Party building counter report and summary

By Marce Cameron, on behalf of the Leninist Party Faction

[The general line of the following report and summary was rejected with five full members in favour, 20 against, no abstentions, and three candidate members in favour, seven against, no abstentions.]

Comrades, we asked for equal time for this counter-report but we were only allowed half an hour. This is simply not enough time to cover what this report needs to cover, so I’d just ask comrades to keep this in mind.

The task of this National Committee plenum is to assess the implementation of the party-building line adopted by the DSP Congress in January.

The essence of this party-building line is that we continue to try to build the Socialist Alliance as our new party in formation, but more gradually than before, recognizing that this new party will take shape more gradually than we had initially hoped.

It’s true that this is not the whole line, but it’s the essence of the line because everything else flows from this. Why do we need to recruit more people to the DSP? So we can carry on building SA.

As the NE minority pointed out in the pre-Congress discussion and in our counter-reports to the Congress, this is not a new line but a continuation of the same Socialist Alliance party-building line that we began to implement from the end of 2002.

Through all the twists and turns and all the adjustments we’ve made, the continuity of our party-building line is expressed in the fact that for all of this time we haven’t been building the Democratic Socialist Party.

So while we’re assessing the implementation of the SA party-building line in the nine months since the Congress, we have to do this from the vantage point of the preceding three years.

We have to grasp the whole of the past four years as a single episode in the history of our party, beginning with the 2002 SA party-building turn.

SA party building turn

In October 2002 we adopted the perspective of seeking to transform SA from a loose alliance of socialist affiliates and individuals into a united party of anti-neoliberal resistance.

But the new party failed to materialize around us despite the heroic efforts of ourselves and some of our supporters in SA.

The SA party-building turn was premised on the continuation and deepening of a slight upsurge of anti-neoliberal resistance which began with the Maritime Union of Australia dispute in 1998.

This upsurge turned out to be far too shallow to bring into sustained motion the class struggle forces and partners needed for SA to take the qualitative step of becoming a broad anti-capitalist party in formation.

If we were to plot the growth curve of SA on a graph, the high-point would be at the very beginning, with a more or less continuous decline ever since.

As the initial enthusiasm for the idea of a united socialist party dissipated, the numbers of unaffiliated SA builders contracted to a very thin layer of our supporters scattered across the country – nowhere near enough to be the critical mass needed to progress SA beyond the alliance stage.

By the end of 2003 we should have reassessed and abandoned the SA party-building turn. But we did the opposite – we deepened the turn.

We didn’t want to disappoint all those people who had hoped SA would unite the radical left in a common party.

We hoped that if we could just hold out long enough, a change in the political situation could come to the rescue of our SA party-building turn.

We were inspired by the Scottish Socialist Party, which seemed to be going from strength to strength.

Substituting hopes for reality

Inevitably, a gap began to open up between our hopes for the new party and the reality.

Our response was to try to close this gap by increasingly substituting DSP activity for the activity of a broader layer of SA partners.

This began innocently enough, but somewhere along the way the SA dream became more compelling for us than the real thing, and we began to lose our Marxist objectivity.

If you try to implement a party-building line that isn’t anchored firmly in the objective possibilities, you begin to distort your view of reality. You start to view everything through the prism of your misguided perspective.

Many comrades fervently believed that in 2006 there’d be a big upsurge, a mass movement against the implementation of Work Choices. There just had to be. Why? Because we needed this upsurge to come to the rescue of our new party project.

This unjustified hope and prediction was based on a gross misjudgement of the real balance of forces in the union movement and our own ability, parading as SA, to alter the course of the class struggle. Comrades looked at the campaign against Work Choices through the prism of their SA dreaming.

Lenin wrote in Left Wing Communism that confusing one’s hopes and desires for reality is “a most dangerous mistake”. We all made this most dangerous of mistakes.

What were the consequences of us persisting in a mistaken party-building line?

As the new party failed to materialize, we felt compelled to keep up appearances for SA as a new party in formation. To do this we had to exaggerate or hype up SA to ourselves and to others.

It’s a compulsion we still feel today, but there’s a difference. In 2003 we were keeping up appearances for a relatively broad layer of people who identified with SA and who hoped it would become a united socialist party in the near future.

Today, we’re keeping up appearances for nobody but ourselves and a few other die-hard true believers in the SA new party dream. Everyone else has sensibly moved on.

With the active core of SA having contracted to just ourselves and a few dozen other committed SA builders scattered across the country, little by little the DSP began to masquerade as the new party.

Out in the suburbs we were building castles in the air, SA branches propped up by near miracles of DSP substitution.

DSP branches met monthly, mostly to talk about the minutiae of SA tactics and branch organisation.

The DSP was run ragged. Green Left distribution dropped, Marxist education was all but abandoned and a financial black hole opened up as we bankrolled the fiction of an SA “party” able to stand on its own two feet.

We neglected Resistance, which went into sharp decline after the “Books Not Bombs” protests in early 2003.

As political exhaustion, discouragement and frustration set in we drifted away from our Leninist leadership principle, which is that the most conscious and committed comrades are organized through the DSP’s leadership bodies to “lift up” the consciousness and commitment of the membership as a whole through political persuasion and the power of example.

This principle had underpinned a Democratic Socialist Party with a high degree of political consensus and comradely relations of mutual trust and confidence.

The gap was filled by stressed out super-organisers trying to substitute for weak or dysfunctional executives and the near-collapse of DSP fractions and committees.

Our Leninist methods of collective assessment, perspective setting and decision-making and careful attention to the rounded development of Marxist cadres began to give way to the blunt instruments of exhortation, hype and commandism.

Our Marxist objectivity and our revolutionary cadre culture didn’t succumb easily. It took a persistent effort on our part to break them down.

We had to learn to deny reality. We had to learn to seize on even the minutest so-called “successes” – such as one SA member selling Green Left Weekly, or a room full of DSP comrades talking to each other and one or two others, as confirmation of our faith in the new party dream.

We had to learn to idealise the unaffiliated members because to us they embodied the supposedly broad forces being drawn to our new party.

We faced a crisis of decadreisation.

Unable to admit to a mistake

In May 2005 we were finally compelled to act to avert a catastrophic meltdown of the DSP.

We retreated from the attempt to integrate the DSP’s political assets such as Green Left Weekly into SA, we retreated from our voluntarist drive to try to “build two parties” simultaneously and we adopted eight emergency measures to shore up the DSP.

While we all agreed that we had misjudged the political conditions which we thought existed when we began the SA turn, most of the DSP leadership shrank back from concluding that our SA party building perspective was therefore a mistake.

If the political conditions didn’t exist for SA to take the qualitative leap from a loose alliance of socialist affiliates and individuals to a broad anti-capitalist party in formation, then our SA party building turn was based on false premises. And if it was based on false premises, then it had to be a mistake.

By abandoning the attempt to integrate the DSP’s political assets into SA we were in fact recognizing that SA couldn’t be built as a new party in formation even gradually, because there isn’t the critical mass of partners capable of absorbing these assets, and us propping up the fiction of the new party is not creating these SA partners.

This logic is unassailable, but most comrades have been too attached to our SA dream to accept this.

Let’s be clear: the problem wasn’t that we made a mistake. Only a sect never makes mistakes or never admits to them, because a sect lives in a world of its own. A sect can never be wrong.

We made a mistake with our “turn to industry” in the early 1980s. We expected a big upsurge of the blue collar workforce as the neoliberal offensive began to bite, so we sent most of our comrades into basic industry.

When the upsurge failed to materialize we recognised our mistake, abandoned the turn and learned from the experience.

The US SWP also carried out the “turn to industry”, but tragically they failed to recognise their mistake. Within a few short years the party founded by James P. Cannon had degenerated into a sect.

Persisting in a wrong line has a dangerous logic of its own. As the line wanders away from reality, as it becomes increasingly absurd, the leadership majority have to cover up for the failure of their line.

Since the line is absurd, its interpretation becomes increasingly arbitrary. An absurd line cannot be owned and understood by the membership as a whole. It must be handed down by the leadership, which becomes the guardians of the line.

The membership become progressively depoliticized, reduced to passive receivers of the leadership’s arbitrary interpretation of the line. The very foundations of democratic centralism are undermined. Assessment becomes taboo, because any honest assessment would draw unwanted attention to the inconvenient truth.

Here’s a typical example. At the DSP branch conference in Sydney in early February, Comrade Alex Bainbridge presented a party-building report on behalf of the exec majority which made the following projections for SA:

On August 22, Comrade Bainbridge reported to the branch that so far this year we’d only been implementing the DSP side of our Congress resolution. This revelation was dropped in without any assessment of why the SA projections we’d adopted in February had not been implemented.

It was simply noted. Now we read in the Green Left calendar that we’re going to try to re-launch Bankstown SA branch, yet again. Deja vu? It seems the NE majority haven’t learned anything from the past four years.

The logic of liquidation

The underlying cause of the decadreisation crisis wasn’t our attempt to force the pace of SA taking shape as a new party, it was the whole SA party-building perspective which underpinned this attempt.

The NE majority don’t see this. If we just do it more gradually, they say, if only we’re patient and we work hard at it, we’ll be able to build this new party over a more extended period of time.

OK, how long then do we have to hide the Democratic Socialist Party behind the facade of SA or some other left-reformist mask?

From now to eternity. Why?

Firstly, because SA can never be built into a broad party of anti-neoliberal resistance, not in a million years. Even if the broader forces and partners did exist for such a new party, and they don’t, it couldn’t happen through SA.

We killed off that possibility a long time ago by masquerading the DSP as the SA party, when we resorted to the wholesale rebadging of DSP activity as SA activity.

Everyone can see that without the involvement of substantial other forces, SA is no longer a genuine alliance but merely the public face of the DSP.

What began as a genuinely collaborative socialist regroupment project, albeit with our explicit intention of whittling down the ISO, has turned into its opposite.

We used to be concerned when one of the founding affiliates pulled back from its commitment to SA. We worried about it, because there’s no other road to bringing together the fractured far left than genuine collaboration that builds lasting trust and confidence.

Now, we celebrate the de facto withdrawal of every other affiliate from SA. “Good”, we think, “now we don’t have to try to involve the ISO, Workers Power, Workers Liberty, Socialist Democracy, the Freedom Socialist Party, etc. Now can have SA to ourselves.”

We’ve got it to ourselves alright. The DSP, masquerading as SA, is becoming more and more isolated from the rest of the left, and we’re beginning to counterpose the fake unity of SA to genuine united front collaboration. An example is the debate we had yesterday in the discussion around the Venezuela solidarity work report.

The majority decided to leave the door open to the DSP organizing joint SA-AVSN events, which could only narrow the network’s appeal by creating the suspicion among some of our AVSN partners that the AVSN is becoming a front group for the DSP masquerading as SA. Given that we’re in the early stages of trying to establish the AVSN as a broad united front solidarity network, this is just playing with fire.

SA is completely and utterly dead as a viable left regroupment project. We said this at the May NC and it’s even truer today. SA has declined even more since May, if that were possible.

I don’t have time to go into the coroner’s report here, I’d just urge comrades to read Comrade Kathy Newnam’s notes on SA which are attached as an appendix to this counter-report.

The second reason why the NE majority doesn’t contemplate a return to building the Democratic Socialist Party is that they now see the “new party” perspective not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

When we talked about the “twin transitions” from an alliance of socialists to a broad anti-capitalist party and from this broad left party to a bigger Marxist cadre party, SA was seen as a tactic to build towards this bigger and more influential Marxist cadre party. SA was simply a means to this end.

But as the new party failed to materialize and we began to increasingly substitute for the absence of a critical mass of active SA partners, the actually-existing Marxist cadre party, the Democratic Socialist Party, itself became the means to an end, the “end” being to prop up the appearance of SA as a broad left party.

The DSP’s day-to-day activity is now driven by our compulsion to keep up appearances for SA as a broad anti-capitalist party.

The original justification for the SA turn was that it would allow us to grow our cadre core relatively rapidly from within the new party. Four years on, there’s still no new party and the DSP is diminished in every sense.

So a new justification had to be invented, the so-called “transitional approach” to Leninist party-building.

The new orthodoxy is that you don’t begin with a publicly-functioning Leninist party. You can’t go out into the capitalist world with a naked revolutionary party, that’s too confronting, too unsophisticated, too un-transitional.

The Democratic Socialist Party must be respectfully draped in a reformist fancy-dress like SA so that people with a liberal consciousness won’t be turned off by our revolutionary ideas. We hide the DSP and its Marxist political line behind the “acceptable” politics of bourgeois left-reformism.

Then one day, when people are more open to our revolutionary ideas, we finally emerge from our reformist cocoon as a beautiful Marxist butterfly.

Brilliant! Now, why didn’t we think of this before? Come to think of it, why didn’t Lenin, Trotsky, James P. Cannon or our very own Jim Percy come up with the so-called transitional approach to Leninist party-building?

If these comrades were alive today they would no doubt see this argument for what it is: the logic of liquidation.

Trotsky’s transitional method for building a mass revolutionary party is based on approaching the masses at whatever level of consciousness and organisation they’re at and drawing them, through progressive struggles and political explanations, towards a higher level of thought and action, that is, in the direction of the socialist revolution.

Trotsky’s transitional method is about tactics and propaganda, not forms of party organisation. It has nothing whatsoever to do with stages in Leninist party-building.

Just as the Mensheviks proposed to put off the socialist revolution in Russia to an indefinite future when capitalist development under bourgeois rule had strengthened industry and the working class, the NE majority want to put off the restoration and rebuilding of our publicly-functioning Leninist party to the indefinite future.

We could call this the Menshevik theory of Leninist party-building.

The majority say we’re still testing the SA party-building perspective. What could we possibly learn from another round of election campaigning in the name of SA, and a one-and-a-half-day gathering in Geelong this month, that the whole of the past four years can’t tell us? Why do we have to keep testing this line when it has already been so thoroughly tested?

Our liquidationist drift

With the DSP presenting itself to the outside world as the Socialist Alliance party, we’ve begun to internalize this new identity.

Dialectical materialism teaches us that being determines consciousness. It’s what we do that makes us what we are. It’s collective revolutionary activity and collective thinking in the framework of building a Marxist-Leninist party that creates and sustains us as revolutionary cadre.

Propping up the fiction of SA requires us to think and act less like Marxist cadres and more like SA activists. Imprisoned in our SA dreaming as SA has contracted to little more than the DSP, we feel a strong compulsion to become SA.

This is the “force” driving the DSP’s liquidationist political drift.

We’re gradually becoming the party we want to see, and in doing so we’re beginning to liquidate the DSP as a Marxist cadre organisation.

This adaptation isn’t the necessary, essentially organizational adjustment to political life as a revolutionary Marxist current existing within a broader anti-capitalist party.

What we’re adapting to is life in the DSP presenting itself to the outside world as the Socialist Alliance party.

The DSP propping up the fiction of SA as a broad anti-capitalist party doesn’t build revolutionary consciousness and commitment, it actively decadreises. Remember, this is the line that gave us the decadreisation crisis. A strong liquidationist acid, this line corrodes our revolutionary consciousness and commitment.

Liquidation can take many forms. The most obvious is the disbanding or dissolving of the Marxist cadre organisation. The key lesson we should draw from the SSP debacle is that you have to build the Marxist cadre core while you’re building the broad socialist party. You cannot take your eye off this ball, even for a moment.

The comrades in the International Socialist Movement (ISM) underestimated the importance of cadre-building. They disbanded, or liquidated, the Marxist ISM platform into the SSP. Key leaders of the ISM theorized the all-inclusive socialist party – the “strategically non-delimited” socialist party, as Comrade Murray Smith put it in an article reprinted in Links – as a semi-permanent tactic.

Clearly, this hasn’t happened to the DSP. We haven’t disbanded, we’re still here, although there are fewer of us than there were at the beginning of the SA turn.

The liquidationist drift of the DSP is less obvious to us because we’re so caught up in it, but it’s

no less real. It’s the drift of our political consciousness and the content of our activity as a consequence of us persisting in an absurd political line.

The public presence of the Democratic Socialist Party has been liquidated: the real party behind Green Left Weekly is almost invisible to the outside world.

Even where the DSP’s Marxist political line is still presented in the paper, as in our analysis of the Venezuelan revolution or “arguments for socialism”, where a DSP comrade is acknowledged as the author it’s almost never as a member of the DSP.

And it’s not just the Democratic Socialist Party that has vanished. The public presentation of our Marxist political line in relation to the domestic class struggle has largely given way to our presentation in Green Left Weekly of the left-reformist, non-Marxist political line of the DSP masquerading as SA.

This is happening most consistently at the cutting edge of our engagement with broader forces, where the opportunist pressure on us is felt most keenly – our coverage and analysis of the Australian trade union movement and the campaign against Work Choices.

From the perspective of the working class in its struggle for power, orienting to an emerging class-struggle left current in the unions and seeking to build this current is the key to our Marxist intervention, as we pointed out in our 1986 DSP resolution on trade unions and the struggle for socialism.

We’re drifting away from this perspective.

We used to see clearly, and point out to others, the real dividing line in the trade union movement, which is between the genuine class-struggle left elements such as Craig Johnston and Chris Cain and the fake-left wing of the ALP-ACTU bureaucracy.

Today, we see only the more superficial and transient divide between all those who want another big rally against Work Choices and all those who don’t. The wretched politics of these protests – Kim Beazley appealing for votes and the flag-waving nationalism – barely rates a criticism in Green Left Weekly.

All that matters to us now is numbers, as in how big the rallies are and whether or not there’s one rally in Blacktown or one in Blacktown and one in central Sydney on June 28.

We’ve been in agitational hyperdrive, throwing our microscopic forces again and again against the recalcitrants in the ACTU. Given the futility of this David and Goliath mismatch, given the chasm between dreams and means, we inevitably fall into the arms of the fake-left union officials who happen to think that a big rally every six months or so will keep Beazley riding high in the opinion polls.

We’re no longer presenting a clear Marxist analysis and an independent working class political line in the trade union movement. In our line articles and editorials in Green Left Weekly, the genuine militants are now lumped together with the fake-left Laborite bureaucrats.

In an article titled “Could Australian workers follow the French lead?” in the April 12 edition of Green Left, Comrade Sue Bolton even went so far as to suggest:

“Fortunately for Australia’s working people, a section of the union movement does want to take Howard on. This group of unions initiated the two national days of action last year, on June 30-July 1 and November 15. The same unions [eg. Doug Cameron’s AMWU] have now convinced the ACTU to call the June 28 protests, although some of the more conservative union leaderships are trying to scuttle plans for a national mobilisation on that day.”

Unlike the poor French workers, Aussie workers are “fortunate” to have such terrific trade union leaders as AMWU national secretary Doug Cameron, who allegedly wants to “take on” the Howard government.

Cameron, the man responsible for putting Craig Johnston behind bars, is considered our ally in the union movement these days because he agrees with us that we need another big rally against Work Choices well before the next federal election.

Note that Cameron is not counted among the “more conservative” union officials, which presumably means he’s one of the more radical ones. He must be, because we say he wants to take on the Howard government.

Yes, it’s harder to campaign for a principled working class political line in the unions when the militant current has been reduced to pockets of militancy and isolated individuals, and when these militants are not openly challenging the ALP-ACTU’s political stranglehold over the campaign against Work Choices.

Still, that’s no reason to tail-end the fake-left officials. That’s just pure opportunism, and our convergence with the ISO’s radical liberal line is striking.

The SA party-building turn gave us a new image of respectability in union circles. It seemed that we were now real “players”, no longer just outsiders barking from the sidelines.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people out there think that anyone who dedicates their life to making a communist revolution in this country must be nuts.

When we drop all this nonsense about revolution it makes it so much easier. People are so much nicer to us. Even that old ALP hack on section council smiles at us, shares a joke in the corridor. “At last”, they think, “she’s come back down to earth.”

Our collaboration with Craig Johnston and Chris Cain, a collaboration we’d built up as the Democratic Socialist Party over many years before the SA turn, did give us some real influence within the militant union current.

But as we began to lose our Marxist objectivity, we started to imagine that our new-found respectability thanks to SA was a simple reflection of our growing real influence.

This is an optical illusion. In the final analysis, our real influence comes down to one thing: the size and strength of our Marxist cadre implantation and our ability to lead real struggles on the ground. Today we have fewer cadres in the unions than we did in 2002.

Cadres or activists?

The line we present in Green Left Weekly is not just ink on paper, it’s the basis for the political activity of our cadre. Since we’re driven by a compulsion to keep up appearances for SA, we organise comrades on this basis.

Instead of regular DSP trade union fractions to organise our comrades, as we used to do, to carry out consistent revolutionary political activity in the unions and the workplace, our default setting is SA caucuses. Mostly, it’s the same DSP comrades plus one, two or a few other individuals. These are hardly broader forces.

To prop up the appearance of SA we sacrifice the organisation and training of our cadres in revolutionary political activity in the unions. For what? So we can survive as an underground Marxist party living under a military dictatorship? No, for collaboration with just one, two or a few individuals in generic trade union activism.

The NE majority have an answer to the objection that we’re no longer organizing ourselves to create and sustain revolutionary cadres. They simply redefine “cadre” as anyone who is active.

For Marxists, the real program of a party is not just what’s written in the party program, but what the party actually does in practice. To the extent that we’re now organizing ourselves as SA activists on the basis of SA’s left-reformist politics, then it follows that we’re gradually becoming SA.

As Comrade Ray Fulcher wrote in a PCD contribution last year, this is a bizarre act of self-negation.

And it leads to a profound identify crisis. Comrades get up in DSP branch meetings and refer to “the party”. But which party are they talking about? The real party that’s invisible to the outside world? Or is it the SA “party”, the party we’re becoming, the party that exists as a mental projection of our frustrated desires to be building something other than the Democratic Socialist Party?

Often the comrades themselves don’t seem to know, using the first and second meanings interchangeably and moving from one to the other effortlessly without even realizing it.

Since the DSP and SA have merged in reality, we can no longer clearly separate the one from the other in our own minds. Comrades say “look, SA did this, SA did that” when it wasn’t SA that did it, it was us. It was the Democratic Socialist Party masquerading as SA.

We credit SA, the imaginary party, with all the work done by our real party, the Democratic Socialist Party. No wonder we’re so attached to the SA dream – we’re constantly reinforcing the illusion.

Look at all the wonderful things SA is doing! Intervening in mass delegates meetings; hosting forums and film screenings; SA contingents at demonstrations; pre-selecting a candidate for the NSW state election, which involved 29 DSP comrades and three independents; and of course that wonderful newspaper of the Socialist Alliance, Green Left Weekly.

When we’re not able to participate in or lead sustained mass struggles, we don’t get much of a corrective from the masses. We can play these dishonest games and it makes no difference to the lives of the millions of ordinary people who will one day make a revolution in this country. The real damage is done to ourselves, to the collective mind and “spirit” of the party.

The NE majority claim that Resistance has been substantially rebuilt, but this is not true. It is true that the June 1 student strike, the Resistance conference and the Lebanon upsurge brought new people into Resistance this year, and that’s good.

But we’ve never had a problem joining people to Resistance. The challenge has always been taking them a big step closer to becoming conscious, committed, lifelong revolutionary cadre. And that’s where we get stuck, because the problem of Resistance is really the problem of the party. We cannot substantially rebuild Resistance as a Marxist youth cadre organisation until we abandon this liquidationist line.

There are other important aspects of our many-sided liquidationist drift which I don’t have time to go through in the half-hour allowed for this counter-report. We could simply list them, but they really need to be explained and justified, so this will have to wait until PCD reopens sometime next year.

Four questions answered

In Comrade Peter Boyle’s outline of his party building report to the NE, he posed four questions, four criteria for judging whether or not we should abandon the SA party-building line.

Let’s try to answer these four questions.

1. Does SA extend the reach of socialist politics?

No. Green Left Weekly sales, hours and participation have gone down since the beginning of the SA turn. And if by socialist we mean our revolutionary Marxist ideas and explanations, then masquerading as SA has blunted our ability to reach out even further.

2. Does SA help us win over leftward moving forces in the working class?

First of all, this is a total abstraction. There are no significant forces moving to the left in Australia today. There are individuals who are questioning things and coming to radical conclusions. There are people active in single-issue or localized progressive campaigns, and there are episodic outbursts of active dissent. But there’s no sustained mobilisation and political awakening, no significant radicalisation to create the class-struggle partners we’d need to pursue a viable new party project.

Secondly, what are we winning people to? To a lifelong commitment to the communist revolution, and to building the seed of a party capable of leading this revolution? Or are we talking about winning people over to the DSP becoming SA?

In any case, the DSP masquerading as SA is an increasingly sectarian posture.

3. Does it help us recruit?

If we simply redefine our traditional DSP periphery as SA, then it appears that a lot of recruits are coming “from” SA. But this is meaningless, it’s just another optical illusion. Until you get to the third decimal point, SA is just the DSP.

The only way SA helps us recruit to the DSP is where we lower the bar to let in frustrated SA members who want to join a real party, not a glossy leaflet making the empty proclamation that SA is “an anti-capitalist party”. This just further erases the distinction between the DSP and SA.

That the SA party-building line has been a disaster for the DSP is summed up in a single statistic: since October 2002 our DSP full membership has declined from 317 to 255, a 20% decline.

But even these numbers don’t tell the whole story because we’ve lost so many valuable, experienced DSP leaders, and this leadership is irreplaceable in the short term. The cadres we’ve lost were forged over many years and in a few cases, decades. Just the six Marxist Solidarity Network comrades alone took with them some 72 years of accumulated revolutionary experience.

We did create a multi-tendency socialist party, but not in the way we imagined. We created it inside the DSP, which is now bitterly divided.

4. Does SA help us advance our objective of building a mass revolutionary party?

No, it’s taking us further and further away from the mass revolutionary party.

If we continue on this path we’ll end up liquidating the Democratic Socialist Party completely into our SA dream, and this would set back the revolutionary party project in this country for years, perhaps even a generation.

This would be to squander what we’ve built up so patiently and so painstakingly over the last three and a half decades, with the sacrifice of thousands of comrades who in their own modest and selfless way made a valuable contribution to building the revolutionary party.

Comrades, we don’t have to do this. It’s not too late to come to terms with our mistake, reconcile ourselves to the reality that the new party is an idea whose time has not yet come, and abandon this disastrous course.

But it will take a lot of political courage, honesty and humility. Comrades will have to stop denying reality, stop shooting the messenger and stop looking for scapegoats.

It’s something we can learn from the Cuban leadership, from Fidel. As the Cuban consul said in her presentation to the Latin America Solidarity conference on Saturday, they don’t lie to the masses. When they fuck up, as they did with the disastrous attempt to harvest 10 million tons of sugar in 1970, they take full leadership responsibility for correcting the mistake.

Comrades, there is a sane Leninist party-building perspective anchored in the realities of the present, still very difficult period for revolutionary party-building in this rich, stable imperialist country.

It’s rebuilding the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance using Green Left Weekly as our outreach tool; engaging with broader forces through genuine united front collaboration as the Democratic Socialist Party, just as we did when we helped lead the magnificent S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in 2000.

It’s strengthening our international solidarity work, especially with the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions, spreading far and wide the message of hope and inspiration of this axis of solidarity and socialist renewal.

It’s rebuilding that revolutionary pride, that trust and confidence in each other and that party spirit which we used to have, that party spirit which sustained us as revolutionaries.

Finally, I’d urge comrades to vote for the motion before you calling for a referendum of the membership to rescind the constitutional amendments we made in 2003 and 2005 so we can restore the DSP as a publicly-functioning Leninist party.

If all that the NE majority is proposing we do with SA is election campaigns plus a one-day national gathering in Geelong, then let’s resume building the Democratic Socialist Party as the party we build today.

Summary

Comrades, as I said at the beginning, unfortunately we weren’t allowed to present a fully fledged counter report.

Firstly on our proposal for a referendum on the constitutional amendments. All this would do is take us back to before our 2003 SA party-building turn, to the first stage of SA when it was a loose socialist electoral alliance that also did a bit of campaigning. It takes us back to the time when we were building the DSP as our party.

If this referendum got majority support in the branches, then we’d have to come back and have a discussion on the NE about how we’d implement it. I don’t think comrades should be worried about taking such a referendum to the membership. It would be a good thing, a democratic thing.

There’s a substantial minority of the DSP that thinks that the Congress party-building line has proved to be absurd, that it can’t be implemented, that this line has failed. So let’s take it to the membership to decide.

Now to respond to a few other points that came up in the discussion.

Comrade Sam Wainwright says that we can do without the psychological explanations in the counter-report. But comrades, we’re human beings. We think, we feel, we make mistakes, we have hopes, we have dreams.

How can you explain the mass phenomenon of religion in the modern scientific age, the 80% of Americans who believe in a divine creator, if we don’t understand something about what drives us as human beings? Sometimes we have a dream or an idea, we pursue it and we become very attached to this idea. It happens all the time.

We shouldn’t have a cardboard cut-out view of ourselves as Marxist cadre. We shouldn’t have an aversion to psychology. Marx’s theory of alienation has an intrinsic psychological dimension. A little psychology is necessary to understand why we’ve persisted for so long in this mistaken SA turn.

Some of us have recognised the mistake and others of us haven’t, in our opinion. So we have a disagreement.

During the discussion, some comrades began to openly justify what has become the permanent tactic of hiding the DSP behind SA or some other left-reformist mask.

One comrade said that we wouldn’t have gone out and created this so-called “transitional form” in the first place, but now that we’ve got it, let’s keep it because it’s useful.

We should ask: useful for what? Useful for building the DSP? No, the evidence is overwhelming that this line has been a disaster for the DSP. The 20% decline in DSP membership alone tells us this. So what is this “transitional form” really useful for? It’s the transitional form of the DSP on its way to becoming SA.

This is the very opposite of the original intention of our SA tactic.

You can’t base a national party-building perspective for the DSP on what’s happening in the Gold Coast and Armidale, where there aren’t any DSP members. You have to look at what’s happening in the big cities where the working class is concentrated, and where we’re concentrated. Comrades can’t say, “Sydney West SA is going well, the rest of Sydney just has to catch up” because it’s the same in Melbourne, the SA branches are dead.

What are we doing this for? This time and energy would be better spent rebuilding Resistance. To really rebuild Resistance we have to devote substantially more resources to our youth work – a bigger Resistance National Office, more projects, more campaigns.

Now, this does have to come at the expense of something. It should come at the expense of DSP comrades being saddled with the futile administrative task of keeping up appearances for this broad anti-capitalist party when it hasn’t happened, when we’ve tested out this SA party-building line for four years now.

What have we got to show for it? A few people who come along to meetings? Yes, some of them come along to hear an interesting political discussion. Some of them even sell the paper every now and again. But we’ve always had a DSP periphery, and we’ve always had a part of this periphery that we could activate.

We built up our relationship with Craig Johnston and Chris Cain over many years. I remember when Comrade Dick Nichols came over to Perth and we put in an intense burst of activity to support Chris Cain’s MUA rank and file ticket in the MUA election campaign.

We did this as the Democratic Socialist Party, and that didn’t scare anyone. Chris Cain didn’t run a thousand million miles away because we said we were revolutionary Marxists. That wasn’t the basis of our collaboration, but we didn’t hide it, he knew where we were coming from and it didn’t scare him.

Back then we had line articles in Green Left Weekly explaining, for example, that Australia’s parliamentary “democracy” is a sham, that we need a revolutionary democracy and a working people’s government. We don’t do this anymore.

There are union officials and activists who cheer on the Venezuelan revolution and do some good solidarity work, but when it comes to our own ruling class they capitulate to the class-collaborationist trade union bureaucracy.

As we said in the counter-report, this is where the SA party-building line is leading us.

We say in Green Left Weekly that the “left” union leaderships that pushed the ACTU to call the big rallies against Work Choices want to take on the Howard government. That’s bullshit. If Doug Cameron’s AMWU and the other “left” Laborite leaderships really wanted to take on the Howard government, they could have brought basic industry to a standstill well before the legislation became law. Mining, manufacturing, construction, the wharves – they could have shut the entire country down.

But as Comrade Graham Matthews pointed out in the discussion, these union leaderships don’t want the ALP to come to power on the back of a mobilized working class, a genuine mass movement. They just want to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground stadium every six months to keep Labor up in the opinion polls.

A couple of years ago when Craig Johnston was imprisoned, we ran a scathing campaign against this same wing of the union bureaucracy. We pointed out what cockroaches they are. Now we say that the working class is “fortunate” to have leaders like this. We are liquidating the presentation of a principled working-class political line in the trade unions.

Comrade Peter Boyle said in his report that SA equals propaganda plus engagement. The implication is that before we had SA the DSP was a propaganda group that didn’t engage, or didn’t engage as effectively, with broader forces.

What is our really effective outreach and engagement tool? Green Left Weekly. The other one is Resistance.

We should be concentrating on these, not on propping up the fiction of a party that after four years is just us and a relatively tiny number of active SA partners.

In persisting with trying to build this broader party when we don’t have the partners to do this, we’re gradually becoming SA. This is the liquidation.

Appendix 1: Resurface the Democratic Socialist Party

Motion submitted by LPF:

“In view of the further confirmation since the 22nd DSP Congress in January that the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party do not exist (in particular, there do not exist the broader left forces to provide the SA with the leadership resources and political confidence to take a significant step to creating a new socialist party), this meeting of the DSP National Committee proposes, in accordance with Article 10, paragraph 4(d) of the DSP constitution, to instruct the incoming NE to organise a referendum of all DSP members to rescind the constitutional changes made at the 21st and 22nd DSP congresses so as to “resurface” the DSP as a fully functioning public revolutionary socialist organisation.”

Appendix 2: LPF position paper on Socialist Alliance

At the May 2006 DSP National Committee, the Leninist Party Faction put forward the assessment:

“The proposal that the Socialist Alliance can in any way start along the path toward becoming a real mass-based class struggle party is wrong. The objective conditions, i.e. a radicalisation producing new partners for such a project, do not exist. Deciding to become purely an internal tendency in the SA was wrong and is even more wrong today. We have dissolved the public political presence of the DSP for a project that has no basis” (Party building counter-report and summary, by John Percy, on behalf of the LPF. The Activist, Volume 16, number 5, pg 60).

This remains the assessment of the Leninist Party Faction. We dispute the arguments put forward by the majority in defense of their failed line.

The truth about SA – a DSP masquerade:

Partners in the project

The Socialist Alliance is an “alliance” in name only. It is nothing more than the DSP and a handful of our long-standing allies. There remain prominent leaders of the trade union movement who identify with Socialist Alliance, namely Chris Cain and Craig Johnson, along with Sam Watson, a key leader of the Murri community in Queensland. But even these comrades have taken a step back in the past twelve months from their previous commitment to the Socialist Alliance. The 2006 DSP Congress resolution stated that “the fourth Socialist Alliance national conference [in 2005] elected a more democratic national executive that includes prominent trade union and social movement leaders such as Craig Johnston, Sam Watson and Tim Gooden. The challenge is to try to develop this into an effective leadership”. This “challenge” was not, and could not, be met. There was, and is, simply no basis for the project and these comrades, rightly, prioritised other work.

Regardless of their political weight and position, these individuals cannot and do not alter the objective conditions – they are not the class struggle partners that would lay a real basis for a broad class struggle party. In fact, it is a serious political error to continue to mislead these long-time political allies of the DSP into believing that the SA is, or could be in the near future, a broad working class party.

Aside from this small number of trade union and social movement leaders, there is only a handful of non-affiliated activists who remain committed to the Socialist Alliance project. A campaign activist here, a long time DSP supporter there are held up to justify building SA as a new party. The prime orientation toward SA for many, if not most, of the non-affiliated members is in an electoral framework. In practice, this feeds the liberal illusions in parliamentary democracy rather than breaking it – a primary political consideration for Marxists.

These illusions are being fostered by the DSP’s current approach in SA. This approach was summed up in the majority report on Socialist Alliance to the May 2006 DSP NC which stated “…we are working with people with very varied experiences, levels of political understanding, ideas about action and energy to implement them. But in the Socialist Alliance they are united in seeing the need for an anti-capitalist movement and organisation, and respect the revolutionary leadership of the DSP to help the left build a new workers’ party and make more of a difference in politics” (State of Socialist Alliance report and Summary, By Lisa McDonald, on behalf of the DSP National Executive. The Activist, Volume 16, number 5, pg 28). What this translates to is an accommodation to the “levels of political understanding” that sees making “more of a difference in politics” in a purely electoral sense.

The “revolutionary leadership of the DSP” is reduced to our role in building a supposed “new workers’ party” to “make more of a difference in politics” [ie. electoral politics]. However the “revolutionary leadership” of the DSP should be aiming to do much more than this – it should be aiming to break these illusions. However this is not happening on the ground. There is a separation between our revolutionary “education” and “leadership” in Socialist Alliance. Time and again in Socialist Alliance branch meetings and forums, grandiose illusions in the potential electoral success of SA are fostered, not challenged, in order to keep on board the few non-DSP activists who remain committed to the project. For example:

The majority report on Socialist Alliance to the May 2006 NC went on to ask the following question: “who, exactly, would be likely to collaborate with the DSP that won’t with the SA?” But what we really should be asking and it is the key question when we consider who is working with us in the Socialist “Alliance” today - who, exactly, would be likely to collaborate with the SA that won’t with the DSP? The answer to this question is at the heart of the LPF position – the SA is nothing more than the DSP, and a small handful of our long-standing allies, masquerading as a “broad left party”.

‘Strengthening the left intervention’

The DSP majority claims that the Socialist Alliance strengthens the left intervention into movements and campaigns. There is absolutely no basis to this claim. The “Socialist Alliance” interventions into the key political campaigns of 2006 have been nothing more than the DSP masquerading as the Socialist Alliance.

Few, if any, non-aligned members of SA wear their “SA hat” in the campaign and movement work that they are involved in. SA is simply another organisation that they support – they are not organised in an SA framework.

During the upswing in the anti-war movement around the war on Lebanon, almost no branches had functioning SA anti-war caucuses. The “SA interventions” amounted to DSP produced SA placards and in some cases DSP comrades on platforms speaking as SA members. In Melbourne, where there was a functioning caucus, it amounted to the DSP caucusing with two ex- DSP members and one DSP contact. This charade was exposed even further as this “SA” caucus took a position against proposing David Glanz, an SA NE member, for the speaking platform at an anti-war rally.

Where the SA trade union caucuses have met, they have played little to no role in organising others in an SA framework to “strengthen the left intervention”. Like SA branch meetings, they are meetings of DSP comrades with at best a small handful of non-affiliated SA members. A recent meeting of the Melbourne SA trade union caucus involved only one non-DSP comrade. The focus shifts to organisationally involving these non-affiliated activists to maintain the charade of an SA broader than the DSP, and the political discussion on our tactics and implantation, which would happen in DSP fractions, gets left by the wayside. In effect, this is weakening the left intervention into the trade union movement as the cadre base of the DSP in the unions is diminished through lack of attention to political training.

Even where an SA Trade Union caucus has attracted forces outside of the DSP, it has brought the weakness of SA to the fore. In Brisbane, the pre-June 28 SA trade union caucus was dominated entirely by discussion on the tactics of the local “rank-and-file group” led by Bernie Neville (leader of 1985 SEQEB strike). Neville’s group had decided on an ultraleft stunt for the June 28 rally of giving the “Red Card” to union officials who had failed to lead. Neville may be an SA member, but he was not going to take direction from the SA caucus. But that did not stop DSP comrades in the meeting spending a good hour trying to convince him and his allies to change their minds on the stunt (this was after losing the argument in Neville’s “rank and file group” earlier that day). The slight re-wording of Neville’s “red card” motion was heralded by the Brisbane branch leadership as a “victory” of SA’s union work. All, bar one, of the non-DSP participants in that SA Trade Union caucus (and one provisional member of the DSP) handed out for Neville’s group at June 28 – along with Sam Watson and various others on the left in Brisbane.

‘A bigger megaphone for socialist politics’

The Socialist Alliance has not increased the audience for socialist politics in this country. In fact, the regular audience for our politics, reflected in the distribution of Green Left Weekly, has decreased. The majority’s projections for what is possible from SA have come a long way from the early musings that motivated the turn to building SA as “the party we build” which posited that such a turn could see gains including doubling of the GLW sub base. Wild thoughts indeed.

But it is not only that the audience for socialist politics has declined, those we are speaking to are getting a watered down version of our Marxist politics – ie. the non-Marxist, left reformist politics of the Socialist Alliance. As the DSP NE minority report to the 2006 congress argued, “that is what we mean by political liquidation – that we no longer publicly argue a Marxist line as expressed in the DSP program but only the line of the SA in public forums” (DSP tasks in the Socialist Alliance, by Roberto Jorquera, for the NE minority. The Activist, Volume 16, number 1, pg 69)

There are innumerable examples of this watering down:

The QLD election campaign.

The Socialist Alliance campaign in the Queensland State elections effectively used Sam Watson’s candidature to propagandise for the need for a political alternative to the ALP. But it also demonstrated four things:

1. The impact of the SA straightjacket in blunting our tactical thinking:

We learned as early as March 2006 that the Murri community had decided that they would field a candidate against Peter Beattie in the seat of Brisbane Central. We failed to initiate discussions with the community, or Sam Watson until the elections were called, despite it being clear for at least a month that Beattie would be calling a snap election. There was no consideration that any other electoral tactic might be a better option for the elections, for example a Fight Racism type ticket that we have run successfully in the past.

2. Even in the electoral arena SA has been reduced to a front for the DSP:

An electoral front does not preclude involving, even as candidates, non-party individuals. But politically speaking, there were no broader political forces involved in the campaign. The “sign-on” tactic was in effect a cover for the fact that there were no forces willing to commit on the ground to supporting the campaign. The handful of non-DSP SA members who helped with the campaign were the same people, or layer of people, who would have supported any DSEL campaign in the past. By masquerading as SA, we are being dishonest with some of our closest allies about the actual state of the “alliance” and its potential in the current objective political conditions.

3. The increasing sectarianism and opportunism creeping into the DSP majority’s approach to movement building:

For all the talk during the election campaign of building campaigns beyond elections, the campaigns reports at the two successive Brisbane DSP branch meetings following the election campaign made no mention of or proposals to play any role in the ongoing protest actions being organised by the Murri community. This is despite the fact that there is very real and ongoing movement taking place in the community, with one of the biggest Murri community meetings for a long time taking place in the fortnight after the elections, which projected a mass rally outside the first sitting of the new parliament.

4. The ongoing slide in the strength of Socialist Alliance:

In the 2004 QLD state elections, in a similarly short campaign (three weeks) Socialist Alliance fielded candidates in three seats, receiving 3.1% of the vote in Inala, 2.9% in South Brisbane, and SA and the aboriginal candidate received a total of 2.7% in Brisbane Central, compared to Sam Watson’s 1.8% this time. In 2004 we mobilised around 100 SA members to assist with the campaign, but 60 this time. (Assessment of the Queensland state election campaign By Jim McIlroy. Socialist Alliance Discussion Bulletin Vol 4 No 2, March 2004)

‘SA is expanding socialist politics in regional areas’

The DSP, along with party supporters around GLW, have for many years found that flying the socialist flag in regional areas brings people around. But the reach of socialist politics, as reflected by GLW distribution and our ability to organise in regional areas has declined since our turn to build Socialist Alliance as our party. In less than five years we have lost our branches in Darwin and Rockhampton, and the Lismore branch is a mere shadow of what it was before Socialist Alliance came on the scene, as is Newcastle. In the late 90’s we came close to establishing a DSP branch in the Blue Mountains. The good work of non-aligned members of the Socialist Alliance in Armidale and the Gold Coast is a pale imitation of the reach that the DSP had before our cadre force, and thus the reach of socialist politics, was so seriously diminished by the failed line on SA.

This is also the case with our outer-city and suburban branches. For example, before the Socialist Alliance, we had a thriving branch in the western suburbs of Sydney. Now, there is no DSP branch, but when the DSP comrades in Sydney’s west meet as Socialist Alliance, along with a handful of non-aligned SA members, it is touted as being a step forward for socialist organising.

Melbourne DSP established a self-sustaining three-branch district in early 2001, following the Melbourne S11 protests in 2000. In 2003-2004 the DSP turned to SA building and its district structure collapsed and its suburban organising wound down. In 2003 both suburban DSP branches retracted back into Central DSP and the newly SA-run offices were closed in 2004 (Northeast) and 2005 (West) due to lack of funds and lack of use.

‘We can do both’

The argument that it is possible to build both the DSP and SA is not so much a political argument in favour of continuing the line on SA as a dodging of the political debate. Nonetheless, it does point to what is the reality on the ground in many branches – that the SA is being used as a front for the DSP, or a supporters’ network. This approach sees the DSP using the SA as either a permanent half-way house for those interested in socialist politics, but not willing to join a Leninist party or a “stepping stone” organisation that potential recruits are signed up to before being recruited to the DSP. For the former – those not willing to join a Leninist party – why are we wasting our resources in servicing them, giving them access to DSP resources for their political projects? In the case of those joining SA as a “stepping stone” to the DSP – we have never needed such a front in the past. Why do we need one now?

The state of Socialist Alliance

The key factors in the health, or otherwise, of SA – its membership, internal democracy and propaganda – all demonstrate that it is anything but a living, healthy, independent organisation.

Membership

Despite repeated projections for recruitment and renewal campaigns and proclamations about how easy it is to join people up to SA, the membership continues to stagnate. Even the DSP membership has to be berated in order to get the (constitutionally required) membership sign-ups. At the May 2006 DSP NC, the majority report on Socialist Alliance put the current membership figures at 616, with 520 who would definitely rejoin if asked (State of Socialist Alliance report and Summary, by Lisa McDonald, on behalf of the DSP National Executive. The Activist, Volume 16, number 5, pg 32).

Nor has there been any broadening of the leadership of SA. In some branches, there has been a further decline on this score since the May 2006 DSP NC. In Adelaide two more of the leading non-aligned activists have resigned from SA. It’s been hard for the DSP to find comrades willing to convene SA branches, let alone non-DSP SA members.

SA ‘deMOCracy’

Many SA branches that are “on the books” are hollow shells or non-existent. Those that do meet do so irregularly (most branches have met less than the quarterly schedule that the majority leadership expressed such horror at when even suggested by comrade John Percy in the 2005 pre-congress discussion). Sydney Inner-West, for example, home to the biggest DSP branch in the country, has, as of October 1, only managed to meet once in 2006. Where branches do meet, they are by-and-large limited to rubber stamping decisions already made in DSP bodies. The decisions are easy to get through SA meetings – as they are overwhelmingly made up of DSP members with a handful of non-aligned members, who are with few exceptions, DSP supporters. For example, the August 22 Sydney Inner West SA branch AGM to pre-select a candidate for the NSW election campaign amounted to 29 DSP members and 3 non-aligned members. Yet another clear example of the DSP masquerading as Socialist Alliance.

Often, DSP decisions are not even taken to the Socialist Alliance to be rubber stamped. For example, Melbourne DSP, not Wills and Northeast SA, branches made the decision to set up a joint organising committee between Wills and Northeast. The Wills branch has not met since May 24.

Propaganda

Socialist Alliance has demonstrated its incapacity to sustainably produce any propaganda independent from the projects which have been bankrolled and carried through by the DSP. There is no reality to the SA-GLW protocols which were meant to increase SA involvement in GLW. There is no-one to involve.

Even the projection for a Fightback Manifesto made by the 2006 DSP Congress, and reaffirmed by the majority report on SA to the May 2006 NC, has not been produced.

Seeing Red is a failure. Of all the projections for Seeing Red made at both the 2006 DSP Congress (The DSP’s tasks in Socialist Alliance, by Lisa McDonald, for the NE Majority, The Activist Volume, 16 number 1, pg 65) and the May 2006 DSP NC (State of Socialist Alliance report and Summary, by Lisa McDonald, on behalf of the DSP National Executive. The Activist, Volume 16, number 5, pg 33), only one has been carried out – the joint GLW-Seeing Red subscription offer. The priority for Seeing Red should be the implementation of the proposal adopted by the Congress – that “SA assess these measures at the next national conference and make a decision about Seeing Red’s financial sustainability”, though we would suggest a proposed amendment to remove the second part of that proposal on “considering alternative publication options”.

Where to for SA?

At the 2006 DSP Congress the NE Minority made the following assessment:

“SA has almost been killed off by us trying to force the transformation into a party without the forces needed as partners. No amount of phone work or sending people membership cards will revive the SA while the DSP tries to force it to become something it cannot yet be. Our task now is to revive it before it dies completely” (We Want our party back! Rebuild the DSP as a public revolutionary Marxist party again, by John Percy for the NE minority. The Activist, Volume 16, number 1, pg 44).

At the May 2006 National Committee meeting, the LPF made the following assessment:

“It’s the majority line that’s killing Socialist Alliance, and increasingly makes its resuscitation impossible. Their vain perspective of turning it into ‘the party we build’ has not just harmed the DSP, it’s harmed SA, turning away all the other affiliates, and nearly all the independents who had some level of activity…The thing that killed SA was the DSP congress vote” (Party-building counter-report and summary, by John Percy, on behalf of the LPF. The Activist, Volume 16, number 5, pg 61).

This remains our assessment. It remains of the utmost political urgency that the DSP collectively recognise the disastrous impact of the attempt to turn SA into “the party we build”. Only then can we begin to have an honest and frank discussion, first with our allies and then with our left opponents. The failure of SA won’t come as a shock to many of our allies – it is increasingly on display for all to see. Just look at the Victorian State elections, where there are no less than three socialist organisations fielding candidates, and this number could grow before November. There can be no illusion that there is any reality left to the Socialist “Alliance”. The DSP has to stop the charade, quit masquerading as a broad-left anti-capitalist party and re-emerge and rebuild the Democratic Socialist Party as a public Marxist party.

Attachment: The origins of the mess we’re in

Reprinted below is the original “wild thoughts” proposal by Peter Boyle to take the “Scottish road”, and dissolve the DSP into SA. It was circulated in the latter part of July 2002, taken to the July 29 Political Committee meeting, and a more detailed proposal presented to the August 5 PC, which was worked up into the document adopted by the September 2 National Executive meeting, “For a new step forward in left unity,” by Peter Boyle. (Printed in The Activist, Vol 12, No 10, September 2002)

We all went along with it at the time, but surely now we can recognize and correct our mistake?

As a measure of the “success” of this tactic (strategy). In July 2002 the DSP’s membership was 317 full members, 32 provisional, for a total of 349. Today, we have 255 full members, 28 provos, for a total of 283. That’s a 20 percent slashing of our full members.

Some wild thoughts about perspectives

I have been thinking about what we should do in the light of two developments: 1) the new crisis in the ISO – I think they are down to about 130 cadre, half or more of whom are currently inactive but could be resurrected. 2) The Greens’ electoral success (possibly enhanced by the Democrats split). There is also a third factor which is the observation that our comrades are a bit frayed as a result of pursuing too many initiatives simultaneously. It shows in $$$, in comrade’s tiredness and a certain scrambling of our perspectives and administrativeness in branch life because there are simply too many tasks.

The more I think about it the more I think it is time for us to seriously consider taking the “Scottish road” with Socialist Alliance, i.e. dissolve the party into Socialist Alliance but taking over our main institutions, the paper and the apparatus associated with it.

This hasn’t gone to any party body yet but I have canvassed it with John, Max, Pip & Terry. Our chief competitor on the left, the ISO, is at its weakest point (and can only recover from here on) and any bilateral unity process would privilege their leadership unduly.

There is very little to loose and we could gain some independents as cadre, a much bigger and involved periphery, no “extra party” to build and a reinvigorated core cadre. What formal discipline/norms we might risk losing would be offset by the extra political authority gained from a step forward for left unity. We would gain from our comrades working and struggling within multi-tendency party. It would also effectively broaden the work of SA beyond elections. This would offset the Greens electoral gains to some degree.

The timing could be: 1) we put it to October NC, 2) make the offer and if everything proceeds well, ratify it at the Congress and start the new regime in the new year (or is this too fast?)

One thing we would not do like the SSP is keep a separate formal faction like the ISM. That is just an incumbrance left over from the unresolved Scottish Labour Militant (at the time) relations with CWI We would be the majority of active comrades at all levels and would not need a faction. Other tendencies would still be effectively in separate factions but that would make them look sectarian to the independents.

Quick gains we could get could include: 1) doubling of GLW (or whatever it is called) sub base, 2) a gain of 20 or so activists from the independents within a couple of months, 3) possibly, within 6 months, a similar number from the ISO who would begin to follow our lead whaever their leaders wanted, 4) a rejuvenation of broader SA membership around this extra step in left unity, 5) greater difficulty by ISO in pursuing sectarian directions in the main movements (refugees, anti-war, etc) because we’d caucus these matters with them in SA.

Certain institutions could remain independent: Resistance, publishing program (resistance books/NCP/Links), Marxism school(?), ASAP and of course the actually ownership of our buildings/material assets. Part of the DSP dues could be transferred into subscriptions/ pledges to the paper and some of these other institutions.

Some assumptions here are: 1) That there is a bigger audience for socialism/anti-capitalism even if there is no “anti-capitalist movements” or even the possibility of the summit-chasing movements n North America/Western Europe. 2) We have a couple hundred cadre who could “keep the faith” through this process even without a formal faction. 3) we have won some authority within the movements for our initiative and leadership over the last couple of years.

Peter Boyle