File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9803, message 248


Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 18:12:39 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: M-I: my column


As comrades will know I have a monthly column in an anarchist owned paper
here in Brisbane.  From time to time I post it on the list.  I do not do
this regularly because often the content is so local, but this one is more
general and it may be of interest. The bin is named "The Bin after the
dustbin of history expression.
Regards

Gary

BTW Tony I will try and find out more about the Cushendall murders.


The bin abides.

The sudden death last year of three friends has plunged me into yet another
spiral of the cycle of mid-life crises that I believed I had well and truly
passed beyond. As a consequence this little column,  which I had been
intending for some time to close down, has now become vital to me.  I know
it is ridiculous and truly pathetic even, but the truth is that I feel a
sense of almost unbearable urgency - a need to say something of
significance and importance.  I also have this feeling ever present in my
work.

However the circumstances under which we are labouring at university make
it more and more difficult to even attempt to say anything of worth to our
students.  Just this semester I have been teaching larger classes than I
have ever taken before in my 34 years of teaching.  When I did my diploma
in education long years ago, our history of education lecturer told us of
De La Salle and how he had taught classes of students numbering in their
hundreds.  We all laughed at the stupidity and backwardness of that.  How
could you teach over a hundred people gathered together?  Indeed there was
a good deal of derision, mockery and laughter.  Were not we young teachers
"smarter than the average bear" because we lived in modern times?  

Just this Thurs 2.3.98, less than two years away from the next millennium,
I stood up in Z411 at Garden's Point Campus of QUT and looked up at the
faces of nearly 500 young people.   Truly it seemed to me that the
arrogance of my youth had come back once more to mock me.  Most of the
rallies and demonstrations that I have spoken at have been smaller.  

I was expected to say something meaningful to them and the topic I was to
speak on was Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, where he argues that the
media through lies and propaganda builds social cohesion in a class-divided
society. I took the first hour and I had prevailed upon my old
anarchist-communist comrade, and former academic, Brian Laver, to come out
of retirement and take the second session.  
There we were two ageing dinosaurs speaking to postmodern youth of human
dignity and the invincible urge to freedom.  It was in a way like Jurassic
Park had come to the academy.  The special effects were less spectacular of
course but then they did not need to be.  Brian and I are still alive.
More or less. I am grateful, more or less, to be so but even more important
for me is the question whether the ideas, which we advocated and expressed
that day, still live.  Perhaps they do but if they do, it is just barely so. 

I have been here long enough to have seen the short rise and long fall of
the Brisbane Left. Saturday after Saturday I have stood in the street in
the West End and watched people pass by Jim McIroy of the Democratic
Socialist Party and not bother to even think of buying a copy of Green Left
Weekly. I often feel like shouting at these people that they should read;
that they must educate themselves.

Once I saw David Solomon of the Courier Mail dismissively shake his head at
Jim.  Solomon is one of the tiny number of Brisbane journalists who could
be deemed educated.  Nevertheless he and most people who think of
themselves as progressive do not even consider buying The Green Left
Weekly.  Yet it is one of the very few sources in Australia for discovering
the truth about our world.

Once upon a time progressive minded people hung upon every word of the
Left.  Once upon a time writers, artists, dancers, choreographers, and
film-makers drew sustenance and support from the Left. Now no more. The
Left today is so marginalised and weak that the only significant sources of
opposition to the Government are a handful of priests.  Among the most
prominent are the Methodist wowser, Tim Costello, from Melbourne and the
Jesuit lawyer and equivocator, Frank Brennan.  At least Costello and
Brennan are intelligent.  We here in Brisbane have to endure the preening
stupidities of 'clickety click' (Where is the camera?) Hollingsworth and
the banalities of Battersby ("The Mayor must get married"). 

But it is important to go beyond the cult that is growing up around Brennan
and to a lesser extent Costello and to insist on the truth that theirs is
the politics of civilising the status quo.  It is as if they want to polish
the fangs of capitalism and somehow make it less savage.  They are
tolerated by the powerful just as the shark tolerates the little fish that
clean around its mouth.  These fish do not at all threaten the shark.
Rather they help it function more efficiently. Just so with the likes of
Costello and Brennan.  They shed sincere tears for the victims of
capitalism but from these tears spring the illusion among the people that
somehow this rotten system can be reformed and need not be thoroughly smashed.

It this need for revolution and the overthrow of capitalism and the
abolition of social class that drew me to the Left decades ago.  I still
hold those truths to be self-evident and I feel it is the message that this
little column in this little paper needs to spread as widely as possible.
As a matter of great urgency we need to rebuild the Left. My own
contribution here I hope will be a message to what remains of the Left that
we need to go beyond sectarianism.  I know that will bring a smile to those
who have known me for some time.  It is true that I have at times been a
sectarian warrior.  But no more.  I intend with what energies are left to
me to rededicate myself to building a Left culture and Left movement in
Brisbane.  I will work with Anarchists and Left Social Democrats and
Leninists and Stalinists where possible to provide a forum for Left ideas.

That will of course bring me into conflict with those who are convinced
they know of the True Path and seek to do nothing but to promote their own
sect.  I myself have done with party building.  When the time is ready the
workers will rise up and create their own party and they will sweep aside
the sectarian fools who now think of themselves as the leaders and
emancipators of the class.  On that day the poseurs of the present time
will know the truth of Marx's great dictum that the emancipation of the
working class is the task of the working class.

Now in case some of my regular readers are dismayed at the thought of me
turning into a SNAG (sensitive new age guru) let me say that there is a
group of people whom I consider to be, as we Irish put it, "traitors".  In
Ireland they would also be called "soupers" - those who sold out the faith
of their fathers to the English for a bowl of soup. 

The traitors that I have in mind are they who have betrayed the ideals of
their youth and made a shabby compromise with the Enemy.  Theirs is the
modern "trahaison des clercs", carried out so that they might cling to pelf
and place.  I will be merciless on them. I will do all in my power to smite
them on the cheek bone and break their teeth as the Good Book puts it and I
reject now any idea that this is sectarianism.

I began this column in a fit of middle-aged despair, but things come to
hand.  I broke off writing and picked up Vol 49 No 8 of the Monthly Review.
 I read an article by Dirk J. Struik, who taught mathematics at M.I.T. from
1926-1960.  It was the 20th annual Sacco-Vanzetti memorial address
delivered on Dec 8 1996 when Struik was an amazing 101 years old.  He spoke
of the part he had played in the campaign to save the lives of the "simple
shoemaker and poor fish peddler" who were executed on August 22, 1927 for
murders of which they were totally innocent.  For Struik, the anarchists,
Sacco and Vanzetti, were humble people but they were also heroic and their
faith could still inspire him even after almost 70 years.  Struik also
calls for new thinking on the Left. He calls for unity between red and
green, but also white, black and brown. He ends his address in this way:-

"That is the faith of a mathematician.  I am not speaking as a
mathematician, though, but as a common man in the sense of Sacco and
Vanzetti, sharing wishes and hopes for a better society with this simple
cobbler and this poor fish peddler and with you."

Amen.



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