PARTISAN!

Telcontar discusses the recent split in Unionists for Palestine.

Many words could be used to describe the “mass meeting” of Melbourne’s Trade Unionists for Palestine (TU4P) on July 16th, few of them nice. The most accurate term would be a clash. This was a clash on several levels, another entry in that nearly thirty year long slap-fight between Solidarity and Socialist Alternative. In another sense this was a clash between two personality-based factions who have split to the point that politics becomes a fig leaf for mutual dislike. Yet on a deeper level it reveals a clash between a pair of fundamentally contradictory positions towards union actions and building a mass movement. Neither are inherently wrong, rather they lack a broader strategic orientation.

The initial motion to dissolve the Coordinating Committee if you ask the authors was pushed forward following an increase in the centralisation of power around said committee, by a clique aligned with Socialist Alternative, and holding a fundamentally activist approach to organising. Of course, those opposing the motion would fire back calling them coalitionists trying to tail the ALP, and in bed with the union officials trying to take down a rank-and-file movement.

The attacks against this motion revealed the political makeup of the body around the Coordinating Committee. One unable to see beyond the narrow activist milieu. It is an inevitability that outside the highest periods of class struggle that workers will work with their officials in unions. The blanket rejection of working with them despite what some would claim is not Ultra-Leftist, rather it is a blatant sign of left opportunism. Some writers have called this an intra-union and extra-union split, and this is in some ways correct, even more so following the naked example of stacking that dominated Tuesday’s meeting.

Yet this meeting would not have exploded to the extent that it did if not for the build of tension over the past few months. Perhaps the best point to start with this build up is the appointment of a Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) member to the Coordinating Committee, without being elected by a RAFFWU body. This blanket branch stacking could perhaps be considered the penultimate manoeuvre towards centralising power in TU4P around the Coordinating Committee. While the RAFFWU delegate would later resign because of this branch stacking, her self-admitted social cowardice meant that she didn’t openly explain the reasons for her resignation, instead allowing for a narrative arguing that she resigned due to being pressured.

As a close personal friend of this individual, the only reason she resigned was to uphold her deeply held views around the importance of democratic accountability. Nonetheless, she was branch stacked, allowing for the further consolidation of power around the coordinating committee. This branch stacking allowed for U4P to swing further into a radical position of anti-Laborism for the sake of being anti-Laborist. This tension only grew with Victorian Trades Hall cancelling a booking held by Unionists for Palestine following the raising of the discussion of “Cops out of Trades Hall” as a demand within the CC. This only added further fuel to the fire of anti-Laborism.

The debate over relationships to the Labor Party (ALP), and the trade union movement as a concept, while primarily framed as an ideological debate, under the vague tatters of a strategic debate, was fundamentally pointless. Without the existence of a mass communist party any attempts to build up a serious base within or without the ALP is entirely pointless. The tailing tactics demonstrated by groups like Solidarity who will defend Labor more than actual Labor members will not win anyone over to socialism, however nor will blatantly tarring every single member of the ALP as a traitor and murderer, as is undertaken by groups such as Socialist Alternative. The Partyist line is fundamentally to agitate and organise for the formation of a genuine mass movement. 70% of the Australian population supports a ceasefire in Gaza, yet the protests are only shrinking. While Senator Fatima Payman’s resignation should be heralded as a major step forward, rather than helping to build internal contradictions within the Labor Party, it creates the image of a mass exodus, but a mass exodus to where?

Without a mass communist party any decline in ALP membership will simply empower the fetish of the activist left, or perhaps a select few sects, but it will not accelerate or increase the class struggle. It will simply wither away and die.

This seems to be the fate awaiting Unionists for Palestine, following the final motion of the evening. The vote to adopt a strategy of pushing for Cops out of Trades Hall was the most controversial vote of the evening. The debate became a proxy for the split between Free Palestine Melbourne, and Free Palestine Coalition Naarm. Free Palestine Melbourne had stated outright that they would not support Unionists for Palestine if the motion was passed, as they do not want the fight for a free Palestine to become a fight against the police.

Free Palestine Coalition Naarm, on the other hand, had a possibly more correct stance in opposing the cops and viewing it as a fundamental part of the struggle for democratic rights. The question of if this was the right decision once again comes down to tactical and strategic concerns, or in this case the total lack of any organised body able to develop said strategic or tactical vision. Any campaign for “Cops out of Trades Hall” would require a much larger mass movement than is available towards Unionists for Palestine. Especially since a major part of U4P’s contingent comes from the Australian Midwifery and Nursing Federation, one of the unions with the closest ties to the police movement. As such this crusade launched without the support of Free Palestine Melbourne, and after many of the attendees to the meeting had walked out in protest due to the shocking conduct demonstrated by many of the members there.

While nothing is set in stone in regard to the future of Unionists for Palestine, it has, for all intents and purposes, split.