[Marxism] The coming DSP conference

[Ozleft <ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The forthcoming DSP education conference as a window into the current 
state of the Socialist Alliance-DSP

By Bob Gould

The Australian Democratic Socialist Perspective is holding its 
traditional New Year conference a bit later than usual, from January 
8-12, and it's a bit shorter than usual.

There has been a bit of a lunatic flurry about this conference on the 
sometimes rather bizarre Sydney Indymedia. One person who claims to be a 
DSP insider carries on at great length about the seating arrangements 
for the conference, but this comment is pretty eccentric, as the alleged 
DSP insider is describing what happens at a DSP decision-making 
conference, not an educational event, which this one seems to be.

The DSP leadership's posting about this conference on Indymedia dubs 
this event "Marxism", which is cocking their snook at bit at their 
ostensible Socialist Alliance partners, the ISO, who also call their 
annual educational events Marxism.

The other feature of this conference is that it's a strictly closed 
event, unlike previous DSP education conferences. Only selected 
outsiders will be allowed to attend, and the DSP's ostensible allies in 
other groups in the Socialist Alliance, on the face of it, are 
particularly excluded.

The agenda for the conference, published on Sydney Indymedia, gives some 
hint as to why this event is so deliberately closed, because in part 
it's an intensive indoctrination session on issues on which other 
Alliance affiliates have different points of view, and obviously the 
presence of people with different points of view tends to puncture the 
intense unanimity desired by the DSP leadership around its political line.

For a start, the actual political configuration of the conference, 
rather than the fictional configuration described by the ostensible DSP 
insider on Sydney Indymedia, is informative.

The site for this event has several small lecture venues and one large 
one, which is designated as WMR. There are several keynote sessions each 
day, and other sessions with between five and eight events running 
concurrently. In the concurrent sessions, the lecture that is regarded 
as most important, and the one that most participants will be encouraged 
to attend, is the one in WMR.

There are five major themes at this conference. The ostensible keynote 
theoretical theme is the 100th anniversary of the 1905 revolution in 
Russia, with Doug Lorimer giving the keynote talk on Monday in WMR. 
Lorimer's account of the lessons of 1905 is quite predictable: an 
extensive repetition of the basic DSP mantra about the Leninist party -- 
the DSP version put forward in all places, for all seasons and for all 
times, in a ruthlessly simplistic way.

Lorimer's main lesson will be that the authoritarian model of so-called 
Leninism practised by the DSP is the only authentic model and he will 
repeat this in different ways, with rather long quotes, for about an hour.

DSP big meetings of this sort are not designed for serious discussion 
from the floor, so it's unlikely that Lorimer's story will be challenged 
much in that forum.

I would put forward an alternative account of the key lessons of 1905. 
The first lesson is the emergence of the soviets as an expression of 
proletarian power. The main personality associated with the emergence of 
the soviets was Trotsky, with Parvus behind him in the background, both 
of them busily working away at elaborating the theory of permanent 
revolution -- the Trotsky-Parvus version, not the latter-day eclectic 
and opportunist DSP alternative to that theory.

The second major feature of 1905 and the two or three years of 
relatively open revolutionary activity that immediately followed it in 
Russia, was the conflict in the Bolshevik party between Lenin and the 
“committee men”, in the first instance over opening up the party to the 
revolutionary mass movement. (For more on this see 
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Liebman.html). The committee 
men opposed that. As well, there was the conflict between Lenin and most 
of the Bolshevik faction over taking advantage of the legal openings for 
revolutionary activity presented by the inauguration of an elected Duma, 
and the elections for that body.

At the two semi-legal big RSDLP conferences conducted in Stockholm and 
London, Lenin even went so far as to break Bolshevik faction discipline 
to vote with the Mensheviks against most of the Bolshevik delegates in 
favour of participation in the Duma.

It's also worth noting the simple physical fact that the main 
conferences of revolutionaries held in Russia in 1905-1907 were united 
RSDLP conferences in which the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and other factions 
participated.

This account of the real sequence of events is unlikely to come from 
Lorimer's hour-long speech on 1905 in WMR, but a lot of it is available 
in my two articles on Ozleft, particularly some lengthy quotes from 
Bertram D. Wolfe's Three Who Made a Revolution.

In terms of time at the conference devoted to overseas events, on the 
face of it none of the 75 sessions is on the Iraq war, which is a 
curious omission, the meaning of which isn't entirely clear to me.

Another omission is any lecture on the current social conflicts in 
China, or on the Chinese revolution at all. Also absent is any lecture 
on the Australian student movement, a big omission considering that over 
many years the DSP has recruited extensively among students. Now, 
however, its presence among students is substantially diminished.
At this conference the three or four DSP student activists who are 
speaking will take on topics quite unrelated to the student movement.

Another feature of the conference is that no national fraction meetings 
are billed for the lunch breaks, other than the national finance 
fraction. This seems to suggest that the financial crisis of the DSP is 
considered of overwhelming importance compared with other spheres of 
activity.

The dominant international theme is a series of keynote lectures on 
events in Latin America. There are no less than seven lectures on Cuba 
and Venezuela, four of them in WMR.

The cadres of the DSP, by the end of this intense education, will be 
exceedingly familiar with the DSP line on Latin America, even if their 
tools for judging the truth or otherwise of the accounts given to them, 
are otherwise rather limited.

Another apparent aim of this conference is to indoctrinate the DSP 
membership about the political crimes of what the DSP likes to call 
"sectarian Trotskyism". There are no less than eight lectures in which 
anti-Trotskyist lessons will be drawn in different ways.

One of them is called "The Trotskyist Mystification", another is "The 
Post-war Experiences of Trotskyism and the Third World Revolutionary 
Leaderships", by Jorge Jorquera, and another is "The Bolshevik 
Revolution: The Test of Practice".

Nick Everitt is billed to speak on the lessons of the course of the 
Vietnamese revolution, which will obviously include the obligatory 
denunciation of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and so it goes.

The only non-DSP outside group giving a paper at this conference is the 
German Party of Democratic Socialism, the formerly Stalinist ruling 
party in East Germany, now a fairly moderate Social Democratic 
formation. The lecture is billed: “German politics and the perspectives 
of the PDS”, and will be presented by a prominent member of the PDS.

The strictures about Social Democracy and the Greens, applied rigorously 
by the DSP in Australia, don’t seem to apply with anything like the same 
rigour to the formerly Stalinist PDS.

One might expect that out of 75 lectures, some overview of the Stalinist 
aberration in the 20th century, and its many aspects. But there's only 
one shy little lecture by Renfrey Clarke on Stalinism, and it's hard to 
assess what Renfrey will say on the topic in the context of this broadly 
anti-Trotskyist atmosphere in the very regimented DSP.

The general repudiation of Trotskyist politics at this conference 
applies mainly to the political content of the long historical struggle 
of the Trotskyists against Stalinism in the 20th century. The baby of 
the battle against Stalinism is thrown out, but the bathwater of 
Cannon’s over-centralised ideas of party structure are retained with 
their full force, and several lectures will sketch out the Cannonist 
style of party in its full rigour as the model to follow.

The conference is obviously intended to stiffen the DSP ranks against 
all the corruptions in the external world, and to steel them as far as 
possible against any too-independent intervention in substantial mass 
movements outside the immediate grip of the DSP leadership.

There's a session on the contradictions of the Greens to harden the 
members against the appeal of the Greens.

There's a curious session on the lessons of the Spanish revolution, by 
Rachel, the author of the rather extraordinary personal blog 
(http://www.livejournal.com/%7Egrrrach/friends), and this lecture will 
concentrate on the mistakes of the anarchists in Spain, which is 
standing the history of the Spanish revolution on its head. Any lecture 
about the Spanish revolution should start with a thorough discussion of 
the crimes of Stalinism in Spain, but Rachel's lecture is unlikely to do 
that, I'll bet.

Discussion of the labour and workers movements is all from the curious, 
eclectic, non-empirical and unscientific standpoint adopted by the DSP 
leadership. It's all directed at inculcating in DSP members the 
overwhelming necessity of building their small party at the expense of 
any serious implantation and oppositional activity in the existing 
workers movement.

There's one other shy little lecture that will be extremely significant, 
given by Russell Pickering, dubbed "Teamster Politics and Party 
Building". Blind Freddy can see that Pickering's lesson will be that 
Farrell Dobbs ultimately chose to go off and build the party rather than 
waste his time any further on the proletarian mass movement in the 
Teamsters. This trope, in my opinion, is putting Dobbs's very useful and 
courageous life to the use of drawing a very narrow, sectarian lesson.

As against this, Sam Wainwright will talk about the life of the 
Communist trade unionist in WA, Paddy Troy. That's one lecture I'd love 
to be at, just to hear how Sam handles Troy's lifelong and systematic 
professional socialist revolutionary trade union activity, a large part 
of it as a full-time union official. It would also be interesting to see 
how Sam handles Paddy Troy's conversion, towards the end of his life, to 
the view that it was better for revolutionary socialists to enter the 
Labor Party as a faction rather than try to maintain the Communist 
Party. I wonder if Sam will even mention that.

The lectures on the workers movement are underpinned by the DSP's 
eclectic and incoherent theory of the aristocracy of labour. This will 
be presented in a tortuous way to try to prove that there was no 
significant Marxian socialist tradition in Australia until the DSP came 
along, tactically speaking, and that the political Labor Party was a 
direct product of the aristocracy of labour (which is contradicted by 
all the evidence). This angle is used as an ideological buttress, a 
convoluted "proof", that the origins of Laborism were mainly bad.

The yawning contradiction of this DSP leadership view is that the sites 
and locations of mass class struggles, up to and including today, in 
Australia, have often been the very unions that, on this artificial 
reconstruction, can be called an aristocracy of labour. I've written 
extensively on this in other places, 
(http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w44/msg00089.htm 
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w45/msg00036.htm 
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w45/msg00146.htm ) so 
I won't burden the reader with too much more on that, except to say that 
the DSP leadership's jerry-built ideological construction on this 
question is meant to harden the view among DSP members that the only 
real political life in the workers movement is in their sect.

On day-to-day political tasks the keynote speeches, mostly taking place 
in WMR, are directed at hardening the DSP cadres in the view that the 
rather stillborn Socialist Alliance project still has legs, despite all 
the evidence to the contrary.

These keynote speeches on the Socialist Alliance will all involve 
lengthy verbal assaults on the other Alliance affiliates for not rolling 
over politically to the DSP's version of the Alliance project. All the 
problems of the Socialist Alliance will be blamed on the orneriness of 
the other affiliates.

There's a curious lecture on the US campaign against the war in Vietnam. 
One would have thought that a history of the forthright and boisterous 
Australian struggle against the Vietnam war might have been appropriate, 
but such a lecture would necessarily have involved trying to come to 
terms with the nature of that movement, the role of substantial 
organizations such as the Labor Party, the Communist Party, the Maoists 
and the existing Trotskyists, and the role of personalities as diverse 
as Arthur Calwell, Jim Cairns, Albert Langer and myself, rather than the 
disembodied entity of the pre-DSP Resistance current, about which John 
Percy lectures awkwardly in his rather self-serving historical articles.

It might also have been useful to have Mike Karadjis present a serious 
overview of problems and contradictions in contemporary Vietnam, but 
that's definitely not on the agenda at this conference. Instead there's 
a celebratory anniversary speech by a Vietnamese diplomat, Nick 
Everitt's inevitable attack on Trotskyism, and the US SWP's version of 
the history of the Vietnam war, and the movement against that war.

This education conference will register the further evolution of the DSP 
leadership in the direction of a kind of latter-day Stalinism, and its 
attempt to harden up the DSP membership against Trotskyism, Social 
Democracy, the Greens and any external force that might distract DSP 
members from the perceived primary task of building their small sect in 
the narrowest possible way.

Someone reading this critique of the coming DSP conference might 
conclude from the foregoing that I regard such conferences as a bad 
thing. That is not my view. The DSP leadership, in its own way, with all 
its eclectic political baggage, makes a serious effort at these 
conferences to train a new generation of Marxists in socialist politics, 
and the problem of how to conduct serious socialist educational events 
is indeed very important.

Many of the lectures that I haven’t commented on appear to be serious 
attempts at socialist education, and there’s no magic formula for 
socialist education, as we’ve all discovered.

I have attended a number of past DSP events such as this one and found 
them useful and informative despite my serious political differences 
with the DSP leadership. What motivates me to be so sharply critical in 
this article and other recent articles, such as the ones about North 
Korea, is that that the gradually developing semi-Stalinist political 
culture embodied in the things that I’m criticising is a completely mad 
political standpoint from which to try to educate socialists for the 
21st century.

I seem to live in a very different world to the DSP leadership. They 
accuse all other revolutionary socialist groups, and people like myself, 
of Stalinophobia without any evidence at all other than their own 
rewritings of history. Over the last few years, since the political 
collapse of Stalinism and the opening of the archives of the Stalinist 
countries, I’ve been almost obsessed by a study of new material coming 
out of the archives that deepens our knowledge of the political 
monstrosity that was Stalinism, and the political errors that made it 
possible.

An educated worldwide public has access to this material and a real 
picture of what Stalinism was is now a concrete part of the education of 
anyone who studies history, and it’s from people who study history that 
potential recruits to the socialist movement often come.

It seems to me both ahistorical and politically self-defeating to try to 
recreate a tiny counterculture in the socialist movement shot through 
with special pleading myths about the alleged good features of Stalinism.

This exercise might be useful for cohering the members of a small sect, 
but it’s no use at all for creating a movement that can intervene and 
construct a serious socialist current in the broader society outside the 
sect. This is the main reason why I continue to conduct my political 
polemic with the DSP leadership. I believe this debate is useful to the 
political education of the youth.



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism