Building the Democratic Socialist Party in 2006

By Marce Cameron, for NE minority

[The following is an edited counter-report and summary to the 22nd DSP Congress presented by Marce Cameron on behalf of the NE minority. The vote for the general line of the report and summary was 15 out of 60 regular delegates and 9 out of 40 consultative delegates. There were no abstentions.]

Comrades, after three years of trying to build SA as “our new party”, the DSP is weaker, politically and organisationally, than when we began the SA “turn”. We have fewer members, fewer branches, a shrunken Resistance, a smaller apparatus of full-time staff, a decline in the street distribution of Green Left Weekly linked to a drop in the average number of sellers, and we’ve suffered recurring financial crises.

Underlying this retreat of the DSP is what we’ve called the “de-cadreisation crisis”. The question is, what do we do about it?

The report we’ve just heard by Pip on behalf of the NE majority was very “organisational”. It was basically a shopping list of tasks for what to do next around sales, finances, education, etc. For the NE majority, it’s business as usual for the DSP in 2006. We’d make some organisational adjustments, which amount to a continuation of the emergency measures to strengthen the DSP adopted at the May NC, and on we’d go trying to build SA as our new party, but this time in slow-motion.

The NE majority disagree on many things, but one thing they all agree on is that they’re bitterly opposed to us renaming ourselves the Democratic Socialist Party. Changing our name back to Democratic Socialist Party would symbolize, to ourselves and to others, that we’re going to resume building the DSP as our party, “the party we build today”.

Our resolution on “The DSP and the Socialist Alliance” commits us to re-emerging the DSP as “a public revolutionary socialist organisation”.

But it leaves unanswered the question: what kind of organisation?

For the NE majority, building the DSP as “a public revolutionary socialist organisation” amounts to nothing more than the DSP running some Marxist educational seminars in our own name. That’s it. There’s to be no DSP public profile other than this and, presumably, our website. No DSP banners at demonstrations. No DSP recruitment leaflets. No comrades getting up and speaking publicly on behalf of the DSP, with the DSP’s revolutionary Marxist politics. The DSP is to remain an underground party, only presenting itself publicly as a Marxist literary association, while the “real” party we build is the non-existent, Socialist Alliance “party”.

But since the Socialist Alliance is not a party – and we make the assessment in our resolution that it cannot take any significant steps towards becoming a new party until a sustained mass upsurge of anti-neoliberal resistance has thrown up substantial new class-struggle leaders and forces with which we can unite – then there is only one party we can build today: our revolutionary Marxist party, the Democratic Socialist Party.

This political logic is inescapable, unless, of course, we – the DSP – become SA.

So the core proposal in this report is that we re-emerge the DSP from this congress as a public Marxist-Leninist party, the party we build today, tomorrow and for the foreseeable future.

Far from being just a symbolic name change, a return to building the DSP as our party is the precondition for a more or less rapid, deep-going and sustained re-cadreisation of the DSP. The key to re-cadreising the DSP is the Resistance – Venezuela-Green Left Weekly “axis”, in the framework of building the DSP openly as our party.

What is a cadre? Marxist cadres are not just good activists who sell papers, build social movements and go to lots of meetings. The NE minority agree with what Lenin wrote in What is to be done. If we want to make a revolution, we need to build a party of professional revolutionary agitators, educators and organisers. This is what we mean by “cadre”.

How we’re becoming SA

In politics, just as in life, you can get so caught up in something that before you know it, what began as a means to an end can become an end in itself.

The inevitable consequence of us persisting with our misguided attempt to build SA as “our new party” with an ever-shrinking pool of active SA partners was a creeping substitution of DSP activity for SA activity.

As our hoped-for “new party” failed to materialize around us, we began to prop up the appearance of SA-as-the-new-party in the hope that if we just held out long enough, a change in the political situation or an influx of new partners would save us from having to retreat.

We began to do more and more in the name of SA, and, more significantly, with the politics of SA. This creeping substitution, this effective “merging” of the two organisations, has now reached the point where the political and organisational distinction between the DSP and SA has become so blurred that it’s almost as if there’s now a single organization, “DSP-SA”.

This can be seen in the following:

1. The other affiliates do nothing, or very little, in SA.

2. The vast majority of the unaffiliated membership can be accurately described as paper members. This is not an insult, but a scientific description of their level of activity and commitment.

3. While many SA members are politically active in one way or another, there are only around two dozen or so unaffiliated SA members scattered across the country that we could describe as committed SA builders. Something like 90%, probably more, of the week-to-week activity of SA is carried out by the DSP alone.

4. The DSP has an absolute majority on most, if not all, SA leadership bodies from the local branches right up to the national executive. We make the decisions, and we do the lion’s share of the work.

5. Resistance aside, we do almost all of our public political work in the name of SA. While Green Left Weekly is now widely considered to be the paper of the Socialist Alliance, the DSP is invisible: the revolutionary party has gone underground.

6. We used to have this thing called the party program, which was a summary of our strategic aims and the political basis for the ongoing selection of our membership. While provisional DSP members are supposed to familiarize themselves with the “Program of the Democratic Socialist Party”, this is now a historic document referring to an organisation that no longer exists.

Taken together, this tells us that the SA today is little more than the DSP re-badged. SA is not much more than us. And the logical complement to this is becoming more and more true every day: SA is not much more than us, and we are not much more than SA.

The demon of substitution and re-badging has led us into this political dead end.

Re-cadreisation or liquidation?

When we began the “turn” to try to build SA as our new party, we faced two dangers. The first was that we could try to impose our revolutionary politics and our cadre norms of activity onto SA. This was the danger of sectarianism. The second was that we could begin to “dissolve” the DSP’s revolutionary politics and cadre norms into SA, that is, we could end up adapting to the lower political level of SA. This was the danger of opportunism.

I wonder: when was the last time you were selling Green Left on a street corner and you really tried to convince someone that we’re living in the twilight of capitalist civilisation; that we need a revolutionary change in society; that sooner or later this system is going to compel millions of people to rise up and say “fuck this, we’re not going to take it any more”, and we need to begin preparing for this revolution now, so why not join the DSP?

Why does this scenario sound so strange, so remote from our everyday experience?

We’ve got used to no longer presenting ourselves as what we are: revolutionaries. We’re politely hiding our revolutionary politics behind the mask of SA. This way, people are nice to us, which makes us think that we have more influence than we did when we presented ourselves openly as members of the Democratic Socialist Party. It’s easier being SA activists.

We’ve lost a lot of the confidence we used to have in the “old” DSP to recruit people directly to our revolutionary perspective. We don’t go around talking about a revolution the way we used to. We leave that to Resistance, and to Tracy Chapman.

Perhaps we’ve forgotten what Karl Marx and Friederich Engels wrote at the end of the Communist Manifesto: “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”.

And it was good old Charlie Marx who wrote that being determines consciousness, and this applies just as much to us as it does to everyone else.

It should come as no surprise to us as Marxists that if we’re doing almost everything in the name of SA, and consequently with the politics of SA, then we’ll begin to think less like Marxist cadres and more like SA activists, because this is what we’re becoming.

Our immersion for so long in the Socialist Alliance has blunted our revolutionary consciousness and conviction, and this goes to the heart of the de-cadreisation crisis.

By no longer building the DSP as our revolutionary party – by no longer having to convince others of our revolutionary perspective from the moment we walk outside the Resistance Centre – we’ve created a big additional pressure on ourselves to succumb, little by little, to a kind of opportunist political adaptation.

This is not just a theoretical possibility, it’s already well advanced. This was confirmed in yesterday’s discussion around the Australian Politics and Campaigns report and counter-report, in which some supporters of the NE majority argued, essentially, that workers are really only interested in the “bread and butter” issues of wages and working conditions, not the Venezuelan revolution.

This is undeniable, if we’re talking about workers in general. But the workers we’re most interested in are the same ones Lenin was after: the politically advanced workers, that relatively thin layer of workers who are interested in Venezuela’s socialist revolution because they’re interested in socialism. These are the workers we can recruit to our party, the Democratic Socialist Party.

In her Australian Politics and Campaigns report, Comrade Sue Bolton said that we need to explain to workers how the new anti-terror laws will affect them as trade unionists. But there was no mention in the report of the need to also explain to workers how these new laws target Aboriginal people, the Muslim community and anti-war activists, that is, how these anti-terror laws are an attack on the working class as a whole.

There’s a drift here towards viewing our DSP trade union work through the prism of the fightback against Howard’s WorkChoices legislation, and this drift reveals the extent to which a wing of the majority bloc has already retreated from Leninism.

Comrades, at this congress we have to decide between two roads which lead in opposite directions.

1. Either we, the DSP, can become SA through continuing with our failed attempt to build SA as “our new party” when the necessary partners to create such a new party do not exist. By doing this, we’ll kill off any possibility of SA being revived as a genuine left regroupment project.

This is the road to the liquidation of the revolutionary party and to the squandering of what’s left of the political authority and goodwill we’d built up in the first period of SA, before we began “the turn”. This is where the implementation of the NE majority’s perspective will lead us.

2. We resume building the DSP openly as our party while seeking to revive SA as a genuine alliance of socialists, a campaigning alliance – as the name suggests – for a new mass workers’ party.

This is the road to re-cadreising the DSP and rebuilding Resistance, and the only way we can rescue SA from death by DSP re-badging. This is the perspective of the NE minority.

If we choose this second road, then the first thing we have to do is “untangle” the DSP from SA, politically and organisationally, so we can get on with the task of building our revolutionary party, the Democratic Socialist Party, and our campaigning alliance for a broad class-struggle party, the Socialist Alliance, so that these two very different kinds of organisations can complement each other.

Untangling the DSP from SA

What would this mean in practice? How would we begin to untangle the DSP from SA when we get back to the branches after this congress?

I think we could use the following four guidelines.

Firstly, we’d only do things “as” SA, that is, in the name of SA and through SA bodies where this involves genuine collaboration with other SA activists and where it really does help to build SA not as the public face of the DSP, but as a campaigning alliance for a new mass workers’ party.

We have to abandon the rampant substitution and re-badging we’ve fallen into with SA. We can’t revive SA as a genuine alliance for a new mass workers’ party unless it involves us doing things together with some allies. It takes two to tango.

Secondly, we’d organize our DSP cadre primarily through DSP fractions guided by DSP branches and executives.

Having untangled the DSP from SA, we’d organise most of our public political work through our party, the Democratic Socialist Party, in the framework of the DSP’s revolutionary Marxist program and perspectives.

To do this effectively, we need DSP fractions in all of our key areas of intervention other than Resistance: our trade union work, our Venezuela solidarity work and our Socialist Alliance work.

Reviving and strengthening our DSP fractions is a key task in the year ahead. DSP fractions are our basic cadre-building “machinery”, and we can’t do without them. This is how we train up new cadres and new leaders. If we don’t have DSP trade union fractions, we won’t be training Marxist cadres in the unions and on the job. We have to draw a line in the sand: regular DSP trade union fractions are indispensable.

As an intervention by DSP members into a non-party organisation, our efforts to revive SA as a campaigning alliance for a new mass workers’ party should be coordinated through a DSP fraction of the DSP comrades assigned to lead this important area of work.

We’ll need to be prepared to take more initiatives as the Democratic Socialist Party. If what we want to do can’t be done through SA without substitution or re-badging, or if by doing it through SA we would unnecessarily restrict our ability to present our revolutionary perspective, then our party, the DSP, must take the initiative in its own name.

For example, we should approach the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society to initiate and build, together with the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance, the next Latin America solidarity conference together with CISLAC, the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity network and other sponsors.

Thirdly, we’d present and argue for our Marxist perspectives and analysis in our “mass” work in the trade unions and elsewhere.

We’d identify ourselves publicly, in Green Left Weekly and in our movement work, as DSP activists, not just SA activists. We’d no longer automatically present ourselves as speaking on behalf of SA. Our default setting would be that where possible and appropriate, we’d want to speak on behalf of the DSP, an affiliate of SA.

We want people to know who we are, and where we’re coming from. We’re not interested in hiding the DSP behind SA.

Using Green Left Weekly more effectively to win people to our revolutionary perspective is the key link in the chain, because Green Left is by far the most powerful propaganda tool in our party-building armory.

As Max proposed in his report, each DSP branch needs to organize a well-built Green Left Weekly public forum at least once a month. It’s essential that we use these forums to profile not just Green Left Weekly, but the DSP’s political analysis – what Marxists say about “x”. So each forum should feature at least one DSP speaker.

We could have done a terrific Green Left Weekly public forum on the New Orleans disaster, which deeply disturbed many people and pointed to the inner decay of US imperialism. But unfortunately, we left this to Socialist Alternative, who probably didn’t talk about Fidel’s offer of Cuban doctors or Venezuela’s distribution of cheap heating oil to low-income families in the US.

These forums need to be planned well in advance and built through saturation paste-ups, media work and targeted phone contacting of our periphery. By the end of the year we should be well on the way to establishing these forums as an institution on the left as highly regarded as Green Left Weekly, eclipsing politics in the pub, Socialist Alternative etc.

Fourthly, we’d restore the public profile of the DSP as a Marxist-Leninist party.

Here, I should clarify what we mean when we say that we should have a DSP banner or two, and perhaps a few DSP placards, at demonstrations. What does this mean? It means just this, and nothing more. It does not mean having no SA banners or placards. As an alliance, SA needs its own profile at demonstrations, and given the present state of SA, we’re the only ones likely to take responsibility for this.

Picture a vibrant SA contingent thundering down the street led by a loud, youthful Resistance “bloc”, and somewhere in the middle, a few DSP placards and a nice DSP banner with our website among a forest of red-and-white SA placards. What’s so outrageous about this?

We should produce an updated version of our one-time best-seller, the little purple booklet What is the DSP?

We should produce some two-or three-colour, thematic DSP profile posters for general use, perhaps with one theme linking our vision of a socialist Australia with the socialist revolution in Venezuela. How about: “Revolution in Venezuela – People Power Can Change the World – Join the Democratic Socialist Party!”

We should revamp our DSP and Marxist education websites, and try to direct more traffic from the Green Left website to these sites.

We should print an attractive, glossy DSP recruitment leaflet for general use. As we become better known again as a party in our own right, and the party “behind” SA, we can expect a steady trickle of applications to join. We don’t want any potential DSP recruits falling into the hands of Socialist Alternative or the ISO.

We should produce a line of DSP merchandise – badges, t-shirts, banners, caps…and that great Aussie essential, a stubby holder.

We should revive an old tradition from the 1990s, the annual Jim Percy memorial lectures, held in November.

Before going on to look at some specific tasks in relation to our various areas of work, let me just recap the main points in this section of the report on “untangling” the DSP from SA and building the DSP openly as our party, because this sets the framework for what follows:

Venezuelan revolution

Comrades, the opening of the socialist revolution in Venezuela is simply huge. It’s the kind of decisive breakthrough we were vaguely hoping for throughout the difficult years of the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Venezuela is so much bigger, so much more inspiring, than anything we would have dreamed of even just a few years ago. When the SA was launched in 2001, a big new socialist revolution seemed a long way off, even in Latin America.

Venezuela’s socialist revolution is unfolding against the backdrop of a continental revolt against neoliberalism in Latin America and a renaissance of the Cuban Revolution, as Cuba begins to push back the concessions to capitalism and emerge from the Special Period with its banners held high.

The NE minority is proposing that Venezuela solidarity, alongside and closely linked with the rebuilding of Resistance, should be a DSP party-building priority in the year ahead.

Last year, Venezuela solidarity was pretty much left to Resistance. From now on, it must involve the entire DSP membership and be taken systematically into all of our areas of work, without exception.

There are two aspects of our Venezuela solidarity work: building a broad solidarity movement and using the inspiration of this revolution to recruit to Resistance and the DSP.

We must carry out this work openly as DSP members, in the framework of the DSP’s revolutionary Marxist politics. It has to be led by experienced DSP leaders in the branches and in the national office, not just comrades assigned to Resistance.

The public recognition of the outstanding role of the Democratic Socialist Party in building solidarity with Venezuela’s socialist revolution by comrades like Venezuelan charge d’affaires Nelson Davila is priceless, but for this to flow on to recruitment to the DSP our revolutionary party must come out from the shadows.

Our first solidarity brigade was a success, a bold and inspiring initiative which gave nearly 60 comrades, mostly DSP and Resistance members, a first-hand feel for this young and turbulent revolution.

We do need to draw a thorough balance sheet of the whole experience of the brigade. This is beyond the scope of this report, but I think we can draw some basic lessons from this experience.

Our Venezuela brigades can be wonderful cadre-building experience, and can help to build the solidarity movement back home, but only if these brigades are extremely well organized, if the necessary post-brigade follow-up is done properly, and only if they’re done in the right DSP political framework, that is, prioritizing cadre-building, Resistance and Venezuela solidarity.

It’s clear from the experience of the first brigade that we need much more thorough and systematic political preparation, months in advance, for all brigade participants. How much comrades get out of the brigades is closely linked to this political preparation, to how deeply comrades have absorbed our Marxist understanding of this and other socialist revolutions before the plane lands in Caracas.

Otherwise, comrades can come away with a very superficial understanding of what they’ve experienced, and this kind of political tourism can even be a negative experience, with comrades coming back more confused and less committed to making the revolution here.

We need to improve the organisation of the brigades themselves, which must to be organised for the benefit of our cadre first and foremost. Key here is experienced DSP leaders heading up the various micro-brigades, making sure all comrades are having the best and the most political experience possible.

Many comrades who visit Venezuela also pop over to Cuba. But again, to make the most of this experience, these trips to Cuba should be seen as part of the brigade experience, and not just a stop-over for cigars and salsa music. We need well planned and well organized Cuba sub-brigades, drawing on our close relations with the Communist Party of Cuba. Resistance needs to revive its relations with the Union of Young Communists, and we should look at touring a UJC leader in early 2007.

Finally, we need a much more systematic approach to the post-brigade follow up. The brigades should inspire comrades to make a greater commitment to the DSP when they return, but this needs to be approached consciously by DSP organisers and leaderships in the branches.

As well as stepping up our Venezuela solidarity work in the year ahead, we also need to project a modest amount of solidarity with the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Green Left Weekly

I now want to turn to Green Left Weekly.

Green Left Weekly needs to be seen as the “scaffolding” around which we build our party, Resistance, the SA and our other interventions. It’s the scaffolding for all our various areas of intervention, but it has to be first and foremost the scaffolding around which we build our party, the DSP.

In his PCD contribution in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 18 Comrade Barry Healy says that we should dumb-down Green Left Weekly to make it more understandable to “ordinary” workers.

This is precisely what Lenin argued against so forcefully in his polemic with the “economists”, the opportunist trend in the Russian socialist movement, in his pamphlet What is to be done? – the same little pamphlet in which we find Lenin’s famous quote about the paper being the “scaffolding” for building the revolutionary party.

Lenin says that the party press must orient to the most conscious layer of the working class, the working class vanguard, and not the more politically backward, “average” workers.

We need to use the paper in the way that Lenin described in What is to be done, as an all-round propagandist, agitator and organiser.

This could be done in a popular and engaging way, perhaps thematically, with feature articles and centre spreads exploring everything from land reform and urban organic farming to the liberation of women, the state and revolution, planning and the market, the armed forces and revolution, socialism and the ecological crisis, and socialism and “human nature”.

The distribution of Green Left Weekly cannot be seen as just another task. A sustained recovery of the street distribution of the paper is closely linked to our overall progress in re-cadreising the DSP. At the same time, Green Left Weekly is absolutely central to the process of re-cadreisation and renewal.

The graph of our national sales participation is crystal clear: the sharp decline in GLW participation coincided with the beginning of our “turn” to build SA as “our new party”, which we began to implement unofficially from early 2003. Yes, correlation does not prove causation, but de-cadreisation as a consequence of our “turn” to build SA as “our new party” is the only explanation for this sharp decline which is consistent with the facts.

In her PCD contribution in The Activist Volume 15 No. 19, Comrade Sarah Stephen points out that “our decline in sales was never simply a problem of SA taking up too much of our time…it’s not primarily an organisational problem but a political one.

“Our drop in GLW distribution is not a product of a lower sales rate…it’s primarily a problem of fewer DSP comrades selling for fewer hours, which is a symptom of the decadreisation and the plain exhaustion of propping up a second party in defiance of the objective conditions.

“A layer of DSP comrades”, she wrote, “have become politically disengaged, disoriented or demoralized”. I think Comrade Sarah has hit the nail on the head: our confidence and our commitment to use Green Left Weekly as a party-building tool is a measure of our morale as revolutionaries.

Compared with 2004, our average national street distribution in 2005 has stabilized, but it’s yet to recover. Our decision at the May NC to implement a series of emergency measures to strengthen the DSP did help us to not fall any further, despite the exodus of the brigadistas in July and August.

But three very important points need to be underlined here.

Firstly, the post-May NC emergency measures we implemented largely at the expense of SA. In our two biggest branches, Sydney and Melbourne, we almost stopped building SA altogether.

Secondly, our street sales were boosted by sharp spikes in the sales rate, and the enthusiasm of our core sellers for getting out with the paper, around the three big trade union mobilisations on June 30/July 1, August 8 and November 15.

Like the “easy” sales in the first few months after the imperialist invasion of Iraq, these spikes masked the underlying weakness: there has been no recovery of our sales participation, which continued to decline slightly over 2005.

In 2006, we have to make reading, writing for and helping distribute the paper at the centre of building the DSP as our party and our efforts to re-cadreise the DSP.

We need to re-win comrades to taking seriously our cadre norms of distribution, with the leadership leading by example, highlighting the outstanding efforts and helping all comrades to prioritise making their norms.

We should do two sales blitzes this year, one timed to maximize Resistance’s O’Week splash on campus and another one towards the end of the year. Blitzes are useful if they help us to refocus on Green Left distribution and allow us to maximise some political opening.

But we can’t rely on blitzes as quick-fixes, as emergency organizational measures in place of the patient political motivation and better organisation of our cadre throughout the year which is the only thing that will lift sales and participation on a sustainable basis.

We need to launch a campaign running throughout 2006 to gradually lift our weekly national sales participation to at least 180 sellers, about what it was when we began the “turn” to SA at the beginning of 2003.

Our medium-term goal, over the next two years, should be to stabilise DSP participation at two thirds or more of the membership. Achieving this would be a very strong indicator of our success in re-cadreising and renewing the DSP.

We need systematic attention to training confident new sellers, in Resistance but also in the DSP.

We need to strengthen the GLW committees in the branches, involving at least one Resistance exec member and using this team to train up new sales organisers in a thoroughly political approach to GLW distribution.

This report proposes that we have DSP branch meetings at least twice monthly, and some branches may want to experiment with our pre-SA “turn” rhythm of weekly branch meetings.

We need to use our DSP branch meetings to help us re-focus politically on the Green Left Weekly project. One idea is to have a brief political report on the feature article or cover story of the current issue, to politically orient us to campaigning with the paper.

Finally, we need systematic attention to increasing our subscription base. Let’s see if we can break through this year and stabilise our national subs base at 1500, a 50% increase. This will require a sustained effort by the branches from January through to December.

Marxist education

In 2006, we need to dramatically step up our Marxist education in all forms. We’ll be immersing ourselves in our theory, going back to the classics, studying history and the rich experiences of the revolutionary movement. As Comrade Fidel never tires of reminding us, a socialist revolution is born of culture and ideas, and the same could be said of a Leninist party.

The Marxist method and outlook doesn’t emerge spontaneously on the basis of practical experience alone. It has to be patiently, painstakingly and consciously assimilated until it has penetrated to the very core of our political being. Becoming a Marxist cadre involves an internal revolution – a revolution, as it were, inside our heads.

A high level of political agreement underpins the unity in action which makes even a small Leninist party so potent in comparison to its tiny numerical weight in society. A Leninist party is a party of action, but it’s also a powerful collective thinking machine.

Since we began the “turn” to build SA as “our new party”, a certain bias has crept in. We’ve drifted into emphasising the “party of action” over the “collective thinking machine”. It’s not just that we were so busy trying to turn SA into a new party that we had little time for reading, thinking and the structured, in-depth study of Marxism organised through the DSP.

In our attempt to fast-forward SA into becoming a new party we put a premium on action, on practical initiatives to get the thing up and running and able to stand on its own two feet.

As a consequence, we deprioritised Marxist education and collective political discussion in the DSP. Education classes, and more generally the in-depth study of Marxism, are usually the first things to fall by the wayside in the daily scramble to get things done. This can’t go on, and we need to draw some lines in the sand.

First, some general considerations. Our education must be intensive, ongoing and strive to involve all DSP members, not just provisional members.

We need to familiarise comrades with the Marxist classics, starting with our wonderful collection of Resistance Books titles. Perhaps the starting point could be a thorough study of the Communist Manifesto, followed by Lenin’s What is to be done? and The State and Revolution.

We need comrades to have a more in-depth understanding of the Russian, Cuban, Vietnamese and Venezuelan revolutions. As a first step, we should design a new introductory class series on the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions, aimed at all DSP and Resistance comrades but especially as preparation for future waves of brigadistas. This series could draw on the abundance of first-hand experience of the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions which we’re steadily accumulating.

Now to some other specific proposals:

1. We should expand the twice yearly, 3-week intensive Marxist theory schools run by Comrade Doug Lorimer so that more comrades can participate, with more facilitators. We should also make sure each branch runs a mini-school sometime during the year, with the national office making available experienced party leaders to run them.

2. We should institutionalise twice-yearly regional cadre camps with two streams: an introductory stream for newer Resistance members and a more advanced stream for DSP members. The camps would be an important component of our cadre education program, as well as helping consolidate a new layer of Resistance activists and allowing for the kind of social-political bonding that happens best around a campfire.

3. With at least two DSP branch meetings held every month, there will be plenty of scope for more Marxist educational content in branch meetings, and we should make sure that at least every second DSP meeting has a decent Marxist educational talk.

4. Branches should, where possible, experiment with monthly, publicly-advertised Marxist half-day seminars, like the very popular Sunday series comrades Jorge Jorquera and Iggy Kim ran in Sydney in 2004. Certainly we can do these in the bigger branches. These seminars can be a form of political outreach and a component of our more intensive and varied cadre education program.

5. We need to make sure that all provisional members get the opportunity to complete both the Introduction to Marxism and the DSP Program series before they join as provisional members, or in the provisional membership period. These class series are an essential orientation to the DSP. We propose that we add a new class to the DSP program series – a brief history of the DSP, our origins and the key turning-points in our party-building experience.

6. We need to politically prioritise and properly resource our Marxist education program in the branches. We should try to generalize the positive experience of Melbourne’s dynamic DSP education and recruitment committee.

Publications

Our publications program is very impressive, but it’s chronically under-utilised as a cadre-building institution.

Re-focusing on Marxist education in the branches should stimulate a thirst for comrades buying and reading our literature, but we need to actively promote and encourage this. In some branches we need to better integrate our bookshops with everything else we’re doing, and especially with our education program.

While we need to increase our revenue from literature sales via the website and to the general public, our primary “market” needs to be our own comrades. Branch education committees should carry out a survey early in the new year to find out how many comrades are actually buying and reading our publications.

Coming out of this congress, we should make sure all comrades have a copy of, and are reading or re-reading, The Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, Organisational Principles and Methods of the DSP and the DSP constitution.

We should continue with our ambitious publications program. In 2006, a number of new titles are already in the pipeline, including the second volume of Comrade John Percy’s DSP history.

We should re-affirm the need to continue with Links magazine, our international journal of socialist renewal. In 2005, we only managed to produce two issues of Links. This year, we should aim to get back on track with three issues.

Finances and fundraising

Since we began the SA “turn” we’ve suffered three serious financial crises. In 2003 our national deficit hit $40,000; in 2004, $60,000; and by mid-2005 it had reached a perilous $100,000. For a thorough understanding of the political roots of this corrosion of the DSP’s financial strength, I urge comrades to read comrades Jon L and Marcus P’s excellent PCD contributions on finances in The Activist.

In 2006 we have to strengthen our financial base so we can keep Resistance Centres open, put on more full-time organisers and national office staff, and help Resistance get back on its feet.

We are privileged to live in one of the richest countries in the world, a country dripping in wealth wrung from the super-exploitation of working people here and our brothers and sisters in the Third World. Capitalist ideology bombards us with the selfish and alienated idea that private enrichment, the grossly unequal distribution of wealth and consumerism that destroys the Earth is what life is all about. Happiness, we’re told, must be purchased with a credit card.

The strength and stability of our financial base is intimately linked to cadre-building. Comrades’ confidence in the revolutionary perspective and our Leninist party project is, and has always been, the cornerstone of party finances. This solid foundation, which has made possible every one of the many outstanding achievements of our party, is the regular, voluntary financial contributions from DSP members: our pledge base.

The direct financial contributions of DSP members financed 39% of our national operating budget in 2004. On top of this, $180,000 of branch operating budgets came from comrades’ pledges. These figures underscore the importance of our pledge base.

The outstanding success story of our emergency measures to strengthen the DSP since the May NC was the 10-week public emergency appeal to save Green Left Weekly.

As national finances officer Marcus P. wrote in The Activist No. 7, this was “our single greatest financial victory in recent years. The target was smashed, this shows our reserve of strength…it’s quite intoxicating… Hundreds of Green Left Weekly supporters have revealed their commitment through donations, more proof of Green Left Weekly‘s authority and relevance.”

But this was only a quick-fix, a once-off cry for help that cannot be repeated. Ahead of us is the hard work of rebuilding our pledge base. This has begun, with Sydney branch leading the way with a solid pledge campaign. There is still some slack to be taken up in the branches, but beyond this, the further recovery of our pledge base is linked to our overall success in re-cadreising the DSP, that is, our efforts to deepen the political consciousness, commitment and the fighting spirit of our cadre.

We need a thoroughly collective and political approach, without moralising, gimmicks or hype. If we’re asking comrades to pledge an extra $5 a week, then let’s motivate it politically, what we can do with this money to build the DSP, not how many cups of coffee or beers it could purchase. Financial commitment won on this ground of sober political conviction will endure.

Since the national pledge campaign began at the beginning of October, our national branch pledge base has increased by a modest $185 to $5573. Our immediate goal should be to increase our national weekly pledge base to $6000, back where it was in August 2002 before we began the SA “turn”. This is equivalent to an average pledge increase of just $1.90 a week per comrade.

Fundraising shortfalls contributed to the 2005 financial crisis. Our fundraising efforts are closely linked to success in building up our DSP periphery. Events such as dinners, film screenings and big public meetings attract and build this periphery of contacts and supporters. A regularly updated DSP contacts database is the essential tool here.

We need strong fighting fund committees in the branches to plan and organise our schedule of fighting fund events, training up a new layer of comrades in this vital political work.

A public Green Left Weekly appeal – but not another “emergency” appeal – run through Green Left Weekly throughout the year is a good idea. And let’s talk to these people about the real party behind Green Left – the Democratic Socialist Party. The steady and sustained recovery of our Green Left street distribution will also help our financial recovery.

Finally, a conscious and political approach to our finances must permeate the life of our branches. Accountability is important. Branch budgets must be “owned” by the membership, with regular finance reports and updates to branch meetings. Our finance reports must bring us down to earth, clarify our priorities and propel us forward.

Creating and sustaining cadre

Comrades, at the heart of the NE minority’s party-building perspective is the need to prioritise cadre-building.

Marxist cadres are created through the collective struggle to build a Leninist party, a centralised party of conscious and committed revolutionaries. This is the ABC of Leninism.

Cadres are the indispensable bridge to any party regroupment project involving broader forces moving to the left, from which a bigger Marxist cadre party can eventually emerge.

It’s not enough to ask comrades to hand over more money, sell more papers and trudge along to yet another SA branch meeting where we dumb down our politics to the level of SA for the benefit of just one or a few SA members. That’s a recipe for further de-cadreisation, not re-cadreisation.

And we won’t re-cadreise the DSP if we’re asking comrades to build “DSP Lite”, the DSP re-badged as SA, a pale imitation of the real thing.

Are we promising miracles? A quick-fix?

No. Building a Leninist party is never going to be easy. And building such a party here, in this relatively stable, affluent corner of the imperialist heartland presents its own daunting and formidable challenges.

As Che Guevara once said, cadres, like Rome, are not built in a day. We know it takes years and years of patient and persistent effort to turn rough diamonds into cadre, and sustain them as cadre.

Cadre-building means developing every comrade’s political confidence and abilities. It means all comrades having the time and headspace to contribute to being part of our collective thinking machine as Marxist cadres, and not as “the rowers in the galley”.

It means building strong teams; a conscious approach to developing women leaders; making sure every comrade feels that their contribution is valued; and much, much more.

This is nothing new for us: our own rich history and traditions tell us how to do this, and do it well.

To borrow a concept from the capitalist world, for the past three years we’ve been living on our “inheritance”, on our historic accumulation of cadre strength.

We can’t continue to try to build SA into a new party, even gradually. This is not pessimism, it’s realism. We’ve tried this, and failed: it simply can’t be done. Faced with the ravages of de-cadreisation, we have to “invest” once more in our cadre.

This requires a deepening and consolidation of the turn we began at the May NC, when we decided on eight emergency measures to strengthen the DSP. We need not just organisational adjustments, but a new party-building perspective to take us forward in the year ahead. We need to return to building the DSP as our party, and implement the main proposals outlined in this counter-report.

But we also need something else, something which can be summed up in a single word: comradeship.

We need to consciously cultivate that revolutionary comradeship, that sense of collectivism, that fearlessness and that wonderful generosity of spirit which was so abundant in the “old” DSP.

A party spirit which sustains us through the ups and downs of the struggle, which takes from each of us all that we are capable of giving and which, in return, gives us something infinitely precious and beautiful: a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse, of the communist future of humanity.

Summary

Comrades, at the heart of the NE minority’s party building perspective is the recognition of two things. Firstly, the reality of the actually-existing Socialist Alliance, the real SA, not the one we might have hoped for or imagined it to be. Secondly, the reality of the DSP, the state of our cadre, of Resistance, our finances, Green Left Weekly and so on.

The reality of SA is that after an initial wave of interest and enthusiasm from a modestly broad layer of unaffiliated people who identify themselves as socialists, the general trajectory of SA has been a decline, such that at the beginning of this year there are less than 30 people across the country who we could say are committed SA builders. This is the result of more than three years of monumental effort to create a new party.

Comrades, this perspective has failed. As it says in our draft resolution, the SA cannot take a significant step towards becoming a new mass workers’ party until there has been a sustained upsurge of mass working class resistance that throws up substantial new class-struggle leaders and forces with which we can unite to take forward such a new party project.

We are a party, comrades. But we don’t present ourselves publicly as what we are, a Marxist-Leninist party. We’ve re-badged ourselves as SA.

By and large, SA is us. Yes, in every branch there’s a small handful of committed, unaffiliated members who we desperately try to get to come along to branch meetings. But even in the better cities, such as Brisbane, we’ve had to give up on SA branches, we’ve been in retreat.

We have retreated as the DSP. We used to have a DSP branch in Darwin. We were beginning to build towards a branch in Launceston. We lost the branch in Rockhampton. We’re probably going to lose the DSP branch in Newcastle.

Resistance has shrunken down, it’s smaller than at any other time in our history, since the early days. There was a time in the mid-1990s when Resistance was selling half the Green Left Weekly bundle. The reason why more people are joining the DSP from SA than from Resistance is because Resistance is tiny. We have not put the time and energy into training revolutionary cadres through prioritizing building Resistance, which we’d done throughout our history up to this point in time.

Denial of reality is leading comrades from the majority to not confront the seriousness of this de-cadreisation crisis which we have barely begun to turn around, to not contemplate taking the measures which will really sustainably and in a deep way rebuild the DSP.

Pursuing this mistaken political line is leading to a political retreat. Now, Comrade Mick Bull got up yesterday and said that we’re not going to recruit lots of people to the DSP on the basis of Venezuela, through building solidarity with this new socialist revolution.

Not a single comrade from the NE majority got up to explain that no, what Mick Bull is saying is beside the point, it’s bullshit.

We’re interested, primarily, in recruiting to our party, the DSP, those workers who have the most advanced political consciousness, those who are radicalizing around Venezuela and drawing the links and the connections. That’s what we should be doing as Leninists.

And I think the failure of the majority leadership to take up any of the arguments put forward by comrades which are, frankly, an anti-Leninist perspective for party building, either indicates that the majority leadership just doesn’t want to take them up because they don’t want to contradict anything that majority supporters say – in which case, it’s politically irresponsible – or that comrades actually agree with it, they think that now something fundamental has changed because of the Socialist Alliance, so we don’t need the same strategy we used to have, the strategy of building a publicly functioning Marxist Leninist party to educate and train professional Marxist revolutionary cadres.

What’s changed, comrades? We’re not in a situation like the US Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s, entering and leading a broad, living, mass socialist formation with substantially bigger forces outside of ourselves. We’re talking about re-badging ourselves to become the public face of a new party that doesn’t exist! How absurd is that? It’s bizarre.

Now, to save the SA as an alliance – which means collaboration around campaign opportunities, defence of the unions, refugee rights, an alliance that has a political purpose, politically advocating and seeking to take steps, where possible, towards a new mass workers’ party – we have to stop pretending that we are the SA.

We’re the majority on almost every SA leadership body. We can do whatever we like, no one is going to stop us. The little socialist groups have walked off, they can see what’s happening. Now, if we want to build this as a campaigning alliance we need to do work with allies. We need to use the Alliance as a genuine united front organisation of socialists advocating the need for a mass political break with the Labor Party.

Comrades have talked about education, that the answer to de-cadreisation is that we have to do more Marxist education classes.

But if over here, we’re doing this Marxist education while over there, we’re doing our public political work in the framework of an organisation that does not have our revolutionary Marxist politics, then we’re not going to be training Marxist cadres effectively.

Why? Because Marxist cadres are not just trained, on the one hand, by selling papers and going along to SA meetings and doing good trade union work and, on the other hand, by assimilating Marxism on a theoretical level.

There’s a link missing here, and this link is our cadres practically building a Leninist party, and being organised through the DSP on this basis. It’s in the doing. We’re not against doing things. We want to do something: we want to build a Leninist party.

That’s how we create cadre, by taking comrades through DSP fractions where we discuss, for example, how we intervene in the trade unions as Marxist cadre. Of course, we’re also building SA, there’s a need for that collaboration and hence the need for SA trade union caucuses.

But our primary goal, and the shift we have to make, is to prioritise building cadre. That’s the essence of our line, that’s what we’re putting forward, and that’s not what the NE majority are putting forward.

Re-cadreisation will happen most effectively if we prioritise building Marxist cadres, which means we have to prioritise building our party, the Democratic Socialist Party.