Tagged with International Committee of the Fourth International

#TrotGuide 2016

See also : Trot Guide September 2018 Update.

trottrottrot

Gosh and bother and tish and fiffle: it’s been just over four years since I last formally updated Trot Guide (April 10, 2012). At that stage I counted a mere fifteen political organisations on the far left — mostly Trotskyist in orientation. The Bad News is that it appears that at least two of these organisations are now extinct; the Good News is that at least two more have emerged — and that’s just in the last few months!

1. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) is still kicking. Its March 2016 newsletter [PDF] contains an account of ‘Fighting fascism in Australia’ by Riki Lane, which concludes ‘All the approaches taken – counter demonstrations; getting unions to take a better stand; broad anti-racist organising – need to be pursued and coordinated. A useful approach could be to build a broader coalition of all the existing groups on a national basis. The key however, is to get the organised labour movement active in fighting this threat.’ Ho hum. The group appears to be strongest in Brisbane, with supporters in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.

2. The Communist League (CL) is also still kicking, though one suspects it would struggle to field a football team. 5-a-side, maybe? For reasons which escape me, the CL was invited to attend the anarchist bookfair in Melbourne in 2012, but I don’t think they’ve been back. In any case, you can subscribe to The Militant and buy their titles from their office in Sydney. PS. The indefatigable Ron Poulsen scored 148 votes in his tilt at a seat in the Senate at the 2013 federal election.

3. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) remains steadfast in its commitment to Communism, which in the last few years has also managed to find expression at the ballot box. Sadly, The Communists were de-registered by the AEC in May 2012 ‘because the party failed to prove it still had 500 members eligible for enrolment’. That said, the Communists are still keen to contest, so ‘If you’re on the electoral roll and would be prepared to help out, please contact us at [email protected] or ring Bob Briton on 0418 894 366’. What else can be said? Well, they still heart Stalin, and you can read a recent (October 2015) apologia for his rule (by Rob Gowland) in The Worker’s Weekly — Anti-Soviet propaganda and Stalin (Part 1) and Cold War propaganda offensive (Part 2). Strongest in NSW, the CPA has a presence in Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin, Melbourne and Perth.

PS. A Comrade wishes to make a correction re the ‘Communist Alliance’, ‘The Communists’ and the CPA. Thus according to CPA General Secretary Hannah Middleton (June 2012): ‘The Communists (originally called the Communist Alliance) was an electoral alliance of which the CPA was one part [emphasis mine], together with migrant [Greek, Latin American, Lebanese, Sri Lankan] Communist parties and progressive individuals from around Australia. The Communist Party of Australia supported the Communist Alliance (CA) because it united a range of left political forces to fight for real change. The Communist Alliance was registered as a party on March 16, 2009. A legal challenge from the Community Alliance [emphasis mine], a conservative group in Canberra, forced the CA to change its name to the Communists. This group did not manage to meet the requirement that it update its membership list in time and was recently deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission.’

4. The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA-ML) has had some troubles adapting to the twenty-first century. In Bad news for spotters, the organisation suspended publication of its newspaper, Vanguard, in 2014, the last print edition appearing in December 2014 [PDF]. First published in 1963, inter alia, ‘The decision to go fully online has been made in recognition of the fact that most young people use the internet as their primary source of news and communication’. Duncan B. writes: ‘I still have a copy of the very first Vanguard published over fifty-one years ago in September 1963. It is interesting to read the editorial of the first Vanguard. Under the heading “Why Vanguard is Published”, the editorial says, “The publication of Vanguard is an historic event. It is now the only paper which upholds the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism. The paper has a big and noble job to do. Its main task will be to give a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the major events of our time.”’ See also : The Explosion Point of Ideology in China (1967) / China: reading guide (libcom). The CPA (M-L) may be contacted through the Vanguard at PO Box 196, Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia 3065 or via email ([email protected]).

5. Feminism + Trotskyism = Freedom Socialist Party (FSP). The FSP is based in Melbourne and maintains a shopfront called Solidarity Salon on Sydney Road, Brunswick. Steady as she goes …

6. NEW! ML Group (MLG). The MLG (Marxist-Leninist Group) announced its existence online in a post on the MLG blog titled ULTRA-NATIONALISM, RACISM AND BIGOTRY ARE NO SOLUTION. WORKERS CAN DEFEAT FASCISM! ALL OUT ON APRIL 4! Alright! You can read the MLG’s PROSPECTUS! and its CONSTITUTION! and much, much more on its blog.

7. Formed in November 1996, the Progressive Labour Party (PLP) doesn’t appear to have made much progress since 2012. They still have a website, however, and will no doubt be active at the 2016 federal election. The party seems most active in Newcastle, NSW. In 2013, it endorsed Susanna Scurry, who ran as an independent for the federal seat of Newcastle and scored 1,026 votes (1.2%) for her troubles.

8. Resistance, 2012: ‘Nominally independent yoof wing of SA’. 2016: Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance. See also : Successful #RadicalIdeas2015 conference.

9. The Revolutionary Socialist Party is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker (etc., etc., etc.). Formed as a split from the DSP (now SA) in 2008, ‘At its final congress on 28 March 2013, the RSP voted unanimously to merge with Socialist Alternative’. See also : RSP and SAlt, Old-Style Opportunism: “Death of Communism” Lash-up, Australasian Spartacist, No. 219, Autumn 2013.

10. The Socialist Alliance (SA) was founded in 2001, has had many ups and downs, and is the organisation into which the Democratic Socialist Party finally dissolved itself in 2010 (being essentially the only group remaining within the Alliance). The intervening four years appear not to have witnessed any growth in SA, the organisation seemingly having been eclipsed by SAlt, but its support is arguably more geographically spread than SAlt’s, having contacts in every capital city and many regional centres. Currently, SA boasts two local councillors (Sue Bolton in Moreland and Sam Wainwright in Fremantle), produces the Green Left Weekly newspaper and is having a conference in Sydney in May titled Socialism For The 21st Century. SA will also be fielding candidates at the 2016 federal election. PS. Two formal tendencies have emerged within SA in the last year or so: ‘The Witches’ (?!) of Adelaide (May 2015) and ‘The 21st Century Socialism Tendency’ (April 2016).

11. Socialist Alternative (SAlt) is almost certainly the largest organisation in this edition of Trot Guide, just as it was in 2012. SAlt benefited from the absorption of the RSP in 2012/2013, while it’s yet to produce a splinter. Occasionally compared to a political kvlt by some of its harsher critics, I semi-seriously examined the claim in June 2013 and concluded that the answer was ‘no’. A highly critical account of the organisation is provided by Liam Donohoe in ‘My Salty Summer’ (Honi Soit, March 15, 2016). PS. Apologies to the SAlt member who waxed lyrical to me about the party and its many activities some months or years ago when I last made noises about updating the Guide.

12. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) AKA The International Committee of the Fourth International modestly describes itself as the ‘leadership of the world socialist movement’ and frequently disparages its rivals (mostly SA and SAlt) as ‘pseudo-left’. The yoof wing of the SEP — International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) — has been engaged in a ding-dong battle with various University authorities over the last few years, including at Melbourne, where a bunch of kids on the Clubs and Societies Committee have failed to recognise the world-historical mission of the IYSSE/SEP/ICFI and refused to allow its supporters there to formally register as a Club. To add insult to injury, the sneaky little yuppies have even had the temerity to suggest that the junior members of the local branch of the leadership of the world socialist movement join the SAlt Club instead! The SEP frequently contests elections and will do so again at the 2016 federal election.

13. The Socialist Party (SP) was, until very recently, steady-as-she-goes. In February 2016, however, 14 members of the party — including Yarra councillor Steve Jolly — decamped, publishing an open letter alleging that the SP was guilty of engaging in a ‘cover-up of allegations of violence against women’ and stating that they ‘will not remain complicit in the silencing of victims of abuse’. The SP, for its part, issued a rebuttal, which you can read here. The folks who resigned from the SP are still flying the red flag as part of something called ‘The Socialist’; the SP remains mostly a Melbourne thing.

14. Solidarity remains the Official representative of the International Socialist Tendency Down Under. Blogger John Passant is a member, while Jim Casey, the Greens candidate for the seat of Grayndler in NSW, was attacked earlier this year for his former membership of the ‘International Socialists’, the group out of which, by various permutations and combinations, Solidarity formed and which stands in the IS tradition. Solidarity may be found in Brisbane, Canberra and Perth but mostly Melbourne and Sydney. See also : Marching Down Marx Street by Tom O’Lincoln on the history of the Cliffite tendency in Australia.

15. The Spartacist League of Australia AKA International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is ace and grouse and my personal favourite Trot group. It has members in Melbourne and Sydney and calls the SEP ‘Political Bandits’ and ‘Scab Socialists’, SAlt ‘Cheerleaders for Capitalist Counterrevolution’ and so on and so forth.

16. NEW! Formed as a split from the SP, The Socialist is The Title of The Newest socialist kid on the bloc. The Socialist has a Marxism study group, a socialist-feminist study group and an uncertain future.

17. Trotskyist Platform (TP) split from The Spartacists over a decade ago. TP hates fascism and racism almost as much as it hearts North Korea — which is A Lot. You can read about The Planks on Which Trotskyist Platform Can Stand Solid And Work Hard to Help Build The Communist Movement here and also An Eyewitness Account of North Korea and Its People: Bravely Building a Friendly, Socialistic Society While in the Cross Hairs of Imperialism here. PS. TP write ‘Though we in Trotskyist Platform have sharply differing political views to the anarchist who runs the Slackbastard blog and who has initiated the 2nd May [2014] counter-mobilisation to the fascist threat, we applaud the initiative he has taken and are thus actively building this action.’

Which I think is probably the only mention, let alone props, I’ve been given by any of the above groups in over 10 years of blogging … LOL.

Notes

• ‘Trot Guide’ is a neat categorisation but the political designation does not obviously, apply to the CPA, CPA-ML, MLG or PLP.
• Despite a hopeful sign in March 2013, the League for the Revolutionary Party/Communist Organization for the Fourth International (Australia) appears to have closed its post office box in North Melbourne.
• SA and SEP will be fielding candidates in the upcoming federal election; fingers crossed, so will the CPA, CL, PLP, SP and maybe even The Socialist will run.
• The online archive at Reason in Revolt has a range of documents on Australian socialist and radical groups: ‘Reason in Revolt brings together primary source documents of Australian radicalism as a readily accessible digitised resource. By ‘radical’ we refer to those who aimed to make society more equal and to emancipate the exploited or oppressed. Reason in Revolt is an expanding record of the movements, institutions, venues and publications through which radicals sought to influence Australian society.’

BONUS! ☭☭☭☭☭COMMUNISM WILL WIN☭☭☭☭☭

communism

Communism Will Win in Australia. See also : Aussie Anarchist Meme Squat.

David North (ICFI) ~versus~ David Green (Grand River)

wsws.org is the online publication of the ICFI, the ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’. You may remember the ICFI from such rallies as took place in Melbourne in the early 1990s (when they were still known as the ‘Socialist Labour League’); the selling of their newspaper, Workers News, sometimes being accompanied by angry denunciations of anarchism.

Well, I do anyway.

In any case, the ICFI is one of umpteen FIs out there battling to maintain Brotsky’s Crotsky’s Drotsky’s Frotsky’s Trotsky’s legacy. For its part, the ICFI modestly describes itself as “the leadership of the world socialist movement… consist[ing] of Socialist Equality Party national sections throughout the world”. ‘The world’, in this instance, meaning Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Sri Lanka, and ‘the leadership’ an American bloke named David North.

(The history of the FI (est.1938) is complicated, and there are many different international associations claiming descent. Wikipedia, for example, lists 20, of which four–CWI, ICFI, ICL and IST–have a noticeable presence Down Under. Their size ranges from the tiny (eg. IBT) to the very, very small.)

In its current incarnation the ICFI, aka the leadership of the world socialist movement, developed in the wake of a split in the I during the mid-1980s. Bob Gould:

…after several years of intense activity, including publishing a bi-weekly newpaper for some time, [the Australian SLL] imploded in 1985, about the same time that the British Workers Revolutionary Party collapsed. Bob Pitt’s thorough political biography of WRP leader Gerry Healy [The Rise And Fall of Gerry Healy] explains most of the reasons for the collapse of the SLL/WRP current. The remnants of the SLL were subsequently incorporated into the Socialist Equality Party, and the newspaper Workers News was closed and incorporated in the World Wide Socialist Website.

So much for Australia. As Bob Pitt puts it: “In February 1986 supporters of David North, led by Dave Hyland, were kicked out with all the WRP’s usual contempt for democratic procedure. Adopting the name of the International Communist Party, the Northites [in the UK] quickly relapsed into sectarian ultra-leftism, adopting the Bordigist position that the trade unions are no longer workers’ organisations having been entirely incorporated into the capitalist state.” Ten Years After, according to the SEP nee SLL:

In June 1996, the SLL held its 17th National Congress to begin the process of transforming itself into the Socialist Equality Party. A similar initiative was being undertaken in all the sections of the ICFI. This was not simply a change of name. It was based on the recognition of the new responsibilities posed to the party by the far-reaching changes in the fundamental historical context in which the party conducted its work. New forms of work were necessitated by the political realignment underway in the international working class.

As part of this transformation, the wsws site was launched wayback in 1998 (that is, three years after The Mid Atlantic Infoshop site). Strangely, despite being launched wayback when, the inaugural SEP conference was only held in January, 2010: many years after its supposed birth. Leaving aside the question of the ICFI’s access to time travel, the blast-off into cyberspace was not greeted with much enthusiasm by their comrades in the International Communist League, who of the historic occasion remarked (Bulletin Liquidated: Northite Pirates Run for Cyberspace, Workers Vanguard, No.687, March 27, 1996):

Contrary to the hostile buzzing of a small clot of petty-bourgeois losers and nerds who obviously have nothing better to do than clog up the Internet with sneers that the SL is “anti-technology,” we actually do believe that computers, and yes, even Web sites, are useful tools — for certain purposes. But that’s all they are. To pretend dumping some documents into cyberspace is any substitute for the hard fight — in the real world, among real people — to build a revolutionary workers party, only confirms the total depths of cynicism and humbug for which the Northites are infamous.

Humbug!

As well as providing incisive analysis of World-Historical Events (and film reviews), wsws also includes innumerable exhortations to join the ICFI, such calls almost invariably concluding ‘most any such analysis. Which makes perfect sense if the reader is committed to following the leadership* of the world** socialist movement.

Be that as it may, recently, while searching for critical materials on Drink-Soaked Ex-Trotskyite Popinjay for War Christopher Hitchens, I stumbledupon a rather unflattering portrayal of him on the ICFI site: Journalist, scoundrel Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 (David Walsh, December 17, 2011). The mournful response to his death on the part of The New York Times, Walsh argues, is on account of his exemplifying “a social type they admire”:

Taken from the widest angle, Hitchens’ trajectory resembled that followed by many of his contemporaries in the “protest generation.” His was an especially spectacular and filthy evolution, but the difference between a Hitchens and a great many left celebrities, including those who still maintain a pretense now and then of opposition to the existing order, is slight. What has characterized these middle class elements, above all, has been an immense unseriousness about the great life-and-death questions of our day.

And certainly, if a complete absence of humour regarding both Life and Death is your thing, then so too is the ICFI; revolution, like the ah, internets, is serious business. With regards Hitchens (Scoundrel time redux: Christopher Hitchens as a social type, David Walsh, February 13, 1999):

He takes positions… that draw attention to himself, allow him to stand out in a crowd, but don’t threaten his social position or standing. To get on in the world it helps sometimes to raise a few eyebrows. In some circles, a British accent, a little sauciness (but nothing too profound) will do the trick.

Maybe. But Hitchens wasn’t the only one to be tricky. The thing is, wayback in April 2007, the leader of the ICFI, David North, was exposed as being David Green, the CEO of a Michigan-based printing company (Grand River Printing and Imaging).

Well, kinda sorta.

When I blogged about it a year later (May 2008) one commenter described ex-SEP member Scott Solomon’s outing as “a pathetic effort to slander David North and the SEP”. Which again, may be so. But this didn’t actually answer the question: is David North, the leader of the world socialist movement aka the ICFI, also David Green, CEO of Grand River?

Dunno.

Solomon’s allegations caused something of a stir at the time, and another FI — the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) — was certainly happy to elaborate, first with Notes on the SEP/GRPI Puzzle (May 15, 2007) and then with Northites Inc.: Toeing the Bottom Line: Being Determines Consciousness (Bolshevik, No.30, 2008). Another FI — (Jan Norden’s) Internationalist Group — also makes reference to the seeming contradiction in Socialists in Bourgeois Electionland (The Internationalist, November 2008) and Where Were You, David North? (The Internationalist, July 2009).

Upon receiving a local business award (“Best Places to Work in Southeast Michigan”, an honour bestowed by Crain’s Detroit Business and IRI Consultants to Management) in 2003, David Green (David North?) remarked of his company that it “places heavy emphasis on what an employee has to deal with day to day, including personal and social responsibilities, and accommodates accordingly. The company firmly believes it and employees must work together to survive.”

As of this date, the name ‘David Green’ has been expunged from the Grand River website; Grand River remains a union-free workplace.

See also : On the Socialist Equality Party, The Partisan, April 6, 2010 | The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International, Alex Steiner, Permanent Revolution, November 2009. NB. This PR is to be confused with Permanent Revolution, the group that split from Workers’ Power aka the Fifth International, in 2006. Sadly, its five Australian members failed to keep the flame of the Fifth International-And-A-Half alive Down Under, their spark expiring a few short years later.