DSP Congress platforms now available

by Dave Riley
As a mirror of an ongoing debate across the far left, the Australian Democratic Socialist Perspective has been debating the broad party options for the past two years in the context of a minority opposing the party's Socialist Alliance engagement.

The DSP Congress convenes on January 3rd 2008 in Sydney and the opposing platforms are now available here on the DSP web site.

After such a long period of focused debate the DSP membership has considered the tactical issues involved in some detail. This congress concludes an extended period of preconference written and oral discussion.

Over this time the DSP membership has been actively involved in two years of activity building the Socialist Alliance so this has been a very informed debate especially in the context of all the denunciations of the Alliance as a regroupment failure and the cries that the time for broad party building is not ripe.

The majority National Executive platform concludes:

15. The DSP sees the struggle to build a broadly based anti-capitalist party as an important tactic in the struggle for a mass revolutionary party in this country. The creation of a serious anti-capitalist alternative, whatever its particular form of presentation (“red-green”, “real people’s party” etc) but founded on a complete break with class-collaborationism, can open the way to working class and broader social movement victories in the struggle against the capitalist imperative to make working people bear the costs of the system’s survival. The tactic is necessary in order to develop the forces needed to challenge the domination of the Australian labour movement by the ALP and the trade union bureaucracy as well as other bureaucracies within the social and environmental movements. While such a party begins with a class struggle platform of social, economic and environmental reforms and a broad socialist objective (i.e. does not have an explicitly revolutionary program), in the course of united engagement in mass struggles, it will steadily and democratically develop its program in a more explicitly revolutionary direction as struggles develop. This requires that revolutionaries provide it with serious and patient leadership.

16. If there is a new rise in the class struggle, new partners will be drawn into the project for a new party and the Socialist Alliance may have to become part of or be transformed into or be supplanted by new structures for organising the strongest and most effective political voice for anti-neo-liberal struggle.

17. While it builds the Socialist Alliance as a broad, class struggle socialist party project, the DSP should continue to maintain its own structures and to build a highly united and disciplined revolutionary cadre core. Revolutionary cadre, systematically educated in Marxism and experienced in struggle, are indispensable in this and any other tactical stage we go through to build a mass revolutionary party. We need to continue to recruit strongly to the DSP from within and outside the Socialist Alliance and, primarily through Resistance, win, educate and develop a new generation of revolutionary youth cadre. The DSP will openly seek to win others in the Socialist Alliance and the general public to its revolutionary politics.

And the minority Leninist Party Faction urges:

13. The DSP must publicly acknowledge that our unilateral attempt to build SA as a new broad-left party in formation was a mistake, a sectarian error and a setback for socialist collaboration. Until today’s conditions of continuing working class retreat change, a broad left party of anti-neoliberal resistance is simply not on the agenda. The necessary partners for such a party, substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders, do not yet exist and will not come into existence until there is a sustained mass upsurge of working class resistance.

14. In the absence of such a critical mass of willing partners, our unilateral declaration that the DSP plus a handful of our supporters is such a party, or party-in-formation, is just clowning. We must resume building the DSP as our public party and seek support for retaining SA’s electoral registration as an electoral vehicle for presenting revolutionary socialist politics in a popular way.