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”.

This year we recognised – unanimously, we thought – that the objective situation on which we predicated that major turn was not there. The major upsurge we were hoping for did not eventuate; the large number of partners and new class struggle forces were not there in the Socialist Alliance; it was us and a small number of others building the Socialist Alliance, and consequently we were seriously overburdened building two parties.

We also recognised – again unanimously we thought – that this overburdening was showing up in all the important indices by which we could measure the strength of our cadre force:

• Finances, we were facing our most serious financial deficit since the mid-1990s, and our national pledge base was declining;
• Sales of Green Left Weekly were dropping, but most starkly the number of sellers had fallen dramatically, from just under 200 a week to about 140;
• Resistance, our traditional replenisher of our cadre base, was getting weaker, and many DSP branches no longer had a Resistance branch;
• And most clearly, our membership had dropped from about 350 to 270-80. We had about 25% fewer cadres than when we started the Socialist Alliance tactic.

The May national committee meeting unanimously decided on emergency measures to address some of the worst organisational crises, and looked to the rest of the year, and the pre-congress discussion and congress, to correct the mistake of our last congress, and set us on track again politically.

But it has emerged in the course of the discussion, on the national executive, at the October 15-16 national committee meeting, and in the pre-congress discussion, that the NC majority is unwilling to face up politically to our mistake of two years ago, and hopes that we can solve our problems with organisational measures.

But it’s not enough to run an emergency campaign on finances, and run a campaign among comrades on pledges. It’s not enough to run a campaign on sales, more blitzes. It’s not enough for DSP members to run harder on these and other tasks (especially since there are fewer of us now.) We have to recognise the wrong political estimates and tactics that led to our weakening, and need to set a political and organisational course for next year that can start to reverse the damage.

Now both majority and minority comrades have embraced the term “recadreisation” as a description of what we need to do following the difficult period when we attempted to implement our “build the SA as our party” line. (At least by using the term the majority recognises we have a problem. They should also recognise why we have to go on a drive to recadreise, because of the SA experience of the last few years.) But I think different views about what “recadreisation” consists of have emerged in the course of this discussion, with the NC majority comrades tending to see it as primarily getting our DSP comrades better organised to sell more papers and give more money, and thus have another bash at trying to transform SA into our party through the sheer willpower and efforts of our DSP cadres.

How are Marxist cadres created?

Cadres are not just activists. When we talk about Marxist cadres we’re not just talking about disciplined activists who put a lot of time and energy into political activity. More important is the Marxist, Leninist political perspective and program that our cadres have, from which comes that dedication and commitment, that high level of activity and discipline.

And the process of creating and training Leninist cadres can’t take place in a vacuum. You can’t do it as an individual. It doesn’t happen in any old organisation.

The process of building cadres takes place in a revolutionary Marxist party, e.g., the DSP, or in the process of trying to form such a revolutionary Marxist party. Is not something that just comes through educationals, or reading books, but critically comes from working alongside other comrades for the common revolutionary goal, and building the absolutely necessary instrument to carry it out – a revolutionary party. It comes from training in interventions (through caucuses of that revolutionary party), learning to expound and defend the Marxist program, and using the Marxist method to work out the best course for the revolutionary party, and for the working class.

The revolutionary Marxist party can take many forms depending on the objective conditions – legal or illegal, above ground or underground, operating in other mass organisations or operating predominantly under its own flag. But the substance of a Marxist party still has to exist, and for the process of cadre creation it still has to function.

In some exceptional circumstances, for example in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the contradictions wrought by imperialism can be so extreme that a fully formed revolutionary party doesn’t get built until later in the struggle, even after the revolution, as in Cuba, as in Venezuela. But the DSP view has been that a revolutionary Marxist party is absolutely essential for carrying through a revolution in an advanced capitalist country like Australia. As the DSP program states:

“The working class cannot as a whole or spontaneously acquire the political class-consciousness necessary to prepare and guide its struggle for socialism. For this, it is indispensable to develop a party uniting all who are struggling against the abuses and injustices of capitalism and who have developed a socialist consciousness and a commitment to carrying out revolutionary political activity irrespective of the conjunctural ebbs and flows of the mass movement.” (Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, New Course, 1994)

One of the many roles and functions of a revolutionary party is the creation and training of Marxist cadre, without whom “the party” would be a fairly hollow idea. You can’t suspend that process for too long, or else we’ll suffer the consequences, there’ll be a break in continuity, and the cadre renewal process dries up.

The line that we started implementing in 2003 had envisaged training and educating socialist cadres within SA, once we started the process of integrating the DSP into SA. That was probably a mistake, which we hadn’t thought through at all thoroughly enough. Certainly it was not spelled out clearly in any document we adopted or report we gave to an NC or congress. Could it have actually happened, however, if the conditions had turned out better, and SA had actually got some real new forces into it?

I’m not sure. It would have required a significant radicalisation, SA getting a mass base, and SA becoming a revolutionary party itself.

A more likely approach would have required us functioning as a Leninist cadre force in a – much larger – Socialist Alliance. We hadn’t really worked it out. But it’s now a moot question. Our hoped-for situation did not happen, SA did not bring in large numbers of new activists, genuine mass forces, and it doesn’t look like that scenario is on the horizon.

Cadre renewal through the DSP as we build SA as our party?

We’ve now retreated (our May NC) from that perspective of thinking we could create and train cadres within SA. The draft resolution admits that “Socialist Alliance structures remain too weak and loose to win, educate and train new socialist activists…” (The Activist Vol. 15, No.4). But will we be able to restart the cadre renewal process while we’re straddling two parties?

The SA is seen by the NC majority as the party we build and our public face (despite the clear statement in the draft resolution that “this resolution proposes that the DSP function as a public revolutionary socialist organisation, while continuing to be affiliated to the Socialist Alliance, to build it and to seek to provide political leadership to it”). They envisage that the DSP would remain the Marxist cadre force in the “project” (in the absence of any active partners in SA) where cadre training is now supposed to take place. But will this scenario actually allow cadre renewal? Can it happen? Only in a stilted and limited way.

Has there been any generation of cadre through SA so far? No. There’s only been a very small number of recruits to the DSP via SA – a few former DSP members, a few DSP contacts who were formally joined up to SA first before joining the DSP, and one or two comrades with a Marxist background who have been reactivated through SA – but no cadre generation.

Comrade Russell P writes (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 15) that that’s the only way that we can create real cadre, i.e., convert DSP members into cadres via engagement with SA, “our entire membership to play a leadership role in SA”. That might be relevant if SA were actually the mass organisation we were hoping it would become; even if there were a small number of real activists in each branch that we could lead. But at this point and for quite some time we’re just leading ourselves, and dumbing down the process when we seek to relate to the odd person who wanders in, putting on our non-DSP, non-scary, SA hat.

Russell’s premise, that the SA is somehow a party, or somehow a mass formation, is wrong. So instead of training cadre the way Marxists should – in a Marxist party, intervening in the class struggle, in mass organisations where possible, as Marxists (but using more popular language to reach people) – we’re going through the motions in an organisation whose activists are primarily DSP members, but who pretend in public and in SA meetings they’re not revolutionary Marxists.

Yes of course, fundamental to cadre formation is engagement in the class struggle. In this period it will take place as we engage in the struggle against the IR laws, in the campaign for civil liberties, in the movement in solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution etc.

But that’s not what we’re doing with the SA project as it is. There are very few, if any, new potential Marxist cadres that we’re going through this with, and unfortunately we’ve been losing some of our precious longer term cadres through the process. Those are the facts that we can learn by looking at those indices, and facts of all kinds are not unimportant to Marxists. We’re compounding our problems by persisting in the fantasy of “SA as our party”. Not only is cadre renewal not possible in this framework, but as we drag out a clearly problematic course for too long we’re actively contributing to the decadreisation of some of our existing cadres.

Recruitment to DSP will still be limited

If the NC majority perspective wins out at the congress and we continue with the failed perspective that we can somehow build SA as our new party in this sort of period, the prospects of recruitment to the DSP will still be very limited.

We know that we can join up hundreds of new students to Resistance at O-week stalls each year. But that’s only the first step; we’re not even to first base as we know. Actual recruitment requires much, much more.

Similarly, we know we can join up hundreds of members to SA if we make a push on it at demonstrations, through the website, or at suburban stalls. We have about 1000 on the books at the moment, which is quite a bit down from the 2000 SA once had (including some who did so to help out on electoral registration only), but we know it’s possible to join people. But we’ve found it much, much harder to get them involved, to come to meetings and other regular activities in building the organisation, let alone take real responsibility for building it. In the early years of SA at least a reasonable number of new people were coming to meetings to check SA out; that’s dried to a trickle now.

Mostly the new recruits to the DSP, apart from Resistance, which hopefully will start becoming a big source of new cadres again, will come from contacts that comrades make through their political interventions in other areas – their union work, anti-war or gay rights campaign etc. Comrades might find it easier to get them to sign up to SA first, but we shouldn’t con ourselves that when these people do join the DSP, that we’re recruiting them “from SA”.

The “SA as our new party” perspective continues to limit recruitment to the DSP in many ways:

1. There’s pressure to keep the rare active independent as an independent. This can be both unconscious, and deliberate. For example, given the small number of active, politically aware independents involved in SA, there’s pressure to elect them or coopt them to leading SA bodies, for example the national executive. Any comrades like this should be immediate candidates for DSP membership, but then, how do we keep up the façade that SA is broad?

2. If SA is the party we’re building, the interventions by DSP cadre as SA members in movements will result in us joining other good activists in those movements up to SA, but not so readily to the DSP. Given the state of SA, these new members or contacts are less likely to stick around, and won’t get the attention that a properly functioning DSP caucus would give them. (The cadre training of DSP members through leading in movements is also made more difficult.)

3. There’s also the terrible dumbing down effect of SA branch meetings. If one independent is there, the DSP members go through the motions, lower the political level. There’s pressure to keep to the political lowest common denominator, keeping it unstimulating and contributing little, if at all, to help bring DSP members’ political understanding forward. This is even worse for the new DSP members who have to go along. It’s a terrible training experience for them – “that’s politics?” they ask. (Just as well no militant workers come along to SA meetings at the moment. They wouldn’t come back.)

4. And it’s going to limit the political campaigning that we could be doing, such as in solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution, that we outlined in the draft minority party-building report to the October NC meeting. The perspectives the NE minority outlined are much more likely to win us new recruits.

The “SA as our new party” perspective also continues to demoralise our existing cadres, more comrades becoming progressively disengaged, and bit by bit reduces our numbers. Fewer comrades will last for the long haul. If we could see that we’re really reaching out to much bigger forces, talking to large numbers of radicalising people beyond ourselves, we’d all stick it out, see the gains. That was our hope. But the reality of SA today is having a negative effect.

Education becomes more difficult

Can we rebuild our education program and still keep the “SA as our party” line?

No! And it’s not just a question of overload, the “building two parties” problem. That by itself would mean it wouldn’t happen, but while we’re propping up the facade, the Potemkin Village of SA, we don’t create the atmosphere for education. This antipathy to Marxist theory has crept into our own party in an unfortunate way, and has surfaced amongst some comrades in their contributions to the PCD.

The atmosphere instead becomes one of “action not words”, “just get on with it” etc. A rather nasty variant of this attitude has been the accusation that all the supporters of the minority are just “demoralised elements”.

See the PCD by Comrade Rachel E “NE minority – Quit throwing cold water and step up to the plate” (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 10) which ends with the exhortation, “Don’t agonise – organise”. Oral contributions in Sydney branch discussion also plugged this theme, of a “useless discussion” which was distracting us from our real work. (Which surely Comrade Graham M was aware of (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 15) when he blindly attacked and misrepresented the very valid point made by Comrade Sarah S in her PCD “We need more theoretical clarity and a dose of reality”. The Activist Vol. 15, No. 13)

There’s also a problem with the frequent argument recently from majority supporters that SA is essential in order for DSP comrades to be able to speak to ordinary Australian workers. Putting aside the fact that we often did succeed in doing just that in our previous 30 years, and that already our previous paper Direct Action was pretty successful at that compared with others on the left, and that Green Left Weekly has become even better, what impact does this approach have on our chances for cadre renewal and Marxist education?

In this atmosphere, it’s us trying to pretend we’re SA, just nice activists, not those old-style hard-line Leninists, isolated from the masses, immersed in their books and Marxist doctrine. We’re just “normal” people who aren’t interested in Marxist theory.

I know how comrades felt after going through 2004, the first year of trying to put our turn fully into practice. I know the DSP was exhausted from having to try to build two parties, but it was also starved for political education and discussion. We realised this vividly after the Marxism conference in January 2005, and APISC in March, which were welcomed by comrades as a breath of fresh air. Many comrades stated, first in January, and then in March “This was the best conference we’ve held.” I don’t think that was actually true, we’ve held better ones, but comrades felt that way because they’d had such a barren year before.

However, education is not just conferences and seminars and classes. It’s not just reading books, and certainly is not just an academic exercise.

All education is linked to the party framework, and the line the party is implementing. If the party is thinking in the wrong framework, education is going to be limited, even distorted, no matter how many formal classes on Marxism we try to organise. And if our education is not integrated with our political work it will be flawed, the “unity of theory and practice” that Marx and Marxists stress. We need to be able to test our theories against the real world, test our strategies and tactics in practice, assess, change if necessary, test again etc.

Our own experience in building the DSP has shown that one of the biggest leaps forward in comrades’ education takes place during important and relevant political debates. Not only do comrades have to seriously assess our experiences, and test our line of march against the results, but we also have to defend our course in debate, and are forced to analyse and defend our views. It often means that comrades are also inspired to delve into the classics, and get much more out of them than if they just read the same texts divorced from a political context.

I know from our early history that during our fight with Bob Gould in 1970 our one copy of Cannon’s Struggle for a proletarian party was pored over by many comrades looking for ideas and help and parallels. All comrades supporting our party-building perspective against Gould took a huge leap in their political education during that fight. In other political debates in our history, mainly international ones, rather than debates internal to our party, which haven’t been so frequent, we advanced politically.

During this current discussion, certainly comrades supporting the minority position would all feel they’ve taken a leap forward in their understanding, been forced to think, examine our line and decisions and experience. The minority comrades in the course of thinking out an alternative line have had an extremely educational process. This PCD provides a good atmosphere for education.

In SA, we’ve gone backwards with the political education of our comrades, and if we operate in 2006 with the NC majority’s perspectives our comrades’ education is again going to suffer.

Forums and reachout

Other ways that will contribute to the renewal of our DSP cadre would be through regular interesting educational forums that our comrades would look forward to participating in, and a greater public exposure of the DSP itself.

The proposal to have regular Green Left Weekly forums was one of the eight emergency measures from the report adopted by the May national committee meeting. This one has not been implemented. Most branches have not had GLW forums since May. No branches have had regular forums, GLW or otherwise.

We desperately need to get the GLW forums established next year, and hopefully it will happen, whatever the vote at the congress, since everyone agrees on them. And they need to be regular, so we have to put a priority on them. There’s always going to be other things that comrades have to do, especially if we’re still on the course of trying to build SA as a party. Even in a quiet time there’ll be lots of movement committees to attend (although this is another area where we’ve actually slipped back while pursuing our “SA as party” line.)

The regular forums will not only attract serious political contacts around us, increasing our prospects for recruitment, they’ll also contribute to the education process of our comrades. Comrades should be encouraged to intervene in them, prepare their interventions, research on the topic, think through the issues, sharpen their intervention skills and confidence in public speaking. We used to prepare comrades for forums in this way, but not for many years. (Unfortunately we can also compare our recent practice unfavourably with that of SAlt, who do a number of things right with their regular forums, for recruiting and training.)

I think we really need weekly forums, certainly in our larger branches such as Sydney and Melbourne. The sterile Stalinists who run Sydney’s “Politics in the Pub” manage a weekly schedule, and get reasonable crowds. We should be aiming to replace them and even steal their audience. That should be our goal, weekly forums. But at least let’s start with regular monthly ones, and try to become more frequent where we have the forces available to do it.

They should be sponsored and organised by GLW, and held in our centres. (Depending on the branch, and the topic, we can also add SA as a sponsor. This would be a concrete way to inject healthy, useful political life into SA as a campaigning alliance – much more useful than too frequent branch meetings.) If we badge them just as SA, it creates unnecessary hurdles for recruiting to DSP, and educating comrades and creating cadre. And they won’t be as big if we use the SA as sponsor rather than using GLW.

This is a general problem with our “SA as party” line – GLW is actually broader and has a much higher recognition among the radical milieu than SA. Our line was thus to dissolve the bigger, broader institution, Green Left, into the smaller, narrower institution, SA, and kid ourselves that it’s progress.

Although the unanimously adopted draft resolution on “The DSP and the Socialist Alliance” (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 4) states that “this resolution proposes that the DSP function as a public revolutionary socialist organisation”, I fear that this is not going to be implemented by the majority comrades. Certainly some of the majority supporters seem to be completely opposed to this, and want every public appearance to be with the SA hat.

Where we’re putting a DSP position, let’s put it as a DSP position, not wearing the SA hat. We should be able to mention the DSP in GLW again. We don’t have to insert “an affiliate of SA” after every mention of the DSP (and certainly not “an internal tendency in SA” every time we mention the DSP in GLW.) We should publicise DSP events and classes.

Next year the DSP has to come out of the SA closet. It will help us recover from some of the cadre loss and demoralisation that we’ve suffered in the last two years.

Fractions as cadre training

We need to systematically reinstitute our DSP fractions, for our trade union interventions, and for our other movement work. The DSP needs to intervene collectively in the movements, as DSP members, as Marxists.

But fractions are not just for organising our work in an area, or ensuring that the right decisions are made by our comrades when they intervene in a committee or union meeting. Just as important is the role that fractions play in training our comrades. Fractions are essential for the cadre creation process.

For the last few years as we’ve tried to operate through SA fractions, it’s been very confusing for our comrades. In cases where the fraction is just our comrades and our contacts who have joined SA, the fraction might function OK, although it’s not really an SA caucus, but more a DSP caucus. In some other cases, where our task has been to organise our own intervention against the sabotage and opposition of our fellow SA members of the ISO, such as in the anti-war movement, to call them SA fractions is plain ridiculous.

The importance of DSP fractions and the proper direction of DSP comrades’ work by DSP leadership bodies was explained well by Comrade Gillian D in her PCD in The Activist Vol. 15, No.15, which outlined her experiences in leading our RAC work in Melbourne. The reality today is that there are few situations where it makes sense to have our DSP comrades’ movement or trade union work organised through an SA caucus.

Of course, there’s a different role if SA fractions functioned that actually included SA members from other affiliates, other political tendencies, or a range of independents with varied views, that helped coordinate and organise a united, stronger intervention. That situation happens very infrequently in SA now.

Also it seems that over the course of our attempts to build SA into our party we’ve given far less attention to the conscious development of leadership, which often takes place in fractions. That is portrayed in a denigrating sense as “old style”, the “old DSP way” of doing things. Now we’ve relied more on the comrades with many years of experience (and training in the old DSP), but unfortunately there’s not as many of them as there used to be.

Our party spirit

Another factor that contributes to the creation, training and retention of cadres is our party spirit. This isn’t an unimportant element, and although it’s not something that can be quantified, like our membership, or the numbers of comrades selling GLW each week, or our average pledge level, it still has an impact on the party’s effectiveness as a revolutionary fighting force.

The Bolsheviks were well aware of this factor and talked about it, partiinost. Lenin first used the term in 1895. It’s about pride in your party, the level of identification with it, the comradeship built up among comrades, the willingness to sacrifice as an individual for the good of the collective and the pursuit of our goals. It’s not blind party patriotism, but built upon politics. For a healthy party spirit our program is key, understanding and confidence in our revolutionary Marxist program. That binds us together.

That’s not “cool” on the left today among a lot of activists of course. Everyone’s an “individual”, (not realising how much that opens you up to all the pressure of bourgeois values and propaganda.) Anti-partyism is dominant on campuses, in the movements, but anti-partyism is very much a bourgeois concept, which we constantly have to battle against.

So the concept of which is “the party we build” is an important concept.

Unfortunately, another flow on of the attempt by majority supporters to hype up the whole SA experience is the inevitable downplaying of whatever went before – our pre-SA history. Supporters of the “SA as the party” line are downplaying, denigrating, our DSP history, our traditions and experiences up to our adoption of the SA tactic.

This does no good to our DSP party spirit, and thus further hampers the cadre renewal process. But the SA “party spirit” that supposedly will replace the “old-style DSP” identification is based on a lot of hope and a lot of hype, and the reality within SA branches is experienced first-hand by comrades. This switch of identification will have bad consequences in the absence of any big new upsurge, and thus an exciting new tradition and range of experiences which we can replace our DSP party tradition with.

Building up a false picture of the SA period and the pre-SA period can seriously distort our historical understanding too. The “nasty ‘90s” myth has been exposed by comrades Kathy N and Eva C in their PCDs. New comrades have to be able to develop an accurate understanding of the political events and our interaction with them in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s as well.

In the Perth branch pre-congress discussion, Comrade Russell P even went so far as to claim that we really didn’t have much trade union experience in the party before we started up SA! This was in the presence of Comrade Ian Jamieson, a comrade with perhaps the most extensive industrial experience in our party, who himself had gone through two of the most important trade union experiences – the struggles in the BHP Wollongong steelworks, and the struggle in the Tasmanian mining industry. But just a few earlier experiences spring to mind quickly where we had much stronger interventions and fractions than today, and much greater actual successes: the Jobs for Women campaign in Wollongong; our vehicle industry fractions, where we had up to 10 comrades in some plants; our struggles in the Wollongong and Newcastle steelworks; the Tasmanian mining industry, where we united with militant workers in Rosebery, and led some big struggles; our Melbourne tramways fractions; our intervention in the CPSU in the ACT…

Our party spirit is also built up by the two features of our party that help provide the framework for our program and the education of comrades:

• Our internationalism. We identify internationally with revolutions, and revolutionary leaders, in other countries. We draw strength from the realisation that we’re not on our own in the anti-capitalist struggle around the world.
• Our historical perspective. We identify historically, we know we’re not on our own in a historical sense, and know where we stood in past class battles.

It’s not so easy to find a substitution within the SA framework for our revolutionary internationalist and historical identification and understanding.

The specificity of the SA tactic

The SA tactic that we opted for in 2003-04 was based on our reading of the objective conditions – or at least a hope in them – a radicalisation, sustained mobilisations, an upsurge.

It was also based on serious partners getting involved, not just ones that we prop up and promote. It was certainly not done with the thought that it might just be the DSP with another name, and a much more limited program.

And it was based on a specific time frame, not for an extended period in that form. It was not conceived as a permanent or general tactic, especially if it proved not to be working.

What do we mean when we refer to our “reach-out approach”? We adopted this approach in the 1980s, and it was general in that we were looking for all openings, ready to test any possibility for making a breakthrough for larger mass influence. In this period we reassessed and rejected the entry tactic as a permanent strategy. We’d been stuck with that for 15 years, an unfortunate inheritance from our Trotskyist past. But this reach-out approach was specific in that each tactic, each opening, gets tried and tested, and doesn’t become a permanent principle if it doesn’t work out. So we tried to build the Nuclear Disarmament Party, we tried unity with a number of small groups, we tried the New Left Party unity with the Communist Party of Australia, we tried unity and the first Socialist Alliance with the Socialist Party of Australia, now rebadged as the CPA, we tried building the Greens.

And all the while with this approach we were very conscious that we were not lowering or significantly diluting our Leninist party-building perspectives, and putting on a more acceptable left social democratic or green hat for an extended time.

However, I think Comrade Sue Bolton starts arguing for entrenching a particular tactic as a strategy when she states:

“Any revolutionary party worth its salt has to chart a course of both recruiting directly to itself, as well as an orientation that can win people who are looking for a political alternative to Labor (and in some cases the Greens, for disenchanted Greens members) to a class struggle workers’ party, even if it is not yet revolutionary.” (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 8)

“Not yet revolutionary”? For how long? 10 years? 15 years? What will happen to Marxist cadre formation during such an unknown, undefined transition? That seems to imply she sees a class struggle non-revolutionary workers’ party as an extended “tactic” – in reality little different from being a permanent tactic. If that’s the case, it’s an innovation in our theoretical views. There are two variants of such a tactic. Firstly, where we are in control of such a non-revolutionary party, it’s our front. Secondly, where we’re in a minority in such a party, we’re sort of doing entry work. (Perhaps there’s the third variant, espoused by Comrade Mike B in this discussion, that we enthusiastically rebadge the DSP as such a party.)

Such a tactic as and when judged to be worthwhile can only be engaged in for a limited time, not over many years, otherwise the process of creating cadres gets eroded – our political clarity starts to suffer, our members’ political understanding (especially those politically less experienced comrades) will get increasingly wishy-washy, and our commitment and dedication gets ground down. In this form it’s worse than the permanent entry strategy (practised by Gould, and the early Trotskyists). And how different is it from the last ditch attempt of the CPA, their New Left Party in the early ‘90s, or the failed but lingering Progressive Labor Party?

Entry or underground situations

When we embark on building “two parties” for an extended period, the DSP (internal), and the SA (external, with a few more independents), can we hope for political recadreisation in the DSP? It’s difficult. It can happen a bit if it’s a “pretend” majority line, that is, in practice building the SA more as the minority proposes, and effectively treating the DSP as the party we build, even if we’re unwilling to state this publicly, for fear of alienating some in the SA.

The “two party” line is actually more difficult for cadre renewal than an entry situation, where the revolutionary Marxist party enters (usually secretly) a mass reformist or social democratic party. Cadre creation and training is possible in entry tactics, though we’ve assessed it’s not something that should become a permanent tactic. Often the entry tactic was disastrous, but sometimes it was a valid tactic and worked, but not as a permanent tactic. For example the US SWP spent one year in the Socialist Party in the ‘30s, and came out doubled in size.

Some differences between the entry tactic and our “two party” tactic would be:

1. With the entry tactic, usually there’s a much larger milieu in which to do political work, many more people to talk to, and try to influence with Marxist politics. For example, Militant in the British Labour Party.
2. You could develop a party spirit for the entry group, sort of like an underground party, which could value theory and education, as especially important for keeping the group together. You could recruit people from the broader milieu to come to classes. In SA you can’t do classes except at a very basic level, both the affiliated groups guarantee that, and many of the independents are unwilling to move politically and are in SA as a kind of “half-way-house”.

In an entry situation, hiding ourselves from the reformist bureaucratic leadership of a mass party, or in an underground situation, hiding ourselves from a repressive state apparatus, we can still create cadre. But it’s actually harder when it’s a self-imposed hiding of ourselves, to build a slightly larger, but politically watered down in order to be more “acceptable”, Socialist Alliance.

International experience

We’ve had plenty of experience here in the last few years that cadre are not getting created in SA, and that it will still be hard to do so in the DSP while we’re still building SA as our party.

There are also some international experiences that can give us some pointers on this problem. The Scottish Socialist Party was a beacon for our SA experiment, even if not a model. We had initial hopes that we’d develop like the SSP. Though clearly we had a very different political situation to theirs in Scotland, we were still looking to them. They had significant electoral success, and a major profile; we weren’t able to succeed electorally. They had a large membership, several thousand in a population a quarter the size of ours. Many more of their members were active, their branches had a life. They were definitely a party with a small “mass base” that had successfully been built by Scottish Militant Labour, the group that used to be part of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers International, the Trotskyist group that the Socialist Party here is still affiliated to.

But in some areas they have had similar problems to us, for example the difficulty of creating cadre, renewing their own cadre. A small number of youth have been recruited who have developed as cadre, and a small number of comrades coming from outside the old Militant Labour group have developed also, but they are still mostly dependent on the cadre that came from and developed in the old group. Whenever one of our comrades goes over there, they get snapped up to go on full time or take on a major responsibility.

From our knowledge of some of the other regroupment or new party efforts in Europe there are similar lessons. In the Red Green Alliance, Enhedslisten, in Denmark for example, which has also had some electoral success, there are few cadre getting created by the new formation itself, but they are still primarily from the groups that came together to form the alliance, primarily from the Fourth International group, but some from the Communist Party.

Conclusion

The NC majority comrades, I believe, are aware of the problems arising from our line, the damage to our cadre base, and the threat to our institutions such as GLW. But still in essence they refuse to draw back from the basic line of two years ago that we’re building “SA as the party”.

Some comrades, such as Vannessa H, talk of SA as already a mass workers’ party (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 15), and Dick Nichols talks about “strengthening SA as a fighting class struggle party” (at the November 21 DSP NE). Comrade Peter Boyle insists that the turn of 2003 was not a mistake (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 2), and he’s been backed up on this by PCD contributions from comrades Nikki U (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 9) and Dave R (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 17), so the line being presented by the NC majority is to keep on that track, with organisational modifications, to keep the finances flowing and GLWs getting sold.

But we can’t recadreise just with the perspectives of the May NC party-building report, without making a proper political reassessment, recognising and accepting that we can’t build SA as a party, as our party. That “The Socialist Alliance will have to go through a more extended period of united campaigning and regroupment with broader left forces that are generated by a new upturn of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’ before it can harness the leadership resources and political confidence to take a significant step to creating a new socialist party.” (“The DSP and the Socialist Alliance”, draft resolution for our congress, The Activist Vol. 15, No. 4)

We can’t just adopt the May NC emergency measures, and then resume on the old line. Neither can we adopt a stop-start strategy, turn SA on and off as the party while we carry out our emergency measures; that will still disorient comrades. Recadreising is not just organising to get our GLW sales up, to get more money in, to join some up to Resistance, or nominally to DSP. That’s just the “SA as the party, DSP as the donkey” line (an analogy used in the May NC). It’s difficult to recruit cadre as instruments to build and prop up a left social democratic front, certainly not for long.

So the prospects for cadre renewal under the NC majority for next year are dim. In spite of the recognition in the unanimously supported draft resolution that SA as a party is not possible at the moment, the NC majority would be implementing the old line with the emergency organisational measures added on. The result will be that the existing cadre base will be weakened further, and few new cadres will be formed. There’ll be less commitment from existing cadre. There’ll be a continuing problem of comrades being unwilling to become branch organisers or to go on full time for the party. There will be a further strain on the DSP.

However, the prospects for cadre renewal with the NC minority party-building perspective are clear. We can be confident that with the alternative draft party-building report we presented to the NC, and which has been elaborated further in the course of the PCD, and which will be presented to the congress, we can take big steps forward in cadre renewal. The conditions are there to build the DSP. With the majority NC report we won’t be successfully building either the SA, or the DSP.

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