socialist Workers Party.
If one has the talent and the patience to sift through the dense morass of codes and argot which typify Leninist left documents, one can discern that perhaps the main political point at issue in the purge is that the LPF has recognised frankly that the Socialist Alliance is a dead duck (as should be obvious from its risible State and Federal election results which are the lowest ever recorded by an Australian party hailing from the communist tradition) and has called on the DSP to think and act accordingly. However it does not appear that the LPF is any more realistic than its persecutors about what is to be done.
Perspectives on this issue are also provided by long-time leftie Jeff Richards, by Marcus Strom at Labour Tribune, by slackbastard, and of course by the inimitable Bob “I got Tanya Plibersek preselected” Gould.
I can only wonder what my old friend and comrade, the late great Denis Freney, would make of it all.
Update: Ed Lewis, commenting at OzLeft, says that I’ve got my splits mixed up and that the Marcus Strom link actually refers to a different split.
Enjoyed your post, Paul. Could make a parody show out of all that. It writes itself.
Do they have any relationship with the Maoist people in favour of the War in Iraq or the Socialist Workers? The Socialist Workers had a stall in Swanston Street (no surprises there) the other day about same-sex marriage. I walked by and got roped into signing the petition. However, I told the guy that I don’t support marriage at all. He didn’t have a clue how to respond and got all tongue-tied.
I am sure it’s very important to the people involved, but I think they’d find that if they walked away from it all the sun would look brighter and the opportunties to do other things would abound.
Very clever post title Paul.
Wow, just add two treacherous bloggers, an anti-Semite and a sniffed chair to this mess and you’d have the state Liberal parties!
If the LPF is one of the rump of truly communist parties left, can we refer to them as Butt Sects?
They’re the invisible butt sects, DR.
Rump?
someone say rump?
*awakens from doze in plush Club armchair, inhales elegant cigar smoke, recalls lovely long lunch, lovely long wines of finest quality, strides back to Office to blog against the putative Leader: “the evil communist Baillieu”
* pinches oneself, is this a dream? is this the Real World? am I caught up in a phantasy?
* draws pay
Very interesting. I’m a member of SA and I knew very little of this. I did know some of it, but not a lot.I am incidentally, one of those independent socialists, though I do have some friends in the DSP.
And as some one on the inside who is not deluded, I hate to tell you this, but for a small left wing party Socialist Alliance is doing okay, thank you.Enough for me to keep up my membership, anyway.
Goodbye Lenin - and don’t let the door hit yr rump on the way out.
No Virginia (sorry, Darlene), the DSP/LPF are neither the pro-war Maoists or the Socialist Worker crew. It’s so much more complicated that it could make your bourgeois liberal brain blow a chip, so I won’t even try to explain. But Paul’s long-time leftie Jeff Richards was a supporter of the Iraqi war last time I heard, if you’re interested in such curiosities. A few months ago Jeff announced he would let his Greens membership lapse and cross over to the Socialist Alliance. Who’s a silly boy, then?
Paul gets one thing wrong. The Jorquera brothers and a few supporters left the DSP voluntarily about 18 months ago and set up the Marxist Solidarity Network, which later became Direct Action and is now known as CLAS (I think, such a rapid succession of names makes even my practised lefty head spin).
Darlene wrote:
On the former point, no. The DSP and LPF are diametrically opposed to those Maoists on the war in Iraq, although both sides of that argument would claim to base their position on “true revolutionary Marxism”.
The “Socialist Workers” you refer to would be the International Socialist Organisation, who publish and sell the Socialist Worker newspaper and exist on campuses in the form of “Socialist Worker Student Groups”. The ISO, like the DSP/Resistance and the LPF, can trace their organisational lineage back to Leon Trotsky’s 4th International. The ISO abandoned the orthodox trotskyist line that the Soviet Union was a “deformed workers state” which was in some sense superior to capitalism in favour of the view that the Soviet Union, etc., were “state capitalist” societies and therefore completely reactionary. The DSP abandoned trotskyism altogether in the 1980s, redefined themselves as a “Marxist-Leninist” (i.e. Stalinist) party, and cultivated relations with the governments of Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and whichever left-nationalist regime was/is in vogue (currently Venezuela). Despite, or perhaps because of, their common ancestry, the ISO and DSP are frequently bickering with one another for the title of undisputed big fish in the small pond of the Australian far left.
Paul at 3.09pm … just curious: was that the Cambodia of Pol Pot/Ieng Sary/ Khieu Samphan/Tuol Sleng, or the Cambodia ruled by puppets of the Vietnamese?
Ambigulous, it’s the latter Cambodia. The DSP’s turn to “Marxism-Leninism” occurred at least 5 years after Pol Pot & Co. had been ousted.
Paul Norton,
Let me stress that none, absolutely none, of what you are saying applies to Socialist Alliance. So any inference it does is frankly bull-sh*t. Secondly, SA’s membership is not restricted to the capital cities as inferred in several of the links. I actually have membership lists and it has a reasonably good rural base. As I understand it SA % of votes in the NSW and Federal election increased from earlier elections - and I don’t think we’ve actually contended that many - so your assertion about the lowest electoral vote ever is somewhat of a misinterpretation of the figures.
I generally make a point of not commenting on Socialist Alliance matters on LP, (though I’ve never hid my membership)but the falsities and gross inaccuracies about us in this post have prompted me to break my silence.
I’m not even going to ask why you bothered.
I was intrigued to read about the contretemps with a right wing faction in the Greens in Victoria, though.
And were they fans of Sendero Luminoso in Peru, too? Or was that crowd a tad too Maoist? It’s the nuance and the very fine distinctions we onlookers savour.
How apt the underground segment in “The Life of Brian”….
Grouplets of the 4th International, disunite and fight! You have nothing to lose but your chain-smokers, and a furled (banner) to win!!
Paul, I just found an article that claims that the Clyde Cameron joined the Socialist Alliance (before he died, of course):
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/ccameron.html
The number of members of political parties has been declining in the last few decades, although perhaps this is more complicated with the “radicalism” of such groups perhaps making them still popular with young people (like a more radical Greens or something).
Hi Ed. I’m sure that it is more complicated, but isn’t that part of the problem? In large parties factions can control such differences of opinion. It doesn’t take much to make my mind blow a chip, but let me assure that it isn’t “bourgeois”. I am but a low paid worker from a working class background.
Thanks for that potted history, Paul. It’s interesting.
“Despite, or perhaps because of, their common ancestry, the ISO and DSP are frequently bickering with one another for the title of undisputed big fish in the small pond of the Australian far left.”
I suspect because of rather than despite.
@Paul Burns: “As I understand it SA % of votes in the NSW and Federal election increased from earlier elections”
Not at the Federal election. Nationally, the SA dropped to 0.08% in the Senate (9 525 votes), down from 0.11% in 2004. By coincidence, 0.08% was their vote in each of the five states they contested. The only state where their vote increased was WA and that’s because they didn’t field a ticket in 2004.
However, I think Paul is wrong about it being the lowest vote “ever recorded by an Australian party hailing from the communist tradition”. The Socialist Equality Party ran in NSW and Vic and got 0.05% and 0.08% respectively (trailing the SA by 132 primaries in Vic)
d
Paul, I just found an article that claims that the Clyde Cameron joined the Socialist Alliance (before he died, of course)
Sounds a bit like the old story about Voltaire converting back to Catholicism on his deathbed!
On SA and the last federal election, (slightly dated) results may be found here:
http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=960
SA ran a total of 17 candidates for Lower House seats and received a total of 9,973 votes or 0.1% (average approximately 587 votes). The total SA vote for the Senate (NSW + Vic + Qld + WA + SA) was 9,525.
No, Darlene, it does not. It reports a rumour and at every point it says of that rumour “if true”.
The Popular People’s Front he’s over there?
>
The Stupid Cult of Cuba - that’s gold man, pure gold.
>
Thing about the Trots is that you know they’re full of shit. Just ask any of ‘em - do you own a gun? Do you know how to use a gun? Know anyone in the army?
>
No? Do you actually know how Leninist revolutions work?
>
PS That Trots don’t own guns is a GOOD thing.
Roberto Jorquera
>
That’s a blast from the past. Used to be Education Officer. I know ’cause I had to do most of his job for him. He was only interested in the bits involving a megaphone.
Paul Burns -
Would you kindly explain what ‘doing okay’ entails? Enquiring minds wanna know.
Paul, its entirely possible there is a “contretemps with a right wing faction in the Greens in Victoria” that I don’t know about. However, if you’re referring to the article by Landeryou about preselections in Yarra then I can only say it was amazingly wrong even by the man’s usually outstanding standards for wrongness (which tend to be world’s best practice).
Paul Burns lives down the road from me in a University town,that sometimes gets very cold in Winter.Likes dropping his opinion here,and seems human enough to not worry about,the fact,most of us find Lenin etcetera a bit tedious ,even if Uncle or indeed,Grand dad Karl the Marx still seems to say something masculine to us who dont do weight training as work.I thought Kim Bullimore said a few things here and there which seemed OK. Maybe they all need a rest from stoking the revolutionary coals over to something that exercises their minds as much as the fact,it does for many,that say, Tim Blair gets read ! I dont always find Paul Norton that relevant to enlighten my waste stream of existence. Not that I would go so far as to say,it is unreadable,but, more,well, I have read it,now what happens! And if Paul said I dont know either,then,he is a bloody genius..and let me say this…as time…and the problems of human existence….manifest …the resistances built into our consciousness by experiences in life…paradigm shift……I am awaiting reading anyone today,and conclude… I have been moved. That still happens to me!
Well as someone with a former interest in such groups (cough) I feel I have to make a slight correction (i.e. the below really makes very little difference but I feel compelled anyhow).
The ISO amalgamated earlier this year with Solidarity (a part of the ISO that left in 2003 and soon became bigger than its parent by the process of watching its parent shrink) and the Brisbane-only Socialist Action Group (which split from Socialist Alternative in 2004). Socialist Worker, to my understanding, is now no more; the new fused group AND magazine are both called Solidarity. Hmm, guess that faction fight has been resolved retrospectively.
And it’s been a loooong time since the ISO was competing with the DSP for the far left crown. Socialist Alternative is the hungry contender (although they’ve reached that danger mark of 200 members, which is traditionally when disagreements become faction fights and the leadership decides to expel the ‘minority’ faction, whereupon everything collapses in short order). But they’re almost entirely on the campuses. Which is probably fortunate as it lessens the damage.
I was once told that at a DSP conference in either the 80’s or early 90’s everyone was chanting “Gorby! Gorby!”.
I regret that my post and comments have caused some distress to a good commenter and (if his posts are any guide) decent person like Paul Burns, and have probably had a similar effect on some of the many good individual activists who beling to groups like SA (both of them), ISO, DSP, LPF, CLASS, etc. Nonetheless I would still make the general point that parties of the Leninist far left exhibit an intriguing kind of “emergent property” by which the whole is invariably much less than the sum of its individual parts.
I wonder if all these groups would exist if Kerensky had been more competent.
Sorry, clumsy use of words GregM. The old writing in a hurry business.
Distress sounds like the wrong word. People are distressed when someone gets hurt, or something else really bad happens.
Nevertheless, Paul Burns is one of the true gentleman of this blog community, and if he’s unhappy about this comments thread, I, for one, apologise.
On the question of the relevance of election results, I have found some statistics on electoral returns for the Federal seat of Sydney from the 1960s through to 2001. You will see that in 1969 and 1972, candidates such as Nick Origlass (trotskyist) and Laurie Aarons (Communist Party of Australia) were polling over 5 per cent. By the 1980s, despite the odium of the association of the words “communist” and “socialist” with the USSR, its crimes in Poland, Afghanistan, etc., and its inept and corrupt leadership, CPA and SWP candidates could still attract percentages measurable in whole numbers. In 1998 and 2004, the DSP/SA vote was down to 0.7 and 0.8 per cent respectively, despite the Soviet monkey being off the far left’s back. Then there is the 2007 Senate result in NSW in which the combined SA and Socialist Equality Party vote (0.08+ 0.04 = 0.12 per cent) was less than that for Graeme Bird’s Liberal Democratic Party (0.13 per cent).
The conclusion to be drawn from this, and from a reading of the hundreds of tortured pages of documents on the DSP’s purge of the LPF, is that a number of basically well-meaning and talented people are squandering vast amounts of energy on a political praxis of utterly minimal relevance to the millions of working class people, women, queers, migrants, Aborigines, refugees, environmental and peace activists, etc., on whose behalf such parties endeavour to speak - and in the process doing themselves and each other a good deal of psychic damage, as the DSP/LPF purge/split documents attest.
It’s the marketing that’s killing these parties. They need bumper stickers:
Darlene, Paul N,
No need to apologise. This is a forum for democratic debate, and I am a democratic socialist, though not a member of DSP. (The people I have met in DSP or had a bit to do with, though, I greatly admire.)
Socialist Alliance is a blanket left organisation for all left wing socialists. (Though somewhat to my relief I’ve just learnt the Stalinist League of Australia have withdrawn from the Alliance and support the LLF; I didn’t know they were in it, so there.)) (I don’t really mind Lenin, theoretically, but historically speaking, I have some problems with his creating the Cheka etc.Don’t ask details for the etc. Its been a long time since I’ve read any history of the Soviet era and I have to admit I’m reasonably unfamiliar with anything except the broad outlines, WW2 aside, and have found detailed study of the period impenetrable.)
In terms of SA doing okay, membership is stable, the party is still functioning and will continue to function. I don’t doubt that in the near future both its membership and its vote will increase, and that within 5-7 years it will be a significate minor party contendeer for upper houses. SA made a considerable contribution to the APEC demo last year, to the anti war movement, to protests protecting civil liberties especially in tegard to the anti-terror laws, gay and lesbian rights, the union movement,Aboriginal rights, the environment movement and the feminist movement, albeit extra parliamentarily;.
And why on earth are people so paranoid about Venezuela? Chavez is not, repeat, not Communist. He’s a new socialist, and no threat to anyone except the rich who have exploited the South American poor since the 19c, including some American businesses.
There. I’ve said my piece about socialism and Socialist Alliance, and unless I have to spring to the defence of the party if it comes under attack, will now revert to my normal stance on LP.
I’ve been amused for quite a while how little ideas or stated goals have to do with these microparties. I am sure there are people who went in believing it but mostly people’s ideas get hammered into the party line. I had a friend who got sucked into the CEC a few years ago (he’s out now) and what he told me reminded me of the Socialist groups I crossed paths with occaionally at Uni. Similarly a lot of Fundamentalist Christian sects work in similar ways. Endless power struggles, a constant demand for purity of belief, endless time spent campaigning to bring new people to the flock etc. etc.
This gives the vast majority of the left ( democratic and libertarian small ’s’ socialists) a good snapshot of the left-fascist fringe. Fascist may sound extreme but Marxists began killing people in 1918 and never stopped since. ( Much like the Xtian sect that began killing 1700 years ago and never stopped since)
So I’m using a definition of fascist that is a person who kills for their beliefs.
Now any snapshot such as this should include the SPA imho. They are mainly clustered in the South and East and includes figures like Stephen Jolly, David Kerin and Anthony Main. The net can distort peoples prescence but I would have ranked them at least as high ( or low) as the Socialist Alternative.
The small numbers of any of these red-fascist groupsucles should not fool us as to the potential danger they still represent. The Neocons in the GOP - now ‘ moving left’ ( Bill Kristol) the Platformists in the anarchist movement and even individuals like Michael Costa show just how dangerous recombinant malarial Marxism is. Good political hygiene praxis by all enlightened democratic and libertarian socialists is necessary - washing yr hands after butt sects for example.
Peter Wood wrote:
“I was once told that at a DSP conference in either the 80’s or early 90’s everyone was chanting “Gorby! Gorby!”.”
In the late 1980s the DSP (in its incarnation as the SWP) was very keen on glasnost and perestroika as it believed that, if the Soviet Union could be successfully reformed into a true socialist democracy, this would lead to a huge boost in the popularity of socialism in Western countries. This view was not confined to the SWP; some members of the CPA who were opposed to attempts to replace it with a New Left Party did so on the grounds that a reformed Soviet Union would renovate the reputation of Western communist parties and obviate the need for a new party.
Such a position could only be sustained if those holding to it neglected to read the more frank and cutting-edge articles in the glasnost press, which made clear both how bad things were in the USSR, and therefore how huge and difficult would be the necessary reforms, indeed transformations, of the system to bring about a tolerable society. And we hardly need reminding of the historical fact that the actual course of events in the USSR and its satellites put the kybosh on hopes that a Moscow Spring would usher in a Summer of Love for the Western left (hopes cherished in wider circles than those of the communist and trotskyist parties).
The conclusion to be drawn from this,… is that a number of basically well-meaning and talented people are squandering vast amounts of energy on a political praxis of utterly minimal relevance to the millions of working class people, women, queers, migrants, Aborigines, refugees, environmental and peace activists, etc., on whose behalf such parties endeavour to speak - and in the process doing themselves and each other a good deal of psychic damage.
This is a question that has always puzzled me. On the one hand the socialist groups do manage to do a lot of damage to the reputation of the left in various ways, and chew through good people - either turning them into mindless automatons or burning them out horribly.
On the other hand, they do work very hard and provide the backbone of quite a few campaigns. One wonders whether many of their members aren’t attracted in part to the cult-like aspects, and might actually not be politically or socially active at all if they weren’t in these groups. I’d rather good activists were being involved in this way (misled as I think they are) than sitting at home watching TV.
It’s also true that a small minority of members (more in Socialist Alternative than in the DSP, Solidarity, Socialist Alliance etc) are naturally quite scary, and there is an arguement that these groups keep them out of the Greens and some other places where they might prove highly destructive.
To those with an intimate knowledge of Trot sects, whatever happened to the Socialist Labour League aka SLL? The SLL and SWP used to hate each other’s guts with a passion that had to be seen to be believed.
Just in case Paul Burns or anyone else doesn’t realise, the Stalinist League of Australia announcement on Slackbastard was a spoof. Perhaps Paul was just deadpanning, but there’s no such organisation.
Ed: um, kinda sorta. In fact, the SLA does exist, but only as a figment in the rather fertile imagination of a teenage high school student from Queensland.
Spiros: the SLL became the SEP, and operates the wsws.org website.
@ndy, the SLA claims to be affiliated to the Australian Workers Union in Queensland, which is entirely plausible for an organisation with such a name.
Ed Lewis @ 38,
Na. They sent me an e-mail. Honest.