Youth work of the DSP
By Zoe Kenny, for NE minority
[The following is an edited version of the counter-report and summary to the 22nd DSP Congress presented by Zoe Kenny 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.]
As comrades would know I presented the youth work report to the DSP NC in October, which the minority platform supporters still stand behind. This report cannot repeat the detail of that report. Instead I will put forward the minority’s perspectives on the key projections for Resistance but also take up several points made in Comrade Stuart Munckton’s outline for the DSP youth work report presented to the December 13 DSP national executive and which the NE minority disagree with.
The outline that Stuart presented to the NE represents a new line for our youth work. Essentially, it downplayed the role of Venezuela solidarity as a tool for rebuilding Resistance and introduces a new campaign, the “young workers rights” campaign as being the “decisive” means for Resistance to rebuild.
The main point that indicates a new level of prioritisation of this campaign is the agreement by Stuart (indicated by his inclusion of this point), and subsequently by the NE majority, with a line in Comrade Brianna Pike’s PCD article, “Running the young workers issue as a campaign and how do we continue to grow and strengthen Resistance?” (The Activist, Vol. 15, No.26), under the section headed “How do we rebuild Resistance?” Brianna writes that “In the next period it will be decisive that Resistance play a leading role in the fight-back against the Howard governments attacks on workers rights”.
It would seem that this means that the most important thing for rebuilding Resistance in 2006 is to “run the young workers issue as a campaign” in order to rebuild Resistance, and although the PCD is ostensibly discussing campaign options for Melbourne, it also states that “it (the young workers campaign) can probably be generalised around the country”. There is also another formulation, further on in the PCD article, which is even more revealing of this new line, “get people into Res[istance] through the young workers stuff [campaign] and recruit and inspire them to revolution through Venezuela”.
This is certainly not the line of the youth work report adopted at the October DSP NC, which in relation to Venezuela states that we are aiming to “draw in a new generation of youth through the inspiration of the Bolivarian revolution currently taking place in Venezuela” which is the “centrepiece of the strategy for rebuilding Resistance” and in relation to the young workers campaign that “a key priority will be continuing to test the ‘young workers rights’ campaign”. Nowhere does it state that this is going to be a “decisive” campaign for Resistance. The “decisive” campaign is actually stated as being Venezuela solidarity.
Why a new line?
The majority’s perspectives for youth are conditioned by the general over-estimation and exaggeration of the objective political situation in Australia, in particular of the strength of the trade union “militant minority” and their ability to decisively influence ACTU strategy for the campaign against the IR laws.
Throughout the PCD period the main argument of the majority has been that, essentially, we should continue on with the same line adopted at the 21st Congress of the DSP; attempting to build Socialist Alliance (SA) as our new party and for the DSP to remain an internal tendency of SA.
The main justification for the continuation of this mistaken line is the majority’s argument that because there is an “emergent mass movement” against the IR laws just around the corner, that this will provide SA with new partners and new life. The minority have been relentlessly portrayed as “pessimistic”, “demoralised” and of wanting to “give up the fight” because we have provided a more sober assessment of the potential of the fightback campaign, i.e. that once the laws went through the campaign would likely be characterised by “spot-fire” defensive struggles on specific workplaces, unions or sectors, rather than an escalating series of mass mobilisations.
In fact it is now clear that the ACTU is unlikely to call a national mobilisation until at least mid-year and if it does this mobilisation will most likely take the form of a Sunday picnic that will allow families to attend. In fact this more subdued form of action was even recommended by one of the militant trade union leaders. However, the perspectives set out by Stuart are still based on this exaggeration of the Australian political situation. It is from this mistaken position that the outline proceeded.
Venezuela turn
This assessment of the Australian political situation differs substantially from the assessment made at the November 2004 DSP NC, where Peter Boyle in his party-building report proposed the most important change in the DSP’s line for youth work for several years: the “Venezuela turn”.
The report set Resistance on a path of rebuilding through harnessing the inspiration of the Venezuelan Bolivarian revolution. As the report stated “we proposed a very conscious turn in our youth work towards building solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution”. The reasons for this: “Australia is one of the most stable, wealthy and conservative capitalist countries in the world. At this stage, only a small minority in our country are won to revolutionary consciousness and usually they begin understanding the necessity for and dynamics of revolutionary politics by studying and actively supporting revolutionary mass movements in other countries. Revolutionary example is all the more important when the prevailing working class mood is one of accommodation, retreat or defeat”.
But, the majority have been arguing throughout the entire PCD period that it is possible that this “mood of accommodation, retreat or defeat” is substantially changing and if this is their argument then a change of line for youth work is at least consistent with this.
What will the consequences of this new line be?
The most obvious danger of this mistaken new line is that the majority will attempt to make Resistance substitute for a broader movement, by running the young workers rights campaign “with the aim of this ‘campaign’ becoming a broader movement”, as Brianna writes in her PCD article.
She goes on to propose a series of measures that, if implemented, would divert resources away from Venezuela solidarity. For example, Brianna lists the following proposals for Resistance to do for the young workers rights campaign: formulate a series of slogans and demands for the campaign, actions around O-Week, lecture-bashing, student response list, sign-on statement, leaflets, A-frame posters, profile posters, kits, declarations of disobedience, high school zines etc.
In terms of organisational proposals, she proposes: media work, “Supersize My Pay” fractions or working groups or even a separate organisation (which is motivated as possibly helping Resistance to “have more of an in to do networking with different organisations, and it could mean that there is more of a chance to actually provoke some of these organisations to come behind the campaign”), and an “all-student walk-out against the IR laws”, which is proposed, and then repeated in Stuart’s outline, despite the fact that there is no firm date for any national mobilisation yet. These proposals go far beyond the scope of both the October DSP NC Youth Work report and the Australian political situation report at the Resistance national conference, which set out a perspective of “continu(ing) to test out the young workers rights campaign” and strongly orienting to the real struggles that occur, not leading an entire campaign on our own.
Why can’t Resistance do this campaign and run a serious Venezuela solidarity campaign at the same time?
One of the key reasons is that Resistance is far too weak. Financial membership of Resistance is approximately 70 members, Resistance currently only operates out of eight cities, and our campus base is extremely weak with only about 30 comrades active on campus and no real campus clubs. This weakness has led to consistently low GLW sales all year. The 2005 Resistance national conference was also the smallest since the early ‘70s. Although there are positive signs of a political strengthening due to the Venezuela solidarity campaign, this basic, worrying fact cannot be ignored.
I was asked to report on whether Resistance would be able to expand in 2006 relaunching regional branches, unfortunately it has to be said that this is well and truly off the agenda. Only two Resistance leaders were available for transfer in 2006 (note: one more comrade volunteered to transfer at the Congress); we are basically holding onto the branches we have currently, and several of these branches, plus much of the current national leadership, are being held up by comrades already at or above the cut-off age for Resistance.
But hasn’t Resistance initiated broader campaigns on its own before like Books Not Bombs? Why not now?
It’s true that Resistance has been able to leap over our tiny size and influence and mobilise hundreds and even thousands of youth in the name of Resistance, i.e. the 19954 anti-nuclear testing protests, the 1998 anti-Hanson anti-racism high school walk-outs. Sometimes we’ve had large-scale mobilisations in the name of broader united fronts such as the 2003 Books Not Bombs high school walk-outs. But this has only been under very special circumstances where there is a widespread sentiment of moral outrage amongst a substantial layer of youth that translates into a sentiment for immediate action, especially among high school students. When other, more conservative political forces (ALP, Greens, Democrats) fail to mobilise people, Resistance can sometimes be in a position to spark a broader response, exploiting a fleeting window of opportunity to stir things up.
Whilst it’s true that the ACTU-led campaign has not specifically mobilised or attempted to relate to young workers in this campaign, which could lead to the conclusion that there is the same kind of opening as was the case with the 2003 anti-war movement, the key difference this time is that there is not the same sharp sentiment amongst young people as there was in the above-mentioned campaigns.
Yes, we can continue to test out the sentiment, but right now, there is no evidence whatsoever that there exists a moral outrage sentiment among young people around this issue. The “Up Yours Howard” contingents (even the largest, Perth’s 80-100) that Resistance called on November 15 were tiny in comparison to the Books Not Bombs or the anti-Hanson walk-outs which mobilised young people in their tens of thousands.
In fact, a Sydney newspaper published a poll last year that showed that young people are more likely to be taken in by Howard’s propaganda. This makes sense because young people have less experience being exploited in the workforce, they’re concentrated in less unionised areas of the workforce and they also have less experience of what a real union can do and what collective action by workers can achieve. Importantly there are no spontaneous struggles breaking out amongst young people around Australian Workplace Agreements or super-exploitation via youth wages. There is not a single example that the majority can point to.
What about the successful ‘Unite’ campaign in New Zealand?
Some comrades might be thinking that some of the inspiring examples that we’re hearing about from the “Unite” campaign in New Zealand are something that we can emulate here.
However, the situation is very different from New Zealand where workplaces are actually de-regulated. In contrast, in Australia the WorkChoices legislation represents a massive increase of regulation, making it harder to enter workplaces.
Also, the people leading the “Unite” campaign are long-term experienced unionists, and they also have a situation where most of the unions have literally been destroyed over the years meaning that workers are looking for a vehicle, unlike in Australia where the trade unions still have a fairly strong hold over around a quarter of the workforce. We need to be clear. Resistance cannot substitute for a union. We cannot organise young workers in their workplace. We can interest them in our actions and propaganda, but we then need to draw them further into Resistance. The inspiration of the Venezuelan revolution will be important in helping this process. Therefore a “Unite” style campaign is not possible at this stage.
So how should Resistance relate to these struggles?
Resistance should definitely relate very strongly to the fight-back against the IR laws, but we have to be clear. The most important thing is for Resistance to relate to the real struggles that occur – the strikes, pickets and national or state days of action, collecting money, visiting the picket lines, and, writing articles about these struggles. It will be very important for Resistance to strongly orient to mass mobilisations and national days of action, campaigning in the lead up and initiating and building young worker and student contingents or walk-outs or student strikes if these seem viable.
We can campaign around this issue on campus. We should support the NTEU in their industrial negotiations, or, being part of the struggle to defend the NTEU’s right to be allowed to have space on campus (witness recent struggles in Newcastle and other universities). We can connect the anti-VSU campaign with the campaign against WorkChoices; by arguing for “No AWAs”, “repeal the anti-union legislation” and “defend unions”, to be included in demands. We can also argue for anti-VSU contingents at IR rallies to include young workers and high-school students. We can organise joint SA/Resistance/GLW “fight-back” forums on campus that draw together students and academic staff to discuss campaign initiatives.
And as the Australian political situation report at the Resistance national conference put it, we should “test out young workers actions more”. We can experiment with this campaign initiative, for example, testing out the sentiment with young workers stunts or actions, using the slogan “Supersize My Pay”. In some cities, where we have close links with militant unions, we can work with them to test out the possibilities for this campaign, i.e. organising young workers or unionists’ meetings with Resistance comrades as speakers, or get formal endorsement from high-profile unionists for our actions and propaganda. In the lead up to big mobilisations we can attempt to network with other groups in order to build joint contingents i.e. in Melbourne networking with the Young Unionists Network and others.
A key part of this campaign will be Resistance’s propaganda aimed at young workers. We should produce the leaflet put together by Resistance comrades in Melbourne that goes through how the laws will affect young workers that should also take up the need to get involved in a union. We should seek out stories from young workers about what it is like in their workplace for GLW. We should make sure that our public forums (branch and campus) cover important trade union struggles (i.e. Clarrie O’Shea) as a way to continue the education around the need for unions and the need to collectively organise to defend rights.
But let’s not fool ourselves that Resistance can spark a “broader movement” around this issue on our own.
Will making Venezuela our No.1 campaigning priority turn ‘Resistance into a Socialist Alternative with better politics’?
Stuart’s outline stated that because I had argued for Venezuela solidarity to be our No.1 campaigning priority (which has previously been uncontroversial) on a Resistance national executive secretariat that therefore the minority advocates that “everything (i.e., all other campaigns) get reduced to the role of ‘propaganda’”.
This false characterisation then became the platform from which to launch numerous other accusations against the minority which attempt to construct a false counter-position between propaganda tasks and agitational tasks i.e. “Can Resistance be a real campaigning organisation or is it limited to being a propaganda group?” or, that there is a “debate” occurring about “whether Resistance can run any campaign other than (the) Venezuela campaign” and finally becomes a crude caricature that making Venezuela solidarity our No.1 priority will lead to Resistance becoming “a Socialist Alternative with better politics”.
I want to take up several issues with these characterisations. Firstly the NE minority rejects the proposition that making Venezuela solidarity our No.1 campaigning priority will essentially turn Resistance into sectarian onlookers. This caricature is based on a black-and-white understanding of how the DSP and Resistance should do our international solidarity work.
How can we lead a serious Venezuela solidarity campaign whilst also relating to other campaigns?
Making Venezuela solidarity our No.1 priority means that we have to devote real resources to Venezuela solidarity work in Resistance, that we should assign Resistance comrades to Venezuela solidarity committees around the country and make efforts to set up Venezuela solidarity groups on campuses and high schools (as we did with ASIET work in the past), in the understanding that we are building a campaign from scratch, in the way that we painstakingly helped build up the East Timor solidarity campaign over many years.
But it does not mean that we have to cut ourselves off from real struggles and campaign openings. As I went through earlier, Resistance needs to relate to the IR fight-back in terms of the real struggles taking place. We need to maintain a “bold and flexible” approach, i.e. to the on-campus struggles (anti-VSU, anti-fee hikes), civil liberties, anti-war, anti-racism, refugee rights etc. In fact this feature of our work has to be emphasised at the current time because of the volatile, contradictory stop-start nature of many campaigns, and we need to relate to these ups and downs.
This year, due to Howard’s massive neoliberal offensive against the working class in this country there are more campaigns and potential campaigns on the boil, i.e. the anti-IR, civil liberties and in some places anti-nuclear campaigns, which are new on the political landscape. We have to maintain the fullest tactical flexibility, and we need to get much better at the kind of rapid responses that we need.
This means an increased attention to keeping our fingers on the pulse through increased discussion in the DSP and Resistance nationally and on a branch level to monitor these developments and make projections. There are lots of examples from last year where issues broke out in very particular places that gave Resistance opportunities, such as the anti-racism campaign on Macquarie Uni, the defend the VSU 3 on Sydney Uni, the Shut Down Maribyrnong detention centre in Melbourne and the Hobart speak-outs against gay marriage ban laws, amongst other issues. We can definitely improve on this, for example, we could have initiated a snap high school walk-out in Sydney after the Cronulla riots.
But it is a mistake to think that retaining the ‘fullest tactical flexibility’ means that we cannot set clear projections. This lack of direction will only disorient comrades if these campaigns rise and fall, and will potentially leave Resistance at a loss when they have died down again.
We do need to bring Venezuela into all these campaigns. We know that it’s amongst people moving into struggle that we will gain the best hearing for our ideas. We did that in 2005 around the first anti-VSU NDA on April 28, with a leaflet linking the attacks on education in Australia to the advances in Venezuela and with a round of forums addressing the same issues, which we built out of the rally.
But Venezuela cannot be limited to something that we only add into other campaigns. We need to commit to building a campaign in and of itself. In his outline Stuart noted that we had had a great success with a Venezuela alternative media forum (40 people) that followed an anti-VSU snap action to respond to the passage of the anti-VSU legislation (about 50 people) which led to six people coming from that protest to the forum. But we can’t take out of that example the fact that considerable time, resources and organisation were devoted to make that forum happen, and we have to guarantee that allocation of resources through continuing on with Venezuela as Resistance’s No. 1 priority.
The majority’s perspectives on Venezuela are too minimalist
Unfortunately, I think the majority are retreating from Venezuela work, as evidenced by their exclusion from the majority platform the October NC report on Venezuela and now the development of a new line for our youth work as well. This is despite the fact that we’ve only just begun to build the Venezuela solidarity campaign, and despite the fact that the campaign got off to a rough start because it had been conceived of as being led by Resistance with only a very minimal role for the DSP.
Although, this was meant to increase Resistance comrades’ confidence and turn Resistance outwards, what it meant in practice was that Resistance was forced to substitute for the tendency as a whole by being asked to lead the interventions into the unions, to take motions to Greens and SA meetings, organise the pickets, fundraisers etc. It’s not that there should be a principle against Resistance doing these tasks, but if we are going to ask comrades to take on big challenges such as building a solidarity campaign from scratch, then the DSP needs to 100% back newer comrades in learning how to go about these tasks.
As a result of this missing link (i.e. the DSP also building the campaign and helping to train up Resistance comrades) Resistance comrades often remained under-confident and reluctant to take on those tasks (as Comrade Fred Fuentes pointed out in his PCD, “Does Resistance need more ‘general’ DSP back-up?”, The Activist, Vol. 15, No.16) and often these tasks simply did not happen. What this also meant was that the key task for Resistance, which was to take Venezuela onto campus and high schools, was neglected and in many cases key goals such as articles in campus magazines were not achieved. The pressure to substitute also led to a loss of tactical flexibility that meant that in some cases we didn’t play as much of a role as we could have, for example in the anti-VSU campaign.
This also meant that there was nowhere near enough political preparation in the DSP and Resistance in the lead up to the Venezuela solidarity brigade and not much of a framework to come back to in Australia in order to make the most of the experience. So, the biggest Brigade in our history, hundreds of hours of comrades’ time and more than $100,000 of comrades’ money was not properly prepared for and afterwards utilised. This cannot be simply blamed on the Resistance national office. This was, and is, a tendency-wide responsibility.
DSP must also lead this campaign
There has been a change of perspectives for the role that the DSP should take in building this campaign, with the development of several Venezuela solidarity committees around the country, built jointly by the DSP and Resistance. But I think that the majority don’t adequately commit to the campaign.
Comrade Sue Bolton’s congress report on the Australian politics and campaigns mentioned that Venezuela solidarity committees have been set up in some cities, but that in other places we have been successfully doing the work through Resistance or SA and that this is not a problem. On the other hand, the minority have clearly put Venezuela solidarity as a very high priority, which the entire DSP should throw its weight behind and commit to building DSP-led Venezuela solidarity committees nationally. Only this will ensure that the valuable and hard-earned lessons and experiences of the DSP in building international solidarity campaigns (which the DSP as a whole has not had a real opportunity to do since the victory of the East Timorese independence movement, and which many Resistance leaders and members have never been involved with at all) is transmitted onto the next generation. This commitment will reap its gains in recruitment to Resistance and the DSP and has happened in 2005.
Resistance needs to lead this campaign primarily on campuses and high schools
Allowing Resistance to build this campaign primarily on campuses and high schools means we will be able to fine-tune how we conduct this campaign. One of the key lessons that we can learn from our experiences last year in building the Venezuela solidarity campaign is that we need projects around which to engage and activate the young people that we come into contact with who are interested in Venezuela.
The tour of a speaker from the Frente Francisco de Miranda to coincide with the Resistance national conference gives us a huge opportunity. We will need thorough planning and organisation in order to properly take advantage of this. We should have leaflets and posters for the Resistance national conference for O-Week, a Venezuela leaflet explaining some of the key aspects of the Venezuelan revolution and its gains and the wider Latin American revolt (including the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia), articles in all campus magazines, motions to SRCs to support the tour and Venezuela in general, take the proposal for the tour to collectives for endorsement and plan events with new people to raise money to pay for the tour. Resistance should also project to launch an ambitious campaign for universities to establish sister programs with Venezuela as the RMIT Globalism Institute has already done.
These concrete proposals will give Resistance the goals around which to organise and measure success and will break us out of the forum, film, forum routine that was typical last year. Plus we can organise pickets of US embassies around Venezuela Solidarity Week and other times. We need to envisage our Venezuela Solidarity work in a similar way to the East Timor campaign. We can involve a key core of people in building solidarity with the socialist revolution, but we also have a longer term view which is that we have to be ready to call into action broader layers of people, some of whom will be the periphery of this campaign, to defend the revolution against US intervention when that occurs.
It’s true that the Venezuela solidarity campaign is essentially a propaganda campaign, winning people to our ideas through the inspiration of the revolution. Perhaps this is what the majority are so against, there certainly seems to be an increasing tendency to deride the role of propaganda, which Stuart’s accusations against the minority perspectives seem to sum up; i.e. propaganda equates with sectarianism.
Does propaganda mean sectarianism?
However, this increasing derision highlights a fundamental misunderstanding of the DSP’s own adopted positions in regards to the main tasks facing us in the current period, i.e. propagandistic tasks, a fundamental fact that the minority is clear about.
The resolution “The election of the Howard Government and the Perspectives of the DSP”, which was adopted by the 17th DSP National Conference in January 1997, explicitly addresses the relationship between propaganda and agitation.
It reads “while our goal is to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party capable of leading masses in struggle, we recognise that we are not such a mass party or anything approaching it. We are the propaganda nucleus of such a party. This means that all our activities are propagandistic in their goals, that is, aimed at reaching out to radicalising workers and students with our ideas and winning them to our ranks. It means that we put priority in our activity, including in the mass movement, on explaining and popularising our ideas through producing and distributing magazines such as Links, a broad range of educational pamphlets and through seeking to win the widest readership that we can for our most effective propaganda tool, Green Left Weekly”.
This means that one of the most important tasks in training up new Resistance comrades is as professional propagandists. This should happen within Resistance where we need to undertake the most systematic and thorough education of Resistance members in the ideas of socialism, i.e., the long view of history, development of social classes, the origins of the oppression of women, Marxist analysis of capitalism and the state etc.
But it doesn’t just mean within our organization. We need to reach out with our ideas. Effective propaganda means that Resistance needs to be seen as the people with the best left analysis and critique of current politics, both of Australian and international politics.
We need to be the ones who are approached for an explanation of the occupation of Iraq, of the crisis in the Third World or of the environment, of the “war on terror”, of the “anti-terror” laws and the Cronulla race riots. “Some of this is with the rapid-response work where we need to be the first ones on the street giving an explanation of a recent political event such as the Cronulla race riots, or the tsunami or the New Orleans crisis, and they require us to be tuned in and dynamic enough to jump on opportunities when they come up.
But it also means clearly projecting explicitly socialist ideas and themes as a way to attract young people who are already questioning the world and want more in-depth alternative explanations to those offered by bourgeois institutions (i.e. the media and universities). One of the key means for Resistance to be able to offer this type of analysis is for there to be a solid commitment by the tendency as a whole to organising and building regular GLW/Resistance forums. These will be the key way that Resistance will be able to finally take on challenging Socialist Alternative’s virtual monopoly on well-built Marxist forums in several cities.
So, Stuart’s accusation that Resistance is “limited to being a propaganda group” is actually right, but why does he then counter-pose this to Resistance being able to be a “real campaigning organisation”?
Another look at the 1997 resolution shows why Stuart’s false counter-position between “campaigning” and “propaganda” highlights the majority’s misunderstanding of the relationship between the two:
“While we are too small to directly alter the objective political situation by calling into being mass struggles, this does not mean that our role is limited to commenting on events from the side-lines. We can initiate modest-sized actions that can set an example of how to struggle for broader forces”. And that “recognising that we are still at the stage of being a propaganda group and that all our activities have a propagandistic goal is not just a matter of being conscious about the objective limits of what we can do as a party. It is also key to understanding what types of actions are a priority for us. That is, we put a premium on actions – rallies, public meetings, street marches, strikes and strike support activities…that…provide us with opportunities to win radicalising elements to our class struggle strategy and to recruit, educate and train them as Marxist cadres”.
That is, we understand that we will win the best hearing from people moving into struggle who are looking for answers and are more open-minded than others to radical and even revolutionary ideas. So even in the campaigns that we build and agitate around our key tasks are still propagandistic, and we have to be clear that when we are in the midst of these campaigns a key task is to profile, and recruit to, Resistance.
This propaganda can also be our main means of building up various campaigns, when there is not much scope for agitation around them, for example the anti-war movement. Yes, we can continue to test out the possibility for mobilisations around these issues through calling actions, and we need to strongly orient to all opportunities for mobilising people such as the March 20 international day of action against the occupation of Iraq, and now the visit by Tony Blair, as well as stirring things up through things like counter-recruitment stunts during O-Weeks, but we know when there is no sustained mass movement around this and other issues the key means of building them will be through our propaganda, i.e. GLW, public forums etc.
This will also be the key to our ability to begin early preparation for the April 2007 APISC (and also the counter-APEC anti-Bush protests later in the year). This will be about projecting Resistance as an organisation that understands imperialism but is also in solidarity with the people’s struggles in the Third World, in particular the Asia-Pacific region. This will occur mainly through public forums and GLW covering all aspects of the struggle in the Third World, past and present struggles in East Timor, Indonesia, Philippines, West Papua – but also on other anti-imperialist struggles in the Middle East and especially Palestine, and obviously throughout Latin America and especially Cuba and Venezuela. Obviously this is a big task, and again, joint GLW/Resistance forums will be key to this perspective being achieved.
Does anyone actually think that the DSP, let alone Resistance, has outgrown this stage?
This role of being a propaganda nucleus or “propaganda group” will not be outgrown simply by our will, but rather by the growth of our tendency (either solely or through fusions, regroupments etc) into a mass workers’ party which has the capacity to call large numbers of workers into action or can attempt to launch a struggle for state power. This means that even at the height of a revolutionary movement, for example in France in May-June ‘68, the role of propaganda for a revolutionary organisation is vital. A Resistance building report adopted at the April 1997 Resistance national council meeting showed how clearly we understood this element of revolutionary work:
“Leading a struggle means more than being the key organisers, the ones who carry out the lion’s share of the work, who take on publicising the actions and rallies, or the ones who organise the marshalling…For revolutionaries, leading a struggle means leadership at all levels and in all fashions, and it means leading in what the aims and the political goals of the movement are. It means leading the thorough politicisation and the radicalisation of the movement. It means seeking to win that movement to socialist conclusions, to seeing that fundamentally the solution to the problems they’re struggling around lies in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, its replacement with socialism…And most of all, it means recruiting and training those recruits as political activists and leaders. It’s based on a recognition that to make a revolution, you need revolutionaries, and that without expanding your forces, you ain’t going nowhere. And so in this situation of May/June, even in this situation of a massive upsurge, the JCR’s (Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire) work was still directed at winning more people to revolutionary politics and to the JCR, it was still propagandistic, based around winning people to a very specific program and set of ideas”.
Another example of the need to continue propagandistic work even at the height of a revolutionary movement comes from the experience of the Bolshevik party in 1917. The following is an excerpt from the book Building the revolutionary party – an introduction to James P. Cannon:
“In April 1917, for example, when the Bolshevik party had some 80,000 members throughout Russia, Lenin still emphasised that the party’s central tasks was still that of conducting propaganda work, of ‘patiently explaining’ to the masses the Bolsheviks’ policies and of ‘preparing and welding’ the cadres of a mass revolutionary workers’ party. In the months preceding the October Revolution, Lenin stressed repeatedly that the Bolsheviks’ tasks were limited to the propaganda work of ‘explaining’ their policies and of ‘criticising and exposing’ the errors of their political opponents in order to win over to their side a class-conscious and organised majority among the workers”.
What sort of youth organisation?
So what does all this actually mean for Resistance? The sum total of the NE majority’s perspectives for youth work unfortunately point to a re-opening of a debate about the character of Resistance. The erring away from Venezuela as the no.1 priority for Resistance, the idea that young people will be attracted to Resistance through our involvement in “bread and butter” campaigns rather than on the basis of altruistic motives and the searching for radical, revolutionary answers, the derision of propaganda as being out of step with the real movements and the actual strength of Resistance, all point to a downplaying of the revolutionary character of Resistance.
The majority also has a minimalist interpretation of the draft resolution’s conclusion that the DSP needs to emerge as a public revolutionary organisation (which is interpreted as being a few educational forums in the name of the DSP), which will mean that there are no opportunities for Resistance comrades to learn how to argue the DSP’s politics in the campaigns. Also the majority’s continuation with the failed line of essentially remaining an internal tendency of SA, which really means holding onto the idea that SA is a party-in-formation, will also mean that Resistance’s needs will continue to slip down the agenda.
There is also a certain logic which flows from all of this which indicates that the same rebadging of the DSP’s politics as softer, “class struggle” (left-reformist) politics (through doing all our public political work through SA) is now being extended into Resistance so that Resistance would become known as the “anti-Howard youth group” (as argued by Comrade Dick Nichols on the December 13 DSP NE, amongst other things, such as not wanting Resistance to be known as the “Venezuela people” and that the October NC youth work report was actually a “minority report”). The majority are attempting to rebadge Resistance as an SA youth group (a mistake we have already made with the misplaced “youth left unity” perspective which sparked a debate within the DSP, and subsequently Resistance, led by the “Pluralists”). There are a few other aspects of Stuart’s outline that indicated a trend in this direction.
Hiding Resistance’s revolutionary profile
In one section of Stuart’s outline, he discusses Socialist Alternative, Stuart refers to their tactics at rallies as something that Resistance should not emulate; “Rather than link into broader motion, SAlt seek to separate themselves out from it – the Red Bloc tactic”. This goes directly against previously adopted positions on how we should intervene into street marches. The Resistance building report adopted at the Resistance national conference proposed a series of measures and ideas to increase Resistance’s profile, one of which was to increase our organisation and profile at rallies; “having Resistance placards or flags in the rallies so people see us as an identifiable contingent”.
So does the NE majority now disagree with Resistance having red Che flags at rallies, which identify us and “separate us out” as revolutionaries? Stuart counter-poses the “Red Bloc tactic” to our supposed orientation, i.e. “We aim to win people on a healthier political basis based on proper orientation to politics”. What exactly does this sentence mean? Does it mean that a “proper orientation to politics” would be that Resistance dissolve ourselves into the broader movement, not identify ourselves clearly and publicly as revolutionary Marxists for fear of being construed as sectarian? I would say that the problem is not the “Red Bloc” in and of itself. The problem is that it should be Resistance not Socialist Alternative that should be the big, loud, vibrant “Red Bloc”.
Tackling bourgeois ideas in Resistance
In Stuart’s draft outline he accuses me of having a “moralising” approach to the question of tackling bourgeois ideas in Resistance in relation to my assertion that we should take up the use of sexist language in Resistance (in a draft outline for a Resistance-building report).
We know we can’t create a socialist paradise in Resistance, but we have to understand the vital need to struggle within Resistance against the never-ending and aggressive barrage of bourgeois mystification that we are all subjected to – the individualism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and homophobia that are used by the capitalist class to divide the working class and which are anathema to a collective, co-operative and inclusive thinking through and decision-making process.
This understanding is essential if we are going to succeed in developing real leadership teams within Resistance, which is a key perspective adopted by the Resistance national conference. If we try to pretend that these issues do not exist then we are not going to succeed in helping people to overcome this conditioning and bourgeois ideas and methods are likely to become the norm rather than the exception, for example, a passive reliance on star leaders for all the answers and women comrades orienting to organisational rather than political assignments etc.
The crisis of the working class is the crisis of leadership. The revolutionary vanguard has to take up this challenge. Tackling bourgeois ideas is an essential aspect of this development of leadership. Again, from the book Building the revolutionary party, James P. Cannon knew that “nine-tenths of the struggle for socialism is the struggle against bourgeois influence in the workers’ organisations, including the party” (or youth organisation in this case).
DSP collaboration crucial
There has begun some discussion in the PCD which is repeated in Stuart’s draft outline, of re-interpreting the meaning of Resistance being an independent youth organisation to mean that the DSP does not need to increase its collaboration with Resistance (much more than has been happening in the last few years) and that Resistance needs to “stand on its own two feet”.
The true meaning of this euphemistic phrase which is coming into common usage means that Resistance needs to bear much more of the load for training and educating new layers of leadership through Resistance and that there is less time for ongoing, active DSP collaboration and thinking through. Sure we want Resistance to lead and take responsibility and of course in that process there will be mistakes (from which valuable lessons can be learnt), but let’s not make a virtue of mistakes – as the DSP Party Program puts it the DSP “seeks the closest collaboration with Resistance” in order to best prepare Resistance to actually have successes which build up confidence, not undermine it.
This idea of Resistance “standing on its own two feet” really makes a mockery of the crucial project of attempting to construct a revolutionary Marxist cadre party, of which one of its main purposes is to maintain continuity between one generation and the next through the transmission of hard-won lessons from countless struggles and which has a living tradition of studying and understanding the lessons from the revolutionary movements as a whole. This process has been interrupted and will continue to be if the majority’s perspectives are adopted, through the downgrading of revolutionary Marxist politics of the DSP, which in turn affects Resistance.
Don’t re-open debates about our youth work
The minority thinks that this will lead Resistance down a completely bankrupt path. The good work that has been done in the last year by utilising the Venezuela solidarity campaign in reaffirming our revolutionary Marxist politics is being threatened and unfortunately it seems that the debate about the character of Resistance is being re-opened.
This can only be a destructive process. Resistance came out of the debate against the “Pluralists” stronger through the decisive refutation of their ideas; but this work is now under threat of being undone. This trajectory will only set Resistance up for a hard fall, having to re-learn the difficult lesson that we gleaned from the Books Not Bombs experience where we assessed that we had not grown despite all the hard work that we had done, precisely because we didn’t have the confidence to project revolutionary Marxist politics and simply presented ourselves as the best builders of the anti-war movement. Comrades, we know that this approach is not enough to rebuild Resistance.
How will Resistance be rebuilt?
Firstly, let’s remind ourselves of what we are actually trying to achieve: a youth cadre-training machine that helps youth take the first steps towards becoming revolutionary cadres. A cadre is not simply someone who’s active, or someone who sells newspapers, or someone who goes to a lot of meetings. Che Guevara, in his September 1962 essay “The Cadre: Backbone of the Revolution” wrote that a cadre:
“is someone of ideological discipline, who knows and practises democratic centralism…she is an individual of proven loyalty, whose physical and moral courage has developed in step with her ideological development, in such a way that she is always willing to face any debate and to give even her life for the revolution. She is, in addition, an individual who can think for herself, which enables her to make the necessary decisions and to exercise creative initiative in a way that does not conflict with discipline. The cadre, therefore, is a creator, a leader of high standing…The common denominator for all cadres is political clarity. This does not consist of unthinking support for the postulates of the revolution, but a reasoned support”.
The NE minority do not think that the discussion about rebuilding Resistance as a strong and effective cadre-training machine can be separated out from the discussion about the DSP’s perspectives as a whole. Continuing to make the mistake of thinking that Resistance will be able to re-strengthen and re-build ourselves as confidently able to project revolutionary Marxist politics, when the DSP is not doing this and when there is such adamant attachment to the projection of our tendency’s politics as SA’s politics is an idealistic dream.
Social being determines social consciousness. Therefore, if we are constantly presenting ourselves as “class struggle” activists rather than as revolutionaries, then we are going to be affected by this. The DSP as a whole needs to practise its Marxism and present ourselves publicly as such, only then will it be politically sharpened. If this does not happen then we will continue to expect Resistance to be able to do this but without having the living example to emulate.
This goes against our traditional method of training up Resistance comrades. Cadres are created and sustained through the application of the Leninist leadership principle to the collective struggle to build the revolutionary party.
The Leninist leadership principle is that the most conscious, committed and self-sacrificing cadres must be organised, through the party’s leadership bodies, to “lift up” the consciousness and commitment of the membership as a whole through political motivation and persuasion, systematic and ongoing attention to education and training, striving to raise the political level of the party as a whole, and through the power of example.
New cadres will not be created if we continue to treat the DSP as simply a “motor force” with which to project the left-reformist “class struggle” politics of SA, and downgrading the revolutionary Marxist politics which are the real politics of the DSP.
Summary
Comrades, we are internationalists, which means that we have to see our struggles in Australia in connection with the struggles of the international working class. Therefore when the Australian political situation is characterised by retreat (as the new resolution on the DSP & SA clearly states), and when the Australian ruling class is on a massive neoliberal offensive resulting in the passage of the IR legislation and the anti-terror laws, it is all the more important that we see ourselves as part of a global struggle and see advances in other countries as our own. This is why Venezuela is so important for us.
The majority’s perspectives for youth work are based on an over-projection of the Australian political situation and in particular of the IR campaign. They are based on the hope that the ACTU will lead a series of escalating mass mobilisations and that it is an “emergent mass movement”. But the fact is the campaign has already suffered a set-back with the passage of the IR legislation.
Some comrades have been saying that the passage of these laws will not affect the campaign and has not affected people’s confidence. But we have to call it what it is: a defeat for the working class, not the final defeat as an NE majority member accused the minority of saying, but a relative defeat. We can’t discount the impact of the passage of these laws on people’s consciousness. When the anti-war movement collapsed we assessed that the majority of people felt demoralised as a result of the invasion of Iraq and this affected their willingness to continue to build the campaign.
This is not to say that there will be no struggles against the implementation of these laws. There most likely will be, and Resistance should support those struggles and be involved in them to the extent that it’s possible. But let’s be realistic about what type of fight back we are likely to see i.e. the spot-fire defensive struggles in individual workplaces, unions or sectors. These may or may not spark a broader fight-back.
We have to take these facts into consideration when deciding upon Resistance’s priorities. Both the young workers campaign and the Venezuela solidarity campaign are campaigns that Resistance will have to build from nothing (although, in the case of Venezuela solidarity we have already made considerable head-way with this process), substituting for real movement. And it will have to be a choice, because Resistance is too weak to run two major campaigns in this way, with only 70 members.
Then let’s choose the campaign which has more potential to win over the youth who are thinking beyond their “hip pocket”, who are questioning the world and looking for real alternative answers, the ones who care about the struggles of people in other countries and who are inspired by the Venezuelan revolution. These are the youth who are more likely to get involved in a revolutionary youth organization and commit their lives to the struggle by joining the DSP.