What’s wrong with the NE majority’s draft party-building report?
By Marce Cameron, Sydney branch
At the very beginning of the draft party-building report adopted by the NE majority on September 26 (and reprinted in The Activist Vol 15 No. 8) there is a summary of three things that we decided to do following the DSP national committee meeting in May. Point three is that “in the lead up to our next congress we needed to re-imagine our perspective on the Socialist Alliance and the DSP. We would have to work out ‘a more realistic engagement and vision for the Socialist Alliance in the present political conditions’”. The report goes on to say that “taking up this point” comprises the “central focus” of the report.
For a report that’s supposedly centred on the need to “re-imagine” our perspectives for the Socialist Alliance, it seems to me there’s precious little re-imagining and even less in the way of proposals, ideas or initiatives to take SA forward as a “new party project” in the coming year. In fact, a careful reading of the entire report reveals something astonishing: there is not a single idea or proposal advanced for building SA in the period ahead. Not one! If comrades think I am exaggerating, go back and re-read the report and see for yourself.
If this strikes you as more than a little strange, it is. Comrades should note, first of all, that this is a departure from previous party-building (or supplementary SA-building) reports following our decision to attempt to fast-forward the SA into a new party capable of standing on its own two feet. Previous such reports had some concrete assessments and projections around such things as the state of the SA branches; progress in consolidating other SA bodies such as caucuses and working groups; the typical form, content and frequency of SA branch meetings; proposals for unifying projects such as SA’s annual national conference, the trade union fightback conference this year, last year’s federal election campaign, the drive to get more branches to make regular payments to the SA national office, and so on; and a concrete assessment of the balance of forces and the key dynamics of the SA process at the time.
This kind of assessment, based on a generalisation of the real-life Alliance-building experiences of comrades around the country, was followed by perspectives and projections for future work. Our approach has been to start with the facts: how many people are coming to branch meetings? What is the state of SA finances? Which SA caucuses are meeting, and what are they doing? On the basis of this kind of information, we’ve tried to come up with as accurate as possible a snapshot of the actually-existing SA at a given stage of its development.
Bringing together this snapshot with an assessment of the objective political openings, we’ve then decided on some fairly specific objectives, projects, proposals and ideas to take SA forward, usually centred on one or more unifying projects.
This is the correct, materialist, approach to developing our party-building perspectives: we start with the facts and we work upwards and outwards. As Lenin said, “the truth is always concrete”. But the NE majority seems to want to turn this materialist approach on its head, starting not with facts, but with theoretical abstractions. In the section of the NE majority report titled “Re-imagining SA”, there’s nothing substantial or concrete, just abstract generalities that don’t “connect” at all with the reality on the ground; mostly, there’s just the reiteration of some key points from the draft resolution. Here are just two examples of this flight into abstraction:
* “It is not enough to say that we advocate building a ‘new mass workers party in the abstract’”. This is true, but any attempt to build such a new mass workers party in the here and now has to be related to real forces and real motion. Some of our draft resolution on “The DSP and the Socialist Alliance” is simply a restatement of our strategic aims. This is important because it gives us a framework for approaching the question of what to do next in a given situation. But such a reiteration of our strategic aims cannot be held up as some kind of timeless answer to our very concrete, present day party-building dilemma.
“Can we draw the non-affiliate membership into greater activity and/or financial contribution to the SA? Our answer is yes and we will try and draw this layer into greater activity.” OK, but simply answering this question as a black-and-white “yes” or “no” doesn’t tell us anything useful at all. We need to be a little more specific: what has been our actual experience of trying to draw the non-affiliated membership into activity over the past two years of monumental effort? The report doesn’t attempt to make even a coarse generalization about this experience. Instead, it just gives a nice, comforting, simplistic and timeless answer: “Yes! We can involve people”.Lapse into idealism
What’s going on here?
Maybe it’s so obvious what we have to do to take SA forward as a new party project that nothing really needs to be said. Perhaps we all know what we’re doing, we’ve had endless reports on building SA in the past, it’s not rocket science, we just have to get on with it – we’ll work it all out as we go along. No need to theorise, just do it! Well, that might be good enough for a Nike ad, but it’s not good enough for a Leninist party like ours.
And if anything, the opposite is true. We’ve lost our way in SA because we’ve had this image inside our heads of SA still going forward towards a new party, if only more slowly than before, an image that reality has departed from.
If the NE majority were to actually present some concrete ideas or proposals for how they think we can build SA in the year ahead, then we could have a far more useful discussion about what to do next. After all, this discussion comes down to what we think we can realistically do to build the SA in the coming year based on our assessment of the objective political situation, the state of the actually-existing SA, and our judgment about the ability or otherwise of the DSP to continue to build both itself and advance another “party project” indefinitely without this new party actually materializing around us.
Perhaps the real explanation for why the NE majority report appears so abstract, so “platonic”, so strangely removed from everyday reality is that it’s far from obvious what we should try to do to advance the SA as a new party project in the year ahead because, as I argued in my earlier PCD contribution “Yes – let’s face reality”, the SA new party project has reached an impasse and we simply do not have the necessary partners for the time being to be able to break it out of this impasse, and no amount of repetition of the words “militant trade union current” can do the trick.
Having nothing concrete to present but desperate to cling onto the dream of SA continuing to advance along the road to a new party in abstraction from real forces and real motion, the comrades then drift off into a defense of abstract principles and platitudes, of words rather than deeds, and along the way they inevitably tangle up hopes and desires with reality. This, of course, has nothing to do with Leninism. Lenin started with facts: “the truth is always concrete”. Facts like the Workers Unity experience in Qld, and the ghost branch of Sydney Central.
Something for everyone
Given the absence of any concrete ideas or initiatives to build SA in the NE majority’s party-building report, this is my concern: if comrades vote for a report like this at our January congress, what will they actually be committing us to try to do with the Socialist Alliance in the year ahead?
The report leaves this so unclear that it leaves the door wide open for DSP leadership bodies, from the NE to branch executives, to interpret this party-building report in widely different ways. This, in my opinion, is a very dangerous way to proceed in trying to clarify our party-building perspectives. In the DSP, which is a revolutionary cadre organisation, our democracy is based not so much on lofty principles and platitudes, but on unity in action.
This necessary unity in action flows from the entire membership understanding what it is that the leadership is proposing that we do next. Sure, not every detail, but at least something specific. If the perspective-setting, decision-making reports that we adopt don’t do this adequately, then they can end up undermining DSP democracy.
Were the NE majority’s party-building report to be adopted by our January congress, then instead of the DSP membership being given some clear guidelines as to what we’re actually deciding to do to try to build SA in the year ahead, comrades will have to appeal to some authority – such as the comrades in the national office responsible for guiding the day to day implementation and coordination of our work across the country, or branch secretaries or organisers – to rule, in a somewhat arbitrary way, on how to “interpret” the abstractions contained in the draft party-building report in whatever way takes their fancy.
The result could be an interminable subterranean arm-wrestle over how this abstract party-building algebra should be interpreted by comrades on the ground who are confused, as they inevitably will be, about what this party-building report actually says we’re supposed to do.
This would be a departure from the principle that the party’s political line is “owned”, understood and developed by the DSP membership as a whole. On the basis of comrades understanding a clear political line that is neither self-contradictory nor so abstract that it offers insufficient practical guidance as to what to do next, we can apply a political line as a guide to our day-to-day work in the branches. The NE majority report, however, is both self-contradictory and devoid of practical proposals or even ideas for advancing what it says is our “second party”, the Socialist Alliance.
What this report should have been is a real party-building report, one that says, “OK, this is what we can realistically do to continue to build SA as our second party-project in the year ahead while continuing to strengthen the DSP and Resistance. Here are some ideas for initiatives we can take without stretching outselves too much. This is how we see the present balance of forces in SA, here is the balance sheet of what SA has achieved since our last DSP NC, here are the facts that back up this assessment.”
Instead, what we are presented with is a flight into the refuge of pristine abstraction. While there are many, very good concrete proposals about building the DSP in the period ahead, there are no such proposals – not even one – for advancing SA towards a new party.