Propagandism and the struggle against electricity privatisation

There’ve been a few comments on Leftwrites about the electricity privatisation struggle. Ablokeimet obviously has some serious understanding of the history of the Australian labour movement and some sense of the form of mass struggles, and I thank him for his pretty sensible observation.

I don’t want to be too hard on Tom O’Lincoln, but his response encapsulates the completely unscientific, and particularly the un-Leninist, notions and practice at the core of the permanent propaganda orientation of Socialist Alternative, to which Tom moved from the ISO a year or two ago.

Mick Armstrong, who I kind of like personally, has just written a lengthy and erudite document turning this propaganda orientation, which he has always had, into an overarching political theory, a view that Tom seems to share. This appears to be the theory on which Socialist Alternative operates.

In a way, this theory postulates students as a permanent vanguard of the class struggle. This differs from Lenin’s view of students, which accepted that upsurges of political activity among students were often precursors of big social upsurges to come. The Bolsheviks didn’t neglect work among students, but they made no concessions to the idea of students as some kind of revolutionary vanguard even if some leader of a socialist sect, such as Mick, christened them a leadership with some kind of Marxist holy water.

The Bolsheviks always strove to maintain some student work and to be a substantial political force among the masses at the same time, and particularly to win a base in the working class, both the vanguard elements of industrial militants and the more conservative sections.

The Bolsheviks also put a lot of effort into getting a toehold in the Zubatov-sponsored Tsarist trade unions. They didn’t set any sphere of work against any other, but Lenin developed the view over time that a permanent student vanguard was nonsense, even if the students were christened a Marxist leadership. This kind of argument was at the heart of his very sharp conflict with the Committeemen at the time of the 1905 revolution.

This permanent student perspective is at the heart of Socialist Alternative’s political practice. When you approach SA’s political practice and the theorisation of it, you can see the theoretical and practical manifestation of a seriously flawed approach.

Tom responds to the assertion of Ablokeimet that the upsurge against electricity privatisation has aspects of a mass movement, saying there’ve been no strikes and demonstrations, therefore it can’t be a mass movement. That’s a foolish thing to say, but it’s entirely consistent with a permanent student orientation. (In fact, there have been mass meetings and demonstrations, and the biggest one was a month ago at the opening of
parliament, by about 7000 workers, several thousand of whom went on strike for the day.)

In the current conditions in Australia, industrial and social upsurges rarely start with strikes, etc. They’re usually pretty defensive. To say it’s not a mass movement because it didn’t start with strikes is to impose on the Australian movement an imaginary schema based on a casual and incoherent reading of events in the Russian Revolution and 1968 in France, which are often waved around as models by people who don’t pay much attention to detail.

I’m familiar with the practice of Socialist Alternative in NSW, in the sense that I see them concentrating most of their activities among the masses on their Tuesday evening propaganda meetings in a hall in King Street, Newtown, usually on rather self-reinforcing abstract topics. People I know encounter them on university campuses behaving in much the same way.

They have some success with this approach among students and a few youth who are outside the workers’ movement. Their problem, however, is that Socialist Alternative is almost totally a revolving door, except for a few old hands who are incurable propagandists. You rarely see the same faces six months later.

On the last two election days I’ve been fascinated by Socialist Alternative’s notion of activity. The Newtown polling booth is a big one for two adjoining electorates and a hive of activity on election day. Socialist Alternative on both occasions have turned up at about 2pm for their routine propaganda meeting directed at the theatre-goers at the Dendy cinema across the road, deliberately ignoring the election activity in a quite imperious way.

The Socialist Alternative youth are usually shepherded by their core of older propagandist members to keep away from the voters, and particularly to keep away from people in other socialist groups, who might contaminate them.

Socialist Alternative’s other activity is a bit of closed-group red flag waving on May Day. This reached a ridiculous point at last Sunday’s May Day in Sydney. Socialist Alternative turned out its 50 or so members and supporters with red flags and slogans, sold magazines in a desultory way to the May Day crowd, and deliberately ignored the delegates pouring in and out of the NSW Labor conference.

Because of the change of venue for May Day from the Domain to the Darling Harbour Convention Centre, to turn it into a protest against privatisation at the Labor conference, the march was very short. Socialist Alternative’s members with their red flags and rather ultraleft slogans were rigidly shepherded into the usual tight group, but the result was ridiculous. All that shepherding and propaganda activity only resulted in them being able to walk for about 1km around Darling Harbour, and at no stage did they have any impact on events in the Labor conference, even physical external contact, from which they abstained.

At the 20 or so anti-privatisation meetings I’ve attended around Sydney I’ve only seen Socialist Alternative once, at Alexandria town hall. In an intervention at the meeting, a young woman from Socialist Alternative, who I had never seen before, belted out the story that the campaign was of limited importance so far because the unions hadn’t called more mass strikes and big demonstrations on the issue, and she said the masses would respond if the call was given, and the failure to give the call was a conspiracy by the trade union bureaucracy.

I replied to this view in discussion, but the most effective response was from Doug Cameron, longtime left leader of the metalworkers union, who made the sound point that the young Socialist Alternative member lived in a different universe from him. He couldn’t see the big, spontaneous mass movement that just had to be unleashed, and he made the general point that in current conditions serious responses had to be organised and led, and quite frequently even if organised and led only modest results could be achieved industrially.

Cameron is clearly correct about the defensive situation facing the labour movement in Australia, although as we all know trade union leaders often try to contain movements as they unfold, which they shouldn’t do.

In reality, Tom O’Lincoln, the young woman at the meeting, and Mick Armstrong, are capitulating to spontaneity. That might in some circumstances be quite useful, but in current conditions they’re doing something that’s quite eccentric by adapting to an imaginary spontaneity that they’ve entirely imagined, which is pretty weird for people who claim to be students of Lenin, since Lenin spent a large part of his political life trying to train the activists of the Bolshevik Party against developing such fantasies.

The problem with all this in current Australian conditions is that you create a group, you give it a sort of in-group very tight esprit de corps, you fence the members off from real interaction with the political world of the working class, you give them an entirely literary education in selected Marxist texts, and worst of all you discourage them from listening to anyone else by christening them the knowledgeable revolutionary vanguard to which the masses will inevitably turn if you preach at them enough.

The discouragement of listening and serious investigation is the greatest travesty of Lenin’s method. Lenin was the greatest listener and investigator in political history. He had the firmest, and often very individual, Marxist outlook and his political practice constantly involved on the basis of further investigation.

When you construct a closed system and call it Leninism, you’re insulting Lenin’s memory in the worst possible way.

What’s worse, you create an outfit in which you christen semi-educated youth and students as some sort of automatic revolutionary vanguard to which the masses will turn. You never turn them towards the mass movement to listen and learn and to try to offer some leadership in concrete struggles outside the student movement.

You create a bunch of know-alls with a sort of cult reverence for a few leaders such as Mick. They become know-alls whose actual knowledge is severely limited by their training and experience.

When you do get the members to make occasional forays into some struggle or other, all they can think to say is some platitude about how it would be better if we had strikes, etc, and they never have any concrete ideas to offer on how to develop the next stage of the movement, except that set of platitudes, which are sometimes right (the stopped clock is right twice a day) but are usually wrong.

I don’t know what to say about Socialist Alternative’s grab bag of theories and practices. As I’ve said, I kind of like Mick Armstrong personally and he deserves respect for more than 20 years of socialist political activity, but his propaganda group obsession is a hopeless obstacle to the development of a serious Marxist or Leninist group.

Tags: socialism, electricity privatisation