A DSP building report

This report (and discussion) has to be a DSP party-building report and discussion.

Peter Boyle’s report is not, it’s still in the framework that we can build the Socialist Alliance as the “New Party”. Even if he puts building “two parties” in inverted commas, or says building two parties, but two “different types of parties”, or ambiguously interprets the phrase “new party project”, switching back and forth between interpreting it as our long term goal, perspective, (for the last two decades) of working to find ways to build a mass workers’ party, and on the other hand treating the SA as that new party we’re building.

This report has to be about how the DSP can best go forward as the party we’re building, in the here and now.

The re-imagining of the Socialist Alliance as something less than a party-in-formation, reflected in the decision to stop the integration of DSP resources into SA, also requires a re-imagination of the relationship between SA and the struggle to build the DSP itself.

Over the last two years in particular, building the DSP and building the SA have been envisaged as intertwined in a fundamental way. It is also now necessary to re-imagine how to build the DSP, where building the DSP becomes the central strategic task. In re-imagining the project of building the DSP, SA becomes an important, but by no means the most important, weapon in our arsenal.

Such a re-imagining of how to build the DSP means a turn back to re-emphasise many of the lessons of our past experience. But it is not a “circling of the wagons” or a turning inwards.

While the general class retreat continues to frame the overall political dynamic, the ruling class’s often more brazen forms of offensive accompanied by this working class retreat continues to stir up discontent and helps maintain a substantial constituency of left-leaning discontent to which we can and must relate.

The potential for us to grow and outreach within this constituency is substantial as we are now the only serious organized left party of sizeable resources (relatively) in Australia. While the period is characterized by no sustained mobilizations at the national level, at the global level mobilization, struggle and protest are sufficiently regular and frequent – now also involving a new revolutionary upheaval (Venezuela) and new alliances between revolutions (Venezuela and Cuba, and maybe later Vietnam). These regular and now historic protests and struggles also help sustain the existence of the left-leaning constituency of discontent against the system in a country like Australia.

Our orientation for building the DSP must be outward looking, finding ways to engage with this agitated, though only sporadically mobilised, discontent. This discontent is variegated and develops in fits and starts in an uneven way. The continuing class retreat means that the ongoing political motion to sustain a more-or-less single overarching means of organising and leading, by bringing into motion new forces and leaders, such as we envisaged SA might develop into, is not possible in this period. We must reach out, lead and recruit using a range of different weapons. SA will be only one, operating in various specific ways.

In that framework, we can make use of what we’ve achieved with SA, and what is actually there, as a useful auxiliary for our work.

It can be a positive contribution to building the party, like Green Left Weekly, like Resistance. But it’s not the party. Not “the party we build”.

Assessing the Socialist Alliance experience

As part of this pre-congress discussion we need to properly assess the Socialist Alliance experience.

Firstly we need to be clear that there have been two main stages in that experience:

Firstly, there’s our initiation of the process, and the first few years. Remember what was the actual initiating event that prompted us to think about this tactic? The decision by the British Socialist Workers Party to contemplate election work after two decades of abstaining totally from it. We thought, here’s an opportunity to make an approach to the local International Socialist Organisation, for joint work, joint election campaigns, and a regrouping of the left. They either had to respond positively, or suffer a political blow, and organisational losses. (In that respect, our tactic worked, they’re certainly a lot weaker than they were in 2001, suffering splits and attrition, and at their Marxism conference in September, they had half the attendance of recent years, with just 40 at their final session. We’ve suffered also, but not as much as them.)

We were excited about the prospects of left unity in the first years of SA. It was a good, positive feeling. But there’s no remnant of that in SA any longer; all the sects are for sabotage, not unity.

Secondly, there’s the period when we started to think that the Socialist Alliance might be able to become a new, broader party, and the big step in that process, our gamble of changing our name to “Perspective”, becoming an internal tendency in the SA, hoping to push the party process along.

It’s this second period, especially the last two years, our major turn at our last congress, that has clearly failed, and which we have to draw back from, rewind.

DSP-SA draft resolution

The draft resolution on our DSP-SA relations is still not a perfect resolution. It still has inconsistencies coming out of the difficult situation of the last two years. But it has the key points there, and is a start.

I’d hoped we had got agreement on the main lines of the resolution at the August 15 NE meeting, and could go forward, but the report by Comrade Peter Boyle on the resolution, and his draft party-building report now, is a retreat from the main points of that draft resolution, he tries to straddle two positions, and his line would continue to confuse the party.

However, on the basis of this resolution, plus the necessary constitutional changes, plus a clear party-building report assessing the past two years, and setting clear tasks and perspectives for the next few years, we can go forward.

With some gains from our SA experience, and able to carry on a realistic level of activities;

With a clear perspective for rebuilding the DSP and Resistance, re-cadreising;

With a balanced set of tasks, and priorities, for our interventions.

There are also some basic amendments to the resolution that we’re proposing today:

• To bring it into line with the factual reality of the industrial relations campaign;
• To bring it into line with reality of SA branches and structures.
• To bring it into line with the reality of how we actually do and can do our international work.

And we’re also proposing a motion “That the national executive recommend to the national committee that it propose that the 22nd DSP Congress rescind all of the constitutional amendments adopted by the 21^st DSP Congress.”

Able to admit our mistakes

But it’s also important to be clear and honest about the past.

We made a mistake two years ago. Call it by its right name.

• We made a wrong assessment of the objective political situation;
• We made a wrong prediction about where things were going;
• We took the wrong political and organisational decisions, our major turn.

We can’t just jump again, and move on. We need to know why we change course; what mistakes we made. We need an objective assessment now for our comrades today, and for comrades in the future.

Peter and comrades who support his approach should not take it personally when we say we have to admit our mistakes. We all voted for the line at our last congress; we’re all responsible for it.

We made a mis-estimation of the state of the class struggle and its likely course. We were wrong. But we shouldn’t react by saying, “don’t make predictions, estimations”. We have to do that, then we have to try things out, and if proved wrong, correct our assessment, and our course.

Probably we need a more thorough investigation of the Australian social and political conditions, and their course over the last 10 years. Perhaps we’d conclude that Australian conditions at the moment are still not conducive to a mass mobilization and upsurge here on Australian socio-economic issues. Reflecting over the last 10 years, you realize that all the big mobilizations have been over international issues, or social justice type issues:

The anti-Hanson protests; the 1998 MUA defense; the East Timor actions; Aboriginal reconciliation; 2000 S11 and other anti-globalisation actions since then; campaigns for refugees; and the campaign against the war in Iraq.

Eliminate the hype, and face up to the reality

Having gained a clear assessment of the past, and what we have to do to move forward, and what we need to do next, we also have to drop one of the unfortunate features of our Socialist Alliance work in the last year or so – we have to cut all the hype and exaggeration. (See the PCD by John Percy and Max Lane in The Activist, Vol 15, No 7.)

This is very much linked to the question of being able to realistically assess our experiences, and face up to our mistakes. If we don’t, or can’t, do that, then the resort is to hype. It’s bad for our comrades. It’s bad for our friends.

If we all honestly think about the reality of SA branches, we have to admit: There’s not much there beyond ourselves. It’s demoralising for comrades to have to go through the motions. And it’s getting worse.

Peter in his report argues that we have to link up with the real leaders of the class. Well, it won’t be through Socialist Alliance branch meetings; they don’t come to them. Craig Johnston and Chris Cain don’t come to SA branch meetings. Craig is on the SA NE, I think he’s come to half a meeting since the conference. The way we relate to them is through our own union leaders and militants, and through Sue Bolton, our national trade union director, or our DSP branch secretaries.

In election campaigns, as in Marrickville, it’s the DSP deciding (against the opposition of the ISO and Greg Adler, and there were no independents involved in the decision), and us doing the work. (There are fewer non-DSPers involved than in most previous campaigns.)

And what about the “Fightback Network”, referred to in Peter’s report several times? What is this? It doesn’t exist!

Peter ends his report by quoting from the September 2002 DSP NC report that quotes Lenin’s Left Wing Communism, which we’ve often done over the last few decades, the quote about “phrasemongering and clowning”. Well, unfortunately there’s a great deal of phrasemongering and clowning involved in our current intervention in SA, and our efforts to prop it up and make it something it’s not, a party.

But worse, Peter continues the quote from that report: “The current political situation is creating new openings to collect a bigger revolutionary vanguard in Australia today and our proposal is a response to these conditions.”

That is, he endorses the assessment of the very political conditions that we all agreed now don’t exist for such a transition. And endorses the very proposal, to become an internal tendency in the SA to push it in the direction of becoming a party, that the SA-DSP draft resolution says explicitly now can’t be done.

Peter reaffirms this reversal to the old line of the last congress, away from the line of the draft resolution, by then stating: “That opening we were responding to back in 2002 has not closed.”! And he tries to gloss over the clear assessment in the draft resolution by saying he supports “the general line” of it.

Perspectives for our Socialist Alliance work

What is actually possible, real, with our Socialist Alliance work, and what’s not?

SA branch meetings have not been productive, and we should keep them to a minimum, quarterly or even less frequent. There should be no forcing of regular meetings where they play no role in organizing others.

Where appropriate, city-wide aggregates are likely to be more useful. (We should close the Bankstown office, it’s draining $180 per week from us, and not being used. No-one goes there for weeks at a time.)

Some trade union caucuses could be maintained where they exist, eg NTEU, but they’re not functioning in most cities. In some cities, broader union fight back bodies have been established, and they’re more useful. At the same time, there’s a need for DSP fractions. DSP bodies have to help with and direct the work of our leading trade union comrades.

We should favour joint GLW-SA events that have the most chance of getting SA members along – dinners and similar social-political events.

We should be doing some electoral work, and keeping SA as our electoral vehicle, but not going too heavily into this. It’s clear that for the present we will be overshadowed by the Greens.

We should reconsider the role of Seeing Red. It’s a financial drain on us, with not a great political impact for our politics. Green Left Weekly is a much better tool, and our resources – money, writers, layout skills, and distribution efforts – would be better poured into that.

We can use the Socialist Alliance for our demonstration contingents, and other active interventions, but add in DSP and Resistance to increase our identification as the main components of SA. The DSP should have a public face again.

We can have Socialist Alliance stalls, but recognise that they’re primarily GLW stalls. We can join up people to SA from the stalls, have all the SA literature on them, but should also have DSP and Resistance material on them. We should not allow Socialist Worker to be plonked on the stalls if they’re not staffing the stalls (which they haven’t been doing for at least a year.)

We should continue to solicit Socialist Alliance membership, and service them with emailings, but find a way that we don’t have to dish out these members’ details to the sects. (Often we find that we’ve done the recruiting to SA, then we find that one of the sects, especially the ISO, has gone round contacting them to join them up to their own organisation.)

We can use Socialist Alliance to initiate campaigns, and call broader coalitions, but the DSP and Resistance should also be part of these broader coalitions.

The next Socialist Alliance national conference needs to adopt the new perspectives for SA, bringing the wishes into line with reality. Given the small number of active independents, we don’t need to project it as a big public conference.

We can regard the Socialist Alliance as a campaigning coalition, with roles also as a supporters’ organisation, and an electoral vehicle. We should see SA as an auxiliary of our party, rather than the other way round.

There’s no basis for the Socialist Alliance to progress to a new party, even proceeding slowly, with “prolonged effort”, over several years, as Peter argues in his draft party-building report.

As an auxiliary tactic for our party-building, it will require us to do a number of things as I’ve just outlined (probably our perspective involves us doing more useful things through SA than Peter’s perspective.) We’ve taken the decision not to transfer more of our resources into SA, and we also have to be clear about not forcing unproductive meetings on comrades, and not wasting more of our resources on unproductive and routinist SA activities.

But also, recognising that there’s no political basis for progressing SA to a new party, and recognizing SA as an auxiliary tactic, this also requires us to be honest with our members and supporters, including our collaborators in the Socialist Alliance itself.

Peter argues that this will alienate the likes of Craig Johnston and Chris Cain. I disagree. We engage with these comrades primarily through our trade union work, and that will continue as it did before the SA started, and before we became just an internal tendency in it. We’ll tell them that we’re keeping SA, but with no illusions that it’s becoming a party, and we’ll boost up our efforts in it when needed, and if they have any suggestion to use SA in the here and now, they should put them forward, and we’ll discuss them seriously, and see what forces they can bring along to help implement their suggestions. But the surest way to alienate them big time, is if we bullshit with them.

Rebuilding the DSP

That has to be the framework of this report, rebuilding the DSP, and our perspectives for 2006.

Politically, we have to get the relationship between SA and DSP right;

Organisationally, all these tasks will follow much more easily.

It can’t be, OK, we have an emergency push on DSP organisation tasks now, to prevent disaster, and after that, have another bash at attempting to build the Socialist Alliance as the new party, which failed, face up to it. “Once more into the breach” might be heroic, but if it doesn’t match the objective political circumstances, and ignores our actual experience of the last two years, it can be suicidal.

Membership

From hovering just under 300 throughout most of the ‘90s, our membership rose to just over 350 after S11, and when we first initiated the Socialist Alliance. From then it has steadily dropped to around 270 earlier this year. From our May NC when we instituted emergency measures to address the crisis, we’ve made some progress. We have risen from 274 to 281 – we recruited 19 comrades, but lost 12.

The 19 recruits from the last four months have come from a variety of sources: some from Resistance; some from APISC; a couple of leaders of SA, a couple of former members rejoining. This was partially mopping up, because it’s hard to see where the next recruits will come from the Socialist Alliance.

There’s been a significant shrinkage of our cadre base. We’ve suffered a significant decline, a loss of cadres, and a decline in cadre morale and confidence. And some other DSP members are just hanging in there; we’ll risk further losses from among our long-term cadres. Also couple that with the serious decline in Resistance.

This is the main measure, test, of how we’ve gone, how our tactic has worked, or not worked – our cadres. (Other indicators, such as sales and finances, point to the same decline and failure.) Just look at the charts covering the last 15 years, and note when our dipping down began.

OK, Peter and other proponents of continuing to pursue the last congress line would say, to get the future gains we’ve got to be prepared to “spend some cadres”. Those are the words. And they’d balance it up against the prospect of the future gains, a bigger, broader (mass?) party.

But we can only risk spending cadres for a short period. It can’t be an extended perspective. And when the pot of gold that we’re gambling for doesn’t look any closer, but even further away, then it’s time to call a halt to gambling our comrades on it.

In regard to recadreisation, we all agree we need it, but it needs to be a permanent process, not risked for the next jump.

We recognised this at our May NC, and took emergency measures to stop the decline. But we can’t just make a push on sales, finances, recruiting, and then drop back into our previous framework, trying to build the Socialist Alliance as the party. This would demoralise and shake loose further cadres, (especially those comrades still substituting hopes for reality.)

We know we suffered from past big party-building efforts to break out, which failed: in 1987, after the CPA backed out of our New Left Party building attempt, we did lose a chunk of leading comrades; in the early ‘90s, after we failed with our efforts with the Greens, we lost some more cadres, some who ended up in the Greens.

Green Left Weekly

We’ve underused a huge asset, Green Left Weekly. GLW is the remaining over-arching reach-out and organizing and leading tool for the DSP. GLW‘s wide support is shown by:

• The support and respect in a whole range of movements, in Australia, and also globally;
• The web statistics, with nearly 11,000 visitors per day;
• The Emergency Appeal, which has gone over $111,000, where more than $28,000 came from non-DSP members (we never raised that sort of money from SA and SA members; it’s that sort of money that we poured into SA).

Current GLW sales don’t measure up to its potential. We’re almost back to the level, just over 1000 sales, that Direct Action was in the late ‘80s, when we made the switch to GLW (it was just under 1000).

The average number of sellers is still falling, and the average number of hours sold is still falling. These are the key statistics.

Although sales have been declining in the ‘90s, the further slump of the last few years is a result of the weakening of the DSP through our SA intervention. There have been no gains in GLW distribution, no broadening out, from our SA tactic.

We shouldn’t accept any more blackmail attempts, through vetoes or weird impositions of articles, from the ISO and the other small affiliates. They’re not building GLW, and they’re not building SA. They should have no vetoes or favours.

We should strengthen GLW as a combination paper, perhaps balancing it better with some more educational, theoretical, historical articles. Step up the “Case for Socialism” columns. Perhaps we need an article on “A Marxist analysis of the Venezuelan revolution”, and a greater highlighting of the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions.

We have to focus on steady, regular sales increases, which will come from increases in DSP and Resistance membership, and education and integration of the new members, and re-inspiration of the longer term members. We shouldn’t rely on blitzes, which don’t seem to lead to any permanent increase in our sales. Blitzes can be useful to expand our regular sales when they’re already heading in the right direction, not as a way to rescue from a decline.

We should have a permanent appeal for funds for GLW, run as a public, weekly campaign. We could also add a campaign to expand sales into new areas, with readers taking small bundles.

Finances

For the period of our immersion as an internal tendency in the SA, we’ve had a two-year financial crisis, that built up to that $100,000 deficit.

What the Emergency Appeal success demonstrates is two things:

• When the DSP organises, we can do great things;
• GLW has built up a huge reservoir of support and good will.

It doesn’t demonstrate that the SA as we had tried it is viable, it only shows it was a financial drain and in danger of leading us to disaster. We can’t now switch back to a new try with the SA as a “party”, and rack up another deficit. We can’t make an “emergency appeal” every year. Our supporters, and members, would start to turn off.

But we should take one lesson from the campaign, the need to run a regular, weekly public fund campaign in GLW. We have done it for some years in the past, and should resume. And we should begin it immediately with the next GLW, coming out after the Resistance Conference, where we can give a major wrap up, thank all our supporters, and announce that our fund drive will be public and running each week in GLW.

To properly solve our financial crisis, we have to recognise the central importance of a national pledge campaign, to get the national pledge level back up. This is something I’ve been raising regularly in the political committee or secretariat over the last year, but usually it’s been met with silence.

Our national pledge level had dropped to about $5000 a week. The average pledge has dropped by $1.50 in the last three years. The level had been well above $6000 in the past, and we had a campaign to reach $7000.

But the success of this campaign depends on rebuilding the DSP, and increasing comrades’ consciousness and commitment. (See the PCD by Marcus Pabian in The Activist, Vol 15, No 7.)

Education

The January DSP Marxism conference and the March Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference were a breath of fresh air to comrades. Comrades craved revolutionary discussion and inspiration, which wasn’t available within SA.

The previous year, with our push to make SA into a party, and having the DSP as an internal tendency in SA, meant that our education programs had slipped.

We’ve taken some steps to overcome this. Comrade Doug Lorimer has already travelled to Perth for a school.

Hobart has requested a visit for a school in November, and Adelaide and Melbourne schools could also be organized. There will be a short school in January.

We need to boost members’ study of the Marxist classics, best done of course in conjunction with their involvement in the real class struggle here. Some branches now have Introduction to Socialism and Introduction to Marxism classes, but we’re still struggling on this front.

Are comrades reading as much as they were (or should)? My impression (and we should check the figures) is that literature sales at our conferences have been down.

It’s important that we hold frequent, regular DSP branch meetings for orienting comrades, for educating, and for planning our interventions. (Contrast our DSP meetings with the negative role of SA branch meetings.)

Our DSP National Newsletters have stepped up our organizing role there, but we’ve also been able to use them partially for motivating and inspiring the education of comrades. The Activist should be playing a regular role here as well.

Regular GLW forums

Regular Green Left Weekly organised forums have not been implemented since the decision we took at the May DSP national committee meeting that we do so.

Such forums can help build the prestige and image of GLW. They should encourage the maximum amount of Marxist discussion. There can be alternating joint sponsors – Venezuela solidarity; SA; ASAP etc.

GLW forums can be a stimulus to sales. GLW is our voice, and the forums can serve a similar function.

Publications

We should be continuing, even increasing, our publications program.

This is part of our party-building perspectives, the necessary education, and the projection of our ideas. Our publications program must be integrated with DSP party-building. It can’t just be separated off, like it’s a commercial enterprise.

DSP fractions

We are going to need some DSP fractions again, especially for some of our trade union interventions, and also for our Venezuela solidarity work.

Our fractions are not just for helping organising and directing our comrades, and discussing and deciding what to do, to make sure we get the right outcomes and decisions. It’s also very much part of training our comrades, building cadres.

Temporarily trying to do this through SA fractions might be a necessary concession for a short period, as we attempted to force the pace on SA becoming a new party, but it can’t continue indefinitely. In most cases it’s just us anyway. We need to reinstitute some DSP fractions.

Where SA caucuses actually work – perhaps the Melbourne trade union caucus is a case in point – they should be continued of course. (But we shouldn’t rule out the need for DSP fractions sometimes also.)

We should also recognise that with the more significant consolidation of our party as the largest force on the left (relatively, of course, with the dissolution of the old Communist party of Australia), we don’t have to circle the wagons, and there is a wider layer of supporters, sympathisers, whom we can sometimes organise with ad hoc caucuses using SA. SA can be a good tool to help organise them, keep in touch with them by email, as well as using GLW for this purpose.

Rebuilding Resistance

Resistance rebuilding is a crucial part of our DSP party-building perspectives in the period ahead. (There’s a separate report on this at the NC.)

The crisis in Resistance is definitely a casualty of our gamble on trying to transform the Socialist Alliance into a party. Our party leadership, both nationally and in branches, almost stopped giving assistance to Resistance leaders. Resistance is probably now the weakest in our history.

There’s a huge potential with the Bush visit in 2007. We have to get in position beforehand, and have Resistance street-heat activity planned. Here especially we have to break with the bureaucratic ways of winning “leadership” of these campaigns used by others on the left, from the CPA, Greens, ISO, to the anarchists. It’s not enough to be the first to call for a campaign or demo, and thus seeking to claim permanent leadership of it. We have to get in there with real actions, our “street heat” initiating and leading actions.

This is how we’ve done it in the past. Remember the anti-Hanson demos, the East Timor protests, the Books not Bombs, and so many others before. So in 2006 we have to get in there early and begin with modest anti-imperialist actions. We need to use, and note:

• The potential of Venezuela, Cuba solidarity and the resulting inspiration;
• The potential of young workers organising;
• The potential of winning high school students (always a strength of Resistance);
• The need to crack the campuses again.

We need to get back to having Resistance functioning in all branches, and also start thinking about clubs.

The Resistance NC after the DSP Congress should declare its solidarity with the DSP again.

And we should aim for a big Resistance Conference in July 2006, which will be a gathering point for our whole tendency in 2006. Perhaps we can lead up to it with a speaking tour of someone from the Frente in Venezuela.

Centrality of Venezuelan solidarity work in 2006

We need to stress the centrality of Venezuela solidarity work in 2006. There are two sides to it:

1. The necessary solidarity, in the certain expectation of further US aggression and subversion. We should be looking at lessons and comparisons with the Vietnam War.

2. The recruiting and radicalisation possibilities from this campaign. Again, we look back at the origins of Resistance and our party.

We will rebuild Resistance through Venezuela solidarity. But Venezuelan solidarity is not just for Resistance, it can’t be. Central DSP comrades have to be assigned to lead, in each branch, and nationally.

We have to be clear that such a central area of our work in 2006, for the DSP and Resistance, has to be led by the DSP, not by Resistance, as Peter states in his report. It has to be led by the DSP as DSP leaders and cadres, and publicly, not by wearing an SA hat.

In leading this work we have to be clear and unequivocal in our support for the Venezuelan leadership and its closest allies, the Cuban Communist Party. That’s not possible if you operate as the Socialist Alliance (unless we are just rebadging). The DSP national leader of this work (and I propose that comrade Dick Nichols takes this up as his main assignment when he gets back in a few weeks’ time) has to lead it and be publicly identified as a DSP leader.

We need to build Venezuela solidarity campaigns, committees with membership. We also have to counter some of the narrow efforts set up, such as by the Vega brothers, operating from the CFMEU in Sydney.

We need more tours, and brigades, more articles in GLW and elsewhere, more forums and discussions.

The Venezuelan revolution has been and will be very inspiring for our comrades, and will help recruit radicalising young people. But how to relate it to the actual Australian political situation, what lessons for revolutionaries here in Australia? The objective conditions in the two countries are so different – a revolutionary process in a Third World country; a very non-revolutionary situation in an imperialist country.

However, we can relate Venezuela to the Australian political situation by linking it to the whole anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation, even “Make Poverty History type sentiment, and win young people partially radicalized on those sentiments to a thorough anti-imperialist solidarity position, opposition to anti-neoliberal globalization. We can link it to the racism and xenophobic fear-mongering of the Australian ruling class and its parties.

In many past radicalisations, people initially develop an anti-imperialist critique, and then that anti-imperialist critique is turned on their own society, and they see that capitalism as a whole is the problem. That process is feasible here too.

On one level, this helps us win new people to Marxism. On another level, it can enable us to strengthen our work, to win a leadership role, and influence the thinking and activity of all those developing an anti-imperialist sentiment.

APISC and ASAP

A big focus of our work for the next 18 months should be building a huge APISC in April 6-9, 2007. (See the PCD by Max Lane in The Activist, Vol 15, No 7.)

It will be a festival of political discussion, and an important tool for building the DSP.

It can be the last stage of our intervention into:

• The anti-Bush protests, round APEC, probably in September;
• The political propaganda and education response that will be raised by discussion of APEC;
• The possible re-launch of Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific (ASAP), before or at APISC.

APISC has to be organized by GLW and Resistance. They should be the main organizers, have the main profile. Other sponsors and supporters can be ASAP, the DSP, the SA, CISLAC, Venezuela solidarity committees etc.

We should start preparing APISC from the start of 2006, and make it the biggest APISC yet, with all our Asian collaborators attending. A delegation from Vietnam has been invited already. At least one comrade, hopefully several others, from the Malaysian Socialist Party will attend.

Asia, and in particular Southeast Asia (Indonesia even more in particular) remain a central focus of imperialist foreign policy as well as ruling class anti-foreign and racist fear propaganda (witness their hysteria around Corby, terrorism etc.)

Discussion should begin on how to revive ASAP as the DSP’s tool to intervene in this arena as well as a way to (a) deepen our relations with socialist forces in Asia, including Vietnam (especially through the Agent Orange campaign) and (b) maximize the Marxist educational benefit to our membership and others of being able to study, discuss with Marxist forces in neighboring countries.

Other campaigns

Does SA (as it actually is, now, compared to our hopes and ideals) broaden our impact and ability to intervene, lead, in more campaigns and committees? Unfortunately, no.

SA hasn’t necessarily helped our campaign work, often we’re trapped in a dysfunctional committee with an ISOer. Mostly it’s just DSP comrades with an SA hat, at best. But there are opportunities for a variety of other campaigns: in the anti-war movement, the refugee rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, ASAP, Agent Orange and other work in the Vietnamese community, countering the old right-wing leadership and working with Vietnamese students.

Resuming our international work

We have to resume the level of our international work, our collaboration and discussion with other Marxist parties, especially in the Asian region, and resume it as the DSP. (See the PCD by John Percy in The Activist, Vol 15, No 6.)

This is especially in the context of the Venezuelan revolution, and developing relations with the Venezuelan and Cuban leaderships, and also with the Communist Party of Vietnam.

We can’t do it as the DSP with an SA hat. For example, where the DSP pays, a DSP leader travels, then tries to force on an SA hat, but speaks on behalf of the DSP program and ideas, where such views have not been discussed, let alone agreed to, in the SA. (eg, SWO in New Zealand).

And as I’ve argued in my PCD contribution, when carrying out work with other parties around the world, it’s much better, for many reasons, to function as the Democratic Socialist Party.

A component of our international work takes place here in Australia also, collaborating with the Venezuelan, Cuban and Vietnamese representatives, and soon with the East Timorese, when Avelino de Silva’s brother will become ambassador in Canberra.

We’re experiencing a stepping up of our comradely relationship with the Communist Party of Vietnam. (There’ll be a report of our recent visit in the next Activist) We hope to get an invitation to their congress in April. But we note some steps to further collaboration agreed on:

• We’ll begin collaboration with Vietnamese students studying here (hopefully beginning at the Resistance conference.);
• We’ll start distribution of English language political books from Vietnam, in our bookshops and online bookstore;
• We’ll organise more solidarity campaigns, on Agent Orange, and work in the local community here.

We have to continue developing our collaboration with all those other parties in the Asian region – in Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Mauritius, South Korea and Malaysia.

The Malaysian Socialist Party has grown, and they put on an excellent conference on socialism that we just attended. A downside of us cutting back on some of our international work in the last period in the region is that the CWI has been courting them, including through a leadership school given for them by Peter Taaffe. However, they’ve requested that we also do a leadership school for them, and we think we can organise it with comrades Max Lane, Allen Myers and Helen Jarvis attending.

We have to continue the production of Links magazine, and find ways to step up its distribution. It’s an important part of our international work, as well as a place for our own longer documents, and theoretical articles. I should recount one very interesting response in Vietnam to No 27, the issue with “Socialism and the market: Chinese and Vietnamese roads” on the cover, with comrade Mike Karadjis’ article, as well as comrade Nguyen The Phiet, the Sydney Consul General, and Eva Cheng’s introduction and translation of the letter by Chinese left-wing dissidents. As part of our thank you gift we gave the president of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations, that had organised all the conferences, a copy of Links 27. On seeing it he exclaimed, “Oh, you produce this. That’s a very interesting article.” Our only conclusion was that the CPV had reproduced the article and had been circulating it to some of their cadres.

Party spirit and psychology

The perspective of the line from our last congress was that the DSP should be “withering away”. That was the psychology. We can’t have any remnant of that psychology remaining.

There’s the recent example of speakers’ designations for the Latin American Solidarity Conference – our DSP comrades are speaking on the Venezuelan process and leadership, and the Cuban revolution and its leadership, as Socialist Alliance speakers.

We need a conscious effort to project ourselves again, not fall into the default SA hat.

There’s no party spirit in SA, it’s not a party. We had built up a party spirit in the DSP, we need to rekindle that. From that we do better, in all our political and organisational tasks: Increasing our GLW sales; Increasing our pledge base.

We need that party loyalty, and party spirit, to encourage younger comrades to be willing to go on full-time again; to become lifetime revolutionaries; to make a sacrifice for the revolutionary party.

I’d stress again, our course is not one of “circling the wagons”. In fact, burying the DSP in SA for another year (or longer!) in the forlorn hope that SA will progress towards becoming the new party is actually a very narrow, internal perspective. That’s more akin to “circling the wagons”. (Many of those SA branches are very narrow circles!)

There’s a much broader, exciting, positive perspective available, of building the DSP, leading the Venezuela solidarity campaign, rebuilding Resistance, using SA where it’s useful as an auxiliary tactic, and being in a much stronger position to take advantage of all political openings that come along – that will inspire existing comrades to greater efforts, and more reach-out efforts, and allow us to recruit and integrate more new cadres.

With this perspective, we can see great growth opportunities for Resistance, and we can see real opportunities for the DSP to grow considerably in the two years ahead.

Building an inclusive leadership team

I’d like to finish with three final points:

Firstly, we can prove our party, our political health, by a healthy discussion – written, oral, and at the congress. We can demonstrate that we’re a democratic party, a party that can have a thorough discussion, and can change course, and benefit, learn from mistakes we make, not gloss over and move on, or worse, continue in the old failed course.

Comrades have to read the PCDs thoroughly, we’ll continue with a range of further PCD contributions. And I hope all comrades contribute, think, put down their own experiences, and argue. Through discussion, the party will be stronger.

Secondly, we have to make use of all comrades. (Recall the story about one of Lenin’s greatest strengths, being able to make use of a very disparate range of revolutionaries to build the Bolshevik Party.) We don’t build our party by putting other comrades down. We have to emphasise comrades’ strengths.

We shouldn’t consider “spending” any more cadres unnecessarily. If we adopt a “forced march” approach that goes against the objective political realities, it will exhaust our branch organizers, and exhaust the comrades in the national office trying to push this through. We need politically stimulating interventions for comrades, and comrades need time for reading and education. If we adopt a “forced march” approach in SA, it will both bore comrades to death, and exhaust them.

Finally, we need a party atmosphere of comradeship. We might come from different social backgrounds, and might have very different things we do in our spare time, outside politics, but our political perspective and project unite us as comrades.

The party needs comradely relations between all of us to operate properly. We don’t have a hierarchical view. We don’t basically operate through orders from above, comrades are politically committed, and can do without hectoring.

And although our goal is to build a strong, Leninist party, with a base in the workers and oppressed, and a clear political program, we need to build an inclusive leadership team, even with political differences. That’s a lesson of successful revolutionary leadership teams.

Summary

Firstly, I’d like to wholeheartedly endorse comrade Susan Price’s sentiments in that last contribution in the discussion, that firstly, this should be a discussion in which we involve the whole, broad membership of the DSP, and secondly, that we should be very careful about what tenor we inject into the discussion.

All members and the whole party will reach a higher level of political understanding and clarity through taking this discussion seriously, reading all the PCD discussions, participating in the oral discussions, and taking a decision based on the analysis of experience and the logic of the arguments presented. But it is important that we keep the discussion on a political level, don’t let personal considerations intrude, and keep the debate comradely.

It’s going to be a very useful, healthy discussion, and it’s going to be especially useful if we get a lot of it written down. Comrades can easily forget arguments made verbally, and even worse, none of our memories are perfect so it’s easy to distort comrades’ positions if they’re just passed on by word of mouth. The core of the discussion, and the most accurate, is the written pre-congress contributions that are printed in The Activist. So comrades should write, and urge other DSP members to write.

In this regard I’d like to disagree with the argument made by a couple of comrades, including comrade Pat Brewer who’s a very experienced comrade and whom I would not have expected to have expressed this position: that is, that because all our discussions could possibly become public, then we should not articulate certain views, for example, the idea that the Socialist Alliance should be seen as an auxiliary tactic for the DSP, not the other way round. The suggestion has also been made that if some of our trade union allies in SA get wind that the DSP is discussing the possibility that the SA might no longer be progressing towards a new party, they’d be demoralised, think we were giving up on them.

If we go down this path, and accept an argument like this, then we’re not going to be able to have a complete discussion. We have to allow all views to be presented and argued for. The most important thing is for our DSP members to have a full and free discussion, it’s a totally secondary issue whether any petty little scandal monger or vitriolic critic of the DSP eventually gets access to our discussion, and spreads it around and distorts it.

Another point I’d like to disagree with also is the suggestion that because we’ve had political disagreements in the national office, because we don’t have a “united party” on this, it has somehow hindered our Socialist Alliance work. There’s nothing that the party hasn’t been able to do in SA because of any differences. It was also argued that by talking about the problems of Socialist Alliance it was a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Absolutely not; that’s putting the cart before the horse, the problems are there in the line, that’s led to the problems.

Another common argument has been that if our line was implemented, that would amount to killing off the Socialist Alliance. (This has moved along from the initial accusations, that we wanted to shut down SA.) This is just wrong; we’re arguing for recognising the reality of SA, and have it function at a level that is real.

On the question of the report on the Australian political situation scheduled for the NC meeting, and the draft that will be prepared by comrade Lisa Macdonald. This is going to be extremely useful for us, and we’ll benefit from a thorough discussion, and research and input from many comrades. There are likely to be many different takes and viewpoints, but we should be wary of assuming that any different assessments on this question are going to mirror the differences we have on our party-building perspectives and our assessment of the Socialist Alliance. In fact, there were very different claims and estimates from supporters of Peter’s point of view on this, from quite exaggerated over-optimism about the possibility of a class upsurge, to a very bleak picture of the situation in recent years.

There’s no time to recapitulate on criticisms of Peter’s report, or to incorporate some further points from the discussion. But I’d note that Peter’s report is essentially in two parts, two sections. Firstly, the defense of the essence of the line we adopted at our last congress, that the SA would be able to proceed to a new party, and secondly, the organisational tasks for the DSP, that will underwrite that line, or as comrade Paul Benedek accurately described it, as an additive.

Every now and then I’ve thought about the image that Peter used to illustrate his report to the May NC meeting, the overloaded DSP donkey with its feet in the air, tipped up by the overloaded SA cart. But I’ve thought, that picture isn’t quite right, because what’s in the cart isn’t actually a very weighty load, it’s a lightweight, puffed up burden.

The biggest problem of Peter’s perspective is that he’s still trying to straddle two incompatible positions, or as it was described by one comrade, with feet on either side of the twist.

Some comrades have criticised my counter report for seeming like an “old-style” DSP party building report. Yes, perhaps that’s true. But that’s exactly what we need to guide us in building the party best in the period ahead, and help the DSP and Resistance grow, and ultimately what will make the best use of the gains and experiences of the Socialist Alliance in a realistic way, and ultimately what will best help drive the class struggle forward.

– The Activist was as the internal discussion bulletin of the Democratic Socialist Party