Antigone
Once upon a time there was a King. Let us call him Oscar.
Oscar was a big strong man with a powerful personality and physical presence. He naturally dominated any group he was in. This wasn’t entirely due to factors such as his size, booming voice, verbal facility and thunderous laugh. He’d studied and then deliberately applied techniques he gleaned from popular psychologist’s books on body language.
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.
Greg Adler
“Henry II was a great Lawgiver,and it was he who laid down the great Legal Principle that everything is either legal or (preferably) illegal.” 1066 And All That
It’s appropriate to start with a quote from a farce as I take a brief forensic look at the process by which the DSP majority carried out its purge against the minority, although to call the process farcical would be to grant it great deal more dignity and authority than it deserves.
Ed Lewis
The struggle against electricity privatisation in NSW has disappeared from the headlines as the two sides, the pro-privatisation Labor government and the anti-privatisation Labor-affiliated unions and Labor Party branch members, settle into trench warfare.
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.
Ed Lewis
The public discussion over electricity privatisation in NSW is increasingly becoming a traditional union bash in the media. Today, Michael Egan, another former Labor Party official and politician, steps forward to read a lecture to the party’s ranks about a properly respectful attitude towards politicians.
Ed Lewis
Another banker weighs in on the Iemma-Costa side of the NSW electricity privatisation battle today, although it’s obvious Babcock and Brown’s Stephen Loosley is a bit better informed about the present state of the Labor Party than either Paul Keating or Bob Carr.
Bob Gould
I’ve just come back from the semi-regular Wednesday evening meeting of the Power for the People Labor Party rank and file committee, set up to oppose the government’s electricity privatisation push. About 40 Labor Party members were present and 25 or so others, including people from the DSP majority, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative, some Greens, and others.
Ed Lewis
After last weekend’s revolt of the NSW Labor Party ranks on electricity privatisation, the media are suddenly full of praise for Morris Iemma, previously execrated by the very same media as an incompetent leader of a bungling and corruption ridden government. Iemma is urged play the strongman in opposing the Labor ranks and offered the carrot that this might his improve his dismal opinion poll figures, never mind the fact that he’s going against the opinions of something like 80 per cent of the state.
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.
Bob Gould
In her important and warm-hearted novel, Ride on Stranger, Kylie Tennant describes labour movement battles in Sydney in the 1930s:
The strange turbulence of the city, its careless ferocity, was perhaps due to the large strain of Scots and Irish in the population, but it seemed that if anyone wanted to start a fight, there were always plenty of strangers ready and willing to join in. If the thing had a political flavour, the unions would take up the case, the Labour Leagues [the old name for Labor Party branches] would take it up. Part of the duty of the UCDL was to be out addressing meetings of Labour supporters night after night in little drafty and dusty halls all over the suburbs, putting the case for this or that protest. It was as though Sydney was encompassed with a network of separate spider webs, the spiders might be suspicious and ready to eat each other; they might be connected by a single thread, yet if you touched a strand of that network, 100 spiders leapt and danced indignantly in their webs … The Sydney of the UCDL was a network of lawyer’s offices, of bare wooden meeting halls, of committee meetings, annual conventions.
Bob Gould
In a spectacular, bulging eyed, shrill-voiced, fist-shaking display of contempt for the Labor Party at the NSW party conference on Saturday, government Treasurer Mick Costa lashed out in a vituperative way at his old associates in the trade union movement and virtually the whole of the organised labour movement, who went on to vote him down on electricity privatisation by 702 votes to 107, about seven to one.
Bob Gould
11pm, Saturday evening.
I’ve just returned, very tired, from the traditional left dinner at the Labor conference. I arrived at it late because the privatisation debate went on into the early evening. I’ve been on the go since 7am, and myself and a couple of comrades have given out 1800 copies of my leaflet.
Bob Gould
A bit of a discussion is taking place on Leftwrites about the the relationship of small socialist groups to the Greens. Apart from the IS-Solidarity, who these days are pretty sane, the rest of the far left seem to be pissing in the wind.
Ed Lewis
Back in 2001 Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy wrote an Ecosocialist Manifesto advancing a left approach to the deepening environmental crisis. Now some leftist environmentalists around the world are involved in drafting a second, updated version of the manifesto.
