Memorial meetings were held last week in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide for Jim Percy, the national president of the Democratic Socialist Party, who died on October 12. A special supplement including details of these meetings and the text of messages received will be published in the near future. The following speech was given by John Tully to the meeting in Melbourne on October 25, on behalf of Solidarity, the organisation of Australian supporters of the Fourth International.
Comrades, I am honoured and moved by the invitation to speak here today in Jim's memory. His death has saddened my comrades of the Fourth International, who I know share the sentiments I am expressing here today.
We all know that we come this way but once. We shall never see him again. Yet we can find considerable consolation in the facts of Jim's life; for Jim was a revolutionary, and a revolutionary's life is an affirmation of the worth and dignity of humanity.
Once met, Jim could not easily be forgotten. I had meant to say quite a deal about Jim's personal qualities, but I fear that I would only be repeating what others have just said. So perhaps you will indulge me in a personal anecdote.
I'll never forget the first time I met Jim. It was over 20 years ago, in the streets of Sydney, and we had a stand-up debate. I knew of Jim by repute, of course. Who didn't among those of us who had come through the immense rough and tumble of the antiwar movement?
By the time I finally met him, I was, alas, a young sectarian. But I knew, in my heart of hearts, that many of my positions were wrong. I'd been an activist against the war in Vietnam, but by 1972 I'd turned my back on that movement, seduced — temporarily — by the ultraleftism of the Healyites. I remember Jim fixing me with that penetrating gaze of his. He demanded to know: "What have you done for the Vietnamese people — lately?" He had an unerring instinct there. He caused me more shame than he'll ever know, simply by hinting that I had, not long before, known much better.
We shouldn't try to beatify Jim. We Marxists don't believe in infallibility, and we don't have saints. Jim was very much a human being, with human weaknesses like all of us. It would negate all that was best in Jim to deny it, and, moreover, it would negate the human essence of our common revolutionary struggle for it would imply that the fight is beyond ordinary
mortals. I think the number of people here today from other revolutionary currents is a measure of the respect we had for Jim, regardless of differences.
We have to admire Jim all the more for his utterly unwavering dedication to the revolutionary path he'd chosen. He could have succeeded in any walk of life he chose. Yet he turned his back on a career in bourgeois society. He became instead a great constant of the revolutionary movement. You knew where he would be, whatever others were doing.
We've seen too many people pass like shooting stars, in a shower of sparks and tumult, only to fall away as dark shadows of what they once were. We shouldn't be too hard on them. The reasons lie not so much in "moral turpitude" as in the sheer, unrelenting hardness of the struggle. Trotsky once likened the revolutionary's life to swimming against the tide, and remarked that it was no wonder that people drowned. Well, Jim didn't drown; he kept swimming in that difficult race right up until the end, long after many others had gone under.
Jim's political life — and that was his entire adult life — spanned a whole period. He entered the struggle during the Vietnam War, and he died at a time of great difficulty for the revolutionary movement.
Today it seems that a long cycle has come full swing. The heady days of the mass movement against imperialist war seem an age away. Imperialism has reasserted itself. The dinosaurs of the free market stride the earth whilst bourgeois ideologues proclaim capitalism as "the end of history". And, in the cause of private profit, this system is tearing at the very vitals of the earth.
Socialism is said to be dead and buried under the rubble of the former Soviet Union. The collapse of "socialism", no matter how deformed, in the Soviet Union, has removed the major restraint on imperialist power. The first fruit of this was the unspeakable high-tech atrocity of the Gulf War, made possible in large part by the demise of the USSR as a counterweight to imperialism.
We are in a "dry white season", yet should we despair? I'm sure that Jim would demand that we rephrase the question to: "Can we afford to despair?" Have we any choice but to fight when this system threatens to drag all humanity with it to destruction? One thing that Jim taught many of us was to see the longer view, and to fight for the long-term aim.
Jim's life was an affirmation of Marx's belief that human beings are not creatures of fate, but are able to make their own
history, albeit in conditions not of our own choosing. As Jim's death illustrates, we cannot stave off our ultimate biological destiny, but while we live we can devote our lives to the creation of a truly human society, a society rooted in the ideals of humanism, of human solidarity, of justice and peace and — as Che Guevara reminded us — of love.
I'd like to conclude with a poem, not the least because I know Jim had an appreciation for literature, but also because it speaks of the hope for the future that Jim would affirm. It is also a metaphor for the loss we all feel:
it is a dry white season
dark leaves don't last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed for the earth
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they stand erect
dry like steel, their branches dry like wire,
indeed it is a dry white season
but seasons come to pass.
(Mongane Wally Serote, the epigraph in Andre Brink's A Dry White Season.)