[Marxism] Re: Socialist Alliance DSP front well to the back.

[Ggregray@xxxxxxx]

In responding to my  post Graham Milner in fact, I believe reinforces the
points I made.

He sets out the work he did for the campaign for the by-election in Western
Australia and refers to the Socialist Alliance's "very fine candidate". I am
quite prepared to accept that Milner and other SA members worked hard and that
John Tattersal was indeed a fine candidate. The fact remains that the SA
garnered a mere 127 votes out of a total of over 16,000 votes cast. Is it too 
unkind
to suggest that a problem for the SA of not being named on the ballot paper
(its candidate was listed as an independent as the SA is not  registered
electoral party in WA) was in fact a blessing as an SA listing may have led to 
even
less votes for its candidate?

The serious point here is that the absurd claims made by the SA and the
Democratic Socialist Perspective/Party that they have strong influence in the 
union
movement and are recognised as the leaders of all sorts of struggles stand in
the greatest possible contrast to and are in fact disproven by the
vanishingly miniscule vote the SA manages  to garner.

Alan Bradley also wrote a response to my post and like many others who have
written in this list and other places claims that I presented a complete
distortion of the meaning of the words of former DSP leader John Percy. The best
answer I can give to this is to quote the passage from John Percy to which I
referred in my post. it occurs in the party building report presented to the
meeting of the DSP Natiopnal Committee last October by Percy on behalf of the 
DSP
National Executive minority. He wrote:
" As part of this pre-congress discussion we need to properly assess the
Socialist Alliance experience.
"Certainly we need to be clear that there have been several distinct stages
in that experience
"Firstly there was our initiation of the process. Remember what was the
actual initiating event that prompted us to think about this tactic? The 
decision
by the British Socialist Workers' Party to contemplate election work after two
decades of abstaining totally from it. We thought, here's an opportunity to
make an approach to the local International Socialist Organisation, for joint
work, joint election campaigns, and a regrouping of the left. They either had to
respond positively,or suffer a political blow, and organisational losses.( In
that respect our tactic worked, they're certainly a lot weaker than they were
in 2001, suffering splits and attrition and at their Marxism conference in
September they had half the attendance of recent years, with just 40 at their
final session. We've suffered also but not as much as them.)

"We were excited about the prospects of left unity in the first years of SA
in 2001-02 it was a good positive feeling. But there's no remnant of that in SA
any longer,all the sects are for sabotage, not unity. As Marce Cameron wrote,
"The united left-unity dynamic  which  accompanied the launch of the SA back
in 2001 has all but evaporated'  "
Now read that , particularly the way in which Percy lovingly describes the
setbacks to the ISO as a result of the DSP's tactic working and you might think
it's all a bit rich for  Cameron to bemoan the loss of the united left-unity
dynamic. The unity the DSP sought was that of the spider and the fly with the
SA as its web.

Bradley has a back-up position of saying that the DSP repudiated Percy's
comments by voting down his perspective at its conference earlier this year.
However this is just not the case. Unless Bradley has information to which I am 
not
privy there was no discussion, to my knowledge, that repudiated Percy's
comments on what intiated the SA "tactic" -what was defeated was Percys more
realistic perspective on how the DSP should relate to the SA.

The point that matters is that in 2001 and in subsequent years up until now
there has been  a desire amongst broad strata of the left for effective and
honest unity. The DSP saw that as an opportunity for its rivals suffer splits 
and
attrition. Predictably the SA died as any real vehicle for left unity and is
now a sad relic operated as a DSP subsidiary. The practical results of that
are reflected in yet another pathetic electoral result  no matter how the DSP
and its apologists seek to spin it.




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