Sydney – Fairfield City Council has caved in to pressure from the right-wing Vietnamese Community in Australia (VCA) and agreed to the group hoisting the defunct flag of the old Saigon regime on council land on three occasions each year.

At its April 2003 plenum, the DSP national committee adopted a report on the international political situation which made the observation that “[t]throughout the 1990s one of the greatest factors bearing down on the morale of the Cuban revolutionaries was the Cuban Revolution’s isolation in Latin America – the fact that there was not a single other revolutionary government in the hemisphere. Today, however, the Cuban Revolution has an ally in Latin America – the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, which has made significant progress in dismantling the institutions of capitalist power in an oil-rich, partially industrialised country with a population more than twice the size of Cuba’s”.

Comrades, the main task for this DSP congress is to correct the mistaken line we began to implement in 2002-03 and formally adopted at our last congress two years ago. The clear choice before us is – to maintain or abandon that false perspective.

When we first embarked on our Socialist Alliance tactic in early 2001 we weren’t all too clear on what it might achieve, or where it would go. Following a number of mass mobilisations in the previous few years – MUA defence in 1998, big demonstrations for East Timor, antiracist mobilisations against Pauline Hanson etc – we were optimistic.

The key task for the coming DSP congress – and pre-congress discussion – is to correct the mistaken line we adopted at our last congress two years ago. What was the essence of our mistake that we have to roll back? Essentially, it was our decision to integrate the DSP into the Socialist Alliance, because we had decided that the SA was “the party we’rebuilding”.

Was I too harsh in criticising Comrade Alison D for describing the last Sydney Central-Marrickville Socialist Alliance meeting as “an extremely good” meeting? Certainly I shouldn’t have just singled her out. (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 14) We’ve all been guilty of SA-hype until recently, putting a good gloss on any SA event, propping it up with DSP cadres, for too long substituting our hopes for the reality.

The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela led by Hugo Chavez has been an important and inspiring event, the “first revolution of the 21st century”, not just shaking up Latin America, but giving hope to socialists around the world.

As has become the pattern in PCD contributions by members and supporters of the NE majority, Comrade Paul Benedek ("From minority to majority support", The Activist Vol. 15, No. 14), defends the majority position in the debate on what party-building perspective the coming DSP Congress should vote for by misrepresenting the NE minority’s position. However, he takes misrepresentation to a new level by attributing a position to the whole party that it never had.

I sat in the DSP Sydney branch conference on October 29 flabbergasted. I looked around at other comrades who had been at that same Socialist Alliance meeting, wondering were they as incredulous as me?

Sydney branch secretary Alison D had just described the amalgamation meeting of Sydney Central SA and Marrickville SA on Tuesday October 25 as “an extremely good SA meeting”!

The August 15 national executive meeting unanimously adopted a draft resolution for vote at the 22nd DSP Congress in January 2006 that stated that the political “conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist” at the time we embarked on this turn; that without a “regroupment with broader left forces that are generated by a new upturn of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’” the SA cannot “take a significant step to creating a new socialist party”, and that, in the absence of the existence of these conditions, the DSP should build the SA, not as a