Counter-report on organisational principles and constitutional amendments
By Doug Lorimer for the LPF
[The general line of the following report and summary was rejected by the national committee. The vote for adopting the report was 5 full NC members in favour, 20 against, with 0 abstentions, and 2 candidate members in favour, 7 against, with 0 abstentions.]
Up until our 1986 Congress, we did not have any rules in our constitution dealing with factions. This fact was reflected in the November 1983 Control Commission report into the secret Barnesite faction in the DSP, which stated “In accordance with the statutes (constitution) of the Fourth International, members of our party have the right to form tendencies and factions at any time they may wish”.
We did, however, have an organisational principles resolution (adopted at the 1977 DSP Congress) that set out our Leninist principles (i.e., guiding ideas) of party organisation, including organisational norms relating to factions. Our 1977 organisational principles resolution was modelled on a similar document adopted by the US Socialist Workers Party in 1965.
Our 1986 Congress rescinded the 1977 document. The reason for doing this was that we had seen the US SWP leadership headed by Jack Barnes interpret the “organisational norms” – that is, the stated expected standards of average organisational functioning – set out in the US SWP’s 1965 organisational principles resolution as obligations and rules, that is, as binding requirements and, on the basis of accusing members of “violating” these organisational norms, use them to expel all known dissidents from the US SWP.
This experience began to give us doubts about having a formally adopted resolution on organisational norms that might be regarded as having the same authority as the constitution because it had been formally adopted by the party congress.. As the party-building report to the 1986 Congress presented by Jim Percy observed: “We began to think that this was the wrong way. That this was not the educational way. That this was not the correct way to organise the party. If you’re going to have rules that you want to stick to – that are rules – that are a bottom line, you’d better put them in the constitution and make it clear that these are the things that you must have. That you can’t really function without this degree of rules. Put them in the constitution.”
Jim continued: “Is that all you know? Is that the beginning and end of all wisdom? No, on top of that of course, there’s a whole number of other things about organising and building and leading and training and developing a revolutionary organisation like our own. And that’s built up primarily through practice. Through an understanding about how the party has operated. Through an understanding of what happened to the party in this particular period. What was the history of that particular split, that fusion, that development? What lessons did we learn? When you try to write that down in a relatively short form, and make that a rule, you distort it in one way or another. You either make it too hard or too soft. Too brief it doesn’t tell the whole story. Or there can be a tendency to do that. So we felt that project was more and more flawed. More and more unnecessary for us. So one of the motions that I want to foreshadow here and that will be put at the time of the presentation of the constitution to the closed session on Wednesday, is that at long last we rescind the old organisational principles in the yellow Socialist Worker.”
However, as an examination of the constitution adopted in 1986 reveals, we did not consistently apply this approach of only including in our constitution the “rules that you want to stick to – that are rules – that are the bottom line”. Our 1986 constitution still contained norms presented as rules, as binding requirements. We only really resolved this problem, when we adopted a preamble to our constitution at our 16th Congress in January 1995. This preamble gave a summary of our Leninist organisational principles that made quite clear the distinction between such a statement of organisational principles and norms on the one hand and the articles of the constitution, which the preamble noted “define the organisational structure of the party, the rights and responsibilities of party units and of individual party members, and set out the rules governing their functioning”.
The report that Graham has just presented on behalf of the NE majority makes proposals that go in the opposite direction to that proposed in the 1986 party-building report. It proposes that we again produce an organisational principles resolution and it proposes that we insert into the constitution statements of organisational norms as rules, as binding requirements – thus ignoring the conclusions we drew in 1986 after observing how the US SWP leadership used organisational norms interpreted as rules to stifle the internal democracy of their party.
Before examining these proposals, I’d like to welcome the recommendation in Graham’s report to rescind the proposal made in the May 2006 NC plenum’s report on organisational principles to “make it explicit that there can be no exclusive meetings or caucuses around positions during a PCD or at a Congress unless a faction has been declared”. This proposal was far too restrictive. In particular, as I pointed out in the counter-report I presented on behalf of the LPF to the May 2006 plenum [see Activist Vol. 16, No. 5], it failed to answer the question of how “a platform grouping that is not a declared faction and does not have a majority on the NE [would] prepare its reports for presentation to a party congress”, other than making “it mandatory for minority platform groupings to constitute themselves as factions, and thus institutionalise an adversarial approach to our pre-congress discussion periods”.
The NE majority proposes a series of amendments to the constitution, the first of which is to “reinsert a preamble to the constitution of the DSP, being an edited version of the preamble adopted at our 16th Congress in 1995, in light of the DSP’s now being a tendency of Socialist Alliance.”
The LPF, of course, does not support the DSP continuing to be “a tendency” of the Socialist Alliance. We are for the “resurfacing” of the DSP as a public Leninist party, which is why we are for rescinding all of the constitutional amendments made at the DSP’s last two congresses. This would mean reinstating the original preamble. If the proposal in Graham’s report however simply means reinserting the original preamble, but with the name Democratic Socialist Perspective rather than Democratic Socialist Party and the word “party” replaced by “organisation”, then we will not vote against it.
The NE majority proposes to amend Article 4, paragraph 2 [c] of the constitution to add the words “‘the constitution” and “even if they have argued and/or voted against those decisions” to the existing obligation of members to “carry out their political activity to the best of their ability in accordance with the decisions of the national and local governing bodies of the DSP”. Since no–one has argued any member should act in a contrary manner, this proposal is completely unnecessary.
The NE majority proposes to add two new sentences onto the rule in the constitution dealing with factions. The first of these is to add the words: “Unilateral canvassing for members outside of pre-Congress discussion/Congress periods shall be prohibited.” In his report, Graham said that this does not mean that a faction cannot recruit new members outside of PCD/Congress periods. Then what does “canvassing for members” mean?
The alleged authority for this new rule is the following point made in the 1983 Control Commission report: “… members of our party have the right to form tendencies or factions at any time they may wish. What they don’t have the right to do is unilaterally decide the time and form in which they may canvass for support for their tendency or faction. This is solely the right of the authorised party bodies. That is, a comrade or group of comrades, who in the course of an authorised discussion in the party find themselves in political agreement on some disputed question, have the right to constitute themselves as a tendency or faction… However, this does not give them the right to decide unilaterally to circulate their platform or other documents to anyone outside their tendency or faction. They may do this only when the official party bodies authorise a discussion.”
Further clarifying this point, the 1983 CC report added: “As we have already explained, comrades who have differences with the party’s policy have no right to open unilaterally an organised discussion of those differences. They may raise them only through the channels, in the forms and at the times decided by the authorised party bodies.”
What the CC report was pointing out was that, as Article 5, paragraph 5 of our existing constitution states: “ The time, form and limits of discussions within DSP bodies shall be determined by those bodies.” The NE majority’s proposed amendment to prohibit “unilateral canvassing for members outside pre-Congress/Congress periods” is simply a very poorly formulated way of saying the same thing, but with the danger that it will be interpreted as a ban on factions recruiting new members outside such periods.
The second proposed amendment to the rules on factions is to insert the following sentence from the constitution adopted by the 1986 congress: “In general, once the questions around which a faction has been formed have been voted on by the party the faction should dissolve itself.” Here, the NE majority proposes that a norm – something that should happen “In general” – be inserted into the rules – the blinding requirements – governing the functioning of factions, thus again opening up the possibility of confusion of one with the other, which is why it was deleted from the constitution by our 1990 Congress.
The NE majority proposes to add to Article 5, Paragraph 5 the sentence: “Discussion of disputed questions within party bodies shall be conducted in a manner that respects the right of the DSP to conduct its work without disruption.” This is a slightly modified version of the first part of a paragraph that the 1995 DSP Congress deleted from the constitution, which read: “Discussion of disputed questions within party bodies should be conducted in a manner that respects the right of the majority to conduct the work of the party without disruption”.
The reason why it was deleted is set out in a report on constitutional amendments adopted by the NE in November 1994, which has been reprinted in the latest Activist. It says: “The first part of this paragraph is not a rule but a statement of organisational principle which is more clearly presented in the preamble, which states: ‘Party democracy means not only scrupulous respect for the rights of minorities, but also the right of the majority to have its decisions carried out and tested in practice by the entire membership before they are rediscussed. The party is therefore entitled to set the time, form and limits of its internal discussions’.”
Continuing, the 1994 NE report says: “Since the rule that follows this general statement of principle is already set down in the constitution, (i.e., Article 5, Paragraph 7 [Paragraph 5 in the current constitution- DL] which states, “The time, form and limits of discussion within party bodies shall be determined by those bodies’), the first part of” the paragraph “is redundant”.
The NE majority’s proposed amendment to Article 5, Paragraph 5 will also be redundant as a statement of organisational principle if the above quoted words are retained in the preamble that the comrades propose be reinserted at the beginning of the constitution..
In the NE discussion of the outline of Graham’s report and again in his report to the NC plenum, it was argued that inclusion of this redundant rule is necessary to refute the claim made in the LPF’s founding declaration that the DSP constitution contains no specific clause authorising DSP bodies to determine the time, form and limits of discussions between DSP members outside of those bodies. How it would do this is a complete mystery since the sentence refers to “discussion of disputed questions within party bodies”!
The final constitutional amendment the NE majority proposes is to Article 5, Paragraph 3. The comrades propose inserting the words “and by elected members of the National Committee and National Executive to plenaries of those bodies respectively” into the sentence “Absentee votes may be submitted by members to branch general meetings and district membership meetings, but shall only be counted if the reason for the submission of such an absentee vote has been accepted by the DSP body concerned.”
But what is not spelled out in this amendment is that the NE majority has decided that the grounds on which absentee votes may be rejected should be widened beyond the “reasons for the submission of an absentee vote”, i.e., the reason the comrade is unable to cast a vote in person, to include a judgement by the body concerned as to whether or not the comrade submitting an absentee ballot is casting an “informed” vote.
Surely the congress delegates should have an opportunity to settle this matter, and wouldn’t that be more clearly done if the NE majority proposed an amendment that left no ambiguity about this rule? For example, proposing to amend the sentence to read: “Absentee votes may be submitted by members to branch general meetings and district membership meetings and by elected members of the National Committee and National Executive to plenaries of those bodies respectively, but shall only be counted if the reason for the submission of such an absentee vote has been accepted by the DSP body concerned and it has decided that the member submitting the vote has sufficient knowledge of the issue being voted on to cast an informed vote.”
That, in practice, is how we’ve considered whether or not to accept particular absentee votes at NC plenums, though all sorts of complications have still arisen. For example, does the comrade have sufficient knowledge if they’ve only heard a report and not the discussion on it. I personally am more inclined to dispense with the matter entirely, that is, to get rid of all absentee voting. But that’s my personal inclination, and I’m not putting it forward to be voted on as part of this report.
Finally, the NE majority proposes that the next congress take a decision to make our internal information and discussion bulletin available for public purchase in our bookshops. This will give immediate access to our internal debates, to future written PCD, to our opponents on the left, many of whom may seek to use such information to influence our internal debates. It is the LPF’s view that the implementation of this proposal would tend to stifle the free and frank exchange of political views among DSP members in charting the best course forward for building our organisation. We are therefore not in favour of this proposal.
Summary
Some comrades have suggested that making the Activist public would require a constitutional amendment to Article 8, Paragraph 4, because this rule states that “The National Committee shall make provision for the publication, in an internal bulletin, of its documents, documents or amendments proposed by other DSP members for consideration by the Congress and written discussion contributions.” However, the rule requires publication of an internal bulletin, not a secret bulletin. It is not proposed by the NE majority that the bulletin be open to contributions from non-DSP members, only that it would be available for purchase by non-DSP members.
I would urge all NC members and all other DSP members to read and carefully consider both of the reports presented here today when they are reprinted in the Activist in the light of our approach since our 1986 Congress, which has been to seek to avoid formulating norms – statements of expected average behaviour – as constitutional rules, as blinding requirements. There is a fundamental difference. For example, we set norms for comrades for the time they spend selling Green Left Weekly, but these are not rules, that is, binding requirements subject to possible disciplinary action if they are not met by any comrade.
I would also urge comrades to consider the proposals and arguments put in both reports on their merits, on what they will mean for the functioning of the party, and not according to whether the LPF opposes or supports a particular proposal, as was argued for here by Dick Nichols. That is the method of blind factionalism, of viewing everything from narrow factional considerations rather than the needs of the party.