Report on constitutional amendments

By Doug Lorimer, for NE minority

The NE minority is proposing that this congress rescinds all of the amendments to the DSP constitution adopted by the previous DSP congress, and is putting a motion before the delegates to that effect.

It is not my intention to reopen the debate on our perspectives for building the DSP and for building the Socialist Alliance. I will just note that this congress has approved the general line of a resolution on DSP-SA relations that recognises that the SA cannot be transformed into a party in the existing conditions of the Australian class struggle and that the DSP should cease to attempt to function as a purely internal tendency of the SA and again become a public revolutionary socialist organisation.

It is the NE minority’s view that, with regard to the DSP’s constitution, rescinding all of the constitutional amendments adopted at the previous DSP congress is the most consistent way to implement that political line – as we explained in the PCD article by John Percy and myself in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 4, to which we appended the constitutional amendments adopted by the last DSP congress and reproduced the DSP constitution as it was before the 21st congress.

With regard to the amendments that have been proposed to the NE majority: While we think they fall short of what is needed, these amendments do represent a limited formalisation of a shift away from the line of the last congress. The NE minority therefore recommends that delegates who support the NE minority platform do not vote against these amendments.

The first of the NE majority’s proposed amendments would remove from the constitution the aim of transferring the political and organisational acquisitions of the DSP to the SA.

The second proposed amendment, while continuing to make membership of the DSP conditional on membership of the SA, i.e., members of the DSP are required to join the SA, the amendment also provides for the possibility of there being exceptions to this requirement, i.e., if this is approved by the DSP national executive.

I assume that this has been proposed because the comrades recognise the possibility that in seeking to recruit from outside the SA, as the resolution projects we will seek to do in the period ahead, it may be a hindrance to require prospective DSP recruits to join the SA. However, the reason why this possible exception was included was not motivated when the two proposed amendments were presented to the NE, nor has it been motivated either in the PCD or in the report Dave has just presented. Perhaps in his summary, Dave can clarify what the thinking is behind this proposed change.