Let’s drop the SA charade and re-emerge the DSP as a public revolutionary party
By Zoe Kenny for the LPF
[The general line of the following report and summary was rejected by the national committee. The vote for adopting the report was 5 full NC members in favour, 22 against, with 0 abstentions, and 2 candidate members in favour, 7 against, with 0 abstentions.]
Almost two and a half years ago, Comrade Peter Boyle presented a party building report “DSP and Socialist Alliance – An urgent reality check on our party building perspective” to the May 2005 DSP National Committee meeting. The report noted the pressures and strains building up on the DSP as a result of our “unsustainable substitution” in attempting to implement our 2003 congress decision to transform ourselves into an internal tendency of SA and integrate our resources into SA in our bid to transform it into a party.
The report noted that the objective political situation held SA back from becoming a multi-tendency socialist party and proposed dropping the perspective of transferring the DSP’s resources into SA and set the task of “re-imagining” the relationship between the DSP and SA.
Later that year two different visions of where the DSP should be going emerged. The minority drew the logical political conclusion from the fact that the objective political situation was not conducive to building SA into a party: It advocated the re-emergence of the DSP as the party we build and maintaining SA as a campaigning alliance.
The NE/NC majority put forward essentially the same line that we had been pursuing for two years – that is, building SA as our party – albeit in slow motion – and keeping the DSP as an internal tendency.
Majority’s over-estimation of political situation
This line was hinged on an overblown assessment of the potential for a major, sustained fight-back against the Work Choices legislation. Comrade Peter Boyle, in his report to the 22nd congress, stated that the majority believed that “there are real and significant forces moving left-ward in the working class, forces that we are relating to, on a broad political basis, through building the SA as a new party project”.
The majority refused to recognise the real balance of forces between the tiny militant current that were keen to seriously fight the new laws and the dominant class collaborationist trade union leadership, including the “fake lefts” within that milieu.
Now that even the fake lefts have been cowed into line there can be no more illusions that this is anything but an elect Labor campaign. The “real and significant forces” just never materialised, because the anti-Work Choices campaign was never anything more than a tactic to better the chances of re-electing the ALP, it was never politically independent of the ALP.
But instead of drawing the consequences of this misreading of the Australian political situation and the Work Choices campaign, the majority continue to put a rosy glow on the fake-left class collaborationist wing and have simply dropped the campaign in the branches, leaving members to work out for themselves what happened to the campaign, why their expectations have not been fulfilled.
However while the anti-Work Choices campaign has quietly dropped off the agenda, the majority’s over-assessment of the objective political condition continues. As a result the majority are continuing to search frantically for the next big thing that might result in a flood of recruits to SA. First it was the anti-Work Choices campaign, then Hicks, Indigenous rights, environment, now anti-war …?
SA is dead
While of course we need to be relating to any campaign openings as they come up, the majority leadership have had unrealistic hopes that each new opening could be the change in political situation needed to give new life to SA. However none have so far succeeded in that end, and now SA is deader than ever. Certainly it is dead as a real alliance. Now that the ISO has left, for the majority to continue on as if SA is the “party of left unity” is becoming increasingly absurd and sectarian.
Even some in the majority are now admitting the reality of SA’s lifelessness. At the recent Sydney Central DSP branch conference on August 14 branch secretary Trish Corcoran noted that the Sydney Central SA branch hasn’t been drawing in new activists, that there are a few (she mentioned three names, one of whom is a long-time DSP supporter) non-aligned members around the branch but that they are not going to play a leading role. During the last blitz the Sydney Central SA branch was only able to mobilise one SA, non-DSP member to sell. But it’s not just Sydney, this is the case around the country.
Unfortunately the conclusion drawn from this observation was that the DSP would have to try harder to recruit SA members off stalls and attempt to draw them into fortnightly coordinating committee meetings. But we’ve gone through this routine too many times before, SA cannot be built as a party – the conditions simply aren’t there.
What would ‘real and significant left-ward moving forces’ look like?
Perhaps some newer comrades think that because SA has several hundred members this is a sign that SA is relating to significant left-ward moving forces. However these members are overwhelmingly paper members who maintain financial membership but are not active.
So if SA is not evidence of a real break from Laborism, what would such a political development look like?
The only time in our party’s history that there was a real chance of linking up with a real break was with the Nuclear Disarmament Party, which formed in the early ‘80s as a response to the Labor Party’s sell-outs on nuclear issues. A 1999 GLW article by Greg Adamson described it this way “By early 1985 the NDP’s impact was being felt. In the elections, 642,435 people had cast their primary vote for the NDP, and thousands of members had joined in just a few months. It had won one Senate seat, and nearly won a second … A party with no political debts to any established party had emerged.”
Could SA be further from this picture? In 2007 after SA has existed for seven years, Sydney Central SA can only mobilise one person to sell GLW during a blitz week. It’s embarrassing and ridiculous to continue on with this line.
Permanent tactic
Regardless of the obvious failure of SA and the lack of “real and significant” forces to breathe new life into it, the majority are now on a course of maintaining SA (or some other “broad left party” front) as a permanent tactic. Point 15 of the draft party building resolution that Peter Boyle presented to the September 3 NE, says “The DSP sees the struggle to build a broadly based anti-capitalist party as an important tactic in the struggle for a mass revolutionary party in this country … The tactic is necessary in order to develop the forces needed to challenge the domination of the Australian labour movement by the ALP and the trade union bureaucracy as well as other bureaucracies within the social and environmental movements.”
But this turns the previous position upside down. Before we needed SA to relate to “leftward-moving forces”. Now we need SA to create those forces, i.e., to bring these into being ourselves.
Cadre crisis continues
The majority line has taken us back to where we were in May 2005. The party is being de-cadreised, not re-cadreised. This is reflected in the shrinking proportion of comrades who are active.
Still just a tendency
The resolution on the DSP and SA adopted at the last congress advocated that the DSP become a public revolutionary organisation, but this has not been implemented. The DSP remains a “perspective” and just a “Marxist tendency within the Socialist Alliance”. Virtually all public profile is given to SA – media releases, placards, banners, public forums etc. The DSP recruitment leaflet promised at the congress has never been produced, and DSP comrades refer to themselves as SA regardless of the intervention (sometimes even in DSP meetings).
As the counter party building report by Comrade John Percy to the last congress noted, “We have to be frank. This is nothing more than liquidation of the revolutionary party into a left social democratic formation. Strangely, and sadly, we are liquidating into a party that consists of not much more than ourselves”.
GLW sellers declining
Particularly stark is the decline in the number of DSP members selling the paper. At the September 3 DSP NE, Comrade Pip Hinman reported that the average number of sellers this year has been 140. This is just one more seller than in 2005. That’s about 50% or less of the membership that doesn’t sell. This is also reflected in the declining national subs base, which recently went below 900.
This year there have been a lot of National Newsletter articles on setting a national minimum “benchmark” or “bedrock” of sales. Why isn’t it working? The majority continue to look for organisational solutions to the problem; it’s always about more blitzes, more exhortations from the NO. But they’re missing the main point. You can’t build a cadre organisation with a wrong political line, a political line that is not based on the reality of the political situation we face.
The majority’s line has deepened a general malaise in the party, reflected in the low sales as well as dropping attendance at DSP branch meetings and fundraising events. There is a general demoralisation setting in, particularly among comrades who voted for the majority line. This is essentially the problem of the party line departing from reality.
When comrades, for years on end are presented with a line of attempting to build SA into a party which is out of touch with reality and is therefore impossible to implement, and yet they are told that if only they worked harder or smarter it would succeed, the result of lower activity and commitment is hardly surprising. The majority’s constant scapegoating and demonising of the LPF also makes it harder for comrades to speak up about their doubts for fear they will be seen to be in agreement with the LPF, thus dropping out might seem the only viable option.
Another financial crisis
The party is again in a financial crisis. While it’s good news to hear that we may have turned a corner on the current crisis [according to figures presented at the NC], there’s no getting around the fact that recurring financial crises now seem to be a permanent feature of the party’s life under the current line.
While the cadre crisis in the party is the main reason for this, there also needs to be an honest assessment of how much SA is contributing to it – someone is paying for that year-round constant supply of glossy leaflets, posters, placards and corflutes, and it’s not hard to work out that the DSP is underwriting SA. Wouldn’t it be better to see more of that money being spent on Resistance or other party building projects other than SA?
The majority are obliged to present the figures of how much SA is contributing to the financial crisis to the membership before the PCD begins (although they should have been on the table at this NC) so that all comrades can assess whether these expenditures are worth it. For example, what is the proposed budget for the federal election campaign?
Resistance hasn’t been rebuilt
While the Resistance conference last year was a good size, this year’s conference collapsed back to the 2005 level of about 100, with about half being from Resistance [2005; 49 Resistance members, 2007; 60 Resistance members – according to figures read out at the Resistance conference]. Resistance GLW sales have not changed since 2005 – about 40-50 sellers and 300-400 papers per week.
Newer comrades may not realise that not very long ago Resistance was much stronger than it is today, particularly on campus. For example in a Resistance building report in April 2000, Comrade Kerryn Williams recounted that a blitz week that Resistance had organised sold 1970 papers in 558 hours with 135 sellers! Compare that to the recent blitz – essentially the entire tendency struggles to sell what Resistance alone was able to sell several years ago.
This is not to say that Resistance is not able to recruit or draw around any young people – of course there is always a periphery, always a range of new activists around the branches particularly in the big cities, but the key question is what we as the DSP do to train and educate these new people into politically confident Marxist cadre.
For example Resistance took a good initiative with the student walkouts against Bush. They were very political and defiant, and Resistance received a lot of media attention and was consistently identified as the organiser of the protests.
Unfortunately, though, while Resistance was the one that organised the student walkouts and had a good contingent march up to the rally, it was Socialist Alternative that had the visible and vibrant “red bloc” at the Stop Bush protest. And it was the Bolivarian Circle that had the huge Che flags. It should have been Resistance that had the biggest red contingent, with Che flags as well as Venezuela flags and Cuba flags. Instead Resistance was mixed in with a lacklustre SA contingent. Perhaps this stems back to the majority’s youth report to the congress which implied that it is somehow sectarian to “separate yourself off” from the rally with a contingent? So is it better to simply blend in to the crowd with a few paper placards?
Nonetheless Resistance has gained a periphery out of this, and the question now is how to make best use of it. The key to drawing in these new young people is to rapidly introduce them to our socialist ideas and integrate them into our campaigning.
It’s important to remember the lessons from the Books not Bombs student strikes in 2003, when we didn’t grow and in fact came out weaker. We can all recognise in hindsight that the reason for this was that we weren’t sufficiently upfront with Resistance’s socialist politics, thus the proposal to launch Resistance Magazine.
We need to counter the trend for Resistance to project itself more as a group that builds all the “movements”, and less as a revolutionary socialist youth organisation. This is an under-confidence borne of the failed SA-party line, and which cannot be adequately tackled while the majority maintain their vehement opposition to the idea of re-emerging the DSP as a public revolutionary party. Certainly the Sandino Carrilles tour and the LAAPISC conference that Brianna mentioned yesterday will be absolutely vital to doing this. And it’s also good that Resistance is planning some forums around Venezuela and socialism. The DSP should assign the resources to make sure these perspectives are followed up.
But the LPF doesn’t think that we can separate the discussion of how to build Resistance as a strong and effective cadre training machine from the discussion about the DSP’s perspectives as a whole. Continuing to make the mistake of thinking that Resistance can rebuild and strengthen as being able to confidently project revolutionary Marxist politics, when the DSP is not doing this, is an idealistic dream.
It’s not just about occasionally holding internal Marxist theoretical forums and schools for DSP/Resistance leaders, the DSP also needs to be regularly holding public Marxist forums, organising joint DSP/Resistance fractions and working more closely with Resistance leaders and members in order to give Resistance comrades an example to emulate.
Vacating the space
This view that you can’t project Marxist politics openly and proudly is sometimes reflected by the attitude that S.Alt’s forums covering an array of historical and theoretical topics are just “abstract” and “irrelevant”. However, as Resistance and the DSP shirk further away from projecting Marxist politics, S.Alt continues to make ground at our expense.
A depressing picture of what our tendency is sacrificing in order to keep up this bizarre charade of SA is illustrated by a cursory look at some of “our” conferences in comparison to S.Alt.
At S.Alt’s major national conference in 2006, they had 255 attending (with about 90% of these being youth between 18-24 and 130 being non-members). In contrast, the DSP summer education conference got 210, the Resistance conference had 170 (and in 2007 this dropped to 108) and the SA conference had a mere 130 (the majority of whom were in the DSP).
Yes, we know they are a sect. But that is not a consolation. Their rotten politics are what make their growth worrying. They are recruiting people who should be in Resistance and the DSP.
We should be aiming to have education conferences and Resistance conferences with 200 young people not S.Alt – but we certainly will not achieve that result continuing on with the SA albatross around our necks.
There is an alternative path
Firstly we have to recognise the limitations, and opportunities, of the current political situation.
In terms of limitations, there are no “significant left-ward moving forces in the working class” that can enable us or anyone else to build SA as a new party at this time. So unless we are going to go down the slippery slope of justifying SA as a permanent tactic, we need to immediately rescind the constitutional amendments of the 21st congress that transformed the DSP into an internal tendency in SA. We need to re-emerge the DSP as a public revolutionary party.
This is not a debate about the “P” in DSP. It’s about something much more important than the number of votes for a candidate, a complete set of detailed policy statements, media attention and raising the “profile” of candidates.
Because we’re trying to build a party capable of leading the working class to overthrow capitalism, the type of party we build today is the central question. As the deleted preamble to the DSP Constitution puts it, “The entire experience of the labour movement demonstrates that the conquest of power by the working class requires the leadership of a politically homogenous, centralised party of professional revolutionary activists”.
At the heart of the Leninist party is the cadre. A cadre is much more than simply an activist, attending meetings and rallies and selling the paper. It’s about creating professional agitators, organisers and propagandists.
Che Guevara, in his 1962 essay, Cadre: Backbone of the Revolution, captured the essence of the concept of cadre, as someone who “knows how to practice the principle of collective discussion and to make decisions on his own and take responsibility in production; whose loyalty is tested”, the “common denominator for all is political clarity. This does not consist of unthinking support to the postulates of the revolution, but a reasoned support”.
The LPF’s platform can be summarised in three words; prioritise cadre renewal. The DSP needs to take a far more conscious and systematic approach to cadre training. While we are not in the midst of a mass upsurge, nor does there seem to be one on the horizon, there are significant opportunities for an open revolutionary Marxist party, and for Resistance, to grow.
As the “Australian politics and campaign priorities report” to the last congress by Comrade Max Lane noted there is “A continuing general retreat of the working class, suffering more defeats, but in the process seeing the forging of a constituency of people, angry at what they have been forced to give up, repelled by the direction that society is heading and seeking answers as to why it is happening and how the retreat can be turned around. These people, this constituency is made up of people whose politicisation and radicalisation proceeds unevenly, provoked by different examples of injustice, occurring at different times, and is reflected in frequent rises and falls in levels of activity and levels of morale, and semi-spontaneous mobilisation around a range of different and changing issues”.
Key to relating to this milieu of people and winning the best of them to the DSP and Resistance is the challenge of clearly and confidently projecting our revolutionary Marxist ideas. If we dropped the charade of SA, and re-emerged the DSP we could re-work our priorities around the creation of cadre.
Resistance-Venezuela axis
Most importantly, rebuilding Resistance would become the top priority for the DSP again – in action, not just in words. For example, there was obviously a lack of motivation and organisation of DSP comrades to build and attend the recent Resistance national conference, as shown by the dismal DSP attendance. The time, energy and political thought now wasted on SA should be devoted to Resistance.
Just to make it clear, the LPF are not criticising individual Resistance-assigned comrades for not doing a good enough job. If anything Resistance comrades and organisers are having to work harder than ever under the majority’s line. As well as having a greater load of the responsibility for convincing and training a new layer of cadre, they are also increasingly expected to carry more of the DSP’s load. This leaves Resistance organisers with less time to think through Resistance’s work, build teams and educate themselves in Marxism.
The cadre crisis is also directly impacting upon Resistance, as more Resistance-assigned DSP leaders are having to move into DSP organiser roles when they are still needed in Resistance. This is fundamentally a political question – by re-emerging the DSP, we could re-establish the party’s traditional relationship with Resistance.
The current situation – where DSP members are constitutionally obliged to encourage Resistance members to join SA creates its own problems. Most Resistance comrades realise that convincing a new member to go to SA meetings is not the way to go – it is more likely to put them off politics than to win them.
This leaves Resistance in a conundrum – with an obligation to convince new members to join SA, which is virtually meaningless because it barely exists. Joining the DSP is what really matters, but it’s harder to convince people to join the DSP these days because it is such a hidden organisation. Perhaps that was why there was no mention of the DSP or SA in the Resistance Building report to the Resistance conference this year.
Resistance comrades need to be confident to engage in the “battle of ideas”. Resistance needs to be ready to battle it out with S.Alt in particular and particularly on Venezuela. But in order to do this properly, Venezuela solidarity needs to be significantly elevated as a Resistance campaign.
Not the way the majority supposedly “prioritise” Venezuela solidarity in Resistance. The majority’s youth work to the last DSP congress included a long list of Venezuela solidarity proposals, and while some of these have taken place, overall Venezuela solidarity work in Resistance has been sporadic, stop-start and lacklustre.
A proposal that was adopted to get 10,000 signatures on the petition to invite Chavez to Australia during o-week this year was dropped. There was never any follow-up on trying to get a sister university campaign off the ground. There’s been no systematic effort to get Venezuela solidarity groups established on campus.
The lack of political motivation for Resistance comrades to take this area seriously was reflected in a relatively low turnout to the Venezuela embassy conference during the Resistance conference, despite the embassy’s timing of their conference to specifically coincide with this. Unfortunately afterwards, some in the majority leadership even tried to blame the embassy’s conference for the low turnout at the Resistance conference!
Resistance needs to be much more engaged in this work, both on and off campus. More Resistance comrades need to be assigned to the AVSN, and there should be serious efforts to build AVSN groups on at least the main campuses on which we intervene. If we rid ourselves of the SA albatross, more DSP comrades could be assigned to help Resistance with this task.
Instead the majority implemented their perspective that the “fight-back” against Howard would be the decisive campaign in 2006. The “young workers campaign” ensured that Resistance’s key initiative last year was the June 1 student strike. This was Resistance’s central focus for several months and completely overwhelmed any meaningful Venezuela solidarity.
The majority leadership hyped up the results of the strike, but when delegates to the 2006 Resistance conference took this assessment to its logical conclusion and proposed another strike the leadership argued it down, possibly confusing some newer comrades about how to make decisions about what to do next.
One year on and what has happened to the “fight-back” and the “young workers campaign”? There was barely a mention of these at the recent Resistance national conference, and while it was listed as the fourth campaign priority in Brianna’s report yesterday there was not a single word about it. That’s why the LPF disagreed with the assignment of so many resources to it – because it was not based on a real political assessment of what Resistance should be prioritising.
The Venezuelan revolution is not some passing fad to be hyped and forgotten, as was the young workers campaign. This is a real live socialist revolution and the best possible means of attracting radical-minded youth into Resistance – not something to “fill in the gaps” between the “real work” campaigning on Australian political issues.
Unfortunately Melbourne branch recently received the resignation of Comrade Azlan, who returned to Socialist Alternative, citing disagreements with our line on Venezuela and Cuba. I think this indicates a lack of real education in the branches, and also shows the problem of not projecting Venezuela solidarity on campus, which allows S.Alt’s view of Venezuela to go uncontested.
Of course Venezuela solidarity is not just for Resistance, it needs to be an over-arching priority for the whole tendency.
We need to be building a strong solidarity movement – with the focal point being building lively, youthful and independent AVSN committees in all branches. Propaganda is not just the written word – the key to winning people is through active interventions.
Prioritise reach-out with Marxist ideas & cadre training
We need regular (at least monthly) GLW public forums where DSP speakers are billed as such and put the DSP line on the issue at hand. If an article presents our line in GLW then the author should be identified as a DSP member. GLW would not just remain as the “paper of the Socialist Alliance”, it would need to take on a greater role as an educator of our own comrades as well as the best reach-out vehicle we have. There would be more forums and public events in the name of GLW, such as the proposed “social change not climate change” conference next year, which is a good initiative.
We should publicise the DSP at rallies and demonstrations with banners and placards.
We could run public Marxist day-schools in the name of the DSP and Resistance. Imagine if the DSP was building itself as a public revolutionary party now. Instead of one or two branches – like Adelaide and Perth – doing forums around the 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution, it could be a national educational campaign, advertised prominently in GLW, strengthening the national profile of the party, boosting Resistance nationally.
We should also be making a much bigger deal out of the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, with a nationally-coordinated series of forums, educationals and celebrations. This is the kind of thing that will mean we will have the 100 or more new members and not S.Alt. Unfortunately it’s these kind of opportunities that are passing us by the longer we focus myopically on attempting to revive the SA corpse, instead of focusing on the DSP and Resistance.
We would restore Links as a regularly published journal, not just maintain it as a web publication, in order to increase collaboration and discussion with other Marxist parties around the world, particularly in the context of the Venezuelan revolution, this work takes on even greater importance.
We would restore DSP-only fractions. Fractions would not only be about the tactics for an upcoming movement meeting for example, but would regain their educational role, helping comrades to understand more deeply the DSP’s political positions and therefore be better equipped to win others to those positions. These fractions would help DSP/Resistance leaders as well in absorbing the accumulated historical experience and knowledge from longer-term DSP comrades.
It’s the majority’s line, not the faction
Comrades, in a 30 minute report there is no way the LPF can present our full view of the changes needed thoroughly enough. Comrades who want to know more about the LPF’s views should read the party building resolution presented to this NC by the LPF as well as our various counter-reports over the last two years and also our contributions to the PCD in 2005. Of course the upcoming PCD period will also be an important time for the whole party to reflect on the experiences of the last two years.
Finally, the LPF appeals to the majority that they don’t fall into the trap of blaming and scapegoating the LPF for the problems in the party. The danger signs of decadreisation were evident far before the LPF formed (re-read Comrade Peter Boyle’s party building report to the May 2005 NC, and just about every party building report since the 2003 “turn” for evidence of how engrossed we’ve been in the problems flowing from our wrong line). It’s been the majority’s refusal to admit the political source of these ongoing problems that led to the formation of the faction.
The party has now been implementing the SA-party line for four years, that’s a long time in politics, how much longer can the charade continue? This NC and the upcoming PCD and congress can and should be used to set the party back on the right track – by discarding the failed SA-as-a-party line and re-emerging the DSP as a public revolutionary party once again.
Summary
The majority leadership have a huge contradiction. On the one hand they can’t tolerate any criticism of their SA dream and are now moving to formalise SA, or any broad left party front, as a permanent tactic. Yet at this NC, there hasn’t even been a report on the state of SA and there were only a few throwaway lines about SA in Peter’s report – why? Because any honest report that assesses where SA is at would expose it as being completely moribund. The fact that the majority cannot present a thorough analysis of SA at this NC nor even discussed SA branches much in discussion just before the opening of PCD, is completely inadequate and irresponsible – after all this is the issue that is at the heart of the debate in the party.
The LPF has consistently put forward our assessment of SA. Re-read Comrade Kathy Newnam’s appendix on SA to the October 2006 NC meeting [The Activist, Vol. 16, No. 7].
Comrades have tried to get around the question of SA during discussion about the Stop Bush protests by simply referring to the great role “our tendency” played. Well if they’re referring to the DSP and Resistance, than yes we can agree, of course “our tendency” played a critical role.
But what role did the SA-party have in relation to organising and leading and building these protests – zero. Yet we have to have SA banners and placards at the protest – the DSP donkey does all the work, but the SA hollow shell gets all the glory. The Stop Bush protests are another example of why we don’t need SA to do good united front work – another reason we should drop the charade and re-emerge the DSP as a public revolutionary party.
The fundamental fact remains – the SA is dead. The majority were hoping, praying for the Work Choices campaign to deliver the “real and significant” forces that would give SA new life – but it hasn’t eventuated. But there has been no analysis, no critical self-reflection from the majority about that campaign or SA, just continue on and hype up the next thing.
I just want to take up one of the many caricatures of the LPF’s position that were brought up in discussion. The report was not saying there have been no successes or achievements in the last two years, but was referring specifically to the majority’s line of attempting to build SA as a new party – a line that is out of step with reality and therefore is impossible to implement. The majority line is a failed line and has brought recurring crises onto the DSP.
Peter alleged that the LPF’s line is “narrow and propagandistic”. But what the LPF is a advocating is a return to the approach that we had before we made the “turn” to build SA as a party in 2003. This was the approach that allowed the DSP to help lead the great S11 protests in Melbourne in 2000 as well as numerous other campaigns and student protests such as the 1998 anti-Hanson walkouts of tens of thousands of high school students. Does Peter think that the approach we had before 2003 was a “narrow and propagandistic” approach?
Peter also claimed that if the LPF line had been implemented from the 2006 congress, then the Stop Bush protests wouldn’t have happened. Comrades should re-read Max Lane’s and Jon Lamb’s 2005 PCD contribution which was possibly the first attempt to lay down a perspective of how to build a major protest against Bush’s visit and the APEC summit, starting with an Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conference in the early part of the year to build into a major anti-imperialist, anti-war protest/convergence in the later part of the year, with Resistance playing a leading role in both events. [Asia and the Pacific in Australian imperialist politics and what the DSP should do, The Activist, Vol. 15, No. 15].
In relation to the upcoming federal elections, comrades should re-read the LPF’s party building report by Marce Cameron at the April NC [The Activist, Vol. 14, No. 4] that laid out the LPF’s view of how the DSP and SA should relate to these elections. I won’t repeat those points here in a five-minute summary.
Unfortunately at this NC, there has been a repeat of the now-familiar LPF bashing and scapegoating that some in the majority leadership substitute for real political engagement and assessment. Some majority comrades have even gone so far as to call for a split of the DSP or an expulsion of the LPF, which would be a major step backwards for the revolutionary forces in this country. This is an extremely dangerous course to descend upon, and the LPF urges the majority leadership to draw back from their split trajectory.
We don’t have to go down this path. I urge comrades to read the LPF’s position, think about the last two years and discard the majority’s failed line at the upcoming congress in favour of a realistic and optimistic line of rebuilding the DSP as a public revolutionary party through prioritising Resistance and Venezuela solidarity.