History will remember that as climate changed engulfed the planet, the truly realest of the real revolutionaries were valiantly ensuring everyone was fully aware of the treacherous extent to which the sectarian liquidationists had sold out and thus committed the ultimate crime.

How about:

“Failing to unite the Socialist Left: the Australian Experience” or

“The Socialist Left in Australia: More divided than ever”

as the comments amply demonstrate.

When are the lot of you going to face the fact that you (Marxist movements of various stripes) still don’t amount to a hill of beans after all these years and get real. The fact is that Marxism was never a science never had a realist perspective on social struggles and, since Lenin and the Russian Revolution, the movement that takes that name has never had a program or practice that was dedicated to the struggle for power – state power that is. Always resistance and “fight backs” of some sort but never the struggle for power.

From 1899, when Lenin first started to present his ideas on the needs of the struggle for power, to 1917 was less than 20 years but more importantly by the aftermath of the 1905 revolution the Bolshevik organization was a coherent small mass party. The defeat of the Autocracy in war precipitated the revolution – before the Bolsheviks were really ready for of course – but by 1914 the Bolsheviks were a significant factor in Russian politics. They had over 10,000 members, a daily paper and several deputies in the Duma (the Tsarist parliament).

Even if we write off the Stalin years and the early part of the cold war (though the movement should have started to significantly recover after the Khrushchev revelations in 1956) we still have an incredibly dismal record for this movement in the 40 plus years since the onset of the youth radicalization around 1965.

Cuba was the only real break in the pattern of defeat and splintering and that process did not in any realistic way fit the Marx’s theoretical perspective. Nor was it anticipated by the movement at the time. It’s not much of a theory when the original central tenets have to be continually ignored or rewritten.

So what does it take to put an end to this never ending ‘he did’, ‘she did’, chicken shit and build a serious contender for power?

“Practice is higher than theory.” as one wise Russian said, and the practice here is manifestly dismal. Just pretend for a moment that you don’t know any of the details being discussed and that you coming to this whole thing as an outsider who wants to get something done. Where would you go? If there seemed to be no alternative, sensible people would probably start from scratch.

Lotsa luck. You’re going to need it at this rate.

“Commentator Ben Reid writes with a particular vehemence against my interview with the National Secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective. His contribution suggests an intimate knowledge of the Socialist Alliance and its membership, but his only reference is selected quotations from reports to members of the DSP. Does he reside in Australia, and is he a member of the DSP or Socialist Alliance with proper access to these reports? No, I am informed.”

Annis is misinformed. The same people who are bullshitting him about SA are doing the same about me.

I am resident in the UK, but I was a member of the DSP for almost 20 years before my expulsion with the rest of the minority in 2008.

I base my assessment on activity in SA before 2005 and the full access to documents and debate over the last 4 years. I was sympathetic to the minority when it emerged in 2005. I joined it in June 2006 when it became clear that there was little substantive participation by non-DSP members in the leadership structures of SA. I also became convinced that the majority leadership had degenerated when the DSP national committee excused the hacking of a female comrade’s private email account in order to spy on the DSP minority’s discussion.

I also base my assessment on direct experience with regroupment in two countries and across Europe. SA is a farce even in comparison with mess of the UK left. At least formations like Respect have real input from a (narrow) range of activists from outside the established left. Even then I would not be so grandiose about the prospects here as Boyle is about Australia.

Does Annis seriously think that two short trips and carefully chauffeured access to handful of contacts can excuse this kind of one-sided nonsense? I would have thought your experience with Jack Barnes would have made you more sceptical of this kind of chicanery. Perhaps it is hard to break from old habits?

Again: read the DSP’s own report on the state of SA from Januray (See http://www.dsp.org.au/node/220): outside of Geelong (the geographical and political equivalent of Winnipeg) there are few if any trade union activists with any kind of ongoing involvement in SA.

Apart from revealing that SA’s membership had shrunk to 400 odd, it is worth quoting at length:

“We already have warning signs here, comrades in the Socialist Alliance sending us letters saying that we haven’t done anything. They write that they are just being left out in the cold. “We used to have a little group here that used to meet. Now, nothing happens. So, we’re joining the Greens, or we have become active around local issues”…

“Comrade A in Perth says: “I don’t invite people to join the Socialist Alliance now, because what can we offer them?” You give us money, and we won’t ring you, we won’t organise you, we won’t keep you up to date with our activity…”

“This state of affairs was epitomised at the Socialist Alliance’s Sixth National Conference. … it was a “Potemkin conference”.

“Resolutions? Not one branch put forward a resolution. Pre-conference discussion? There was no pre-conference discussion, that I know, that actually happened (correct me if I am wrong). The conference resolutions turned up at the very last minute, so that although they were discussed there and the discussion was real, there was very little sense in which this was a discussion coming out of the concerns and work of the branches.”

“the idea was to present the multiple environmental crises … to an audience of worker-militants, especially worker-militants from Geelong, and spark discussion about where we are and where we are going in the construction of a red-green political political axis for sustainability. That really didn’t happen.”

“Finally, the last session was something through which we would not want to go again. By the time most people had gone—probably a blessing in disguise…”

In other words: there was no real participation outside the DSP. Branches didn’t report because they don’t exist. The discussion that did happen at the conference was like something from an asylum.

What’s happening now is Peter Boyle’s “exit strategy” with SA. In January the DSP national committee could not agree on what resources to allocate to SA. Despite acknowledging that there almost no active SA branches and membership had shrunk to 400 odd, a pro-SA ‘senilista’ current (with no grasp of reality) led by Dick Nichols wanted even more allocated. This included a weekly publication at a time when circulation of Green Left weekly had collapsed. Boyle baulked at the issue.

Confronted with the reality that SA is the DSP plus 150 or so mostly paper members (and that this will not change) they are now confronted with 2 options. Either than can revert to the DSP and let SA go (but this would mean admitting the minority was right) or they can dissolve fully into SA (and look farcical to the rest of the Australian left). Boyle appears to have accepted the second (no prizes for guessing why), proposing that the fiction that the DSP is a separate entity to SA can come to an end.

I say”great”! Stop pretending you are still a revolutionary group and formalise the reality that you only promote the class-struggle and left-reformist SA program. Go ahead and dissolve the DSP.

But please don’t claim this has anything to do with “uniting the socialist left”. What will emerge is a rebadged DSP with a few long-term allies as ornamental independents.

Two more things:
1. The most revealing and offensive aspect of Boyle’s article is his claim that it was the existence of a minority faction in the DSP that prevented or was somehow a distraction from building SA. Surely in a situation when it is clear that SA was in decline one would expect the formation of a minority faction precisely to make these elementary points? Well we did and Boyle’s majority ostracised and eventually expelled us. And the DSP claim that they want to build SA as an inclusive organisation! They couldn’t even tolerate a minority in the DSP.

2. If the DSP is serious that it wants a new party broader than the DSP and to involve others in discussion how about some ground rules? Why not mandate that at least 50% of contributions should come from non-DSP members? How about making a rule that at least 50% of members in the new SA have to have not been members of the DSP?

The LCR made rules like this with the NPA: one of two committee reps had to be a non LCR member, for instance. They did this because they wanted to show that the NPA was going to be more than a re-badged LCR.

Will the DSP make the same kind of commitments? Not likely. Formal SA membership is probably about 30-40% non-DSP. Active membership is maybe 5-10%. I would estimate that about 90% of contributions to discussion will come from DSP members.

Under the section “Continued growth”, Peter Boyle states that despite all the original affiliates to the Socialist Alliance bar the DSP (and Resistance) walking away from the Socialist Alliance is growing.

Well not according to the DSP’s own internal report at their January 2009 NC: http://www.dsp.org.au/node/220

The report given by Dick Nichols, a member of the DSP National Committee and one of the Socialist Alliance National Convenors states: “… Socialist Alliance as an organisation has shrunk, and shrunk quite seriously. If you look at the financial membership statistics at mid-December 2008 (which still lack Western Australian data) the financial membership for Australia declined over 2008 by 282, a big fall.” Nichol notes that the membership of SA dropped from 750 to 460 financial members.

The current membership of the DSP is probably around 210 – 225 members, so the number of “independents’ only just outstrip the DSP. In addition, the majority of these independents are in fact “paper members”, that is they are not active activists (Nichols notes this later in the report, that they are recruiting very few activists).

In the report, Nichols describes the last SA conference as a “Potemkin Conference”, pointing out that there was no preconference discussion, no resolution put forward during the pre-conference period (when all members can write anything they want for discussion at conference), there was no pre-conference discussion in the branches and there was no time to discuss constitutional amendments or election of the leadership.

Nichol’s states in the report that “comrades in the Socialist Alliance sending us letters saying that we haven’t done anything. They write that they are just being left out in the cold. “We used to have a little group here that used to meet. Now, nothing happens. So, we’re joining the Greens, or we have become active around local issues.”

He goes onto quote one of the DSP convenors of SA in Western Australia saying: “Comrade Annolies in Perth says: ‘I don’t invite people to join the Socialist Alliance now, because what can we offer them?” You give us money, and we won’t ring you, we won’t organise you, we won’t keep you up to date with our activity. Obviously, that’s connected to the state of our DSP organising, but it’s the beginning of the end for Socialist Alliance organisation unless turned around’ ”.

Of course the Boyleite DSP like to blame those DSP members in the LPF who they expelled for this (as Boyle does in the interview with Roger Annis).

However, the reality is that the current objective conditions in Australia there are no “significant left ward moving forces” which would see SA grow significantly.

During the faction fight in the DSP, Peter Boyle and his supporters argued at the 2006 Congress that that they key reason to keep adhering to the Socialist Alliance tactic was that there WERE real “significant leftward moving forces”.

When during the pre-congress discussion in the lead up to the 2008 DSP congress, the LPF pressed the majority to provide evidence that there was in fact “significant leftward moving forces” as Peter Boyle had argued at the 2006 Congress, we were met with complete and resounding silence.

This was primarily because the Boyleite majority knew that there were no “significant left ward moving forces” and therefore as a result their whole argument for the SA tactic was in tatters. Instead, they just hoped if they ignored this inconvenient fact they could keep up going with the charade that was SA.

In the report by Nichol’s, however, finally admits that there are no left ward moving forces, instead he states the “core problem” that they (the DSP) face is that “even while there is a broad disenchantment with existing bourgeois politics, the vast majority of disenchanted people are passive (“Good on you, you’re doing a good job!”). The discontent is generating only a small layer of activists (including people we have managed to make active) yet we have given ourselves as the DSP the job of trying to organise and energise a bigger leadership to strengthen and give direction to that disenchantment. That’s the key problem. That’s the root source of the stress we all feel”.

This is bascially what the LPF was arguing but we were continually howled down and vilfied as being demoralised and defeatist for pointing this reality out.

Re the Trade Union leaders that Roger notes: Yes, there are a handful non-DSP trade union leaders remain in SA – such as Craig Johnson, who is not a member of the DSP (or at least wasn’t in the past). There are also a couple of others, but not many. The majority of trade union leaders in SA, however, are actually long time DSP members, who simply operate under the SA title. Also it should be noted that a number of high profile “independent” SA trade union leaders left Socialist Alliance in disgust when the DSP majority expelled the LPF in 2008.

Re Peter Boyle’s comments that the DSP will be discussing their party building perspectives in relation to SA in the lead up to the DSP congress in 2010 and that according to him: “My personal opinion is that it is time for the DSP to make a decisive turn towards building the Socialist Alliance as our new party. We’ve been held back by the hesitations of former Alliance affiliates and a former minority in the DSP for too long already. That’s behind us now and it is time we moved forward”

Does this mean that the Boyleite DSP will be now finally completing their liquidation into Socialist Alliance? That they will fully liquidate from being a Marxist revolutionary Leninist cadre party into a broad reformist party? And that this will be in the words of Peter Boyle, the DSP’s “new party”?

Kim Bullimore (Expelled in 2008 after being a member of the DSP for 10 years. Now a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party http://www.rsp.org.au )

Ben Reid was a longtime member of the DSP. He was also member of the Leninist Party Faction and was expelled along with the rest of the LPF in 2008 by the Boyleite majority.

As a member of the DSP, Ben had access to all the internal discussion documents of the DSP regarding Socialist Alliance and the DSP projectons for SA, up until the time he was expelled.

In addition, at the 2008 DSP congress, the majority of the DSP voted to support making their internal bulletin’s public. However, since that time it was done only intimittenly – on the whole the Boyleite DSP has not publish them. They did, its seems after some reluctance tho, eventually publish their January 2009 NC reports. The Jan NC reports, which Ben links to, are simply an addendum to the SA debate and merely confirm in spades everything the LPF said about the Socialist Alliance.

Therefore, as a long time former member of the DSP, he would be, without a doubt, will be better well informed than Roger Annis, who was not a member of the DSP or SA and who was not engaged in the faction debate in the DSP which focused around the Socialist Alliance tactic.

Kim Bullimore (living in Australia, expelled after 10 years in the DSP for being a member of the LPF. Now a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party).

The half a dozen other groups and hundreds of independent members left because the DSP used its numbers on leadership bodies to force through motions that the majority did not want. People just gave up and walked away.

There is nothing “hack” about my interview with Peter Boyle. I have traveled twice in the past 18 months to Australia, attending conferences and other events in which the DSP and Socialist Alliance were involved in Melbourne and Sydney. I was deeply impressed each time with the commitment and leading role of members of both organizations in a wide range of contemporary struggles–confronting the climate change emergency, solidarity with Latin America, trade union fightback against the John Howard government, opposing Australia’s colonial subjugation of the Aboriginal peoples, and the list goes on. That’s why I thought it important to interview Peter Boyle and bring these issues to the attention of the left in Canada, if not internationally.

Many of the trade union activist-members of the Socialist Alliance who I have had the privilege to meet impress me as battle-hardened activists, certainly in comparison to the situation we confront in Canada. Union activists in Canada and the United States, at least, will do well to learn from their experiences.