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”!

I did a double take, just to make sure she wasn’t making a tongue-in-cheek joke to ensure comrades were awake during her perspectives report to the branch conference. No, she said it, and she actually seemed to believe it!

What a sorry state we’ve got ourselves in when our branch secretary can be so far off the mark. What are the facts of that “extremely good SA meeting”?

We organised the meeting to amalgamate Sydney Central and Marrickville SA branches (a total of about 90 members on the books). Marrickville in the past had been a bit of a rotten borough for the ISO, they regarded it as “their” branch and had a modest concentration in the area, although this year for the Marrickville by-election in September we’d taken control, ensuring that we stood in the by-election, and that it was our candidate (at a meeting just attended by DSP and ISO members).

• 24 were present at the October 25 meeting: 18 DSP members, 2 ISO members, and 4 independents (though they would be more accurately described as 4 DSP periphery, one of them had tried DSP membership for a while.)
• The meeting lasted two hours, and heard “reports” on matters DSP members would have mostly heard about already: campaigning against the IR laws on November 15, and what we needed to do on the day; on Howard’s new anti-terror laws. Comrades dutifully elaborated.
• The meeting discussed amalgamating, and both previous branches voted. The ISO argued against (actually with dignity, for them). The two ISO members voted against (reserving their “right” to form a Grayndler branch in the future).

The technical achievement of the meeting, amalgamation, could have been achieved much quicker with far fewer comrades involved, but then I suppose appearances had to be kept up. As the meeting droned on I had been doing some mental calculations: 18 comrades at the meeting, going on for two hours, with an hour added for travel to and from, that’s 3 x 18 = 54 comrade hours. That time could have been much better spent:

• It could have been much better spent, say, selling GLW. Say 18 comrades, selling for two hours, at a rate of four per hour: 2 x 4 x 18 = 144 GLWs sold, for approximately $300. Not to mention the potential in terms of political conversation and mobilisation for upcoming events, even steps to recruiting, from GLW sales on the street.
• It could have been much better spent with all comrades reading, spending the time on serious Marxist classics, or even catching up on the newspapers.
• It could have been much better spent intervening in real political meetings, engaged in real campaigns.

Or a combination of all three, rather than going through charades. It certainly was bad management of our comrades’ time.

But the worst casualties of the “extremely good SA meeting” were the number of relatively new DSP members who attended. What sort of training is this going to give them? What impression of politics are meetings like this one going to leave them with?

OK, those of us who’ve been around in politics a lot longer have been to many awful meetings. We’ll grit our teeth, and bear it, hoping that our sacrifice will be for the good of the cause. Although I would much prefer not to be told barefaced in a DSP branch meeting that it was “an extremely good meeting”.

But such meetings (and such distorted descriptions of them) will turn new recruits off politics. (Hopefully none will get to like such a style of meeting.) It wouldn’t have educated them or trained them; it would have miseducated them. Perhaps it would have de-politicised them – persisted in long enough it’s even going to depoliticise some of our longer-term cadres.

Comrade Eva C made the point in her PCD in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 8 that poor, low level Sydney Central SA meetings were being repeatedly dressed up as good or very good meetings. Then at the October NC meeting Comrade Susan Price, who had been organising Sydney Central SA for much of that time, admitted that Eva had only revealed half of how bad they really were. But until Eva’s PCD all the report backs to DSP branch meetings maintained that the Sydney Central SA branch was essentially a very strong branch with lots of good meetings, and this is what comrades in other branches thought was the real situation in this important branch. After many attempts by comrades in the pre-congress discussion to point out this exaggeration as a bad political method, and that more realistic and honest assessments should be made, here we go off into the stratosphere again with Alison’s “extremely good SA meeting”.

But there’s now also another type of justification for boring SA meetings being made, that “they’re all like that”, it’s normal. Just think that through to its logical conclusion.

And I also understand that supporters of the NC majority feel compelled to put everything done in SA’s name in a good light, pop up to speak in the discussion whenever they’ve encountered an SA paper member, call all SA meetings “good”. But “extremely good”?

That overblown description lavished on yet another boring, wasteful SA meeting shows the extent of the hype we’re now in the habit of showering on SA. It’s stunning. But I fear it’s also becoming indicative of the hype that’s seeped into our normal political description. What does it mean?

What can we believe of political reports from our organisers if this becomes the norm? Have our expectations for political meetings fallen so low that such a meeting can now be described as “extremely good”? Is this the best we can expect? Who’d hang around for many more meetings like that?

Mostly, it shows the dead-end nature of the line that the NC majority is trying to extend way beyond its use by date.

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