[Marxism] No DSP split is immediately indicated

[Ozleft <Ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By Bob Gould

In the first week in January the DSP held a four-day summer school in a 
college at Sydney University. The venue was not widely advertised and I 
turned up with a certain amount of trepidation in light of the recent 
unpleasant incident on the Green Left discussion list when an 
unreconstructed Stalinist accused me of being an agent provocateur, and 
there was no adequate response from the people running the Green Left list.

In the event, the atmosphere at the summer school was quite civil. There 
is an account of the gathering 
<http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/694/36077> in /Green Left Weekly/ by 
Dave Holmes, the king of bland and spin, who is the old DSP leader whose 
support shores up the current leadership of the DSP, around Peter Boyle. 
According to Holmes, the papers presented at the summer school will be 
available on the web soon.

Numbers were down on past live-in DSP summer schools, but paradoxically 
the change of venue, the vagaries of Sydney weather and the more human 
scale made for a more civilised environment for serious political 
discussion. This year has turned out to be the subtropical coolish, wet 
Sydney summer that alternates with the super-hot, dry ones.

The venue suited me because I just had to trot down the hill to the 
campus, so I attended about half of the event. I might have attended 
more, but muggy, wet holiday periods are a peak business time in my 
bookshop.

The political disagreements between the two groups in the DSP were 
clearly evident to any educated eye. The leaders of both groups tended 
to bond among themselves and with their own supporters, although there 
was a bit of interchange among the ranks. The interplay between the 
leaders of the two groups was obviously very tense.

Full: http://tinyurl.com/36lkhd



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