DSP and Greens

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>This suggests that you were out of touch with the rank and file.  You
probably should have been voted out of the leadership.>>

You may be right Alan, but hardly anybody gets voted out of the DSP
leadership by the ranks.
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.
As far as I know, I'm the only one ever to have had a Nominating Commission
list changed from the floor of the conference. I did that in the mid-1970s,
and never saw it happen at another conference. At that time I wasn't part of
the central leadership, but an organiser in Melbourne.
As to being out of touch. I was out of touch with the central leadership,
not the ranks. I spoke up on the Cleary fiasco because comrades from
Melbourne and Sydney had told me they were appalled.
The reaction to what I said was so fierce because the leadership knew my
views were reflected in the ranks, and probably on the National Committee.
The point of it was to intimidate, and it worked.

>>The various liquidationists that appeared in the DSP in the early 90s did
us a great disservice.  They forced us to unite against them, when we should
have been fighting amongst ourselves.>>

I didn't know about any liquidationists -- except perhaps people like
yourself who wanted to liquidate into the Greens. Are they the
liquidationists you're talking about, or were they take-overists?
I left because I thought the DSP was on the wrong track, but I didn't tell
anyone it should be liquidated. A few months later I joined the Greens, but
I didn't leave the DSP with the intention of joining the Greens.
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?

>>war in the party. That is precisely what we needed.>>
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.



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