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Newsletter October 2000 - S11

The left and S13+: Returning to normal?

by Martin Thomas

After the September 11 to 13 protests, don't "return to normal'," was the headline of the leaflet from the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), Australia's largest revolutionary group, on the World Economic Forum blockade in Melbourne.

A good thought. But the only way of not "returning to normal" which the leaflet proposed was for its readers to join the DSP.

A perspective-setting article by Allen Myers in the "Special S11 issue" of the DSP's paper Green Left Weekly had the same message. The S11 Alliances should dissolve, as ad hoc groups usually do when their immediate focus for action has passed. People who want to continue active should find an "appropriate... form of organisation", which means joining a "revolutionary political party".

A pretty similar message came from the S11 issue of Socialist Worker, the paper of the second-biggest revolutionary faction, the International Socialist Organisation (ISO). David Glanz posed the question, "where will the movement go after Melbourne?" He argued that "those committed to change from below [must] organise", but mentioned only "a revolutionary party" as the way to do that.

‘Disband S11’ to … ‘build the Party’?

The ISO, like the DSP, says that the S11 Alliances should now disband.

An authentic revolutionary workers' party - meaning a collection of the most energetic and thoughtful working-class activists, self-educated and self-organised over years so it has a solid and constantly redeveloped theoretical culture and programmatic direction, as well as the respect of a major part of the whole working class - would indeed be an excellent vehicle for taking the battle forward. Unless we build such a party, future revolutionary upsurges will be defeated through lack of preparation.

But joining the ISO or the DSP will not create that party overnight. What can it create? It can, as Glanz and Myers emphasise, make you more "organised", that's for sure. Then the question is, organised for what?

The disappointing fact is that, despite excellent work both groups had done in mobilising for S11-13, neither ISO nor DSP had any good answer to that question. Both insisted repeatedly on the need for more "action" by "the people" (DSP) or "ordinary people" (ISO), and on how much they wanted to "link the struggles together" (ISO) or "unite more and more people in action" (DSP).

But it hardly takes a rocket scientist to work out that if you want to do anything after 13 September other than say: "Right, I've done my bit, global capital can now exploit and trash the world all it wants, and I won't object", then you have to try action of some sort! The ISO and DSP just say: Yes, action's what you need - but you must be organised, and that means doing the "action" under our command! Or, in other words, don't return to your normal, return to our (ISO or DSP) normal.

What's wrong is not the ISO and DSP trying to recruit. Every revolutionary faction which wants to be a creative factor rather than just a secluded "think tank" or snobbish clique has a duty to recruit new people. What's wrong is the vacuousness of the political content - program, ideas, proposals - within the ISO's and DSP's organisational formulas.

Workers' Liberty has proposed that the S11 Alliances should continue and orient to "a drive to take on capital, not just in its assembly halls and ceremonial chambers, but in the clatter and roar of its production lines. [This] means taking our cue... primarily from the concerns of working-class people in their daily struggles. It means a strategic priority for helping and developing rank and file movements in the unions and workplaces"(WL11). The positive alternative to global capital is working-class self-liberation, which (as Marx put it) will also be the liberation of all human beings without distinction of race or sex. We should fight to force the big capitalist corporations to open their books - revealing details of their worldwide chains of production sites and subcontractors - and to level up the wages and conditions of workers throughout those chains. We should campaign for borders to be open to people as well as trade. We want to recruit new activists to our own faction, not just to make them more organised for action in general, but to help develop, transmit, and redevelop such ideas (and the whole complex of theory and program of which they are part).

Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly, however, generally pose the task as just one of making "people" in general more active and militant against capitalist institutions. SW has a particular line in abstract militancy, making a big deal of shutting down the WEF, WTO etc. as if breaking those institutions would by itself liberate humanity. In making this case, they frequently (twice in their S11 issue, for example) quote Susan George's analogy that the World Trade Organisation is like cancer. However, if you can cut a cancer out, then you get a healthy body! It is not true that cutting the WTO out of capitalism would create a healthy social order. (I very much doubt that Susan George wanted to imply that it would. But when her phrase is quoted out of context by the ISO, that is what it does imply).

The ‘people’ or the class

GLW tries to be more thoughtful. But it tilts even more than SW towards appealing to "the people" (without class differentiation) rather than the working-class. The DSP applauds the slogan "The people, united, will never be defeated". Articles like Peter Boyle's perspective-setting one in GLW421 speak of "people's power", "we, the people", and "progressive political alliances", without any mention of class. Allen Myers' GLW419 "way forward" article, already cited, identified the revolutionary force as "the people exploited, cheated, abused, poisoned and murdered by capitalism", "the majority", "broader layers of people", and so on. It referred to workers only as one example of a group which needs to organise (workers need unions, campaigners to protect forests need committees, S11 protesters needed an ad hoc coalition, revolutionaries need a party...)

Since we see the working class not only as the obverse of capital, but also as the fundamental creative force for social change, with a liberatory program implied in the solidarity and co-operation which is its essential rule of life, we question GLW's "people-ist" (or, in traditional terms, "populist") approach on three grounds. First, it fails to orient working-class socialists towards seeking political independence for the working-class, rather than the pursuit of "popular fronts" or "progressive alliances". Second, it fails to explain to socialists from middle-class backgrounds that they must break with that class and attune themselves, heart and soul, to the working-class. Third, its vision of socialism is not working-class self-emancipation but the general dispensing of democracy and welfare from representatives of "the people" down to "the people" themselves.

GLW's "Special S11 issue" made that rather clear when, arguing for protesters to aim for socialist revolution, it chose to explain that by a centre-page feature (flagged up by a huge headline on the outside pages) on the "humane prison system" in Cuba. Whatever valuable reforms may exist in Cuba and however much this small nation deserves solidarity against US bullying, it is an island where workers have no right to form their own unions, publish their own papers, or organise their own parties independent of the state.

The ISO would agree with us that Cuba is not socialist, and their S11 special newspaper does, in one inconspicuous article, mention class. "The spread of capitalism... has created a working class with the power and the interest to overthrow it... As... Rosa Luxemburg wrote... 'Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they can be broken'." Actually Luxemburg wrote: "there they must be broken. That only is socialism..." Even in its nod of acknowledgement to class politics, the ISO presents the working-class only as a big and well-placed battering-ram to be used against the fat cats, not as the historical force whose self-liberation defines socialism.

Mostly the ISO refers to the agency it looks to, and the prospective human basis of socialism, only as "ordinary people". This usage is even more noxious than the DSP's appeal to "the people" in general. At least the DSP concedes that extraordinary people (of whom there are rather a lot in the working class) have a role to play, whereas the ISO presents a vision of a grey mass of featureless plebs being shouted into action which "shuts down" capital by the ISO megaphones.

No, let's not "return to normal". Let's try to reassemble the S11 Alliances, or as big a part of them as we can, around a working-class orientation.

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