[Pen-l] The Democratic Socialist Party's dirty laundry

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last year there was a split in the Democratic Socialist Perspective 
(DSP) in Australia, a group that was originally modeled after the 
Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. but went its own way rather than 
drinking the SWP’s workerist Kool Aid in the 1980s. The DSP’s break with 
sectarianism was not total, however. To this day it retains a belief 
that the writings of SWP founder James P. Cannon remain valid even 
though there are clear indications that the SWP’s batty turn in the 
1980s was a natural outcome of Cannon’s own wrongheaded understanding of 
Leninism. An early symptom was the remarks of Morris Stein, Cannon’s 
chief lieutenant, to the party convention in 1948:

"We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any 
competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the 
revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the 
lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history 
since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out 
to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of 
being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct 
program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, 
treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists."

But if you are going to break with this kind of madness, you have to go 
all the way. Unfortunately, the DSP’s problems in the Socialist Alliance 
reflect its failure to make a clean break with sectarianism. Like the 
RESPECT Party in Great Britain, the Socialist Alliance was hampered by a 
contradiction between its own narrow goals and those of the broader 
left. While it was careful not to advertise its goals, the DSP clearly 
had the intention of using the Socialist Alliance to achieve hegemony on 
the Australian left. Perhaps they were not even fully conscious of this 
goal, but it was almost predetermined so long as you embrace the 
Cannonite party-building model.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-democratic-socialist-perspectives-dirty-laundry/
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