A step toward a stronger socialist left

BY DICK NICHOLS

[The following is an abridged version of a talk presented to the International Socialist Organisation's Marxism 2002 conference held in Melbourne, September 6-8. Dick Nichols is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party and a national co-convenor of the Socialist Alliance.]

Each and every time a revolutionary socialist organisation like the DSP or the ISO meets, a question always hangs over the gathering, a question so obvious that there's hardly ever any need to pronounce it — how best can we strengthen the socialist, the Marxist, cause in the coming period?

Ninety-nine times out of 100 the answer to that question is simple — by strengthening ourselves. Discussion then passes on to improving revolutionary work in the movements, the unions and the communities, to sales of the press and to the distribution of literature, and to educating ourselves better for revolutionary work.

But there are rare times when that natural-enough answer is not the right answer to the question, or when we have to ask what “strengthening ourselves” really means, when unearthing the right answer requires more thought, more investigation. Who is “ourselves”, after all?

This is especially the case when there is a rise in interest in socialism, or a vaguer search by sections of workers and students and other parts of society in general for an alternative to standard capitalist politics. Then it's our responsibility to ask what impact the answer we give will have on them — those curious but still sceptical human beings with which our socialist cause will be built or it won't be built at all.

More specifically, what impact will that answer have on our ability as socialists and Marxists to link up with the natural leaders of working class, community and movement struggles, to convince them that the Marxist viewpoint is necessary and valid and, by strengthening this connection — this vital link — help us build a broader social and political base for socialism?

This is the case in Australia today. There are scores, if not hundreds, of working-class militants who are disgusted with the ALP, and we have to be sure that we have lost no opportunity to help them pass permanently out of the camp of Laborist politics and into that of socialism.

There are hundreds if not thousands of opponents of capitalism, who appreciate left unity and who would think more about joining if the socialist pole could be strengthened. Many of these are already members, if largely still passive members, of the Socialist Alliance.

DSP NE proposal

The national executive of the DSP, basing itself on an analysis of the present political conjuncture in Australia and on the experience of participating in the building of the Socialist Alliance — and after quite a deal of agonising — is convinced that we cannot, if we are to serve the socialist cause as well as we possibly can, just give the same old answer to the question: how to strengthen the socialist cause today?

If we are to “capture” as many of the potential recruits to socialism that are out there as we possibly can, we can only do it by strengthening our best recruiting instrument — and that's the Socialist Alliance.

So for us the answer to the question “what is to be done?” certainly cannot be: “Just build the DSP!”, dropping the Socialist Alliance. That is discounted from the outset and would be a criminally sectarian error which would toss away many of the invaluable gains that have been achieved.

But nor can it be: “Carry on building the DSP together with the Socialist Alliance”, because our experience of the last 18 months is that neither job can be done properly.

We are convinced that our answer has to be: “Use the accumulated resources and strength of the DSP to help strengthen the Socialist Alliance as the primary organisation for socialism in this country.”

That's the essential political meaning of the letter sent to the Socialist Alliance national executive by the DSP NE on September 3 (available at <http://www.dsp.org.au>). The DSP national executive is convinced — and we hope to convince DSP members who will vote on this proposal at our 20th party congress at the end of this year — that through ceasing to build the DSP as a public organisation we can help construct the Socialist Alliance as a bigger, more powerful alternative for socialism in this country.

Now that it's out in the light of day, it's clear — and confirmed by the overwhelmingly positive reaction it has received — that this is a step that has been crying out to be taken. And we hope our example will lead other affiliates to review their own relation to the Socialist Alliance project.

What will happen if the DSP NE proposal is accepted at our party congress? I quote from the letter: “If a majority of our members accept our proposal the DSP will cease to operate as a public organisation and begin to operate as an internal tendency in the Socialist Alliance from January 2003. Our members will, from that point, be building and recruiting to the Socialist Alliance rather than the DSP.

“We will then commence negotiations with the Socialist Alliance about taking as much of the political and organisational assets we have built up through the DSP into the Socialist Alliance as is possible. We undertake to pursue this process within the democratic framework of the Socialist Alliance and in a thoroughly open, consultative and inclusive manner.

“The objective of our tendency will be to pursue the transition while ensuring that the gains of our three decades of work as a party will not be lost to the left as a whole.

“We are confident that this will be a big step forward for left regroupment in Australia and that we will be able to agree, in stages, on concrete steps forward for the Socialist Alliance. This is based on the substantial political consensus and comradely collaboration achieved since the founding of the alliance.”

What would be the purpose of the Democratic Socialist tendency? We do not envisage it as a permanent faction, to which we would be seeking to recruit people from within the Socialist Alliance. Rather: “Our proposal would make the Socialist Alliance and its bodies the political framework governing the work of former DSP members and the organisation that they would work to build. Within this framework the goal of the Democratic Socialist tendency would be to make itself redundant in step with the further development of the alliance.”

In short, the tendency would be a construction tool for the Socialist Alliance and not a permanent repository of historical DSP positions.

Revolutionary organisation

Now I would like to explain why the DSP NE thinks this “shock move” of ours is practicable, why we have made this proposal now and how we think the process of strengthening the alliance can best proceed.

The first question that must occur to anyone who is acquainted with the DSP and the Socialist Alliance is: “The DSP aspires to be a revolutionary socialist organisation. Yet how can you possibly dream that this alliance, whose platform is just a series of immediate demands, can be transformed into a revolutionary organisation, supplanting the DSP?”

Let me begin my answer to this question with a question. How will the socialist cause in this country achieve most rapid increase in relevance and political profile?

It certainly won't be by building the left of the ALP, or of the Greens (although socialists will always seek to collaborate as closely as possible with good people in those organisations).

And it won't be by the growth of any one of the affiliates within the alliance at the expense of any other affiliate. Already the alliance enjoys greater visibility and presence than any of the affiliates. It is the face of socialist unity that has given it this status.

This is the first part of the answer: the natural growth path for the socialist cause in this country is to strengthen what we've already got, to build on what we've already built.

But what about its political basis? Here we have to grasp the real, operational foundation of the alliance, as opposed to its formal basis as adopted at its founding conference.

I can do no better than quoting the DSP NE letter on this point: “Our collective experience in building the Socialist Alliance has revealed its actual political basis. There is a significant amount of shared socialist program among the Socialist Alliance affiliates. While this is not formally outlined as a program of the Socialist Alliance, the founding documents refer to the fact that there is more common ground than that sketched out in the initial Socialist Alliance platform.

“This has been confirmed in practice by the actual experience of having to take a stand on such testing issues as the 'war on terrorism', Palestine and the current attacks on the most militant union leaderships in Australia.”

This last, particularly the offensive by AMWU national secretary Doug Cameron against the elected Victorian AMWU leadership, was a particularly important test for the alliance. We could easily have taken refuge in that old coward's formula that parties don't interfere in “internal union business”, but that would have destroyed our credibility with some of the best working class fighters in this country at a stroke.

Our experience has also shown that, while the alliance doesn't have an in-principle position in favour or against the disaffiliation of unions from the ALP, we have been able to relate concretely to union politics and can be confident of finding a correct case-by-case orientation, based on the most important principle of all, union democracy and the reclaiming of the unions by the membership.

The level of collaboration achieved has only been possible because of implicitly shared program. Had the Progressive Labour Party, for example, joined the alliance that would have become even clearer, because it is highly likely that the PLP would have been on the other side of the fence on many of the issues we have had to face.

As soon as we can manage, the DSP will draft a popularly written socialist perspectives document, which we believe would make explicit the real, operating basis of the Socialist Alliance. We will submit it for discussion and adoption by the May 2003 second alliance national conference.

This document will make clear that we are looking to build the alliance as a revolutionary socialist and not a left-social democratic organisation. But it will be written in the language of ordinary life and struggle and not in “Cominternese”.

Nor will it be a complete revolutionary program. As the DSP NE letter says: “Our experience in working together surely confirms that left regroupment and unity will come about, and can only come about, on the basis of our rising to the objective challenges that are being posed by an intensifying class struggle and movement of anti-capitalist resistance. It will be our success in meeting these challenges — including the challenge of giving concrete and credible form to the socialist alternative at every turn — that will provide and strengthen the programmatic basis of the alliance.”

This process will also set existing differences in the right framework.

“In this context, existing differences among affiliates will have increasingly less weight and the grounds for the maintenance of the existing minimalist organisational form of the Socialist Alliance increasingly less operative. How important our existing differences really are and what organisational form they really justify should be tested out by serious debate in the context of ongoing joint work within the framework of the alliance.”

Behind this analysis lies our conviction that at the political centre of the alliance is a revolutionary core, a working-class core, an internationalist core. The affiliates certainly don't agree on everything, we certainly need to discuss thoroughly and in an informed way — and not as an exercise in set-piece battles — many of our differences, but these discussions will be set in the existing context of rising class confrontation and greater opportunities for our side, opportunities which we must gear ourselves up to meet.

Why now?

Why do we propose to take this step now? The answer to this question comes in three parts.

Firstly, because the alliance is falling increasingly short of its potential. There is, for example, a weird contradiction between how well known the Socialist Alliance is and the joke of a “national apparatus” with which we have to do its work. Examples of untapped potential abound, especially in rural and regional Australia. We have 200 members “at large” in NSW alone. Some 10 days ago I received a call from a comrade in Castlemaine who wants to help organise for the alliance in the Castlemaine-Bendigo region.

We don't have basic literature on a whole range of issues. Our policy development process is slow, at the same time as interested people are not getting organised to participate. What things are done well usually have to be done as emergency operations (witness the Victorian electoral registration campaign).

The longer this goes on, the worse it will get. Then we will not be even be able to make use of our electoral potential, because that is increasingly linked to the work Socialist Alliance does in the sphere of campaigns and protests, the sphere where we are most failing.

Secondly, because there has to be a thorough discussion and debate on the DSP NE proposal within the DSP itself. Contrary to the view of an autocratic, top-down DSP peddled by some, the DSP NE proposal has to be thoroughly discussed by our party's members and a lot of DSP comrades will have questions, doubts and even counter-positions. They will, for example, ask: “Are we, the DSP, about to throw 30 years of accumulated effort away on a piece of wishful thinking? What's the guarantee that the strengthening of left unity we're envisaging won't fail like the attempts at left regroupment we were involved with in the 1980s?”

Thirdly, because what we propose cannot possibly work without a thorough, clarifying debate involving all Socialist Alliance members. We will need until the May 2003 conference (and beyond) for relevant documents, amendments to constitutions and practical questions around asset transfer to be worked out.

Moreover, this time is also necessary because everyone has to be convinced from their own reflection that what is envisaged is a real turn to strengthen the socialist cause and neither a “DSP takeover”, as some bizarrely refer to it (when the DSP has a maximum of six people on a Socialist Alliance national executive of 17), nor an attempt to capitalise on real or imaginary divisions in other organisations (when we want every last socialist and left-winger to participate in the Socialist Alliance).

In short, for the restructuring of a bigger common home to take place, as many as possible will have to feel secure that they have a space.

Next steps

Where should we go from here? Firstly, let's construct a real, serious debate on the entire left, and not just among Socialist Alliance affiliate organisations and members. Green Left Weekly will open its pages to this debate. We will propose to carry it on the Socialist Alliance web site. We would also hope that Socialist Alternative, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party engage in the debate.

Secondly, let's all put much more effort into giving the Socialist Alliance profile, including covering its (often under-reported) success stories, such as the Western Australian trade union forum and the public meeting done jointly with the Skilled Six Committee last week.

Thirdly, we need boosted effort in forthcoming election campaigns, even in the knowledge that the first port of call for most disaffected voters will remain the Greens in the short term. However, the Tasmanian election campaign showed us how election campaigns are invaluable to opening the road to the expansion of the alliance as a truly national organisation, with a presence beyond the capital cities to which the left has traditionally been confined.

Lastly, let's see more joint work by Socialist Alliance affiliates and members. The DSP will argue for greater use of Socialist Alliance caucuses in the unions and in the movements. These, of course, can't be imposed on anyone and their decisions can't be binding. Nor, in many cases, should they replace broader left caucuses. The important point is for us all to strive to carry out joint work and to achieve a united approach.

The DSP NE is convinced that with this approach most of the existing differences will disappear. Where they don't we'll just have to agree to disagree and await the test of experience.

Comrades, Australian left politics isn't like European left politics, marked by general strikes and millions in the streets. But our discussion here is common to all the revolutionary left in the advanced capitalist world. Everyone is discussing forms of regroupment. That opening exists here too, not in the form of a collapse of mass working-class support for the ALP but in that of a break of important and precious sections of the working class vanguard from the ALP, combined with the growth of an important layer of anti-capitalist activists who like and appreciate left unity.

In this context we should be wary of the argument that left regroupment requires a certain predetermined level of mass movement activity and break from social-democracy. While this is true in the sense that a rise in revolt and political disaffection is a precondition for reviewing old positions and tactics, it's not true to say that we can only seriously talk about left regroupment once the class struggle has reached some preconceived level of intensity.

More likely, indeed, the truth is the other way around. The missing link in driving the class struggle and the mass movement forward in this country is the existence of a sufficiently strong, sufficiently unified revolutionary socialist organisation with real — if still minority — implantation in the unions, the movements and the communities and with the capacity and authority to provide leadership and support to those in struggle.

The DSP NE believes we have a chance, through channelling our resources into radically strengthening the Socialist Alliance as the site of left unity, to help build just such an organisation. We fervently hope that we can persuade as many as possible to join us in that effort.

From Green Left Weekly, September 18, 2002.
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