Credit where credit is due

I went to a couple of sessions of the DSP-Socialist Alliance conference a couple of weeks ago, including a session in which Simon Butler made a sustained, eloquent argument on why socialists should not support an implicitly chauvinist push for what is sometimes called a population policy, and why socialists should in general defend the right of migration to Australia for the poor of the world.

The world is in deep strife

And the Labor left is at its biggest turning point ever

Bob Gould

Starting at the top with national issues

The current economic crisis is rapidly shaping up to be the greatest economic explosion in the history of the capitalist system. All serious commentators including most governments agree on that.

Support Pacific workers’ access to Australia

What is in fact a very old dispute has currently been simmering again in the labour movement, about migration in general, and in particular about unskilled migrant access to Australia. This always-present controversy has now sharpened around a new scheme requested by the governments of small Pacific states, and introduced by the Australian Labor Government for organised and controlled access of seasonal workers from the Pacific nations to Australia to fill specific labour shortages in unskilled jobs in agriculture.

Mick’s metaphysics

A critique of Mick Armstrong’s pamphlet on socialist organisation

Bob Gould

In this pamphlet, Mick attempts to raise the Socialist Alternative propaganda group orientation to the level of high Marxist theory. He presents this orientation as an organic development of Marxism and Leninism and as a kind of culmination of the Marxist and Leninist tradition which is presented as a “seamless web”, so to speak, starting with Marx and Engels, and culminating ideologically in Socialist Alternative, and its menu of special theories.

Eighty years of defying authority

Issy Wyner, 1916-2008

By Tony Stephens

WHEN a teacher at Fort Street High School recommended that students read the economist John Maynard Keynes, the schoolboy Isadore Wyner suggested Karl Marx. Young Issy was reprimanded. This did not stop him from engaging with the world for another eight decades.

The DSP leadership’s ugly venture into religious bigotry

Bob Gould

Anyone who is uneasy with my classification of the DSP political leadership as unprincipled political adventurers should sit back and review the events since the DSP organised the extended exercise in religious bigotry and backwardness known as the NoToPope Coalition, and attempted to pass it off as Marxism.

The new Direct Action and the Labor Party question

Bob Gould

It’s no secret that in the internal battle inside the DSP I have been, broadly speaking, more sympathetic to the minority that has now been expelled from the DSP and started publishing Direct Action. This sympathy was based on my estimate that, taken as a whole, they are a more serious group of people, particularly the younger ones, and more interested in Marxist theory, and to some extent the history of the labour movement.

Electricity privatisation: the elephant in the room

The winter of our discontent

Bob Gould

This winter is the coldest in NSW for a long time. The practical effect of this is that Saturday morning stalls and protests against electricity privatisation, aren’t affected when it’s sunny, but evening meetings preparing for such activities are affected rather dramatically.

A second win against electricity privatisation in NSW

Bob Gould

The withdrawal of the electricity privatisation legislation in NSW until the parliamentary sitting in September is a second victory for the anti-privatisation forces in a protracted war on the question.

The sad, contradictory life of Wilfred Burchett

Bob Gould

During my long political life there have been a number of decisive moments. Among them were the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Khruschchev’s secret speech on the crimes of Stalin, and the crushing of the Hungrarian revolution in 1956. These events shook me out of the political orbit of Stalinism.

A bleak wind back to the dismal past

Bob Gould interviewed by James Valentine on the seizure by police of the Bill Henson photographic display, ABC Radio, May 20, 2008

James Valentine: The raid on the Roslyn Oxley Gallery at Paddington to remove the Bill Henson photographs from the wall has been a true talking point. Some defend that position passionately and that’s what always happens at these moments when suddenly art, literature, the movies, television confronts a group in society that says that is not acceptable, that’s got to go. This is of, course not, the first time it has happened , so I thought this is a good chance to present a little bit of archive material, on the various other things that have been censored, banned and caused confusion in society, in Australia It’s a Sydney-Melbourne thing isn’t it? Sydney has the bookshops and galleries, and it’s where these things tend to happen.

Mick Armstrong’s prayer meeting about May 1968

Bob Gould

On Sunday evening Mick Armstrong came into my shop, as he does when he’s in Sydney, worked his way through my Marxist shelves picking up all kinds of things for his personal bookstall, which he conducts at Socialist Alternative events in Melbourne, and I gave him the usual significant discount as a pretty good customer. The arrangement suits him and it suits me, and we had the usual desultory exchange of political ideas.

Propaganda versus agitation

Bob Gould

One by product of the explosion in the DSP is very healthy. Apart from a bit of rearguard bluster from the DSP majority, almost everyone else who participates in the discussion adopts a rational tone, discussing the political problems of the far left in a more open and concrete way than has been the case in my memory.

The politics of the DSP purge

Bob Gould

Tom O’Lincoln is quite unfair to Kim Bullimore in their exchange on Leftwrites. He says Kim Bullimore should get over the split and get to the politics.

Australian DSP divides

Dysfunctional marriage is finally dissolved by the expulsion of the minority

Bob Gould

Tomorrow, May 13, the DSP majority will expel the whole of the minority, which calls itself the Leninist Party Faction. A protracted witch-trial in the DSP has culminated in a recommendation from the three-member investigating committee appointed by the national executive to expel the whole of the Leninist Party Faction, led by John Percy, Doug L, and a number of others in other cities.