Hate Trotskyism, Hate the SL

Radical Women & Freedom Socialist Party Protest DSP Assault

Following the thuggish attack by a male Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) member on one of our women comrades in Melbourne on 29 August, the Spartacist League has sought to widely expose and condemn the DSP’s attempted political censorship and subsequent cover-up of the anti-woman and anti-communist attacks of its supporters. The assault followed a sharp exchange over the DSP’s refusal to oppose Australian imperialist military in East Timor. As we have noted, some DSP members appear willing to substitute the fist for the brain when losing an argument (see ASp No. 196, Spring 2006).

At union rallies and other protests, many have expressed to us their outrage over the attack and the DSP’s lying response. As part of our defence of the rights of the whole workers movement, we have urged unionists, leftists and others to condemn the DSP assault. We reprint below a 31 October protest letter to the DSP from Radical Women and Freedom Socialist Party (RW & FSP). The letter acknowledges the compelling evidence and captures the DSP’s culpability. Speaking to the issues of “sexism and sectarian violence in the Left,” they state “The DSP has shown so far that it condones both....”

However, giving comfort to the DSP, RW & FSP also smear the SL as “sectarian and sexist,” papering over the fundamental divide between the DSP’s physical assault in the service of political suppression, and Leninist polemics based on principle and program, the purpose of which is to make clear the political differences between competing tendencies within the workers movement. By accusing us of “sniping” and “lies,” they mean that we sharply criticise their politics, as indeed we do. They write:

“RW and FSP understand how the SL can be infuriating in their own sectarian and sexist conduct. FSP is often a target of their sniping and lies. This goes back to the 1960s, when their U.S. section attacked Clara Fraser, a founder of the FSP, when she waged a political fight against her ex-husband, Richard Fraser, who was expelled from the party because of his sexist betrayals.”

Clara and Richard Fraser were both among the founding members of the FSP, formed in the U.S. in 1966. Dick Fraser was cut off from the organisation when it underwent a split the following year. Clara Fraser made her 1967 divorce from Fraser a central issue. The FSP took the old-style New Left feminist credo that “the personal is political” to its logical extreme and turned Clara’s divorce into its founding “political” principle. Indeed Clara seemingly based her entire subsequent political career on it. (See “Personalism as a ‘Political’ Program,” Workers Vanguard No. 559, 18 September 1992.)

Dick Fraser was a veteran of the revolutionary Trotskyist movement in the U.S. in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. He developed the program of revolutionary integration, which sees the struggle for black liberation in the U.S. as central and integral to the struggle for socialist revolution. Dick was a theoretical mentor of the Spartacist League on this question. While political differences separated us for many years, at the time of his death in 1988 he was a comrade of the Spartacist League. We refer readers to our Prometheus Research Library bulletin, In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser, which includes his most seminal works. Today, while the FSP continue to pay lip service to revolutionary integrationism, they mold it to fit the confines of their own liberal, reformist outlook and practice. (See “Revolutionary Integrationism: The Road to Black Freedom,” Workers Vanguard Nos. 864 & 865, 17 February and 3 March 2006.)

The FSP’s socialist feminism is a species of reformism, which in this country is imbued with Laborite backwardness including capitulation to male chauvinism. Along with assorted left groups, the FSP joined the DSP-dominated Socialist Alliance (SA). In the last federal elections, SA pushed for an ALP victory through electoral preferences even as the then-leader, Mark Latham, tried to outdo Howard on “family values,” pushing his hated “parental responsibility” scheme.

In response to the FSP’s unsubstantiated accusations of “sexist conduct” by the SL, we cannot help but note that along with the rest of the anti-Soviet reformist left (including the DSP’s forebears) they championed the anti-abortion, Catholic reactionary, counterrevolutionary Solidarność movement in Poland in the 1980s. More recently, in 1999, the FSP claimedin words to oppose Australian imperialist troops to East Timor but nevertheless joined in the chauvinist “troops in” rallies. As for the DSP, they endorsed and were in the forefront of these pro-imperialist mobilisations, marching in lock-step with the ALP and Laborite trade-union misleaders. Just months later Australian troops were terrorising East Timorese women and torturing prisoners. Despite their stated opposition to the Australian imperialist military in East Timor, to our knowledge the FSP remain in Socialist Alliance with the social-chauvinist DSP. It is no accident that SA’s “gender agenda” appeals to capitalist governments with barely a mention of the working class never mind a class-struggle perspective and the fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution.

Despite these deep differences with the FSP, we appreciate the stand they are taking against violence in the workers movement. The suppression of political debate by physical attacks and threats ultimately serves only the ruling class and its racist system of exploitation.