Whilst Oz's Leninist parties are small, they do currently seem to constitute most of what organised left-of-Labor-Party politics there is (unless you count the greenies). Even the party to which I belong (the Progressive Labour Party) boasts a fair few of 'em, and good 'uns they are, too. The trouble is, their (very productive) presence does make for some differences over how to go about things and how to handle internal disagreements. We're all doing okay so far, I think, but mebbe such circumstances don't always focus those involved to best advantage (we could end up attacking or defending contending histories regarding a long-dead Russian radical when we should be acting according to the dictates of the day). You might have a point, anyway.
Cheers, Rob.
>What's interesting is why anyone should be anxiously fearful of Leninism in
>_1999_. As far as I can see, there is no Leninist party in Australia that
>has any political influence to speak of, much less power. (It might make
>sense for Angela to argue against Leninism if there were one.) Nor is
>there one in the USA & the UK. If Rob Schaap's comments on Derrida down
>under are correct, the Australian Right don't even condescend to attack
>Marxists. According to Peter Starr, the logics of "specular doubling,"
>"structural repetition," and "recuperation" serve "to reenact an exorcism
>that had largely taken place in fact, if not always in mind -- to
>'conjure' an impasse, in the full ambivalence of that verb. For in the
>context of post-May France, the image of the revolutionary (or
>revolutionary organization) as double to the powers-that-be was
>increasingly that of a ghost, made to be called forth and exorcised -- or
>rather, called forth precisely to be exorcised -- in the interest of a
>politics of transgression" (9). It's a bit like toppling the Soviet-era
>statues in ex-socialist countries, except that such an act of symbolic
>vandalism against what has vanished by ex-socialist citizens is a wee bit
>more meaningful & understandable (though it still signals the continuing
>alienation & political disorientation of workers under the newly-minted
>capitalist economy) than an anti-Leninist e-list theorizing in the
>fin-de-siecle Australia.
>
>Yoshie