Last year, commenter amused queried my allusion to certain people having been members of the Spartacist League for thirty years. I replied that whilst I could not prove that any such person existed, I had reason to believe that at least one person had come close to thirty years of Spartacism.
Now I can prove it.
If one goes to the website of the Australasian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internatinalist), which is what the Spartz now call themselves, one finds that Neil Florrimell and Phillipa Naughten remain true to the Spartacist cause. If one then goes to the La Trobe University (Bundoora) Library and reads through back copies of the student newspaper Rabelais, one finds that Neil was an active Spart as early as 1976, and that Phillipa was an active Spart as early as 1974 – 35 years ago.
La Trobe was once the jewel in the crown of Australasian Spartacism. In the space of nine months in 1978-79 Neil succeeded in being elected as one of La Trobe’s six delegates to the Annual Council of the Australian Union of Students, and as a member of the Students Representative Council in a by-election. In his former capacity Neil gave the fake leftists of the Broad Left Caucus both barrels over their objectively reactionary defence of the Australian cricket establishment against the historically progressive bourgeois Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. In his latter capacity Neil made history as the shortest serving SRC member in history when he read out a trenchantly worded letter of resignation in protest at the circumstances of his election. Given that the central commitment of Neil’s policy speech had been a call “For workers’ political revolution in Hanoi, Peking and Moscow!” he would have been disappointed had he stayed on.
The Spartacists’ decline and eventual disappearance at La Trobe was precipitated by a graffiti campaign centred on the slogan “Spartz Meanz Fartz”, and greatly accelerated by the Spartz’ unwillingness (to put it mildly) to see the joke on themselves, manifested in the Spartz turning up in the Agora with a megaphone to harangue bemused students about “this reactionary red-baiting campaign!” whenever anyone spoke the phrase in jest.
As an ex-member, I can attest that there are indeed some members of that standing.
I was there in 1979 (during the fall out from the Logan period and the ICC they had on him) and maintained contact for most of the time up until a couple of years back.
There would be members in SL/B and Sl/US who would be of even longer standing. head of the tendency is James Robertson, who was there when it first appeared as thr RT within the (US)SWP in the early 1960s.
SL/ANZ was a bit later.
Wow, Fran.
I almost joined the Sparts once, but I had better (social) offer.
I take it ICC was the Control COmmission or something similar. What did Logan do?
I always liked Pip and Neil …. Both were worthy people when I knew them, though any joke about Pip could not have missed her reluctant and rather wan half-smile, even at the appearance of some seemingly positive piece of news. Andrew G (which could have stood for “Greek” but didn’t) was always a laugh — I wonder what he’s doing these days? — and my great Texan friend, John?
memories …
I can honestly say that we/they took them/ourselves very seriously indeed, as all fundamentalists do. We studied the minutiae of revolutionary history with a passion I can’t imagine was matched in what we called the “OROs” (“ostensibly revolutionary organisations”). If nothing else, it took me — then a fairly naive lefty from being all over the place to knowing why I thought stuff and why I didn’t.
So although I’ve long parted company with their basic programmatic framework, rejecting the key defining ideas of Trotskyism (the idea of deformed and degenerated workers’ states) and Leninism (dialectical materialism [really that's Plekhanov but anyway], the idea of a vanguard party, and the idea that capitalism has everywhere come to an impasse and cannot further develop the productive forces) I do recall those days with some fondness.
They were honest to a fault and were the first people to treat me as a human being rather than a woman or a child. It’s no bad thing either to feel you’re on a mission, though it would of course be qualitatively better if the mission were a feasible one. It’s also no bad thing to regard intellectual life as important and something more than mere playacting, and that too I learned at the knew of those better equipped than I.
Even the derision we got from others as sectarians and splitters kind of worked for me. All through my schooldays in a lower middle class suburb of Sydney I had seen myself as different and unwilling to conform — so much so that I saw my in-your-face non-conformity as a badge of honour. Now I was in a group with people despised by almost everyone, and whom ASIO thought enough of to send in a spy! (“Janet Langridge” who claimed to have been sent in by ASIO but who had been won over to the cause)
Salad days …
Yes IIC — International Control Commission, chaired by Sammarakody …
I think the documents are now public — and stored at inter alia at ANU …
There was a whole litany of undesirable conduct surrounding being something like a sect leader, bullying and pressuring a comrade to have an abortion. Logan went to NZ and then went on to found first the ET (External Tendency) (yes the pun was fun) and then the BT — “Bolshevik Tendency” which focused on being an anti-Spart party.
I always enjoyed their newspaper. Worker’s Vanguard was it? They could write polemics and apologia better than anyone.
d
The US paper was WV … and yes, we all loved it …
Of all the leftwing papers, it was the one most likely to surprise … the Nina Hartley!! story
The Australian one was pretty much entirely derivative.
Their Class Struggle Defence Notes (PDC) was always a good read …
Welcome to the thread Darryl. You and I can form a rotten petit-bourgeois social-pacifist bloc.
I once took out a subscription to Australasian Spartacist in the naive hope that this would spare me from being monstered by their sellers every month. It backfired on me – once they knew I was a subscriber they were emboldened to monster me to buy Workers’ Vanguard. Still, it was kinda fun opening AS to find out what I and/or my group were being denounced for this month.
Imagine a Spartacist group at La Trobe University today aka the day time activity centre of most of Melbourne’s taxi drivers. They’d be looked upon like they were Martians.
The rotten reformist careerist opportunist Graham Proctor is afraid to show his face in the Agora to politically debate his reactionary red-baiting lumpenroletarian statement that Spartz Meanz Fartz! Bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon!
Paul Norton@9
Not only do you not avoid the sellers, but you run headlong into one of the only examples of competition the Spartacists approved of — competition at sub drive time. You were bound to get a knock at your door from a member and what was called a disciplined sympathiser. Competion to win the sub drive and between the Melbourne OC and Sydney was fierce.
To understand the behaviour of the organisation at the time you have to understand concepts like cadre organisation, regroupment perspective, fighting propaganda group and exemplary work.
The point of their works was not to win struggles for higher pay or some other goal. The point of the exercise was to win membership from other OROs, debilitate them as obstacles to revolutionary politics, train the cadre in the battel they believed was coming and to stay principled for the moemnet when the prlletariat came knocking — hopefully with some standing in a couple of bonafide proletarian organisations central to the class — at the time the AMWSU, the Seamans Union, PKIU, etc.
Putting aside the unreality of the view of their posibbility, withing the paradigm, it made sense. The alternatives included simply permanent entryism in the ALP (see Bob Gould, Militant) and swallowing all that went with that, or catastrophism of the Healy/SLL kind in which you pretend you’re a mass party of the class in embryo and that this latest ripple in the capitalist firmament is just about to carry you to the head of the world proletarian struggle. That way lies madness and burnout and much time reading utterly impenetrable theses by the lider maximo about abstruse philosophic points and crazed excursions into why Joseph Hansen was an FBI agent, and the embrace of all soerts of shonky and brutally repressive characters in the Middle East.
There were of course others — “family of the left” in which all left-thinking people make kissy faces at each other at the usual gatherings, go home feeling cleansed as if they had paid their dues and could go back to their lives.
From the standpoint of 2009, it’s easy to see that each of these views was seriously flawed, and why of course, the left never amounted to much of anything.
The Spartacists were probably closest of anyone to being right about something — not that this insight was of any practical use. They asserted that unless the political grip of the ALP and its associated bureacracy and their apologists in the trade unions was destroyed, nothing much would change. And accordingly they took their heaviest weapons and trained them accordingly. For better or worse though their heaviest weapons turned out to be rhetorical popguns which caused much humour and derision but no actual pain to the enemy.
Not a few people, including some of us came reluctantly to grasp this point. For many, that realisation became a kind of god that failed thing and so some simply dropped out of politics altogether, or worse, got buried in critical theory or postmodern critique where you don’t have to measure the success of anything. Some went “family of the left” of course. Nostalgia does have its consolations. And some clung to what they’d always done, because, well, what else are you going to do? With each passing year, admitting that your life’s work was a fool’s errand becomes just a little harder.
Leave aside the unreality of becoming a mass party of the class within the foreseeable future
Here’s a little joke for all you godless bolsheviks.
Brezhnev is going to visit Poland, so his staff decide on a gift to the Polish party leader, a painting titled Lenin In Poland. They get an artist who points out that Lenin never visited Poland. “Never mind that,just get on with it,” they tell him.
Finally the artist produces the picture. It shows a man and a woman in bed together. The apparatchiks are appalled. “What on earth is that?” they demand.
The artist explains. “The man is Trotsky. The woman is Lenin’s wife, Krupskya.”
“And where is Lenin?”
“Why, Lenin is in Poland.”
But Lenin did visit Poland in 1913-14, albeit the country didn’t exist at the time.
You want bolshie joke? We have bolshoi joke.(?)
Lenin died, and being a good Communist, and therefore an ardent atheist, he went straight to Hell.
Being Lenin, however, he immediately set about organising the lost souls, encouraging strikes in Hell’s Kitchen, go-slows at the furnaces of the Eternal Inferno, and led repeated uprisings aimed at toppling Lucifer from his blood-stained throne.
Eventually the Devil had had enough, and he got out his phone, dialing 777 for the Heavenly Host. Saint Peter answered the phone.
“Hello Lucifer. What can I do for you?”
“It’s this Lenin bloke,” the Devil replied “he’s driving me mad, with all his agitating and protesting and strikes and rebellions and speech-giving. It’s only a matter of time before he brings down the whole shop down here, and you know what that means for you lot. Liberated souls, no more eternal damnation – the whole business will be in a shambles. He’s even been talking about storming the gates of Heaven.”
“All right, all right,” said St Peter, “We’ll take him for a spell, and give you time to get it back together. But then you have to take him back. Ok?”
So Lenin ascended to Heaven, and Lucifer took a nice, well-earned, break, torturing unbaptised infants, Hindus, gays and and Carlton supporters.
After a few weeks, however, he became curious about how Lenin was handling in Heaven, so he got back on the Celestial blower. This time, however, St Peter wasn’t there and the phone rang out, so Lucifer called the direct line to the Almighty.
“Hello, is God there?”, the Lucifer enquired.
A Sonorous Voice Replied.
“Firstly, That’s Comrade God. And Secondly, I Don’t Exist.”
How productive!
The Sparts were nuts.
Private Eye magazine in London decades ago ran an amusing columnn called ‘Dave Spart’. Strangely, it included rants.