The Australian political situation and our campaign priorities counter report

By Nick Everett for the Leninist Party Faction

[The following is an edited report and summary to the 23rd DSP Congress, January 3-6, 2008 presented by Nick Everett on behalf of the LPF. The report and summary were rejected by the Congress. The general line of the report and summary received the votes of 12 out of 57 regular delegates and 8 out of 41 consultative delegates. There were no abstentions.]

Comrades, the LPF requested equal time to present this report, but was instead allocated only 30 minutes by the National Executive. This report will therefore not provide a detailed analysis of the Australian political situation nor cover all of the campaigns the DSP is involved. Rather it will address those areas in which the LPF is in disagreement with the majority. It will seek to explain why the objective conditions do not exist for seeking to transform Socialist Alliance into a broad left party today and what shift in campaign priorities are required to rebuild the DSP as a public Marxist party.

Our strategic aim – constructing a mass revolutionary workers’ party

The strategic aim of the DSP is to construct a mass revolutionary workers’ party, which, through raising socialist consciousness, can lead the masses in carrying out a proletarian revolution and constructing socialism.

Building such a party has always been our strategic orientation and remains our strategic orientation. But in deciding our immediate tasks we have to start from the recognition that we are not yet such a mass party, or anything approaching it. We are today just a small “nucleus” of that future mass revolutionary workers’ party.

Given the limited cadre resources at our disposal, the audience for our propaganda and agitation is not the mass of working people, but rather the most advanced layers - the radicalising elements.

Since the early 1990s, with the demise of the Communist Party of Australia and the rightward shift of the ALP, we have observed the relative increase of the weight of the DSP in the social movements. Following the election of the Howard government in 1996, and its attempt to de-unionise the waterfront in 1998, there was a rise of active dissent and resistance, which continued until the mass protests against the invasion of Iraq in early 2003.

During this period, the DSP has played a significant (sometimes critical) role in mobilising thousands of people. The DSP’s leadership role in mobilising 10,000 people in Sydney against the visit of US President George Bush is a recent example.1

Working with others and correctly applying the united front tactic, we can mobilise thousands around specific issues at certain times, when the opportunities arise. But, as Comrade Doug Lorimer observed in a report on “The DSP’s interventions into Australian politics” in 1995:

“[While] we are involved in building actions… that can involve thousands of people outside our own ranks… [this fact should not] be allowed to blur the reality that we are not a mass party or anything approaching it. This reflects an objective fact about the stage of development of anti-capitalist consciousness among the overwhelming mass of workers and students in this country… This objective fact cannot be overcome by the subjective action of a few hundred revolutionary-minded militants. Neither we nor any of our opponents on the revolutionary left have massive forces under our influence and at our disposal, whose actions in and of themselves can alter this objective situation.”2

The mobilisations we have led in the last period do not signify a change in this objective situation. There is not a generalised radicalisation occurring, either amongst workers or amongst youth. Our tendency is today smaller than it has been at any time in the last decade. And, contrary to the argument put by the majority, the DSP’s current party building tactic – seeking to build the Socialist Alliance as a new party project – has not succeeded in achieving even a modest step towards the construction of a mass workers’ party, or a new left party that can alter the course of the class struggle.

The question of how we evaluate the current political situation and the opportunities for us to intervene in the struggles that emerge is directly related to the question of our party building tactics.

If we misjudge the political situation, if we fail to identify or exaggerate the openings for our political intervention, we will fail also on the party question. The question of building our cadre party - the DSP, of extending its political influence and developing its cadre force, should determine our priorities for our mass work.

“Leftward moving forces” and the SA party building tactic

In 2001, the DSP, together with the International Socialist Organisation, launched the Socialist Alliance. The DSP sought to test out the possibilities for left regroupment by seeking to transform the Alliance into a “multi-tendency socialist party” (MTSP). While recognising that SA would start with a program limited to a series of class struggle reformist demands, our objective was to win SA members over to a revolutionary socialist program over time.

In 2003, we decided to cease functioning as a public Marxist party and build the SA as our party. We hoped that the rise in struggle we had seen since 1998 would be the start of a cycle of sustained working-class and anti-capitalist resistance. But these mobilisations reflected only a relative increase in struggle against a backdrop of continuing working class retreat. We had interpreted the exceptions to the trend as the new trend, or, in the words of the 2003 Congress, the “new cycle of working-class and anti-capitalist struggle”.

At the May 2005 DSP NC, in the face of a major DSP financial crisis, declining membership and declining Green Left Weekly sales, we were forced to acknowledge that SA as a regroupment project had stalled and that, without new political developments, the level of DSP substitution in SA was unsustainable.

We recognised that SA had effectively ground to a halt – in part due to the internal machinations of the SA – but more significantly due to the overarching objective political constraints: the retreat of the anti-war movement, setbacks for the union militant current and another Howard electoral victory. Comrade Peter Boyle’s party building report at that NC observed:

“This integration [of DSP resources into SA] cannot resume without new political developments – developments that unleash new forces and greater political confidence in SA. Not with just an isolated victory here or there but at least a new step forward of a significant enough militant minority in the working class that can re-invigorate broader sections of the movement with a stronger will to struggle… There has to be enough militant minority action to inject significant new forces into any broad left regroupment project.”3

Two different assessments

But, in the lead up to the last DSP Congress, major differences emerged on how to proceed. Two different – and counter posed – assessments were presented to that congress on the Australian political situation and the prospects for advancing SA towards a new workers’ party.

Comrade Peter Boyle’s party building report, presented on behalf of the NE majority, argued “there are real and significant forces moving leftward in the working class, forces that we are relating to, on a broad political basis, through building the SA as a new party project.”4

These “significant leftward moving forces”, according to the majority, were to be found in an anticipated upsurge of protest against Howard’s recently introduced WorkChoices legislation. The DSP majority assessed that there were strong prospects of this campaign breaking out of the ACTU’s elect-Labor framework and that a political break from Labor, led by a growing layer of union militants, was a significant possibility.5

Comrade Sue Bolton’s “Australian politics and campaigns report”, presented on behalf of the NE majority, asserted “there are some union leaderships that want a serious campaign and don’t want to put all their eggs in the basket of getting Labor elected…

“It is possible that even some tame-cat unions may be forced by their members to ignore the legislation and take wildcat illegal industrial action…

“In Victoria at the moment, there are a lot of unionists who are preparing themselves and other activists in their unions for the possibility that they will be jailed … Even in New South Wales, one of the unions told all of its organisers … that they couldn’t continue as organisers unless they are prepared to go to jail.”6

The minority at the DSP Congress presented a more cautious assessment of the campaign. Comrade Max Lane’s Australian Politics and campaign priorities counter report stated:

“… the prospect[s] for any short-term campaign to change ACTU strategy away from ALP electoralism towards a sustained mass action strategy are very poor. A mass action strategy is, of course, more than the use of the occasional mass rally and march as a public relations action… The ACTU campaign will remain an essentially electoralist campaign, relying on TV advertising and marginal seat campaigning and occasionally using well-controlled mass rallies and marches, but only if deemed useful electorally. Even those on the ‘left’ of the ACTU leadership, Doug Cameron and John Sutton, will not do anything to put the ALP’s re-election at risk”.

Comrade Lane’s report concluded “resistance to Howard’s IR attacks will probably take a different form once the legislation is passed, with struggle more focused on specific workplaces, sectors and unions under attack from the bosses.”7

Immediately after the Congress, the DSP (masquerading as SA) launched a petition campaign directed at pressuring the ACTU to launch a national strike to coincide with the implementation of Work Choices in March 2006. Despite the ACTU’s failure to consider any further mobilisations – let alone a national strike - until the next day of action planned for June 2006, the majority falsely concluded that its petition campaign was proving successful in impacting on the course of the campaign.

Comrade Boyle’s party building report summary, at the May 2006 NC, stated:

“It is a fact that we have today, in concert with other militant trade unionists, a certain limited power of initiative in the trade union movement. Together we did have an impact on the course of the IR laws struggle last year, a dramatic impact.”8

At the same NC, the NE majority’s Australian Political Situation report, argued the campaign against Work Choices “has the potential to combat working class passivity and give people confidence in their own capacity to struggle and to win rather than relying on parliament. It also has the potential to strengthen alliances within the working class and to generate new militant leaders.”9

Every campaign has the potential to “give people confidence in their capacity to struggle” and “generate new militant leaders” but the campaign against Work Choices could not (and did not) generate the leftward moving forces to transform Socialist Alliance into a successful regroupment project able to lead a significant break from the ALP.10

Comrade Bolton’s October 2006 NC report, while conceding that “many of the leaderships are running scared and putting all their eggs into the ALP re-election basket,” claimed that “there is a considerable layer of militants who have not been crushed and want a blue.”11 But even this “considerable layer of militants” was unable to force even any one of the more progressive union leaderships to “blue” with employers over the implementation of the laws.

By the April 2007 NC plenum, talk of a mass fightback against the laws had disappeared. Comrade Graham Matthews Australian politics and campaign report conceded that:

“From its beginning the official campaign against WorkChoices has had a strong electoral flavour. The ACTU has consistently attempted to route the campaign into a ‘re-elect Labor’ campaign. From the outset the ACTU policy was to minimise mobilisations, restrict platforms to reflect only Labor politics, reign in industrial campaigns, and divert attention to a so-called ‘political’ campaign of advertisements and marginal seat campaigning to quietly re-elect Labor at the next federal election.”12

What Comrade Matthews didn’t say was that the majority’s expectation that the fight back against the IR laws would generate “real and significant forces moving leftward in the working class, forces that we [could relate to], on a broad political basis, through building the SA as a new party project” had been proven completely false.

Now let’s compare the majority’s mistaken assessment with that put forward by the minority. Comrade Lane’s counter report to the last DSP Congress stated:

“…the conditions for the building of a broad left or mass workers’ party still do not yet exist.

“In no sphere of activity can we identify evidence of new forces (i.e. large number of people) moving into sustained campaign activity, bringing forth new leaders, and breaking from the ALP. The conditions we face remain the same as those we have faced over the last twenty years and which we have determined already are not the conditions that allow us to proceed beyond advocating, championing the need for a new workers’ party towards building such a new party in the here and now.”13

Indeed if the fight against Work Choices was generating “significant leftward moving forces” why have so few of these militants joined SA? Why, after distributing tens of thousands of SA recruitment leaflets over the last two years at the Your Rights @ Work rallies, has SA’s membership declined by 30 percent between March 2005 and March 2007?

Some comrades supporting the majority line have sought to justify a prioritisation of building the YR@W rallies over propaganda work countering the ACTU’s strategy by arguing that the mobilisations have boosted workers’ confidence to resist the Work Choices laws.

But the trade union movement today is weaker than it’s been for a century. And Work Choices has precipitated a further decline. In 1976, 51% of workers were in unions. In August 2006 union density had fallen to just 20.6% (declining 2 percentage points since August 2004). Working days lost due to industrial action are today at the lowest levels since statistics were first recorded in 1913.14

So what are the prospects of a union movement offensive now that Labor has been elected? Can we expect a rise in active dissent? Would this constitute the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle, a reversal of the long period of class retreat that characterised the Australian political landscape since the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983?

A neo-liberal Labor government

The new Rudd Labor government elected on November 24 is a fundamentally neo-liberal government. The YR@W campaign, and Rudd’s commitment to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, helped Labor woo voter support away from the Coalition. However, it was support from big business, reflected in the corporate media’s glowing praise for Labor’s economic credentials that got Labor over the line.

Significant sections of big business, who had criticised the Howard government for squandering the opportunities presented by the resources boom to press ahead with economic reform, swung behind Labor as the best means for implementing their neo-liberal reform agenda.

On December 3, Treasurer Wayne Swan told the ABC’s 7.30 Report: “We ran as economic conservatives and we will govern as economic conservatives.” When asked about the danger of rising prices and interest rates, he declared “dealing with inflationary pressures in the economy is our number one priority,” adding, “that’s why we need strict budget discipline.”

During the campaign, Rudd announced that Labor would reinstate the Expenditure Review Committee of the previous Hawke and Keating Labor governments. The new “razor gang”, headed by the minister for finance and deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, will slash $10 billion from government spending over four years. “Any program we find that’s not working, that will be a target,” one ALP official told the Sydney Morning Herald on December 1.

Within hours of being sworn in, deputy PM and minister in charge of industrial relations, Julia Gillard, addressed an Australian Industry Group conference. According to the Australian, she offered “a hand of cooperation to employers”. Gillard has reassured business groups that Labor’s “Forward with Fairness”, will retain many of the anti-union provisions of Howard’s draconian Work Choices legislation.

Labor’s so-called “education revolution”, which also falls under Gillard’s portfolio, won’t be rolling back Howard’s deregulation and defunding of public education. Instead this “revolution” will aim to lift labour productivity to address immediate shortages of skilled labour and position the Australian economy to be more competitive. Every aspect of Labor’s “education revolution” – from providing childcare to encourage women into the workforce to the emphasis on computers and technical training in schools, marketable skills and a uniform national curriculum – is geared to the requirements of big business. “Welfare to Work” measures will remain as a means to turn the disadvantaged into a cheap labour force. Gillard urged corporate executives not to see disadvantaged Australians as “an economic dead weight” but rather as “a severely under-utilised human capital resource”.

Big business support for Labor was also boosted by the constellation of Labor governments in all states and territories, which has given Rudd unprecedented leverage to pressure the states to adopt his austerity agenda. Following in Howard’s footsteps, Rudd will be looking to use conditional Commonwealth funding to accelerate deregulation and privatisation of state service delivery and infrastructure construction, in areas such as health, education, energy water, and public transport.

Last month NSW Labor’s parliamentary caucus endorsed the privatisation of the state owned electricity retail outlets, and the long-term leasing of power generators, in a move publicly supported by federal treasurer Wayne Swan. The United Services Union, supported by NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson, is seeking the support of back benchers in the state parliament to defeat the bill. However, it remains to be seen whether NSW unions will pursue a serious public campaign. If the Iemma government succeeds with its unpopular privatisation, we can expect that other state utilities, such as water, will be targeted also for privatisation.15

Labor and the unions

Comrade Dick Nichols has described Rudd’s pact with big business as having “been shaped by the circumstances in which Labor won office – on the crest of union and worker mobilisation against WorkChoices”. Comrade Nichols wrote in Green Left Weekly, “That fact has set a limit to how far Rudd and… Gillard can go in feeding the anti-union appetites of the big end of town… it leaves the unions as institutions, as players in the game…”16

But the “all-round economic rationalist recipe” that Comrade Nichols acknowledges will go “further even than the Howard government” is not the product of a government elected on a “crest of union and worker mobilisation”. It is a measure of the capitalist class’s confidence that Rudd and Gillard will be able to stifle and overcome any union dissent to their neo-liberal agenda.

This big business confidence is born of the fact that the unions have been seriously weakened over the last two and a half decades: firstly, by the co-option of their leadership under the ALP-ACTU accord of the Hawke and Keating years; and secondly, by the Howard government’s successive waves of anti-union legislation.

Had 2007 been a year of unprecedented union and worker mobilisation, one would expect that Labor would have been forced to adopt an industrial relations agenda that returned at least some of the limited rights unionists had in the Hawke and Keating era.

But having waged a passive, electoralist campaign that has consistently avoided any criticism of Labor’s conservative agenda, the ACTU has given Rudd and Gillard a free hand to embrace much of Howard’s IR agenda. And the militant union current has been too weak to chart a different course.

Under Labor’s transition legislation to be introduced early next year, existing individual workplace agreements (AWAs) will be allowed to stand until 2012, and new special transitional individual employment agreements introduced for the next two years. Gillard has already rejected union calls for the new legislation to be retrospective. Limited legal protections against unfair dismissal are unlikely to be reinstated until the middle of next year.17

Secret ballots for industrial action and the Workplace Relations Act’s restrictions on union right of entry will remain. In addition, pattern bargaining will be outlawed and the Australian Building and Construction Commission – with its coercive powers to intimidate, fine and jail construction workers – will remain until 2010.

Where to now for the Your Rights @ Work campaign?

Having fundamentally mistaken the prospects for a mass struggle against WorkChoices, the majority now have false hopes that the election of the Rudd government provides the union movement the opportunity to “go on the offensive” to take back the rights lost under the Howard government.

Writing in Green Left Weekly, Comrades Bolton and Matthews urge:

“Labor will not act quickly enough, nor will it go far enough, without sustained pressure from below. While the YRAW campaign has one victory in unseating Howard and his government, the greater victory of winning fairness at work still needs to be fought for.”

This article conveys the impression that Labor can be made to work for us, that under pressure it can deliver “fairness at work”. But a Labor government cannot deliver “fairness at work”. A radically different sort of government – a working people’s government – is needed to do that.

In the same article, Comrade Tim Gooden is quoted as saying:

“The YRAW campaign forced the anti-Work Choices campaign onto Labor’s agenda in the first place”, so “only by continuing the campaign, including the street demonstrations, and solidarity with workplaces under attack, will the union movement be able to maintain pressure on Labor …”18

But what campaign are we talking about here? Are we talking about the YR@W campaign? A campaign that, according to Comrade Matthews, the ACTU had “from its beginning… consistently attempted to route in a re-elect Labor direction”? A campaign in which the ACTU’s policy of “minimis[ing] mobilisations, restrict[ing] platforms to reflect only Labor politics, reign[ing] in industrial campaigns, and divert[ing] attention to a so-called ‘political’ campaign of advertisements and marginal seat campaigning” had predominated?

Instead of trying to portray the campaign as something external to Labor we need to patiently explain that, while there are union militants that want to fight, the campaign remains controlled by the ALP. And that a campaign aimed at taking back the rights that have been lost under Howard’s anti-union laws, and re-winning conditions lost during two and half decades of neo-liberalism, will require a political break with Labor.

The ‘debate’ within the YR@W committees, and the unions, as to where to take the campaign, won’t be won in favour of a U-turn. A re-elect Labor campaign, can’t simply be transformed into a campaign that directly challenges Labor to abolish the laws that it supports.

Our work in the unions

In the report presented by Comrade Bolton to the last NC, she noted the campaign that led to the release of unionist Clarrie O’Shea in 1969, and made the penal powers of that period a dead letter, “took around 10 years of patient education work of public meetings, motions and petitions in workplace meetings to build consciousness to the extent that workers knew what they needed to do when the laws were defied and a unionist jailed.”

Comrade Bolton observed, “The strikes and demonstrations [in 1969] appeared to be spontaneous but they were not really because the campaign to resist the laws had been meticulously built for ten years.”19

The LPF agrees with Comrade Bolton that:

“[Today] we are a long way from the more militant and progressive unions deciding on and building a consistent campaign like the O’Shea campaign… But given that the Labor Party strategy has failed so spectacularly, we need to popularise the idea that such a campaign, to win back our rights, is needed and should be initiated”20

Such a campaign needs to begin with consistent propaganda at both a national and branch level. This report proposes that the DSP publish a pamphlet explaining how a campaign to defeat the anti-worker laws should be built, drawing on the experiences of the O’Shea campaign. Similarly we should be using historical experience and analysis in polemical articles in Green Left Weekly and organising Green Left forums that profile DSP speakers articulating this analysis.

This proposal is not one of abstract propaganda, but should be seen as directly linked to the work we are undertaking in the unions.

Our first task in the unions today is to rebuild membership activist structures that can fight to defend and improve wages and conditions and to win leaderships that are committed to this task. Throughout the DSP’s history, in particular since the DSP’s turn to industry in the early 1980s, we have gained a rich experience of seeking to build militant, class struggle currents within the unions.21

Strengthened activist structures in unions where there is a leadership committed to struggle (such as the WA MUA) would allow better fight back possibilities against Work Choices. However, the limited number of such pockets of militancy means that the tactics of fight-back will be greatly impinged upon by the politics of alliances with other unions that remain under the political umbrella of the ALP.

The work of rebuilding and strengthening union structures requires a conscious and systematic approach to implanting DSP cadre in work where union activity is possible and to organising those cadres through DSP industrial fractions. Such fractions need to function as building blocks for the DSP, training cadre in the task of winning leadership on the job and amongst wider layers of unionists.

Fractions can help us to identify openings to build solidarity with workers’ struggles in which we do not have comrades directly involved. Regular DSP fractions should be accountable to DSP branches, enabling all comrades to collectively set the tasks and priorities for our industrial work.

Fractions should also discuss Green Left Weekly copy and distribution. The paper should carry consistent reports on union struggles, and critiques of such struggles. But this alone will not be enough to win workers, even the most advanced, and indeed especially the most advanced, to be regular readers.

Our second task is to introduce into the trade union arena our anti-imperialist work, in particular our solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution. Green Left Weekly will be the main instrument. But seeking involvement in AVSN committees should also be given priority.22

Anti-imperialist solidarity

While the last 14 years of economic boom in Australia have softened, and fragmented, the impact of neo-liberal reforms in Australia, global capitalism’s constant search for more profitable fields of investment continues to drive imperialism’s squeeze over the semi-colonial world. This phenomenon has entered the popular vocabulary as “globalisation” and is commonly associated with debt bondage and enforced “structural adjustment” programs. But it’s also the driving force behind US imperialism’s attempts to recolonise countries and impose either direct or indirect (military) rule, where their peoples are seen as being uncompliant with the dictates of US capitalism.

The Australian ruling class supports most of the neo-liberal offensive of the imperialist countries, led by the US, throughout the world. Whether on Iraq and Afghanistan, or on the need for so-called “structural adjustment” policies in the Third World, the Australian ruling class is a firm member of the imperialist club.

In the Asia-Pacific, Australia plays the role of deputy sheriff to US imperialism, adopting a strategic alliance with the US but at the same time pursuing its own imperial interests. During the federal election campaign, Labor pledged its support for the US-led “war on terror” and, while proposing troop reductions in Iraq, pledged more troops for counter insurgency operations in Afghanistan. Labor’s commitment to being “tough” on asylum seekers, and its bi-partisan commitment to “anti-terror” laws that seek to increase insecurity and suspicion of “non-Western” peoples, are both examples of the imperialist ideological offensive aimed at shoring up support for the ongoing squeeze of the underdeveloped world.

The DSP has always understood that one of the best interventions against this pro-imperialist ideological offensive in Australian domestic politics is through international solidarity campaigning. Such campaigning attacks a fundamental plank of the ruling class’s own ideological campaign among the Australian working class.

The LPF’s draft resolution on party building notes that the socialist revolution in Venezuela, the first socialist revolution since the end of the Cold War, is “the most radical political and ideological challenge to imperialism”.

“The Venezuela-Cuba axis of socialist renewal is showing with deeds – sharing the oil wealth, wiping out curable blindness on an entire continent – what socialist collaboration on the scale of whole peoples can achieve if the working people have state power. Cuba is taking its “battle of ideas” to the Asia-Pacific region, building East Timor’s public health system almost from scratch and sending doctors to PNG, the Solomons and Kiribati.”23

This report proposes that the number one campaign priority for a resurfaced DSP and Resistance must be to lead the building of a broad based solidarity campaign with the Venezuela-Cuba axis. Adopting this campaign priority can help us to gain a bigger audience for Marxist ideas and explanations and to recruit, educate and train Marxist cadres through building an openly Marxist party.

Building a broad based Venezuela solidarity campaign

In motivating a turn towards Venezuela solidarity work in November 2004, Comrade Peter Boyle’s (unanimously adopted) NC party building report observed:

“Our tendency has a proud tradition of building international solidarity for revolutionary and national liberation struggles that spans from Vietnam to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Cuba, Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor and now Venezuela. Through building solidarity movements with these struggles we recruited most of our central cadre”.

“Australia is one of the most stable, wealthy and conservative capitalist countries in the world. At this stage, only a small minority in our country are won to revolutionary consciousness and usually they begin understanding the necessity for and dynamics of revolutionary politics by studying and actively supporting revolutionary mass movements in other countries. Revolutionary example is all the more important when the prevailing working class mood is one of accommodation, retreat or defeat.”24

Comrade Boyle’s 2004 NC report proposed that Resistance seek “to try and set up Venezuela solidarity clubs/committees on every campus where they are active. These should attract young people inspired by an actual living revolution and we should seek to win these people to revolutionary politics and develop them into cadre. We should be single minded about this…”

“Obviously most young people in this country probably have never heard of Venezuela. It’s not the first issue on their minds but this is really beside the point. Our challenge is not just to reach out to young people… Reach out is not the problem but rather it is trying to cohere [a] relatively small group of young revolutionary activists.”25

At the last congress the DSP pulled back from the perspective that Venezuela solidarity should be Resistance’s overarching campaign priority. And the DSP’s submersion within SA has left the tendency weaker to reach and recruit to revolutionary socialist politics those that are – or could be - radicalised by the Venezuelan revolution.

Socialist Alliance’s federal election leaflet26, Workers Rights Charter, Welfare Rights Charter, LGBTI Charter and say nothing about the Venezuelan revolution at all. In fact, the only references to the Venezuelan revolution in any SA statement in two years were two sentences that appeared in an amended version of SA’s federal election statement, published in issue 731 of Green Left Weekly, and a brief mention of Venezuela (and Cuba)’s roll out of energy efficient light bulbs in the Climate Change Charter.

What is the explanation for this omission? The departure from active involvement in Socialist Alliance by former affiliates hostile to the leadership of the Bolivarian revolution occurred more than three years ago. The omission of any reference to the Venezuelan revolution in the SA propaganda we are producing today cannot be justified by maintaining that SA is an alliance or a regroupment project.

And the detailed and comprehensive analyses of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution published in Green Left Weekly – made possible by the presence of a Green Left Weekly bureau in Caracas for more than two years now – is not even credited as being written by members of the Democratic Socialist Perspective.

Is this because we are so fearful that a public identification of the DSP with the perspectives on Venezuela published in Green Left Weekly will expose the total absence of any analysis of the Venezuelan revolution undertaken by the SA at a branch or national level? And SA’s failure to advance one iota its analysis of the Venezuelan revolution in the last two years will demonstrate that SA remains no closer to emerging as “a broadly-based anti-capitalist party” in Australia”?

The consistent omission of the Venezuelan revolution from our (SA) party propaganda is in practice diminishing the DSP’s revolutionary politics and sapping the confidence of our cadre to articulate a revolutionary strategy for changing the world.

The LPF’s identifies “the core task of our Venezuela solidarity work” as seeking “to establish the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network as a broad national network with a ‘life’ of its own capable of nurturing a cadre of committed solidarity activists, from which we can recruit to Resistance and a resurfaced DSP.”27

It has been suggested in PCD that the LPF counter poses building AVSN with taking Venezuela solidarity into our movement work.28 To make it absolutely clear - this report proposes that we do both.

AVSN stalls held at Walk Against Warming rallies in Sydney and Perth last November provide positive practical examples of taking Venezuela solidarity work into the movements. At each of these rallies we were able to gain new contacts for AVSN and distribute widely AVSN’s statement dispelling the corporate media’s lies about Venezuela’s constitutional reform. Resistance’s intervention at the Students of Sustainability conference, at Murdoch University last July, provides another positive example. But generally such interventions have been rare.

In their PCD contribution “Our Venezuela solidarity work in perspective,” Comrades McIlroy and Winter argue that the APEC rally was “perhaps the single most effective act of solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution” all year. But if this is the case, why was there no AVSN stall at it?

We should be taking every opportunity at rallies, festivals, student and union meetings etc - wherever we can get an audience – to promote AVSN. But these initiatives alone will not build a broadly based solidarity movement if we are not also allocating sufficient resources to building AVSN committees.

Next March, Venezuelan student activist, Sandino Carrizales, will be touring Australian campuses. This will be the first national speaking tour by a Venezuelan youth leader since the visit of Alvaro Guzman in late 2003.

Like the petition to invite Chavez, the Sandino tour provides a valuable opportunity to increase Resistance’s identification with the Venezuelan revolution. But the maximum impact for the tour can only be achieved if we have Resistance comrades involved in Venezuela solidarity work on an ongoing basis, training up others in this work. Seeking to build AVSN clubs on campuses where we have a presence provides a means to winning people to Resistance through consistent and patient work alongside them in building a solidarity movement.

Rather than seeing building AVSN on campus as counter posed to building Resistance, we need to view the construction of AVSN campus clubs – and Resistance involvement in AVSN generally - as part of a strategy for rebuilding and strengthening Resistance on campus. This perspective – of making Venezuela solidarity an overarching campaign priority for rebuilding Resistance – was adopted at the November 2004 NC plenum. But it was never seriously tested and remains held back by the DSP’s current build-SA-as-our-party line.

Comrade Marcus Pabian’s PCD contribution “Should Venezuela solidarity be our top campaign priority”29 provides 14 proposals for our Venezuela solidarity work that this report endorses. Other proposals have also been presented in Comrade Bolton’s report and will be presented to this congress in the report on the DSP’s youth work.

However, there are three proposals that I wish to emphasise here:

But an AVSN national consultation will only reach its maximum effectiveness, if it follows six months of consistent work in building AVSN committees and if it is a consultation among regularly meeting committees who are organising a wide range of activities.

Climate change and environment campaigns

New research showing that the global warming continues to increase at an accelerating rate is having a significant impact on mass consciousness. The climate crisis will inevitably need to become a growing priority for the DSP and Resistance’s movement intervention.

The DSP is proposing a two-day climate change-social change conference next April. Our authority to lead such an initiative will rely heavily on Green Left Weekly’s coverage of the issue and holding the conference in Green Left Weekly’s name will hopefully assist us build the profile of the paper. But more engagement in environmental campaigning work is urgently required.

The Walk Against Warming youth contingents were a good example of united front work undertaken by Resistance comrades. We need to explore whether there are openings for us to establish groups on high schools, and openings within environment collectives on campus, for us to construct and develop a stronger network of environmental activists amongst youth. World Environment Day, in June, may provide a useful focus for Resistance to explore further united front work around the question of the environment.

The Gunns Pulp Mill is also likely to loom large this year, with Labor having committed to the pulp mill going ahead.

Further intervention in the environment movement, requires more consistent attention to our youth work than has been possible under the present SA-as-our-party line. A resurfaced DSP could sponsor an educational series providing a Marxist explanation of the environment crisis as a means of winning and consolidating youth cadre.

Perhaps the DSP should publish a revised and updated edition of the book Environment, Capitalism and Socialism. In addition, Green Left public forums, with DSP speakers need to be organised to provide consistent Marxist analysis.

Correcting a wrong line

None of these campaign perspectives can be implemented successfully without breaking with a wrong line. The concentration of DSP forces on SA has become a block to consistent united front work. As the LPF’s draft party building resolution notes:

“The DSP’s public interventions should be guided by the Marxist conception of the united front tactic, the essence of which is to “march separately but strike together.” The dual purpose of this tactic is to seek to bring together the broadest possible forces for effective action while allowing the Marxist forces to demonstrate the superiority of Marxist strategy and tactics. A resurfaced DSP would seek agreement for joint action with other forces as an openly Marxist party, not as SA.”31

The objective forces for building SA as a broad, anti-capitalist party today do not exist. To persist with trying to build such a party, in the here and now, is a dead end. However, the conditions do exist to build the DSP as a public Marxist party. Such a course can overcome the DSP’s stagnation and decline and can reawaken a spirit of revolutionary comradeship that can sustain us through the ups and downs of the struggle.

Summary

It was suggested by Sybille in her contribution that the LPF had taken the view that the Your Rights @ Work Campaign had not impacted on class consciousness. I want to start with that question. Has the Your Rights @ Work Campaign impacted on class consciousness or mass consciousness?

Well I think it has. And I think LPF comrades would agree with me. But the question is how and in what ways? The further question we need to ask ourselves is if it has impacted on mass consciousness has it actually radicalised people? I think this is an open question and one on which there would be more disagreement.

I am going to pose four ways in which we can consider these.

Firstly, let’s look at weather they are coming to us. Having set up Socialist Alliance and seeking to win those workers impacted upon by the Your Rights @ Work campaign, SA’s membership has declined over the two years these mobilisations have taken place.

So I think we have to agree here today that they haven’t come to us.

Secondly, have they come to the unions? Well union membership has also declined over the period of the campaign. Perhaps this decline has been a bit more modest than Socialist Alliance’s membership. But nonetheless it has declined. We haven’t seen the unions pick up these workers into their ranks.

Has the campaign resulted in an increase in industrial action, strike action? Certainly all the figures on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website I looked at before writing this report indicate that no it hasn’t. Strike action has in fact declined.

Fourthly, has it impacted on the electoral sentiment of workers? Yes. I think we can all agree. It impacted on the electoral sentiment of workers. Workers turned towards the Labor Party, particularly in those seats that were targeted by the Your Rights @ Work campaign.

So I think when we answer this question, we have to recognise that the principle impact of the Your Rights @ Work Campaign has been one of impacting electoral sentiment. Which is what the LPF has said since the beginning and which has been acknowledged at certain points in this discussion.

We therefore have to recognise that the strategy the ACTU pursued consistently throughout this campaign is the strategy that has dominated, the one that has prevailed in the course of this movement, this campaign developing.

The second point I want to look at is are we leading campaigns or actions. How does that compare, as Comrade Mick Bull raised, with what we were doing 20 years ago? Well I disagree with Mick that we were tail-ending campaign in the mid-1980s. The Jobs for Women campaign is one that comes to mind that we led at that time. But I’m sure there are other comrades more able than I to debate Mick on that question.

But it is the case that there are more opportunities today for us to lead campaigns, lead actions, sometimes involving thousands of people. I said that very specifically in my report. I said:

“Since the early 1990s, with the demise of the Communist Party of Australia and the rightward shift of the ALP, we have observed the relative increase of the weight of the DSP in the social movements.”

True. But does this mean that by having more opportunities to lead that we are able to impact directly on the course of the class struggle. We are not. And the reason why I went through a detailed assessment of the Your Rights @ Work campaign, and out inability to change the direction of that campaign, is evidence of that.

But the reason of course is that we are still a few hundred militants. That is why we cannot impact on the course of the class struggle. And it is in that context that we should be looking at the campaign opportunities that we should take up. There are always more campaign opportunities that we can take up than we can practically do.

Because my report was half the length of Comrade Bolton’s obviously I could not canvass anywhere near the number of campaigns that she canvassed in her report. I focused on two, I focused on the union intervention and the Venezuela solidarity work. But of course there are other campaign opportunities that we should and can take up. This report and the LPF are absolutely in favour of taking up campaign intervention opportunities where they arise.

But nonetheless, at the end of the day, we have to focus on which campaigns we focus on, on an ongoing basis. And it is in that context that the LPF is arguing that we prioritise Venezuela solidarity.

In what way? We supported a position that had previously been adopted in the DSP, back in 2004, that it been an overarching campaign priority for Resistance. We agree with the motivation that was made at the time for this. Comrade Boyle’s report said at the time:

“Obviously most young people in this country probably have never heard of Venezuela. It’s not the first issue on their minds but this is really beside the point. Our challenge is not just to reach out to young people… Reach out is not the problem but rather it is trying to cohere [a] relatively small group of young revolutionary activists.”32

We continue to put that position, because an understanding of the Venezuelan revolution – solidarity with a mass movement in that country – can better encourage young people to grasp what we are on about as socialist revolutionaries.

That question is not independent of the public face of the DSP – of what kind of party we are trying to build today.

I want to just touch on the environment work. I did have to jump over this in the report due to reasons of time. I want to stress that in the original draft I had that we want to take up World Environment Day as a key opportunity to test out united front work. Wherever possible I think we should lead this through Resistance. This report endorses the point Comrade Zoe Kenny made about the necessity of DSP and Resistance fractions to lead our environment work and look at all opportunities for intervention. We do support the Climate Change conference. Prior to today I did not have any dates for when the conference was proposed, only that it was in April. So obviously we have to revisit the question of marking April 11. It won’t be possible to have a national day of action, but I am sure it would be possible to have a public event in Sydney with Sandino to mark that anniversary.

In terms of the Gunns pulp mill campaign, without wanting to make predictions or crystal ball gazing, I think we need to look at what opportunities there are for building that campaign on the mainland. It’s certainly been a very significant campaign in Tasmania and it may well emerge as a major issue in Australian domestic politics. We’ve got to be ready to respond to that possibility.

There were different points of view about to what extent we are really building Venezuela solidarity. I cited examples in the report of the Socialist Alliance propaganda we are putting out. We mass distributed the Socialist Alliance election leaflet – the red and white leaflet – of which we printed tens of thousands. But it didn’t mention the Venezuelan revolution. We attended Work Choices rallies that have involved tens, hundreds of thousands of workers over the last two years, but our Venezuela propaganda has generally been limited just to what is in Green left Weekly, which is only reaching a few hundred people at such rallies. So I think these are stark examples of how we could reach a much wider layer with the example of the Venezuelan revolution, at least at the propaganda level.

I mentioned in the report the very positive examples of where we did AVSN stalls at Walk Against Warming, which were a way of reaching people who are liberal, left, looking for solutions, looking for alternatives and who are very interested in the Venezuelan revolution. The experience we had in Perth was that we were constantly talking to people at the AVSN stall all day. There was not a break. There were people constantly coming up to the stall wanting to talk about this solidarity campaign.

To finish up, what can we agree on? I think we can all agree that the key task that we confront, with the election of the Rudd government, is how do we break illusions in this government and how do we win people towards us.

Clearly Rudd himself will contribute to illusions being broken. Labor’s roll out of further austerity and so on will break illusions in this government. The final point is what we are winning people to.

This is the key question that we confront at this Congress. We need to win people to a public revolutionary Marxist party. And it is on that basis that the LPF continues to organise.l