Protesting at Forbes 500 on August 30

What, me, manipulated? It seems to me that protesting at the Forbes 500 conference will make me into another notch on the DSP belt. They will be able to boast that they got me to come to ‘their’ event. They can report to their hierarchical superiors that another unit of Green Left Weekly was sold and another unit of radicalisation has been achieved.

The trots are simply going to be using “anarchist tactics” to appear radical and recruit uni students on the tail end of puberty while they’re still aching to go to extremes. Almost everything that trots do constitutes a cynical rectuiting excercise. For May Day 2002, the DSP organised a spokescouncil to capitalise on the trend in student organising toward the autonomous. (Though I was trapped between the campus of death and the workplace of death at that time and rather confused at the energy put forth by the trots on this issue).

The organising structure may be open, the organisation name might by different from that of the party, but the comrades in control of the microphones, loudhailers, maps and directives on the day will all be DSP central committee members. As ususal, the action will be poorly planned and poorly executed. The Opera House (the site of protest) is situated on a peninsular. Protestors will be hemmed in by a police cordon. They can use rails, or just a line of horses and pyjamas. While we’re sitting-in and chating to try to excercise our autonomy, there’ll be no question about who is in charge - the police. In fact, it’ll make a great training excercise for them - “10,000 activists have just converged on the opera house. You have a horse, pepper spray, and complete civil immunity. What do you do?”.

They say: “Workers Rights”, I say “NO WORK” Ok, this is a white lie - I’m a workerist. Still, I’d really like to work on my own terms and fuck off all bosses for good.

They say: “Drop the Debt”, I say “ABOLISH MONEY” ABolishing 3rd world debt is either going to tie 3rd world countries to a bunch of conditions which wil suit the IMF (gee, could it be that debt is going to be exchanged for zero tariffs and fucked labour laws?). Or its going to simply help these countries into international trade - again on terms in IMF is happy with. Either way, this is hardly a demand that’s going to transform society into a happy place of love and equality.

They say: “No War”, I say “NO GOVERNMENT” Governments cause war. Why? Because killing on the scale of a war is about economics, not emotions that are felt on a human scale. Governments make war for their convenience. They make war to drive their war-economies. They make war to capture markets. They make war for profit.

They say: “No Forbes”, I say “ABOLISH POLITICIANS - not their just policies” Politicians are for themselves, not for their contituents. Whatever is totally wrong with government is wrong with politicians because they form government, and are paid high salaries to decide that the minimum wage is $70 over what it should be.

Transitional demands suck The demands that are being made about the 30a network are transitional demands. And they suck.

Transitional demands are things that the radical vanguard ask you to accept (and demand) and then once you realise that achieving those demands is implicitly anti-capitalist and anti-state, then you become enlightened and are allowed to go to party school to read James P Canon. The secret of revolutionary vanguardism is then unlocked to you. You have become elite and must wear dreads in your hair while you work in a student organisation.

Its duplicitous to make transitional demands simply for the purpose of radicalising proles. The revolutionary vanguard reckon we can’t handle the truth, so they feed us a half-truth and hope we won’t catch on.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that transitional demands have a tendency to get stuck in a rut. The DSP is a fantastic example of transitional demands failing to transit. For years they’ve been inventing feeder organisations and changing their transitional demands with the tides. “No war” and “no blood for oil” are alway favourites. Saving the environment is popular too - and they do this by printing and distributing a newspaper using an absuve free labour system. Woo.

Transitional demands are just enough to make post-teens think that the party is hip, but they leave me wanting more.