Party building counter-report
By Marce Cameron, on behalf of the LPF
[The general line of the following report and summary was rejected by the national committee. The vote for adopting the report was 6 full NC members in favour, 23 against, with 0 abstentions, and 3 candidate members in favour, 10 against, with 0 abstentions.]
Comrades, in her party building report on behalf of the NE majority, Comrade Sue Bolton proposes that our main task coming out of this NC is to develop Marxist cadres and build the DSP, especially through recruitment from Resistance.
The report goes on to claim that the education and training of Marxist cadres and the rebuilding of the DSP is being held back, however, by the “lack of revolutionary unity” in the DSP, for which the NE majority blames the existence and conduct of the Leninist Party Faction.
Disband the faction, say the NE majority, and we’ll have “revolutionary unity”, and we’ll be able to rebuild the DSP as a revolutionary Marxist cadre organisation as rapidly as is possible in the present political conditions.
But the faction itself is just the organised expression of the sharp differences which have developed within the DSP over what should be our basic party-building line of march.
The NE majority’s argument rests on the assumption that our party-building line is fundamentally correct: that us masquerading a diminished DSP plus a tiny handful of the DSP’s active periphery scattered across the country and some hundreds of paper members as a new, broad-left party in formation is the best way to rebuild the DSP as a Marxist cadre organisation.
It’s the task of the National Committee to assess, review and if necessary adjust or abandon the basic party-building line adopted by the Congress.
But the NE majority refuses to make an honest and objective assessment of the implementation of this line. Instead they dodge, fudge and try to scapegoat the LPF for the failure of this SA party-building line.
The NE majority want us to believe that we’ve turned the corner, and now the only thing holding us back is the faction.
But the data on such party-building basics as membership growth, Green Left Weekly distribution and finances tell a different story.
We haven’t turned the corner
Membership growth is negative for the period since the October NC, falling from 287 to 282 full and provisional members.
Average Green Left Weekly sales hours have declined every year for the previous three years, from 417 per week in 2004 to 366 in 2007 while the sales rate has held steady.
Our financial situation is not as dire as in 2005 and 2006 but it’s still precarious, with an income shortfall of $25,000.
Not only have we not turned the corner, but when we step back and look at the graphs of these basic party-building indicators over the past five years, the basic picture is decline and stagnation – and the decline coincided with our 2003 turn to transform the DSP into an internal tendency of the Socialist Alliance and our attempt to build SA as a broad left party in formation.
There has been no more or less rapid and sustained recovery of any of these basic party-building indicators, and this stagnation had set in by the end of 2003, two years before the LPF was formed.
Sobering as these data are, they don’t tell the whole story. More important than numbers of recruits, for example, is what our new DSP and Resistance members are actually doing or not doing.
More important than sheer numbers of papers distributed is what kind of politics our paper is seeking to win people to, and how effectively it’s being used to build the DSP.
This brings us back to the most important question of all: what kind of party are we trying to build, and are we succeeding? What is holding back the rebuilding of the DSP and Resistance?
Not the faction, but the failed SA party building line, a wrong line that undermines cadre building no matter how enthusiastically we try to implement it.
It’s the line, not the faction
When SA was launched in May 2001 as an alliance of eight socialist organisations and hundreds of individual leftists, left unity was the magnet that attracted so many people to SA.
Now that all the other affiliates have long since formally or de-facto withdrawn from the Alliance; now that the active core of SA has shrunk to just the DSP and a tiny scattering of committed SA-builders; now that the DSP has institutionalized the whole-scale substitution of its own activity and initiative for that of SA; now that SA democracy is a joke because the DSP decides almost everything and does almost everything; now that the Alliance is just a pitiful remnant of its once promising beginning, who are we to appropriate SA?
Who are we to privatize this common dream and present our own little party, and a few other activists, as the broad left party under construction?
For us to continue to strut around wearing the mantle of SA is a sectarian posture.
SA’s hundreds of paper members don’t represent a coming together of the radical left. The breaking down of organizational barriers and the convergence of ideas and activities can only grow out of a sustained mass upsurge of anti-capitalist resistance that generates substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders.
Castles in the air
From Green Left Weekly to the Socialist Alliance website to all those expensive glossy leaflets we dish out in vast numbers, we’re still hyping up SA.
“We have been involved in all of the community-union pickets to support workers who are fighting employer’s attacks,” claims our SA “Time’s Up Howard” leaflet. Really, all of them? Every industrial picket line in Australia with “community support”? What about the ones we haven’t even heard about?
And this: “We are taking up the campaign against global warming”. How are we doing this? Only through Green Left Weekly and the occasional public forum, that is, through propaganda (so much for SA “the party of action”) and it’s not even SA that’s doing it, it’s the DSP.
When we hype up SA it sounds impressive, and we hope this will trick more people into signing up for SA.
This misleading advertising is self-defeating. Sooner or later people find out that “SA” is really the public face of another, shadowy organisation – the DSP, a once proud and openly revolutionary party that now politely conceals itself behind the left-reformist mask of SA.
Sooner or later people find out that there are at least half a dozen other far-left organisations outside the Socialist Alliance. “SA” might still be bigger than the others, for now at least, but it’s just one among many, and what little collaboration there is among these far-left groups certainly isn’t happening through SA. So much for left unity.
If they join via the website and they happen to live in Sydney, they’ll soon discover that the Bankstown, Inner West and Sydney East SA “branches” don’t actually exist.
Where then is SA, they might wonder? We might wonder too. It always seems to be somewhere else.
The SA-new-party enthusiasts insist that SA is helping us break out of a certain routinism and inertia they believe we’d fallen into with the Democratic Socialist Party.
But the lack of real, tangible progress towards this new party is breeding the very passivity and routinism that building SA as our new party in formation was supposed to help us avoid.
Comrade Bolton could name only eight SA members around the country who regularly distribute Green Left Weekly. Only two SA members participated in the recent “Blitz Week”, selling a total of 11 papers. One is a former DSP member.
Every now and again we go through the ritual of committing ourselves to “really getting the SA branches firing”, as if we’ve been so busy with other, more important things that it’s only now that we’re finally getting around to it.
Then the whole thing is quietly forgotten until months later, when there’s another report to the DSP branch which proposes the very same thing, as if it were a new idea that hadn’t been tested, when it has been so thoroughly tested.
We’re exhorted to get on the phones and ring all those paper members we never see, and the very few we do see. Some comrades get up and confess that they could have done more; others prefer to blame the faction for the persistent failure of this new party to materialize. No wonder fewer comrades are turning up to DSP branch meetings.
So we just lower our expectations, and lower them still further to the point of absurdity, where we call two or three SA members sitting in a room full of DSP members “a terrific meeting”. Yet we go through the motions and console ourselves with the thought that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Maybe, but what do we have to show for more than four years of us attempting to build SA as a new broad left party in formation while the DSP has disappeared underground?
This adaptation to absurdity has been going on for years now, and it’s created an unhealthy internal culture. Comrades who dare to speak the truth about SA are dismissed by the SA-new-party enthusiasts as “pessimistic”, “demoralized”, “transmission belts for defeatism” or just “Sparts”.
The party we used to have
With the DSP almost invisible to the outside world and diminished both organisationally and politically, even the memory of the Democratic Socialist Party is fading.
Comrades forget that the Democratic Socialist Party was never an obstacle to collaboration with Sam Watson, Chris Cain and Craig Johnston.
Comrades forget that before we went underground in SA our DSP membership reached around 360 full and provisional members. In April 2001 we had 16 DSP branches. We had DSP branches in Fremantle, Footscray, Northcote, Burwood, Bondi Junction, Lismore, Geelong and Darwin, and two more on the way in Rockhampton and Ballarat.
We were growing, building cadre, developing new leadership and expanding into the suburbs and regional Australia. This was real, solid growth, the fruit not only of our very visible and outstanding leadership role in the September 2000 mass blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, but a steady accumulation of political authority and recognition throughout the 1990s following the demise of the old Communist Party of Australia.
By the late 1990s the DSP was by far the biggest and most influential of the far left organisations. This was achieved in part through a succession of major national initiatives and interventions, among them the launch of Green Left Weekly in 1991; solidarity with the liberation of East Timor and the downfall of Suharto; the Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conferences; the Resistance high school walkouts against One Nation and the Maritime Union of Australia dispute in 1998; and our leadership of the S11 blockade and the May Day mobilisations against corporate tyranny.
It was also achieved through our patient and persistent revolutionary base-building work with Resistance on campus; in the trade unions, especially the CPSU and the AMWU; in International Women’s Day; in East Timor and Indonesia solidarity; and the list goes on.
I remember there were Resistance comrades who couldn’t enjoy a good night’s sleep until Dita Sari, Budiman Sujatmiko and the other People’s Democratic Party comrades were released from Suharto’s prisons. Our heartfelt solidarity with these heroic young comrades carried over into our determination to build the revolutionary party here.
Today the DSP’s political influence and authority is waning, both in absolute terms and relative to some of our left competitors.
By the late 1990s Resistance had eclipsed Left Alliance and the ISO to emerge as the strongest left organisation among university students. Today Socialist Alternative is more influential than Resistance in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Pointing the finger at SAlt for their abstract propagandism and their sectarianism is beside the point: the point is that we’ve been losing ground to them.
How can it be that the Communist Party of Australia and fellow travelers pose a serious challenge to our leadership of the emerging Venezuela solidarity movement when we have all the advantages: Resistance, Green Left Weekly, the Caracas bureau, the brigades, our national weight, our track-record of Latin America solidarity work?
Why is it that the national anti-war conference held in Melbourne last year was initiated by the ISO and not the DSP? When was the last time the ISO initiated a major national movement gathering like this? Why is Steve Jolly’s little Socialist Party getting respectable votes in elections while the DSP masquerading as SA is not?
These other forces are taking advantage of us while we stagnate under our self-imposed SA straight jacket.
Our new identity
The way the SA-new-party enthusiasts project the DSP’s achievements onto SA makes us think that all the good stuff we still do is because of SA.
We hear comrades get up in the branch meetings and say, “SA did this, SA did that, SA had a terrific intervention at such and such a rally”. Yet when you get to the bottom of it you find out that it wasn’t SA that did it, it was the good old DSP cadre machine, with maybe one or two SA members pitching in.
The illusory party, SA, is credited with all the good work done by the real party, the DSP. The SA-new-party enthusiasts seem to want to deny, even to themselves, that they’re still the DSP. No, they prefer to think of themselves as SA now, and they’ve begun to internalize this new political identity and to view everything through the prism of this new identity.
This warps comrade’s judgment about everything from the campaign against Work Choices to the kinds of people we should prioritise recruiting, educating and training, and this goes to the heart of why this line is liquidationist.
It’s not just that the DSP is all but invisible to the outside world and that the SA mask blunts our ability to reach out with our revolutionary Marxist ideas, explanations and political line and to organise ourselves as a party on this basis.
It’s also that we undervalue revolutionary cadre, and idealise the handful of SA activists and “personalities” who aren’t members of the DSP, because in our eyes they symbolize the supposedly broader forces we hope will be drawn to the SA party.
We lavish attention on people we have little hope of ever developing into Marxist cadre, but who happen to have signed up for SA. A few SA joiners are potential DSP recruits, since there’s some overlap between the SA membership and our more or less active DSP periphery.
But most of them are not potential DSP recruits, unless we want to loosen up the DSP politically and organisationally to accommodate them.
Naturally, all this attention makes some SA members feel pretty special, and some take advantage of our generosity. We can end up indulging their pet projects or accommodating their political weaknesses, rather than challenging them as we would do, or should do, in the DSP. In particular, we indulge their fantasies about SA.
Meanwhile the cadre development of DSP and Resistance comrades suffers. How could it be otherwise when the Marxist cadre party itself is gradually giving way to a lesser party, a looser, less rigorous, less demanding party, a party that strives to meet a handful of Socialist Alliance members half way, a party that’s becoming more and more like SA?
On the one hand, we’ve resorted to SA “open organising meetings” in which literally anyone can walk in off the street and have their say in SA, after which the industrious DSP cadre machine quietly does all the work – which is then credited to SA. This undemocratic farce allows us to cover up for our inability, after repeated attempts over many years, to develop genuine SA leadership bodies, with very few exceptions.
On the other hand, such as in Newcastle, DSP execs often grossly substitute for SA, working out every little detail of the SA branch’s day to day operation. A mockery of SA democracy, yes, but also a squandering of the DSP leadership’s time and energy, which should be focused on rebuilding the DSP and Resistance.
It’s not just that we’re masquerading the DSP as SA; it’s that the DSP and SA have become thoroughly entangled. There’s no clear separation politically or organisationally.
The SA-new-party enthusiasts pride themselves on flexibility. In the “new” DSP many things seem very flexible, such as what constitutes a party; what’s seen as progress towards the SA new party; the line of demarcation between the DSP and SA; etc.
But there’s a striking exception. The SA-new-party enthusiasts will not contemplate resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party. On this they are absolutely inflexible.
This is a clue to what’s really going on, which is that under cover of our SA-new-party gimmick some of the SA-new-party enthusiasts have discovered that they no longer have the stomach for building an openly revolutionary Marxist party.
These comrades are desperately looking around for a rags-to-riches road to that big, broad party they’d rather be building – that we’d all rather be building, but which isn’t remotely possible in today’s conditions, and this has been thoroughly tested now for more than four years.
These comrades think that SA might just be it, if only we can persist with this masquerade, or some other similar gimmick, for long enough. The road to liquidating the DSP is paved with good intentions.
I don’t want to upset anybody so I won’t call this a delusion. Maybe that’s too strong a word. Let’s just say this is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.
Two years since the May 2005 NC
Given that SA today is hardly more than the public face of the DSP, what possible justification can there be for not resurfacing the real party, our revolutionary Marxist party?
Let’s think back to exactly two years ago, to the May 2005 DSP NC. This was the last time that we had a report about the DSP and SA that was adopted unanimously by the NC.
Having assessed that we hadn’t been able to build SA into an effective multi-tendency socialist party and that building two parties, the DSP and SA, was unsustainable, we formally abandoned our attempt to build two parties and set as a task for the upcoming pre-Congress discussion to consider resurfacing the DSP as part of our “re-imagining” of SA.
Resurfacing and rebuilding the Democratic Socialist Party while continuing to build SA as something less than our new party in formation – as a campaigning alliance of socialists, a first step towards the eventual formation of such a broad socialist party – seemed the obvious and logical adjustment to make.
This would have taken us back to the first period of the Socialist Alliance, when the DSP operated as a public revolutionary Marxist party while participating in SA as one of a number of affiliate organisations.
In the months following the May 2005 NC, this openness to canvassing all options, including resurfacing the DSP, closed over for the NE majority. By the time of the October 2005 NC, opposition to resurfacing the DSP had hardened into total intransigence.
What would it actually mean to resurface and rebuild the Democratic Socialist Party, and what would happen to SA if we did this?
I’d like to take up this question from several angles, because resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party is at the heart of the LPF’s alternative party building perspective.
This is not a rounded explanation of our whole perspective, there’s no time to do this in a half-hour report. I’d refer comrades to other NC and Congress reports presented on behalf of the NC minority and the LPF, and the LPF draft Resolution on Party Building (The Activist Vol 16 No. 5).
1. Resurface the Democratic Socialist Party
Let’s start with the fact that the real party behind the SA mask is almost invisible to the outside world. Obviously, the more visible we are then the more people will know about us.
We’d return to campaigning publicly in the name of the Democratic Socialist Party, not the “Socialist Alliance” party. Even in election campaigns under the banner of SA, we wouldn’t hide our DSP affiliation.
Rather than promoting the left-reformist politics of the DSP presenting itself as SA, we’d return to our past practice of seeking to win the widest hearing for our revolutionary Marxist ideas, explanations and political line in the movements.
That is, we’d pitch our propaganda at what should be our primary audience, radicalising youth and others who are open to Marxist ideas and explanations and from which we can recruit, educate and train Marxist cadres.
We’re not talking here about the Spartacist League caricature of revolutionary propaganda. What we’re talking about is what we used to do very effectively in the “old” DSP: popular, engaging propaganda for socialism and the Marxist political line in the class struggle.
For example, here’s how our 1996 DSP federal election campaign broadsheet captured our vision for the socialist revolution:
“The emergence of this movement will be a profoundly empowering process. Millions will shed their feelings of inferiority and powerlessness as the majority class – which for generations has worked for the profits of a few – moves into collective action and refashions society on the basis of human solidarity. Divisions and alienation will give away to united action.”
“We call this new society – where all individuals will enjoy the right and have the economic means and political liberty to determine the course of their own lives – socialism.”
The new socialist revolution in Venezuela and the growing awareness of this revolution in Australia opens up whole new possibilities for lively DSP propaganda for socialism, and for the first step in the Australian socialist revolution – the struggle for a revolutionary working people’s government.
2. Green Left: the paper that builds the DSP
Paragraph 30 of the LPF’s draft Resolution on Party Building says:
“Throughout the 1990s, Green Left Weekly played a dual role as both a left regroupment tool, establishing its unique authority as a broad left publication, while at the same time being a de facto party paper, profiling our revolutionary tendency and our Marxist political line.
“We need to return to this dual conception of the role of Green Left Weekly. In line with the restoration of the DSP as a public party, the content of the paper needs to be adjusted (a) to present our Marxist ideas and explanations more systematically and explicitly, and (b) to profile once more the DSP’s political line, its leaders and activities without compromising its broad appeal.”
Paragraph 31 of the Resolution proposes that DSP branches “schedule regular weekly or fortnightly Green Left Weekly public forums. Each forum should have at least one DSP speaker who can present the DSP’s Marxist analysis on the topic in question to help facilitate a more regular dialogue with our supporters, and to ‘out’ the Marxist party behind the paper.”
3. Make Venezuela solidarity No. 1 priority
The Democratic Socialist Party must be seen as the Marxist party in Australia that fully identifies with the revolutionary socialist leaderships in Cuba and Venezuela, and with the Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal.
This alone would justify us resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party in 2007. Failure to do so now will allow the Communist Party of Australia to increasingly assert itself in this role.
Any idea that throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into building solidarity with these socialist revolutions is somehow a diversion from “engaging in the Australian class struggle” should be stomped on.
Paragraph 21 of the draft Resolution says: “The over-arching and unifying campaign priority for the DSP and Resistance is to help build and lead a broad-based solidarity movement with the unfolding socialist revolution in Venezuela, and with socialist Cuba. This solidarity work must be carried systematically into every arena of DSP and Resistance intervention and be thoroughly integrated into our general approach to Marxist education and propaganda.”
The key challenge for us is still to develop the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network as a broad activist network with a “life” of its own capable of nurturing a cadre of committed solidarity activists. For this to become a reality we need to do much more work to establish real AVSN activist committees in each city with a DSP branch, and AVSN activities on the campuses.
This will not happen unless many more DSP and Resistance comrades are assigned to Venezuela solidarity work, and unless the DSP and Resistance branches as a whole come behind this sustained effort.
Being clearer on which party we’re building – the Marxist cadre party – will help us come together as a party to do this work properly.
No longer having to prop up the dead weight of the SA-as-our-party façade will free up the DSP politically and organisationally to surge forward with our Venezuela solidarity work in the year that the Chavez leadership moves to establish the mass revolutionary socialist party in Venezuela.
4. Resistance needs a resurfaced DSP
Expanding the depth and scope of our Venezuela solidarity work, spearheaded by Resistance, will draw around us a bigger pool of young people from which we can recruit to the DSP and replenish our depleted cadre core.
Confidently and aggressively taking up this solidarity campaign on the campuses is the key to rolling back the growing influence of Socialist Alternative.
Publicly challenging SAlt’s sectarianism towards Venezuela and Cuba, in both words and deeds, is essential. Comrades learn better and more quickly through the confrontation of ideas. It’s through such public polemics with our left competitors, especially on campus, that we can train confident young Marxist cadres.
But Resistance comrades won’t feel confident to take on SAlt in this way unless they have a public revolutionary Marxist party behind them, leading by example.
Resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party will help us recruit, educate and train a new generation of Marxist cadres. Hiding the DSP behind the SA mask blunts our ability to do this effectively.
5. Revive DSP fractions
The LPF draft resolution notes that “reviving and strengthening our DSP fractions and committees is vital, since these working bodies are our basic cadre-building machinery”.
Two areas of intervention in which regular DSP fractions are essential are our trade union work and Latin America solidarity.
These factions should be open to the participation of Resistance comrades. In Sydney, for example, there is just one Resistance member assigned to the Latin America solidarity fraction. That’s not enough.
Again, when we’re clear on which party we’re building it will be obvious that we need DSP fractions, not SA caucuses (where they even exist) to coordinate our public interventions and train Marxist cadre.
6. SA as an electoral vehicle
Finally, where would all this leave the Socialist Alliance?
What we’d do with what’s left of SA, which is basically its electoral registration, some hundreds of paper members and a part of the DSP’s more or less active periphery and some of our close collaborators, is that we’d retain SA’s electoral registration and use SA as an electoral vehicle to campaign on a popularly-pitched revolutionary socialist platform.
We could see who else is interested in standing as SA candidates in this kind of campaign, and we might be able to revive it as a revolutionary socialist electoral alliance.
But before we did any of this we’d make a frank, honest public assessment of the SA experience – and the lessons to be drawn from this experience – for left regroupment and for building the revolutionary party. We’d explain why we’re resurfacing the DSP.
Resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party would reveal to everyone the reality of SA, which is that it barely exists outside the DSP. Unless we want to try to hide this reality – and I can’t think of any good Leninist reason to do so – then this is just a cold hard fact that resurfacing the DSP will force us to finally face up to.
Comrades, there’s no doubt that when we do this we will turn the corner and begin to grow again. It will feel like a weight has been lifted off our shoulders. We’ll be free to build our party again, the real party, not the sad little Potemkin Village of SA.
Our revolutionary morale and our trust and confidence in each other as comrades will also begin to flourish again, and we’ll get back that party spirit we used to have.
The factional situation in the DSP
Many comrades wail about the existence of the faction as if it were a terrible thing for the party. That’s one-sided. This faction fight is a necessary one, and the DSP has benefited from this sharp confrontation of ideas. Not only is there nothing wrong with criticism in a party like ours, criticism is essential.
James P. Cannon said that “Polemics are the mark of a revolutionary party. A party that’s ‘too nice’ to engage in what some call ‘bickering’ and ‘criticising’ is too damn nice to live very long in the whirlpool of politics”.
The report presented by Comrade Sue Bolton on behalf of the NE majority urges us to disband the Leninist Party Faction and put the factional struggle to one side at least until the opening of pre-Congress discussion.
This is an attempt to find an organisational solution to a political disagreement.
It was the NE majority that proposed to the delegates to our January 2006 Congress that we be urged to form a faction…and now you say we’re “irresponsible” for forming a faction!
We’re not going to disband the LPF.
Resolving these differences won’t be achieved by majority votes which reaffirm the SA party building line. Such votes “resolve” only that the DSP will continue with this party building perspective. They don’t resolve the underlying political differences which have given rise to the LPF.
Secondly, dissolving the faction would not create more “revolutionary unity” in the DSP. Quite the opposite: it would undermine our unity in action. One of the responsibilities of the faction is to ensure that its members abide by the discipline of the DSP. Dissolving the faction would lead to a greater risk of indiscipline.
Thirdly, dissolving the faction would make it more difficult for the supporters of the alternative party-building perspective to bring together and present their views as clearly as possible to the DSP membership as a whole. Comrades need to continue to collaborate to this end.
We reject the idea that the LPF is to blame for holding back the rebuilding of the DSP. Stop scapegoating a substantial minority that contributes a great deal to our party, comrades with a wealth of experience and ability, comrades who have earned their place in this party and continue to earn it.
What’s holding us back is not the faction, but the failed SA party building line.
Summary
In her report on behalf of the NE majority, Comrade Sue Bolton made the assessment that we are recruiting to the DSP and rebuilding cadre, and that therefore we could continue with our attempt to build SA as a new broad left party in formation.
While it’s true we continue to recruit to the DSP, as we’ve always done, the DSP is not growing significantly. So this leaves us with the other justification of the NE majority for “staying the course” with SA – that we’re recruiting, educating and training Marxist cadre.
Again, Comrade Bolton’s report provided no convincing evidence that we are now rebuilding our depleted cadre core. Any significant growth in our cadre base should be reflected in two data sets: the number of full members of the DSP and average Green Left Weekly sales hours.
Membership growth is flat, at best, and our Green Left Weekly distribution effort, measured by the total number of hours, has declined every year for the past three years. These two data sets alone refute the key assessment in Sue’s report, which is that we’ve now turned the corner and are rebuilding cadre.
As I stressed at the beginning of this counter-report, these numbers don’t tell the whole story. There’s the all-important question of quality, and we can’t educate and train good cadres by persisting in a wrong party-building line.
Another weakness of Comrade Bolton’s report is that it did not even try to explain why resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party would not allow us to achieve a more or less rapid and sustained rebuilding of the DSP as a Marxist cadre party.
The SA-party-building line has been thoroughly tested now for more than four years, and the result has been decline and stagnation. The LPF’s alternative course of resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party and rebuilding the DSP as our public face has also been tested, for the three decades from the formation of the Socialist Workers Party in 1972 to 2003, the year we disappeared underground in SA.
Under this party-building line we were able to reach 360 DSP members, and there’s no reason to think that we could not have continued to grow if it weren’t for our mistaken turn to attempt to build SA as a new broad left party in formation.
We all agreed at our May 2005 NE that this turn was a mistake; that we had overestimated the objective conditions; that we hadn’t been able to progress SA as a multi-tendency socialist party; that we couldn’t attempt to build two parties simultaneously; and that we had to consider the option of resurfacing the Democratic Socialist Party.
I think the DSP membership deserves an answer from the NE majority to this question: under what conditions do you think we should resurface the DSP and abandon our attempt to build SA as a new broad left party in formation? Are there any such conditions? Or has this now become a permanent tactic – that “every Leninist party worth it’s salt” must now have a non-revolutionary half-way house as its public facade, as Comrade Bolton wrote in a pre-Congress discussion contribution?
A second question to the NE majority. Your report claims that the faction is to blame for the failure of the DSP to grow more rapidly, or indeed at all. Yet the graphs of membership and Green Left Weekly distribution clearly show that the stagnation had set in well before the formation of the LPF. Doesn’t this indicate that there’s something wrong with the SA party building line? That this line, rather than the faction, is to blame for the decline and stagnation?
Comrade Alex Bainbridge asks why this line is liquidationist. Let me quote a few sentences from the counter-report that Comrade Bainbridge must have missed:
“It’s not just that the DSP is all but invisible to the outside world and that the SA mask blunts our ability to reach out with our revolutionary Marxist ideas, explanations and political line and to organise ourselves as a party on this basis.
“It’s also that we undervalue revolutionary cadre, and idealise the handful of SA activists and ‘personalities’ who aren’t members of the DSP, because in our eyes they symbolize the supposedly broader forces we hope will be drawn to the SA party. We lavish attention on people we have little hope of ever developing into Marxist cadre, but who happen to have signed up for SA.”
Comrade Sue Bull gave a very good example of how this liquidation is happening. She said that Geelong branch had signed up some new people to SA, and many of them want to campaign around environmental issues. Sue explained that because of this, the DSP branch in Geelong is going to be doing a whole lot more environmental campaigning.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the DSP involving itself in environmental campaigns. Indeed, orienting to the climate change, anti-nuclear and anti-uranium campaigns has been adopted as one of our national DSP campaign priorities.
But why is it that a bunch of people who happen to have signed up for the “Socialist Alliance party”, which is hardly more than the DSP masquerading as a broad left party, are now determining the DSP’s campaign priorities in Geelong?
Shouldn’t it be the DSP that determines the DSP’s campaign priorities on the basis of what the DSP thinks will most effectively build the DSP as a Marxist cadre party? Wouldn’t this approach, which is implicit in the resurfacing and rebuilding of the Democratic Socialist Party, allow us to more effectively rebuild the DSP as a Marxist cadre organisation than building ourselves publicly as a small left-reformist party?
Is it not true that allowing non-DSP SA members to set the DSP’s campaign priorities will lead to the eventual liquidation of the DSP as a Marxist cadre party that decides its campaign priorities on the basis of what will allow us to most effectively recruit, educate and train Marxist cadres?
When we say that this SA party building line is liquidationist, it’s not intended as an insult but as an objective assessment of where this line is taking us. When Comrade Jim McIlroy says that he thinks the LPF’s position is sectarian we don’t take this as an insult, this too is a political characterisation.
Comrade Terry Townsend asks whether the LPF believes the SA-new-party enthusiasts in the leadership of the DSP are no longer Marxists, no longer revolutionaries. No, that’s not what we’re saying and that’s not what I said in the report.
As Comrade Coral Wynter said, “the time has passed for the old sectarian Trotskyist party, the world has changed.” By the old sectarian party she’s referring, I think, to the Democratic Socialist Party. Now, this is nothing new from Coral, she’s been saying this for years. It’s all there in The Activist. But whereas in the past Coral’s liquidationist argument was refuted and rejected by the NC, now the majority of the NC enthusiastically endorses her view that we just can’t return to building the Democratic Socialist Party.
If instead of abandoning a mistaken party-building line we come up with one new justification after another for persisting in this failed line, then a contradiction begins to open up between our Marxist objectivity and our attachment to the failed line. Eventually, comrades can end up with a different kind of politics to the revolutionary Marxist politics they began with.
This is a process, a tendency, and it’s not irreversible. That’s the whole point of the LPF’s persistent “battle of ideas” – to alert the party to the dangers of our present course, to draw out the ultimate consequences of persisting in this failed course and, hopefully, to reorient the party by convincing a majority of comrades.
On “revolutionary unity”, let’s be clear that there’s only one kind of revolutionary unity in a party like ours, and that’s unity in action.
The NE majority assure us that they’re not trying to impose unity of thought, unity of opinion, in the DSP. It’s OK to disagree with the majority. It’s OK to form a faction, they say, but please disband yours.
It’s very worrying to note that throughout the NC there were hints of threats that the LPF might be punished if it persists in putting forward an alternative course for the party.
The NE majority has already established that the LPF will only be allowed half-time counter-reports.
Now there’s the threat that the LPF may lose its representation on the NE because the NE majority doesn’t like what the LPF members on the NE say, or don’t say, about SA. They will decide what is to be deemed a “constructive” contribution and what isn’t, and the majority will use its numbers to get rid of the dissenting voices. Once we go down this dangerous path where will it lead?
Then there’s the proposal to fiddle with the constitution and our organizational principles and methods because the majority have discovered that it’s inconvenient to have a substantial minority of the party saying “you’re wrong” and organising as a faction on this basis.
If these threats against the letter and spirit of party democracy are carried out then it will be harder to prevent a split. We don’t want a split. We want to do everything possible to prevent a split, but muzzling a substantial minority of the party, trying to shut us up, will make a split more likely.
Finally, I’d urge all comrades to study the reports and compare both lines of march against the test of experience as serenely and objectively as possible.