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Issue No. 183 | 20 June 2003 |
A Beautiful Set of Numbers?
History: Nest of Traitors Interview: A Nation of Hope Unions: National Focus Safety: The Shocking Truth Tribute: A Comrade Departed History: Working Bees Education: The Big Picture International: Static Labour Economics: Budget And Fudge It Technology: Google and Campaigning Review: Secretary With A Difference Poetry: The Minimale Satire: Howard Calls for Senate to be Replaced by Clap-O-Meter
Task Force Sleeps Through Killing Go To Gaol � Do Not Collect $500,000 Putting Steel into Government�s Spine Fortnight in Killing Fields Anyone? Underpaid Worker Fights Deportation Job Cuts Caught in Spill Cycle Mum Wins Family Friendly Hours Aussies Back Zimbabwe�s Gaoled Strikers
Politics The Soapbox Media The Locker Room
Is Beazley's Popularity a Winner? Rank Marchers
Labor Council of NSW |
Letters to the Editor Questions for Cuba
I recently posted a comment at Melbourne Indymedia questioning whether, if I lived in Cuba, I and others who share my views could form a Green Party, openly recruit people to it and stand a Green Party ticket in elections. The answer, according to a Democratic Socialist Party cadre/s who write/s as "Redstar", is No, and this was justified on the grounds that allowing a plurality of political parties would open the door to counter-revolution as in Nicaragua (even if, as in the case of a Green Party, the parties would not have a platform of restoring a capitalist economy) and that multi-party democracy isn't really more democratic than a single-party state anyway. What I find disturbing about this response is that I had hoped, and believed, that after the disastrous failures of "actually existing socialism" the entire Left would have learned that a viable socialist/left project must include a range of institutional guarantees of democracy including free elections, free and pluralistic political organisation including a multiplicity of parties, non-partisan judiciaries to uphold the rule of law, etc., etc. Instead, a mere 14 years after the Berlin Wall came down and a mere 12 after the Soviet Union collapsed, we have forces on the left (who are not insignificant given the DSP's central role in the Socialist Alliance) defending the same institutional arrangements which blighted the socialist project in its Leninist/Stalinist form, using much the same arguments that Australian Stalinists used for decades. It appears we have an incipient "culture of forgetting" about the evils of Stalinism on the Left comparable to the "culture of forgetting" about the Holocaust and fascism which the Right exhibited over the Demidenko literary scandal. Am I the only person on the Left who's alarmed by this? Paul Norton.
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