Alex Mitchell’s memoir Come the revolution (New South, ISBN
9781742233079) is an interesting reminder of a past I had hoped I had
forgotten. Mitchell, a renowned Australian journalist possibly best known these
days for his long-running political column in Sydney’s The Sun-Herald, travelled to the UK in the late 1960s. First, he
worked on Fleet Street papers, then on television. However, a commitment to
Marxist philosophy led him to join a Trotskyist group, the Socialist Labour
league, later the Workers Revolutionary Party. This organisation imploded
dramatically in 1986 when its leader, the demagogic Gerry Healy, was accused of
sexual indiscretions.
Mitchell’s experience
resonated with me. In late 1973 and 1974, I was involved in the Socialist Youth
Alliance, the youth group of the Socialist Workers League. This was a small
group of people whose Marxist philosophy purported to follow the directions set
by Leon Trotsky. The group met in their headquarters at 167 St Johns Road,
Glebe. In 1974, influenced by my then partner, who vacillated between
charismatic Catholicism and Trotskyism, I had a brief dalliance with the
Socialist Labour League in Australia, which was vehemently opposed to the
Socialist Workers League, despite both groups claiming to be Trotskyist. I’m
afraid, but not ashamed, that I exhibited a middle-class reaction to the Socialist
Labour League’s zealous practices and methodologies. I didn’t want to be roused
out of bed early on Saturdays to sell the Workers
News to disinterested train travellers. I loathed the endless political
discussions, eventually being expelled from one that was being held in some
suburb miles from where I lived. The long walk home was welcome: it was, if you
like, my long walk to freedom. I happily renounced any form of Trotskyism.
It was a small world then. A
few years later, I was living with my new partner at 184 St Johns Road. One
day, walking with friends back home along Jarocin Avenue we were engaged in bawdy repartee
with a group of young men on a first storey balcony. One of these was Stephen
Kirby, who invited me up to meet him. Despite the fact we were both in
relationships, we commenced a highly passionate affair that lasted a number of
years, even after Stephen moved back to Melbourne. When I was down there on
business in the early 1980s he would come to my hotel and we’d enjoy each
other’s company. Stephen edited Outrage and
came to Sydney when the company behind that journal took over the Sydney Star
Observer, then evolved that into the community organisation which currently
runs it and of which I was an inaugural board member. Stephen died of AIDs in
1994. He wasn’t a Trotskyist. I mention him only because I think of him every
time I am in Glebe and I also remember my brief flirtation with Trotskyism. I miss him.
Alex Mitchell did not have a
flirtation with Trotskyism. He married into the creed. I use that word because
it exemplifies the almost blind devotion to their beliefs that so many
Trotskyists have. Only they have the truth. Only they can lead. They are not
very different from evangelical Christians in their devotion to their core
beliefs. And yet, their numbers have ever been pitifully small, their influence
by and large negligible. Though Mitchell writes an exciting and often moving
account of his involvement in the activities in Britain of what became known as
the Worker’s Revolutionary Party, the truth is that party was always marginal
in the British political context, despite it recruiting high-profile members
such as Vanessa and Corin Redgrave.
I met the latter when he
came out to Australia in the late 1970s to support the activities of the Socialist
Labour League here. Though I was no longer a Trotskyist, there were elements in
the Australian Labor Party, of which I was then a member, which were in contact
with the SLL. Bob Gould, the bookshop owner, and George Petersen, the maverick
member for Wollongong in the NSW Parliament, were the leaders of a far-left ALP
faction and Corin Redgrave addressed members of that group, me being one, in a
room above Gould’s bookshop in George Street.
The site is now a tower for some capitalist enterprise on the corner of
George and Bathurst Streets. All I recall of the evening is boredom, but of
course I wasn’t very dedicated to the cause.
My recollection of the SLL
in Australia is dominated by bullying. Leadership consisted of badgering and
intimidating members. In this, the party leaders claimed to be following the
model set by Gerry Healy, the man Mitchell writes most about. I found the Healy
leadership model repugnant. Mitchell obviously had an admiration for the man,
but Healy still emerges from this book as an abrasive and unpleasant character.
This book is a fascinating
account of how an otherwise sensible man could fall under the spell of a thug
like Healy. I encountered Healy’s avatars in Australia and rejected them and
their politics. I decided that they were crazy. Mitchell spent the best part of
two decades closely involved with the work of these crazies, and he still
embraces the tenets of Trotskyism, even though he is no longer a card-carrying
WRP member. I admire his ability to tell the story of the WRP and his role
within it, but I also wonder what he might have done as a journalist if he was
not caught up in Healyism.
