I sat in the DSP Sydney branch conference on October 29 flabbergasted. I looked around at other comrades who had been at that same Socialist Alliance meeting, wondering were they as incredulous as me?

Sydney branch secretary Alison D had just described the amalgamation meeting of Sydney Central SA and Marrickville SA on Tuesday October 25 as “an extremely good SA meeting”!

The August 15 national executive meeting unanimously adopted a draft resolution for vote at the 22nd DSP Congress in January 2006 that stated that the political “conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist” at the time we embarked on this turn; that without a “regroupment with broader left forces that are generated by a new upturn of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’” the SA cannot “take a significant step to creating a new socialist party”, and that, in the absence of the existence of these conditions, the DSP should build the SA, not as a

This report (and discussion) has to be a DSP party-building report and discussion. Comrade Peter Boyle’s report is not, even if his first half is about DSP organisational tasks, it’s still in the framework that we can build the Socialist Alliance as the “New Party”. Even if he puts building “two parties” in inverted commas, or says building two parties, but two “different types of parties”, or describes it as “two organisations”, or ambiguously interprets the phrase “new party project”, switching back and forth between interpreting it as our long term goal, perspective, (for the last two decades) of working to find ways to build a mass workers’ party, and on the other hand treating the SA as that new party we’re building.

In her PCD article “Political divisions in the DSP and how to proceed” (The Activist Vol. 15, No. 10) Comrade Pat Brewer urges “comrades to read exactly what the documents are saying so the differences can be clearly expressed”. However, she completely ignores her own advice and bases her assessment of what the NE minority is saying not upon the documents we have written, but upon the assumption that we are engaged in a “cynical manoeuvre” to shut down the Socialist Alliance. Comrade Brewer is not alone in doing this.

This report (and discussion) has to be a DSP party-building report and discussion. Peter Boyle’s report is not, it’s still in the framework that we can build the Socialist Alliance as the “New Party”. Even if he puts building “two parties” in inverted commas, or says building two parties, but two “different types of parties”, or ambiguously interprets the phrase “new party project”, switching back and forth between interpreting it as our long term goal, perspective, (for the last two decades) of working to find ways to build a mass workers’ party, and on the other hand treating the SA as that new party we’re building.

In their contribution to the pre-congress discussion printed in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 5, comrades Karl M and Margarita W begin by agreeing with John Percy that we should eliminate “the hype, over-exaggerations, and substitution of hopes for a sober recognition of realities.”

John Percy, a central figure in the development of the Australian revolutionary socialist movement over the past half century, died on Wednesday 19 August in Sydney, after suffering a severe stroke on 20 July and another on 13 August.

Throughout his political life, John was a revolutionary party builder. “Party builder” was the highest praise he could bestow on another political activist.

The National Executive’s draft resolution for the 22nd DSP Congress on “The DSP and the Socialist Alliance” provides the political motivation for a new party-building orientation in which the DSP ceases to operate as an internal tendency of the Socialist Alliance and returns to functioning as a public revolutionary socialist organisation that recruits members from within and outside the membership of the Socialist Alliance, while continuing to be affiliated to the Socialist Alliance, to build it as a campaigning alliance in the social movements (particularly the trade union movement) that seeks to build a mass workers’ party.

In Links No. 26, Murray Smith, a former leading member of the Scottish Socialist Party and now a leading member of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International), made extensive comments on my article “The Bolshevik Party and ‘Zinovievism’ Comments on a Caricature of Leninism printed in Links No. 24., focusing in particular on the issue of the public expression and debate of political differences within the Bolshevik Party.(1)

The disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union opened an important debate within the Marxist movement about how to evaluate the history of the socialist movement, and especially of the Bolshevik Party, the party that led the world’s first successful socialist revolution. One of the central aims of Links has been to provide a forum for such debate.