DSP and Greens

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

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Alan Bradley wrote: >>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.>> Fair enough. I'm pretty close to that
position, and was when I was in the DSP, although I think the DSP intervention
in the Greens was crude and cynical (but we've had that discussion).  I would
go further and say the structure of the party was secondary to the socialist
program, not the DSP program. I'm not at all convinced by the DSP program
these days, although I had a hand in some of the formulations in it. Doug L
wrote most of it, and I edited quite a bit of it.  Just before that program
was adopted, Jim Percy came back from the US, where he had been talking to
Camejo. They had discussed the Program (the Red Book) and Socialism and Human
Survival, and Jim had come around to the view that we didn't need the Red
Book, just Socialism and Human Survival, or something like it.  Doug and I
opposed Jim on that, but it was a brief discussion because we were only about
a week out from the conference, and we didn't have time to give it much
thought. In the end, none of us thought there was time to change course. Both
were adoped at the conference. It's one of the few things I opposed Jim on
that I think I was wrong about. Socialism and Human Survival is much closer to
the sort of program a socialist organisation needs to succeed in Australia. It
says everything that needs to be said much more clearly and briefly than the
Red Book.  But yes, the socialist program stands above any organisational
form.

>>The second one is to talk in euphemisms, like fundamental social change
instead of revolution.>> The socialist movement in Australia has rarely found
a way to talk to the masses in a way that strikes a chord and wins
support. There have only been a few socialists elected to Australian
parliaments since the socialist movement first emerged here in the 1890s:
Percy Brookfield, Fred Patterson, and a few others, mostly from very tight
port or mining working-class communities that are very hard to find today. Of
course, parliament is not the only measure, but it is what most Australians
regard as politics.  If the word revolution scares the pants off people, I
don't mind saying fundamental social change, or something that's a bit less of
a mouthful. At least it gives me a chance to get in a few more sentences. I
don't tend to talk much at work about the dictatorship of the proletariat,
either (although some of the right-wingers at work do bait me about that, good
naturedly, sometimes).  Yes, I do think members of a revolutionary party
should know that they're in a revolutionary party. I also think that we don't
have a clue what a revolution will look like in an advanced capitalist
country. Probably not like 1917 in St Petersburg, perhaps like 1968 in Paris,
but I don't know, and I haven't met anyone else who does either. Maybe there
will be more than one revolutionary party. I'd certainly like to think we'd
have a multi-party system if we ever win.

>>The third one was various proposals to ease off on the party's norms of
activity.>> I don't know who you're talking about. In my resignation letter I
said I was I couldn't fullfil those norms and didn't think I should be a
member. That was part of it. I didn't go into more detail because I wanted to
remain on good terms, and probably would have if the DSP had taken a less
sectarian stance towards the Greens.  I don't know what other people said, but
I wasn't part of any group that wanted to lower the norms. I wasn't part of
any group of any kind. I wasn't a "troublemaker", "griper", "gossip" or
"cliquist". Perhaps I should have been, perhaps a lot more members should be
to keep the central leadership on its toes. But people like that are shown the
door very quickly, or were in my experience.  I do think now, that while the
DSP remains a tight cadre organisation of the type it has become, it will
never be a mass party. Looking at it from a distance, which I could never do
while I was a member, I can recognise that the political homogeneity, the
curious lack of animated discussion at conferences (it's mostly description of
experienes rather than political analysis) and other bodies, the
depoliticisation of the ranks by constant organisational tasks, the
flatfootedness of members in public activities, was not accidental, nor was it
healthy.  It was not what I set out to build when I joined as a young
university graduate who went to work in the railway yards because I didn't
want to be part of "the system". I don't think many of us consciously wanted
what the DSP became. Like the rest of the left we trapped ourselves in an
organisational framework that took us in the wrong direction.  Very few of our
members got long-term experience in union or community work. We moved around a
lot, so we were never party of any community but the party. Most of the DSP's
political interventions didn't last long enough to train members as
experienced political agitators. We became narrow in our experience of
Australian society although we were well educated and read widely about the
world, and particularly world politics. We could write pretty good resolutions
and put out a pretty good newspaper (sometimes -- I think it's pretty dry at
the moment and get very little from it that I don't already know). But we
couldn't make those resolutions work in Australian society and we struggled to
sell enough copies of the paper to keep it afloat.  One of the things I didn't
put in my resignation letter was that I didn't have a clue what to do
next. Cannon's phrase "the art of politics is knowing what to do next" might
be a bit glib, but there's truth in it. I knew that the DSP didn't know what
to do next, and neither did I. It put up the shutters. I resigned.

I don't think I can tell you much more about the DSP, and would like to take a
break from this thread for a while, if you don't mind. Dredging my memory for
this is taking a lot of time and emotional energy and there are a few other
things I have to do. But thanks for helping me to order some of this in my
mind.


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