DSP tasks in Socialist Alliance
By Roberto Jorquera, for NE minority
[The following is an edited report and summary to the 22nd DSP Congress presented by Roberto Jorquera on behalf of the NE minority. The general line of the report and summary received the votes of 15 out of 60 delegates and 9 out of 40 consultative delegates. There were no abstentions.]
As we have noted in the reports and discussion at this congress there are a variety of political opportunities for the DSP to throw itself into this year. It will be a challenging year. But it will be a year in which the DSP can lead struggles and grow.
The fundamental line of this report is to project a line of march for the DSP on how best to revive the Socialist Alliance from a mistaken line that has been pursued by the party for the last two years, a line that the NE majority wants us to continue. The NE minority has throughout the PCD stressed the need to re-imagine the SA, which is what we said in the draft congress resolution. But this re-imagining cannot just be an organisational re-imagining of the SA. We do need to be clear what we do with SA in an organizational sense but we first must be clear politically about the political potential of the Socialist Alliance. From this political clarity we as the DSP can work out how best to utilise the Socialist Alliance in the coming period to take the revolutionary struggle forward.
The Socialist Alliance has and will continue in the coming period to play an important role in how we relate to broader political forces that come into motion.
The main thrust of the majority’s SA tasks report looks at organisational fixes for a political problem that we face with SA. It stresses the changes in how SA is to be organised which will reduce the pressure on the DSP; the NE minority agrees with some of the changes. I will tackle some of the specific proposals later in the report. But the majority report does not tackle sufficiently the fundamental political problem that SA and the DSP face.
As we began to draw out at the May NC, the objective political situation for the significant advancement of a multi-tendency socialist party had changed. That is, that it did not exist.
So we began to address this political reality. Our high hopes for a mass upswing in the working class against the Howard agenda has failed to materialise in a sustained manner. There is a fightback and that will no doubt continue but not significantly enough to advance the creation of a new mass workers’ party. That does not mean we stop trying a variety of tactics to push for such a party. That has been at the heart of our history since our formation, to always be on the look out for opportunities to propagandise and in some cases actively work for greater left unity in the form of broader alliances. In some cases that has been on an electoral level while in other cases we have thrown ourselves into broader party formations such as the NDP, unity with the Socialist Party, the New Left Party project and, more recently, the Socialist Alliance.
Party and campaigning alliance
A question that we face is, what does it mean to build a party and what does it mean to build a campaigning alliance?
A party is fundamentally about building a leadership, as Cannon observed, not only in relation to the class, but also within the party. SA right now does not present this possibility.
However, SA can and should be built as a campaigning alliance – a political front consisting of key elements engaged in the vanguard of the current political struggle – the DSP, union militants, some old left elements. Other potential elements include forces disillusioned with the Greens, other mass movement activists and youth and students.
The possibility of developing this vanguard into a party depends on political developments – no amount of sending out membership cards or ringing around will solve the fundamental political problem that SA faces. Leading comrades from the majority have argued that the problem with SA is that we don’t ring people enough, that if we had done more of this it would be bigger, it would have taken fundamental steps forward. Though we can always improve our contacting for SA, DSP and GLW we cannot come out of this congress with the assessment that this has been the main problem with SA in the last period: That if we just organised ourselves more efficiently things would be fundamentally different. As Marxists we look at the objective political situation and try to best respond to that situation. It is the balance of class forces that will fundamentally determine how much we can achieve.
We do need to look at the organisational responsibilities and priority that we place in Socialist Alliance but that must be done within the framework of a clear political assessment of where SA is at and what potential it has in the coming period based on the information that we have available to us to this moment.
The fundamental problem has been that SA has significantly stalled politically as a broad left party project. Once again this is the main political assessment that we made at the May NC but the majority refused to satisfactorily address this in PCD and now in the reports to the conference.
The May NC began to correct the mistaken line but since then the NE majority has argued for a line which is contrary to the main political assessment that we began to make at that NC. The political line of the NE majority if implemented would begin a process of reversing the assessment that was made in May and take us back to a situation that would not only discredit the gains that we have made in Socialist Alliance and make it harder to revive SA in the coming period, but will also jeopardise the DSP itself.
The key problem with the NE majority line is that the DSP will continue to politically and organisationally remain an internal tendency of the Socialist Alliance, a line that is fundamentally in contradiction with the draft congress resolution. Such a line will not only be disastrous for the DSP but it will also strangle SA as an effective political force in the coming period.
It has become increasing clear to the NE minority during the period of PCD that the main thrust of the NE majority line would in fact lead to a process of liquidating our revolutionary Marxist politics into Socialist Alliance which has a non-revolutionary class struggle platform. Such a line if implemented would result in killing off any potential for the Socialist Alliance as a left regroupment project in the future. It would lead to a process which in fact has already begun a rebadging of the DSP as SA with a broad class struggle program rather than a revolutionary Marxist program.
This is what we mean by political liquidation – that we no longer publicly argue a Marxist line as expressed in the DSP program but only the line of the Socialist Alliance in public forums.
The NE minority is arguing for a political line that will not only clearly project that it is the DSP that is the party that we are building but also a political line that will be able to revive the SA as the resolution states, “as a campaigning alliance in the social movements (particularly the trade union movement) that seeks to build, in actions and in words, a new mass workers’ party…”.
The notion of a campaigning alliance in the social movements is the key section of this formulation and the resolution as a whole for that matter. It points to how we should be viewing the SA, that is, an alliance not as a workers’ party or broad left party or mass workers’ party or broad left party in formation, all of which have been argued by majority comrades throughout PCD.
Lessons from our history
In trying to understand how we relate to SA we need to be clear about our history, traditions and socialist perspectives that have been central to our survival in very difficult political times in an advanced capitalist country. We don’t face the same challenges as do some of our comrades in the Asian region or Latin America but we do face those very deadly “ideological bullets”.
Australian capitalism in comparison with other OECD countries is one of the most economically and politically stable in the world. There is still sustained economic growth, which we all know will inevitably turn around due to the fundamental contradictions that are intrinsic to capitalism. However in the mean time the economic growth has allowed Australian capitalism to divide the working class together with the use of ideological attacks such as racism.
By studying and fully understanding our history we realise that it is filled with discussion and experimentation of broad party formations from the Nuclear Disarmament Party to the recent experience with the Socialist Alliance. During most of the ‘80s we were engaged in some form of broad party discussion or activity but we never lost sight of building a public revolutionary Marxist party. The DSP, or SWP as we were called at that time, was everywhere.
We always stressed the necessity of publicly arguing for revolutionary Marxist politics through the party and Resistance. We never gave up that fundamental right for independent Marxist politics to be expressed publicly. But we also learnt that when projects did not meet our expectations we made the assessment and moved on. We didn’t try to reinvent a reality to fit what we wanted to happen. We never seriously jeopardised the revolutionary Marxist party project.
One of the fundamental lessons that we have drawn, from all those experiences, is that we have always put our revolutionary Marxist organisation and politics first and upfront and publicly. Our perspective is to build a revolutionary movement in Australia and to do that we understand the need to use a variety of tactical orientations.
We understand the need for an independent revolutionary organisation and the need to place our struggle within a global perspective/context. The international situation has always played a crucial part in our understanding and interpretation of what needs to be done in Australia.
The lessons that we learnt from the ‘80s are still very relevant today, though the political conditions have changed. One thing is different, that being that the working class retreat that began under Hawke’s Labor government has been more prolonged. There is a fightback but there is also two decades of working class retreat to overcome.
In the ‘80s and early ‘90s we experienced some very difficult situations with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the massive propaganda campaign against communism. But through this period we developed some basic party-building perspectives that hold true today.
In an October 1987 NC report Comrade Jim Percy stated: “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.
“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.”
What was the May NC assessment
The resolution that was drafted after our May NC made the key political point that we could no longer remain as an internal tendency of the Socialist Alliance due to the political fact that the objective political situation did not allow for SA to take any significant steps forward in the creation of a new socialist party or of a mass workers’ party.
But we also made the assessment that SA had stalled as a political project. What we initially had in mind for SA was no longer the case even though we tried our best. Comrade John Percy’s report yesterday outlined the dynamics of SA Mark 1 and 2.
From this we began a process of rethinking of what to do with SA. We took significant organisational steps back in SA. In fact to really implement the DSP emergency measures the overwhelming majority of DSP branches actually had to put the organisation of SA on hold.
But do we really think that organisational steps, in the DSP or in SA, will save SA from its current political problems?
The starting point for DSP tasks in SA is based on our understanding of what the Socialist Alliance is. What we do in SA will be dependent on how we view SA. This has changed dramatically since the May NC realisation that SA could not make “significant steps forward towards a new party”.
Comrades from the majority have argued for all sorts of formulations when referring to the Socialist Alliance. We need clarity not confusion on this question. Many of these descriptions are in fact contradictory and in opposition to each other. It does not help us in trying to draw a framework for building SA.
The NE minority is clear on this question. The SA needs to be built as a “campaigning alliance in the social movements (particularly the trade union movement) that seeks to build, in actions and in words, a new mass workers’ party…” From this perspective we can get a clear view of the role of the DSP but also our role within SA. That is, it is not the party that we are building but a campaigning alliance that we are intervening into to help propagandise for a new mass workers’ party. It is a very important calling card and organisational forum together with Green Left Weekly particularly in the trade union movement.
Our tasks are based on the assessment made in the resolution
When we first initiated the Socialist Alliance we had just gone through the MUA struggle, large demonstrations for East Timor and against racism and Hanson and the Melbourne S11 protests. There was agreement amongst eight socialist organisations that unity was necessary and this appealed to many people.
But that objective political situation was not enough to take any significant steps forward towards a new party.
The draft resolution states: “While the Australian working class is being forced into political action, it is too early to proclaim this as the end of the last two decades of class retreat in the face of the capitalist neoliberal offensive. Our characterization, at our last congress, of the post-1998 political developments as the beginning of a turn in the working class struggle was over-optimistic. Certainly those developments marked a broadening legitimacy crisis of neoliberal politicians and the rise of some new political vanguards and the partial revival of advanced political elements that had previously retreated into relative inactivity. However, the working class as a whole remained generally on the retreat. The long 15-year capitalist expansion cycle (with all its contradictions) continued to dampen resistance to capitalist neoliberal reforms. While understanding that the post-1998 political developments did not mark the end of two and a half decades of class retreat, the scale of the 2005 ruling class offensive and the initial mass response against it means that there is the potential for a shift in the working class struggle which we need to be ready to respond to.”
So the challenge that we have ahead of ourselves is how to prepare ourselves for any potential “shift in the working class struggle”. The mass mobilisations that took place in July and on November 15 last year were an important development but we need to put them in context with what we have experienced over the last two decades. We must not overestimate the significance of these protests but even more importantly we must have a realistic assessment on what might happen in the coming period based on what we have seen over the last two decades in the working class.
The resolution argues clearly that the SA cannot progress significantly towards a new socialist party project without a more sustained united campaign against the neoliberal attacks.
In reference to the changed political reality of the last few years section 20 of the resolution states:
“This reality has posed a change for the DSP’s perspectives for the Socialist Alliance. Our December 2003 resolution to integrate as much of the resources of the DSP into the Socialist Alliance as possible was based on an overestimation of the political conditions. This attempt at integration failed because the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist. To persist with such an integration plan would have jeopardised 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 an invaluable and indispensable political institution on the Australian left.”
Section 21 of the resolution then says:
“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 the 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. Nevertheless, for the first time in many years many unionists look towards a left party project. By championing the need for a broadly based anti-capitalist party or a new mass workers’ party (as Craig Johnston put it at the Melbourne 2005 National Trade Union Fightback Conference) and by organising the most united left intervention in the social movements, the Socialist Alliance can continue to win the respect of and recruit broader layers of militant workers to its ranks and in this way take practical steps along the road to such a party.”
This is encapsulated in the phrase “campaigning alliance in the social movements that seeks to build a new mass workers’ party”. This is the most quoted section of the resolution for very good reasons. But we must be clear in what it says. Firstly it says that the Socialist Alliance is a campaigning alliance. Secondly that it has the perspective of building a new mass workers’ party which is what attracts people to it but it is also saying that the political conditions do not yet exist to create such a party.
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”.
The new draft, like the previous draft, argues (see paragraph 23) that “DSP members will also continue to politically organise together with other Socialist Alliance members through branches, caucuses, committees and working groups … in order to build the most united political intervention possible”, though in the new draft the words “wherever effective” are inserted before the words “in order to build the most united political intervention possible” and the words “and to build the Socialist Alliance” are added after these words.
The insertion of the words “wherever effective” appears to be a response to the criticism made by the supporters of the NE minority that, without an unsustainable level of DSP cadre time and effort, the SA branch meetings are not an effective means to politically organise with other SA members to carry out united campaigning activity – “united left intervention” – in the social movements.
But this still leaves unanswered the question: Which “structures” of the SA should we prioritise to build it as a campaigning alliance?
The NE majority report on party building to the October NC plenum (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 12) puts the priority on keeping SA branches “alive” by having them each adopt a “modest campaign”. It makes no specific proposals with regard to any other SA structures.
The NE minority report to the October NC plenum argues that the SA’s “main campaign will continue to be around the industrial relations laws, before and after implementation”, that it should be “the most active vehicle for resisting attacks on unions”, and that the SA structures we should prioritise putting our time and effort into are “SA organising caucuses around specific purposes, such as fighting the IR laws, or defending specific unions under attack”, rather than the SA branch meetings.
Nowhere in the new draft is it proposed that the SA can take any significant practical steps today or the foreseeable future to organise itself into a mass workers’ party or a broadly based anti-capitalist party or a new socialist party.
Fundamental problem with majority report
It sees SA as the party that we are building, not the DSP. In the DSP perspectives report presented on behalf of the minority we stated: “we need to shed our delusions that SA has become a party, mass or otherwise, and be realistic about what it is, and return it to a useful campaigning alliance.”
Increasingly comrades from the majority get ecstatic that a SA meeting has one or two independents or simply that there was good political discussion even though everyone in attendance was from the DSP or Resistance. This is not making SA a broad left party formation or anywhere near it at the moment.
It organizationally rebadges SA as the DSP rather than viewing it as a campaigning alliance that we are intervening in to propagandise for a new left party. Through this process we have helped to discredit SA as an alliance and if we continue along this line we will kill off any opportunity to save the positive reputation that SA does have.
What the draft resolution and the supporters of the NC minority are saying is this: the current reality is that 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.”
In fact, comrades, our drive to turn SA into our party has almost killed SA as an alliance. If we continue in this way we’ll thoroughly discredit it on the left.
The task ahead is to revive SA as something real, to get it back some of the life it had in the first year or two, when it was a very useful campaigning alliance.
The minority argues that the Socialist Alliance is a very useful bridge in relating to the leaders and vanguard in the movement, but only if we build it as a campaigning alliance, not a party-in-formation.
Tasks
Comrade John Percy noted in his report presented on behalf of the minority that 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 militants and socialists in the trade unions.
So how do we measure the state of SA. The key measure for our success in building SA as a campaigning alliance in this period is the ability of SA to assist in the development of the DSP’s work in the unions and other social movements.
The SA branches that work are those that have a solid local foundation. Even then they work mostly as “holding patterns”, attracting a small number of activists who participate in activity in “local ways”. These branches that work do not represent a qualitative jump from the revolutionary party nucleus.
Rather than pretending they do, we should accept what they are and organise them on that basis. We should take a realistic approach and prioritise those branches that are working and build on their strengths, as they do represent an important gain in terms of the potential spread of propaganda and our agitational capacity and allow us to tap into real local campaigns. In this sense, we cannot have a simple formula for SA branch meetings.
However, we also need to be open to how we organise these SA branches – no mickey-mouse branch executives, no activities just to “keep things ticking”, etc. Instead we should be looking at the strengths of these branches – what and who they organise – in order to find ways of developing on those strengths.
For example, in Melbourne West, could we develop the SA branch into a sort of “Western Left Forum” – making use of the movement links which a range of our SA members have, but do not feel the framework exists for developing them through the SA branch.
Tied to our schemas we are increasingly losing the initiative. In Melbourne West for example there are a range of networks developing which we are at the tail-end of rather than in the lead – the Western union network, the NTEU and AEU at Victoria University, etc. This is despite the DSP and SA having an important presence in many of these networks and potential networks.
This is the irony of the charge against the minority – that it seeks to “kill” SA and return to a “warm niche.” In reality it is the majority schema that is preventing us from taking up the political opportunities which do exist in the here and now, and which hold the key to the political development of SA.
SA faces a serious financial situation that is not sustainable without severely undermining the finances of the DSP. We can no longer project things that will take away from DSP finances. Every political decision has to be able to be financially viable and self-funded by SA. This is the harsh reality we face.
A project that needs a lot more discussion is Seeing Red. The NE minority currently believes that Seeing Red has lost its political usefulness. SA propaganda is much more effective through GLW, mass flyers such as during November 15, statements and short documents such as the Gender Agenda. Resources that are currently being used for Seeing Red would be much better being used in these areas.
We need to project for an SA national conference that brings together the best of the vanguard in the unions and the social movements. A fightback conference should also be projected around the conference. We need to think through what it is that we are projecting so that we get the most from it.
At a branch level SA needs to project for the organisation of branch conferences or in some cases a state conference.
SA caucuses should be seen as one of the main forms that we can politically involve SA members in. This is particularly important in the trade union area. A variety of union caucuses could be organised on a regular basis. But in this area we must also prioritise DSP union fractions. In fact this should be a precondition. Our own comrades must be politically clear about our line before we discuss that with other SA members.
We need to be flexible in how we relate to parliamentary elections. We should not automatically think that we need to run in every election. SA should participate in elections only if comrades from the branch make the assessment that a serious campaign can be run by the branch. Empty bucket campaigns are a political disaster for the Socialist Alliance.
We should also be open to broader electoral alliances. This may even mean that we do not run as the Socialist Alliance but rather as part of a broader electoral ticket and identifying ourselves as SA. Branches need to look at all possible forces inside and outside of SA when it comes to the electoral arena.
On the question of public forums/film screenings. A number of comrades from the majority have argued throughout PCD and in this congress that SA forums and film screenings have attracted on occasions a good layer of broader activists. Perth Hills has had some very good results with this. And there are similar examples around the country. The key point to make with this is that overall we are not reaching out to any significantly larger layer of activists that we could not do through GLW forums. This has been our experience before and during the Socialist Alliance experience. This is not to say that we cannot or should not continue to organise some of these activities under Socialist Alliance’s banner but rather that we need to put it into a political context.
GLW continues to be our best reachout and propaganda tool on a weekly level. GLW also plays a crucial organising role. In Melbourne there was a very successful GLW/RAC public meeting with Comrade Sarah Stephen and Julian Burnside that attracted some 100 people.
SA structures
We are not building party-style branches (no leadership bodies etc); branches are more like “left forums” for discussion and planning.
State leadership bodies are most meaningful not as a composition of branches but more so as discussion and planning forums for the key political elements (currents) in this united front; this also goes for national leadership bodies.
Caucuses, built around real interventions (ongoing or single events), not caucuses as routine gatherings of relatively arbitrary mixes of SA members, are what we should prioritise.
In Comrade Lisa Macdonald’s outline of the DSP’s tasks in the Socialist Alliance that was presented to the DSP NE it was stated: “…the notion of a fixed meeting routine or meetings for their own sake must be junked. There is no one size fits all formula for SA branch meetings. Their frequency (and form) must be determined by political developments and the needs of each branch.”
So comrades should not have taken such offence to the NE minority position on branch meeting frequency that was presented by Comrade John Percy at the October NC.
Our projection for quarterly or less frequent, as a general guideline but not a rigid prescription, is based on the realistic assessment that the SA as a genuine campaigning alliance for a new party can’t be revived primarily through building local SA branches. Local branches might be appropriate and typical structures for a party, or a party in formation, but they’re not the kind of structures through which we can realistically and usefully revive SA as a campaigning alliance, at this stage anyway, when SA is so threadbare that it hardly exists outside of the DSP, outside of our DSP membership, our DSP organisation and our DSP initiatives.
That is, the NE minority perspective for SA reaffirms the move away from trying to organise SA through local branches to emphasise more ongoing caucusing around specific campaign initiatives, or more ongoing areas of SA alliance-building, such as SA’s trade union interventions.
Our campaign perspectives for SA in 2006 should be:
1. The union fightback – building real coordination into specific industry groupings (CFMEU, AMWU, NTEU, AEU, etc); caucuses that meet to develop tactics for real defence campaigns.
2. Civil liberties/anti-war: develop a plan to build alliances and proposals for action in this arena (maybe a national civil liberties, anti-war and refugee rights campaign meeting to start with).Conclusion
We should only do things “as SA” where this involves genuine collaboration with other SA activists, and where it really does help to build SA as “a campaigning alliance for a new mass workers’ party”.
For us, for the DSP, SA is an area of intervention into a non-party organisation, where we have to decide how many DSP comrades we need to assign to SA’s various bodies, campaign initiatives and political interventions at a given time, taking into consideration all our other DSP areas of intervention and our DSP party-building priorities.
There will be political openings for us in the coming period if we view the Socialist Alliance as a campaigning alliance and this will enable us to be in the best position to more effectively revive SA from its current state.
Summary
In this summary I will not be able to go through all the different opinions and questions that comrades have raised from the majority about the minority position, but I do want to try to cover what I think to be some of the most crucial ones. This is not to ignore some of the questions that comrades have raised but just to try to cover the most important ones.
I would first like to quote from Jim Percy’s book Traditions Lessons and Socialist Perspectives, a book that I make a point of reading every year.
In a report that Jim gave to the DSP in October 1991, he said: “Moreover, the very fact that we are a small party, a small organisation, means that we are always looking for tactical approaches to building the party; building alliances and looking for regroupments. We’re going to need these approaches for a long period… When we’re discussing our party building work we should bear in mind quite clearly our general method – that we have to look at things in their development. That is we have to assess not only where we are at, or even what is desirable, but how do we get to where we want to go. That makes the task rather difficult. We’re probably the only party that calls itself Marxist in this country that has that approach…” (p.55)
Jim also goes on to say, “There is something else that we did often in the 1980s, and that’s zig-zagged in our overall tactical orientation and organisational practices. You can look at it two ways – either finding a new opportunity or quickly admitting an error when you find that what you had hoped would happen doesn’t happen.” (p.63)
Comrades, I think that those words still hold true today in terms of looking at the framework of the whole debate and trying to work out what we do next. We need to use the reports – both the majority and minority – as a testing ground and to assess our intervention into the Socialist Alliance and our party-building tasks in the next period.
In the reports presented by the minority we deliberately concentrated on the question of re-imagining Socialist Alliance on a political level rather than just organisationally. This is not to downplay the organisational changes that need to take place but the minority did concentrate on the political changes that need to take place. This is also because the NE minority agrees with some of the organisational changes. There is the 24 points presented by Lisa as an appendix to the report that the NE minority generally agrees with.
On the question of Seeing Red, it is a point where we do differ. We still hold to the view that Seeing Red is not viable financially but also question whether it is the best political tool to use for SA. The NE minority feels that we still need more discussion on this question in the party but also in the Socialist Alliance.
Another key reason why such a large section of the report was dedicated to the political re-imagining of Socialist Alliance and how that effects our tasks in Socialist Alliance is because we still think that it is on this question that the fundamental differences come into play.
I think that what was voted on in Melbourne reflected a sense of some united action and is a useful document but I think that it is not a complete document and is something that in Melbourne we need to have more discussion on how we think that can be implemented. I think that there will be differences there and it is not going to be easy to work out. In that document the key question of what exactly is Socialist Alliance and what are we trying to do with SA was not talked about. The key difference that was not discussed was whether SA was a campaigning alliance or a party in formation. These are very different concepts in Marxist terminology and is something that we did not discuss.
On the question of some of the proposals that Lisa put forward in the majority report. Even though the NE minority can agree with many of them, there is still a problem with these points. There is something that needs to be flagged here and that is that the 24 points seem more like a wish list of tasks rather than something that is really achievable. The question that we raise, is this a bad thing? I think that such a list can lead us into problems. In our reports to congresses we have always been careful to propose things that we actually think can be achieved.
We need a bit more clarity on this question and in fact I think that we need some sort of benchmark so that we can work out at the next congress how to analyse the success of our projections. Obviously if we achieve all 24 then it would be a success, but if we only achieve three or four we need to go back and assess if they where realistic.
I think that this points to some of the problems with the proposals that comrades have raised through discussion, that in essence you can’t necessarily disagree with some of the proposals put forward by the majority but do they really think that they can be achieved or is it just wishful thinking? I think that is something that we need to be open about when we put up proposals.
One particular example is that when I put up a 15-point proposal of tasks to project for the year in our Venezuela solidarity work at the October NC they were based on what we thought could be achieved. There were things that I thought would have been good to also propose but I didn’t think they could really be achieved, and therefore left them out.
We need to be careful that we are not just setting up ourselves for failure which is something that we do not want to do.
Comrades have said that the minority have questioned the “loyalty” of the majority. I don’t think that I have done that or that the NE minority has done that but let’s also look at it from another angle and let’s be open about it. I think that the majority has questioned the loyalty of the minority. That has happened in Melbourne and also in other cities. I think that the majority has the right to do that. Comrades have questioned my loyalty which is their right but provide the evidence and be concrete about it.
That is what it means to be part of a Marxist party, assessing ourselves and the party. The party as a whole needs to assess where we are going and what are our goals and what are our revolutionary Marxist positions. That is something that we always need to question. Are we sticking to Marxism or not?
Within that framework I think that individual comrades do have the right to question other comrades about their “loyalty” in the sense of political direction. I think that it is something serious but is part of the party constitution and members do have that right but that is something that has to be backed up. But let’s not condemn people for questioning it, because that does lead us down a dangerous road.
On the question of political liquidation, which is part of the report. Of course it is a serious accusation, there is no denying that but it is the right of all members to do it but to do it openly. I think that it has been better that it has been done openly. This is something that we think – that there is a possibility of political liquidation. We have tried to define that a bit more. If we think that it is not happening then I think that we will also be very open about that too.
One issue that came up in informal discussion is that at a previous congress we changed the section of the DSP constitution about membership. The original section said that members needed to abide by the party program but we changed that to members familiarising themselves with it to be a member of the DSP. This is something that we need to change.
Another issue that comrades from the majority and the minority raised is that of alliances and what we do with Socialist Alliance. There is still a lot of distortion by comrades from the majority that say that the minority do not want to have Socialist Alliance branch meetings. That is clearly false and is stated in the minority report. It’s a question of their frequency and what we do at them.
On the question of looking at other alliances. I don’t know about all the ins and outs of all the cities but you can look at Melbourne where there are definitely different forces or at least individuals that represent broader forces that we do need to look at and work out how to relate to. These people are part of the militant minority current but many of them are still part of the Labor Party and do not want to leave the Labor Party. But there are also independents that we need to look at how we relate to.
There will be many opportunities that we need to look at and see where they go. The key thing in this is that we need a sense of flexibility in how we look at the question of alliances so that we can advance the working class movement in Australia.