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. We also felt the international momentum from the growing anti-globalisation protests after Seattle in 1999. And we were closely watching a number of regroupment and alliance efforts in Europe. With the mass blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne on September 11, 2000, we felt that radicalisation had really hit our shores, and the time was right for us to attempt a major reach-out project such as the Socialist Alliance.

By late 2002 this optimism about the advancing political conditions and working-class radicalisation also underpinned our major turn, the proposal at our September 2, 2002 DSP national executive meeting to make the Socialist Alliance “the party we build” and transform the DSP into an internal tendency within SA. Our full implementation of this further tactical step was slowed a bit by the ISO threat to walk out of the Socialist Alliance, but we began implementing it and formalised the change at our congress in December 2003. We were very clear and explicit about the political upsurge on which we were basing this daring tactical move. As Comrade Peter Boyle wrote in an article in Links 23 (Jan-Apr 2003) based on that September NE report:

The current political situation is creating new openings to collect a bigger revolutionary vanguard in Australia, and the proposal is a response to new conditions…

A layer of newly radicalised activists has joined re-inspired older activists in a new cycle of protest. These radicalised layers are very interested in real steps towards left regroupment and unity. Our estimate is that, by making the Socialist Alliance the party we build today, we will gather more of the class-conscious vanguard of the working class and increase its ability to link up with the broadest masses.

At the end of the article Peter examined the “lessons from previous regroupment attempts” that we’d tried in the 1980s, and stated that “The main reason that previous regroupment attempts failed was because the movements were in retreat”, and that there was “a bigger audience for socialism/anti-capitalism today”.

Today that tactic of transforming ourselves into just an internal tendency in SA and making SA “the party we build” has clearly failed, whether it’s justified as a revolutionary left regroupment, or building a new mass workers party, or the dozen other variants that have emerged in this discussion. The political conditions are not there, we overestimated the state of the movement, or underestimated what would be required to propel significant new forces into activity in a new party, or hoped that the different movements that arose in 1998-2000 were the harbinger of bigger class struggles and radicalisation just ahead. Our tactic has failed, certainly in the form that it was the path to a new party, “the party we build”. As the draft resolution for our coming congress – unanimously adopted – says, “the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist.”

This pre-congress discussion period provides us with a partial opportunity to make a proper assessment of our experiences with this tactic, and the different models of it, for nearly five years now. Unfortunately if the line of the NC majority gets adopted by the congress, the negative effects of the tactic will be dragged out further, the DSP will make further unnecessary mistakes, but eventually we’re going to have to make such a balance sheet.

We will have to understand what we’ve been through, and one of the key assessments we will have to make is that here, yet again, is the terrible consequence of transforming a tactic into a strategy.

Tactics that have ended up as strategies

Throughout our history, our goal has always been the construction of a mass revolutionary party, which we consider a prerequisite for socialist revolution in an imperialist country like Australia. Our overriding strategy is our party-building strategy, building that revolutionary party. (See the Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, pp. 64-66, “The role and character of the revolutionary party) This is our strategy even before we are able to win that mass base in the working class.

In times of social and political passivity it’s often difficult to build a mass, revolutionary party, but during mass revolutionary upsurges, a small revolutionary party can grow rapidly in size and influence. By applying correct tactics in such a political crisis, the party can win mass influence and guide the workers’ struggle for power to a successful conclusion…

A party capable of undertaking such colossal tasks cannot arise spontaneously or haphazardly. It must be built continuously, consistently and consciously. This requires the utmost consciousness in all aspects of party building, from questions of theory and policy to details of daily work. It requires determined, systematic work aimed at winning influence in all sectors of the mass movement, and persistent attention to recruiting new members, training them to become professional revolutionary activists.

But to achieve that unchanging goal of a mass revolutionary party, we need the utmost flexibility in tactics to meet the constantly changing opportunities and challenges. This is explained in detail in our program, (pp. 67-70, “The main tasks of socialist strategy and tactics.”)

In conducting its work, the party must be clear in distinguishing between strategy and tactics, and between propaganda campaigns (the dissemination of many fundamental ideas), agitational campaigns (the dissemination of a few ideas, or even one key idea) and slogans for action – and when it is appropriate to employ them. Strategy is a long-range proposition requiring propagandistic approaches. Tactics deal with immediate aims and agitation leading to action.

Sometimes, the tactics have stalled, and the party gets stuck with that focus, and the process has finished up with the tactic as the permanent strategy.

Sometimes, persisting in a failed tactic against the evidence of experience can lead to the destruction of the party as a healthy organisation.

There are many examples in the history of the Marxist movement where the classic mistake has been made of elevating a tactic into a strategy. It’s been the downfall of many a revolutionary movement. But we have three major examples from our own experience here and from our collaborators in the international Trotskyist movement, which should have educated us and inoculated us against repeating this error.

First is the example of the entry tactic, Marxists joining a Labor or social-democratic party to reach broader forces, militant workers. But it has dangers, and much of the Trotskyist movement, including every strand of it from the small old Trotskyist current here in Australia, made an error. A tactic became a strategy, a matter of principle, and eventually the cause of the degeneration of the likes of Gould.

The second is the example of rural guerrilla warfare, the tactic adopted by the majority of the Fourth International at its 1969 congress, which was elevated into a strategy. And the small Bolivian and Argentinean Trotskyist groups madly set out on this course (several years after the Cubans, with a revolution behind them, pulled back from this course). After the most extensive – and instructive – debate in the FI that occupied most of the 1970s, and ranged far and wide, the error was corrected.

The third is the example of the US SWP, which did so much in inspiring and educating us in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but then degenerated comprehensively when they converted their tactic of the “turn to industry”, getting nearly all of their members jobs in blue collar basic industry in anticipation of a big workers radicalisation in the US and internationally, into a permanent strategy. The hoped-for workers radicalisation didn’t occur, but the SWP leadership kept talking about it, and thrashed about in different ways to “deepen” their turn, and ended up a sorry sect.

Woe is us if future revolutionaries will be able to quote a standard fourth case – that of the DSP in Australia that transformed their socialist alliance tactic into a strategy, and ended up on the rocks.

In defence of Jim Percy

It shouldn’t have happened. We’ve had many useful experiences with our reach-out approach since the early 1980s, with a wide variety of different situations we responded to, and many tactical responses that we tested out. And all of these have been documented in some form or other (and will be much more thoroughly recorded and analysed once I complete Volumes 2 and 3 of my history of the DSP). We didn’t make the mistake of persisting with any of them after they had clearly failed.

A good starting point is often the pamphlets or articles of Jim Percy, especially those that originated as his (“old style”) party-building reports. It’s especially galling to see some of the supporters of the NC majority quoting selectively from Jim to try to justify their mistaken course; he’d be turning in his grave, and needs to be defended. Jim’s party-building reports are nearly always instructive, and so often still relevant, and I’d recommend all comrades to read or reread as many of them as you can get – the four in his book, those published as pamphlets, those in old copies of our discussion bulletins.

One that I picked up that shows that relevance is his Building the Revolutionary Party – Some recent experiences, that includes his report to the October 1987 joint national committee meeting of the DSP (then Socialist Workers Party) and Resistance. (It’s a very good pamphlet. There are still some in our bookshop bargain bins in some branches.) This was in the middle of our attempt to unite in a new party with the then Communist Party of Australia. They had considerably more members than us at the time, even though less active, and still a sizeable union base, and although their politics fell well short of revolutionary Marxism, they’d made a small retreat from their previous full support for the ALP Accord. The regroupment attempt, in a “New Left Party” with some other forces, didn’t succeed. The CPA backed off, we judged that they got scared at seeing us close up, realising that although they would have had the numbers, we had the youth and energy, and would have prevailed in any new party. (Eventually the CPA dissolved in 1991, after they made a final attempt to dissolve into their own new party.)

At the start of his report Jim pointed out that “Our involvement in the attempt to create a new party can blur our understanding of our political course in the present political situation and paradoxically it can undermine our consciousness about the importance of party building.”

He then went on to note that we thought

[W]e had been making a rather long-term error, probably from about 1974-75. Throughout that time we had expected a transformation of the political situation through some sort of working-class fightback led by the trade union. In 1976, we got excited when the ACTU called a one-day protest strike against the Fraser government’s abolition of Medibank, but we’ve been waiting ever since for further developments.

We were to some extent victims of a paradox that has marked politics in the capitalist world for the past decade or so. While the capitalist system has been facing steadily increasing difficulties, none of which has any prospect of resolving, there has also been a serious decline of the working class movement in the advanced capitalist countries. Just when the socialist movement might have been expected to grow, it has plunged into a serious crisis.

Stretch that out for the last three decades or so. And we’ve had worse crises and disappointments – the collapse of the Soviet Union, the abandonment of socialism in China etc. It hasn’t been such a great period compared with the ‘80s – until the Venezuelan revolution! Jim went on:

It’s not difficult to understand why this has happened. A number of serious structural weaknesses have become clearly evident in the working-class movement over the past half-century. The most serious of these weaknesses is definitely the post-World War II evolution of the trade union bureaucracy towards virtually complete acceptance of bourgeois political perspectives.

Absolutely. And it’s got worse in the last 18 years. Jim continued:

“For our part, in 1985 we decided to put a period of organisational experimentation behind us, and to concentrate on a process of consolidation. We saved our assets by introducing a new dues structure, and we stressed party organisation and education by going back to weekly branch meetings. We took steps to ensure that Resistance was not starved of resources, and we began explaining to people joining our movement that they should prepare for the long haul, that it was unlikely there’d be any quick breakthroughs.”

So this is not the first time we’ve had to implement emergency measures to get the party back on track after trying different reach-out tactics, or regroupment efforts. (We had to do it again in the early ‘90s.) And that doesn’t mean we retreat behind our wall; we try the next opportunity that comes along, and at that time we were trying it with the CPA, and the discussion about new parties that was happening.

New party tactic as part of our party-building strategy

Jim continued explaining to comrades the case for the new party attempt with the CPA.

Above all, our support for the new party is part of a general party-building strategy. It doesn’t represent a sharp break with our past. The fact that we regard it as our main tactic indicates how much we’re still in a propaganda period. We’re very much looking towards regroupment of the existing left and socialist forces. There’s not a lot of scope for political action right now.

When we talk about a new party, it can seem like a break with our past. People can think that the very act of forming a new party will make all of the old party-building tactics obsolete. Some who are attracted to the idea might be expecting immediate electoral success that will rocket them to Peter Garrett status. Similar ideas can infect our party. We all want an easier life.

While we think the new party represents a continuity with the past, that’s not to say there’s nothing new about the new party project. We mean it when we say we have learned and will continue to learn from other forces. We know that we don’t have all the answers.

At the same time, however, we should be aware that this view can weaken our resolve and our view of our own importance. If we don’t have all the answers, maybe the SWP isn’t so important? If we’re going to dissolve into a new party, why build the old party?

Acceptance of that attitude would be a big political error. Without the old party, there won’t be any new party. While we might be preparing to dissolve our existing organisational forms in the context of a new party, we’re not about to dissolve our program, our ideas, our individual cadre or our assets. We will certainly take certain essentials into the new party with us.

It’s rather inevitable that we sometimes get a little lost in this complicated new party tactic. In recent months we’ve probably been a party with something of an identity crisis. This can be compounded when, inevitably, we go through some rough patches and start to doubt that we can put together a new party. Because so many comrades have put so much work into this chance for an important political breakthrough, the prospect of failure can seem devastating.

Yes. And we did fail with the CPA. But we tried again with the SPA, and failed again. And the fact that we tried again, with the Socialist Alliance, and that has failed to develop into a new party certainly disappoints us, but shouldn’t devastate us. We have to be able to regroup, to try again.

But first we have to register that it has failed. We can’t revive the NDP, although Michael Denborough and one other valiant comrade have kept it “alive” in Canberra. We can’t revive the New Left Party, the regroupment with the CPA (the Search Foundation would have their millions of dollars of assets locked up too tightly for us to even think about it.). We can’t attempt the SPA Socialist Alliance again, at least they’re far less significant, they’re much smaller, weaker, older. And we’re not going to get anywhere by trying to revive the Progressive Labor Party, one of those efforts we didn’t participate in, although it still lingers on in a few places. These were all “new party” efforts, and didn’t succeed. The Socialist Alliance has not succeeded as a party either, and is not going to in the foreseeable future.

Having hopes that the Socialist Alliance is going to become our new party any time soon leaves us stuck in a failed rut, in the same league as those trying to retain their failed projects.

SA Mark 1 – ‘left regroupment’

When we initiated the Socialist Alliance in 2001 we weren’t too clear about our goals and where it would lead us. Certainly the project changed drastically by 2002-03. But we had some precursors, if not “models”, in England and Scotland, with the Socialist Alliances there.

We can all recall that the initial motivation was news from England that the British Socialist Workers Party, the mother party of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) here, had taken a decision to participate in election activity, after two decades of vigorously declaring it off limits. They started participating in the Socialist Alliance there. The English Socialist Alliance had first been initiated by the Socialist Party, formerly Militant, the mother party of Steve Jolly’s SP here, and then abandoned when the larger SWP moved into the organisation.

We saw this as providing an opening to the ISO here. They would be hard put to reject a proposal for a Socialist Alliance here, that would stand in elections. It could lead to greater unity, and possibilities of regroupment, which we were more sceptical about, or else they’d suffer. The letter signed by myself for the DSP and Ian Rintoul for the ISO calling the first meeting on February 17, 2001 said: “Our two organisations are confident that there will be enough agreement to form an electoral alliance at this meeting and that this will be greeted with enthusiasm by significant numbers of radical activists outside the ranks of the organised left.”

With us and the ISO on board, many of the smaller Trotskyist groups were also pressured to sign up. We began with nine affiliates, and some big launch meetings in Sydney and Melbourne.

We were also looking to the success of the Scottish Socialist Alliance, then moving to become the Scottish Socialist Party. It had been initiated by Scottish Militant Labour, they had a profile through their struggle against the poll tax, led by Tommy Sheridan. They were willing to break with the CWI/SP leadership in London, and were excommunicated from the CWI when they continued with the SSA proceeding to a party, the SSP.

Regroupment is a necessity for building a larger revolutionary party. We won’t get to our goal just with recruitment by ones and twos. We’ve had this perspective for more than two decades, and the whole party plunged in on various occasions to try out various regroupment possibilities in the ‘80s, with many partners, and eventually ran out of possible partners. So we started Green Left Weekly.

When we initiated the Socialist Alliance in 2001, the ISO, as the second largest and active left group at the time, was the main candidate for regroupment. We also invited the CPA (ex SPA) and Socialist Alternative, but they declined. The other small Trotskyist groups added to the numbers, but they were small, with five, 10 or 15 or so members.

So we should be honest, up front, about the specific origins of the SA tactic, “SA Mark 1.” It was not to link up with the militant trade union current. That only got raised as a possible partner later. It was not to link up with the potentially large layer of political independents and former members of left groups that’s out there. It was specifically aimed at the ISO, to pre-empt any move by them to electoral work, and to discuss regroupment with them.

Perhaps the chance of regrouping with them was only a half-hearted expectation on our part. We knew the ISO had the major shibboleth of their state capitalist theory to overcome; we knew the strings were pulled in London.

But to have another go at our regroupment perspective we have to have real – and preferably significant – forces to regroup with! We needed some partners. The ISO was what was on offer, so we tried it with them and the small Trotskyist groups.

But this regroupment project through SA has thoroughly stalled. There’s little left of that initial regroupment momentum of Socialist Alliance Mark1. The ISO in 2004 must have made a decision to stop participating in joint stalls, or joint contingents at demos, even holding SA placards at demos. Their involvement in SA today is purely nominal. The way they would see it is as purely a wrecking operation, as long as it doesn’t take too much energy from them.

Comrade Chris Slee made a valid point in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 16, that our push to become an internal tendency in SA put an end to any prospect of winning the ISO and other affiliates to that regroupment project. They threatened to walk out when we first proposed it in 2002. When we went ahead anyway in practice during 2003 and formalised it at our congress at the end of 2003, it wasn’t long before their involvement in SA became nominal.

Probably the prospect of regroupment with those groups was a forlorn hope, certainly in the absence of a major political upsurge. Without that, they wouldn’t get shaken from their prime loyalty to their international sect, mostly looking to London, and their particular shibboleths.

Certainly there’s always a lot of appeal for “left unity” in general, especially among those who’ve seen the fractured left landscape. And our stance will always be for left unity. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves that the small affiliate groups still in the Socialist Alliance are any example of “left unity”.

So that phase of the Socialist Alliance, with its rationale of left regroupment, ended fairly soon, and our justification shifted to the tactic of building a new party. But we still needed the framework of “left regroupment”, because it was to be a “Multi Tendency Socialist Party” – SA Mark 2 as MTSP.

2002 – at a turning point

Nevertheless, although this regroupment stage in SA Mark 1 didn’t succeed, it didn’t have a destructive effect on us, the DSP. Before we set out on the next stage, SA Mark 2, the major turn of dissolving the DSP into SA to build a new party, we were doing OK with SA. It might have laid the basis for better cooperation between left groups, and might have laid the basis for the ISO’s organisational decline and future splits, but the DSP was still growing in this period.

At the June 2002 DSP national committee meeting I gave the party-building perspectives report, giving it the title “Why we got this far, and how we can go further”. (The Activist Vol. 12, No. 6) (Perhaps comrades from the current NC majority would see this as one of those “old style” party-building reports; it was the last party-building report I gave to an NC or congress.)

The report reaffirmed our party-building perspective, against the threats from anti-Leninists, movementists here and internationally – “the political perspectives we had stuck to: our understanding of the class nature of society, the need for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist state power by the working class, and at the centre of it, our understanding of the need for a party, a Leninist party, to make that revolution, and the tradition and skills in building that party, our party-building perspective.”

The report also looked at our basic party-building tasks (and “indices”).

The most important gauge of how we’ve been going, the most direct measure of our success, is the simplest one, recruitment, and growth. Assuming we’re maintaining our standards of commitment and activity, the size of our membership indicates how our party-building project is going.

And in the last year or two, we can see clearly what we haven’t seen for quite a while, actual growth, a very real upward turn in our membership graph.

I also noted a bit of a worrying sign, a fall in our provisional members, only 60% of what it had been the previous year.

We have a broader milieu and bigger periphery, the impact we make is bigger, and the relative weight of our tendency on the left is greater than ever before. But we still need to look at how we can raise the actual profile of the party. More DSP banners and placards at demos; more specific DSP statements; more mentions in GL. This question is even more important now with Socialist Alliance the vehicle for our election campaigns. People know us indirectly, for GL, for Resistance, for Socialist Alliance, for Links, for APISC. Let’s look for an opportunity to raise the specific DSP profile in a big way.” I also urged that “We should put regular forums back on the agenda.”

GLW sales seemed to be going well, with the number of sellers rising as well as the rate, and the total average sales figure so much higher than it is today.

Comrades can see from the charts that we’ve made some progress this year compared to 2001. There’s been a small jump in sellers (not quite yet reflecting fully the jump in membership), and a small jump in hours sold. But the rate of improvement has meant a considerable jump in average sales: from 1916 to 2441.

However, we were worried by some signs of a declining financial consciousness:

The most significant area where this problem impacts is on pledges, the bedrock of our party finances. Our overall total of comrades’ pledges, and the average level of pledges from comrades, has been declining, not merely not keeping up with inflation, but going down absolutely! At our conference we set a goal of getting the national pledge total up from $6,300 to $7,000 per week by the end of the year. It’s actually slipped back to $6,100. And this at a time when the full membership of the party has risen significantly!

Nevertheless, in spite of some worries about the decline of provisional members and financial indicators, we still felt confident enough to project some ambitious expansion plans:

1. Purchase another building, probably in Adelaide, or Darwin, where there are still possibilities for real estate bargains – or at least fairly reasonable prices…

2. We need more party full timers, both branch organisers, and in the National Office. We can’t take up all the opportunities in front of us now, and we need more organisers to do it, not substituting for the branch members, but helping organise them. The political situation warrants it. Our party-building indicators warrant it – the sales, finances, membership figures. The lack of enough full time branch organisers can be a brake on our further growth and expansion, and limit our ability to train, retain, and develop new recruits into cadres. Let’s stretch our resources to allow us to build and grow as we know is possible.

We also need to have our next expansion goals in mind – A workers solidarity centre; real bookshops; our own party school again; and the resources to organise the next major political campaigns we have to mobilise on.

These were some of our perspectives before we were tied down by our “just an internal tendency in SA” line. I’m not quoting all this just for reasons of nostalgia, but in order to pin down a little more precisely when our DSP problems really began. It’s so clear that it’s linked intimately with our major turn, to SA Mark 2.

SA Mark 2 – ‘a new party’

We launched our major turn to become an internal tendency in SA, making the Socialist Alliance “the party we build today”, at the DSP September 2, 2002 national executive meeting. Comrade Peter Boyle presented the report “For a new step forward in left unity”, (The Activist Vol. 12, No. 10, September 2002)

The September NE report projected doing all our political work through SA. “At present, neither the DSP’s main propaganda work nor our mass work is organised through Socialist Alliance and pulls against it to a degree because of the resource squeeze in the DSP.” The report projected that “We have either to move forward or pull back with this project.”

So the proposal to make Socialist Alliance the party we build today is, in part, an attempt to free up resources on many levels to not only make the most of the Socialist Alliance initiative but also to improve the intervention of the radical left in the broader movements, to speed up the development of revolutionary cadre (present in several organisations), and to broaden the influence of that cadre.

We thought that by doing our political work through SA, the impact will be greater “because other tendencies and independents in the Socialist Alliance will be encouraged to do the same.”

Comrades sometimes talked of “dissolving” ourselves into SA, for example Comrade Maurice Sibelle responded to “the boldness of this proposal for the DSP to dissolve into the Socialist Alliance”, The Activist Vol. 12, No. 12, September 2002.

Although it wasn’t the formulation in the reports we presented to NCs or our congress, we did encourage the dissolving approach. The September 2002 NE report stated that “We will declare to the Socialist Alliance that:

The Democratic Socialist tendency’s intention is to make itself redundant as fast as possible. We would hope to inspire other affiliates to adopt the same approach, in a comradely competition to see who could ‘wither away’ first!

We also pointed positively to the situation in the SSP where the International Socialism Movement, the remnant of the originating Militant Tendency, was withering away.

And there was always outside pressure on us to take this approach. If we didn’t have a sufficiently strong and conscious internal organisation and education we’d be vulnerable, with comrades succumbing to the anti-partyism of the movement milieu.

We presented this new turn to our October 5-7 2002 DSP national committee meeting, in a party-building tasks and perspectives report by Peter Boyle. The report concentrated on the organisational steps to make this transition, stressing the need to retain the “Democratic Socialist Tendency” (our first thought for a new name) in the first stage against some comrades who had run too quickly with the idea, wanting to get rid of the DST altogether.

This report also reflected how we were still based in the first stage of SA, referring to it as a “new left regroupment”, “this regroupment”, “an honest struggle for left unity”, and the goal was “SA eventually becoming a bigger united revolutionary socialist party” with 1000-2000 members. There was no mention at all of the militant trade union current in the report.

But the ISO threatened to walk out of SA if we went ahead with our plan, delaying some aspects of our integration, and preventing us from formally proclaiming it for a year. However we started implementing it in practice.

So with the ISO not playing, the search was on for new partners, displacing the affiliated left groups that we began with, who all condemned our new party plan. In the course of the next three years these original affiliates dropped back to purely nominal involvement, and their replacements were the independent socialists who had joined SA, some of them organised next year as the “Non-Aligned Caucus”, NAC, and the militant union current. Both of these replacements have proved inadequate for the task of actually moving SA much beyond the DSP, not actually contributing much to Socialist Alliance as “the new party we build today”.

The Non-Aligned Caucus

The 11^th hour formation of the Non-Aligned Caucus in the lead up to the May 10-11, 2003 SA national conference (GLW #537) pulled a stalled SA back from the brink and allowed us to override the ISO blackmail threat and push ahead with our turn to SA as our party.

By the time of the conference, NAC had 157 signatories. Although in the branches DSP comrades were still the majority of activists, in the election for delegates we used our weight to ensure that a large number of NAC delegates were elected, with 43% of the 280 delegates ending up being “non-aligned”.

This bloc between DSP and NAC resulted in a 75% majority at the conference for a “Multi-Tendency Socialist Party”. The central figure in NAC was John van der Velden, a DSP member two decades ago, who had very firm views that the only way that SA could go forward would be if it was led by non-aligned forces, not the DSP or other affiliates. In one sense he was right. For a new party to develop in a healthy way it had to bring in new forces, new partners, new leaders of the movements. But the NAC didn’t fit the bill; Van der Velden especially, and a few of his allies, wanted the power, but they didn’t represent much in the way of activists, real leaders in the movements.

NAC, or its key leaders at least, went rabid at start of 2005, but the whole concept was flawed, in hock to a few at the top of NAC, especially John van der Velden.

SA was also given a boost at that time by the Scottish Socialist Party getting six MSPs elected in May 2003

A new party with the militant trade union current

At the time of that 2003 SA national conference we also saw more of the potential and possibilities of the militant union current. Many of us who had been feeling down about the prospects of SA, with the affiliates not wanting to proceed with this major move to a MTSP, and realising that the NAC independents didn’t really represent a lot of activists and commitment, started to put more of our hopes on the militant union current, especially those in Workers First, the leadership caucus in the Victorian AMWU led by Craig Johnston.

During the conference Workers First organised a big fundraiser at Comrades Bar, and all those from SA conference were invited to attend. It was a great atmosphere, packed out, and we even noticed a nervous observer or two from SAlt come along, and retire a bit subdued. Craig made a $500 donation to Socialist Alliance from the proceeds of the night.

During the 2004 SA national conference in Melbourne, again the saving grace was meeting up with Craig Johnston, Workers First, and other militants, in the social event afterwards.

So at each of the last three SA national conferences our hopes that SA can become our new party have been raised by our contact with the militant trade union current in Melbourne. And by now we desperately needed them, since our first sets of partners, the small left groups, and then the NAC, had decisively demonstrated they weren’t going to be contributing much to our new party project.

The militant trade union current is supposed to fill the gap now, but few are actually involved in SA, they’re not activists in SA. They rarely come to branch meetings, and rarely to national executive meetings when they’re placed on that body. We can make them nominal leaders, and that’s useful for us, they’re happy to be solidarity partners, or sponsors of events, they’ll pass the bucket around for collections for us or our campaigns, and say “Good on you.”. But they’re mostly not organisationally building a project together with us.

Furthermore, the militant trade union current in general is also in the ALP and the Greens. And in this period there’s a pull towards the ALP, rather than a likely break

So we’re left with hyping the militant trade union current, and it’s time to look realistically at the actual picture. The militant trade union current is there – in Victoria there’s been that current for many decades. But we haven’t succeeded in making it an SA current. More of them are in the ALP. I’m not downplaying the significance of the militant trade union current in the trade union sphere but rather pointing out the reality of their role in SA, which is rather minimal. It calls into question whether we’re wise to persist with SA as “the party we build” at the expense of weakening the foundations of the DSP.

Our tactic has become our prison

The Socialist Alliance tactic that we began with was meant to be very flexible. But now it has become our prison, limiting our tactical flexibility.

The jumps which we make, NC after NC, to respond to the permanent crises, which are quite large, are jumps to desperately retain the tactic when the conditions are not there to implement the tactic, and when it has proved to be a mistake. This is the opposite of the flexibility we need.

We need flexibility, to respond to new openings. We shouldn’t be bound by a single tactic, or an old tactic that’s not working. But with “SA as a party” as our permanent tactic, the flexibility, the jumps, get applied to finding new ways to justify (not actually build) the SA tactic.

The jumps are there to keep us in prison. They’re indicators of more than a tactic, but a permanent strategy

Dave Riley asks (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 17, p24) do we want to “transcend” the DSP model of the last 20 years? Yes, we want to grow to a new level of a revolutionary party, to win more cadre, to win more of a base in the working class. We’ll keep trying, and keep those flexible tactics. But not if that transcending means getting rid of or threatening the gains we’ve made over the last 35 years. Not if it means a retreat.

Of course there’s frustration that we haven’t become a mass party, and I’ve got cause to be frustrated more than most, having been at it longer than most comrades. All of us want a faster pace. But when a tactic has failed, don’t persist in it. Preserve the gains we’ve made, and operate at a realistic level, and preserve the experience, don’t forget it.

But don’t lock ourselves into a false new party course, not as a tactic, but as a permanent strategy, where there’s the DSP, and a few others, operating with a non-revolutionary program. It won’t be the way to a bigger revolutionary Marxist party.

The tactic in desperate search for a rationale, for a justification, ends up transformed into a permanent strategy, and a flawed one at that.

Twisting on the dilemma of a mistake – June 2004 NC

The impasse we’re at with Socialist Alliance, its obvious failure as a new party, and the dynamic of the debate, has sent our party-building perspective reports further off beam, as we try to straddle irreconcilable positions, to somehow find a rationale for persisting with the “SA as our party” line that was launched with such hope three years ago.

We adopted the new line formally at our congress in December 2003. But almost straight away we were having problems with it. Each party-building report since then has addressed the crisis, of dropping membership, falling sales, financial crisis, weakened Resistance.

Even before that congress, at the July 14, 2003 DSP national executive meeting, the “Party-building perspectives” report presented by Comrade Peter Boyle began: “This is a discussion forced on us by a crisis”. We launched an emergency campaign on GLW distribution, finances and education. Peter ended by stressing that “I want to make it absolutely clear that nothing we will propose here comprises a retreat from our perspective of making SA the new party we build. Indeed what we are doing is part of the necessary transition to this end”.

By the June 2004 NC meeting we could see we were in serious trouble. Peter Boyle’s report on “Party building and the Socialist Alliance, (The Activist Vol. 14, No. 4) argued that we had hopes for the militant trade union current to “offset the sectarian tendencies [of the affiliates] but it can also be an important balance against the more individualistic and liberal tendencies of some of the pro-MTSP independents.” This anticipated the huge blow up as they went feral earlier this year.

We now referred to it as the “two party problem”, a huge overload on our comrades as we simultaneously tried to build two structures.

But we compounded the problem. Our initial response was to recognise the crisis, but decide to speed up the first transition, that is dissolve more of the functioning of the DSP, do more of our work within the framework of SA. But it was a contradictory response, because we did make an initial recognition of the need to “organise differently” in regard to branch meetings etc.

Since the last congress, we’ve been thrashing around with new organisation “fixes” which don’t solve anything – splitting branches; merging branches; centralising; pushing out. In this debate, the majority thinks they’ve defined the problem out of existence, it’s now just a question of “two organisations” rather than two parties, but it’s not two organisations that will be really functioning at the same time. To respond to the emergencies, SA has to be put on hold for a period.

Looking for a solution – November 2004 NC

Immediately after the twin shocks of Howard’s re-election and Bush’s as well, by our November 2004 NC meeting our problems were not being overcome, but at least we were starting to more realistically address them, and there was an actual proposal to address one of our biggest crises, the decline of Resistance.

The party-building report presented by Comrade Peter Boyle was very sober, and had the concrete proposal of organising the Venezuela brigades, for reviving Resistance through solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution, getting inspiration from a living revolution. It was an excellent step.

And the rest of the report was in sensible mode, starting to address the problem although not yet willing to admit the fundamental line was a mistake, that the “SA as our new party” tactic had failed, and that we had to revert back to a more realistic role for SA, before it became our permanent strategy.

I’ve taken some quotes from it here, and printed it in full as an appendix, since this report was never printed in The Activist. (One of the consequences of our transition into SA as our party, was that some of our DSP institutions suffered and we were making less use of The Activist, although we were also worried about our internal deliberations getting leaked to our political opponents.) The report began:

1. The previous report (Lisa M’s “Australian Politics and our Socialist Alliance work”) registered that it is proving a hard and dragged out struggle to try and get Socialist Alliance to progress towards becoming a united socialist party. This is not fundamentally a result of subjective failure – that is if only we had done X or Y differently, we would be much further ahead – but that it reflects the objective political conditions.

2. This recognition doesn’t demolish the key premise of our last congress perspectives document, ‘The Democratic Socialist Perspective and the Socialist Alliance’, that: ‘The opening for the Socialist Alliance was very concrete. It was a response to the beginning of a new cycle of working-class and anti-capitalist struggle following two decades of working class retreat.’ That opening was there but there have been setbacks: the attack on Craig Johnston, his removal from leadership of the Victorian AMWU and now jailing was significant. The rapid retreat of the million who took to the streets in February 2003 against the invasion of Iraq, was another. These are objective developments which have worked against speedier progress….

DSP membership has continued to fall since the last NC. In June we had 281 members and now we have 275. What is noticeable about these figures, especially when you compare it with previous years is the very low numbers of provisional members…. But in the last two years, since we did our turn into SA, provisional membership has totally dropped off. Basically we’ve stopped recruiting to the DSP – or at least slowed it to a dribble….”

“Now let’s look at the Green Left Weekly sales statistics: this year’s average is slightly lower than last year’s but both years are way down on the previous two years – where we averaged about 2000 per issue – while now it is around 1600…. [lower now – JP]

21. And the sales chart shows very graphically our declining cadre base. Since 2001, the number of sellers we get out on average each issue has fallen from 193, to 188, to 163 and this year on average 147! This is a better measure of our cadre decline than the raw membership figures because we have a large proportion of members who are no longer very active at all….”

23. Again there are many other factors behind this decline: the ageing and tiring of our DSP membership, or the impact on political morale and confidence of the decades of working class retreat, the conservative tide on campus, etc but there is also the impact of the turn into Socialist Alliance. As we analysed last NC, this is putting a tremendous strain on overstretched comrades, especially in the leadership and the time has not been put into basic development and training of new cadre. In addition a layer of our membership is tending to retreat to the lower average activity level of many SA members (sometimes even below that!) [emphasis added – JP]

30. Even simply from the point of view of addressing our financial problem we can see that the cadre decline is at the heart of a solution. Look at our falling weekly pledge base: In Aug 2002 it was $6,308. By August 2003 it had fallen to $5,558. We began campaigning to bring it up to $6,000 but by August this year [2004] it was down to $5,202 and now [November 2004] it has fallen below the $5,000 mark to $4,996. Some of this is due to the loss of some members but more to members with decent incomes reducing their pledges for a variety of personal reasons.

39. Rebuilding Resistance as the main engine of growth for the revolutionary cause in this country is what we are talking about in this report. This is serious business that we need to deal with right now. If we don’t deal with this then all our grand hopes for left regroupment might as well be chucked out the window. Can’t be done for lack of cadre. Full stop. Game over.

One step forward, two steps back – May 2005 NC

Our May national committee meeting was an important further step in clawing our way out of the mess we’d got in. It built on the progress made at the November NC, and a stark analysis at our March 14 national executive meeting of the state of the DSP and the crisis in the SA with the sabotage of the ISO, and the blackmail demands of the NAC leaders. (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 2)

The May NC also followed a successful DSP January education conference, and the very successful Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference in March. Comrades responded to both these conferences like a breath of fresh air. The previous year of desperately trying to build SA as our party, without our usual political stimulation and discussion from a properly functioning DSP, had left many comrades both exhausted and politically starved.

Because the DSP organisational crises had got even worse, the May NC launched an emergency campaign, the eight emergency measures. It also foreshadowed the need for “Re-imagining our party-building perspective”. “If SA cannot become our new party – without new external political developments – what can it be? What must the DSP be?” This rethinking was projected for the second half of the year as we went into our pre-congress discussion and congress.

But the May NC was contradictory. What happened before it? Comrade Peter Boyle seemed to be getting pulled in two directions, seeing the root cause and the way out of our crisis, but unwilling to let go of the “SA as our new party” tactic/strategy. His party-building report was a good report, but the summary was not so good, reflecting his dilemma, and I shouldn’t have voted for it.

Around the time of the May NC Peter had only small hopes that the SA could stick together, the leaders of NAC were behaving so factionally, it threatened to blow. In private conversations he considered abandoning it.

But at the June SA national conference NAC and the affiliates were decisively beaten back. At last we let our comrades vote for DSP members as delegates according to their real weight in the branches, not having to vote for and prop up the NAC leaders, so we had an absolute majority of delegates anyway. We just let the actual strength of NAC be laid bare, and stopped propping them up.

There was also the successful Fightback conference, which attracted a range of militant union speakers from the different political currents, and a number of rank-and-file workers. This was presented under the banner of Socialist Alliance, but organised by DSP comrades, especially Comrade Sue Bolton. It was clearly successful, so that the ISO and Freedom Socialist Party had to try to claim that they, as part of SA, had been instrumental in helping organise it!

So for the third year in a row, the DSP leadership was renewed in its faith that the SA new party tactic might still work through its contact with the militant union current during the SA national conference in Melbourne. Once again we placed our hopes on the militant union current as the rationale for the SA as our new party, but the reality was they weren’t going to lead it, build it, and very rarely come along to meetings.

Coming out of the conference the comrades now leading the NE majority were gung ho about SA again. So although we’d made an emergency change of course on the organisational tasks at the May NC, there was not going to be any “re-imagining” of our SA tactic. It was back to compounding the problem, with no political assessment and recognition of the mistake, just the organisational fix by the DSP – run on sales, and the emergency finance appeal – so we could have another bash at SA as our new party.

Of course, the events of the June SA conference seem nowhere near a good enough reason for reviving the “SA as our party” perspective. We “won” decisively because we had stopped propping up the NAC independents who had very little support in the branches, so we had an absolute majority, and of the small number of independents who were delegates, we had supported those who were working closely with us, so we had a large majority guaranteed.

In terms of significant forces in SA, it is now, even more than ever, not much more than ourselves. We have a good basis for a campaigning alliance, but not for SA to move towards being a party.

The ISO presence is purely token, they don’t help with SA stalls, don’t help with SA contingents at demos, don’t hold SA banners or placards.

The NAC independents, certainly those that we had propped up as leaders, are mostly gone.

In spite of the Fightback conference, the militant trade union current plays very little role inside SA, hardly ever coming to meetings, or taking responsibility for leadership.

SA is pretty lifeless, and especially in the last six months as the DSP has been trying to solve the GLW sales and finance crises.

Perhaps other considerations that we’re not fully aware of yet were starting to come into play in this period as well. In any case, Comrade Peter Boyle and the other comrades who had been playing major roles in SA became gung ho for “SA as our party” again just as it became clearer for some other comrades on the national leadership that our tactic of building SA as our party had clearly failed, and the weakening of the cadre base and cadre quality of the DSP couldn’t go on any longer, and we had to resurface the DSP again.

Our initial draft resolution on the DSP and SA, versions 1 and 2, had the emphasis on back to SA as the party, but the August 15 NE meeting accepted the main minority amendments, which drew it back from that, so we were able to support the general line of version 3.

There are many viewpoints covered by the NC majority bloc, and not even all of these have surfaced in the PCD yet. There are so many descriptions of what SA is, and will be.

So the dominant majority line is a straddling position, with some positions not stated (and some key members of the bloc not writing or talking in the PCD). Combined with Comrade Boyle’s reports being quite in conflict with the actual draft resolution, and the varied positions of the key majority supporters, we have a deeply contradictory and confusing line.

Three years ago Peter concluded his “Party-building tasks and perspectives report” to the October 2002 DSP NC meeting with the warning: “But we are not blind to the possibility that we may be forced to turn back at some stage. This too is another reason why we must keep our discipline. If we are forced to retreat on this project it will be an orderly and temporary retreat that can quickly be turned into a new offensive.” (The Activist Vol. 12, No. 14, October 2002)

Today we have the realisation that the international and Australian conditions for creating our new party are not yet here, the hoped for workers upsurge has not yet happened. And all the partners we were looking to have let us down – the small affiliates, including the ISO; the Non-Aligned Caucus, and very few independents playing an active role; and the militant trade union current just there in the shadows, not playing an active role in SA.

Surely it’s time to recognise we have to make that orderly retreat, and recognise that SA is not “the party we are building today”. That has to be the DSP.

SA Mark 3 – where now?

Either we go back to a realistic perspective for SA, as a campaigning alliance, with no illusions that we can proceed to a new party any time soon, and return to the DSP as “the party we build”. Perhaps this would be more like SA Mark 1, at least we had more people coming around SA then.

Or else we thrash around looking for new justifications for persisting with the SA as our new party tactic, which thus becomes clear that it’s seen as our permanent strategy by now.

More comrades are coming up with new organisational justifications for it, for example as a permanent half-way house, a bridge, that “any revolutionary party worth its salt” has to have, as Sue Bolton wrote in one PCD. (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 8) This is an innovation, that we need a left social democratic front to reach workers. (It’s not the same as the labour party tactic that revolutionaries in places like the USA have used where there’s no social democratic or labour party at all.)

Is the new upsurge against the IR laws, led by the ALP/ACTU, going to be the saviour of the tactic? Hope springs eternal in those who are so fundamentally committed to a particular tactic, in spite of the experience of three very difficult years, even if to do so means forgetting our understanding of the tactics used by the ALP in misleading working people.

Is this the final resting place of our tactic in desperate search of a rationale?

Why the heat?

Some comrades ask, “Why the heat?” Why has this political discussion in the DSP become so sharp?

Isn’t it just a slight difference over the allocation of resources? How much goes to SA, how much goes to other political tasks, how much to our organisational tasks.

No, that’s one aspect of it, but “SA as our party” was a fundamentally flawed tactic, which has settled in as a flawed strategy now. It will lead to further worse consequences, and the political problems are already starting to grow.

Dave Riley asks (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 17, p.24) “If it was overwhelmingly a problem of sales, cadreisation and such, of party organisation – I cannot fathom where the sudden urgency is coming from.”

Firstly, and set aside, the fact that it’s not just “organisation”, we won’t solve the cadre renewal crisis just with the May NC emergency organisational adjustments.

But more importantly, there are the dangers of now seeing the SA party project as our strategy, something which began as a tactic within the framework of our revolutionary party-building strategy. I can understand some of the heat – on both sides – since the new party tactic has become transformed into a strategy for some comrades.

The minority perspective is logical, once you realistically look at the facts, our experience: don’t persist in a failed tactic. It is necessary to “re-imagine”. But that was not done. What we’ve seen is an actual retreat back to a failed tactic, keeping the political integration into SA, even if drawing back from the integration of our physical resources. So the DSP does the hard work, but SA is the public face of our politics.

I think also partly the heat of the discussion is inherent in the nature of the mistake, and the hype and delusions needed to keep it from collapsing.

The minority has made a sharp analysis, warning of the mistake and the dangers of persisting in it, and pointing to the very obvious indicators of how our party has been weakened by this erroneous line. But the majority looks on us as though we’re wrongly airing dirty linen in public, we shouldn’t be speaking about it. It’s a bit like the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Emperor’s new clothes”, and we’re like the little kid who points out the obvious truth, that everyone else has been conned into shutting up about.

What are the possible responses to such a scenario?

One range of response involves weaving a new magic coat, putting up more smoke and mirrors. For example, the DSP can’t tell the militant union current that we’re a party, that’s too sensitive, it would demoralise them.

Another range of responses is to get the kid out of the parade, shut her up, shoot the messenger. Thus you mock the discussion, as Comrade Peter Boyle did during his October NC report. Or you argue that “we shouldn’t have had this discussion, it just stirs up the demoralised elements,” as he said to one comrade at that NC. Or you call all the minority, “demoralised elements”, or impute ulterior motives to them. We might yet see more of this before the discussion is finished.

So are the differences so big? Yes, if it’s a difference between recognising that “the party we build” is the DSP, or persisting with the failed perspective of “the party we build” is the Socialist Alliance.

A new party with ourselves

After four and a half years of hard work and tens of thousands of dollars expense, what are the indicators of SA’s life as a party-in-formation?

• No more than 25 activists semi-regularly active in building SA all around the country – after four and a half years;
• Almost no SA branches where it can be said that there are leadership teams for an embryonic class-struggle party with a significant number of non-DSP members participating;
• Apart from Geelong, no SA branches where trade union militants from outside the DSP are playing leadership roles, taking on responsibilities;
• SA trade union caucuses, for example in Sydney and Melbourne, still involving very minimal numbers;
• Are trade union militants, outside the DSP, writing in Alliance Voices? Not really;
• After four and a half years, an SA NE that in its month to month operations is hardly more than the DSP plus a few opponents – no real breadth;
• Tiny non-DSP SA mobilisation in the last anti-war actions.

But what about November 15, majority supporters ask?

• Yes, 114 non-DSP members assisted in distributing SA propaganda material. This shows that SA can indeed be a banner under which activists might gather in a campaigning framework compared to the tiny numbers who get involved in SA as-a-party building work. But even then we should note that for the biggest trade union mobilisation in a long time and the biggest since the anti-Iraq war demos, only 10% of listed SA members helped do SA propaganda work.

But what about June 30/July 1?

• We must not confuse the spontaneous sentiment among trade union members for more action with SA influence. Resolutions for an action often got up because the mass sentiment was already there, not because SA somehow had already influenced people.
• Our comrades would have made their interventions from the floor anyway, as would have other trade union members who wanted more action.

But what about our alleged generally increased influence? More trade union leaders and activists are willing to speak on SA platforms, for example?

SA, with a much more limited program (in fact only a classical social democratic platform), where the DSP’s profile is buried, makes DSP members when they wear a SA hat much more acceptable. The SA is less threatening, at least to those on the left of the trade union spectrum. We should not confuse SA’s acceptability with an increase in influence for the DSP and its program.

Neither should we confuse the authority and respect the DSP has won as a result of, in particular, our last 15 years of interventions, GLW and projects, including a decade of campaign interventions and projects prior to SA, but includes our initial genuine attempt to make a go of SA, with an “influence” that is somehow embodied in SA.

Nor should we confuse the references to “the trots” and the like from the class collaborationist trade union bureaucrats with our own analysis of our weight. One, they are bloody paranoid and two, they are likely to write off any opposition as being “the trots”, as an attempt to isolate it.

Our earlier reach-out efforts

The Socialist Alliance has been touted as “our best chance” ever to break out to a mass base. We can assess more at our leisure whether it ever was “our best chance”, whether we’d misjudged the political possibility and the objective conditions when we began, in 2001, or when we made our major turn, in 2002-03. But it’s not now anyway, not in the light of our years of really trying hard with it, and applying a new rationale as each one fails, disappears.

Our earlier efforts at reach-out in the 1980s all failed too, but they were also big opportunities, and real chances to expand our mass base, and this latest failure doesn’t stand out as a qualitatively bigger opportunity than many of them, only that we’ve stretched it out longer, and the negative impact on our cadre base has been deeper.

• The Nuclear Disarmament Party, the NDP, based on the anti-nuke movement for example, had 10,000 members. It attracted large numbers of activists (plus some prime opportunists and right-wingers – in itself an indicator of its potential for getting people into parliament, which it did.) It won a significant percentage of the vote, and was able to get several senators elected.
• When we were involved with the New Left Party, the regroupment effort with the Communist Party and some others, the CPA still had a significant membership, more than a thousand, and still a sizeable union base. If that had succeeded it would have shaken up left and labour movement politics considerably.
• Even our unity effort with the Socialist Party of Australia (which has now changed its name to CPA) with its aging membership and a smaller number of activists, it still would have been significant. They still had certain resources, and a trade union cadre (increasingly retired unionists) and migrant groups around them.
• Even with the Greens, if we’d been able to remain members and not renounce or totally hide our socialist politics, it could have put us in a very interesting position, given the subsequent growth of the Greens and their electoral successes.
• For Socialist Alliance Mark 1, when we began the ISO might have had 200 members on their books, and the other Trotskyist groups added another 50.
• For Socialist Alliance Mark 2, the small affiliates pulled back, we hoped for more from the independent activists, but NAC proved a failure, and there’s the hope of the militant trade union current making the difference, but we haven’t seen much of their active participation or leadership.
• For Socialist Alliance Mark 3, there’s ourselves and who else? A small number of other activists!

We’re at the crossroads, spelled out by the two different party-building reports presented to our October NC. The minority report outlined the realistic, specific things that we can actually do with SA, as a campaigning alliance, but not having the DSP substitute itself for the party that hasn’t developed. The majority report still sees SA as the party we build today, while the DSP remains behind the scenes, not as the party we build.

I gave our international work report to the October 2002 NC meeting that adopted our major turn to become a tendency in SA – “Imperialist crisis and the impetus to international left renewal”, (The Activist Vol. 12, No. 14, October 2002). As well as looking at the international situation, I set our bold turn in the framework of our 1980s reach-out efforts.

Those efforts in the 1980s were predicated on our political reassessments, breaking with schemas. Don’t convert tactics into strategies. Don’t get stuck with permanent tactics…

This development, the SA 18 months ago, and our new proposals for strengthening it, should not be seen as a surprise, a break. They are in the framework we developed in the 1980s.

And we shouldn’t see it as our old party ‘dissolving’. As Jim Percy put it in his report to our October 1987 NC meeting (reprinted as the pamphlet Building the Revolutionary Party): Our party-building strategy is not a break with our past. The biggest political error we could make is to think that our party-building perspective is outdated – ‘without the old party, there won’t be a new party.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve followed that wise advice over the last three years, and have now ended up in a precarious state.

Dangerous consequences

A mistaken tactic, persisted in, has unfortunate and dangerous consequences.

1. We lose objectivity. Hype, in all its varieties, becomes standard. We hype up SA itself, of course, and hype up any individuals or grouping that might be able to rescue the tactic – NAC, and their leaders; the militant trade union current; what next?
2. We develop an organisation focus, away from the politics. It fits in with the “reach the broad masses” line, “get out of our ghetto”, become “more like ordinary workers”. “Just do it.”. SA is not nearly so scary as that DSP, they’re revolutionaries/communists/fanatics etc. GLW has to be written for eight-year-olds (as Comrade Barry Healy argues in his PCD in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 18). And there are further organisational consequences, “fixes” to try to address the uncomfortable contradictions that increasingly arise.
3. Cadre renewal and education becomes increasingly difficult. (See my PCD on “Is cadre renewal possible with the NC majority perspective?” in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 18) It’s not just the GLW sales problem that gets worse. Not just the ongoing financial emergency. Not just the hard organising work on fewer shoulders. Not just the cadre renewal drying up from Resistance. Comrades slide away from thinking as Marxists, basing our perspectives, our tactics, on objective reality rather than our political desires.
4. We lose our critical vision, lose our sharp political judgement. We can contemplate that a mass upsurge might be “led by the ALP and ACTU”. We fudge on reporting Combet’s militant posing, not thinking it’s necessary to report his actual proposals for “action”. We’re in danger of making other political mistakes if we feel pressure to shoehorn the facts into our tactic now transformed into a strategy.

The collective refusal to admit past mistakes is a scary psychological approach, as we still search for the replacement rationale for our failed tactic.

All in all, it’s a retreat from the party we have built over the last 35 years.

Appendix

Party-building report to November 2004 DSP NC by Peter Boyle

[Following is the party-building report to the November 2004 DSP NC presented by Comrade Peter Boyle. It was not published in The Activist at the time. It’s worth printing for this pre-congress discussion as a contribution to a better understanding of the last five years of our Socialist Alliance tactic, the changes in our justification of the SA tactic, and our assessment of a year ago.]

1. The previous report (Lisa M “Australian Politics and our Socialist Alliance work”) registered that it is proving a hard and dragged out struggle to try and get Socialist Alliance to progress towards becoming a united socialist party. This is not fundamentally a result of subjective failure – that is if only we had done X or Y differently, we would be much further ahead – but that it reflects the objective political conditions.
2. This recognition doesn’t demolish the key premise of our last congress perspectives document, The Democratic Socialist Perspective and the Socialist Alliance, that: “The opening for the Socialist Alliance was very concrete. It was a response to the beginning of a new cycle of working-class and anti-capitalist struggle following two decades of working class retreat.” That opening was there but there have been setbacks: the attack on Craig Johnston, his removal from leadership of the Victorian AMWU and now jailing was significant. The rapid retreat of the million who took to the streets in February 2003 against the invasion of Iraq, was another. These are objective developments which have worked against speedier progress.
3. The political confidence of the broad layers of people attracted by the idea of a united left is affected critically by such broader political conditions. Comrades saw this relation in the last two Socialist Alliance conferences where the presence of the trade union militants gave massive confidence to the pro-MTSP majority.
4. However, the new political situation opened up by Howard’s election victory and control of the both houses or parliament will favour Socialist Alliance if it plays a good role in the resistance to Howard’s attacks. So we expect that the objective conditions for progress towards building SA into a new party may improve.
5. On the basis of this expectation, this NC is projecting that we stick to the party building tactic of regroupment through the Socialist Alliance project, as outlined in The Democratic Socialist Perspectives and the Socialist Alliance document we adopted at the last congress. Because we are still implementing this perspective, the NE judged that we didn’t need another Congress this year, and given our urgent education needs would be better off with an education conference.
6. However, as we already recognized at our June NC, carrying on with a drawn out “building two parties” situation requires that we take certain measures. On one hand we strive to make our work in SA more efficient and on the other we need to replenish our cadre resources.
7. The June party building report focused largely on the former (and we recognized that we have made limited progress with that – largely because of the long federal election campaign – but agreed in the previous report to retackle those tasks) but in this report we will focus on the later task: cadre replenishment.
8. First, let’s take a look at where we are at in party building terms today: DSP membership has continued to fall since the last NC. In June we had 281 members and now we have 275. What is noticeable about these figures, especially when you compare it with previous years is the very low numbers of provisional members. There were only seven in June and there are 12 now. This is better but not enough. A third of these provos have been recruited out of Socialist Alliance, and two of them were won from the Greens to SA and then joined the DSP.
9. So, on one hand, you could say that compared to previous years our turnover is smaller (i.e. we are keeping members better, we are not recruiting new members at anywhere near the rate of past years. In 1998 we had an average of 40 provisional members, in 1999 we had 37, in 2000 we had 47, 2001, after the S11 upsurge 80, and in 2002 we had an average of 31 provisional members. But in the last two years, since we did our turn into SA, provisional membership has totally dropped off. Basically we’ve stopped recruiting to the DSP – or at least slowed it to a dribble. If you look at this chart you will notice that provo membership is a sort of lead indicator: when the number of provos starts falling we know that the number of full members will soon start to fall, and vice versa. That’s the good news!
10. Now let’s look at the Green Left Weekly sales statistics: this year’s average is slightly lower than last year’s but both years are way down on the previous two years – where we averaged about 2000 per issue – while now it is around 1600. The two years before that (1999, 2000) the average sales were more around the 2200 mark and in 1997-1998 it was around 2400.
11. Many objective reasons have been suggested for this decline: the political situation gradually cooling off from the high of 1998, especially on campuses and the rise of the internet. And undoubtedly these are real factors.
12. Certainly we are getting used to the idea that the majority of our readers never see the paper – some are surprised to discover that actually is a physical newspaper associated with Australia’s top political website! This premier position on the web is a real asset: 10,000-14,000 visits per day and an increasing page reads per visit. And since the elections we’ve seen another huge leap. I guess with Bush and Howard back in the saddle people feel they need Green Left Weekly all the more.
13. The internet makes Green Left Weekly our biggest political asset and this registers all over the place. We haven’t got all our eggs in the Socialist Alliance basket – far from it. Wide layers of people may not be sure about the prospects for the Socialist Alliance, and lately a few of us probably have shared that doubt, but as Green Left Weekly has come out regularly for 14 years it has won greater respect. Accumulated and earned political authority is the real currency in politics. How many times has someone unexpectedly said to you while selling Green Left Weekly on a street corner: “I’m Glad you keep on going!” And they express this in many ways: they help us keep the paper alive, and we have reason to believe a growing number are remembering us in their wills. So our falling sales are more than balanced by our growing internet readership – in terms of getting the word out.
14. We’ve continued to make moves to capitalize on this: Slowly improving and modernising the website, adding new features – weblogs are the latest but a sort of update/breaking news feature with links to interesting articles on the web will be next. We finally got secure transactions placed on the site and a spate of subscriptions have come in through the website since we did this less than a month ago. We’ve also got some donations. Two weeks after we had secure transaction we received apparent donations totalling $25,000. The credit card agencies OKed them and transferred the money into our accounts and we thought there’s the end of our deficit! Indeed we calculated if this is what we received in just eight days, in a year we could get $1,140,635!! But alas these were hoaxes, at the expense of some rich credit-card holders. However, I reckon it was close: somewhere out there, there probably is a millionaire or two or even a dozen who recognize that capitalism is a doomed system and want to help end of the agony – via donation to GL. I can sense it out there: the Lasseter’s Reef of socialism!
15. Where do you draw the line between crazy dreams and wise planning for the future? Well we have now set up a special incorporated body to receive bequests and donations called Green Left Inc. We are not fantasists – we’ve done the hard yards and we count on a reward.
16. Apart from our huge and growing internet readership, our domestic subscription base has remained relatively stable at around 1000 over the last few years. We have in this a core of loyal, long-time subscribers – many of them people who donate and come to our fund-raising. The good news here is that we have a sort of stable semi-organised periphery with this subscription base.
17. But while some branches have a healthy sub base but in others it could do with a bit of building up. How does your branch shape up on this score? And what is your branch going to do about it? Remember the more subscribers your branch has the easier it is to organize major events, forums, fundraisers etc. What could be more valuable – apart from comrades – than a layer of people who read what we have to say week after week, whose address and phone number (and increasingly email) we have access to?
18. And recently we have begun adding a new category to this valuable base – internet only subs. These are people who pay for subscriptions but only read it on the internet. Since we began advertising these on the website we have had 11 people take out internet-only subs, and even more ordinary subscriptions.
19. The sub base dropped a little during the last few months of pre-election madness, but over the last week with the subscription drive beginning, we have made a sharp recovery. In three weeks we went from 867 to 950. If the branches that haven’t done their sub-a-thons do some then, for sure, we will go over the 1000 mark again. Our subs are selling more easily especially in the wake of the Australian and now US election victories for the pro-war Howard and Bush. The plan, as discussed with organisers over the lunch break, is to follow this up with a sales blitz in the last issue of this year.
20. But the resilience of the sub base points to a subjective failing in the declining GLW sales: its not just objective factors but our failing. Part of it is weaker organizing from the National Office – the last decent sales organizer we had was Sue Bolton. As we’ve sliced off part of our NO for the Socialist Alliance this has left us with fewer people juggling too many responsibilities so that often nothing gets done well at all.
21. And the sales chart shows very graphically our declining cadre base. Since 2001, the number of sellers we get out on average each issue has fallen from 193, to 188, to 163 and this year on average 147! This is a better measure of our cadre decline than the raw membership figures because we have a large proportion of members who are no longer very active at all.
22. In the 1990s when GLW sales were much higher, more than half the weekly bundle was sold by Resistance members (DSP-Res mainly), now less than a third on average is sold by Resistance members. Of course in those days we had a little army of young unemployed and barely studying students but these days many youth have increasingly time-challenged lives because have to work part-time. And the unemployed youth are simply not allowed to be!
23. Again there are many other factors behind this decline: the ageing and tiring of our DSP membership, or the impact on political morale and confidence of the decades of working class retreat, the conservative tide on campus, etc but there is also the impact of the turn into Socialist Alliance. As we analysed last NC, this is putting a tremendous strain on overstretched comrades, especially in the leadership and the time has not been put into basic development and training of new cadre. In addition a layer of our membership is tending to retreat to the lower average activity level of many SA members (sometimes even below that!)
24. We recognized all this last June NC and resolved to deal with it but then went into another cycle of trying to build SA through the election campaign. But sooner or later something has to give. We have to make time and find the resources to replenish our cadre resources or we go under. Back in June the alarm bells were set off by the state of our finances and though I didn’t begin this report with finances they are not good.
25. Let’s look at the finance figures. Our operating deficit, which had ballooned to $60K by April has been cut back to $36K. There is no doubt that without the long drawn out election campaign we would have been in a much better position. We subsidised SA’s election campaign at many levels (expenditure never claimed, comrades contributions financially – remember who joined the $100 Club, and diversion of fundraising space and energy). Hence after improving dramatically in May and June, we then went sideways for two months and down again in September and October.
26. All this time DSP expenditure has been reined in and has been declining but alas income has declined faster!
27. We are not proposing another specific emergency finance campaign but we are requesting that all branches make a big effort to make the end of year fundraising events a big success. The dinners, harbour cruises. We are also asking comrades to pay up their back branch pledges and meet their fighting fund pledges. If we do this, we should end the year with not too unbearable deficit. But unlike the USA we cannot carry on year after year building up our deficit. Nobody in the world dare to take them to the cleaners for fear of the consequences. We did this for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then spent much of a decade paying it off, with interest. We’ve got some reserves today and we don’t have any debt left.
28. Meanwhile, we are on a permanent expenditure-cutting watch. In any case, we have been reducing our expenditure steadily over the years – by more than 40% over the last decade in dollar terms. This means it is much more when you take inflation into account. And now we are trying further savings, through technological changes (more use of data phones, free instant messenger services, savings on internet changes, etc). We’ll also look for other sources of income, including investigating selected advertising on our website.
29. But we urgently need to try and attend to the main source of this problem: the need to replenish our cadre. It’s so urgent we should be prepared to go into the red if it helps us address this problem.
30. Even simply from the point of view of addressing our financial problem we can see that the cadre decline is at the heart of a solution. Look at our falling weekly pledge base: In Aug 2002 it was $6,308. By August 2003 it had fallen to $5,558. We began campaigning to bring it up to $6,000 but by August this year it was down to $5,202 and now it has fallen below the $5,000 mark to $4,996. Some of this is doe to the loss of some members but more to members with decent incomes reducing their pledges for a variety of personal reasons.
31. We will keep asking comrades to raise their pledges, especially if they are on good incomes, but we know that this will meet with a greater response if we can show that we can attract some new youth activists. As the party ages, the ageing layers look over their shoulders to who may replace them at the political battlefront. And when the numbers of younger comrades coming forward look thin they get worried, some get disheartened. But if there are healthy contingents of spritely young Bolshies charging up, jostling for a spot on the frontline then the mood lifts and the battle is rejoined with greater vigour.
32. So this is another reason why we are looking to step up our recruitment of young activists.
33. Two months ago, the National Executive and Political Committee confronted the political challenges of recruiting a new generation of young revolutionary cadre. Given the low ebb of campus politics, how would it be possible to recruit and develop such cadre? And the answer came from Caracas.
34. Basically our reasoning was this: A real revolutionary process was underway in Venezuela, and it was inspiring a much broader new wave of revolt against neo-liberalism and its political regimes across Latin America, Further it was linked to and strengthening the Cuban revolution. 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.
35. 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.
36. So we proposed a very conscious turn in our youth work towards building solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution. The time is right, as comrades who attended yesterday’s Latin America Solidarity Conference saw to build such a solidarity movement. Indeed if we don’t build such a movement others will.
37. Apart from building CISLAC and existing solidarity organizations we proposed to the Resistance leadership, and it agreed, to try and set up Venezuela Solidarity Committees/Clubs on every campus where they are active. These should draw attract young people inspired by an actual living revolution and we would seek to with these people to revolutionary politics and develop them into cadre. We should be single-minded about this. We don’t have to abstain from other issues on campus, certainly if a fight to defend education arises we should be part of it, and if a campus anti-war group starts getting active, join it too. Though on current info we shouldn’t hold our breath for either of these. But come hell or high water we want to get a Venezuela Solidarity Group going. Doesn’t mater if it is modest and only manages a film showing of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Just do it and we will make gains.
38. 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. That is not the problem here. This year there were 532 Resistance joiners but only about 90 people are currently involved in activity with Resistance. Reach out is not the problem but rather it is trying to cohere relatively small group of young revolutionary activists. Let’s put some numbers to this objective: let’s see if we can attract about 100 young people around the country into this work, with the help of a brigade to Venezuela next August (to attend the WFDY international meeting and let’s then try and win at least half of them to Resistance and revolutionary politics. This is what we need, for a start. Such a modest accumulation of young cadre will allow us to rebuild Resistance as the main engine of growth for the revolutionary cause in this country.
39. Rebuilding Resistance as the main engine of growth for the revolutionary cause in this country is what we are talking about in this report. This is serious business that we need to deal with right now. If we don’t deal with this then all our grand hopes for left regroupment might as well be chucked out the window. Can’t be done for lack of cadre. Full stop. Game over.
40. Currently Resistance is a long way from playing this “cadre factory” role, as it did for three decades. Resistance now operates in only ten cities and involves about 90 people in some level of activity. But this is very unevenly organized. In half these cities Resistance branch execs no longer exist or don’t meet. I think we cannot assume that just because campuses are politically flat that we cannot attract young people. Because we are attracting young people through our street campaigning and even through the work we’re doing in Socialist Alliance.
41. During this year, some comrades were beginning to wonder whether Resistance should be abandoned and instead we could build a Socialist Alliance youth organization. But the Congress decided we support Resistance as a revolutionary youth organization, not as a broad left youth organization, which is sort of what the Socialist Alliance is and will be for a long time. And I think the Congress made the right decision. The reason why an SA youth wing is not the best thing is illiustrated by a problem we have now of taking forward the handful of younger people drawn into activity around Socialist Alliance (heaps more send in join forms from the website every week but don’t seem to become activists). Is the politics in SA going to keep them around? I worry that the answer is “no”. Many of the older people come around Socialist Alliance with very modest expectations. They’ve battled on long enough with few results often on their own and SA is a big advance on that, however modest its vote in elections. But the younger SA comrades need more than this to hang around. They need to be challenged by revolutionary politics and be exposed to enough political experience to choose a political life. We need Resistance to take them on. I was disappointed to hear that some of the young comrades around Bankstown SA weren’t at the LA Solidarity conference yesterday. That’s a shame. I’m not sure if Bankstown SA is up to keeping let alone politically developing those young people around it without the intervention of Resistance.
42. We abandoned Resistance organizing in Darwin, Lismore and Geelong because we simply didn’t have the youth leadership to try to run branches there. That was a retreat, and one that the revolutionary presence in those cities cannot afford. Probably as a direct result, we have not developed any new cadre in those three cities. It is a worry. It is not sustainable. Without a steady infusion of revolutionary youth, we have seen other parties degenerate. Look at the old CPA or some of the micro-Trotskyist sects. But we cannot re-establish Resistance in these cities unless we have more youth cadre.
43. One way or another we have to turn this situation around. And we are lucky to have the helping hand of the Bolivarian revolution.
44. But Chavez won’t do all the work for us. Apart from the Venezuela Solidarity initiative, we also need to re-organise Resistance as a revolutionary youth cadre organization. We have finished the debate with a couple of DSP members about Resistance perspectives. And it was about time. For too long Resistance has been divided about its own political character. Maybe it began with grandiose dreaming about the meaning of the high school walkouts against Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation party. Maybe the dream of Resistance as a loose mass movement of youth stems from that time. If that was the source of it there’s no pointing fingers in this room we all share the blame for helping pump up that illusion. (Actually, as John’s book on DSP history will show, it’s an old wrong idea.) Then it got transposed into the dream a few years ago about Resistance merging with the Left Alliance-NBL student left scene, and then this was reinforced with the romantic anarchist/radical liberal fantasies about the so-called new anti-globalisation movement. It was all unreal, we can say confidently with hindsight. Perhaps, we should have forced a reality check earlier. However we allowed time and space for a democratic discussion in the DSP.
45. But winning that debate decisively earlier this year, has not been enough. It is one thing to agree in theory that Resistance should be a revolutionary youth cadre organization and another thing to make it so. Basically Resistance needed to be rebuilt anew and we are only now getting to this task. What does it need is spelt out succinctly in the Congress document, The Democratic Socialist Perspective and Resistance. We should publish the two documents from the conference in an attractive pamphlet and use it as a recruiting tool.
46. So what do we need to do to help rebuild Resistance as a revolutionary youth cadre organisation? We can do a bit of brainstorming today but there are some basics and this is a 6-point proposal that the DSP makes to Resistance leadership if we are agreed here today: 1) We will free some time, space and resources over the next four months to help Resistance Restructure and rebuild itself as a youth cadre organization. 2) We’ll assign a full-time party comrade in the national offices to assist the Resistance NO to rebuild Resistances’ apparatus and organisation. 3) The party will financially assist Resistance to put on the full-timers it needs to do the job. 4) Plans and targets will be negotiated with DSP branches for education and recruiting from Resistance. We want to take DSP provisional membership up to 40 nationally by March or April and we seek to recruit most of these people from Resistance. 5) We will propose a joint DSP-Resistance education working group to coordinate and assist revolutionary education work among the youth in our tendency. Resistance Books should offer special discount and pay later deals to get young comrades to buy revolutionary literature. And we should take around some schools to a number of cities. Leading Resistance comrades have had priority in selection for the post-education conference cadre school. 6) We will urge Resistance to launch a recruitment drive over the next four months and offer some financial assistance for this. Perhaps, to catch the launch of Motorcycle Diaries and the post-election escalation of the war on Iraq Resistance should print a Join Resistance postcard with an image of imperialist war, Che’s “if you tremble with indignation” quote. Something that will help kick-start this drive.
47. How many times did I say financial assistance in that 6-point proposal? Aren’t we facing a financial deficit? Yes but the situation is like this. If you are stuck in a financial hole it’s a better idea to get deeper into debt to buy some good shovels than to sit there worrying about the lack of money. This is the logic of our proposal. It might add another $10-15,000 over the next few months but it will be worth it.
48. We should not let the close of campus worry us as campuses have not been the best young people expect go to find radical politics these days. We can recruit through street stalls, at cinemas, especially political films and at functions we organize. We should get young people to sign up for the Marxist Summer School, attend the preparatory reading groups.
49. We should sign people up to the Venezuela Brigade and involve them in fundraising for that brigade. We will need to raise $60-70,000 to fund that brigade so that work needs to start now. We need to start soliciting donations from unions, SRCs, and start organizing fundraisers, etc. Next year we have the Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference and the Brigadistas should have a prominent place in this conference. Perhaps money can be raised to take some young activists from Indonesia and other countries in the region along with the Brigade.
50. Resistance leadership will need to step up to the challenge too. Stuart has already been on the phone. Young comrades will be asked, and some have already, to volunteer to take on new and heavier responsibilities. They should step forward confidently. We’ll do this collectively and with a clear eye to arming the comrades stepping with the knowledge and skills required to get the job done.
51. With the downturn of the student movement we have suffered a shortage of the sort of ready-made confident political activists. Quite a few of the young people who join Resistance struggle for personal and political confidence. But in our experience, these are struggles that can be won with that revolutionary tool called “team leadership”. This is not just an in-word. It’s an expression of the experience of political struggle by the oppressed. Class society is inherently unequal in terms of wealth, power and even the confidence to organize and lead. That sort of confidence is reserved for the master and his loyal overseer, the one with the whip! That’s the normal situation. Student radicalisation has in the past diverted some of the folk who would otherwise wield the whip to turn against the master. But not so much these days.
52. So where do the oppressed learn to fight and lead if the universities are mainly training people to keep their heads down? Obviously in the university of struggle. Much of what we do must be seen like this. Our work is one big collective exercise of education and empowerment through actively trying to advance the movements and spread socialist ideas. And if it doesn’t look like that then we are doing something wrong. If each day in struggle, each of us is not lending a hand to bring another comrade forward then we are doing it wrong. As the late Jim Percy reminded us in a report to the October 1991 National Committee, published in Traditions, Lessons and Socialist Perspectives, “the key criterion for leadership in our party above all else should be one’s willingness to help other people become leaders”. For the DSP leadership assembled in this room today this has to be our most urgent task over the next few months: bring forward a new layer of cadre.

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