Party-building report to October 2005 DSP NC on behalf of NE minority

By John Percy

A DSP building report

This report (and discussion) has to be a DSP party-building report and discussion.

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

This report has to be about how the DSP can best go forward as the party we’re building, in the here and now.

The re-imagining of the Socialist Alliance as something less than a party-in-formation, reflected in the decision to stop the integration of DSP resources into SA, (which we’ve already voted unanimously for, at our May NC) also requires a re-imagination of the relationship between SA and the struggle to build the DSP itself.

Over the last two years in particular, building the DSP and building the SA have been envisaged as intertwined in a fundamental way. It is also now necessary to re-imagine how to build the DSP, where building the DSP becomes the central strategic task. In re-imagining the project of building the DSP, SA remains an important tactic, but not a general tactical framework, which it has been recently for all our work.

Such a re-imagining of how to build the DSP means a turn back to re-emphasise many of the lessons of our past experience. But it is not a “circling of the wagons” or a turning inwards.

While the general class retreat continues to frame the overall political dynamic, the ruling class’s often more brazen forms of offensive accompanied by this working class retreat continues to stir up discontent and helps maintain a substantial constituency of left-leaning discontent to which we can and must relate.

The potential for us to grow and outreach within this constituency is substantial as we are now the only serious organized left party of sizeable resources (relatively) in Australia. While the period is characterized by no sustained mobilizations at the national level, at the global level mobilization, struggle and protest are sufficiently regular and frequent – now also involving a new revolutionary upheaval (Venezuela) and new alliances between revolutions (Venezuela and Cuba, and maybe later Vietnam). These regular and now historic protests and struggles also help sustain the existence of the left-leaning constituency of discontent against the system in a country like Australia.

Our orientation for building the DSP must be outward looking, finding ways to engage with this agitated, though only sporadically mobilised, discontent. This discontent is variegated and develops in fits and starts in an uneven way. The continuing class retreat means that the ongoing political motion to sustain a more-or-less single overarching means of organising and leading, by bringing into motion new forces and leaders, such as we envisaged SA might develop into, is not possible in this period. We must reach out, lead and recruit using a range of different weapons.

In that framework, we can make use of what we’ve achieved with SA, and what is actually there, as a useful tactic for our work.

It can be a positive contribution to building the party, like Green Left Weekly, like Resistance. But it’s not the party. Not “the party we build”.

Retaining our tactical flexibility

This report makes a point of not surrendering our tactical flexibility, by banking everything on Socialist Alliance. Our party has made a point of rejection of dogmatic schemas in the past; we don’t want to succumb now.

Some comrades have criticised my counter report for seeming like an “old-style” DSP party-building report. Yes, perhaps that’s true. But that’s exactly what we need to guide us in building the party best in the period ahead, and help the DSP and Resistance grow, and ultimately what will make the best use of the gains and experiences of the Socialist Alliance in a realistic way, and ultimately what will best help drive the class struggle forward.

I did go and check some of our previous party-building reports and perspectives, back in the 1990s, for example. In many ways we were in a better position then, for example, with a much stronger Resistance, not a better position now because of SA.

This party-building report on behalf of the NE minority has benefited from lots of feedback and discussion and a range of pre-congress discussion contributions. SA itself is a new thing for us, so it’s natural that a thinking out process, a fine-tuning would be needed – a real process of “reimagining”.

Our main party-building projections for 2006

At the centre of the report is a clear listing of exciting party-building projections for 2006.

1. Concentration on rebuilding Resistance.

Resistance has been the main source of new cadres for our party throughout our history. We need this process to resume.

We should plan a big Resistance public conference in July, and precede it and build it with a tour from a Venezuelan youth leader from the Frente Francisco Miranda.

Resistance should take the lead in organising anti-Bush actions for 2007, and start now. Resistance is to begin guerilla scale actions against the US-British-Australian occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan and the xenophobic and racist policies associated with building up a climate of support for imperialist intervention. We need to rebuild Resistance as an organisation of street heat, and in 2006 Resistance can play a leading role in the lead-up to the anti-Bush actions in 2007, a big APISC, and a launch pad 2007 Resistance Conference before APEC in September.

2. Making more of Green Left Weekly as a general tactic.

Green Left Weekly has to fully make use of the breadth we have and the respect we’ve won through it. It’s our biggest reachout vehicle – “the most valuable political institution in the left”, as our resolution states.

As a combination paper it’s able to agitate and campaign on all issues, Australian and international, where we have no separate organisational form. It’s able to carry comprehensive propaganda for socialism. It’s the ideal banner for regular forums in each branch.

3. Reorganising Socialist Alliance as an important tactic.

As our draft resolution states, it has to be “a campaigning alliance in the social movements (particularly the trade union movement) that seeks to build a new mass workers’ party.”

Its main campaign will continue to be around the Industrial Relations laws, before and after implementation. It will be the most active vehicle for resisting attacks on unions, especially the CFMEU,

SA will be the framework for broadening our trade union work. At the same time we’ll reaffirm the necessity of DSP trade union fractions.

But as our resolution makes clear, the SA is not a party and cannot be one without the resurgence of a sustained fightback that throws up new forces, movements and class struggle leaders.

4. Venezuela solidarity.

We have to take the lead in this area, setting up Venezuela solidarity committees, led openly by DSP members.

We’ll be organising solidarity, actions, tours and brigades: the Venezuela trade union tour in the 2nd half of the year; campaigning and solidarity in the lead up to the presidential election next December; actions to defend Venezuela against imperialism, and very public political identification with Venezuela and Cuba and their leaderships.

5. Early projection of APISC, and beginning building against Bush, as part of re-invigorating the party’s anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-racist work.

APISC will be at Easter 2007, and we’ll get out early invites and organising underway, early leaflets and posters.

We’ll connect as from now with Resistance, the DSP, Venezuela solidarity, ASAP and SA anti-war, anti-racist etc propaganda – e.g. share slogans.

Clarity about our Socialist Alliance perspectives vital

Given these five major party-building projections, clarity about our Socialist Alliance perspectives is vital.

We should be participating in and building SA as part of our important projections for 2006 and into 2007, fine tuning our participation into SA to make it an effective networking tool with those who identify with it; a more effective megaphone for agitation; a means to maintaining collaboration with socialists in the trade unions, these will be important tasks.

However, in all our consideration of this fine-tuning of our participation in SA, to make it a more effective vehicle for the things it can do, we must have in mind the most pressing and central tasks ahead of us: rebuilding Resistance, making full use of GLW, reorganising SA, building the Venezuelan solidarity campaign and the early preparation of an inter-continental APISC, where that early preparation is also synchronised with all our propaganda and agitation around the opposition to US and Australian imperialism and the racism and xenophobia being generated to defend imperialism. These are the most important things that will help build the authority of our party, the DSP, and help win it more recruits.

It is not and cannot be enough to present to our membership at the congress and then through The Activist after the congress a report on tasks and perspectives that does not put these main tasks (Resistance, GLW, SA, Venezuela solidarity and knitting our anti-imperialist work around the lead up to APISC and then Bush) at the centre of our perspectives and which does not explain the political framework for this. Our work in and through SA, to make SA more effective as a campaigning alliance, will also need to knit in as much as possible with the various components of these perspectives as well as be open for any new twists and turns in the class struggle, from within the TU sector or from without.

What’s important will be the politics, recruiting, rebuilding Resistance and the DSP.

The draft resolution on our DSP-SA relations is still not a perfect resolution. It still has inconsistencies coming out of the difficult situation of the last two years. But it has the key points there, and is a start.

Peter read out some of the paragraphs. He partly read section 20:

20. This poses a change of the DSP’s perspectives for the Socialist Alliance. Our December 2003 resolution to integrate as much of the resources of the Democratic Socialist Party into the Socialist Alliance as possible was based on an over-estimation of the political conditions. This attempt at integration has failed because the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist. To persist with such an integration plan will jeopardise real gains of the socialist movement in this country, including its modest pool of revolutionary activists and Green Left Weekly, which in our estimate is the most valuable political institution in the left.

He urged comrades to read section 21. It reads:

21. The Socialist Alliance will have to go through a more extended period of united campaigning and regroupment with broader left forces that are generated by a new upturn of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal “reforms” before it can harness the leadership resources and political confidence to take a significant step to creating a new socialist party….

25. In short, the DSP has not been able to and cannot afford to operate as an internal tendency in the Socialist Alliance. Therefore, this resolution proposes that the DSP function as a public revolutionary socialist organisation, while continuing to be affiliated to the Socialist Alliance, to build it and to seek to provide political leadership to it.

I’d hoped we had got agreement on the main lines of the resolution at the August 15 NE meeting, and could go forward, but the report by Comrade Peter Boyle on the resolution, and his draft party-building report now, is a retreat from the main points of that draft resolution, he tries to straddle two positions, and his line would continue to confuse the party.

Unfortunately Peter’s approach for the NE majority amounts to the emergency drive to keep the DSP afloat plus a schema, based on a hyped up picture of what the SA is, that the SA is going to take off somehow in the future as a broad or mass party of some kind with no tasks or elaboration of perspective around this. It opens the way, as some PCDs have argued, for a week to week voluntarist working out of tactics.

It would be an obscuring of our perspectives, and a limiting of the possibilities for our cadres’ regeneration. Peter’s report is essentially in two parts, two sections. Firstly, the defense of the essence of the line we adopted at our previous congress, that the SA would be able to proceed to a new party, and secondly, the organisational tasks for the DSP, that will underwrite that line, as an additive.

We can convince, inspire, and mobilise our membership around a clear set of perspectives and priorities.

GLW sales, financial commitment etc flows on from our political perspectives. It can’t be an emergency campaign to enable the “SA as the party” perspective to be propped up again. We shouldn’t try to substitute our will for political motion that isn’t there.

However, on the basis of this resolution, plus the necessary constitutional changes, plus a clear party-building report assessing the past two years, and setting clear tasks and perspectives for the next few years, we can go forward.

Assessing the Socialist Alliance experience

As part of this pre-congress discussion we need to properly assess the Socialist Alliance experience.

Certainly we need to be clear that there have been several distinct stages in that experience:

Firstly, there was our initiation of the process, and the first few years. Remember what was the actual initiating event that prompted us to think about this tactic? The decision by the British Socialist Workers’ party to contemplate election work after two decades of abstaining totally from it. We thought, here’s an opportunity to make an approach to the local International Socialist Organisation, for joint work, joint election campaigns, and a regrouping of the left. They either had to respond positively, or suffer a political blow, and organisational losses. (In that respect, our tactic worked, they’re certainly a lot weaker than they were in 2001, suffering splits and attrition, and at their Marxism conference in September, they had half the attendance of recent years, with just 40 at their final session. We’ve suffered also, but not as much as them.)

We were excited about the prospects of left unity in the first years of SA, in 2001-02. It was a good, positive feeling. But there’s no remnant of that in SA any longer; all the sects are for sabotage, not unity. As Marce Cameron wrote, “The initial left-unity dynamic which accompanied the launch of the SA back in 2001 has all but evaporated.”

Secondly, there’s the period (from 2003) when we started to think that the Socialist Alliance might be able to become a new, broader party, and the big step in that process, our gamble of changing our name to “Perspective”, becoming an internal tendency in the SA, hoping to push the party process along.

It’s this second period, especially the last two years, with our major turn at our last congress, that has clearly failed, and which we have to draw back from, rewind.

There were two parts of this second stage, which overlapped:

A. Where our hopes were on the large influx of independent members of the Socialist Alliance. We hoped there would be many more non-aligned activists than actually existed. We relied on the perspectives and the assistance of the Non-Aligned Caucus leaders to give some reality to SA as a new party. There’s not much positive left from that NAC current.

B. Where our hopes reverted almost entirely to “the militant trade union current”. We relied on the militant trade union current to revive our hopes for SA at each of the last three SA national conferences, where we were disappointed by our NAC allies, this last time totally. But in terms of actual activists in the structures of the SA itself, the militant trade union current doesn’t amount to much – most of the militant trade unionists in SA are DSP members.

We’re now in yet another stage of our Socialist Alliance experience, which will be different from those earlier ones.

SA’s failure as a party does not mean we’re only confronted with two choices: to shut it down or reduce its work down to pure propaganda for a new party. The correct choice is to firstly recognise its reality, but to then use the best of SA’s achievements to continue alliance-building, collaborating etc. in order to help bring about the fightback conditions that are necessary for a new party. This is neither bullshitting to ourselves or our friends about a new party, nor denying or cutting ourselves off from the prospects for a new party in the future.

Able to admit our mistakes

But it’s also important to be clear and honest about the past.

We made a mistake two years ago. Call it by its right name.

We can’t just jump again, and move on. We need to know why we change course; what mistakes we made. We need an objective assessment now for our comrades today, and for comrades in the future.

Peter and comrades who support his approach should not take it personally when we say we have to admit our mistakes. We all voted for the line at our last Congress; we’re all responsible for it. And at our May NC we made an important correction, which we all agreed on.

We need to be clear about the nature and the extent of the erroneous line we took at our last congress. We made a wrong assessment and prediction of the objective political situation, and were thus wrong to think SA would become the party, and reduce DSP to just a tendency.

It’s not a blanket condemnation of SA. We were right to initiate it in 2001. We have made some gains, some that we can retain. But we have to be crystal clear about what was wrong, and what we don’t continue to do. Most importantly, we have to be clear about which party we’re building now.

But nevertheless, knowing what we now know, we wouldn’t make that same mistake if we had our time over again at our last congress (unlike Nikki Ulasowski in her PCD contribution, and unfortunately, re-reading Peter’s summary to his May NC report, I realise he actually says that too, that it wasn’t wrong to take the turn to try to make Socialist Alliance our new party. But if we all agree that the political circumstances make it a wrong course, why would we want to try it again, or persist in it?

We made a mis-estimation of the state of the class struggle and its likely course. We were wrong. But we shouldn’t respond by saying, it was still right to try. It was heroic, and we have to learn from our mistakes, not ignore them. And we shouldn’t react by saying, “don’t make predictions, estimations”. We have to do that, then we have to try things out, and if proved wrong, correct our assessment, and our course.

Eliminate the hype, and face up to the reality

Having gained a clear assessment of the past, and what we have to do to move forward, and what we need to do next, we also have to drop one of the unfortunate features of our Socialist Alliance work in the last year or so – we have to cut all the hype and exaggeration. (See the PCD by John Percy and Max Lane in The Activist, Vol 15, No 7.)

This is very much linked to the question of being able to realistically assess our experiences, and face up to our mistakes. If we don’t, or can’t, do that, then the resort is to hype. It’s bad for our comrades. It’s bad for our friends.

As James P Cannon observed in his 1942 lectures on the history of American Trotskyism, “the most important of all questions for a political group or party, once it has elaborated its program, is to give the correct answer to the question: What to do next? The answer to this question is not and cannot be determined simply by the desire of the whim of the party leadership. It is determined by the objective circumstances and the possibilities inherent in the circumstances.” (Cannon, History p118)

Note, not our hopes, but the objective circumstances.

If we all honestly think about the reality of SA branches, we have to admit: There’s not much there beyond ourselves. It’s demoralising for comrades to have to go through the motions. And it’s getting worse.

Peter in his report argued that we have to link up with the real leaders of the class. Well, it won’t be through Socialist Alliance branch meetings; they don’t come to them. Craig Johnston and Chris Cain don’t come to SA branch meetings. Craig is on the SA NE, I think he’s come to half a meeting since the conference. The way we relate to them is through our own union leaders and militants, through our national trade union director, or our DSP branch secretaries.

In election campaigns, as in Marrickville, it’s the DSP deciding (against the opposition of the ISO and Greg Adler, and there were no independents involved in the decision), and us doing the work. (There are fewer non-DSPers involved than in most previous campaigns.)

And what this about the “Fightback Network”, referred to in Peter’s report several times, with capital letters? It has failed to materialise since the SA conference. There’s a network of militant union comrades that has existed for a while, but nothing organised, and certainly not something based on SA.

Peter ended his report by quoting from the September 2002 DSP NC report that quotes Lenin’s Left Wing Communism, which we’ve often done over the last few decades, the quote about “phrasemongering and clowning”. Well, unfortunately there’s a great deal of phrasemongering and clowning involved in our current intervention in SA, and our efforts to prop it up and make it something it’s not, a party.

But worse, Peter continued the quote from that report: “The current political situation is creating new openings to collect a bigger revolutionary vanguard in Australia today and our proposal is a response to these conditions.”

That is, he endorses the assessment of the very political conditions that we all agreed now don’t exist for such a transition. And endorses the very proposal, to become an internal tendency in the SA to push it in the direction of becoming a party, that the SA-DSP draft resolution says explicitly now can’t be done.

Peter reaffirms this reversal to the old line of the last congress, away from the line of the draft resolution, by then stating: “That opening we were responding to back in 2002 has not closed.”!

Revolutionaries are optimists, and we all need a good dose of that. But we can’t exaggerate too much to the masses; we can get a reputation as bullshitters. But hype and exaggeration can have even worse consequences when we start extending it to our own members, and even believing it ourselves. This idea that “the DSP is a different party than it was five years ago,” implying that our mass impact has qualitatively changed. When what has changed is that the key indices of our cadre strength show we’ve taken a step back in that period. Look at our graphs on membership, GLW sellers, pledge base, and the strength of Resistance – all show a dip that coincides with our efforts to build SA as the party.

The hype and false perspective of the NE majority’s position has led them to adopt a number of frame-ups and caricatures of our position, which have been sharply exposed by a number of the articles in the PCD from Marce, Doug, Iggy and other comrades.

One argument has been that if our line was implemented, that would amount to killing off the Socialist Alliance. (This has moved along from the initial accusations, that we wanted to shut down SA.) This is just wrong; we’re arguing for recognising the reality of SA, and have it function at a level that is real.

Let’s reiterate:

What the draft resolution and the supporters of the NE minority report are saying is this: the current reality is the SA is not a party and cannot be one without the resurgence of a sustained broad fightback that throws up new forces, movements and class struggle leaders.

Therefore, we need to qualitatively adjust our perspectives (and not just periodically reshuffle resources) so that we and SA will be better positioned for such developments in future. This will be best served by the perspectives in the draft resolution: “To build Socialist Alliance as a campaigning alliance in the social movements (particularly the trade union movement) that seeks to build a new mass workers’ party” (point 34, draft resolution).

Perspectives for our Socialist Alliance work

What is actually possible, real, with our Socialist Alliance work, and what’s not?

SA branch meetings have not been productive, and we should keep them to a minimum, quarterly or even less frequent. There should be no forcing of regular meetings where they play no role in organizing others. Where appropriate, city-wide aggregates might be more useful. We shouldn’t just rebadge what might be suburban concentrations of DSP members as an SA branch. But where SA members can be organised around a campaign, let’s do it.

We should favour joint GLW-SA events that have the most chance of getting SA members and supporters along – dinners and similar social-political events.

Some SA trade union caucuses could be maintained where they exist, eg NTEU, but they’re not functioning in most cities. What would be more useful is SA organising caucuses around specific purposes, such as fighting the IR laws, or defending specific unions under attack. At the same time, there’s a need for DSP fractions. DSP bodies have to help with and direct the work of our leading trade union comrades.

SA should relate to flare-ups of defensive struggle (eg. MUA disputes, defending the CFMEU) in particular unions or sections of the workforce that may emerge in the period ahead. SA could organise its members to do picket line solidarity, help build solidarity actions, be seen to be at the front line of the struggle, etc.

We should be doing some electoral work, and keeping SA as our electoral vehicle, but not going too heavily into this. It’s clear that for the present we will be overshadowed by the Greens.

We should reconsider the role and form of Seeing Red. It’s a financial drain on us, with not a great political impact for our politics. Green Left Weekly is a much better tool, and our resources – money, writers, layout skills, and distribution efforts – would be better poured into that.

We can use the Socialist Alliance for our demonstration contingents, and other active interventions, especially in our campaigning against the Howard government and its attacks on workers’ rights and civil liberties. But although the main placards and slogans should be from SA, we should also add in Resistance placards and where we have enough comrades a DSP banner or two to increase our identification as the main components of SA. The DSP should have a public face again, we should come out of the SA closet.

We can use Socialist Alliance to initiate campaigns, and call broader coalitions, but the DSP and Resistance should also be part of these broader coalitions. Socialist Alliance can be the vehicle for local campaigning, and reaching into new areas.

We can have Socialist Alliance stalls, but recognise that they’re primarily GLW stalls. We can join up people to SA from the stalls, have all the SA literature on them, but should also have DSP and Resistance material on them.

We should continue to solicit Socialist Alliance membership, and service them with emailings. We can use SA as an organisation that can organise and sometimes mobilise a large milieu of our supporters, and bring the best of them closer to the DSP. But do we have to dish out all these members’ details to the sects?

For November 15, we should contact as many SA members and GLW supporters as possible, to help in the sales effort on the day. Have multiple GLW/SA assembly points and distribution points.

The next Socialist Alliance National Conference might be organised as a conference against the IR laws, or a conference to defend the CFMEU. But it would also need a small decision-making session of delegates (realistically, a majority of DSP comrades, given the small number of active independents) to formally adopt the new perspectives for SA, bringing the wishes into line with reality.

We can regard the Socialist Alliance as a campaigning coalition, with roles also as a supporters’ organisation, and an electoral vehicle. Concretely, what does it mean organisationally for such a united front body? Certainly not rounded branches as we would have for a party.

There’s no basis for the Socialist Alliance to progress to a new party, even proceeding slowly, with “prolonged effort”, over several years, as Peter argues in his draft party-building report.

As a tactic for our party-building, it will require us to do a number of things as I’ve just outlined (probably our perspective involves us doing more useful things through SA than Peter’s perspective, which is almost empty of guiding concrete measures for the immediate period ahead.) We’ve taken the decision not to transfer more of our resources into SA, and we also have to be clear about not forcing unproductive meetings on comrades, and not wasting more of our resources on unproductive and routinist SA activities.

It will also be a tactic for building our party, the DSP, due to the indispensable leadership role of the DSP within SA, and the fact that SA draws around us a pool of people, among them some people whom we can convince, through becoming part of our DSP periphery, to join the DSP.

So SA is both one tactic for building a new left party; but it’s also a tactic (the primary one being Resistance) for building the DSP. These two roles for SA are complementary, not mutually exclusive, as long as (1) we continue to build the SA as a campaigning alliance for such a new party; and (2) we’re very careful not to turn SA into a crude front for the DSP. If we fall down on either – if we do nothing to build SA as a campaigning alliance, or if we simply rebadge the DSP as SA – then SA can be neither a secondary tactic for building towards a new left party, nor can it be a secondary tactic for building the DSP.

But also, recognising that there’s no political basis for progressing SA to a new party, and recognizing SA as one of our tactics, also requires us to be honest with our members and supporters, including our collaborators in the Socialist Alliance itself.

How robust or fragile is the Socialist Alliance?

Peter speculates that this will alienate the likes of Craig Johnston and Chris Cain. I disagree. We engage with these comrades primarily through our trade union work, and that will continue, and we’ll tell them that we’re keeping SA, but with no illusions that it’s becoming a party, and we’ll boost up our efforts in it when needed, and if they have any suggestion to use SA in the here and now, they should put them forward, and we’ll discuss them seriously, and see what forces they can bring along to help implement their suggestions. But the surest way to alienate them big time, is if we bullshit with them.

Comrades supporting Peter’s perspective tend to hype up the reality of the SA, exaggerating its actual solidity and strength. But often in the next breath they warn our course would be disastrous, that if the Socialist Alliance activists, or the militant unionists, got wind of the fact that the DSP was no longer viewing itself as just a tendency in SA, or that, heaven forbid, some DSP members wanted to call themselves Democratic Socialist Party again, then the whole thing would “detonate,” or collapse like a house of cards. The SA is so fragile.

The suggestion has even been made that if some of our trade union allies in SA get wind that the DSP is discussing the possibility that the SA might no longer be progressing towards a new party, they’d be demoralised, think we were giving up on them.

We have to remember that we’ve worked with comrades we regard as “the militant union current” such as Chris Cain and Craig Johnston since the 90s, from well before we initiated the SA in 2001, well before we took the step to DS Perspective, and well before we tried to portray SA as a party.

These comrades are not going to be conned by us, I’m sure they know the real state of SA.

Rebuilding the DSP

The framework for this report has to be, rebuilding the DSP, and our perspectives for 2006.

Many comrades recognise this, eg Jim McIlroy begins his PCD in this framework, but then slides back on the key political question, that we got wrong, still thinking the party we’re building is the SA.

Politically, we have to get the relationship between SA and DSP right.

Organisationally, all these tasks will follow much more easily.

It can’t be, OK, we have an emergency push on DSP organisation tasks now, to prevent disaster, and after that, have another bash at attempting to build the Socialist Alliance as the new party, which failed, face up to it. “Once more into the breach” might be heroic, but if it doesn’t match the objective political circumstances, and ignores our actual experience of the last two years, it can be suicidal.

The May NC emergency campaign

Is the May NC emergency campaign enough?

Not if we’re not addressing the wrong line that got us into the crisis. Peter’s report is: keep the wrong line re SA as a party, but push even harder on the party-building tasks.

Firstly, we can’t do both at the same time, it will be stop-start. The biggest problem with the emergency measures, which the NE majority is in denial about, is that they worked because SA went on hold.

Secondly, this approach won’t resolve the political problem, and the problem of cadres. We have to ask – Why do we have to go on a drive to recadreise?

We can look at the charts of our progress in the last few months, and it’s encouraging, for example, the Emergency GLW Appeal, showing what we can do. But the important charts and statistics we need to burn in our brains are the charts of the last 10-15 years, showing:

All these indices show a significant decline that coincides with our experiment with trying to build SA as “the party we build”.

Membership

From hovering just under 300 throughout most of the ‘90s, our membership rose to a little over 350 after S11, and when we first initiated the Socialist Alliance. From then it has steadily dropped to around 270 earlier this year. From our May NC when we instituted emergency measures to address the crisis, we’ve made some progress. We have risen from 274 to 281 – we recruited 19 comrades, but lost 12.

The 19 recruits from the last four months have come from a variety of sources: some from Resistance; some from APISC; a couple of leaders of SA, a couple of former members rejoining. This was partially mopping up, because it’s hard to see where the next recruits will come from the Socialist Alliance.

There’s been a significant shrinkage of our cadre base. We’ve suffered a significant decline, a loss of cadres. And some other DSP members are just hanging in there; we’ll suffer further losses from among our long-term cadres. Also couple that with the serious decline in Resistance. The May NC report recognised this problem: “Trying to do more with fewer cadre”, and stated we cannot keep doing this.

This is the main measure, test, of how we’ve gone, how our tactic has worked, or not worked – our cadres.

OK, Peter and other proponents of continuing to pursue the last Congress line would say, to get the future gains we’ve got to be prepared to “spend some cadres.” Those are Peter’s words to me. And they’d balance it up against the prospect of the future gains, a bigger, broader (mass?) party.

But we can only risk spending cadres for a short period. It can’t be an extended perspective. And when the pot of gold that we’re gambling for doesn’t look any closer, but even further away, then it’s time to call a halt to gambling our comrades on it.

In regard to recadreisation, we all agree we need it, but it needs to be a permanent process, not risked for the next jump.

We recognised this at our May NC, and took emergency measures to stop the decline. But we can’t just make a push on sales, finances, recruiting, and then drop back into our previous framework, trying to build the Socialist Alliance as the party. This would demoralise and shake loose further cadres (especially those comrades still substituting hopes for reality).

Green Left Weekly sales

We’ve underused a huge asset, Green Left Weekly. GLW is the remaining over-arching reach-out and organizing and leading tool for the DSP. GLW’s wide support is shown by:

Current GLW sales don’t measure up to its potential. We’re almost back to the level, just over 1000 sales, that Direct Action was in the late ‘80s, when we made the switch to GLW (it was just under 1000).

The average number of sellers is still falling, and the average number of hours sold is still falling. These are the key statistics. Look at that chart published by Pip Hinman in TA8. That’s the key statistic, the number of sellers. Over the last four years, from just under 200, it’s now down to under 140!! That points to the crisis.

Although sales have been declining in the ‘90s, the further slump of the last few years is a result of the weakening of the DSP through our SA intervention. There have been no gains in GLW distribution, no broadening out, from our SA tactic.

We shouldn’t accept any more blackmail attempts, through vetoes or weird impositions of articles, from the ISO and the other small affiliates. They’re not building GLW, and they’re not building SA. They should have no vetoes or favours.

We should strengthen GLW as a combination paper, perhaps balancing it better with some more educational, theoretical, historical articles. Step up the “Case for Socialism” columns. Perhaps we need an article on “A Marxist analysis of the Venezuelan revolution.”, and a greater highlighting of the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions.

We have to focus on steady, regular sales increases, which will come from increases in DSP and Resistance membership, and education and integration of the new members, and re-inspiration of the older members. We shouldn’t rely on blitzes, which don’t seem to lead to any permanent increase in our sales. Blitzes can be useful to expand our regular sales when they’re already heading in the right direction, not as a way to rescue from a decline.

We should have a permanent appeal for funds for GLW, run as a public, weekly campaign. We could also add a campaign to expand sales into new areas, with readers taking small bundles.

Our website reach is a great bonus, but we know we have to hugely increase our comrades selling, GLW as our organising tool, face to face, on the streets, in the campaigns, on the campuses, in the workplaces.

Finances

For the period of our immersion as an internal tendency in the SA, we’ve had a two-year financial crisis, that built up to that $100,000 deficit.

What the Emergency Appeal success demonstrates is two things:

It doesn’t demonstrate that the SA as we had tried it is viable, it only shows it was a financial drain and in danger of leading us to disaster. We can’t now switch back to a new try with the SA as a “party”, and rack up another deficit. We can’t make an “emergency appeal” every year. Our supporters, and members, would start to turn off.

But we should take one lesson from the campaign, the need to run a regular, weekly public fund campaign in GLW. We have done it for some years in the past, and should resume. And we should begin it immediately with the next GLW, coming out after the NC, where we can give a major wrap up, thank all our supporters, and announce that our fund drive will be public and running each week in GLW.

To properly solve our financial crisis, we have to recognise the central importance of a national pledge campaign, to get the national pledge level back up. This is something I’ve been raising regularly in the political committee or secretariat over the last year, but usually it’s been met with silence.

Our national pledge level had dropped down to about $5000 a week. The average pledge has dropped by $1.50 in the last three years. The level had been well above $6000 in the past, and we had a campaign to reach $7000.

But the success of this campaign depends on rebuilding the DSP, and increasing comrades’ consciousness, confidence in the party project, and commitment. (See the PCD by Marcus Pabian in The Activist, Vol 15, No 7.)

Education

The January DSP Marxism conference and the March Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference were a breath of fresh air to comrades. Comrades craved revolutionary discussion and inspiration, which wasn’t available within SA.

The previous year, with our push to make SA into a party, and having the DSP as an internal tendency in SA, meant that our education programs and political content of comrades’ regular activities such as branch meetings had slipped seriously.

We’ve taken some steps to overcome this. Comrade Doug Lorimer has already traveled to Perth for a school. Hobart and just recently Newcastle has requested a visit for a school with Doug in November, and Adelaide and Melbourne schools could also be organized. There will be a short school in January.

We need to boost members’ study of the Marxist classics, best done of course in conjunction with their involvement in the real class struggle here. Some branches now have Introduction to Socialism and Introduction to Marxism classes, but we’re still struggling on this front.

Are comrades reading as much as they were, (or should)? My impression (and we should check the figures) is that literature sales at our conferences have been down.

It’s important that we hold frequent, regular DSP branch meetings for orienting comrades, for educating, and for planning our interventions. (Contrast our DSP meetings with the negative role of SA branch meetings.)

Our DSP National Newsletters have stepped up our organizing role there, and we’ve also been able to use them partially for motivating and inspiring the education of comrades. (I agree with Kathy N about cutting back on the hype.) The Activist should be playing a regular role here as well.

Regular GLW forums

Regular Green Left Weekly organised forums have not been implemented since the decision we took at the May DSP national committee meeting that we do so.

Such forums can enhance our outreach and regroupment efforts, and can help build the prestige and image of GLW. In Sydney, for example, our goal should be to take over much of the sort of audience from Politics in the Pub. They should encourage the maximum amount of discussion. There can be alternating joint sponsors – Venezuela solidarity; SA; ASAP etc.

GLW forums can be a stimulus to sales. GLW is our voice, and the forums can serve a similar function.

Publications

We should be continuing, even increasing, our publications program.

This is part of our party-building perspectives, the necessary education, and the projection of our ideas. Our publications program must be integrated with DSP party-building. It can’t just be separated off, like it’s a commercial enterprise.

We’ve advanced this year with our online bookshop, thanks to John Cameron. Soon we’ll have 500 items listed – books, pamphlets, badges, flags, videos and DVDs, posters and mugs, and at current rates will lift our mail-order sales to $13,000 per year. Further promotion of the site could see this rising even higher.

DSP fractions

We are going to need DSP fractions again, especially for our trade union interventions, and also for our Venezuela solidarity work.

Our fractions are not just for helping organising and directing our comrades, and discussing and deciding what to do, to make sure we get the right outcomes and decisions. It’s also very much part of training our comrades, building cadres.

As a working class party, our trade union or industrial fractions will be a core part of our structure. They are needed for organising and helping direct our trade union work, and in situations where we’re in alliance with broader forces, such as in SA, or trade union defence committees, we’ll have broader caucuses. But we’ll need our own party caucuses to have broader discussions, and also to help recruit, train, and educate new trade union comrades.

Temporarily trying to do this through SA fractions might be a necessary concession for a short period, as we attempted to force the pace on SA becoming a new party, but it can’t continue indefinitely. In most cases it’s just us anyway. We need to reinstitute some DSP fractions.

Where SA caucuses actually work – perhaps the Melbourne trade union caucus is a case in point – they should be continued of course. (But we shouldn’t rule out the need for DSP fractions also.)

We should also recognise that with the more significant consolidation of our party as the largest force on the left (relatively, of course, with the dissolution of the old Communist Party of Australia), we don’t have to circle the wagons, and there is a wider layer of supporters, sympathisers, whom we can sometimes organise with ad hoc caucuses using SA. SA can be a good tool to help organise them, keep in touch with them by email, as well as using GLW for this purpose.

I think many of us have breathed a sigh of relief as most branches have returned to frequent, regular DSP branch meetings with solid political content. We need these for our political oxygen. We all breathe more confidently after a good, constructive branch meeting. For example Sydney’s large branch meeting last Tuesday. This reconfirms the vital importance of the DSP as the party we need to build. In this and many other respects it’s a real “rebuilding” of the DSP that we’re undertaking.

Rebuilding Resistance

Rebuilding the DSP, but central to this perspective is Resistance rebuilding. This is a crucial part of our DSP party-building perspectives in the period ahead. (There’s a separate report on this at the NC.)

The crisis in Resistance is definitely partially a casualty of our gamble on trying to transform the Socialist Alliance into a party. Resistance is probably now the weakest in our history. Our party leadership, both nationally and in branches, almost stopped giving assistance to Resistance leaders. That close collaboration and assistance has to resume, to ensure a strong focus on recruiting and developing youth cadres.

We can’t just put the blame on objective circumstances. Idiots like SAlt have been able to grow. And let’s not take solace from the fact that they might only have 50 members at Melbourne Uni, not the 60 they used to! Other splits from ISO like Solidarity have even grown.

We’ve just had the smallest Resistance conference since our founding national conference in 1970. That should be sobering. But from that conference we can grow. There’s a good team, politically confident from the Venezuelan revolution, able to rebuild. Comrades gave good reports, and there was good discussion at the conference, and a few good new recruits. We’re also starting to grow again in a few branches.

There’s a huge potential with the Bush visit in 2007. We have to get in position beforehand, and have Resistance street-heat activity planned from early 2006. Here especially we have to break with the bureaucratic ways of winning “leadership” of these campaigns used by others on the left, from the CPA, Greens, ISO, to the anarchists. It’s not enough to be the first to call for a campaign or demo, and thus claim permanent leadership of it. We have to get in there with real actions, our “street heat” initiating and leading actions.

This is how we’ve done it in the past. Remember the anti-Hanson demos, the East Timor protests, the Books Not Bombs, and so many others before. So in 2006 we have to get in there early and begin with modest anti-imperialist actions. We need to use, and note:

We need to get back to having Resistance functioning in all branches, and also start thinking about clubs.

The Resistance NC after the DSP Congress should declare its solidarity with the DSP again.

And we should aim for a big Resistance Conference in July 2006, which will be a gathering point for our whole tendency in 2006. We can lead up to it with a speaking tour of a Venezuelan youth leader from the Frente Francisco Miranda.

There’s a big challenge for the youth leaders of the DSP; rebuild Resistance, and through that, rebuild the DSP.

Centrality of Venezuelan Solidarity work in 2006

We need to stress the centrality of Venezuela solidarity work in 2006, and we had a good discussion on that this morning. There are two sides to it:

1. The necessary solidarity, in the certain expectation of further US aggression and subversion. We should be looking at lessons and comparisons with the Vietnam War, and the Cuban Revolution.

2. The recruiting and radicalisation possibilities from this campaign. Again, we look back at the origins of Resistance and our party.

We will rebuild Resistance through Venezuela solidarity. But Venezuelan solidarity is not just for Resistance, it can’t be. Central DSP comrades have to be assigned to lead, in each branch, and nationally.

We have to be clear that such a central area of our work in 2006, for the DSP and Resistance, has to be led by the DSP, not just by Resistance. It has to be led by the DSP as DSP leaders and cadres, and publicly, not by wearing an SA hat.

In leading this work we have to be clear and unequivocal in our support for the Venezuelan leadership and its closest allies, the Cuban Communist Party. That’s not possible if you operate as the Socialist Alliance (unless we are just rebadging). The DSP national leader of this work has to lead it and be publicly identified as a DSP leader.

We need to build Venezuela solidarity campaigns, committees with membership. We also have to counter some of the narrow efforts set up, such as by the Vega brothers, operating from the CFMEU in Sydney.

We need more tours, and brigades, more articles in GLW and elsewhere, more forums and discussions.

The Venezuelan revolution has been and will be very inspiring for our comrades, and will help recruit radicalising young people. But how to relate it to the actual Australian political situation, what lessons for revolutionaries here in Australia? The objective conditions in the two countries are so different – a revolutionary process in a Third World country; a very non-revolutionary situation in an imperialist country.

However, we can relate Venezuela to the Australian political situation by linking it to the whole anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation sentiment, and win young people partially radicalized on those sentiments to a thorough anti-imperialist solidarity position, opposition to anti-neoliberal globalization. We can link it to the racism and xenophobic fear-mongering of the Australian ruling class and its parties.

In many past radicalisations, people initially develop an anti-imperialist critique, and then that anti-imperialist critique is turned on their own society, and they see that capitalism as a whole is the problem. That process is feasible here too.

On one level, this helps us win new people to Marxism. On another level, it can enable us to strengthen our work, to win a leadership role, and influence the thinking and activity of all those developing an anti-imperialist sentiment.

APISC and ASAP

A big focus of our work for the next 18 months should be building a huge APISC in April 6-9, 2007. (See the PCD by Max Lane in The Activist, Vol 15, No 7.)

It will be a festival of political discussion, and an important tool for building the DSP.

It can be the last stage of our intervention into:

APISC has to be organized by GLW and Resistance. They should be the main organizers, have the main profile. Other sponsors and supporters can be ASAP, the DSP, the SA, CISLAC, Venezuela solidarity committees etc.

We should start preparing APISC from the start of 2006, and make it the biggest APISC yet, with all our Asian collaborators attending. A delegation from Vietnam has been invited already. At least one comrade, hopefully several others, from the Malaysian Socialist Party will attend.

Asia, and in particular Southeast Asia (Indonesia even more in particular) remain a central focus of imperialist foreign policy as well as ruling class anti-foreign and racist fear propaganda (witness their hysteria around Corby, terrorism etc.)

Discussion should begin on how to revive ASAP as the DSP’s tool to intervene in this arena as well as a way to (a) deepen our relations with socialist forces in Asia, including Vietnam (especially through the Agent Orange campaign) and (b) maximize the Marxist educational benefit to our membership and others of being able to study, discuss with Marxist forces in neighboring countries.

Does SA (as it actually is, now, compared to our hopes and ideals) broaden our impact and ability to intervene, lead, in more campaigns and committees? Unfortunately, no.

SA hasn’t necessarily helped our campaign work, often we’re trapped in a dysfunctional committee with an ISOer. Mostly it’s just DSP comrades with an SA hat, at best. But there are opportunities for a variety of other campaigns: in the antiwar movement, the refugee rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, ASAP, Agent Orange and other work in the Vietnamese community, countering the old right-wing pro=-Saigon regime leadership and working with Vietnamese students.

Resuming our international work

We have to resume the level of our international work, our collaboration and discussion with other Marxist parties, especially in the Asian region, and resume it as the DSP. (See the PCD by John Percy in The Activist, Vol 15, No 6.)

This is especially in the context of the Venezuelan revolution, and developing relations with the Venezuelan and Cuban leaderships, and also with the Communist Party of Vietnam.

We can’t do it as the DSP with an SA hat. For example, where the DSP pays, a DSP leader travels, then tries to force on an SA hat, but speaks on behalf of the DSP program and ideas, where such views have not been discussed, let alone agreed to, in the SA. (eg, SWO in New Zealand).

And as I’ve argued in my PCD contribution, when carrying out work with other parties around the world, it’s much better, for many reasons, to function as the Democratic Socialist Party.

A component of our international work takes place here in Australia also, collaborating with the Venezuelan, Cuban and Vietnamese representatives, and soon with the East Timorese, when Avelino de Silva’s brother will become ambassador in Canberra.

We’re experiencing a stepping up of our comradely relationship with the Vietnamese Communist Party. (See the report of our recent visit in the The Activist Vol 15, No 9) We hope to get an invitation to their Congress in April. But we note some steps to further collaboration agreed on:

We have to continue developing our collaboration with all those other parties in the Asian region – in Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Mauritius, South Korea.

The Malaysian Socialist Party has grown, and they put on an excellent conference on socialism that we just attended. A downside of us cutting back on some of our international work in the last period in the region is that the CWI has been courting them, including through a leadership school given for them by Peter Taaffe. However, they’ve requested that we also do a leadership school for them, and we think we can organise it with comrades Max Lane, Allen Myers and Helen Jarvis attending.

We have to continue the production of Links magazine, and find ways to step up its distribution. It’s an important part of our international work, as well as a place for our own longer documents, and theoretical articles. I should recount one very interesting response in Vietnam to No 27, the issue with “Socialism and the market: Chinese and Vietnamese roads” on the cover, with comrade Mike Karadjis’ article, as well as comrade Nguyen The Phiet, the Sydney Consul General, and Eva Cheng’s introduction and translation of the letter by Chinese left-wing dissidents. As a thank you gift we gave the president of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations, that had had organised all the conferences, a copy of Links 27. On seeing it he exclaimed, “Oh, you produce this? That’s a very interesting article.” Our only conclusion was that the CPV had reproduced the article and had been circulating it to some of their cadres.

Party spirit and psychology

The perspective of the line from our last congress was that the DSP should be “withering away”. We were “dissolving ourselves into the Socialist Alliance”. That was the psychology. We can’t have any remnant of that psychology remaining.

There’s the recent example of speakers’ designations for the Latin American Solidarity Conference – our DSP comrades are speaking on the Venezuelan process and leadership, and the Cuban Revolution and its leadership, as Socialist Alliance speakers.

We need a conscious effort to project ourselves again, not fall into the default SA hat.

There’s no party spirit in SA, it’s not a party. We had built up a party spirit in the DSP, we need to rekindle that. From that we do better, in all our political and organisational tasks: Increasing our GLW sales; Increasing our pledge base.

We need that party loyalty, and party spirit, to encourage younger comrades to be willing to go on full-time again; to become lifetime revolutionaries; to make a sacrifice for the revolutionary party.

I’d stress again, our course is not one of “circling the wagons”, look at all the content outlined with this perspective. In fact, burying the DSP in SA for another year (or longer!) in the forlorn hope that SA will progress towards becoming the new party is actually a very narrow, internal perspective. That’s more akin to “circling the wagons.” (Many of those SA branches are very narrow circles!)

There’s a much broader, exciting, positive perspective available, of building the DSP, leading the Venezuela solidarity campaign, rebuilding Resistance, using SA where it’s useful as a secondary tactic, and being in a much stronger position to take advantage of all political openings that come along – that will inspire existing comrades to greater efforts, and more reach-out efforts, and allow us to recruit and integrate more new cadres.

With this perspective, we can see great growth opportunities for Resistance, and we can see real opportunities for the DSP to grow considerably in the two years ahead. There’s a challenge for our youth! There’s a real possibility of excitement about politics again!

We know we suffered from past big party-building efforts to break out, which failed: in 1987, after the CPA backed out of our New Left Party building attempt, we did lose a chunk of leading comrades; in the early ‘90s, after we failed with our efforts with the Greens, we lost some more cadres, some who ended up in the Greens. Recall the early ‘90s, when we were coming out of a period of efforts at regroupment and broadening out that didn’t turn out as we had hoped (NDP, CPA/NLP, SPA, Greens.)

Jim Percy gave a party-building report at the DSP NC, October 7, 1991, where he pointed out: “One of the things we’ve done is to try every tactic to break out of our isolation. That’s what we did in the 1980s, and there’s a sort of danger in doing that, in and of itself – in downplaying the importance and permanency of our party, in unsettling comrades who start to look for a breakthrough or even begin to confuse our ideas with the less formed ideas of others on the left.” (Traditions, Lessons and Socialist perspectives, p78)

We had to emphasise the party again then, party-building and recadreisation!

Building an inclusive leadership team

I’d like to finish with three final points:

Firstly, we can prove our party, our political health, by a healthy discussion – written, oral, and at the congress. We can demonstrate that we’re a democratic party, a party that can have a thorough discussion, and can change course, and benefit, learn from mistakes we make, not gloss over and move on, or worse, continue in the old failed course.

Comrades have to read the PCDs thoroughly, we’ll continue with a range of further PCD contributions. And I hope all comrades contribute, think, put down their own experiences, and argue. Through a healthy discussion, the party will be stronger.

And I hope we have no more instances of mocking our pre-congress discussion, as Peter just did in his report. That’s in no way our party’s tradition.

All members and the whole party will reach a higher level of political understanding and clarity through taking this discussion seriously, reading all the PCD discussions, participating in the oral discussions, and taking a decision based on the analysis of experience and the logic of the arguments presented. But it is important that we keep the discussion on a political level, don’t let personal considerations intrude, and keep the debate comradely.

It’s going to be a very useful, healthy discussion, and it’s going to be especially useful if we get a lot of it written down. Comrades can easily forget arguments made verbally, and even worse, none of our memories are perfect so it’s easy to distort comrades’ positions if they’re just passed on by word of mouth. The core of the discussion, and the most accurate, is the written pre-congress contributions that are printed in The Activist. So comrades should write, and urge other DSP members to write. And as several comrades have pointed out in the discussion, it’s only with a realistic assessment of the political situation and our tasks can we insure that comrades don’t get demoralised.

(And there should be no limitations on the discussion. We have to allow all views to be presented and argued for. The most important thing is for our DSP members to have a full and free discussion.)

Secondly, we have to make use of all comrades. (Recall the story about one of Lenin’s greatest strengths, being able to make use of a very disparate range of revolutionaries to build the Bolshevik Party.) We don’t build our party by putting other comrades down. We have to emphasise comrades’ strengths.

We shouldn’t consider “spending” any more cadres unnecessarily. If we adopt a “forced march” approach that goes against the objective political realities, it will exhaust our branch organizers, and exhaust the comrades in the national office trying to push this through. We need politically stimulating interventions for comrades, and comrades need time for reading and education. If we adopt a “forced march” approach in SA, it will both bore comrades to death, and exhaust them.

Thirdly, we need a party atmosphere of comradeship. We might come from different social backgrounds, and might have very different things we do in our spare time, outside politics, but our political perspective and project unite us as comrades.

The party needs comradely relations between all of us to operate properly. We don’t have a hierarchical view. We don’t basically operate through orders from above, comrades are politically committed, and can do without hectoring.

And although our goal is to build a strong, Leninist party, with a base in the workers and oppressed, and a clear political program, we need to build an inclusive leadership team, even with political differences. That’s a lesson of successful revolutionary leadership teams.

Conclusion

Finally, we should note and welcome the fact that we have general agreement on our immediate concrete tasks and practical proposals flowing out of this NC, and which we’ll reinforce at our congress in January – rebuilding Resistance, organising Venezuela solidarity, organising a campaign to raise our pledge base, organising regular GLW forums, increasing GLW sales, etc. We’re still in the framework of the May NC which put up front the rebuilding of the DSP and Resistance.

I would have been extremely happy if our SA tactic adopted at our last congress had resulted in us leading and organising hundreds, thousands of militant working class activists on a class struggle program. It would have been worth cloaking our revolutionary socialist perspective for that. But it hasn’t succeeded. What we have are a few dozen, not very active contacts. It’s not a party. It hasn’t the solidity or real weight worth continuing that sacrifice of hiding our politics and name for.

I hope the hopes of the majority that SA will become the new broad party will be fulfilled. But I fear we’ll all be disappointed, the objective circumstances do not exist, and the perspectives outlined in this report will have to be implemented sooner or later.

But insisting on continuing SA as “the party we build” blocks the chance of real DSP growth, taking advantage of difficult political circumstances, but political developments such as the Venezuelan revolution that favour us. We can still force march on sales, or finances, for a while (and succeed while we put SA on hold) but we can’t properly implement a revolutionary DSP line, won’t be able to rebuild Resistance as easily, won’t be able to build a big APISC and a big anti-Bush campaign, and won’t be able to properly take advantage of Venezuela solidarity.