Resolution on Party-Building
Presented to the DSP NC meeting by the LPF
[The following resolution was presented to the DSP NC meeting May 13-14, 2006 by the steering committee of the LPF. The resolution was not submitted for a vote at the NC meeting.]
The Socialist Alliance is dead. This reality can be denied only by those DSP members who persist in mistaking their own activities for vital signs in SA. How and why SA died, and where we go from here, are the subject of this resolution, submitted by the Leninist Party Faction to the May 2006 DSP National Committee plenum.
The DSP and left regroupment
1. The dream of the US rulers of a “New American Century” is giving way to the nightmare of the Iraq quagmire and a continental rebellion against neoliberalism in Latin America, a rebellion spearheaded by a firebrand revolutionary socialist who has sworn that Venezuelan blood will be spilt if the US tries to invade socialist Cuba, the defiant superpower of solidarity. The coalescing of a new anti-imperialist bloc of Third World countries emboldened by waning support for US military adventures at home; the latest worker-student revolt in France; the victory of Morales in Bolivia and Hamas in Palestine; the giant mobilisations for immigrant’s rights in the US – all these developments point to the fact that while imperialism may not yet be under siege, it is being challenged on a growing number of fronts.
2. The most formidable challenge is the opening of the socialist revolution in Venezuela. However, the rise of working class resistance, rebellion and revolution is extremely uneven across the planet. Working class and peasant resistance to the brutal capitalist restoration underway in China is still at an embryonic stage; most of Africa and Asia are relatively quiescent. Australia – experiencing the anomaly of a prolonged economic expansion fueled by China’s thirst for raw materials – is one of the most politically stable outposts of the imperialist empire.
3. The dominant character of the Australian political situation is the ongoing retreat of the working class in the face of the capitalist neoliberal offensive, punctuated by sporadic outbursts of active dissent and dispersed defensive struggles. This is underscored by the passage of the Work Choices legislation through federal parliament with only symbolic resistance by the ALP-controlled ACTU.
4. Against this backdrop of continuing working class retreat, from 1998 to mid-2003 there was a significant but still sporadic rise of active dissent and resistance, beginning with the historic 1998 MUA dispute and the subsequent revitalization of the militant trade union current in Victoria and Western Australia, followed by the rise of the refugee rights movement; the emergence of the anti-corporate globalization movement with the September 11, 2001 mass blockade of the World Economic Forum; and the spectacular outpouring of dissent against the impending imperialist invasion of Iraq. It ebbed with the invasion of Iraq, the jailing of former Victorian AMWU secretary Craig Johnston and the re-election of the Howard Coalition government in November 2004.
5. From its formation in May 2001 until early 2003 the Socialist Alliance achieved modest success in facilitating greater practical collaboration and constructive dialogue among its revolutionary socialist affiliates and its unaffiliated membership. Trade union militants and leaders such as Craig Johnston and WA MUA secretary Chris Cain were attracted to SA because of its left unity dynamic. As the face of socialist unity in election campaigns and to some extent in the social movements, SA both reflected and reinforced a strong desire among most of the unaffiliated members and sympathisers for steps towards greater unity, a desire shared by the DSP.
6. However, our decision to begin to implement a new perspective of seeking to build SA as “our new party” from early 2003 – formalised in the December 2003 change of name to Democratic Socialist Perspective – was a mistake. This attempt coincided with the retreat of the anti-war movement and the ebb of the post-1998 resurgence of the militant trade union current, which resulted in a sharp contraction of the active layer of unaffiliated SA members, and we implemented this turn in the face of determined opposition from all but one of the other SA affiliates.
7. While the downturn in the social movements since 2003 would have made it much more difficult to sustain SA as a viable campaigning alliance for a new left party, the DSP has killed off SA as a left regroupment project by persisting in our misguided attempt to build it as if it were already a new party, or a new party in formation, with an ever-shrinking pool of active SA partners. The inevitable consequence has been the creeping substitution of DSP activity for SA activity.
8. Since 2003 the main trajectory of SA has been a progressive decline, while the left unity dynamic has dissipated. Many SA branches haven’t even met on a quarterly basis in 2006. Given (a) the all but formal abandonment of SA by the remaining affiliates other than the DSP and that (b) there are only around two dozen unaffiliated members still actively building SA around the country, SA is no longer a genuine alliance, much less a new party in formation. The SA today is little more than the public face of the DSP.
9. The DSP must now publicly acknowledge that our unilateral attempt to build SA as a new party in formation was a mistake, a sectarian error and a setback for socialist collaboration and regroupment in this country. We should initiate a discussion with the remaining affiliates and SA members about the possibility of retaining SA as a socialist electoral alliance.
10. Considering the unfavourable political situation and the transmutation of SA into the public face of the DSP, a viable new left party project – ie. a formalised alliance of class-struggle forces as a first stage in the creation of a broad new party of anti-neoliberal resistance – is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future. The necessary willing partners for such a project do not exist, and will not come into existence until there is a sustained upsurge of mass working class resistance.
11. Therefore, the only practical steps we can take towards the creation of such a new left party today are (a) building our party, the Democratic Socialist Party; (b) consistent DSP propaganda explaining the need for a broad party of anti-neoliberal resistance as a stage in the creation of a mass revolutionary workers party; (c) the DSP’s participation in united front-type coalitions and alliances with other left and progressive forces which can help to create the necessary preconditions for the emergence of substantial new class-struggle forces and partners with whom we can unite.
12. Rather than seeking to build a single, formalised, over-arching campaigning alliance for a new left party, we need to intervene – as the Democratic Socialist Party – in many ad-hoc, as well as more ongoing, united front-type coalitions and alliances in the trade unions and other social movements and campaigns. We will have to go through a more or less extended period of such multi-faceted alliance building before we can initiate, together with other substantial class-struggle forces, a viable new left party project.
13. Further, as we recognised in our resolution The Election of the Howard Government and the Perspectives of the DSP, adopted by our January 1997 DSP congress,
“While we are too small to directly alter the objective political situation by calling into being mass struggles, this does not mean that our role is limited to commenting on events from the side-lines. We can initiate modest-sized actions that can set an example of how to struggle to broader forces. Where these actions raise issues and demands that connect with the concerns and sentiments of the broad masses, such actions can have an impact on the class struggle by forcing the labour bureaucracy, the capitalist media and the bourgeois parties to address these issues and concerns.”
The DSP’s united front work
14. The urgent priority of the DSP is to strengthen and renew our weakened and depleted Marxist cadre core. To do this effectively, we must:
Restore the Democratic Socialist Party as a publicly functioning Marxist-Leninist party, “the party we build today”
Prioritise the rebuilding of Resistance – our main source of new cadre historically and today – and all aspects of Marxist cadre education and training.
15. Our 1997 resolution notes that strengthening our organised nucleus of Marxist cadres “has been the central task facing us since the founding of our party [in 1972]…our main tactical orientation is to directly recruit to our tendency newly radicalising youth and to transform them, through education in Marxist theory and practical experience in the mass movement, into professional revolutionary propagandists, agitators and organisers.” This remains true today. While our goal is to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party,
“We recognise that we are not such a mass party or anything approaching it. We are the propaganda nucleus of such a party. This means that all our activities are propagandistic in their goals, that is, aimed at reaching out to radicalising workers and students with our ideas and winning them to our ranks. It means that we put priority in our activity, including in the mass movement, on explaining and popularising our ideas through…seeking to win the widest readership that we can for our most effective propaganda tool, Green Left Weekly.”
16. The DSP’s interventions in the trade unions and the social movements must be guided by the Marxist conception of the united front tactic. The dual purpose of the united front is to seek to bring together the broadest possible forces for effective action, while allowing the Marxist party to demonstrate – in practice – the superiority of Marxist strategy, tactics and leadership, creating the most favourable conditions for winning new allies, supporters and recruits to the DSP and for training Marxist cadres.
17. The passing of the Work Choices legislation through federal parliament with only symbolic resistance from the ALP-controlled ACTU is a significant defeat for the working class. While the militant union current in Victoria and WA has been able to exert some pressure on more conservative union leaderships to take some action, it has been forced onto the defensive and remains too small and too isolated to be able to compel the class-collaborationist ALP-ACTU bureaucracy to launch a campaign of sustained industrial action and mass mobilizations capable of compelling the Howard government and the bosses to retreat from the implementation of Work Choices.
18. However, the implementation of Work Choices will be resisted by individual unions and workplaces. The DSP must respond to these outbreaks of resistance by seeking to collaborate, wherever possible, with other left and progressive forces to help build the broadest possible solidarity actions and activities. Where union solidarity coalitions or alliances have been formed, we should intervene to help build and lead them; elsewhere, we should consider initiating them.
19. Also essential is DSP propaganda explaining (a) the need for solidarity with unions and workers who are resisting, and the need to defend and rebuild the class-struggle union current; (b) how this legislation could be turned into a paper tiger if the unions were to adopt a strategy of independent mass action, ie. if they were no longer misled by the class-collaborationist ALP bureaucracy; (c) the necessity for a political alternative to the ALP, ie. a broad party of anti-neoliberal resistance. We need to further establish Green Left Weekly as the voice of union and community resistance to the implementation of Work Choices.
20. The Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is capturing the imagination of growing numbers of radical and progressive youth on every continent, re-inspiring an older generation of radicals and leftists, and reopening the debate about socialism. This revolutionary resurgence is political gold, a “gift” that must not be squandered.
21. The over-arching and unifying campaign priority for the DSP and Resistance is to help build and lead a broad-based solidarity movement with the unfolding socialist revolution in Venezuela, and with socialist Cuba. This solidarity work must be carried systematically into every arena of DSP and Resistance intervention, and be thoroughly integrated into our general approach to Marxist education and propaganda.
22. Our main tasks in relation to this area of work are (a) to spread the Venezuela-Cuba message of hope and inspiration to the broad progressive milieu; (b) to popularize a Marxist understanding of these unfolding revolutions; and (c) to establish the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network as a broad network that can bring together the various constituencies which are beginning to organise their own solidarity activities to carry out joint initiatives through the AVSN, and for the AVSN itself to have a “life” of its own capable of nurturing a cadre of committed solidarity activists. Branches should also consider reviving local Committees in Solidarity With Latin America and the Caribbean.
23. Resistance, politically guided and supported by the DSP, must play a leading role in this solidarity and cadre-building work. We need to educate and train a new generation of youth cadres through immersion in building a Venezuela-Cuba solidarity movement in a DSP political framework.
24. Pre-emptive wars for “regime change” combined with repression of dissent and racist scapegoating at home are the twin pillars of imperialist strategy today. Through our participation in united-front type coalitions and also through our own initiatives, the DSP and Resistance must help to build campaigns against Australia’s participation in the imperialist occupation of Iraq, against Australian support for a US attack on Iran, in defense of civil liberties, against racism and national chauvinism, and for the rights of refugees. Given Australian imperialism’s increasingly interventionist role in our own “arc of instability”, we need to re-launch Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific nationally and, where possible, locally.
25. The DSP should initiate a broad alliance to organise the largest possible anti-Bush mobilisations to coincide with the APEC summit to be held in Sydney in late 2007. We should aim to make the April 2007 Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conference the largest-ever gathering of revolutionary and left parties in Australia from the region and beyond.
Rebuilding the Democratic Socialist Party
26. Three years of attempting to build SA as our new party weakened the DSP both politically and organisationally, whether measured in absolute terms – the decline over this period in members, cadre, Resistance, Green Left distribution, the closing of DSP branches (Darwin, Lismore) and offices, recurring financial crises – or in relation to some other left forces, to which we have lost initiative in key areas of movement work and base-building, and which have grown in size and/or influence at our expense.
27. Arresting the decline in our national Green Left Weekly distribution and DSP finances has been made possible mainly by the abandonment, since May 2005, of any serious attempt to implement the party-building perspective of the DSP congress majority, which is to build SA as our new party in formation, albeit in slow motion. In reality, in 2006 we have been “building” SA solely as the public face of the DSP, which has freed up some cadre resources at the branch level.
28. Since we began the turn to build SA as our new party, not only has the DSP itself all but disappeared from public view, but the public presentation of our Marxist ideas and explanations has largely given way to our presentation of the left-reformist, “class-struggle” politics of SA. This re-badging of the DSP’s revolutionary politics in practice has had a corrosive effect on our revolutionary consciousness and morale, disorienting comrades politically, sapping the will to struggle against the all-pervasive influence of bourgeois ideology and contributing – among other factors – to the rapid decadreisation of the DSP.
29. While the working class in Australia is still in retreat, this retreat is punctuated by sporadic expressions of active dissent and defensive actions which sustain a broad progressive dissenting constituency. Among this constituency there is a growing receptivity to radical ideas and explanations, a “search for answers” fueled by (a) the ever-sharper mass exposure of the glaring contradictions of global imperialist capitalism; (b) the insecurity and uncertainty resulting from decades of neoliberal restructuring; and (c) living examples, from Iraq to France to Venezuela-Cuba, of working class resistance, rebellion and revolution.
30. The moral, political and ideological bankruptcy of the capitalist ruling class – and not any immediate possibility for formalised left regroupment – is the biggest political opening for revolutionaries in Australia today. The challenge for the DSP is how to engage most effectively in what Comrade Fidel Castro calls “the battle of ideas”, to gain a bigger audience for our Marxist ideas and explanations and to win new recruits to Resistance and the DSP. Branches need to schedule regular, monthly or more frequent public Marxist seminars or workshops in the name of the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance Books.
31. Throughout the 1990s, Green Left Weekly played a dual role as both a left regroupment tool, establishing its unique authority as a broad left publication, while at the same time being a de facto party paper, profiling our revolutionary tendency and our Marxist political line. We need to return to this dual conception of the role of Green Left Weekly. In line with the restoration of the DSP as a public Marxist party, the content of the paper needs to be adjusted (a) to present our Marxist ideas and explanations more systematically and explicitly, and (b) to profile once more the DSP’s political line, its leaders and activities without compromising its broad appeal.
32. DSP branches need to schedule regular weekly or fortnightly Green Left Weekly public forums. Each forum should have at least one DSP speaker who can present the DSP’s Marxist analysis on the topic in question to help facilitate a more regular dialogue with our supporters, and to “out” the Marxist party behind the paper.
33. Under the strain of our forced march to try to build SA into a new party – and as a consequence of our persisting with this misguided political perspective – there has been a drift away from our Leninist leadership principle, which is that the most conscious, committed and self-sacrificing cadres are organised, through the DSP’s leadership bodies, to “lift up” the consciousness and commitment of the membership as a whole through political motivation and persuasion; systematic and ongoing attention to cadre education and training; striving to raise the political level of the party; and above all, through leadership by example.
34. This Leninist leadership principle underpins the creation of a revolutionary cadre party with a high level of political agreement, comradely relations of mutual confidence and the development of every comrade’s leadership capabilities. We need to return to a more conscious and consistent application of this leadership principle, and give conscious attention to the development of women leaders in particular.
35. Reviving and strengthening our DSP fractions and committees is vital, since these working bodies are our basic cadre-building “machinery”. In particular, we need to revive regular DSP trade union fractions.
36. Having drifted into emphasizing the “party of action” over the “collective thinking machine”, we need to correct this imbalance. Our cadre education and training must be systematic, intensive and aim to involve all DSP members, not just provisional members. More leadership attention and resources must be dedicated at the national level and in the branches so that a rich and varied program of DSP classes, seminars, workshops, camps and educational talks in branch meetings can become a true pillar of recadreisation.
37. The urgent challenge facing the DSP is to replenish our aging Marxist cadre core through recruiting and integrating, as rapidly as possible, a new generation – the “Venezuela Generation” – of youth cadres and DSP leaders. The revolutionary continuity and vitality of the DSP has rested, above all, on our ability to renew our cadre core primarily through prioritizing the building of Resistance, the socialist youth organisation in political solidarity with the DSP.
38. The priority of the DSP is to rebuild Resistance, which is smaller and weaker today than at any time in the past three decades. Resistance needs to position itself as the socialist youth organisation that closely identifies with the Venezuela-Cuba axis of socialist renewal. Resistance’s leading role in building a broad-based solidarity movement with the peoples of Venezuela and Cuba is an essential complement to Resistance’s efforts to stir up active youth dissent against our own ruling class at home. With the facts, arguments and inspiration of these living revolutions behind us, we can begin to challenge the increasing dominance of our left competitors – principally Socialist Alternative – on the campuses
39. We must strive to cultivate the spirit of revolutionary comradeship in the DSP and Resistance. We need a “party spirit” which can sustain us through the ups and downs of the struggle, which takes from each of us all that we are capable of giving, and which gives us, in return, something infinitely precious and beautiful – a tiny glimpse of the communist future.