12.07.2006

Labor Tribune launched

Marcus Ström is the editor of Labor Tribune, a recently established website of Marxist discussion and intervention in Australia. He was previously prominent on the revolutionary left in Britain as a CPGB member and a leader of the Socialist Alliance. He spoke to Mark Fischer

Tell us something about the role envisaged for Labor Tribune.

It is aimed at injecting a degree of seriousness into the workers' movement in Australia. It is also an attempt to rearticulate coherent Marxist theory and practice for that movement.

So a modest task then!

I suppose you could summarise it as an attempt to establish a political-theoretical centre for practical Marxism in and around the labour movement. It is aimed at involving people in the Labor Party, but not exclusively, in a project of establishing a network of correspondents, activists and contributors at a variety of different levels who can hopefully aid the rebirth of mass socialist politics in Australia and beyond.

What impact has it had so far?

It's still early days. We just had our launch a couple of months ago: 70 people attended, which was more than we expected. The launch meeting was addressed by Meredith Burgmann, the Labor president of the New South Wales upper house, and Jack Mundey, former Communist Party member and ex-leader of the Builders Labourers' Federation. This was a conscious signal that we are wanting to draw on the best traditions of the working class in Australia: from the Communist Party and the best of the Labor left.

It has been met with a degree of nonchalance by the some sections of the left, but there is a growing interest in what we are doing. We are still establishing ourselves as a feature on the political landscape, really. We are only just beginning to have an impact on debate on the Marxist left here. But I think things will change as we see the tempo of our political work pick up.

We're getting a couple of hundred visitors to the website every day, which is very encouraging. And we've reached parity with the CPGB website in terms of Alexa rankings.

But that could just be curiosity about the new. Are many people engaging with the ideas?

Not too many yet, but, given the political level of the movement that is not surprising. At the moment, people are still relating to it passively. Yes, they log on and read articles, but I think there is an element of 'wait and see'. We are starting to have people respond on some issues - for example, we have been critical of the revolutionary left's fixation with the general strike tactic, of its elevation to a strategic principle. Calls for general strikes, or 24-hour strikes, have been advanced recently in order to fight off government attacks on the unions; yet those unions are barely in a position to win the membership to defend their own basic conditions, let alone shift the whole movement onto a level of generalised political strike action.

I'm not saying 'economics first, then politics'. But, clearly, calls for action have to be related to a real working class movement and its level, not one that exists in the fevered imaginations of some of our comrades here. That's fantasy politics.

Labor Tribune is instead advocating a republican strategy for the labour movement. Strikes and elections are important tactical considerations in achieving profound constitutional and political change. While the Laborite left calls on the working class to "vote out these laws", the far left calls on the working class to 'strike them out'. We reject both approaches and instead call on the working class to fight for the immediate abolition of the monarchist constitution and the establishment of a democratic republic. A republic whose laws and constitution guarantees the right to strike, to organise and bargain collectively. Of course strikes and elections will have their appropriate role to play in this strategy.

The fight for a democratic republic, with the working class at the centre of political life, is the means by which we open the political space for the victory of socialism and the democratic government of the working class.

You were active in British politics as a Communist Party member for nearly a decade. How does the left in Australia compared with the 'poms'?

Similar problems, writ smaller really. Here, just as in the UK, we are still seeing the decline of the old - expressed both organisationally and in the continuing inability of the left to think outside of the sect politics of the past. Hence, those sects are quite brittle. We have just witnessed a small split out of the largest left group here, the Democratic Socialist Perspective. And a more profound split is still possible in that organisation.

In the past few years, the International Socialist Organisation - the Cliffite group - has dwindled from 200 people to about 50 or so. There are now three or four Cliffite groups in Australia, all operating at a very low level.

That's very sad, I think. The left is failing to learn from the mistakes it made in the 20th century. It continues to repeat errors that are leading to its own fragmentation, decline and a sclerosis of its ability to think and act.

Where there is activity, it is - as in Britain - of that hyper-activist campaignism engineered to keep the new recruit busy with leaflets, but not with books. Members are not expected to think, in other words.

So in that sense, Australia is quite similar to Britain.

Seems bleak - anything positive?

Labor Tribune has found a pretty open space to operate in the Australian Labor Party (ALP). I had expected a cold shoulder, if not worse. But there is a genuine interest in fresh ideas about socialist struggle. In the 15 years since the collapse of the Communist Party, nothing has replaced the hegemonic role it played on the left of society. We are aiming to rebuild the left on the basis of sound theoretical foundations.

There are the beginnings of people wondering to themselves, 'Surely we must be able to do this in a different way'. People are open to exploring new alternatives. However, I've found most of these sentiments come from the Labor left or 'official communist' tradition, rather than the Trotskyoid left.

For example, there are four members of Workers Power in Australia - or there were before their London leadership thought it was a good idea to start a cull. There are the various IS Cliffite groups, we have the splits from the DSP, we have the imploded wreckage of the Socialist Alliance, etc. So in that sense, there is a quite a lot of despondent human raw material out there that needs cohering into something that can think and act. Unfortunately, most of it is in self-imposed exile from the mainstream labour movement.

But you can't cohere the despondent. Demoralisation and cynicism about the old is no basis on which to build something new.

True, but these layers constitute part of our audience at the moment. As individuals and organisations, where they go is one thing - and there are always grounds for optimism. But in the here and now, they provide a template of how not to build socialist organisations that we can argue against and thus outline a positive model.

Look at the six people who have just split from the DSP - the Marxist Solidarity Network. They include some longstanding and prominent members, but they appear to have immediately fallen into 'mass movementism'-style politics. If you remember from a few years ago in Britain, the same sort of nonsense was peddled by the short-lived Socialist Democracy Group - or 'Socialist Hypocrisy Group' as I think you styled them once in a column of yours after some crass anti-Weekly Worker plotting by some of their members.

Your Socialist Unity Network is another example of the same problem - semi-liquidationist holding pens for traumatised ex-Trots. Mostly good people. People who might know in their hearts that communist organisation is needed, but just can't find the energy, the inspiration, the vision, the leadership - you name it, they lack it.

Labor Tribune must become a site for the discussion of these sorts of questions. Being a Labor Party-orientated project may hamper interaction with the non-Labor left in the short term, but it still gives us a certain leverage to open up these debates in the broader movement.

So why are you in the Labor Party exactly? I have encountered Australian comrades in this country who seem to imply that this is some sort of political collapse on your part, that your arguments are discredited simply by dint of the fact of where they are being made. Who are you to lecture the rest of the left about the political state of their parties "¦?

My Labor Party membership entails no restrictions on the debates I am able to intervene in, the things I can say. Obviously, I cannot call for a vote for non-ALP candidates, but in today's political landscape, that's not much of a price to pay at all. Outside the Labor Party, organisational leverage - if I can use that term - is non-existent. The SA is dead in real terms, it is simply the public face of the DSP, as the recent split put it. Then, all you have are the micro-groups.

If anything, the Labor Party is where the current struggle is centred. In the CPGB you talk of operating where there is the concrete manifestation of the party question. If only in an abstract form, I think it exists in the nexus between the objective needs for working class representation and the continued capitalist programme of the ALP. Between organised labour and the parliamentary representatives of Labor. Unlike the DSP, which calls the ALP a "capitalist party", or the Socialist Party here (Committee for a Workers' International) which calls the ALP a "bourgeois party", it remains a bourgeois workers' party. That contradiction is bound to cause tensions, as workers move into action. There is an increased tempo of trade union action of various sorts against the anti-trade union laws.

The ability to make interventions in the Labor Party and broader movement is clearly enhanced by membership of it. As we say in our 'About us' statement, Laborism "is the greatest barrier preventing our class uniting around a consistently democratic and socialist programme". So fighting Laborism at the source has its benefits.

At the same time, I have no pretence that we are thinking of some Grantite 'deep entry' assimilation project. We make it clear what we think of Labor's history as well as its present. The very choice of the name 'Tribune' is an explicit statement - Tribune was the name of the Communist Party newspaper here. We want to critically draw on revolutionary traditions, including that of the Communist Party.

The website is explicit that it is for the liberation of the working class globally. That is its politics, not Laborism.

What lessons did you glean from your time in British politics?

Well, having completed my near-decade of transportation to Britain, I did return home with some important lessons. I suppose the main one concerns the centrality of democracy in Marxist theory and practice. Means and ends are connected. Our task must be about reasserting the democratic heart of Marxism - both for social outcomes as well as for the organisational practice of the workers' movement.

In order to lead, you need not only to base your organisation on firm principle but to seek to give expression to those principles in all your subsequent activities. In other words, it's no good being against immigration controls in your programme if you are not prepared to propagate and fight for that principle in your wider work in the movement. Principle is important - as is tactical flexibility.

If you pander to backward elements - either in your own organisation or in the movement - then you will collapse politically. My earlier political experiences in Australia were of that variety, in hindsight.

I have learned that unity is not about lowest-common-denominator haggles. This is mainly what you see on the British left - dishonest backroom deals where principles are negotiated away, resulting in brittle unity that breaks up in the face of serious challenges. Flowing from that is the idea that open polemic and debate is the only true method to win that higher unity. Democratic debate with the most disciplined unity in action. Bureaucratic centralism poisons the atmosphere inside political organisations. Effectively, it equates open political disagreement with organisational betrayal. This approach fosters splits and disorganisation - as the recent mini-disaster in the British Workers Power group illustrates.

All this sounds very familiar, Marcus. Don't people just regard you as the CPGB in a corked hat? Seriously, do comrades over there think we have set up a 'franchise' via you?

No, not at all. I have my own political history in Australia before I met the CPGB. And, as I say to people, there's a clue in the name, Communist Party of Great Britain. I was very clear when I was writing as a CPGB member - and this is the general culture of the organisation - that we are not interested in oil-slick 'internationals'.

As Marx wrote when the First International collapsed, a genuine international will re-emerge based on the real movements of real political parties of the working class, not on the collaboration of a handful of co-thinkers scattered across the globe. I'm not opposed to that sort of collaborative work, but so-call 'international democratic centralism' (or the left's bureaucratic version of it) involving 'sections' not big enough to fill a World Cup subs bench is just a lot of hot air and gargantuan travel costs, frankly.

Look at Workers Power. Fifty to a 100 people around the planet apparently convinced that they were the core of a 'Fifth International'. Really, unless you're the Monty Python script-writing team, you couldn't make it up.

I'm up front about my political past. I was in the CPGB. I was expecting some cheap shots about me forming a 'section', but people have been generally sensible. I don't think there's any confusion.

Are you optimistic?

I am, actually. I think it's going to take a long time to get things straight again, but I remain optimistic that good theory and good practice will out in the end. It's what the working class needs and what is needed has a historical tendency to be born - with struggle, of course. Our approach is not passive.

With the working class internationally being thrown so far back, through its own spontaneous struggle it will begin to inch forward: initially at a very low level. With neoliberalism looking a bit wonky, the process of the political reformation of the working class means that advanced elements of our class will start to look for ideas, feel the need for theory. Not simply about their own economic struggles, but about big ideas such as what it means to be human, our impact on nature, questions such as the relationship between the sexes, the nature of sexuality, freedom of speech and democratic culture and so on.

The ex-Revolutionary Communist Party/Spiked people bang on about how the overarching climate of fear is a means of keeping people under control. Well, there's a truth in that. But I also think it is inevitable that people will begin to fight back and, again, will need Marxist ideas in order to do it effectively.

And I am even optimistic that some sections of the left, or some individuals, can think their way out of its meandering crisis. I mean, 20 years of selling some brain-dead strike-chasing rag outside a supermarket to indifferent shoppers - you would hope that people would arrive at the conclusion that the time is ripe to think a little more deeply about our tasks.