'Left Connection' formed
By Brian T. Carey
The 140 people who had survived as members of the New Left Party decided at their dissolving conference on March 20-21 to replace that organisation with a body called Left Connection. This would be open to members of other parties and would aim to facilitate and participate in left networking and alliances.
This in many ways represents recognition of the abject failure of the NLP, an attempt to lure the left into a left Labor/Democrat reformist electoral party with muddled ideology and strategies and some confused socialist aspirations.
The NLP was born primarily out of the rejection of Marxist theory and working-class socialist objectives by a majority of the former Communist Party of Australia. Its failure was expected by the Marxist minority within the CPA.
How the new organisation fares remains to be seen, and depends to a considerable extent on whether it can draw in substantial numbers of activists and socialists. In this regard, the withdrawal of the ill-fated embargo on members of other parties may contribute significantly.
At the moment, the organisation is still troubled by ideological confusion. There was some consensus at the conference that it contained no single ideological position. There was a contention that we no longer knew what socialism was, nor agreed on how to get there. From at least one speaker there was an open disavowal of Marxist theory and analysis.
Emphasis will be on participation in actions and alliances on a broad basis. While this is an important need in the left at the moment, the writer, amongst others, pressed the view at the conference that to succeed there would have to be alongside this some core Marxist socialist organisation providing a link and perspective to the many movements and individual activities on the left. A tolerant umbrella of unity in diversity is not only desirable amongst the left in a broad sense, but also in bringing closer together the divergent socialist and Marxist groups in Australia, if a revolutionary way forward is to be charted.
Although at the conference there was some tendency to run away from the question of socialism, some of the aims adapted from the NLP incorporate a socialist vision, although couched in non-class and utopian terms.
The conference adopted a new item under Methods of Work which said that the Left Connection would "give high priority to the development of education and research through projects and other appropriate means which will assist members in their activity and will contribute to left, democratic and socialist analysis and action". [The writer is a member of the interim tee of Left Connection.]