This has all happened before… A recent history of entryism in environmental justice movements

For this article, I tracked down a handful of people’s stories of a range of entryist strategies: from the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the 1980s, to the emergence of the NSW Greens Party, the Jabiluka uranium mine campaign, the new Community Climate Network, and Climate Camps. I called folks who were involved in the group at the time for a conversation.  All of them are still grassroots activists.  I’ve not doubt there are other interpretations of history and I haven’t done in depth historical research – these are just snippets of people’s experiences.  [This is abridged version – there is a longer version here.]

I have been active in social movements for about a decade – in student groups and community climate justice networks – and have faced a variety of strategies from Socialist organisations.  Sometimes we have been able to work together, and some members have been our friends and allies; but I have found their behaviour as a faction in collectives – or as an organisation at conferences, summits and large actions – to be difficult, disruptive and destructive.

Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, or understand why they might be interested in our groups.  It’s been helpful for me to talk to people in Socialist organisations/factions about their organisational structure, and understand how they think change happens.  [Mostly, the response is: ‘building the revolutionary workers’ party that can get masses of workers onto the streets’].

It’s also been helpful to know these tactics and interventions have been happening for decades (and longer!): there are lessons to be learnt.  [In fact, resistance to organised “entryism” has been around since Trotsky’s first proposed the strategy in his essays on “The French Turn” in 1934.  The intervening French Trotskyists faced some resistance as they attempted to dissolve their organisation into the French Socialist Party, however they still managed to significantly raise their group’s membership. But, soon after, the French Socialist Party began to expel the Trotskyists.  Hooray! …Or not? Anyhoo, I think the take home message here is, “You are not alone.  This has been happening since forever.”]

Currently, the strongest ‘entryist’ organisations in the burgeoning climate movement in Sydney are Solidarity and Socialist Alliance (which is mostly made up of people from the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) and their youth wing, Resistance). So far, Socialist Alternative have participated very little in Sydney-based climate organising.

But interventionist or ‘entryist’ strategies are not new to these organisations and political tendencies. Sourcewatch describes entryism as “a political tactic in which an organisation or group enters a larger organisation in an attempt to gain recruits, gain influence or to take control of the larger organisations’ structure.  Characteristically, these groups intervene in single-issue campaign groups, and sometimes cause folks to spend more time on dealing with internal wrangling, than with organising work itself.

Beyond individual groups, both organisations currently prioritise participation in ‘peak’ decision-making spaces, in which many groups participate (campaign alliances, national network committees, committees to organise major rallies or large movement events like Climate Camp).  They also prioritise student spaces, which they identify as the key grounds for recruitment to their organisation.  Student environment collectives – some of the only active networks to survive the Howard Government’s gutting of student unionism – are seen as the largest and strongest student movement, and have faced sustained and sometimes aggressive entryism.

Recently, Wenny Theresia wrote of participation in the growing community climate movement, “An organisational philosophy of groups like Socialist Alliance and Solidarity seems to be seeing highly-charged, lengthy and (deliberately) polarised debates – dominated by a few, pre-caucused positions of these organisations – as ‘politicising’ and beneficial for the movement. Personally I’ve generally found these methods patronising, counter-effective, frustrating and often predictable: not a method that supports critical, grassroots discussion of ideas and consensus decision-making.”

To be fair, it’s possible some ordinary, new or younger members are completely unaware of the entryist tactics and strategies their organisations employ; while others don’t take issue with manipulating other groups for their own agendas (but see this as useful work to ‘politicise’ or ‘radicalise’ what they see as ‘liberal’ groups).  I acknowledge members of these organisations have a right to put forward their views, act around their beliefs and join social change groups. But such groups also have the right to defend themselves – and defend consensus-based and non-hierarchical organising structures – against those who undermine them by participating with ulterior motives and hidden agendas.

Nuclear Disarmament Party 1985

In the 1984 Federal Elections, 642,435 people had cast their primary vote for the Nuclear Disarmament Party: it was a new political party, hastily put together and fast gaining thousands of members.  They won one Senate seat (Western Australia’s Jo Valentine, with Peter Garrett almost winning their second).

Before the Conference – defending the NDP

The March 1985 Newsletter of the Sydney branch of the Nuclear Disarmament Party reported that members of the Socialist Workers Party (later called the Democratic Socialist Perspective, and today forming the Socialist Alliance) were trying to take over the NDP by entryism and block-voting. The November 21 issue of the newspaper of the SWP and Resistance announced its entire staff had joined the NDP.

Recent Interventions in the Community Climate Network

I have not been extensively involved in the Community Climate Action Network, and there are probably many others who have more to say about their experiences of socialist interventions in that network. However, from reading a report written by one of the organisers of the network, Wenny Theresia (who has not been involved in writing this piece), it is clear that there are many parallels between the entryism and interventions experienced in the Community network, and my own and others’ experiences in the student environment movement.

The Community Climate Action Network- the network of local Climate Action Groups (CAGs), first met on a national level at the Australia’s Climate Action Summit (ACAS) in early 2009. Wenny Theresia expressed concerns that the Network Facilitation Group (NFG), conceived as a mechanism for communication and sharing support, would become a decision-making space used to exert control over the grassroots climate movement. She states:

“I have particular concerns that specific groups in the climate movement, namely the Socialist Alliance and Solidarity, may come to dominate representation on the NFG, and then informally use it as a vehicle to wield influence over the rest of the movement.”

She also states:
“[I}n my experience, I have not found people in groups like Socialist Alliance and Solidarity to be completely honest and transparent about internal organisational decisions that may impact group members’ involvement in the rest of the movement.”

The report points out that larger organisations such as the Socialist Alliance have the ability to ‘assign resources’ in the movement, as the organisation sees fit. Dishonesty about internal organisational decisions that affect participation in the movement, and dominating spaces that “are or are may be promoted as ‘authoritative’ or influential’” are behaviours we have seen in many other groups including student movements, not just the grassroots climate movement.

What are the politics?

Whenever the problems in Sydney Uni Enviro Collective last year were brought up in the wider world, people kept asking “what are the politics?”  Supporters of the intervention into collective (by some members of the socialist organisation Solidarity) claimed that the implosion of collective was caused by the refusal of other collective participants to engage in “political discussion.” This claim spread beyond the collective, and various people who had never been to collective confidently explained that the “real issue” was this supposed absence of political debate. Paddy Gibson (who had not been to any of the relevant meetings, or in fact any meetings at all in 2009) claimed that “there has not been accountable and open debate about what the SRC should do about climate change” in collective.

But I think that this isn’t really true. And I think that this claim is symptomatic of the lack of respect with which Solidarity as an organisation has recently treated other groups and individuals in the left. There was a political debate, and the rest of collective had a political response to Solidaity’s positions. The fact that Solidarity members did not listen to or engage with this response in more than the most superficial manner is what I want to describe and discuss here.

The debate which Solidarity wanted to have centred around a couple of main demands. They demanded that collective concentrate all of its energy on one particular campaign. This campaign was, chronologically, against the Nuclear Institute (2007) against Energy privatisation (2008) and against the CPRS (2009). They argued that, generally, no other campaign should be organised through collective (because of the need to build a “mass movement”), and specifically, that a “On Campus Campaign” about renewable energy would be lifestylist, capitalist, and wrong. They argued that collective should give up its commitment to pluralism and consensus decision making.

Collective members made coherent, political arguments against each of these demands. They pointed out that a “mass-movement” need not be mobilised on a single issue (especially where that single issue is as narrowly constructed as a particular campaign tactic against a single piece of legislation). If you want a mass movement against capitalism, surely the different aspects of capitalism which people are oppressed by are together capable of building a mass, anti capitalist movement. Do Solidarity members expect that we can only have a campaign on CPRS, and that Indigenous Elders on Muckaty station have to be mobilised by CPRS and not be motivated by their long struggle for sovereignty and the right not to be exposed to  radioactive waste? Of course they don’t. It would be cool if we can extend to non-Solidarity members the right not to have to believe doggerel. They pointed out that the collective could help to build a “mass movement” through continuing to campaign on their preferred issues: anti coal campaigning, anti CPRS campaigning (2008 and 2009), renewable energy on campus campaigning, anti-nuclear campaigning, forest campaigning, and others (including each of the campaigns Solidarity put forward). They pointed out that it wasn’t a very strong argument to claim that increasing the number of people on a campaign from 7 to 20 would be the crucial step in showing our commitment to “mass movement” politics. They affirmed their political commitment to pluralism and diversity of tactics. They explained the political reasoning behind each of their campaigns, at length and ad nauseam, because Solidarity repeatedly asked them too.

The Sydney Uni Enviro Collective Story

By the end of semester it will be one year since the unilateral declaration of autonomy by students now known as the Student Environment Action Collective (SEAC).  Some reading this zine may have seen our declaration and the response.  This declaration of autonomy was seen by some as completely illegitimate.  Despite this widely held claim of illegitimacy, it is neither the first nor the last time that groups have bifurcated (I just didn’t want to use the word split, for reasons which I will explain soon-ish).  Some say the environment collective was ‘lost’ to an external group uninvested in the long term health of campus environment collectives, but I think we gained a lot more than was lost, this is why.

Articulating what you need in a space is important.  We could all do a bit better at calling out consistent destructive behaviour, even when it is our own.  But when we do, lessons need to be learned, people need to change and take these concerns seriously, not merely rely on the false assumptions that these concerns relate to politics.  My interpretation of the ASEN way has been to favour decision making processes that create pathways of involvment for the many different ideas, this has allowed campus collectives to be diverse and member driven, and genuinely ‘bottom-up’.  This can be uncomfortable and has drawn opposition from the left (Solidarity) and the right (NUS), mostly because this means they can’t control students.  What if people who get involved don’t have our same commitments or priorities?  ASEN affiliated collectives are characterised by their openness to accomodate people’s interests if other people share them.  If we want student movements that are defined and shaped by students we need to preserve this feature.

When people intervene in a group in order to steer it in a direction that they think is a more correct one overall, it necessarily involves coercion.  When coercion enters the political pratice of a group in a collective space, it is time to act.  Coercion necessarily means subordinating other priorities for your own, it necessarily means ending the idea of a group that is inclusive.   Sometimes, this gets characterised in other ways, like ‘quality over quantity’, ‘what we really need is a smaller group of activists that have the “right” politics’.  For example, at Sydney University this political practice has involved often difficult discussions about forcing collective to take positions on x and y, rather than genuinely forming affinity or consensus about actions groups that can happen, instead trying to create situations of mutual exclusivity that suit their group’s priorities:

“Spending our resources and time campaigning to get the university to ‘buy green power’ will actually take us a step backwards and fighting for what really needs to  be done.”

It really means defeating and demoralising competing currents until they leave… but what if they refuse to be demoralised and defeated for not sharing their narrow view?

We don’t maintain pluralism in our movements by walking away, tail between legs, hoping that eventually those involved in coercive political practice might stop.  We maintain pluralism by declaring it, asserting the autonomy of the plural over the loud voices.  This has been the SEAC experience.  We decided not to drop out, but to start again, to create a space where we did what we came to do, to act.  We tried to reconcile, but that brought only more pain, people thought that maybe after being so strong, we could negotiate on equal footing, but really, if you reject the pluralist idea, you will always reject autonomy, so why bother.

Sydney University now has two functioning autonomous environment collectives.  There was no split.  Conventional wisdom says that splits sap away all our power as a group in the things that we did and that all of a sudden we would all be useless.  Well, both collectives have organised effectively, both have engaged new students.  Everyone has got to work in a supportive space on things they want to work on, and the environment movement benefits from that.  We can only define our success by what we actually do, not what happens in meetings.  And if you have to bifurcate to do it, don’t be scared, the only scary thing you have to lose, are your chains.