Comment by Dave Riley
Roger Clarke's brave attempt in the pages of Green Left Weekly to encourage us not to forsake the Labor Party has contributed nothing new to a perennial debate. Roger's gall is his attempt to sweeten the bitter pill of Laborism at a time when the ALP is the most broadly reactionary — in its rhetoric, in its platform, in its philosophical loyalties and in its practice — during the whole of its history.
History, if you recall, is what happened yesterday. Instead, the amnesic Clarke promises the left a new beginning if it only joins him in the ranks of the Labor Party.
This debate developed out of an interview I did with ALP ex-senator George Georges, which was published in these pages last September. Georges — rather boldly, I thought, given his own somewhat bitter experience of ALP membership — called for a return of the left to the ALP.
Since that time, almost six months ago, what has the left of the ALP achieved within the party that seems worth crowing about? Have they changed their tack and tried to win one? Indeed, we could ask of them how successful have they been in fulfilling the mission prescribed for them by George Georges and Roger Clarke?
The balance sheet isn't conducive to confidence. Aside from word that reaches us about the usual run of faction fights, we would be hard pressed to discover what the Labor left has done for us lately.
To insist on tangible results is not an unfair demand given our previous collective experience of the ALP — of its left as much as its right wing. Maybe the left is waiting for an issue to cut its teeth on, choosing to pick its fight rather than going off half-cocked. But what's wrong with the issues already to hand?
It is, however, outside the Labor Party where issues are not being neglected or put off to another day because it is outside the Labor Party where struggle is currently focused. From Mascot airport to abortion law reform and East Timor, the actual dynamic of campaigning is being determined by people outside of — and in most cases, extremely hostile to — the ALP.
Clarke concedes to reality and bemoans our readiness to identify the party with its spots. But then we are told that our easy bias fails to address the presence of the ALP's true left — the genuine socialists in its ranks, like Comrade Clarke (who now seems determined to donate his political organs to the party).
These are the flecks of gold within Labor's dross and supposedly deserve our undivided attention — so much so that even the hint of their presence should be enough to cause us all to drop everything else we are doing and go in after them.
This doesn't mean that an active orientation towards the Labor Party is, in principle, wrong or merely a hypothetical question. Two examples that stand out in my mind which could call for such a tactic to be adopted are the massive spread of the socialisation units in the New South Wales Labor Party during the Lang administration of the early '30s, and the climate within the Victorian branch soon after federal intervention — and the initial formation of the Socialist Left — which coincided with a threefold increase in state ALP membership before the 1972 federal poll. Neither of these dynamics is analogous to the situation in the Labor Party today.
Indeed, many of these so-called "genuine socialists" who supposedly inhabit the cloisters of the ALP are refugees from small or defunct organisations outside it — like Roger Clarke — who have given up the project of building an alternative to laborism and now cover their tracks under the guise of the rhetoric of "relevance" (which is supposedly distinct from the practice of accommodation).
But as it is said: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Since Clarke has courageously put his foot in it and spoken so keenly for the left to rejoin the ALP, it is now not merely a question of how many naive souls take up his call but also what Clarke, Georges and company manage to achieve.
We all will be watching and waiting. Personally I'm sticking with the independence of the political life I have rather than trading it in for the second hand existence imprisonment within the ALP offers.
[The editor respectfully suggests that all participants in this debate follow Dave Riley's advice by absorbing the experiences of at least a few months before renewing this discussion.]