When we first embarked on our Socialist Alliance tactic in early 2001 we weren’t all too clear on what it might achieve, or where it would go. Following a number of mass mobilisations in the previous few years – MUA defence in 1998, big demonstrations for East Timor, antiracist mobilisations against Pauline Hanson etc – we were optimistic.

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”.

Was I too harsh in criticising Comrade Alison D for describing the last Sydney Central-Marrickville Socialist Alliance meeting as “an extremely good” meeting? Certainly I shouldn’t have just singled her out. (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 14) We’ve all been guilty of SA-hype until recently, putting a good gloss on any SA event, propping it up with DSP cadres, for too long substituting our hopes for the reality.

The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela led by Hugo Chavez has been an important and inspiring event, the “first revolution of the 21st century”, not just shaking up Latin America, but giving hope to socialists around the world.

As has become the pattern in PCD contributions by members and supporters of the NE majority, Comrade Paul Benedek ("From minority to majority support", The Activist Vol. 15, No. 14), defends the majority position in the debate on what party-building perspective the coming DSP Congress should vote for by misrepresenting the NE minority’s position. However, he takes misrepresentation to a new level by attributing a position to the whole party that it never had.

I sat in the DSP Sydney branch conference on October 29 flabbergasted. I looked around at other comrades who had been at that same Socialist Alliance meeting, wondering were they as incredulous as me?

Sydney branch secretary Alison D had just described the amalgamation meeting of Sydney Central SA and Marrickville SA on Tuesday October 25 as “an extremely good SA meeting”!

The August 15 national executive meeting unanimously adopted a draft resolution for vote at the 22nd DSP Congress in January 2006 that stated that the political “conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist” at the time we embarked on this turn; that without a “regroupment with broader left forces that are generated by a new upturn of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’” the SA cannot “take a significant step to creating a new socialist party”, and that, in the absence of the existence of these conditions, the DSP should build the SA, not as a

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

In her PCD article “Political divisions in the DSP and how to proceed” (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 10) Comrade Pat Brewer urges “comrades to read exactly what the documents are saying so the differences can be clearly expressed”. However, she completely ignores her own advice and bases her assessment of what the NE minority is saying not upon the documents we have written, but upon the assumption that we are engaged in a “cynical manoeuvre” to shut down the Socialist Alliance. Comrade Brewer is not alone in doing this.

In the last issue of The Activist (Vol. 15, No. 9), a number of NC comrades made contributions which do little to clarify the debate on the relations between the DSP and the Socialist Alliance because they do not take up the actual issues that are in dispute – I refer in particular to those by comrades Nikki Ulasowski, Jim McIlroy, Sue Bull and Graham Matthews.