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 DSP National Executive statement on LPF split

Statement from the DSP National Executive

The Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) in Australia has suffered a destructive split organised by the Leninist Party Faction (LPF), a minority whose perspective of retreating from left regroupment and engagement with broader forces in struggle had been decisively rejected by large majorities at the last two DSP congresses.

From the May 2005 NC, it was clear that there were different assessments about the value of Socialist Alliance within the leadership of the DSP. But this is a difference that we could have easily and constructively dealt with within a united DSP if the minority leadership had kept a sense of proportion and responsibility about their differences. Instead, they chose to factionalise the DSP and develop new theoretical differences, including labeling the democratically adopted course of the DSP as “liquidating” its revolutionary socialist politics.

The main documents relating to these differences can be found at in this website under “Documents of the DSP”. Further material will be made available on this website shortly.

Download The Activist with reports and documents from the 23^rd congress
Final report of DSP internal investigation into recent actions of the LPF
A revolutionary socialist organisation like the DSP cannot exist without internal democracy: it requires the maximum possible discussion and democratically exchanged ideas at all levels if the party is to be able to chart a correct course through the shifts of the class struggle. Likewise, centralism is implicit in the very existence of a revolutionary socialist party: we are a voluntary union of revolutionaries precisely because we understand that united action is more effective than the uncoordinated efforts of individuals.

In this framework, factions are provided for within the DSP as a mechanism for facilitating serious debate and political clarification in the party. But for factions to successfully play that role they must also respect the discipline of the DSP constitution and the decisions of its elected leadership bodies because differences in a revolutionary socialist organisation are resolved not simply through debate but also by the test of practice.
However, this democracy also means, not only respect for the rights of a minority, but also the right of the majority to insist that the work of the party not be disrupted. Therefore, the existence of factions strengthens the party only for so long as the faction members respect the democratic decisions of the party and continue to act within the framework decided upon at party congresses and in elected party bodies.

Without such an approach, factions weaken rather than strengthen the party. Since the party is an entirely voluntary union of revolutionaries who are committed to building a stronger party, a faction that is not loyal to the party as a whole will eventually have no purpose or role in the party.

We have now had more than two and a half years of internal struggle in the DSP, during which period we have had a total of seven months of oral and written pre-congress discussion, eight LPF counter-reports to two congresses and numerous LPF counter-reports to four National Committee meetings.

In order to maximise the chances of increasing political clarity in the discussion, the majority in the DSP have bent over backwards to avoid using any organisational measures to deal with the LPF’s increasing disregard for democracy and collective action in the DSP. Numerous leadership reports, letters, and individual and collective contributions to the discussions have urged the LPF to work for its stated aims within the framework of loyalty to the party as a whole, and many warnings were given to the LPF of the damaging consequences – for the party and the faction itself – if they chose not to do so.

Furthermore, over the past two years, the DSP leadership has repeatedly encouraged the LPF to dissolve the faction and engage fully in the party’s collective discussions and activities, rather than conduct an ongoing, separate and secret discussion via the LPF elist and meetings.

While recognising the right of DSP members to form factions, there is a dangerous dynamic inherent in exclusive/secret discussions among sub-groups of party members, which tend to cement and exacerbate differences, rather than resolve them. The most effective way to resolve differences is through the maximum possible engagement, in discussion and action.

The January 2006 DSP congress rejected the LPF’s perspectives by a 75% majority. The majority line was tested over the next two years and at the January 2008 DSP congress support for the majority line was even stronger, securing 80% of the delegate votes.

In particular, the DSP ranks strongly rejected the LPF’s growing dismissal of our engagement and initiatives, alongside other working class militants, in the three-year mass struggle against the anti-worker “Work Choices” laws of the former Howard Liberal-National government. The LPF argued that there was no mass campaign against Work Choices, simply a campaign to elect a Labor government. The LPF prescribed a retreat to narrow propagandism, focused on university students, around championing the example of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela – at the expense of engagement in the local struggles – while the majority argued that we should engage in local struggles while building solidarity with the first revolution of the 21^st century.

The LPF tried to present their course as a “return” to the heritage of the old DSP but the course they advocated we “return to” was a distortion of the DSP’s real political heritage in a sectarian direction, and the DSP ranks overwhelmingly recognized this.

The DSP membership had a right to expect that, whatever the LPF thought of the outcomes of the last two congresses, the minority would respect the overwhelming decision of the majority and allow it to try to implement its perspectives. However, the LPF has proceeded along a different course.

The LPF has repeatedly violated the constitution and organisational principles of the DSP, in particular during the four months since the January 2008 DSP congress and has clearly been operating as a separate organisation, within and outside of the DSP.

(i) the LPF has its own internal organisation and discipline, to which LPF members give their first loyalty even when this unquestionably damages the DSP’s ability to achieve its aims;

(ii) the LPF decides and collectively implements its own campaign perspectives and activities separate from and often in contradiction to those democratically decided by the DSP as a whole;
(iii) the LPF collaborates separately and secretly from the DSP with other left organisations, both in Australia and overseas, including with organisations that are politically hostile to the aims and activities of DSP; and

(iv) the LPF has its own separate membership that includes people who have consciously decided not to be members of the DSP but who are given access to internal DSP discussions through the LPF’s elist.

With the unveiling of its website (www.lpf.org.au) on May 12, and its posting to several email lists, the LPF has made public their split from the DSP. This confirms that the LPF was already acting effectively as a separate organisation to the DSP, to which it feels no loyalty or sense of common purpose.

On Tuesday May 13, the DSP National Executive recognized that this split had already taken place and therefore expelled all 39 members of the LPF remaining in the DSP in order to protect the security of the DSP. The LPF’s split actions left the DSP no other real choice.

The left is already far too fractious and divided. To suffer yet another split in our movement is a tragedy.

If any LPF members wish to dissociate themselves from the LPF split and genuinely wish to help build the DSP, they should make their position clear and the DSP will consider their readmission as full members.

We are confident that in the course of future struggles we will find opportunities to reunite with comrades who have split from the DSP.

The LPF split has been a waste of years of hard work and sacrifice. However, the DSP has already been operating for most of this year with most LPF members boycotting or even sabotaging its work. It has continued to produce and distribute Green Left Weekly, build the Socialist Alliance and strongly engaged in the social movements, including the trade union, anti-war, environment, same-sex rights, Aboriginal rights and Venezuela solidarity movements. In the last few months alone, despite the factional situation, we have organised the successful Climate Change | Social Change conference and led the eighth Australian solidarity brigade to Venezuela. Therefore, we are confident that we can quickly recover from this split and continue our work.

DSP National Executive

May 13, 2008

For futher documentation, see: http://www.dsp.org.au/

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 Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) launched

Announces publication of Direct Action

The Leninist Party Faction, a dissident minority expelled from the Democratic Socialist Perspective on May 13, and Direct Action, an organisation established by former DSP members in Melbourne and Geelong after they left the DSP in June 2006, have united to launch a new party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), with members in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Geelong, Adelaide, Newcastle and Cairns, and others currently residing overseas.

This is a principled unification of our two organisations. Both the LPF and Direct Action support the Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, a program that the DSP remains formally committed to but which it is abandoning in practice. Together, LPF and Direct Action members waged a common struggle against the degeneration of the DSP until June 2006, when six LPF members decided to leave the DSP to establish Direct Action.

Both the LPF and DA seek to preserve the continuity of the revolutionary tradition of the DSP prior to its political and organisational degeneration in recent years, culminating in the wholesale purge of the LPF on May 13. The LPF and Direct Action share not only basic programmatic agreement, but also agreement on the main tasks and perspectives for regrouping and rebuilding the revolutionary Marxist current once embodied in the DSP and its predecessor, the Socialist Workers Party, founded in 1972. The RSP’s strategic aim is to build a mass revolutionary workers party capable of leading the Australian working class and its allies to overthrow capitalism and, together with the working people of other countries, to build socialism, a global society of shared wealth and democratic planning to meet social needs. We recognise that we are not the only revolutionary socialist organisation in Australia, and that a future mass revolutionary socialist party will not be achieved solely through the incremental growth of any one of the existing far-left organisations.

Building towards the future mass revolutionary workers party will require a variety of tactics, among them efforts to unify the existing far-left organisations. But in today’s conditions of continuing working class retreat, the creation of a broad left party of anti-capitalist resistance is simply not on the agenda. The necessary partners for such a party — substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders — do not yet exist, and will not come into existence until there is a sustained mass upsurge of working class resistance. The Socialist Alliance is not such a broad left party or even a modest step torwards such a party, but a front for the DSP. The RSP rejects any such sectarian attempt to masquerade as a broad left party. Rather, we seek to collaborate with all left and progressive organisations and individuals to achieve the maximum unity in action where we have agreement.

The RSP’s ongoing campaign priority is to help build a broadly based solidarity movement with the Latin American socialist revolutions in Venezuela and Cuba. Building solidarity with the Venezuelan and Cuban peoples is the duty of revolutionaries everywhere, especially in an imperialist country closely allied with US imperialism. Moreover, the inspiration of these living socialist revolutions is key to winning a wider hearing for revolutionary socialist ideas among working people in Australia. The RSP seeks to build the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network as a democratically functioning national network of affiliated solidarity groups and individual solidarity activists.

Next week the RSP will launch a new monthly radical left publication, Direct Action. This new publication, and its associated website, will present the views of the RSP as well as encouraging constructive debate on the left and will seek contributions from a broad range of radical commentators, activists and organisations. The RSP will hold a delegated founding congress in early 2009.

May 28, 2008

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The RSP has set up a website “www.rsp.org.au”, where the party’s documents and political positions will be progressively uploaded. The RSP’s initial Perspectives Resolution is available there, as well as the RSP’s program and constitution. The Perspectives Resolution is attached below. For further background on the political debate in the DSP see the article by Allen Myers, “The Political and Organisational Degeneration of the DSP” on the LPF website, “http://lpf.org.au/?q=node/35”.

The RSP has established a National Office in Sydney at Suite 72/65 Myrtle St, Chippendale 2008. For further information contact John Percy 0419 989 720, Marce Cameron 0413 158 480 or Doug Lorimer 0434 209 342, or email  rsp.org.au>.

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RSP Perspectives Resolution

Building the Revolutionary Socialist Party

Imperialist decline and socialist renewal

1. Planet Earth may have already crossed the threshold of catastrophic and irreversible climate change. As higher temperatures reduce crop yields, tropical rainforests are razed and more farmland is devoted to growing fuel for cars, hundreds of millions more of the world’s poorest people are suffering from hunger as staple foods become suddenly unaffordable. Since August 2007 the capitalist world has been also hit by the most severe financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. Moreover, the dream of the US rulers of dominating the world politically and militarily has faltered in the cities and towns of Iraq, where US imperialism is bogged down in an unwinnable counterinsurgency war.

2. These multiple crises remind us that we are living in the epoch of decline and decay of the global capital social order. Capitalism’s contraditions are profound, insoluble and explosive. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism – a global society of shared wealth and democratic planning to meet social needs – offer the only hope for the survival of civilisation. But such a revolutionary transformation of society will not happen spontaneously. It requires conscious revolutionary socialist leadership.

3. The most radical political and ideological challenge to imperialism today is the socialist revolution unfolding in Venezuela, led by revolutionary socialists in close collaboration with Cuba’s outstanding Marxist leadership team. Despite many difficulties and some setbacks, the Bolivarian Revolution continues to advance and consolidate. Efforts to forge a mass party of the revolution, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, are a critical step forward.

4.Venezuela is giving besieged socialist Cuba some much-needed moral and material reinforcement, as Cuba gradually emerges from the post-Soviet “Special Period”. The Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is showing with deeds – sharing the oil wealth, wiping out curable blindness on an entire continent – what socialist collaboration on the scale of whole peoples can achieve if the working people have state power. With the Cuban and Venezuela socialist revolutions leading the way, Latin America is the continent in which the struggle against imperialism and for socialism is most advanced.

Working class retreat

5. Australia continues to be one of the most politically stable imperialist countries. There are no new revolutionary upheavals in the Asia-Pacific region; Australia’s involvement in the imperialist occupation of Iraq is minimal; and Australian capitalism is enjoying its longest period of uninterrupted expansion, driven by a mining boom sustained by China’s thirst for raw materials and propped up by ever-higher levels of household debt. While millions of working people are feeling the pinch from higher mortgage interest rates and rising rent, food and petrol costs and the rural drought, a decade and a half of relative prosperity has softened the impact of neoliberal counter-reforms aimed at shoring up capitalist profitability.

6. While corporate profits soar, strikes have fallen to historically low levels, with the trade unions still dominated by a privileged bureaucracy utterly subservient to capitalist rule whether “left” or “right” in ALP factional terms. With the complicity or capitulation of the ALP-ACTU bureaucracy, the capitalist class has been able to make deep inroads into working class consciousness and organisation during the past two decades. Enterprise bargaining and individual contracts backed up by some of the harshest anti-union laws of any imperialist country have further stratified and fragmented the working class, eroding traditions of struggle and solidarity.

7. The enactment of the Howard government’s Work Choices legislation was a significant defeat for the working class. While militant unionists were able to exert some pressure on the union bureaucracy to take action, the militant current was too small and too isolated to compel the ALP-ACTU bureaucracy to launch a campaign of crippling national strikes that could have forced the Howard government to retreat. Instead, the Laborite trade union bureaucracy channelled the opposition to Work Choices into a successful campaign to elect the federal ALP to government.

8. The class struggle in Australia is still defined by the ongoing retreat of the working class in the face of the capitalist neoliberal offensive. Defeat after defeat for the working class without a real test of its potentially enormous collective power is punctuated by only sporadic outbursts of active dissent and dispersed defensive struggles – and even such sporadic mobilisaitons are at a low ebb today. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the rulers of the imperialist countries, including Australia, launched a new ideological offensive aimed at undermining working class solidarity by stoking racist xenophobia against the Muslim peoples of the Third World and clamping down on dissent in the name of national security, sending a chill through the progressive dissenting constituency.

9. The election of the Rudd Labor federal government in November 2007 has not significantly altered the class struggle landscape. Labor was not elected on the crest of a mass upsurge of independent working class mobilisation or radicalisation, but as a result of an electoral campaign by the ALP-ACTU bureacracy that featured a series of bureacratically controlled mass mobilisations. Despite some largely cosmetic tinkering around the edges in Aboriginal affairs and climate change policy, Rudd Labor pursues essentially the same neoliberal agenda as the Howard government. Expectations of progressive change have been so reduced by decades of capitulation of the Laborite trade union bureaucrats that simply replacing the Howard government with Rudd Labor’s cosmetically ‘softer’ version of neoliberalism is welcomed with a sense of relief by most of the progressive dissenting constituency

The radicalisation today

10. With social protest and mobilisation at a very low ebb, the declining moral and ideological credibility the capitalist ruling class among growing numbers of working people, is the most important political opening for revolutionaries in Australia today. The popularity and impact of progressive documentaries such as Sicko and An Inconvenient Truth point to a search for explanations fueled by growing awareness of the glaring contradictions of capitalism in decline, from Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction to alarm at the looming ecological apocalypse. The explosive growth of the internet over the past decade has made a much wider range of information, including the full spectrum of radical critiques, readily accessible and more easily shared. A significant minority is relatively open to anti-capitalist ideas and explanations.

11. There is no mass anti-capitalist radicalisation today, but individuals continue to draw radical conclusions. This tenuous, fragile radicalisation is disconnected from the clarity and empowerment that can come from direct participation in mass struggles, and it bubbles away in the absence of any widely held conviction in the possibility and desirability of a socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. The challenge for us as a small Marxist party is to engage this dispersed radicalising constituency in an ongoing “battle of ideas”, i.e. to gain a bigger audience for Marxist ideas and explanations and to recruit, educate and train professional Marxist cadres.

Propaganda

13. The strategic goal of the Revolutionary Socialist Party is to build a mass revolutionary socialist party capable of leading the Australian working class and its allies to overthrow capitalism and build a socialist society, but we recognise that we are not such a mass party or anything approaching it. We are only the propaganda nucleus of such a future mass party; propaganda being the dissemination of socialist ideas and explanations to those who are most receptive to such ideas and explanations. All our activities are propagandistic in their goals, that is, aimed at reaching out to radicalising workers and students with our ideas and winning them to our ranks.

14. While we are far too small to directly alter the objective political situation by calling into being mass struggles, this does not mean that our role must be limited to commenting on events from the sidelines. We can initiate or help build modest-sized actions that set an example of how to struggle to broader forces. Where agitation on and actions around these issues and demands connect with the concerns and sentiments of the broad masses, such actions can have an impact on the class struggle by forcing the trade union bureaucracy, the capitalist media and the bourgeois parties to address these issues and concerns

Left regroupment

15. While our strategic goal is to build a mass revolutionary workers party, we recognise that we are not the only revolutionary socialist organisation in Australia, and that a mass party capable of leading a socialist revolution will not be built solely through the incremental growth of any of the existing far-left organisations. Building towards a mass revolutionary party will require a variety of tactics, among them efforts to unify the existing far-left organisations. However, in today’s conditions of continuing working class retreat the creation of a broad-left party of anti-capitalist resistance is simply not on the agenda. The necessary partners for such a party – substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders – do not yet exist and will not come into existence until there is a sustained mass upsurge of working class resistance.

16. From its formation in May 2001 until early 2003 the Socialist Alliance achieved modest success in facilitating greater practical collaboration and constructive dialogue among its revolutionary socialist affiliates and unaffiliated membership. Since 2003, however, the trajectory of the Socialist Alliance has been a progressive decline while the left unity dynamic has dissipated. Given the formal or de facto abandonment of SA by all its affiliates other than the Democratic Socialist Perspective, the Socialist Alliance is no longer a genuine alliance of socialists but simply the public face of the DSP.

17. The only practical steps we can take towards the eventual emergence of a broad party of anti-capitalist resistance are building our own party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party; explaining the desirability of such a broad-left party as a step towards the creation of a mass revolutionary socialist party; and our participation as a public Marxist party in various united front-type campaign coalitions with the aim of achieving maximum unity in action.

Venezuela-Cuba solidarity

18. The Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is inspiring millions of people around the world as the real story gets out and more people are able to experience these revolutions first-hand. This socialist renewal is political gold, a “gift” that must not be squandered. There’s nothing like a living revolution in all its concrete richness, contradiction and emotional appeal to inspire youth to become dedicated lifelong revolutionaries and to absorb Marxism into their bones. We know from experience that youth drawn around us through this solidarity work tend to be very open to the ideas of revolution and socialism.

19. Venezuela-Cuba solidarity is our number one, ongoing campaign priority. We do not view this solidarity work as simply a means to recruit to our party. We are serious about building up a broadly based solidarity movement together with all other organisations and individuals who share this goal. A key task of our Venezuela solidarity work is seek to establish the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network as a democratically functioning national network of affiliated solidarity groups and individual solidarity activists.

Direct Action

20. As a small Marxist propaganda party facing the difficult task of rebuilding in a period of protracted downturn in working class struggle, we need to return to Lenin’s conception of building the party around the paper. Direct Action is our primary outreach, campaigning, recruitment and educational tool. The paper must profile and promote the party and its revolutionary Marxist ideas syematically and explicitly. We are not seeking to hide the party behind the paper.

21. At the same time, we seek to establish Direct Action as an authoritative and widely read publication among the Australian and international left. To achieve this, DA cannot be a party paper in the narrow sense. It must seek to engage a wider audience than those who are already won to the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. The paper must explain and popularise the party’s views without compromising its broader appeal. DA will seek to encourage and promote constructive debate on the left and will seek contributions from a broad range of radical commentators, activists and organisations.

22. RSP branches should seek to organise at least monthly Direct Action public forums. Each forum should have at least one party speaker who can present the party’s views on the topic in question to facilitate a more regular dialogue with our supporters. Building up these forums into a real institution on the left in each city can complement a rich and varied program of Marxist classes, seminars, workshops, camps and discussions in party branch meetings.

International collaboration

23. The working class in this country will not be able to rise to the level of class consciousness needed to overthrow capitalism until decisive numbers of workers have overcome the petty divisions, narrow parochialism and racist nationalism cultivated by the capitalist ruling class to secure its ideological domination. For there to be a socialist revolution in this rich, imperialist country it won’t be enough for the working class to have more confidence in its own strength. It must also come to identify not with its own relatively privileged position in the global division of labour but with the struggles of the working peoples of the Third World and those of other imperialist countries. For the RSP, international solidarity and collaboration are not just add-ons to the task of intervening in Australian politics. They are at the very heart of how we intervene to win the battle of ideas.

24. The Revolutionary Socialist Party seeks international collaboration based on the principles of mutual respect and non-interference in the internal affairs of other parties. In particlar, we seek to facilitate ongoing collaboration and the exchange of views among revolutionary parties from the Marxist tradition in the Asia-Pacific region. We declare our political solidarity with the revolutionary socialist leaderships of the Cuban, Vietnamese and Venezuelan socialist revolutions, and we look forward to establishing relations with the Communist Party of Cuba, the Vietnamese Communist Party and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Party spirit

25. We must strive to cultivate the spirit of revolutionary comradeship in the RSP. We need a party spirit that can sustain us through the ups and downs of the struggle, that takes from each of us all that we are capable of giving and that gives each of us, in return, something infinitely precious and beautiful – a tiny glimpse of the communist future of humanity.

For futher documentation: www.rsp.org.au