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.

It’s not only the SA branch meetings where we go through the motions (collectively putting on an act in case someone drops by), but the national executive meetings also. This is the highest body, meeting monthly, of our “new party”, described by supporters of the NE-NC majority as “the actually existing core of a mass workers’ party project” (Lisa Macdonald, The Activist Vol. 15, No. 8) right up to “a new mass workers’ party” (Vannessa H, The Activist Vol. 15, No. 15)

The last NE meeting on October 30 illustrates the hollowness of our SA project well.

There were 12 people at this NE meeting, nine of them DSP members, and three non-DSP. Who provided the breadth, the mass input, at the meeting? The three independents? They were Melanie S, a DSP member until fairly recently, and still rather bitter towards us; Mark Lockett, who was a DSP member quite some time ago, but is also still rather bitter; and Alison Thorne, from the Freedom Socialist Party, one of the smallest and most esoteric of the Trotskyist sects.

That was it! Melanie S, Lockett, and Thorne our partners in the “core of a mass workers’ party project”! I’m sure they all felt very pleased with themselves, sitting on the powerful highest decision-making body of that mass workers’ party project.

Where was the militant union current? They rarely come to SA branch meetings, and rarely to SA NE meetings either. Tim G was there, certainly a militant union leader, but he’s a leader of the DSP, and we don’t gain anything by rebadging him as an SA leader all the time.

We’re told there was a very good discussion at the SA NE meeting, on the campaign against Howard’s IR laws and November 15, and the campaign against Howard’s anti-terror laws.

I wasn’t there, but I can believe the discussion would have been informative, since six of the DSP comrades also took part in the DSP national executive meeting the following day, where the same agenda items were discussed – important issues, and interesting progress reports on the struggle were passed on. It might have been a bit boring for the six comrades who went over the same thing twice (quite apart from the waste of cadre time).

But perhaps there were important features of the SA NE meeting that we’re not aware of? Perhaps there were exciting political insights offered by our three independents? Perhaps there were encouraging guarantees of mass support for SA and the coming mobilisations from the big battalions behind our three independents?

At least in one respect it would have been a better discussion than the DSP NE discussion on the same topics the following day. SA NE meetings take place through a proper phone hook-up, costing several hundred dollars each meeting, so there’s no problem with connections, and everyone comes through loud and clear. The DSP NE meetings take place through computer connections via Paltalk. This service is free, but comrades frequently drop out, and often the sound quality is bad, so the meetings get disrupted.

But this is probably an accurate picture of how the DSP has been spending its money in the last few years. It does cost a bit to create a Potemkin Village. Under the NE-NC majority’s perspectives, such priorities would continue.

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