(The following appeal was made Jan. 4, 1985, to the delegates of the January 1985 National Conference of the Australian Socialist Workers Party. The appeal, made on behalf of Australian supporters of the Fourth International, was signed by Lynda Boland, Dave Deutschmann, Nita Keig, Ron Poulsen, Deb Shnookal, and Lee Walkington. The conference refused time for the appeal to be heard and rejected it unanimously.J
Dear Comrades,
We are addressing ourselves to the delegates of the SWP National Conference in order to call to your attention the central political issues at the heart of the appeal to your conference. We also request time to present this appeal to your conference.
The political direction of the leadership of the SWP (Australian Section of the Fourth International) has set the SWP on a course away from Marxism.
This course includes:
• rejection of the turn to industry and the introduction of an ultraleft and opportunist trade union policy:
• abandonment of class criteria in determining the orientation to mass working class organisations including in the electoral arena;
• adaptation to Stalinism;
• political support for a pro-fascist Croatian emigre organisation (the HDP |Croatian Movement for Statehood - IPT:
• adaptation to the nationalist and pacifist pressures of the peace movement.
This loss of class bearings has resulted in a sectarian degeneration away from advancing the struggle of workers and farmers for power and building the Fourth International.
The SWP leadership has imposed undemocratic and arbitrary conditions on members dissenting from its course. This included denying members of the SWP the right to political collaboration with cothinkers (in the unprecedented form of breaking relations with other parties of the Fourth International). Those who opposed these flagrant violations of the norms of functioning in the International were removed from membership.
As Deutschmann, Keig. Poulsen, and
Shnookal stressed in the conclusion to their October 1983 submission to the Control Commission: "We do not intend to be cut off from contact with other parties in our world movement" and "we will not accept the leadership majority moving to take the party out of the Fourth International."
The expulsion of Deutschmann, Keig. Poulsen, and Shnookal was a direct result of their opposition to the dangerous political direction of the SWP leadership.
We call on delegates to reject the SWP leadership's accelerating break from the program of the Fourth International. We urge you to condemn the undemocratic organisational measures that have flowed from this, and to elect a leadership that will reverse this process.
In November last year the National Executive of the Socialist Workers Party expelled a number of members of the party. This was the culmination of a split course set in motion with a number of decisions taken by the NE on August 31, 1983. During this period a number of other members resigned in protest at the SWP leadership's actions and in solidarity with those expelled.
This has resulted in the existence of another distinct political current in Australia in support of the Fourth International.
The objective of the split engineered by the SWP leadership was to silence a developing minority current within the leadership of the organisation. This expressed internally the anti-internationalist course of severing relations with the U.S. SWP and later other individual leaders and sections of the FI [Fourth International]. The SWP leadership in Australia wanted to play a vanguard role in advancing this split course in the international. At the same time, these actions demonstrated the extraordinary lack of self-confidence of the central leadership in the context of the deepening political debate in our world movement.
The breaking of relations with some parties of our world movement and the subsequent expulsions of those who opposed these moves marked a turning point in the process of insulating the membership of the party from political contact with certain political currents within the international and from full access to all points of view in the international discussion. The NE climaxed its underground campaign against the leadership of the U.S. SWP (which had been cultivated for several years by breaking relations with the U.S. party and removing all those inside the Australian party who shared any political agreement with its views. Such political agreement was deemed inherently disloyal to the central leaders of the Australian SWP and hence intolerable.
In order to find the technical grounds on which to carry through this purge, the leadership had to conduct a free-floating "investigation." This "investigation" was simply a trial of the political views of the minority. Although it preceded the laying of a single charge, it was obvious that it was set up to prepare the expulsion of the minority. This corrupt method of investigating members in order met rivestgaung members in order to find some grounds on which to charge and try them is contrary to the functioning of any democratic Leninist party, although it has its parallels in the practices of other sectarian currents. The intimidatory atmosphere built up in this investigation is evident in the transcripts and documents included in SWP (Australia) Internal Information Bulletin No. 1 in 1983.
The result of the expulsions was to deprive the membership of the right to hear and participate in a discussion of the emerging differences within the leadership. All the subsequent fanfare from the SWP leadership concerning its various initiatives towards "left unity." fusions, and broad public discussions cannot conceal the fact that it could not face a serious debate over the widening strategic differences with those it expelled.
The spurious charges of "disloyalty" manufactured by the NE to try to justify the purge were merely a means of avoiding a discussion which would call into question the increasingly erratic, ultraleft, and opportunist course being charted by it.
Central to the developing differences in the party was the new course being set by the leadership which meant an abandonment of the political perspectives of the turn to the industrial working class. Instead, the leadership began a mad scramble in search of short cuts to illusory party growth and influence.
In our submission to the SWP control commission (October 7, 1983; see IIB No. 1 in 1984) we pointed to some of the main features of the political evolution of the SWP as we then saw them:
Retreat on the turn
We do not agree with the leadership majority that the turn is "behind us." as is repeatedly claimed. On the contrary, by not meeting the political and organisational challenges of the turn to the industrial work ing class the turn continues to be undermined. There has been an erosion of our base in industry far beyond that forced on us by objective conditions.
Trade union election strategy
The political corollary of the retreat on the turn is the implementation of the new trade union election strategy. This election strategy sees us initiating both extensive challenges to union posts as well as artificially constructing rank-and-file grouplets which pose - along with the party itself — as the class struggle left wing.
The trade union election strategy prematurely counterposes us as an alternative to the entire existing trade union bureaucracy. It cuts across our political tasks on the job and leads us to try and substitute ourselves for the necessary movement of much broader forces of workers to begin to transform the unions into class struggle instruments.
Sectarianism toward the ALP