On September 2, the Democratic Socialist Party’s national executive agreed to propose to the party’s membership that the DSP cease to operate as a public organisation from January 2003 so as to devote much more resources to building the Socialist Alliance.
If the proposal is adopted by the party’s 20th Congress, to be held December 28-January 1, DSP members will devote all their efforts to building and recruiting to the Socialist Alliance rather than the DSP. The DSP will seek negotiations with the Socialist Alliance national executive about taking as much of the party’s political and organisational assets into the Socialist Alliance as is possible.
DSP members will continue to organise as an internal tendency within the Socialist Alliance in order organise a transition that ensures that the gains of its three decades of work as a party will not be lost to the left as a whole, including their dedicated efforts in producing and distributing Green Left Weekly.
We are confident that this will be a big step forward for left regroupment in Australia and that we will be able to agree, in stages, on concrete steps forward for the Socialist Alliance.
This confidence is based on the substantial political consensus and comradely collaboration on the left achieved since the founding of the Socialist Alliance.
Face of socialist unity
In just a year and a half the Socialist Alliance has managed to establish itself as the “face of socialist unity” in Australian politics. While we should not exaggerate its impact and visibility, it certainly enjoys, as a result of its electoral registration, election campaigns and overall work (including a presence in activist campaigns), much greater profile than any of its affiliates or any other left organisations.
Its modest but solid initial election results (around 1.4% at best in contests with the Greens, up to 4% where the Greens have not been present), its 2200 members and broader periphery confirm this judgement.
The Socialist Alliance has to one degree or another drawn around itself a large part of those who view themselves as socialists and left-wingers in Australia. These amount to roughly three times the membership of the founding affiliates. It has begun to extend socialist organising into new regions (like northern Tasmania) and it has the potential to repeat this sort of regional growth in other states.
Many working-class militants are looking seriously at the Socialist Alliance as their possible new political home. Further growth of the Socialist Alliance electorally and/or as a campaigning vehicle in the unions and communities will draw many more such militants into its ranks.
These gains have been won on the foundation of successful collaboration among the affiliates. Both at the founding conference and through the ongoing work of the Socialist Alliance national executive, we have been able to find – despite some disagreements – a correct and reasonably timely response to all the main political challenges of the day.
The Socialist Alliance has shown that the left can work together, a fact that is appreciated well beyond the ranks of the affiliate organisations themselves.
This experience tells us that the real political basis of the Socialist Alliance extends beyond its formally adopted founding platform and constitution to a consensus around a principled class-struggle approach to international and Australian politics.
The alliance’s successes aren’t the result of Australian political trends alone. The rising wave of resistance to neo-liberal globalisation and the spread of alienation from labour and social-democratic parties – experienced as enforcers of austerity by millions of workers – opens up the possibility of creating mass revolutionary socialist parties in country after country.
Australia has yet to experience popular mass mobilisations as powerful as those in Barcelona, Paris and Rome or a vote for far left candidates as high as that achieved in the first round of the French presidential elections (over 10%) or the 8% the Scottish Socialist Party is currently polling.
Nevertheless, the unity expressed in the Australian Socialist Alliance has its roots in the same basic social and political trends ? the rise of the (still very heterogeneous) movement against neoliberal globalisation and the emergence of class-struggle trends in the trade unions (like SUD in France, Cobas and SinCobas in Italy or the Victorian left unions in this country).
The Australian Socialist Alliance is also part of a global trend toward revolutionary left regroupment, especially in the advanced capitalist countries.
With due regard to all that is specifically Australian about it, the emergence of the alliance parallels the rise of the Socialist Alliance in England, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Portuguese Bloco de Esquerda, Denmark’s Enhedslisten, as well as the “left turn” of Rifondazione Comunista and the recently launched proposal of the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire for a new mass party of the radical anti-capitalist left.
These organisations and others like them have been meeting for several years now at the level of a European anti-capitalist left and their latest gathering in Madrid has produced a comprehensive statement of position on the burning issues of world and European politics.
Within all of these organisations the issue of what degree and form of unity it is necessary and possible for the radical left to achieve has been at the centre of discussion and debate.
Constraints
The Socialist Alliance has large unfulfilled and as yet untested potential. However, the constraints under which the alliance is presently labouring, if not lifted, will leave much of this potential unexploited.
The rise of the Green vote means that even less than previously can the Socialist Alliance hope to grow as a purely, or mainly, electoral formation. However, we have been unable to progress much beyond electoral work even though that was the express intent of all affiliates at the founding meeting and first national conference.
While the affiliates are maintaining and building their own organisations, this places an unavoidable constraint on what they can do to build the alliance. They are playing important roles in mass movements like the struggle for refugee rights (mainly outside of the framework of the alliance), but this also means that every rise in movement activity has the potential to lead to a reduction in commitment to building the alliance.
The Socialist Alliance has no publication except its web page and issues-based leaflets and irregular broadsheets. These have been invaluable in giving the alliance profile on the issues of the day but they are no substitute for a regular paper putting a comprehensive alliance position and building its presence in all sectors of the population.
While the alliance has developed a majority non-affiliate membership, those who bear the burden of its work are still mainly members of the affiliate organisations.
The existing alliance “apparatus” is struggling to maintain the basics of membership records and finances, let alone responding in a timely way to national and international political issues.
Inspiring a bigger contribution from existing Socialist Alliance members and further extending its membership will, in the short run at least, require a bigger contribution from the members of the affiliates. There are local groups to be organised, hundreds of members whose concerns and areas of interest the alliance must get to know, especially in those regions where branches do not yet exist.
The DSP national executive is convinced that this growing impasse cannot be broken by affiliates applying a “more of the same” approach to building the Socialist Alliance. While it is up to each affiliate organisation to decide on its course, we are confident that DSP members will be prepared to radically increase the resources devoted to its construction.
Our collective experience in building the alliance has revealed its actual political basis. There is a significant amount of shared socialist program among the Socialist Alliance affiliates. While this is not formally outlined as a program of the alliance, the founding documents refer to the fact that there is more common ground than that sketched out in the initial alliance platform.
This has been confirmed in practice by the actual experience of having to take a stand on such testing issues as the “war on terrorism”, Palestine and the current attacks on the most militant union leaderships in Australia.
When we reflect on the success of the alliance in developing positions of consensus or by very large majorities on such issues and add to this the high degree of unanimity reached over practical work, it is obvious that there is great potential for transcending or repositioning some of the traditional differences among the alliance’s affiliates. The democratic culture that the alliance has established can only help this process.
Rising to challenge
Our experience in working together surely confirms that left regroupment and unity will come about, and can only come about, on the basis of our rising to the objective challenges that are being posed by an intensifying class struggle and movement of anti-capitalist resistance. It will be our success in meeting these challenges ? including the challenge of giving concrete and credible form to the socialist alternative at every turn ? that will provide and strengthen the alliance.
In this context, existing differences among affiliates will have increasingly less weight and the grounds for the maintenance of the existing minimalist organisational form of the Socialist Alliance increasingly less operative. How important our existing differences really are and what organisational form they really justify should be tested out by serious debate in the context of ongoing joint work within the framework of the alliance.
[John Percy is national secretary of the DSP. Green Left Weekly invites further discussion and debate on how to strengthen and build the Socialist Alliance and other issues.]
Source: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/dsp-discusses-major-initiative-left-unity