Yes – let’s face reality
By Marce Cameron, Sydney branch
[An earlier draft of this contribution was circulated to NE members before the September 26 NE meeting. This final draft has been substantially adjusted and expanded – Marce]
We have all, each and every comrade and the DSP collectively, invested an enormous amount of blood, sweat and tears in the Socialist Alliance. As well as hard work, sacrifice and money, we’ve also invested something else, something just as precious – hope – in this ambitious project.
Hope is precious. It’s the “spiritual fuel” that allows us to keep going, especially in difficult times, in a non-revolutionary period like the present, when the weight of our isolation seems to bear down on our little cadre force with unrelenting intensity. Without our conviction in the real possibility of a socialist future for humanity, a conviction fortified by the tremendous and inspiring advance of the socialist revolution now unfolding in Venezuela, we would cease to be revolutionaries. Comrade Fidel Castro once put it like this: “I think you can’t be a revolutionary without a large dose of idealism and tremendous confidence in human beings. A sceptic can’t be a revolutionary. A revolutionary is an optimist, someone who believes in human beings.”
But as Marxists, as materialists, our hope, unlike that of the sects, with their messianic, grossly exaggerated view of their own importance and their own achievements, has a sane and rational foundation in the materialist conception of history and our objective, scientific approach to reality. False hope, false optimism, blindness to problems, weaknesses and inadequacies, exaggeration that may deceive ourselves or deceive others, is deadly.
Comrades who have read this far may be wondering: what on earth has this to do with the present debate about our party building perspectives?
I think it’s important to reflect on the fact that over the past couple of years of trying to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party, we have thoroughly tangled up our hopes for a decisive breakthrough in building this new party with the reality of what the Socialist Alliance is and what it can only be, unless a change in the objective political situation breathes new life, new momentum, into this attempt to create a new broad party of anti-neoliberal resistance.
This tangling up of our hopes and illusions with reality was, to one degree or another, unavoidable. It was absolutely correct for us to launch, with others, the Socialist Alliance and to test out the potential for SA to be fast-forwarded into a new party capable of standing on its own two feet in the present political period. We didn’t have a crystal ball. We made a judgement about what we thought might be possible at the time and we threw ourselves in enthusiastically, just as we should have done, because only by doing this, only by straining ourselves to the utmost to “break through”, could we really test out both the possibilities and the limitations of this fast-track attempt.
I think that our efforts over the past nearly two years of seeking to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party has been one of the finest and most heroic episodes in our party’s history. We have learnt a lot from this experience, and we will continue to learn from it. It was in keeping with our tradition of taking advantage of every possibility – and these openings have tended to be few and far between – to link up with broader forces moving to the left, to take real risks and to make real sacrifices to try to transcend our relatively small size and isolation and to take a step, however modest, towards the creation of a mass party for socialism in this country.
But this attempt was also, in hindsight, clearly a mistake, a mistake we’ve recognized in the decision we took at our May DSP national committee to abandon the attempt to transfer our political assets, such as Green Left Weekly, into the Socialist Alliance, and to implement a series of emergency measures to strengthen the DSP and Resistance.
In recognizing and frankly acknowledging this mistake, and in deciding on what adjustments are needed to our party-building perspectives for the period ahead, we need to take a big step back and look afresh at the Socialist Alliance with the greatest possible objectivity, serenity and detachment. We have to make a very sober, hard-headed assessment of the actual dynamics and the reality of the actually-existing Socialist Alliance. We need to strip away hype, false hope and fantasy from this actually-existing reality. Unfortunately, the draft party-building report prepared by comrade Peter Boyle fails to do this adequately.
What I am not saying
Before going any further, I want to first of all make very clear what I am not saying in the contribution:
1. I am not saying that the Socialist Alliance is a failure, worthless, a waste of time or any such thing.
2. I am not arguing that we should abandon, walk away from, close down or cease to build at all, the Socialist Alliance. To do this would be to throw away the very real and precious advances, and the opportunity to build on these advances, that we have made through our efforts – and the efforts of others – to build the Socialist Alliance so far. Comrades have to get away from any idea that at the heart of this debate is a simple counterposition between those who want to continue to build the Socialist Alliance, and those who don’t. That’s not what this debate is about at all.
3. I am not saying that there is nothing we can do to build the Socialist Alliance in the coming year or two. I am not arguing that we should withdraw all cadre and other resources from the Socialist Alliance, put the whole project in mothballs and wait around until the political situation changes. Later on, I sketch out some ideas on what we can realistically hope to do with SA in the period ahead.
The SA has reached an impasse
First of all, we have to recognize that it’s not just the integration of the DSP’s political assets into the Socialist Alliance that has stalled, as we recognized at our May NC, but the SA itself has stalled, it’s not going forward. The SA has reached an impasse.
1. The “fightback network” projected to come out of the SA-initiated national trade union fightback conference in June this year has failed to materialize. This doesn’t mean that progress can’t be made here in the period ahead if, as Howard’s anti-union legislation begins to bite, more unionists who want to be part of such a network start to make it real. But we do have to register that since June, we haven’t been able to get this network off the ground, despite the good intervention that SA has had around the country in distributing material at the mass delegates’ meetings, and that SA members (ie. DSP comrades wearing their union official or union member hat) have made from the floor of some of these meetings to move motions which were agreed to at the fightback conference.
2. With very few exceptions, the state of the SA branches is that they are now little more than hollow shells, attracting no more than some DSP comrades and just one, two or a few unaffiliated SA members to meetings, and doing little else in between meetings or election campaigns. Not only are these SA structures “too loose and too weak to win, educate and train new socialist activists”, as the draft resolution acknowledges, but they are also too weak to involve people at all on an ongoing basis, unless we, the DSP, are prepared to resort to make-work to keep up appearances. The SA’s other structures (caucuses, working groups etc.) are also threadbare, although they do exist and in some cases we should be able to consolidate them in the period ahead.
3. There is a steady trickle of new members coming in from the website, from clipoffs in Green Left Weekly and from the street. But what we have been able do to involve the vast majority of these members is, to be honest, pitiful. This is not just a question of us trying some new tricks, although we can and should continue to experiment with creative ways to involve people in whatever small ways they might be prepared to make a contribution (I’ll take this question in more detail later). Nor can we see this glaring weakness of the actually-existing SA as our fault, a failing of the DSP. The obvious conclusion we should draw after the past two years of monumental effort is that this pitiful harvest is a reflection of some inherent limitations in the party-building (or even alliance-building, let’s not play with words) consciousness and commitment of the vast majority of SA members today, which flows more or less directly from the extremely contradictory political situation we face (more on this below).
4. The initial left-unity dynamic which accompanied the launch of the SA back in 2001 has all but evaporated as a drawcard, a magnet, for left activists who have some familiarity with the left zoo in this country. Especially in those cities where there are one or more other socialist groups competing with SA – such as Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth – the initial enthusiasm for the Socialist Alliance based on the idea and the example of left unity embodied in the SA has dissipated. If a new member of SA, recruited on the basis of “left unity”, goes along to a rally these days they will be confronted with the tribal spectacle of one, two, three, or even more socialist grouplets competing directly, and aggressively, with SA.
This powerful drawcard of left unity, so important in attracting the initial wave of recruits to SA and which lasted only so long as the initial enthusiasm and momentum in SA was able to keep the sectarian affilates in check, has not yet been replaced by the much more real left unity embodied in the potential for the further strengthening of the alliance between the DSP and the militant trade union current, through the Socialist Alliance. Folks just don’t see large numbers of unionists joining SA and rolling up their sleeves to actively build it – yet.
Not enough movement out there
The SA we see today has settled, come to rest, at a level determined largely by the objective political situation, but also by two other factors: the hositility, abstention and sabotage of the ISO, the largest of the smaller affiliates of the Socialist Alliance; and the amount of time, energy and money that we, the DSP, can sustainably commit to building the Socialist Alliance while at the same time preserving the political assets and authority that the DSP has built up (eg. Green Left Weekly, Resistance, solidarity with the Latin American revolutions) over the past three decades.
For the Socialist Alliance to move forward again, to break this impasse, we will need active, willing partners, far more than the mere TWO DOZEN or so loyal Socialist Alliance activists still scattered across the country (yes, we have to define “active”, but this is the rough estimate of comrade Lisa Macdonald, an NE member who voted for the NE majority draft party building report). There has to be a substantial layer of activists who see the task of building the Alliance as an urgent priority.
Certainly, this is not just a question of numbers of activists, but also how much public profile and leadership authority these partners have. It is true comrades like (WA MUA state secretary) Chris Cain, (former AMWU Victorian state secretary) Craig Johnston, (well-known QLD Aboriginal rights activist) Sam Watson and (Geelong TLC secretary) Tim Gooden bring with them a special kind of influence that is qualitatively more significant than that of the “average” person who signs up to SA.
To one degree or another, these comrades bring to SA – to this long range project of building up solid bases for a new left party to come into being at some time in the future when conditions allow – at least the beginnings of a base of supporters who can be mobilized. If Tim Gooden wanted to, and if he had the support of enough union delegates, he could shut down most of Geelong’s industry for 24 hours just like that! Now that’s a powerful position to be in, and the same is true of Chris Cain. And there is no question about the great profile and prestige of SA leaders like Craig Johnston (who is like a mini Ned Kelly and Tommy Sheridan rolled into one) and Sam Watson. Some partners who have joined us already in the SA project, and others who have yet to do so, bring with them at least the beginnings of a mass base in the working class and the oppressed.
However, this alone does not give us enough, in my reading of the situation, to break SA out of its present impasse. This has to be underlined: we need not just a few more class-struggle leaders with high public profile, recognition and authority that can be used to mobilize a constituency. Vital as this is to the future of SA, we also need two other things to move SA forward in any significant way: (1) real political openings through which this profile, recognition and authority can actually be harnessed; and (2) a sizeable influx of willing partners, activists, to help us break the deadlock.
Let’s take what is arguably SA’s most important constituency and “growth medium”, the trade union movement. Having Chris Cain, Craig Johnston (former AMWU Victorian state secretary) and Tim Gooden as members and leaders of the Socialist Alliance is an extremely significant, hard-won achievement that will help us recruit more union activists to the Socialist Alliance in the future. For example, we can tour Craig Johnston and say, “hey, why not join Craig Johnston’s party, the Socialist Alliance?”
But for the time being, while SA remains stuck in its present impasse, the big problem seems to be that we either aren’t joining up significant numbers of trade union activists to the SA, or that we haven’t been able to organize them effectively through the Socialist Alliance (ie. through SA caucuses or branches), or some combination of both. This may be due to a number of factors, but underlying them all is the setbacks suffered by the militant trade union current since the jailing of Craig Johnston last year and the inability of this current, due to its still small size and its relative isolation, to compel the ACTU bureaucracy to launch a serious fightback against Howard’s industrial laws – which brings us back to the starting point for understanding the limitations on what SA can be in the present circumstances: the unfavourable objective political situation. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma…and we don’t run the poultry farm.
Such a substantial influx of willing partners will not drop out of the sky, and neither can it be accumulated gradually, in a molecular way, just by incremental recruitment to SA of the kind we see today. Based on the hard-won experience of the past few years, we know that of the steady trickle of people who join SA, the vast majority of them either remain basically paper members or else after an initial flush of enthusiasm they – just like most people who join Resistance at O-Weeks – quickly succumb to the all-pervasive mood of demoralization, and for many, the sense that the SA is not really doing much or going anywhere. They’re on the reserve benches and the won’t come into play until the match really begins.
So the next question is: where will this substantial influx of willing partners come from? How will it materialize? It can only emerge from a rising tide of mass working class resistance, from a more or less sustained reinvigoration of the trade union, and possibly other, social movements. This would amount to a political situation qualitiatively different from the present political period, which is characterised by the isolation of the militant trade union current and the ongoing retreat of the working class, punctuated by episodic, if sometimes spectacular, expressions of mass dissent (eg. the February 14-16, 2003 anti-war mobilizations) and short-lived mass working class struggles (the 1998 MUA dispute).
Certainly, the whole question of the objective political situation needs a thorough discussion that can begin at the upcoming NC and continue through PCD to the conference. But I think we can, and need to, make a coarse judgement that at present, the possibility that resistance to the implementation of Howard’s anti-union legislation will lead, in the short or medium term, to a generalized and more or less sustained rise of working class resistance – not enough to turn the tide, but enough to create a bigger militant trade union vanguard and to vaporise some of the deeply entrenched despair and demoralization in that broader dissenting constituency out there – cannot be ruled out. But I think that if we read the signs and weight the balance of forces with our feet firmly on the ground, we have to say that while this is a possibility, we cannot be certain enough that this is what’s going to happen in the coming year or so – not enough, anyway, to base a “continuing to build two party projects” perspective on. This would be to read too much hope (desperate hope?) into the present political situation. A rising tide of working-class resistance may be just around the corner, but we cannot be sure enough of this to act accordingly.
This is not to say that SA shouldn’t do what it can to help organize and lead whatever concrete possibilities there are for mass resistance to emerge in the period ahead. But while the actually-existing SA can help to lay the groundwork for such more or less sustained mass resistance to emerge and, flowing from this, the creation of a broader layer of confident, combative and politically clear class-struggle militants who can act as willing partners with us to take a new-party-project forward, the actually-existing SA cannot call into being such mass resistance on its own initiative.
SA as a ‘campaigning alliance’ for a new party
Election campaigns aside, even for the Socialist Alliance to be built as a “campaigning alliance” in the trade unions and the other social movements that “seeks to build a new mass workers’ party” (as our new perspective for SA is formulated, correctly in my view, in the draft resolution), there has to be some actual movement out there. At the very least, there have to be sporadic political openings that allow the initiating and leadership role of the DSP to combine with the desire of other SA members, and especially the militant trade union leaders, to work together to make this campaigning alliance at least a fleeting reality.
One example of just such an opening was the very successful trade union fightback conference held in Melbourne this year, which was initiated and built by SA. This event did put SA on the map when it was widely reported in the capitalist media and in Green Left Weekly, and when positive feeback filtered through the informal union networks; it did play a very useful role in bringing militant unionists together; and it did build confidence among SA members in the SA itself (even the sects had to grudgingly acknowledge the success of the event). Here, the potential of SA to bring people together, to make left unity a reality, to make a difference to the outcome of the struggle, was real, undeniable and has had a lasting impact.
But we have to clearly distinguish between this example of the SA really functioning as a campaigning alliance that poses concretely, as well as propagandistically, the need for a new, mass workers’ party – and the many “miscroscopic” possibilities that exist at present for DSP members to work alongside one or two SA members in, for example, the refugee rights movement in Sydney. Unlike the fightback conference, such microscopic “Alliance fragments” in which the DSP acts as the sole connecting thread cannot build the confidence, the cohesion and the fighting spirit of SA as a whole: it can’t shift the Alliance any further towards becoming a new party, as a “new party project”.
The reality is that when SA itself is such a threadbare, anaemic organsation incapable, through its own structures, of creating and retaining activists, this kind of collaboration has far more to do with building our own DSP periphery than it does with progessing the Alliance as a new party project. This is not to say that such work isn’t worthwhile – it is, and we must do it wherever possible and useful. But here, “useful” has to be judged more by how it builds our actually-existing party, the DSP, in the here and now.
And given that a great deal of what we call “building the SA” outside of Victoria and WA, where the militant trade union current actually exists as a current, is this kind of fragmentary, microscopic Alliance-building work that cannot move the SA forward as a new party project, it becomes even clearer what the real limitiations are on us, on the DSP, in trying to advance SA in the direction of a new party when we don’t have the necessary partners to allow us to do this.
The same is true of the activity, it seems, of nearly all of the SA local branches. Here, despite our best efforts, most branch meetings involve only one, two or at most a few SA members other than DSP comrades. Lisa Macdonald’s notes on the state of SA branches and other bodies, reprinted in The Activist Vol 15, No. 7, gives a feel for this. What DSP members sitting in a room with just one, two or a few other SA members can really achieve in advancing SA as a campaigning alliance in the trade unions and the other social movements that seeks to build a new mass workers’ party, is not at all clear. Most of the time this is just make-believe, make-work, and should be abandoned.
If we accept that local branch meetings haven’t been able to involve any more than ones and twos of the SA membership other than the DSP, then surely all but the most lively and dynamic local branches (none of the Sydney branches qualify, in my opinion) should meet only three or four times a year, or on a strictly as-needs basis (for example, to organize an election campaign).
Comrades who don’t want to accept this reality may argue that if “we” let local branches meet only three or four times a year, then we’ll be guilty of “killing off the Socialist Alliance”. Unfortunately, this is just moralistic demagogy. Comrades may think this sounds harsh, but it’s true. I’m not attacking anyone who makes this kind of argument, I’m not being uncomradely, but I am attacking the argument because it’s a kind of political blackmail, scaring people, holding a gun to the head of anyone who dares to suggest that most SA branches are little more than hollow shells and branch meetings a waste of time, except as triennial formalities incapable playing any role whatsoever in actually organizing people, outside of a very specific campaign initiative that SA can relate to if there is the interest among some of the broader membership, and not just the usual thing of DSP substitution.
If it were true that continuing to hold branch meetings with just DSP members plus one, two or a few other SA members is what will keep the SA “alive”, then we’d have to say that the SA is already dead, it wasn’t the DSP who killed it. I don’t think the SA is dead – far from it. In fact, I probably have more confidence in the future of SA than those comrades who get all worked up and worried if six months goes by and branch “x” doesn’t have yet another pitiful, demoralizing meeting.
The SA is not dead, but it has reached an impasse, and we alone, the DSP and the handful of other loyal Socialist Alliance builders still left in the Alliance around the country – cannot break SA out of this impasse. For this to happen, we will need the help of a much bigger layer of active, willing partners. And this, in turn, depends on a substantial layer of new (or revived) class-struggle activists and “natural leaders” of the working class emerging (or re-emerging), rising above the Jupiter-like gravitational pull of electoralism, demoralization and isolation, and connecting with a new party project in a meaningful way, that is, more than just joining the SA as paper members, important as this is.
Basing our perspectives on reality
What does the recognition of the reality of this impasse mean for our perspectives for the Socialist Alliance in the coming year? Do we just admit defeat, close it down and “go back” to just building the DSP? Of course not. Here, we have to avoid a totally false, black-and-white counterposition that says either you have to build two parties (or one party, the DSP, and another “party project”, SA) – or we might as well just “give up” on the Socialist Alliance altogether, “kill it”, etc, etc.
Comrades who see our options in these black-and-white terms have failed to come to grips with the basic, stubborn fact that without active, willing partners – lots of them – we cannot do much more than this, which I think encapsulates a realistic perspective for building SA that is consistent with the political line of the draft resolution:
Keep SA ticking over; keep its flag flying high; inch forward on as many fronts as we can; be ready to seize every real opening for SA to come to life, from time to time and however briefly, as a real campaigning alliance that poses the question, not just in words but in deeds, of the desperate need for a new mass party of the working class in Australia.
This would be my vision-statement for SA in the period ahead. It doesn’t say kill it; it doesn’t say walk away; it doesn’t say do nothing; but it does imply that we cannot project building SA as a “new party project” in the period ahead; this would be to confuse a long-range perspective with what tasks we set ourselves to do, following our January congress. Until there is a break in the political situation, this is pretty much all we can do, and whatever else we try to do in the meantime, the next period cannot be one of significant advance for the Socialist Alliance as a new party project, as is stated clearly in the first sentence of paragraph 23 of the draft resolution:
“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 [necessary] leadership resources and political confidence to take a significant step to creating a new socialist party” (my italics).
‘Re-imagining’ SA
To help us think about (“re-imagine”) a realistic perspective for building the Socialist Alliance in the period ahead, it might be useful to think about the actually-existing SA as being made up (leaving aside the other smaller, more or less sectarian affiliates) of three component parts:
1. An alliance – threadbare in the organisational sense, but considerably deeper in a political sense, having been built up painstakingly over many years – between the DSP and a few key leaders of the militant trade union current and other prominent social movement activists (eg Sam Watson, Ray Jackson) or comrades who can be considered part of the broad socialist vanguard in this country (eg. Humphrey McQueen). The key aspect of how I think we should relate to this component of SA was outlined earlier: we have to seize the real openings for mass resistance to Howard’s drive to smash the trade unions, as these opportunities arise. There is also some scope, even if these outbreaks of mass resistance are few and far between, for inching forward with SA propaganda, profile, recruitment and loose networking which may sometimes take the form of SA caucuses.
2. SA also embraces and organizes, in a very loose way, a part of our close DSP periphery (friendly ex-members, and close supporters), largely through Green Left Weekly rather than through the Alliance’s own weak structures. We need to encourage more of these comrades to join the DSP.
3. Hundreds of other members, most of whom we have very little contact with, although some of them are also Green Left Weekly subscribers and in some branches and cities, all members receive an SA newsletter.
The great majority of these hundreds of members are, for the time being at least, basically “paper” members. This is not to downplay or dismiss those members who, for whatever reason, are not making a more active contribution to SA. These are all people who identify with the Socialist Alliance and who see it, to one degree or another, as their party, their organisation. This in itself is valuable, and it needs to be patiently and persistently cultivated, much as the Balinese rice-farmers have terraced their hillsides for millennia (no, I didn’t get this from Max, I thought it up myself as part of my contribution to our re-imagining SA ?).
Some of these members do already make a small, but nonetheless valuable, contribution from time to time (eg. a donation to Green Left Weekly, or helping out on polling day). For some of them, we can do more to find ways for them to make a more active, ongoing contribution. Getting to know better this smaller subset of the broad SA membership, and finding creative ways to involve them a little bit, here and there, or at the very least to keep in touch with them through mailouts, phone contacting or even house visits, is very important. This is what can build up, over time, their loyalty and their sense of identification with the Socialist Alliance.
And – this must be stressed – we can do this kind of gentle, “cultivating” work perfectly well without trying to get these members to attend SA meetings. Most folk out there don’t like meetings very much anyway, unless it’s something they’re particularly interested in. We sometimes forget that activists have to be trained to sit through meetings every other night of the week.
This, along with consolidating and initiating whatever networks, ad-hoc working groups and more ongoing caucuses as are practically useful in involving SA members in real work, and which we can do without distorting too much our the necessary balance in our overall party-building priorities, in which SA is just one, albeit very important, component. This is some of the work that we can and must do in the period ahead to keep the SA ticking over, and inching forward where possible.
As for keeping the flag flying high, this is all about having vibrant contingents in rallies, small actions and media stunts, press releases, visiting picket lines and so on. We can creep forward, one millimetre at a time, on many fronts, especially where there is significant overlap between this kind of modest Socialist Alliance work and things we need to do anyway to strengthen the DSP as the real party we can, and must, concentrate on building, for now.
The whole Green Left Weekly project is one such axis of overlap. OK, so we have to increase our GLW subscriber base. Who are we going to sell subscriptions to? One important constituency is SA members and supporters who don’t already subscribe, and there are plenty of them. Is this “SA work” or “DSP work”? It’s both, because it will help to strengthen the DSP and help to prepare the Socialist Alliance for a significant advance in the future, when conditions allow. But this is not building two parties, or one party and one “party project”. Let’s not fudge this. We need clarity, not fudging. The DSP is the party we have to build now, not the Socialist Alliance, because the SA cannot be advanced, for the time being, as a new party project.
SA, the DSP and Resistance
In the absence of SA having much of a “life” around it, it’s even more important to encourage SA members who want to discuss politics and “link in” with what’s happening out there to come along to Green Left Weekly fundraisers, DSP and Resistance social events (yes – I do think the DSP needs to have its own social events from time to time), DSP Marxist education classes and seminars, activist camps and Green Left Weekly public forums (of course, we need to continue to do some forums in the name of SA, or as joint SA-Green Left Weekly events). In this way, those SA members who are seeking out something more than just signing up and handing over their membership dues can – some of them, anyway – become part of our tendency periphery. Some branches are already beginning to do this more consciously and systematically.
What we have to say to the keenest of these people we draw around via SA is, “look, the SA as a campaigning alliance is an important step towards a new party, and the DSP is committed to building such a party when this becomes possible, but for the SA to really function as an activist party, it needs to have a lot more activists. So in the meantime, if you’re looking for a party that you can actually get involved in on a week-to-week basis, maybe you should consider joining the DSP?”
We may be able to keep alive the illusion, inside our heads, that SA is still going forward, is still advancing towards a new party, if only a bit more slowly than before. But other people won’t be fooled. How could they be? They won’t see much bigger SA contingents at demonstrations; they won’t see a big surge in activists standing on street corners selling Green Left Weekly, the paper that builds the Socialist Alliance (unless we manage to build a much bigger, stronger Resistance in the period ahead…); they won’t feel a compelling urge to join and actively build this new party because our side doesn’t seem to be winning here; it’s had too few victories in recent memory; socialism in Australia appears to be light years away; they’re just struggling to get by or they have other life priorities; and, for those who are familiar with the tiny world of the Australian left, SA appears to be little more than the DSP rebadged.
However untrue this may be, this is the perception among a fairly broad layer of people on the left who have some idea of who’s who in the left zoo. And we must admit that it’s not entirely untrue, given that something like 90% of SA’s week-to-week activity is carried out, I suspect, by the DSP alone. This does have a positive side to it, in that we’re seen by others to be just about the only people out there actually building the SA, but this is just the silver lining of a big dark cloud – the withering away of the active constituency of the actually-existing SA to pretty much just ourselves. We have had a tendency to keep on emphasizing the silver lining – “it’s so much easier now to do what we want to do with SA, without the ISO or anyone else around…”, while forgetting about that big dark cloud.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with always trying to look on the bright side of life, as in “The Life of Brian”. I am all for optimism, it’s essential. But as I said at the beginning of this contribution, we need to see things as they really are, and not as we’d like them to be, not basing our optimism on hype and illusions inconsistent with the facts.
I think the counter-report drafted by comrade John Percy is the better of the two reports, despite some weaknesses, in particular some rather crude, black-and-white formulations about SA (which I put down to polemical exaggeration and the fact that it was written in a hurry, but this needs to be clarified) and the fact that it doesn’t sketch out sufficiently what the counter-report actually does propose that we can do with SA in the period ahead that IS consistent with the political line in the draft resolution. On the whole though, it’s far more balanced and circumspect about what is really possible with SA in the present political period, more in line with the actual political line of the draft resolution.
It stresses how we should see SA as just one way for us to seek to relate to a vary variegated, overwhelmingly passive and dispersed dissenting constituency. It also stresses the absolutely necessary focus on a strategic adjustment, and not just a continuation of the emergency measures adopted and partially implemented since the May DSP NC, to building the DSP as the party we build today, without ambiguity, without fudging, as does the NE majority report as it tries straddle two clearly different political lines – the line in the draft resolution, and the one based on lingering false hope and baseless, blind optimism about what is realistically possible for SA until there is a change in the political situation.