Democratic Socialist Perspective, the main component of the
Australian Socialist Alliance, is in a bit of a pickle. Peter Boyle, a
leading figure in the dominant grouping on the DSP's national
committee, is in full damage-limitation mode after the
publication of an article by Greg Adler on its internal divisions
(`DSP split over future' Weekly Worker December 1).

Boyle issued a terse statement on the DSP's public discussion
list in response to the article less than four hours after it was
posted there (groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion).
Another hour later, he followed this empty protestation by posting
a link to an article by Andy Newman of Britain's Socialist Unity
Network (www.socialistunitynetwork.co.uk/voices/cadre.htm).

Boyle must be very desperate indeed to rely on Andy Newman's
threadbare defence of the fortunes of the Socialist Alliance in
Australia. I winced with embarrassment for Newman and Boyle
at its inaccuracies and overblown expectations for the SA, which,
as I projected in March this year, has gone the way of the dodo.
You may still see it around from time to time, but that is because,
like the dodo, it's stuffed.

The first inaccuracy in Newman's article is to lump me in with
Greg Adler. Comrade Adler would be the first person to agree
that the distance between our respective political
methodologies, practice and perspectives can be measured in
astronomical units rather than angstroms. Before continuing
with Newman's errors and misunderstandings, which are
legion, a comment on the DSP executive statement.

Boiled down, the political core of the statement actually backs up
much of what Adler said in his article. The DSP regards the
Socialist Alliance as its private property; debates about its future
are for the eyes and ears of the initiate. While the DSP - formerly
the Democratic Socialist Party - has a more literate and political
culture of internal discussion than the Socialist Workers Party in
Britain, it shares with it the same sect attitude that led the SWP to
shut down the SA in England and Wales. The statement
breathlessly informs us that when and if the DSP decides to end
the pretence of the Socialist Alliance actually existing, it "will be
promptly reported to the Socialist Alliance and announced
publicly". Gee, thanks.

Despite the DSP's rejection of Trotskyism and its relatively fluffy,
outward "green-left" appearance (particularly for someone as far
away as Newman), it remains a loyal adherent to the
sect-building methodology of James P Cannon, founding
member of the US Socialist Workers Party. Cannon wrote the
handbook on how to build a monolithic Trot-sect: The struggle
for a proletarian party. It was endorsed by Lev Davidovich and to
this day it is one of the main text books for aspiring young
acolytes in the DSP and features on its courses, run by Doug
Lorimer. Lorimer, of course, now briefs his students against
Trotsky's permanent revolution with a warmed-over
soft-Stalinism.

Boyle and the DSP can easily remedy what the executive
statement refers to as "selected and out-of-context quotations". It
can make the debates public. Of course, permitting the public
voicing of differences is like salt on a slug to any Cannonite.
Such an approach would only sully the pure and rarefied air
breathed by the self-selected vanguard. Public scrutiny would
only confuse the minds of the backward elements in the rank
and file. All 200 and something of them.

Of course such practice has nothing in common with Marxism or
Leninism, or any other scientific pursuit. It has all the hallmarks
of religiosity and sectism. Surely the remaining members of the
Socialist Alliance are due the courtesy of knowing the debates
about their political future. Such debates should be open to the
entire labour movement. There are hardly matters of political or
personal security at stake: only sectarian pride.

There is a previous exchange on these matters between Doug
Lorimer and myself, which was published in the Weekly Worker
in 1999 (DSP letter to CPGB, December 11 1998:
www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/279/nopubcrit.html; response from
CPGB, March 11 1999: www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/279/revop.html -
Weekly Worker March 11 1999).

In my reply to Lorimer I wrote: "Your idea - shared by most
Trotskyites - that the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as a
separate party organisation from the Mensheviks in January
1912 and then banned their members from public discussion of
party matters is a myth. What this myth serves - quite starkly in
the case of the SWP, Socialist Party, Workers Power, etc, in
Britain - is a method for building a mono-idea sect. It can only
serve to cower internal opposition and hide debates from the
advanced layers of the class. Even in the most democratic of
such organisations, differences are only to be debated by the
enlightened and ordained, who then must deliver the discovered
truth, unadulterated, on fear of expulsion, to the unenlightened
masses."

The DSP still clearly holds to such a method. We wait with baited
breath for Boyle or national secretary John Percy to deliver - on
tablets of stone, no doubt - what the ordained have decided for
the future of the Socialist Alliance in Australia after the DSP's
January congress (to which, I fancy, I won't be invited).

The DSP adopted the "Socialist Alliance tactic" with two aims.
The first was a genuine desire to build a new socialist party, the
second was to mop up its rivals on the revolutionary left,
specifically the International Socialist Organisation.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the DSP, it was incapable of
achieving its first aim. How can a Cannonite sect act as the
catalyst for an inclusive, democratic socialist movement? It has
largely achieved its second aim, as Percy points out in The
Activist, the internal DSP bulletin.

The fight between Percy and Boyle rests largely on the first aim.
Percy seems to want to cut his losses; Boyle seems to think
there is more to be gained from flogging the Socialist Alliance
pony.

Now to Andy Newman.

Andy, Andy, Andy. Where to start with such a befuddled and limp
attempt at analysis, when he admits, "much of the detail of the
situation is unknown to me". Newman says my failings are
fourfold. First, I have not set out the broad political context in
which the SA operates in Australia (Andy, I never knew you cared
so much). Second (now, don't laugh), I failed to mention "the
work of the SA in building what became the largest
demonstration in Australian labour history" on November 15.
Third (straight face), I do not mention the "real achievements" of
the SA in the trade unions. And fourth ... well, Newman's fourth
point seems to be, `Hey, don't dis' the SA - you never know,
anything could happen.'

On point one. Suffice to say that a reactionary conservative
government sees a generational opportunity to put the unions
out of business and is enacting laws to make that happen. The
unions are fighting back, with marked success in gaining public
support. However, there is a crisis of strategy. Despite some
astute political observations by Greg Combet, secretary of the
Australian Congress of Trade Unions, on the need for a broad
democratic movement against the government, the strategy of
the union leadership is to get Labor leader Kim Beazley elected
as prime minister in 2007, then keep him to his word to "rip
these laws up". The Trot-left in its various guises says
yah-boo-sucks to that - what you should all do is go on strike till
we win. Or some variation on that theme.

In short, my position is that a democratic movement is needed to
get rid of the Howard government, its laws and the constitution in
order to establish a republic, based on the power of the labour
movement. Strikes may be part of that strategy, as may be voting
in an ALP government. But they are tactical considerations, not
strategy.

Newman points to the "crisis of representation". While the
political contours in Australia are different from those of Britain,
there is a growing disillusionment with the mainstream parties.
It is not overly political, with some of it going to independents,
some to the Green party, but a crisis of representation is
emerging for the labour movement. Interestingly Newman points
out: "Germany proves that the left can overtake an established
Green electoral presence." What he fails to expand upon is that
this was the result of a significant split from the Social
Democratic Party, combining with the remnants of the former
ruling party of the German Democratic Republic.

My decision to join the Australian Labor Party has nothing to do
with hitching my fortunes with the Labor left, but with finding a
strategic position within the labour movement for any future
developments or divisions that may emerge. Marxists need to
work within the historical mass organisations of the working
class: its unions and its social-democratic parties. At its
establishment, I believed the Socialist Alliance in Australia
offered an opportunity to fight for the unity of Marxists and
socialists around a democratic program for working class
liberation.

For me, these two decisions are not mutually exclusive. Andy
Newman may remember that when I was on the Socialist
Alliance executive in England and Wales, I regularly brought up
the necessity for the SA to do consistent work in its approach to
the Labour Party. This included work inside the Labour Party; not
just tick-a-box come election time or sharing the occasional
platform with this month's favoured Labour left MP.

The scant opportunities offered by the Australian SA were
squandered. By adapting to the DSP's cretinist attitude to the
ALP (basically a sectarian, `third-period' Stalinite approach), its
dire economism and lowest-common-denominator reformist
program, and the continued Cannonite religiosity with which the
DSP continued to work in the SA, that organisation went into
almost immediate decline. The SA is now dead in Australia. And
that is not hyperbole. Its branches do not meet; the national
executive does not operate. There has been no members'
bulletin issued since August: the organisation does not function.

Newman points to the SA's union involvement. Specifically he
says: "The work of the SA in the Fightback campaigns against
these anti-trade union laws are far more important than the
election, and their success or failure in this field will probably
determine whether or not the SA project in Australia prevails or
not." While I do not share the economistic fetish that electoral
work is less important than union work, Newman hits on a truth
here. And damns the SA in the process. He talks of the
"Fightback campaigns" as if they were at the heart of the labour
movement's struggle with the government and its legislation. Yet
they are not much more than figments of the fetid imagination of
the DSP, that not even it pretends to uphold any more.

The June 11 National Union Fightback conference was a
DSP/SA event. It has gone nowhere as an independent
campaign. To be honest, I had forgotten about it until Newman
reminded me in his article. Fightback does not register
anywhere in the labour movement. Look at Green Left Weekly.
Look at the Socialist Alliance website. If something was going on
in the "Fightback campaigns" you would be reading about it.
Read Sue Bolton's `Where to now for the IR campaign?' and see
if you can spot any mention of it (Green Left Weekly December
7).

So, even judged by Newman's own criterion, the SA is going
nowhere. Less than a handful of local union positions and one
Craig Johnston do not make a thriving union fraction. Even DSP
national secretary John Percy notes that "in terms of actual
activists in the structures of the SA itself, the militant trade union
current [sic] doesn't amount to much; most of the militant trade
unionists in the SA are DSP members … Craig Johnston [jailed
and since released former secretary of the AMWU manufacturing
workers union] and Chris Cain [West Australia state secretary of
the Maritime Union of Australia] don't come to SA branch
meetings. Craig is in the SA national executive; I think he's come
to half a meeting since the conference." 'Nuff said.

Newman's final blow against me is that I "discount other
possible countervailing tendencies: for example, that the DSP
could consciously work to build trust with other socialists, that
there may be an influx of militants due to the trade union
Fightback campaign, that Labor may win an election in the future,
that the Greens may discredit themselves in coalition."
`Nostradamus' Newman is correct. Labor may win an election in
the future (you heard it here first). And the Greens may discredit
themselves. (This they are already doing on Marrickville council,
where, with the backing of conservative independents, they are
keeping Labor off every council committee.)

The rest of it is pure fantasy. For socialists in Australia, the idea
of the DSP working to build trust with other socialists is
laughable. It has a long history of dishonest political dealings
and opportunism, combined with its Cannonite monolithism. I
would love the DSP to change, Andy, but I'm not holding my
breath.

Newman makes a serious point about the relationship between
cadre and the mass movement. A broad socialist project (and by
that I mean encompassing masses of workers, not a
dumbed-down, opportunist mish-mash) will require experienced
cadre to succeed. However, not those schooled in Cannonite
gospel. The cadre base of the DSP is somewhat different to that
of the former Taaffeites leading the Scottish Socialist Party or
even of Andy Newman's former organisation, the SWP.
Militant/SP/SSP and the SWP in Britain have and had a real
presence in sections of the labour movement and even in some
localities. During the anti-war movement, the organisation of the
SWP was nationally significant. Further, the SWP/SP/SSP cadre
are not entirely the spotty middle-class youth of Student Grant in
Viz comics. There is a strong working class element. The same
can not be said of the DSP. Its `turn to industry' in the late 1980s
and 90s gained it very little. Those cadre who did well in the
broader labour movement either left or were pushed out.
Historically, it has recruited mostly through its youth
organisation, Resistance, on campuses and through `groovy'
campaigns that often involve wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and
drinking a lot of Nicaraguan coffee. Even Resistance is now
barely functioning.

No doubt there are serious and sincere people in the DSP, and I
hope that the future brings unity for Marxists and socialists in
Australia. However, the DSP's trajectory and method certainly is
not leading us in that direction right now.





--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, Pip Hinman &
Peter Boyle <ppz@g...> wrote:
>
> DSP National Executive statement in response to the article
"DSP split
> over future" by Greg Adler published in Weekly Worker (the
newspaper of
> the Communist Party of Great Britain) 603 Thursday December
1, 2005:
>
> The publication by the CPGB and former Australian Socialist
Alliance
> member Greg Adler of selected and out-of-context quotations
from the
> internal discussion being held in the Democratic Socialist
Perspective
> in the lead-up to its congress in January 2006 is a calculated
and
> malicious attempt to destroy the modest progress in
regrouping the left
> made by the Socialist Alliance over the last four years.
>
> The DSP membership, like the membership of any Socialist
Alliance
> affiliate, has the right to have a frank internal discussion about
the
> DSP's perspectives towards the Alliance. Since the inception
of the
> Alliance and prior to every DSP congress our members have
always
> participated in a frank discussion about these relations.
>
> The DSP has been the strongest builder of the Socialist
Alliance and has
> made great sacrifices to advance this left regroupment project.
It also
> has an unblemished record of operating constructively,
democratically
> and collaboratively within the Alliance. Unfortunately, the same
cannot
> be said of Greg Adler.
>
> In the DSP's internal discussion, a variety of views are
expressed by
> members. None of them should be equated with the views of
the DSP, even
> if these are views expressed by individuals holding leadership
positions
> in the DSP.
>
> The DSP remains completely committed to building the
Socialist Alliance
> and a broad, multi-tendency socialist party project. Any change
in this
> position will be promptly reported to the Socialist Alliance and
> announced publicly.
>
> DSP National Executive
> Friday, December 02, 2005
>