re: DSP and Greens

["Alan Bradley" <abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Steve Painter
> The only way to get voted off the national leadership is not to make it on
> to the list recommended to the national conference Nominating Commission
> by the outgoing national leadership.

The Nominating Commission list is a factional slate.  Usually there's only
one faction.  If it was necessary to start removing people, you would
obviously have at least two.

> I keep in touch with a few people who left around the same time, and some
> others who've left before and since, but none of them have ever told me of
> any liquidationist proposals.
> Are you sure you weren't suckered by some boogey-man stories about all the
> traitors and deserters?

There were three brands of "liquidationism" in the DSP in the early 90s.

One was my kind, where the structure of the Party was secondary to its
program, and could be abandoned if it was appropriate.  That was my position
then, and it is my position now.  It's not actually liquidationism, in that
it (attempts to) maintain the integrity and continuity of the revolutionary
program.

The second one was a nasty tendency to talk in euphemisms, like saying
"fundamental social change" instead of "revolution". This kind of stuff can
sometimes be appropriate, but what was happening was that it was carried
into internal party discussions.  This resulted in a fuzziness in
discussion, and some potentially very serious miseducation of comrades.
This is liquidationism in the sense that it obscures, and hence undermines,
the party's program.

The third was the one I was referring to.  There were various proposals to
ease off on the party's norms of activity.  Essentially, it would have been
OK not to sell Green Left, go to meetings, pledge, and do all that kind of
stuff.  This would have thrown the party's activities into complete
disarray, and would have forced serious cutbacks in areas like Green Left.
These proposals were supposed to make the party more attractive to new
recuits, but the fact of the matter was that these masses of new recruits
weren't actually out there at the time. As well, the whole point of
membership norms is that they aren't rules. Not all DSP members sell Green
Left. I rarely did, as I hated it with a passion, although I was very
successful when I forced myself to do it.

The DSP encourages its members to be as active as possible. This is a good
thing. "As possible" does vary, of course.

The proposals to reduce membership norms would have worked against this.
More to the point, they would have damaged the ability of the DSP to do the
kind of things it has to do, without there being any genuine benefits to
offset the drawbacks.

These proposals would have undermined the party, and its attempts to
implement its program.  They were, therefore, liquidationist.

> If you wanted a war in the party, Alan, you should have started your own.
> There would have been plenty of people lining up to boot the daylights out
> of you (politically, of course). In fact, some of them would have been
> delighted to have someone to do it to.

Faction fights are like that.

I actually suspect that a lot of the goals of "the fight we didn't have"
could have been achieved without actually having to win votes.  Merely
making people aware of the issues would have actually gone most of the way
towards dealing with them. Or a little more harshly: accusing people of
doing things is a good way of making them nervous when they do it.

Copping a bit of shit is worth it to save the party from going astray.

Alan Bradley
abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx


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