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Nick Fredman's speech and the Socialist Alliance leaflet for June 28By Bob GouldNick Fredman's response to my comment on his speech prepared for the June 28 union protest in Lismore is civilised and careful, and suggests we may be beginning to establish a more rational basis for discussion, which is altogether a good thing. Nick refers us to some comments by Tim Gooden on the DSP website, and he insists that essentially his own speech is no different to the thrust of the DSP leadership's general line. In passing he says that glossy leaflets aren't costly in long runs. In my view he's just wrong about that. To assist in clarifying the point I'm making we reproduce here the three leaflets with their different approaches, so the reader can judge whether I've drawn too long a bow in contrasting Nick's speech with the Socialist Alliance national leaflet. Nick's speech makes a real effort to strike a common chord with the Labor and Greens supporters at the rally. That can't be said about the Socialist Alliance leaflet prepared by the DSP leadership. That leaflet, which the reader can study below, has a definite function. Leaflets are intended to draw the attention of the reader to the main political lessons in a given struggle. The whole emphasis in the DSP leaflet, and to a lesser extent the CPA leaflet, isn't what's needed in the campaign, but the proposition that the workers should reject their existing leaderships and join the Socialist Alliance or the CPA. These are glossy recruiting leaflets for the two organisations, much more than agitational leaflets about the struggle. To justify the proposition that the existing leadership should be rejected and the Socialist Alliance or the CPA supported, both leaflets are mainly concerned with attacking the existing leadership of the labour movement. That agitational approach is hopeless, blinkered and self-defeating, and will get no hearing from the workers who are currently rallying behind the labour movement leaders who supported and organised the rallies. Tim Gooden is even quoted in the DSP leaflet as saying that Liberal spokesman Kevin Andrews is correct on a particular interpretation of historical events. That's a throwaway remark that's guaranteed to make it very difficult to get a hearing from the tens of thousands of workers who were protesting in opposition to Andrews. These two leaflets from the DSP and the CPA are simply exercises in what the old Stalinists used to call, “showing the face of the party”. For most of the history of the Stalinist CPA, leaflets at most workers' rallies were not so crude as these in their attacks on existing leaderships. It's not so much the content but the emphasis that is such dead-end sectarianism, in the DSP/Socialist Alliance leaflet in particular. The glossy paper the leaflets are printed on tend to accentuate the impression that these groups are an alien force of political Martians parachuting in from outside the labour movement. There's not all that much difference between the Socialist Alliance leaflet and the approach of the World Socialist Web Site, which quotes an anonymous worker who is alleged to have said that all the union officials are sellout merchants, or words to that effect and that the whole Blacktown rally was an exercise in misleadership, and existing unions are no good anyway. Nick may continue to insist that his approach and his speech are consistent with the DSP leadership's mass leaflet, but that's clearly not the case if you read his speech and the mass leaflet side by side. Nick claims that the contrast I see is accidental, but I'm inclined to the view that he's being politically diplomatic when he says that. The contrast between the two glossy leaflets and the much more modest but politically entirely sensible Greens leaflet is devastating. The Greens, who are engaged in quite a determined struggle to get votes in competition with everyone, including Labor, avoid in their leaflet any attacks on the existing leadership of the labour movement, including the Labor Party. They rely in quite a realistic way on the fact that a leaflet about the nature of the struggle, and their small Greens logo, will get them more electoral results among the radical minority than any rabid denunciation of the Labor and trade union leaderships. The Greens are seriously engaged in electoral politics and they have learned through experience when to have a go at Labor and when to subordinate differences to the general struggle, which they are clearly doing in the battle against Howard's industrial laws. Paradoxically, recent polls show the Greens gaining electorally while the self-important Marxist sects, glossy leaflets and all, are still nowhere electorally. Readers of the Green Left site and Ozleft should carefully study the three leaflets and Nick Fredman's speech and make their own judgements on which approach is most likely to advance the struggle of the left in the labour movement. |
