Party building counter report

By Marce Cameron for the LPF

[The following is an edited report and summary to the 23rd DSP Congress, January 3-6, 2008 presented by Marce Cameron on behalf of the LPF. The report and summary were rejected by the Congress. The general line of the report and summary received the votes of 12 out of 57 regular delegates and 8 out of 40 consultative delegates with one abstention.]

Comrades, we come to this Congress deeply divided over whether or not it is possible to build a broad left party in Australia today and whether or not the Socialist Alliance as it exists today is a step, however modest, towards such a party.

We need to come out of this Congress with a clear and unambiguous answer to the most important question of all: what kind of party are we going to build in 2008? The Marxist cadre party, or a broad-left party?

We have to decide between these two alternatives, because we know we cannot build two parties simultaneously, as we recognized in May 2005 when the DSP NC adopted a report titled “An urgent reality check on our perspectives”.

To insist that we have to choose between building the Marxist cadre party and trying to build a broad-left party is not an exercise in definition-mongering, semantics or the denial of dialectics. We really do have to decide, it’s one or the other.

The SA party-building line reaffirmed by our 2006 Congress has given us two more years of disorientation, decline and stagnation. Let’s just remind ourselves what this line is:

(a) We continue to build SA as a broad-left party in formation, but more gradually than before

(b) We build the DSP as a public Marxist tendency in SA

(c) We prioritise Marxist cadre-building via a strengthened DSP and a rebuilt Resistance.

I hope we can all agree that these three points convey the essence of the line, and that this is what we should be assessing.

As Comrade Allen Myers pointed out in his PCD contributions “A test of two lines” and “The silence of the MRF”, the DSP leadership majority should have circulated to the membership its own assessment of the line, its own comprehensive balance sheet well before Congress delegate elections. This is what a responsible leadership would have done.

What was presented was not a detailed, critical and objective assessment of the line but a brief resolution, a sloppy, illogical and evasive document that some comrades have admitted they didn’t read before signing on to the MRF.

Which party have we been building?

Which party have we been building since our last Congress, the Marxist cadre party or the broad left party? I appeal to any delegate who is not a member of the Leninist Party Faction to get up during the discussion and give us a straightforward answer to this question. This is not a rhetorical question, it’s a serious one.

You ask us: “When will you disband the faction”? If you can convince us that we have been successfully building either a broad-left party with a Marxist leadership or a Marxist cadre party, if you can point to the facts which demonstrate that we have been building either one or the other successfully, then that’s all you have to do. Convince us that your line is working and we’ll disband the faction.

We think the answer to this question is neither. We haven’t been able to build either a broad-left party or the Marxist cadre party successfully in the past two years. Not because we haven’t tried hard enough, or because of the LPF. The problem is the party-building line, a line that’s absurd, self-contradictory and for the DSP, self-negating.

The broad party and SA

To build a broad left party we need willing partners. How many? This is not just a question of numbers, because not all partners are equal. Some will participate in the broad party as individuals. Others will be leaders of an organization, a struggle or a movement.

But we do need a critical mass of active partners, that is, people who are involved in building the party in one way or another as distinct from what we might call “paper” members. We’d need enough party-building partners to allow the DSP to transcend its existence for three decades as a small Marxist propaganda party to be part of something bigger and broader with a life of its own.

We’d probably need at least a few hundred party-building partners to allow us to make the leap from being a small Marxist propaganda party to being a Marxist tendency in a small broad-left party, with the broad party taking over the DSP’s political assets and institutions.

Such numbers would be needed to “dilute” the disproportionate weight of the DSP in any new party. I think we can make this judgment with some confidence based on our experience with SA. This is a lesson we should learn from this experience.

Anything less than this and the new party wouldn’t have enough of a critical mass to get off the ground and develop a life of its own. All we’d end up with is a DSP periphery or supporter’s organization, a kind of half-way house between the DSP and the outside world.

There is no connection whatsoever between such a periphery organization and a broad-left party. They are two completely different things, and the one does not lead to the other.

The fact that SA branch X has three relatively active non-DSP SA members is a fact, but it’s not a fact that supports the conclusion that SA is being built as a broad-left party or even as a modest step towards such a party.

Where might such a critical mass of potential partners for a broad-left party come from? How will we know when it’s the right time to campaign for such a party – not a propaganda campaign in the sense of explaining the desirability for such a party, but an agitational campaign for a broad-left party to be launched in the here and now?

By potential partners I don’t mean people who might one day be interested in building a new party.I mean people who are prepared to roll up their sleeves and help build a broad-left party in the here and now. In Australia, a critical mass of such potential partners might come about in one of three ways:

Whatever form this break does take, one thing we can say with absolute certainty: it’s not happening today. We cannot even begin to build a broad-left party in today’s conditions.

Perhaps there’s a way around this, a fourth road to the broad-left party. Maybe we can build towards this broad-left party gradually, starting with the DSP and working outwards, accumulating partners in ones and twos over many years of painstaking effort. It has probably never occurred to anyone in the history of the Marxist movement to try to create a broad-left party in this kind of “molecular” way, but maybe it’s worth a try.

There’s a problem, however. We’re the DSP, a revolutionary Marxist party. If we want to gradually build outwards towards a broad left party, we can’t join all of these people directly to the DSP. What we’d need is to build around the DSP a half-way house for people who like the idea of a broad-left party but who don’t want to join a Marxist cadre party.

Those who want to join the DSP can join, but what about the ones and twos out there who are looking for a left party that’s less revolutionary and less Marxist? These people are very important to us now, because every one of them we sign up to SA will supposedly bring us a tiny step closer to the broad left party.

But if none of the other far-left organisations are involved in SA and if the only thing giving it a semblance of reality is the activity of the DSP, then it’s going to look suspiciously like it is just the DSP. The solution is to make ourselves appear less like the revolutionary DSP and more like SA.

It helps if we don’t push our revolutionary politics too much, because this just alienates people who are less politically conscious. In fact the less we come across as Marxist and revolutionary, the more we dissolve our sharp revolutionary propaganda into the mish-mash of generic class-struggle reformism or left-reformist “socialism”, the more people seem to like us.

Trade union bureaucrats, for example. They never liked the DSP very much. “Always caused trouble in the unions, the Trots. At least SA doesn’t go around saying we’re the enemy, class collaborationist fake-left blah blah blah. SA is more responsible. They even interviewed me for Green Left Weekly without the usual DSP expose appearing on the opposite page. They’re pushing for another big rally against Work Choices. I’ll go along with that, gives us a bit of left cover and helps get Beazley elected. Let’s fill the MCG, sing the national anthem and get Greg Combet to push the marginal seats campaign. Why not throw them a few bucks for their federal election campaign. Left cover on the cheap and it encourages them to be players, not mad dogs barking from the sidelines.”

This is not a real quote, but you can imagine NSW CFMEU secretary Andrew Ferguson thinking along these lines. Why else would a NSW ALP state executive member donate $350 to the SA federal election campaign? Not because the ALP is moving to the left.

It’s hard for the DSP masquerading as a broad left party to compete with the Greens for votes. This time we tried to go one better than the Greens, saying that SA stands for 90% greenhouse gas emissions cuts by 2030.

It seems we’ve learned something from the Spartacist League after all. How do they make themselves look more impressive when they’re competing against much bigger socialist groups like the DSP? They try to outdo us with more radical slogans and demands. If we say “troops out of Iraq” they say “bring down imperialism”. If the Greens say 80% cuts by 2050, we say 90% by 2030. The irony is that the MRF accuse the LPF of abstract propagandism.

Trying to outdo the Greens like this does not help us win people to a revolutionary consciousness and commitment and does not help us educate and train Marxist cadres. These are just paper targets, something the bourgeois parties sell to the electorate like you sell a brand of cornflakes. We’ve never run in elections to play this silly game.

We do have a SA climate change broadsheet, well written and beautifully laid out. But we need a DSP broadsheet with the DSP’s Marxist political line on capitalism, socialism and the ecological crisis as explained in our book Environment, Capitalism and Socialism. This would help us win people to the DSP’s politics and to the DSP and would help us train Marxist cadre. A DSP broadsheet would have had something to say, for example, about the need for a revolutionary working people’s government.

In case comrades have forgotten, this is the line separating Marxism from left-reformist “socialism”. This can be done in a popular way without resort to Marxist terminology such as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Is this program fetishism? No, this is the true art of the transitional method.

A DSP broadsheet would direct people to the DSP website and to our politics, not to the SA website with its false claims that SA in an anti-capitalist party that unites the left, that SA has grown in size and strength and a list of branches that only exist on paper.

A DSP broadsheet might have an ad for Resistance, and say a bit more about the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions. It’s socialism or barbarism, socialism or ecological apocalypse. We have to do here what the Cubans and the Vietnamese have done, and what the Venezuelan people are doing. We need a revolutionary change in the system. Let’s tell it like it is. The sooner we can convince more people of this the better.

Significant leftward-moving forces?

What were the political conditions on which the SA party-building line reaffirmed by our last Congress was premised? This was summarised in Comrade Peter Boyle’s party building report to the 2006 Congress on behalf of the NC majority:

“In the opinion of the National Executive/National Committee majority – and as the draft resolution [on DSP-SA relations] states unambiguously – there are real and significant forces moving left-ward in the working class, forces that we are relating to, on a broad political basis, through building the Socialist Alliance as a new party project. However, the NE/NC minority has argued strongly that this political opening does not exist and that it is just an opening that we wish existed. That’s the heart of our disagreement [emphasis added].”

We agree. This is at the heart of the differences. But Comrade Boyle was wrong to state that the party-building resolution unanimously approved by the 2006 Congress “states unambiguously” that such forces exist today. In fact the resolution said the opposite that such forces will only come into being through a new upturn of working-class resistance:

“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.”

But the majority held out hope that the ALP-ACTU-led campaign against Work Choices in 2006 might lead to such a turn-around in the class struggle, and that this might create new partners to breathe life into SA as a broad-left party.

The majority got it wrong, basing their hopes on a gross misreading of the balance of class forces in the trade union movement and the ability of our own small forces to tip the balance through an agitational petition campaign directed at the ACTU leadership.

In their PCD contribution “When is it the right time to build broad-left parties?” (Activist Vol 17 No. 18) Comrades Pip Hinman and Peter Boyle try to defend the idea that there are significant leftward-moving forces in the working class today.

“The LPF argues that now is not the right time for a broad left party project like the Socialist Alliance. When is the right time? Their answer is that we have to wait until ‘significant class forces’ move into action. However, the events we have all lived through and participated in since the last Congress confirm that there is still a broader radical constituency outside the ranks of the DSP that we need to find ways to unite with, without sacrificing our revolutionary politics.”

There is no disagreement that there is still a “broad radical constituency” out there. A progressive dissenting constituency has been a part of the background of the Australian political landscape for decades, and we’ve always been able to unite with a part of this constituency from time to time in action, for example at the S11 blockades or the big rallies against Work Choices.

But this progressive dissenting constituency is not the same thing as significant leftward-moving forces. Class-struggle forces which may be partners for a new broad-left party means class-struggle organizations, activists and leaders who are developing a radical political consciousness and confidence through sustained struggle experience.

Further on in their PCD the comrades draw an equal sign between the progressive dissenting constituency, which has existed for decades, and significant leftward-moving forces, which the 2006 Congress resolution said did not exist:

“Has the broader radical constituency, the significant leftward moving forces outside the ranks of the DSP we identified in 2001 and in all our congresses since then disappeared? The DSP majority answers ‘no’, but the LPF minority insists that such a constituency does not exist today.”

By fudging the distinction between people with progressive or radical ideas and significant leftward-moving forces, the comrades slip into viewing the broad party posture as a permanent tactic and, presumably, the hallmark of true Leninism.

As evidence for such “significant leftward-moving forces”, Comrades Hinman and Boyle point to the defeat of the Howard Coalition government at the ballot box, the million votes for the Greens in the federal election, the 230,000 people who signed on the anti-Howard Get Up! campaign website, the Walk Against Warming marches, the Stop Bush protest and the big rallies against Work Choices.

The Stop Bush protest was a one-off demonstration. One million people voting for the Greens is not a class-struggle force. Sydney’s Walk Against Warming had a forest of Greens placards, it was basically a Greens pre-election rally. The emerging movement against global warming is dominated by electoralism, lobbying and the promotion of individual solutions and has not yet thrown up a class-struggle leadership.

The Australian trade union movement under the near-hegemonic misleadership of the class-collaborationist ALP-ACTU bureaucracy is also not a class-struggle force. The ACTU-led campaign against Work Choices did not give confidence to large numbers of workers to struggle. The enactment of the draconian Work Choices anti-union legislation was a defeat, a setback for the working class, not a victory. Strike activity today is at its lowest ebb since 1913. When it came to the federal election, unionists drifted back to the ALP in droves or voted Greens, not for SA or any other socialist party.

The militant trade union current is a class-struggle force, but this current did not grow out of the ACTU-led campaign against Work Choices and most militant unionists are understandably focused on the task at hand, rebuilding their unions as fighting organisations. Building a broad class-struggle party is not their preoccupation, and the default setting is still to come behind the ALP as the alternative party of government and the lesser evil.

There are individuals who are questioning things and coming to radical conclusions out there. There are people active in single-issue or localised progressive campaigns. There are sporadic outbursts of mass dissent, such as the outrage at Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last year, but there are no significant leftward-moving forces in the working class today.

The reality of SA today

In his 2006 Congress report Comrade Boyle claimed that not only were there “real and significant forces moving left-ward in the working class”, but that we were “relating to these forces on a broad political basis through building the Socialist Alliance as a new party project”.

How are these so-called “real and significant forces”, potential partners in a broad left party, relating to SA as a broad-left party “project”?

Comrade Boyle’s “real and significant forces” are not reflected in SA branch meetings. Even SA’s paper membership has declined by about a third since the last Congress. They’re not helping us expand the distribution of Green Left Weekly. They’re not writing for the SA-GLW editorial board or Seeing Red. The “real and significant” forces are not marching alongside us in SA contingents.

They’re not participating in the SA trade union caucuses. Comrade Susan P informs us in The Activist that in Sydney, if it wasn’t for SA member Bea Bassi calling meetings of the SA trade union caucus then DSP comrade’s trade union work probably wouldn’t get organised. It was supposed be the other way around, with the DSP providing revolutionary leadership to SA. This is an example of liquidation.

They’re not contributing to Alliance Voices. In 2006 there was only a single volume produced with the minutes of the rather small SA national conference held that year. There was only one volume in 2007 too, mostly information and some discussion about SA’s greenhouse gas emissions targets. Two bulletins in two years is hardly a sign of life in the new party under construction.

Did the “significant leftward-moving forces” vote for SA in the 2007 federal election? No, the progressive dissenting constituency voted overwhelmingly for the Greens, the ALP, other minor parties and independents. The vote for SA was small even by the yard-stick of the tiny socialist vote in this country. We used to get more votes as the Democratic Socialist Electoral League. Even if everyone who voted for SA in the senate signed up to SA as paper members it would change nothing.

The SA NE is little more than a rubber-stamp for decisions already taken by the DSP NE. All the other founding affiliates have walked away. The second-largest founding affiliate, the ISO, formally resigned from the Alliance last year. SA NE meetings are all DSP plus one, two or three SA members who are not accountable to anyone else in SA and are not building SA as a party.

In the case of the SA greenhouse gas emissions targets and the SA climate change broadsheet the DSP had no discussion on the NE or in DSP branches. It went straight to SA, which some comrades evidently think is the real party. This is an example of liquidation.

Why weren’t these “real and significant forces” clamoring for an SA national conference to be held in 2007?

The only left force that has grown significantly on campus during the past two years is Socialist Alternative. They’re not in SA and have grown largely at Resistance’s expense.

Does SA help us recruit to the DSP? If we label a part of our DSP periphery as “SA” then it appears that a lot of recruits are coming “from” SA.

Our hopes for SA

Let’s remind ourselves of the kind of party we hoped SA would become when we made the turn to becoming an internal tendency in SA and building SA as a multi-tendency socialist party (MTSP) in late 2002. Our vision was of a broad class-struggle activist party uniting the radical left in a common political home, a party capable of challenging exposing and eventually defeating the Greens and the ALP.

Through building SA as a broad class-struggle party we thought we could also build a bigger and stronger DSP, winning activists to Marxism and educating and training them as revolutionary cadre. We would have had a bigger audience, both within and outside the party, for revolutionary Marxist ideas, more scope for Marxist propaganda and education. This was supposed to be the second of the famous “twin transitions”.

What’s left of SA today has nothing in common with such a genuinely broad, militant, class-struggle socialist party. It’s not even a little bonsai version of the real thing. It’s a totally different creature, the DSP masquerading as a broad left party, pretending to be such a party.

This pretense by the DSP and a part of our small periphery is what the MRF now describes as “a modest step towards the emergence” of a broad left party – the latest downsizing of our hopes and expectations for SA.

A pretense, a lie, cannot be a step towards anything constructive for a Marxist party whose watchword is to tell itself and the working class the truth. It can only be a step backwards for a Leninist party.

Failure to correct a wrong line

The SA party-building turn was premised on the continuation and deepening of a slight upturn of working class resistance which began with the Maritime Union of Australia dispute in 1998.

This upturn turned out to be too shallow and fleeting to create the class struggle forces needed for SA to become a party. If we were to plot the growth curve of SA on a graph the high-point would be in its early days as a genuine alliance, with a more or less continuous decline ever since.

As the initial enthusiasm for SA as the embodiment of left unity dissipated the number of unaffiliated SA builders contracted to a very thin layer of our supporters scattered across the country, nowhere near the critical mass needed to progress SA beyond the alliance stage. Our response was to begin substituting DSP activity for SA activity.

By the end of 2003 we should have reassessed and abandoned the SA party-building turn but we did the opposite, we deepened the turn.

Rather than striving for real and lasting unity through a consensus approach, building up trust and confidence in SA by working together as a loose alliance wherever we could find agreement, we tried to force the pace. We tried to force the other affiliates to accept SA on our terms. Then we had the fight with the supporters of the MTSP, the Non-Aligned Caucus, in the lead-up to the 2005 SA national conference.

In May 2005 we were finally compelled to act to avert an organisational meltdown of the DSP. We retreated from the attempt to integrate the DSP’s political assets such as Green Left Weekly into SA, we retreated from our voluntarist drive to try to “build two parties” simultaneously and we adopted eight emergency measures to shore up the DSP.

While we all agreed that we had misjudged the political conditions which we thought existed when we began the SA party building turn, the leadership majority shrank back from concluding that the SA party building perspective upon which this turn was premised was a mistake. We’d all invested an enormous amount of blood, sweat and tears in the SA dream. We didn’t want to let go of the dream, admit that the whole idea was wrong.

By abandoning the attempt to integrate the DSP’s political assets into SA we were recognising that SA couldn’t be built as a new party in formation, however gradually, because there wasn’t enough of an SA outside the DSP to absorb and sustain these assets.

Liquidation of the DSP

The past two years have confirmed that propping up the SA facade leaves almost no room for resurfacing the DSP as a public Marxist tendency. Put simply, more profile for the DSP and our politics means less profile for SA and its politics. SA comes first because SA is seen as the party.

Under the SA party-building line the DSP has not been able to function as a public tendency of SA except in the most minimal way, mainly through the DSP website, DSP books and pamphlets and the occasional Marxist seminar or class series advertised publicly. The “DSP tasks” report adopted by the 2006 DSP Congress proposed a glossy DSP recruitment leaflet that was never produced.

There have been no DSP banners or placards in demonstrations, no DSP media releases, no DSP ads in Green Left Weekly, no DSP broadsheets, no DSP line articles in Green Left Weekly on Australian politics in which the authors are identified as members of the DSP.

There’s a drift away from presenting a Marxist analysis in articles written by DSP authors. For example, there was not a single line article in Green Left Weekly giving a clear Marxist analysis of the ALP-ACTU campaign against Work Choices during the past two years. The DSP statement on East Timor and a couple of line articles in Green Left Weekly on this issue have been rare exceptions.

The objection that the DSP is known to everyone in SA is beside the point. SA members, nearly all of them paper members, are only a part of DSP’s periphery and a tiny fraction of our potential audience. What about everyone else out there who’s never even heard of the DSP? How are they going to find out about the DSP and be won to the DSP’s politics when the “party” we’re promoting is SA?

Hiding the DSP behind SA is only one side of the liquidationist coin.

The other side of the coin is that hiding the DSP and downplaying its revolutionary politics means that we’re no longer training and sustaining comrades as Marxist cadres the way we used to when we were building the DSP as our public party.

You don’t become a Marxist cadre just through reading books and doing classes, vital as this is. It’s revolutionary practice – which for us means above all winning ones and twos to a revolutionary consciousness and commitment through persuasion and the power of example – that builds Marxist cadre and the Marxist cadre party. You develop as a revolutionary cadre through going out there and convincing others of the revolutionary perspective and building the revolutionary party.

This is at the heart of Lenin’s argument in “What is to be done?”, and we should remember what Marx and Engels wrote at the end of the Communist Manifesto: “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”.

If we’re doing so much in the name of SA and also with the politics of SA then this does have a corrosive effect on our revolutionary consciousness and morale. We begin to think and act less like Marxist cadres and more like SA activists, and this SA identity is reinforced in the internal life of the party when comrades fall into the bad habit of crediting SA with the DSP’s efforts and achievements. This in turn leads to utter confusion about which party we’re supposed to be building.

We’ve all heard comrades get up and talk about “the party” in DSP branch meetings as if the party we’re building is DSP on the inside and SA on the outside or some kind of SA-DSP hybrid. The political and organisational boundaries between the DSP and SA have become so blurred that the two “parties” have effectively merged into a single entity, DSP-SA, an inevitable consequence of the DSP propping up and grossly substituting for SA. This entanglement is a source of unending confusion and disorientation where clarity is needed most: the party question.

This ambiguity can be seen in the compartmentalisation of our work. Good Marxist analysis and reportage on the unfolding revolution in Venezuela is not complemented by good Marxist analysis of the Australian trade union movement. Marxist education has become more isolated from revolutionary practice. The SA department produces reams of SA policy over here, while over there the Resistance comrades are doing their best to try to rebuild Resistance without much help from the DSP and without the example of a public Marxist party.

A few DSP comrades are immersed in what little is left of SA – a few branches with a little bit of life in them – while most DSP comrades, including most of the supporters of the SA party-building line, have no involvement in SA.

Early on the DSP leadership recognised the danger of liquidation and decadreisation as an unintended consequence of the SA party-building line.

The October 2002 DSP NC party-building report warned that “to really win people to a living revolutionary program we have to keep alive a revolutionary activist culture. So if our regular collective revolutionary work is eroded then our objective of winning more people to revolutionary socialism will recede accordingly. And if this happens those who say the DSP NE’s proposal is one of liquidation will be proved right.”

Comrade Peter Boyle returned to the theme of the dangers of liquidation in a July 14, 2003 report adopted by the DSP NE (The Activist, Vol 13 No. 6). He warned that the decadreisation crisis precipitated by our SA party-building turn “is not just a problem of losing activist culture and activist-accumulating tools by default or just sloppiness. There is an actual pressure within the Socialist Alliance as it currently exists to step back from activism, to retreat to more economistic political interventions, organisational liquidationism (and its political consequences), etc.

“It is also a pressure within the party. The more tired comrades and some of the less conscious ones may be influenced by these pressures. In some cases they may even become the main expression of such pressures.”

The drift towards decadreisation that we recognised and warned about at the beginning of the SA party-building turn has continued under the SA party-building line. The difference today is that most comrades either don’t see it or they try to deny it or, more worrying still, they embrace it enthusiastically and say we should go even further down the road towards liquidating the DSP as a Marxist cadre party.

New theoretical justifications for continuing with the SA party-building line have emerged or were further developed during PCD. These were taken up by LPF comrades in The Activist.

Resurfacing the DSP

Comrades, after two more years it’s clear that the SA party-building line has failed.

SA is not even a modest step towards a broad-left party; it’s the DSP and a part of our periphery masquerading as such a party. We have not been able to build the DSP as a public Marxist tendency in SA. We have not succeeded in recadreising the DSP and rebuilding Resistance.

It’s time to resurface the DSP as a public Marxist party and make this party the party we build today.

If we did this what would happen to SA? At the time of our January 2006 Congress the minority proposed resurfacing the DSP and continuing to build SA as something less than a party, a campaigning alliance in which the DSP would participate as a revolutionary Marxist party.

This would have taken us back to the early days of SA when it functioned as an alliance. We were hopeful that if the DSP stopped using SA as our broad-left party facade, SA might be able to be revived as a genuine alliance.

Since then all of the other affiliates have left SA and SA has declined even further. Another two years of the DSP using SA as its broad-left facade has killed off the possibility that SA could be revived as a genuine alliance.

Resurfacing the DSP and making the Democratic Socialist Party the party we build wouldn’t kill off SA as a left regroupment project. SA is already dead as a left regroupment project thanks to our mistaken and sectarian attempt to build SA as our party.

Resurfacing the DSP would reveal to everyone the reality of SA. What’s left of SA is a part of our DSP periphery, some of our close collaborators and some hundreds of paper members who signed up for SA as a gesture of support and to help SA achieve electoral registration.

We’d explain to SA members and the wider left public the truth about SA. We’d honestly admit our mistake and say why we’re resurfacing the DSP. We’d stress that we want to continue the collaboration.

Our collaboration with comrades like Sam Watson, Chris Cain and Craig Johnston goes back many years before SA. I’m sure if we sat down over a beer with these comrades and explained the situation they would say, “Comrade, I understand. Don’t sacrifice the DSP if SA isn’t working. You’ve done your best to keep the dream alive. Let’s continue to work together in the struggle. We value the DSP above all.”

What we’d do with SA is retain SA’s electoral registration and use SA as an electoral vehicle to campaign on a popularly-pitched revolutionary socialist platform. There’s no reason to think some of our closest collaborators wouldn’t agree to be part of such a ticket.

A resurfaced DSP with a correct party-building line will start to grow again, and a growing DSP will have a growing periphery. This is how we’d maintain SA’s electoral registration.

We’re not proposing that we build the DSP as a public party in the crude way the Spartacist League or Socialist Alternative build themselves publicly. We’ve always had a much more sophisticated approach.

We always had various “bridges”, non-party organisations and institutions which we built up alongside the party such as Resistance, Green Left Weekly, CISLAC and ASIET.

As the Democratic Socialist Party we didn’t always speak on behalf of the DSP on public platforms. Most of the time we wore the Green Left Weekly hat or some other hat. But we never went out of our way to hide our party and we never pretended to be something else, people with another kind of politics.

We always felt the tension between building the movement and building the party, between adapting to the mass and isolating ourselves from the mass. But when we did go off course, such as the 1983 turn to industry, we were always able to get back on track because we were crystal clear about what kind of party we were building: a Leninist party. We never saddled ourselves with a disorienting pseudo-party straightjacket like SA.

We never missed an opportunity to pursue left regroupment, but when the opening closed over we didn’t cling on for years, we went back to building our party. This is our real tradition, this is what Leninist tactical flexibility is really about. You don’t get stuck on something that isn’t working.

SA is not just another “bridge” for building the Leninist party like Green Left Weekly and Resistance. It’s the wrong kind of bridge, a bridge away from the Leninist party.

We can learn a lot from the experiences of other far-left parties with the broad-left party tactic. When we began the SA turn we were inspired by the example if the Scottish Socialist Party, which seemed to be going from strength to strength.

The liquidation of the Marxist ISM current into the SSP and the damaging split led by Tommy Sheridan stands in stark contrast to the much more positive experience of the French LCR, which got 4% in the French presidential elections on a revolutionary socialist platform. They creamed the rest of the left, including the Greens and the French CP.

Internationalism

Comrades, by clinging to the SA facade for so long we’ve lost confidence in being able to build a revolutionary party in the shadow of the long tide of working class retreat.

To chart a new course for rebuilding the Democratic Socialist Party we first of all need to get our bearings. We need to step back and grasp the bigger picture, the longer view of history and what’s happening beyond the shores of this island of capitalist stability.

We need to absorb fully the impact and significance of the new rise of the socialist revolution in Latin America for building a Leninist party here.

As revolutionaries in an imperialist country we have to be anti-imperialists and revolutionary internationalists first and foremost. The working class in this country will not be able to rise to the level of class consciousness needed to overthrow the bourgeoisie until it has largely overcome the petty divisions, narrow parochialism and the racist nationalism cultivated by the ruling class to secure its ideological domination.

For there to be a socialist revolution in this country it won’t be enough for the working class to have more confidence in its own strength. It must also lose the fear of losing its privileges. It must come to identify not with these privileges – the crumbs of imperialist exploitation – but with the struggles of workers and peasants in the Third World, especially in our Asia-Pacific region, and also those of working people in other imperialist countries.

The working class vanguard in this country must be persuaded to act in the same spirit of selfless solidarity that the Cuban revolution exemplifies.

Our internationalism and our international solidarity work is not something we just tack on to the “real” work of intervening in Australian politics. This is how we intervene in Australian politics to win the battle of ideas.

The battle of ideas

Getting our bearings also means understanding where we’re at, not indulging in fantasies that through SA we’ve somehow transcended the propaganda stage of Leninist party-building and we can now move on to doing more agitation.

Where we’re at today is explained very well in our 1997 Congress resolution The Election of the Howard Government and the Perspectives of the DSP:

“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.”

A Leninist propaganda party has nothing to do with the Spartacist League caricature. What we’re talking about is the kind of creative, ambitious, interventionist and youthful Marxist cadre party that we built successfully for three decades, the kind of party that led, for example, the historic S11 mass blockade of the World Economic Forum seven years ago.

Our 1997 resolution says that while our strategic 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 [revolutionary Marxist] 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.”

There is a radicalisation out there but it’s a fragile and tenuous radicalization, because it’s disconnected from the clarity and empowerment that can come from direct participation in mass struggles. This individual radicalization bubbles away in the vacuum of any widely-held conviction in the possibility and desirability of a socialist alternative to capitalism.

The challenge for us is how to engage this dispersed radicalising layer in “the battle of ideas”, because the moral and ideological weakness of the ruling class and its gradual exposure is the biggest opening for revolutionaries in Australia today, especially where this exposure meets the inspiration of the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions.

The LPF party-building resolution notes that 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 party, the content of the paper needs to be adjusted to present our Marxist ideas and explanations more systematically and explicitly, and to profile once more the DSP’s political line, its leaders and activities without compromising the paper’s broad appeal.”

In particular we need more polemical articles which differentiate the DSP’s politics from that of our far-left competitors.

Our resolution proposes that DSP branches “schedule regular, at least monthly 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.”

Resistance and Venezuela solidarity

Around the time that the DSP began to immerse itself in the SA party-building turn Resistance went into sharp decline after the Books Not Bombs high school walkouts initiated by Res in early 2003.

For the first three decades of our party’s history Resistance was always our number one ongoing priority. This not only kept the DSP relatively youthful and renewed its leadership, it helped build DSP cadre. The priority given to youth work meant that we were always working alongside and helping to educate and train Resistance members as Marxist cadres.

Resistance used to have the example of a Marxist party that did not hide its Marxist politics and identity, a Marxist party that didn’t shy away from polemics with other left tendencies to prop up the appearance of socialist unity via SA. It had the inspiring example of a party that lived and breathed revolutionary Marxism, a party that wasn’t dulled and diminished by clinging to the ghost of a failed left-regroupment project.

The LPF party building resolution says that “the Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is inspiring millions of people on every continent as the real story gets out and more people, especially young people, are able to experience these revolutions first-hand.

“This socialist resurgence is political gold, a ‘gift’ that must not be squandered. The over-arching and unifying campaign priority for a resurfaced DSP and Resistance must be to lead the building of a broad-based solidarity movement with the Venezuela-Cuba axis. Firstly, it’s our revolutionary duty; secondly, there’s nothing like a living revolution in all its concrete richness, contradiction and emotional appeal to inspire youth to become dedicated lifelong revolutionaries and to absorb Marxism into their bones.”

How the Venezuelan revolution could help us rebuild Resistance and the DSP was captured very well in Comrade Peter Boyle’s party-building report to the October 2004 DSP NC:

“Australia is one of the most stable, wealthy and conservative capitalist countries in the world. At this stage, only a small minority in our country are won to revolutionary consciousness and usually they begin understanding the necessity for and dynamics of revolutionary politics by studying and actively supporting revolutionary mass movements in other countries. Revolutionary example is all the more important when the prevailing working class mood is one of accommodation, retreat or defeat. So we proposed a very conscious turn in our youth work towards building solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution.

“Apart from building CISLAC and existing solidarity organizations we proposed to the Resistance leadership, and it agreed, to try and set up Venezuela solidarity clubs/committees on every campus where they are active. These should attract young people inspired by an actual living revolution and we should seek to win these people to revolutionary politics and develop them into cadre. We should be single minded about this. We don’t have to abstain from other issues on campus…but come hell or high water we want to get a Venezuela solidarity group going. It doesn’t matter if it is modest and only manages a screening of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Just do it and we will make gains.

“Obviously most young people in this country probably have never heard of Venezuela. It’s not the first issue on their minds but this is really beside the point. Our challenge is not just to reach out to young people. Reach out is not the problem but rather it is trying to cohere a relatively small group of young revolutionary activists. Let’s put some numbers to this objective: let’s see if we can attract about 100 people around the country into this work, with the help of the brigade to Venezuela next August and let’s try to win at least half of them to Resistance and to revolutionary politics. Such a modest accumulation of young cadre will allow us to rebuild Resistance as the main engine of growth for the revolutionary cause in this country.

“Rebuilding Resistance as the main engine of growth for the revolutionary cause in this country…is serious business that we need to deal with right now. If we don’t deal with this then all our grand hopes for left regroupment might as well be chucked out of the window. Can’t be done for lack of cadre. Full stop. Game over”.

This turn to rebuilding Resistance by Resistance throwing itself wholeheartedly into Venezuela solidarity was never carried out.

In late 2004 and the first half of 2005 the DSP was preoccupied with the factional battles and maneuvers in SA in the lead-up the June 2005 SA national conference.

With the DSP’s hands tied in SA, Resistance was expected to do the entire tendency’s Venezuela solidarity work, but without the political guidance and practical back-up from the DSP that would have allowed a much-weakened Resistance to take full advantage of the Venezuela turn.

The centerpiece of the 2004 Venezuela turn was the July-August solidarity brigade, and in the lead-up to the brigade Resistance branches organised forums, film screenings and other solidarity events both on and off campus.

While falling far short of the ambitious projections coming out of the October 2004 DSP NC, even this very modest amount of Venezuela solidarity work confirmed that we had struck political gold.

We came across many young people who were very interested not only in understanding what was happening in Venezuela but in getting involved in solidarity activities. There was keen interest in the brigade itself. We also discovered that most of the young people drawn around Resistance through Venezuela solidarity activities were very open to discussions about revolution and socialism. They tended to have a higher political level.

The brigade itself was a wonderful initiative and an eye-opening experience for the 60 or so participants, most of them DSP and Resistance members. But as Comrade Shua Garfield argued in his PCD contribution “The path of least Resistance”, we were not able to make the cadre-building gains we should have been able to out of the brigade experience.

The brigade suffered from insufficient political preparation of the participants and not enough post-brigade follow up in the branches. Some long-term Resistance members who went on the brigade were actually less active a few months after having returned from the brigade than they were before they went. We must have been doing something wrong.

If in 2005 Resistance’s Venezuela solidarity work suffered from benign neglect from the DSP, in 2006 much of Resistance comrade’s enthusiasm for Venezuela solidarity was burnt out of them by the DSP majority’s agitational gamble on the ACTU-led campaign against Work Choices.

Toward the end of 2005 a new line on DSP youth work emerged from the supporters of the DSP NC majority. As Comrade Stuart Munckton’s youth work report to the 2006 DSP Congress put it, “we cannot afford to set out a proscriptive approach that insists that we have to declare that Venezuela is our number one campaigning priority…Resistance has to actively engage with the ‘fight-back against Howard’ – a fight-back that provides potential openings on a number of fronts, all of which we need to be tested out”.

Comrade Munckton predicted that “if we get this balance right, by the end of [2006] we could see some significant growth and we could have a Resistance twice the size it is now.” As it turned out, “getting the balance right” meant Resistance doing even less Venezuela solidarity work in 2006 than it did the previous year.

As Comrade Garfield explains in “The path of least Resistance”:

“In September [2005] Resistance held speak-outs and pickets in Sydney and Melbourne to protest the Work Choices laws and to highlight the impact they would have on young workers. These pickets were small, propagandistic actions attracting only a few dozen people. To build on the small number of contacts we made from these actions and other campaigning on this issue, Resistance called for “Up Yours, Howard!” young workers’ and students’ contingents at the massive November 15 marches against Work Choices. While useful as a tactic to draw youth around Resistance, these contingents only mobilised 200 participants around Australia. This should have served as an indication about the limited prospects for Resistance to lead a mass campaign” for the rights of young workers.

Yet for months in the lead-up to the June 1 student strike against Work Choices called by Resistance, Resistance branches ran cold on Venezuela solidarity. The so-called “strike” mobilised only around 1500 young people across the country.

In late 2004 Chavez wasn’t even talking about socialism. These days he talks about little else but socialism. What possible excuse can there be now, in 2008, for not making Venezuela solidarity the number one ongoing campaign priority for a resurfaced Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance?

As the LPF resolution concludes, “the urgent challenge facing the DSP is to replenish our aging and depleted cadre core. The revolutionary continuity and vitality of the DSP has rested, above all, on our ability to renew our cadre, primarily through Resistance.

“The priority of the DSP must be to rebuild Resistance, which is smaller and weaker today than at any time in the past three decades. Resistance leading the building of a broad-based solidarity movement with the peoples of Venezuela and Cuba is an essential complement to our efforts to stir up active youth dissent against the ruling class at home. With the facts, arguments and inspiration of these revolutions behind us we can begin to push back our left competitors on the campuses.”

Socialist Alternative is our main competitor, not the Greens. SAlt has become is the largest socialist organisation on campus, eclipsing Resistance in the past few years.

Let’s adopt the targets proposed in Comrade Peter Boyle’s 2004 NC report: 100 young people drawn into Venezuela solidarity work this year via Resistance’s efforts, with half of these being won to revolutionary politics.

Let’s paint the campuses Bolivarian red from O’Week with multi-media presentations, film screenings, lecture-bashing, posters and mass leafleting. Let’s set up those Venezuela solidarity groups on every campus where we have Resistance members. As Comrade Boyle said, we should be single minded about this.

Let’s campaign for campuses to become sister universities with Bolivarian universities in Venezuela, promoting student exchanges and ongoing solidarity.

Let’s also get Resistance to throw itself into building the AVSN both on and off campus. Let’s plan for another big youth solidarity brigade to Venezuela and Cuba in a year’s time, and big a mid-year Resistance national conference where we bring out some Venezuelan and Cuban revolutionary youth leaders and tour them around the country.

Let’s do it. But this time, let’s do it with the right party-building line.

How can the differences be resolved?

Comrades, I’d like to briefly take up the question of how the differences can be resolved.

I hope we can all agree that there are no organisational solutions to political differences in a healthy Leninist party. Dissolving the faction wouldn’t dissolve the differences.

In presenting his outline for today’s report to the DSP NE, DSP national secretary Comrade Peter Boyle reaffirmed this principle, saying there would be no organisational solution to the factional situation in the DSP. We welcome this.

But there are two kinds of organisational solutions. There’s the mass expulsion of the LPF or the expulsion of individual LPF members one at a time.

Then there are organisational solutions of a lesser magnitude, “solutions” which relate to the handling of political differences. These kinds of organisational solutions have already been applied by the DSP leadership majority.

Firstly, the denial of equal time counter-reports. This is a departure from our tradition and that of the US Socialist Workers Party under the leadership of James P. Cannon.

In his “Letter to the Party Membership of January 3 1940, Cannon wrote: “All resolutions and articles submitted by the minority are published without censorship or discrimination in a jointly edited internal bulletin. At branch membership meetings where the disputed questions are under discussion, an equal division of time is the uniform rule. No restrictions of any kind are put in the way of the minority getting a fair hearing.”

Secondly, the policy of seeking to exclude LPF members from serving on branch executives.

In branch executive elections the leadership majority never urge comrades to consider the value of an inclusive leadership team, as explained in the book Organisational Principles and Methods of the DSP. On at least one occasion the inclusion of LPF members was explicitly demotivated in an outgoing executive report to a Sydney branch conference by Comrade Sibylle K.

Thirdly, the suppression of written contributions to The Activist during PCD.

Comrades Sam K and Max L each submitted individual contributions to the DSP’s pre-Congress discussion on the recent expulsion of the leadership minority of the Indonesian People’s Democratic Party by the leadership majority, and the PRD’s orientation to the upcoming presidential elections.

Comrade Lane’s contribution also replied to the accusation that he was urging the DSP to take sides in the dispute, an allegation contained in the DSP national secretary Peter Boyle’s party-building report to the October 2007 NC.

Fourthly, the editing of reports and individual contributions to The Activist by the leadership majority to censor things they don’t like.

Comrade John P’s party-building counter-report to the 2006 Congress on behalf of the NC minority was edited before publication without Comrade Percy’s consent. The deleted sentences detailed the organisational measures that had been taken by the leadership majority even before a faction was formed.

Fifthly, the proposed changes to the DSP constitution. These will be taken up in the organisational principles and constitution counter-report by Comrade Doug Lorimer.

Sixth, the attempt to hack into the LFP’s internal email list which Comrade Terry Townsend has admitted to.

Taken together, these practices demonstrate that the leadership majority is failing the test of handling political differences without resorting to organisational solutions.

They’re resorting to this because they’re failing an even more important test: taking political responsibility for a failed party-building line.

We don’t have to vote on history, on who was right and who was wrong. Leave that to the historians. What we have to decide is what to do next. We appeal to the majority to handle the differences without resorting to organisational solutions.

Finally, I’d urge all delegates to read our platform document, the LPF resolution on party building, and the two appendices to this report on Resistance and SA. You should have a copy of each, and they’ll be reprinted in The Activist. If this counter-report is adopted then these appendices will be presented as the “implementation” reports scheduled for tomorrow.

Summary

Comrades, I think a number of comrades feel very upset that the LPF keeps emphasising differences. Of course, we agree on a lot. We’re all comrades in the struggle for socialism, whatever we may think of each other in the heat of the moment, whatever tensions there might be in a party that’s rent with sharp disagreement – we’re comrades. I hope we can agree on this. Obviously, the LPF has a different view from the majority, so we emphasise the differences to make it clear where we disagree, so we can have the best possible discussion around the alternative that the LPF is presenting.

There’s nothing uncomradely about pointing out where we disagree, or at least there shouldn’t be in a healthy party. I wasn’t trying to insult anybody, DSP comrades or anyone else. The point I was trying to make about the SA trade union caucus in Sydney is that there’s something wrong with the DSP – the DSP has been undermined – if the DSP’s trade union work is being organised by a non-DSP member who doesn’t share our political ideas. Yes, she may be a revolutionary from a different tradition, but she’s not a DSP member. We don’t have regular DSP trade union fractions, the DSP’s trade union work is organised through an SA caucus, and SA has different politics to the DSP, different goals, different objectives.

Now, this is a problem. This is an example of liquidation. I don’t say this to insult comrade Jim McIlroy, who I have enormous regard for having worked with him for many years. I don’t say it to insult anyone, but we think we are undermining, weakening and hiding the DSP because of this attachment to presenting ourselves as something that we’re not – presenting ourselves and a relatively small layer of more or less active supporters of the DSP and some of our close collaborators as a broad left party.

Comrades, I began with the question: what is the party-building line we should be assessing, and deciding has either succeeded or failed, that need to be reaffirmed, adjusted or abandoned? Peter’s party-building report on behalf of the NC majority didn’t really address it. Neither did most of the discussion. In our opinion, we haven’t been able to successfully build SA as even a modest step towards the eventual emergence of a broad left party. I explained why in the first part of the counter-report.

You can’t build a broad-left party by building around the DSP some sort of half-way house, some kind of supporters or periphery organisation, which is what SA amounts to today, seven years after we launched an inspiring left unity project that had other forces involved – the other small left groups, and a number of other people signing up with great enthusiasm. We are a long way from this now. SA is just us and a relatively small number of active partners. But even most of these comrades we’re working with in SA are not helping us build towards a broad left party. We cannot get to a broad left party by doing this. It’s not working. Even SA’s paper membership has declined by a third during the past two years.

This is a fact that you cannot sweep under the carpet. You can try to blame it on the LPF, but that would be extremely dishonest. It’s not the LPF’s fault that the Australian political situation isn’t generating the “significant leftward moving forces” that Comrade Peter Boyle claimed existed, and is the basis for the SA broad-party project. But we cannot build a broad-left party in Australian conditions today, and calling ourselves SA is not helping us get even a little step towards that broad party, it’s weakening and undermining the building of the only party we can build in the present political conditions – our Marxist cadre party, the good old DSP.

The Democratic Socialist Party was not some Neanderthal abomination that put forward crude, Spartacist-like untransitional politics. No, this was a party that was the envy of so many others, not only here in Australia but internationally. As little time ago as the September 11, 2000 mass blockades of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne we had that party. It was a public Marxist party. We didn’t hide behind SA. We were honest about who we were, we didn’t pretend that we were some other kind of people with some other kind of politics. We had a much stronger Resistance.

This is important. Why do we talk about Socialist Alternative? Not because the LPF thinks they are some kind of example we should emulate. Socialist Alternative have all kinds of weaknesses – their sectarianism, they don’t support Cuba and Venezuela, they’re sometimes very ultra-left, and not very good at working with the rest of the left. They’re got many weaknesses. They’re confined to campus. The problem is that with all these political weaknesses, Socialist Alternative has emerged in the past three years or so as the biggest socialist organisation on campus, stronger than Resistance. In Melbourne they have probably, what, a hundred to a hundred and fifty active young members. They dominate several campuses where a few years ago we were much stronger, we had a real base. The University of Western Sydney Bankstown campus, for example, was for a long time a campus on which Resistance was very influential, back when we had a DSP branch out there in western Sydney.

But because we’re now focused on building SA we are neglecting Resistance, we are neglecting youth work. We’re deciding, if we vote for the NC majority report, that we will not make youth work, Resistance, our party-building priority. Yet the road to rebuilding the Democratic Socialist whatever-you-call-it, Party or Perspective, is through Resistance. The LPF is saying this should be our number one priority, along with Venezuela solidarity.

Why? Because the people we should be reaching out to and building a party out of are the people who are closest to us politically. And Venezuela attracts, like a magnet, those people who are interested in the question of fundamental social change, the question of revolution, the question of socialism. Venezuela is what draws such people around us, and these people tend to have a higher political level. These are the people we need to be reaching out to and drawing them into our revolutionary tendency, the DSP and Resistance. This is best done, in our opinion, by junking the straight-jacket of SA, which isn’t going anywhere. We need to get back to building our party, the Democratic Socialist party. That’s what we’re saying.

Now, this relates to the question of propaganda. Our propaganda, things such as the climate change charter, should be pitched at those people who are most open to the revolutionary perspective. We do need a DSP and Resistance broadsheet on the ecological crisis. Why don’t we have one? OK, we can have an SA broadsheet for elections. The LPF does agree that SA can be maintained as an electoral vehicle. But it should put forward our politics in a transitional way. The art of the transitional method is not putting forward some other kind of politics, it’s explaining our revolutionary, Marxist politics in a way that’s approachable and understandable, that’s most easily grasped by people who are relatively open to these ideas. Not using unnecessary Marxist jargon such as “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but using especially the living examples of socialist revolutions which are inspiring millions of people across the world.

I’ll end on this point. I think, comrades, that in the long tide of working class retreat and having failed to abandon a mistaken party-building line that has dragged on for years and years, causing tremendous division in the party, we’ve lost sight of the party that we were building before we got lost in the SA dream. If w were building this party today, we would be growing and we’d be having a better time. There’d be much more solidarity and comradeship. This is the perspective that I tried to convey in the counter-report.l