by John Percy

[This article was written for the internal pre-congress discussion in the Democratic Socialist Party, and published in the Activist, vol 17, No 14, November 2007. Percy was expelled with the rest of the Leninist Party Faction from the DSP in May 2008 and is now national secretary of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.]

Our central aim…

Building a revolutionary Marxist party based on the working class is central to the political outlook of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, and it’s at the core of the DSP’s program:

“The working class cannot as a whole or spontaneously acquire the political class-consciousness necessary to prepare and guide its struggle for socialism. For this, it is indispensable to develop a party uniting all who are struggling against the abuses and injustices of capitalism and who have developed a socialist consciousness and commitment to carrying out revolutionary political activity irrespective of the conjunctural ebbs and flows of the mass movement….ultimately, only a revolutionary socialist party that has deep roots in the working class, that is composed primarily of workers, and that enjoys the respect and confidence of the workers, can lead the oppressed and exploited masses in overthrowing the political and economic power of capital. The central aim of the Democratic Socialist Party is to build such a mass revolutionary socialist party in Australia.” (Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, pp 63-66.)

We’re all united around that central aim, but how to get there? How do we grow? How do we reach the masses? How do we build a party that is both revolutionary socialist and has a base in the working class?

While not a complete and finished document, not a bible or a recipe book, our program goes a long way to tackling those basic questions and repays regular study by all comrades. The program must be a living one, constantly checked and enriched by experience; it must be taken to workers and others in struggle by an active, interventionist party. One paragraph draws together some general observations about tactics:

“The party’s tactical proposals must be subordinate to and aimed at advancing its strategic aim of socialist revolution. The party must choose tactics that help to raise the class consciousness of the workers and their confidence in their ability to fight and win. In determining its tactical line, the party must take into account the existing political situation, the relationship of class forces, the masses’ consciousness, militancy and preparedness for action, and the influence and strength of the party itself.”

One hard-won lesson from our own experience over four decades and from our study of the experience of Marxist parties in other countries is that there are no permanent tactics. And there’s no model of a party independent of time and space – independent of political circumstances.

Unfortunately, in recent years the majority of the DSP leadership have forgotten this important lesson, and have elevated one tactical approach, that of building a “broad party”, onto a pedestal, defending it as a permanent, necessary tactic on the road to a mass revolutionary party.

Many tactics…

History – our own and that of other Marxist parties we’ve learnt from – show that there are many tactical approaches on that road to a mass revolutionary party.

* Proclamations, running up the flag, straight propaganda. You can issue a manifesto, the Communist Manifesto, for example. You can bring out the first issue of your paper, for example, The Militant, in 1928, announcing your program.

* Unity, regroupments and fusions with other political currents heading in the same direction. Or reaching agreement in the face of new political developments. Lenin’s Bolsheviks unite with Trotsky’s Mezhraiontsy in 1917. Cannon’s unity with the Musteites in 1934.

* Entry into another party, usually one with broader support, to win some of its base, reduce isolation, link up with radicalizing workers. The US Trotskyists’ entry into the Socialist Party in 1936, a successful entry that lasted only a year. Or the longer entry of some Trotskyist groups into the British Labour Party. Some European Trotskyist groups tried entry into Communist parties.

* Broad parties. Join with other forces to participate in elections, or produce a newspaper, build a new party, on less than your revolutionary program.

* Coalitions or blocs with like-minded parties for contesting elections, or for wider and regular campaigning.

The name of the party, or the actual form, is not fixed. This can change with changing political circumstances. Sometimes it’s best not to have “communist” in the name; sometimes we might have to dispense with “socialist” as well.

One lesson is that we don’t rule out any tactic. Just as importantly, it’s best not to get stuck on a particular tactic.

Our experience with the ‘broad party’ tactic in the ‘80s

In the 1980s we formally broke with the entry schema we’d inherited from earlier Australian Trotskyism. In practice we’d departed from the “deep entry” of the old Trotskyist group right from our beginnings. For them, entry in the ALP was a principle, not a tactic. Any open organizing as revolutionaries was subordinated to keeping ALP membership. Any tactic other than entryism was ruled out – it had become a strategy. (See my “History of the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance, Vol 1.”)

During the movement against the war in Vietnam in the ’60s and the radicalization of youth we continued to pay lip service to work in the ALP, but knew in practice where the action was, where the potential recruits to Marxism were coming from. We prioritized building Resistance, the public circulation of our newspaper Direct Action, our activity in the campaigns and movements, and from 1975 running in elections as socialists.

In the ’70s we were fully involved in the Trotskyist Fourth International, collaborating closely with the US SWP. We reoriented to the Cuban revolutionaries as a result of the Nicaraguan revolution, and carried out the turn to industry initiated by the SWP, but by the beginning of the 1980s were thinking more independently, reacting to the sectarian degeneration of the SWP. We broke with the SWP and then with the FI. The ’80s were a period of thinking and experimentation for us. We broke with SWP schemas and FI schemas. We developed our analysis of the ALP, wrote and adopted our own program and other documents.

We were also looking for new forms for organising, and  at all possibilities for regroupment or unity with other left parties. We had the exciting Nuclear Disarmament Party experience, a political break to the left of Labor that drew in 10,000 members. There were broad united front campaigns against Labor’s Prices and Incomes Accord: the Social Rights Campaign and the Fightback Campaign. We had small fusions with the Turkish group Revolutionary Path, with Socialist Fight (Workers Liberty) and a group of miners in Rosebery, Tasmania. We had the experience of the New Left Party, attempting to regroup with the old Communist Party of Australia (CPA). We attempted to unite with the Socialist Party of Australia (now renamed the CPA), and ran Socialist Alliance election campaigns. We made various efforts to link up with left greens, initiating the Greens in some places.

The New Left Party project was the closest parallel to the Socialist Alliance project that the DSP is pursuing now.

The background was CPA complicity in the Accord (their then leaders of the AMWU initiated it). In early 1986, they made a small move to the left , embarrassed by the disastrous results and the criticism. We grabbed the opening for regroupment when they proposed forming a New Left Party. But once we started working with them they stepped back, realizing that although they and their allies would have a big majority in a New Left Party, we had the youth and the energy and principled politics, and could eventually have called the political shots.

They called it off with us, and their project lost momentum. A few years later they tried to restart it as they dissolved the CPA itself, but their NLP lingered only a few months beyond the CPA’s demise. The NLP project was couched in terms of a reach-out project for the CPA, a way to become “broader”, but it served as a step to their self-liquidation. In the ’90s there were a few more attempts to build “broad left” parties in the political mould of the CPA’s efforts – Joe Camilleri’s Rainbow Alliance and the Progressive Labor Party pushed by Bob Leach, attempting to mimic the New Zealand New Labour Party break from Labour.

Our experiences in the ’80s were marked by openness and flexibility, looking for any openings to reach out and work with others. We tried a variety of new forms, tried all possibilities and gave each our best shot.

But we never considered it wise or appropriate to ditch our Marxist organization in any of these efforts. And we didn’t stick with failures. In the end we ran out of possible partners for regroupment, and the launch of Green Left Weekly in 1990 recognized this.

As I said in my international report to the DSP National Committee meeting on October 5-7, 2002, as we were contemplating that major turn to making SA the party we build:

“Those efforts in the 1980s were predicated on our political reassessments, breaking with schemas. Don’t convert tactics into strategies. Don’t get stuck with permanent tactics. Get clarity on the ALP, the big schema. It’s worth re-reading our documents from that period – our 1986 document on the ALP, and Jim Percy’s 1984 report on the NDP and elections ...

“And we shouldn’t conceive of it as our old party ‘dissolving’. As Jim Percy put it in his report to our October 1987 NC meeting (reprinted as the pamphlet Building the Revolutionary Party): Our party-building strategy is not a break with our past. The biggest political error we could make is to think that our party-building perspective is outdated – ‘without the old party, there won’t be a new party.’” (The Activist, Volume 12, Number 14, October 2002.)

But we succumbed to the very errors we’d warned about five years ago. We got stuck in a schema.

We made a mistake in 2002. It didn’t work. Earlier, we could admit our mistakes and correct our course. We could move on, try a different tactic. But now we did “convert tactics into strategies”. We did “get stuck with permanent tactics”.

The political context for our tactics

We were very conscious of the importance of the political context when we decided to initiate the Socialist Alliance and take the further step with our SA tactic in 2002. Here’s a further section from my 2002 international report:

“Our proposals – and our timing – are based on our appreciation of the real political and social situation in Australia and internationally. We observe whether people are breaking from the establishment parties, we look at the situation with other forces such as the Greens and we test our perspectives.

“We don’t begin from abstract projections, or crude sectarian schemas. We’re not sucking out our tactics from abstract formulae, a method endemic to so many Trotskyist currents ...

“We relate the facts, the actual conditions, to our tactics, and continually check our theory through engagement with the movement.

“That’s our method, the Leninist method. We begin from the facts, international and local, the balance of class forces, what sections of the class are in motion, the real possibilities ...”

What was the political context when we initiated this tactic?

1. This period was still very much under the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were defeats in Eastern Europe; the Chinese Revolution was being rolled back; Cuba’s economy suffered huge problems. In the imperialist countries this meant the old Communist parties, mostly small and weak anyway, had a limited life. Some dissolved completely; many declined rapidly. Only in a few cases have the old CPs been able to consolidate. This was a period of imperialist cockiness, of bragging about the “end of history”.

2. In many countries there was a further clarification about the nature of social democracy. There were real victories for neoliberalism, with many unions and workers’ organizations weakened or smashed. In Australia in the ’80s we saw this dramatically with the Accord. This and other developments prompted our party to reexamine the nature of the ALP and a view we’d inherited from our Trotskyist origins, which labelled the ALP a “bourgeois workers party”. It led us to realize the ALP should have been characterised as a bourgeois party from birth. In Britain, union defeats and retreats by Labour in the ’80s and ’90s led some of the Trotskyist groups to assess that the Labour party had stopped being a workers party.

As Phil Hearse wrote, “With the Labour Party now widely seen as an openly bourgeois party, the question of a new mass workers’ party, a new socialist party, is posed directly” (Links, Number 15, May-Aug 2000). Many of these comrades, especially those coming from the Militant tradition that had practiced entry into the Labour Party for many years, now ruled out entry as a tactic, and contemplated tactics such as building a new broad left party. The argument was that there was now “space” to the left of Labour.

3. This period also saw the rise of the Greens. The Green parties exhibited a range of politics, varying from country to country and within countries. But they represented a growing environmental consciousness, and often became the political vehicle that attracted people concerned on a range of left liberal issues. They soaked up some of the break from the more traditional “workers” parties, CPs, social democracy, Labor parties. They showed both the potential for new parties in this period and the limitations.

4. It was also the period of impressive campaigns against globalization around the world. These indicated a radicalization, but often also exhibited a confusion or hostility about the need for building revolutionary parties, with the anti-party strictures of the WSF, and the NGOs and right-wing parties in control.

As we were contemplating becoming just a tendency in the Socialist Alliance, I wrote an article in The Activist (Vol 12, No 19, December 2002), which we subsequently published in Links 23 with the title, “Looking backward, looking forward – Pointers to building a revolutionary party”. It repeated many of the points in my October 2002 NC report. It looked at the political background to our move – including “the huge upsurge around the world of the movement against neoliberal globalisation ...

“The developing movement was not buried, not cowed by the September 11 terrorist attack and imperialism’s ghoulish response. The new activists were not fooled by imperialism’s ‘anti-terrorist’ war drive. The mobilisations have been even bigger, especially in Southern Europe, in Spain, France, and Italy. Even before Bush could start his all-out war on Iraq, the demonstrations have been absolutely huge and inspiring – 400,000 London, 300,000 in New York and San Francisco, a million in Florence.”

Our tactical boldness was based on our positive assessment of the developing political situation. But re-reading this article in the light of subsequent developments, we can note the changes in the political circumstances: the expected upsurge did not occur. We can also note the DSP’s departure from the tactical flexibility and the party-building basics that I reiterated in that article. It argued for giving the new tactic a go, but for “no permanent tactics”.

Our initiative for SA in 2001 and its extension in 2002-03 were based on both these general assessments of the local and international political circumstances, and also some specific circumstances:

1. Our assessment of the upsurge of the previous few years in Australia – defending the Maritime Union of Australia, the campaign for East Timor’s independence, the anti-racist campaign against Pauline Hansen, the successful blockade of the World Economic Forum on September 11, 2000.

2. The changing approach of the International Socialist Organisation to electoral work, at the time the second strongest left organization, after ourselves. This change opened the possibility of an electoral alliance.

3. Some international experiences, especially that of the Scottish Socialist Party. Based on their leading role in the campaign against the poll tax, Scottish Militant Labour was able to form the broader Scottish Socialist Alliance, then Scottish Socialist Party, and get Tommy Sheridan elected to the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

The ‘broad party’ push internationally

In response to these general political conditions, the idea of developing a broad anti-capitalist or anti-neoliberal party, was considered by Marxists in many advanced capitalist countries. Where the workers’ movement and explicitly Marxist parties were weak, it was seen as a tactic that could take advantage of changing circumstance, respond to upsurges, and benefit from the further exposure of the old misleaders of the workers’ movement.

This was the case among the international left that we were most in contact with, especially the Fourth International. In Britain and Europe there has been intense discussion, thinking and testing of this tactic.

Our party had left the Fourth International in 1986, but sought to maintain comradely collaboration with it and its component parties. After a few years, we were able to establish that sort of relationship, and from the ’90s often attended the FI’s World Congress or International Executive Committee meetings, and sometimes the congresses of some of their organizations. The FI, especially in Europe, where they were strongest, adopted the approach of attempting to build anti-capitalist parties, and many FI sections have had varied experiences with this tactic. For example, the FI’s 1995 World Congress adopted a perspective of regroupment and “mutation” of its historic basis. A document on the “Role and tasks of the Fourth International” stated:

“6. Building broad anti-capitalist proletarian parties:

(1) Our goal is to form proletarian parties that:

- are anticapitalist, internationalist, ecologist and feminist;

- are broad, pluralistic and representative;

- are deeply attached to the social question and steadfastly put forth the immediate demands and social aspirations of labour;

- express workers militancy, women’s desire for emancipation, the youth revolt and international solidarity, and take up the fight against all forms of injustice;

- base their strategy on the extra-parliamentary struggle and the self-activity and self-organisation of the proletariat and the oppressed; and

- take a clear stand for expropriation of capital and (democratic, self-managed) socialism.”

Their approach was described in a report to the World Congress of the Fourth International that took place in Brussels in February 2003:

“For almost ten years, the Fourth International has worked with other currents of the non-sectarian radical left, for a broad and pluralist anti-capitalist regrouping in order to beat the hegemony of the social-liberal left.” (International Viewpoint No. 349)

The results have been quite varied, depending on the political conditions and possibilities in each country. But the individual tactics have been interwoven with a desire to work out a European-wide approach, and the question of the increasing integration of capitalist Europe and the building of a European Left Party.

One of the negative sides of “internationals” such as the Fourth International, the state capitalist IST led by the UK SWP, and the Committee for a Workers International led by the Socialist Party in Britain is a tendency to generalize tactics. In the case of “internationals” directed by a mother party, usually tactical changes that are determined by that party’s conditions and experiences are generalized and applied to their offspring parties in other countries, often in quite different conditions, without taking proper account of the actual situation.

Even in the case of the Fourth International, where there’s not so much a central party leading the current, there’s a tendency to look for universal tactics.

We saw it in the case of the entry tactic. It was proposed by Trotsky in the difficult conditions of the ’30s, “the French turn”, and some Trotskyist groups applied it. In Australia, the tactic of entry into the Labor Party was not applied until the middle of WWII, when the motivations were somewhat different – the group had been banned, so public work was no longer possible. After the war, with the onset of the Cold War, further arguments for the entry tactic were developed by the secretary of the Fourth International, Michel Pablo, who argued for “deep entry”, for an extended period. It proved disastrous for most of the Trotskyist groups.

Having finally broken free of Pablo and the entry “principle” in the ’60s, and responding to the youth radicalization, the colonial revolution, and the campaign against the Vietnam War, the majority of the FI got caught again.

At their World Congress in 1969, they elevated the tactic of guerrilla warfare in Latin America (and elsewhere!) to a strategy. It proved a disaster, and took a long debate and faction struggle to reverse.

We also experienced the “turn to industry” schema of the US SWP under Jack Barnes. From a short-term tactic, he elevated it to an all-encompassing, ever deepening, strategy. This turn was initiated by the US SWP in the late 1970s, and followed by others in the FI, including our own party. The arguments for the turn were based on a prediction of a working class upsurge in the advanced capitalist countries, of which there were some signs. In this scenario, the working class, especially in the US, would move to centre stage, and revolutionaries would have to be alongside them in the coming struggles. We carried out that turn, with some positive results and useful experiences, although there were costs too. When it became clear that the upsurge on which the turn was predicated was not occurring, we made adjustments, allowing us to quickly step up our political work among students and in the varied campaigns and movements. But the US SWP refused to face facts, persisted in its turn, even “deepening” it, rolling it out again and again. That was not the only factor contributing to the degeneration of the US SWP, but it was a major one – the refusal to face facts, and all the political distortions that flowed from that. (See the report on the US SWP by Doug Lorimer to our January 3, 1984, National Committee meeting, published as the pamphlet The Making of a Sect.)

My international report to the January 2001 DSP Congress recognized some of the negative sides of the renewal processes and the interest in broad, pluralist parties:

“What sort of socialist renewal and regroupment is possible around the world? What sort of party is needed? Can it just be on a broad anti-capitalist basis? Or do we need revolutionary Marxist parties right away?

“Perhaps it depends on each country. There are varied social circumstances, and very different political situations. Movements and parties are at different stages of development, and have different political heritages. We can’t be too prescriptive on this.

“Some countries will need a broad, anti-capitalist regroupment, with the revolutionary Marxist forces just functioning as a current within the broader movement. Sometimes revolutionary Marxists will be able to lead the regroupment, as in the Scottish Socialist Party. Sometimes the revolutionaries will be in the minority. Sometimes there will be a variety of Marxist currents.

Certainly there’s a need for a conscious anti-sectarian stance in order to succeed.

“Also, it’s clear that we don’t need international factions, or the fake internationals with delusions of grandeur. We’ve experienced numerous actual negative effects of such internationals.

“But the goal, the task, is to get to a revolutionary Marxist party, a Leninist, Bolshevik party. Without it, a revolution won’t succeed.

“So we shouldn’t make a virtue, or necessity, out of a temporary, partial step or stage.
“Similarly, we shouldn’t make a principle of a retreat, a lesser form of organisation that has to be accepted because of political and organisational weakness.

“For example, the idea of the ‘pluralist left’, that’s emerged in some places as the description of the virtuous types of parties, the only acceptable parties.

“Certainly, we’re all for the right of tendency, the importance of discussion and debate. But unfortunately some have interpreted this to be the most important defining principle of a party, and made a principle of being anti-democratic centralism, anti-Leninist ...

“This can lead to a slide to the right, a slide to a social democratic political position, and a retreat from the party-building project altogether.”

The report pointed to some of the dangers of generalizing the FI’s “approach: Will the “new mass anti-capitalist international” “be based on the NGOs? Or based on the youth activists, and parties? Efforts towards an alliance of anti-capitalist parties are a step forward, but the ‘Fifth International’ alliance of movements project will likely further weaken the building of Marxist parties.” It noted: “Some of the FI groups are now openly liquidationist, not just anti-Leninist, but not seeing the need for a party at all, transforming themselves into a left-wing ‘think-tank’ to serve the movements, as in Holland with the SAP.” (The Activist,Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2001)

Lessons from some recent experiences

Comrades in the FI and others have had varied experiences trying to build broad parties in recent years. There have been instructive experiences in Scotland, England, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Brazil, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. Some experiences have been positive, some inconclusive, some disastrous.

We can not draw a broad generalization that “all broad left party efforts are misguided”. Rather, we should be assessing which broad left parties or coalitions was it correct for revolutionary Marxists to try? What provisos should we include in arrangements for unity? When should we join, and when should we leave such formations? And what lessons for Marxist tactics might we draw from these new experiences, building on the previous tactical experiences of Marxist parties over the decades?

We’re not in the position of cheering when broad left parties fail, or collapse disastrously. But comrades in the Majority Resolution Faction seem to be cheering whenever there’s some mention of a broad left party or coalition, as though it somehow proves their line. Every hint of a coalition or left regroupment is seized on as an example of the relevance or importance of the “broad party” strategy.

Questions of unity and splits and coalitions and regroupments have been basic issues from the beginnings of the Marxist movement. If the revolutionary Marxists are not hegemonic in the labour movement, what tactics are needed to become dominant? Sometimes the central issue is how to unite.

But the “broad party” tactic/strategy being posed in Australia and similar advanced capitalist countries is related to a particular objective situation, especially taking note of the “space” vacated by social democracy or Labor as it marched to the right, embracing neo-liberalism.

It’s even more confusing if we generalize the “broad party” strategy to countries in the Third World as well. Comrade Pip Hinman, for example, at an October 23 oral PCD in Sydney lumped us together with the PRD in Indonesia, the LPP in Pakistan and the PSM in Malaysia, as well as the LCR in France, claiming they’re all engaged in broad party alliances so “we’re in good company”. First of all, unless you’re hegemonic on the left, alliances and questions of unity are going to be regularly raised, but will be addressed in many different forms. Secondly, the types of alliances and fronts required in neo-colonial countries will be different than in imperialist countries – fronts for democracy, or national liberation, will be central. Thirdly, a basic lesson is that you don’t hide or immerse your revolutionary Marxist forces except for good reason – the need to develop a viable political front, or the need to defend yourself against state repression and victimization. You don’t go underground unless it’s necessary.

The lessons from the actual experiences reinforce all our old lessons. Not that the “broad party” tactic is never appropriate. But the basic, general, lessons, which we should have learnt from previous experiences of the workers movement:

• That it should not be a permanent tactic, it’s not a strategy.
• That we should not get stuck in the tactic until it becomes a strategy, a “principle”, a schema.
• That it does depend on the actual political circumstances.

The key lesson is, let’s try the tactic, if the objective and subjective conditions are appropriate, but let’s not get fixated on schemas. This is one clear lesson from examining the history of the old Trotskyist groups, the FI, in relation to entrism. It’s also the lessons we draw from our experience of the ’80s.

Note also that we can’t be accurate in answering such a question as “What would the DSP do in such and such a country, in such and such a situation?” We can’t answer it even if we ask, “What would an individual comrade do?” Because the size of our own forces in the actual situation is part of the equation. There’s no fixed formula, independent of political circumstances, independent of the state of the class struggle, independent of the size and nature of other left forces, and independent of the size and political influence of our own forces.

So we reject the “broad party strategy” as a general perspective. We also reject it specifically, in the here and now, in the current political situation in Australia (where there’s no upsurge) and not the forces (just us). But we don’t reject it as a tactic where it’s appropriate in the framework of a Leninist party-building strategy.

Scottish Socialist Party

We’ve all observed sadly the disastrous split and electoral catastrophe suffered by the Scottish Socialist Party. Many on the left in Britain and around the world had been looking at the SSP experience with hope.

As Phil Hearse put it: “In Scotland, where the relationship of forces is much more advanced than in the rest of Britain, intermediate steps towards the resolution of the question of the political representation of the working class are immediately possible. The SSP cannot immediately be a mass party, but it can have an echo in sections of the masses and be looked to as a real potential mass leadership by sections of the workers and youth.” (Links 15, May-Aug 2000)

But now those possibilities have been much reduced. Tommy Sheridan and the SWP and CWI split away to form “Solidarity”; the SSP went from having six members of the Scottish Parliament in 2003 to zero in 2007. Their vote dropped from 128,026, 6.7%, to 12,572 across the country, 0.66% on average.

The SSP shipwreck has been especially relevant for us, since the SSP was our inspiration, our model, for  SA. Of course, we’d always make the qualification that conditions are different and we’re not following recipe books. But we were looking to the SSP for ideas, we were hoping to follow in their footsteps, even to the extent of leading comrades asking, “Who can be our Tommy Sheridan?”

But there has been no discussion in DSP bodies on the SSP disaster, trying to analyse what went wrong. We all knew which side we should have been on in the disastrous split. And we could clearly see the opportunistic and sectarian behaviour of the SWP and CWI. We reprinted most of the relevant documents in a special issue of the Activist (Vol 16, No 6, August 2006), and most of the information is available to us. We’ve also had DSP comrades working in the SSP for many years, and comrades have frequently visited Scotland and observed their conferences. So a political assessment was possible, and necessary, given the weight we had put on the SSP successes.

There hasn’t been much published in the way of analysis of the cause of the crisis by the SSP leadership themselves. The main article so far, by central SSP leader Alan McCombes, points to the central role of Sheridan, and the supporting role of the SWP and CWI, in the election debacle. He also analyses the “massacre for the left” at the election as partly due to the squeeze on voters, seeing a vital choice between the Scottish National Party and the British Labour Party, as well as the huge number of disqualified votes adversely affecting working close voters, and thus the SSP. (The Activist, Vol 17, No 5, July 2007)

But so far there doesn’t seem to have been a deep analysis of how the SSP, with a small mass base, and six members in the Scottish parliament, could be brought down by one individual, and what could have been done to prevent such a situation.

It especially brings into question the wisdom of scrapping the Marxist core organisation within the SSP, the International Socialist Movement that initially organised the central Marxist leaders of it, who initially came from Scottish Militant Labour, the CWI group. This was an issue being debated in the ISM several years ago, and at one time there were three viewpoints – one group wanted to scrap the ISM (which is what happened), one group wanted it to stay as a fairly loose caucus, and a third group argued for a tightening up of the Marxist core group.

There are many functions of such a Marxist core within a broad left party. One would be to impose a certain discipline on leading comrades who might have a tendency to get out of control or run amok.

But there was an even more fundamental problem that was not getting addressed in the SSP with only a partially functioning Marxist core group, and was not  addressed at all when the ISM dissolved. That’s the problem of the regeneration of Marxist cadres. The SSP was developing a broader base, getting recognition, and winning votes, but the big problem was that this was nearly all done on the backs of cadres who had been recruited and trained in the previous Marxist cadre parties, primarily Scottish Militant Labour. This was a problem that the SSP leaders admitted to us when we visited. It was a problem that our own comrades who were working in Scotland could clearly identify.

In 2004, for example, only a handful of SSP members would sell the SSP paper Scottish Socialist Voice outside of the original core of cadres who had been trained in Militant.

The SSP youth did start to develop and train some new cadres, but it was a fairly slow process, and numbers were small compared to the weight of the SSP itself.

Another way this problem appeared was in the literature available – or not available – in their office and on their bookstalls. At one stage we offered to make available bulk copies of our Marxist classics and reprints and all our books on complete credit, but they declined the offer. I got the impression they felt our range of books and pamphlets would detract from their “broadness”. I don’t think much was happening in the way of Marxist education.

While it lasted, the SSP attempt at a broad party succeeded, to an extent. The SSP comrades leading it had a huge task, and did a great job, and probably part of their consideration was that it was just too hard to build both the broad party and the ISM as a Marxist core.

Some of the central leaders of the SSP had come to the view that a Marxist core group was no longer needed, that the broad, pluralist, socialist party they were building was the only body to build. New SSP activists came to consciously reject the idea of a cadre party. The Leninist party was rejected. Certainly this became the view of one of the SSP leaders, Murray Smith, who for the last few years has returned to France and is on the National Committee of the French LCR. Murray Smith developed the view that the revolutionary Marxists should not organise separately.

In the wake of the debacle in Scotland, I hope that Murray Smith and other SSP leaders will  seriously rethink this.

A lesson that we all might want to draw from the experience is that building a broad party along with the necessary Marxist core group is a situation that can’t go on indefinitely; the longer it’s drawn out, the more chance of crises arising.

England – Socialist Alliance & Respect

The various efforts at building a broad left party in England had neither the success nor the potential of the SSP in Scotland. Objectively, the more militant tradition within the Scottish working class gave the SSP a better chance, and subjectively, the dominance on the left of Scottish Militant Labour and their willingness to break with their London head office meant there were the forces willing to give a broad party a try.

As Phil Hearse and Liam Mac Uaid point out in their assessment of the break-up of Respect, “Respect is the third major attempt to build a united left formation in the last 15 years – preceded by the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) launched by Arthur Scargill in 1994 and the Socialist Alliance refounded at the beginning of this decade. The SLP foundered on Scargill’s insistence on his own bureaucratic control and the Socialist Alliance’s potential was far from maximised: indeed the SWP’s decision to sideline the SA during the height of the anti-war movement effectively sealed its fate.” (The Activist, Vol 17, No 12, November 2007)

Once the SWP moved into the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Party/CWI moved out. (This move was the change of line of the SWP on participation in elections that signaled to us that a Socialist Alliance with the ISO might be possible.) First the SP, then the SWP, dominated, then abandoned the Socialist Alliance, only a husk remaining. The two most recent efforts at building a broad party in England – Socialist Alliance and Respect – have now failed spectacularly.

Respect never had the broad base established by the SSP at its height, and it always lacked the democratic structures for inclusion of different currents and structures to guarantee accountability. It began essentially as an alliance between the SWP, George Galloway, the expelled Labour MP, antiwar activists and sections of the Muslim community in East London and Birmingham.

This alliance has now dramatically come apart. There will be two separate “Respect” conferences on November 17 – the “official” Respect conference, consisting mainly of the SWP and a few supporters, and “Respect Renewal” gathering nearly everyone else in Respect.

There are lots of lessons from the Respect split – not necessarily new insights, but reinforcement of old lessons.

There are certainly more lessons here about the “star” problem, and problems of accountability and democratic functioning. Any successful new left party would need to be thoroughly democratic, with full accountability, no space for special privileges or automatic control by one group.

The SWP has made huge errors, and lost authority and members. It was by far the largest political organization in Respect, but insisted on its tight control. It might end up with the Respect name after the “official” conference, but it will be clear to everyone that it’s just the SWP. In both Socialist Alliance and Respect, it looks as though the immediate cause of the failure was the sectarianism and ham-fisted organizational methods of the British SWP. That’s not too surprising; it’s not at odds with their bureaucratic internal regime, which is a caricature of Leninism. The SWP allows very limited possibilities for debate and discussion, giving little space for minorities to argue their views. Factions are frowned on, there’s no right of faction or tendency outside the limited preconference discussion period. Anyone who argues for such measures or defends a consistent criticism gets ostracized, called anti-Leninist or permanent factionalist, and fairly soon is forced out.

So there’s no disputing the sectarianism, and the stupidity, of the SWP, in Scotland, or in England. But it’s not proof of the failure of Leninism, as most of the opponents of Leninism commenting on the Respect fiasco are concluding. It’s proof maybe that the SWP leadership do not understand much at all about Leninism.

Some on the left are still hoping that Respect without the SWP can develop into a broad left party. (Indeed, some are arguing that it stands a better chance without the SWP.) Alan Thornett and John Lister from Socialist Resistance are on the old Respect National Council (SR had been part of a grouping, the Respect Party Platform, trying to get Respect to act more like a party, with its own newspaper, for example) and are backing the call for Respect Renewal. Alan Thornett argues that the “objective conditions that created Respect are still objectively there ... space to the left of Labour”. But the prospects of getting such a party off the ground have been set back for a long while, after the succession of failures.

Moreover, the next largest group after the SWP, the SP/CWI, has its own broad party project, the “Campaign for a New Workers Party” (CNWP). The second conference of the CNWP was held in London in May 2007, with 250-280 present. This was smaller than the founding conference in 2006. They have gathered 2,500 signatures on their founding charter, but the CNWP has little life outside the SP, and unionists who have signed the charter aren’t actively involved.

So we could soon end up with the different Marxist groups in Britain each with their own blueprint for the new party, usually around themselves. An article by Andrew Johnson on the website of Socialist Democracy, the Irish FI group, analysed this dilemma in May 2005, and drew some conclusions:

“The SA failed because it never agreed what it was for. Based on a prediction that there would be an exodus from the Labour left, this alliance, composed 95% of revolutionaries, restricted itself to a very mild reformist programme. The exodus never materialized….

“The failure of the SA demonstrates the fallacy of the ‘vacuum on the left’ theory championed for decades by the SWP and more recently by the SP. This theory posits a static and passive constituency to the left of social democracy which simply has to be appealed to. This inevitably leads Marxists into not only an electoralist strategy, but a strategy based on occupying a reformist space that the Blairites have abandoned. Therefore the revolutionaries end up putting forward a programme to the right of the old reformist politics!” (http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/OnlinePublications.htm#New%20workers%20party)

France – LCR

For the past decade the Fourth International has had the perspective of trying to build anti-capitalist parties or alliances. The French LCR is the largest section of the FI, and in effect its political leadership, even if it sometimes has not directly intervened in the running of the FI. It has implemented this line in a sensible way, without converting it into a strategy.

In the electoral arena the LCR had confronted the larger French CP, with a shrinking but still significant working class base, shrinking electoral support, and committed to a governmental bloc with the Socialist Party.

The LCR also confronted the problem of another Trotskyist group, Lutte Ouvriere, that was  sectarian and mostly abstained from the political campaigns the LCR was involved in, but which had been able to outdo the LCR electorally in the past, especially with their usual presidential candidate, Arlette Laguillier. The LCR had pushed for electoral blocs with LO and another Trotskyist organization, Parti des Travailleurs (PT).

In the 2002 presidential elections, the LCR’s candidate, Olivier Besancenot, a young postman, gained 1.2 million votes, 4.25%, an increase on their past results, but the LO candidate still got 5.7%.

In the lead-up to the 2007 presidential elections, the LCR participated in an attempt to get a united left election campaign going, with themselves, the French CP, and all the activists involved in the French “No” campaign in the European constitution referendum in 2005. The unitary collectives established to run the 2005 campaign were transformed into collectives for a united campaign for the 2007 presidential elections, initially involving 15,000 activists.

But the LCR majority leaders refused to be pressured into an unprincipled campaign, making clear that any united campaign should be firm against giving support to a Socialist Party government. They insisted on a clear statement refusing to participate in any SP-dominated government. In September 2006, unable to get a clear guarantee, they set in motion their own presidential campaign of Olivier Besancenot.

In December the CP also pulled out of the unitary campaign attempt, after trying to impose their own comrade, Marie-George Buffet, as the unitary candidate.

A 40% minority in the LCR still opposed the Besancenot campaign, and with some of the remaining forces kept the attempt at a unitary campaign going; farmer leader and anti-globalisation activist Jose Bove emerged as the presidential candidate.

The result of the election itself was a win for the right, Sarkozy, and the overall far left vote was down, but within that framework the LCR campaign was extremely successful. The left results were:

Besancenot, LCR, 4.1%

Buffet, PCF: 1.9%

Bove 1.3%

LO: 1.3 %.

Greens: 1.6%

PT: 0.3%

More important than the vote, Besancenot’s campaign had huge meetings, at least double the size of previous LCR election meetings, including big turnouts in traditional PCF working class regions. 4,000 came to the LCR’s final campaign meeting in Paris.

During the campaign 2,000 people applied to join the LCR. This comes on top of the LCR growing from 1,000 to 3,000 from its successful political organizing and election campaigns in recent years.

The LCR minority, including Murray Smith, insisting on a unitary campaign at any cost, ended up in a terrible predicament. Many of them supported Bove rather than the LCR campaign! Some of the minority have resigned from the LCR, including long-time central leader Michel Husson. This stance of the LCR minority illustrates the danger of getting stuck, turning a tactic into a strategy.

The majority line was proved in practice. After their electoral success, the LCR majority leaders were in a strong position and confident enough to propose a tactical move that could maximize their gains, and consolidate their new, bigger base. They’re proposing to launch a new party – around themselves, and with their clear principled politics. But this new party isn’t going to satisfy the proponents of the “broad party” strategy within their ranks.

In an article he circulated just before the election, Murray Smith states: “There is no doubt that the LCR carries part of the responsibility for this situation [no united campaign]. In principle, it is committed to the perspective of building a new anti-capitalist force. However, even before the current elections, it has never succeeded, not only in concretizing this perspective, but in taking an initiative that is even a little bit serious. The reasons advanced for this, variously the objective situation and political obstacles, are very much open to question.” (The Activist, Vol. 17, No. 6, July 2007) Murray Smith still thinks broad left parties are universally the way to go. This article reads as very dated. It might have had some credibility 3-4 years ago, but doesn’t seem to have adjusted to developments of recent years. Like our majority, his hopes are set on a tactic that hasn’t proved a universal panacea for the different situations of the left.

The proponents of the broad party strategy in the DSP welcomed the LCR call for a new party, thinking it could be interpreted as support for their line on SA, and hoping it would draw attention away from the actual experience of the LCR and the elections, and the real debate that had taken place within the LCR between the majority leadership, who had a sensible approach of attempting to build the revolutionary party while exploring any realistic and principled anti-capitalist alliances or new parties, and the minority who defended a broad party at any cost perspective, even to the extent of organizing against their own party’s election campaign.

Alliances

In Portugal and Denmark, the FI groups have been involved in fairly stable, successful left alliances – the Red Green Alliance in Denmark, and the Left Bloc in Portugal.

Both alliances have been able to involve several small parties, with no party playing a dominant role, stifling the other groups. These alliance have enabled the left to get some modest parliamentary representation. They have increased political cooperation on the left, and improved the left’s image.

The Marxist parties involved in these alliance have not completely submerged their own parties. The FI groups, for example, still find their own groups necessary for cadre development and Marxist education. The component groups can still have their own publications.

The new electoral alliance in Greece, SYRIZA, has pulled together several far left groups around Synapsismos, and won 5% in this year’s election, electing 14 MPs.

Engaging in existing broad parties

In some political situations where the revolutionary Marxist forces are relatively small compared to the broad left party, it can be more accurate to regard it as an entry situation.

Perhaps this is the case with the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, and the PRC in Italy. In both these situations, it probably was the right tactic for the revolutionary Marxists to participate. But in these situations there are new dangers, different problems. A key question becomes knowing when to leave.

In both Brazil and Italy, the broad party veered to the right, became or participated in the government. The Marxist forces got too comfortable; some started adapting and relinquished their principles.

Perhaps the problem of the comrades who became entranced with the large party, and went along with politically disastrous directions, was that they had come to believe in a “broad party strategy”, and given up on the idea of building a revolutionary party.

Brazil – PT

At the outset the Brazilian PT was seen as a “broad party” project by revolutionaries who got involved. The Brazilian FI forces were quite large, and grew from their intervention in the PT. It seemed an anti-capitalist party at the start, led by former metalworker Lula, but now it is very clearly implementing neo-liberal policies, governing in the interests of the local ruling class and imperialism. This has led to a split in the FI forces. The majority are still part of the PT government. The minority left the PT and, with other groups, formed a new coalition party. Now it seems the majority have left the FI, continuing to go along with Lula’s neo-liberal policies.

The entry resulted in the absorption and capitulation of the majority of the FI forces. The tactic became permanent, with disastrous results. What tactic they should have pursued – quit the government, denounce Lula’s rightward evolution, quit the PT – is not for us to say, but it is clear that by staying allied with Lula, they’re relinquishing their revolutionary principles.

Italy – PRC

The FI comrades in the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC) were probably silent for too long as the PRC went to the right, became part of Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition government, supporting the war in Afghanistan, supporting the expansion of the US base in Vicenza.

The PRC had been the regrouping of the left of the old CP, which had majority support among Italy’s workers. The regroupment had different currents and allowed the involvement of the various revolutionary groups, including the Trotskyists. The Italian FI group Bandiera Rossa joined and was able to win more supporters around its caucus, Sinistra Critica (Critical Left). As part of the PRC, they won one senator and one comrade in the lower house.

But as the Prodi government speeded up its right-wing course, the PRC leadership of Fausto Bertinotti went along with it, and the comrades in Critical Left were slow to criticize and slow to break.

Germany – Left Party

The newly formed Left Party in Germany unites the left forces in the east – the PDS, coming from the progressive remnants of the old ruling Socialist Equality Party of Germany – and the west, the Labour and Social Justice, The Electoral Alternative (WASG), a left split from social democracy led by former SPD president Oskar Lafontaine.

It’s probably tactically correct to enter into the new united party, as many of the Trotskyist groups have done. The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSB), a dissenting FI group, has remained outside, probably a sectarian/abstentionist mistake, but it has written a document that makes a number of sharp points and asks whether broad parties should be “a universal goal in organizational construction”. It concluded:

“... we don’t see it as useful to apply a universal tactic of building ‘broad’ parties, ‘anti-neoliberal’ parties or ‘anticapitalist’ parties. Often such tactics have been blown up into strategies, which – in the best of cases – have proven to be mere chimeras when they encounter the reality of concrete traditions, the evolution and perspectives of the actual workers’ movement in the different countries. In the worst of cases, schemas are imposed on the sections, causing them quite a few problems. We do not oppose identical or corresponding tactics on the international level on principle, but we think they are useful only in the context of an international upturn in workers’ struggles, (i.e. in the years 1917-23, 1934-37, 1968-74/5). In defensive periods the differences between workers’ movements in different countries are much sharper, which makes the application of a common tactics difficult.”

Holland – Socialist Party

The Dutch Socialist Party (“Tomato Party”) is a different case again. Founded in 1972 by Maoists, it long ago eliminated all traces of Marxism and minimized ideology to project a broad appeal. It focused on local issues, and support has gradually grown. Most of the far left groups have now joined the SP.
Doug Lorimer and I visited the SP in 1997, and were struck by its bland politics, the minimal level of activism, and the almost total absence of literature – pamphlets, books, a substantial newspaper or magazine. It was a political culture without education.

Bryan Evans from the Canadian Socialist Project reported in its magazine Relay on the SP’s recent electoral success: “On Nov. 22 2006, the party almost tripled its number of seats in the Lower House ... to twenty-five and overtook the historic libertarians ... as the third party of the Netherlands, both in seats and membership. ”

Evans concludes: “The Dutch SP is in an enviable and yet at the same time precarious political position. In 1991 the party began a turn toward a more ‘pragmatic’ political approach. It remained the most resolved and single voice of opposition to neoliberalism in the Netherlands. At the same time, while the critique of neoliberalism deepened and was popularized, the nature of the alternative became fuzzier. The party came to speak not of ‘socialism’ but rather ‘social ism’ – that is an emphasis on a more humane, perhaps humanist, perspective and political approach rather than class analysis and struggle. The SP no longer calls for significant nationalization of strategic sectors and no longer demands that the Netherlands withdraw from NATO. Even its symbolic demand that the quaint Dutch monarchy be abolished has disappeared. It may well and fairly be argued that the SP may well be contending to replace the discredited (for now) Labour party as the authentic voice of social democracy given that Labour has embraced neoliberal policy nostrums with enthusiasm when given the opportunity.” (Relay, March 26, 2007.)

Lessons, and the range of dangers

The DSP’s initiative in 2001 to launch SA did not take place in a vacuum. We were looking at the local and international political situation, and expecting an upsurge in working class struggle. Clearly, we were wrong – this was unanimously recognized at our May 2005 National Committee meeting.

We were also looking at other efforts to build broad left parties, especially in Europe, especially in Scotland. Surely we also need an honest and realistic assessment of the recent experiences on this front.

We now have a clearer picture of the difficulties, problems and dangers from this tactic.

Unfortunately, the MRF leaders have not heeded either the realities of the political situation or the lessons and experiences of other broad party experiences. They’ve stubbornly persisted with their tactic, in spite of the political circumstances, and in spite of recent experiences, and in spite of the arguments raised by 25% of the DSP membership.

All the recent international experiences of broad parties seem to reconfirm the old lessons:

1. Whether such a broad party is likely to succeed, and whether it’s wise to launch one, depends on the political situation. It depends on leftward moving forces, a political upsurge, forces that could break to the left from reformist parties. In times of political retreat, it’s not a wise tactic.

2. The tactic depends on having real forces to sustain it – enough revolutionary cadres from one or more Marxist organizations. Just running up a new flag won’t be enough. And if it continues for any length of time, you’ll need ways to recruit and train new cadre.

3. The politics of the unity or broad party matter. It needs a class-struggle, anti-capitalist program – anything less and you might as well just join the old social democrats.

All the European examples of the “broad party tactic” were worth a go – alliances, blocs, electoral alliances, entering broad left parties. But there is no necessary tactic. And we also have to be aware of the dangers that many of the recent experiences with broad parties point to:

• degeneration onto an anti-Leninist path;
• getting stuck in a permanent half-way house;
• substituting and masquerading as the broad party.

A danger – giving up on Leninist parties

One danger of the broad party tactic is a drift into giving up on a Leninist party, either temporarily or permanently.

Some on the left have drawn false conclusions about the place for Leninist parties in the struggle today – regarding them as outdated or an obstacle. Some adopted this position on their path out of the movement, arguing that democratic centralism as an organizing principle was harmful. Some have theorized their opposition to Leninism as a result of the problems they encountered in sectarian Trotskyist parties. For example, some former US SWP members – Louis Proyect, Jose Perez – drew these conclusions directly from their negative experiences with the degeneration of the US SWP.

After the Respect debacle, for example, Louis Proyect wrote: “I plan to look at the Respect controversy but am also interested in trying to figure out how these attempts at broader left or socialist parties keep going kerblooey. I suspect that the refusal to simply dissolve old vanguard parties is key.” < http://www.marxmail.org/msg32801.html>

Undoubtedly some activists, confronted with the sectarianism of the British SWP, either in the Socialist Alliance, or now with Respect, could develop similar conclusions, and think that what the SWP practiced was Leninism rather than a caricature of it.

Andy Newman, a former SWP member who runs the Socialist Unity Network (and blog, which has provided very useful information, documents and discussion during the Respect split) is a strong proponent of the “broad party” strategy. He also believes that revolutionary Marxists should not organise separately in broad parties:

“I have disputed that the type of party that the SWP is trying to build is useful, and I have disputed that there is a need to organisationally separate “reformists” and “revolutionaries”, because I argue that what we need is a class struggle party, not a rrrr-revolutionary party.”

In an article in Green Left Weekly, he wrote: “The argument of the SWP that revolutionary Marxists must retain their separate identity in a ‘united front of a special type’ has now failed in both the Socialist Alliance and Respect.”

Andy Newman frequently quotes Murray Smith:

“I am convinced that the role of revolutionary Marxists today is to build broad socialist parties while defending their own Marxist positions within them, with the aim, not of building a revolutionary faction with an ‘entrist’ perspective, but of taking forward the whole party and solving together with the whole party the problems that arise, as they arise.”

Smith and Newman would probably argue that a broad socialist party is a stepping stone in today’s conditions to building a mass revolutionary party in the future. But they have certainly rejected the idea of building a Leninist party now, or even a revolutionary caucus within the broad party.

The DSP majority position has a similar tendency to postpone indefinitely the real tasks involved in building a Leninist party. And the longer we go on with this “SA as our party” line in conditions where it’s not working, the more this sort of thinking will become embedded in the minds of DSP comrades, new and old.

Giving up on Leninism permanently is a danger, as we’ve seen with some broad party developments, such as the Dutch SP. But even when dissolving the Marxist core is seen as only a temporary tactic, there are some insuperable problems. For example, cadre can’t develop and be trained and educated just in the broad party. So there’s the question: how long without a Leninist party can you survive?

Phil Hearse addressed the problem of building the broad party and recruiting to Marxism in his Links article in 2000:

“How do you put together building the SSP and recruiting to the Marxist current at the same time? This is a problem far from unique to Scotland, and in my opinion there are two thoroughly incorrect answers to this conundrum.

“The first is to say, like Taaffe and Walsh, [leaders of the Socialist Party/CWI] the key thing is to build the revolutionary party, and so solve the problem by suppressing it. Get out of the SSP, build the SML, put off or ignore the question of class independence and the political representation of the working class. This sectarian course would be posing an organisational solution to a real political problem. The dilemma of how to build a broad socialist organisation (in countries where that is posed and possible), and at the same time build a Marxist leadership current, is a dilemma which exists in reality, not in abstract schemas. The Scottish comrades have both to build the broad party and to win people to Marxism within it, just as Marxists inside Italian Communist Refoundation have to carry out a dual tactic. Complex tactics like this, full of dangers, are imposed by the state of the workers’ movement internationally as well as the state of the revolutionary left.

“The second incorrect solution would be to say: build the broad socialist party, give up on building the Marxist current. All the current debates about Leninism and democratic centralism have to start with this issue: is the specific and separate organisation of Marxism, of the forces won to the Marxist program, necessary or not? This means, in effect, does Marxism have anything specific to say, any program to propose, different from that advocated by broad (and very heterogeneous) organisations like the PRC in Italy or the United Left in Spain? I think the answer is obviously yes. And if so, then the Marxists have to organise themselves in a more or less formal current.”

A danger – getting stuck in a halfway house

Marxists need the flexibility to try different tactics to win broader support, but there’s no virtue in sticking with a failed course. We shouldn’t get stuck on a “broad party” or unity initiative that is not working. Even worse, we shouldn’t try to justify theoretically a failed tactic, to convert it into a permanent strategy.

Doggedness can sometimes be a virtue, but on a wrong course it’s just stupidity.

In the difficult political situation of the last decade, some Marxists internationally have generalized too far. They had adopted the “broad party” tactic as already more than a tactic, as a principle for all times and situations. The DSP majority leadership has unfortunately also backed itself into a corner, defending the “Socialist Alliance as the party we build” tactic come what may.

The LPF, and in 2005 the NE and NC minority, were correct to criticize strongly the majority course of continuing with the SA tactic as a permanent strategy. But we’re also aware of an unfortunate consequence of our stand – the majority is unwilling to admit its mistakes, so it’s even less likely to pull back from the mistaken course. If we had kept silent, perhaps the majority would have just quietly dropped the failed SA line. But this would have been a disastrous course for the DSP – a revolutionary party that can’t honestly assess a mistaken course will never be able to address the even harder political choices it will have to make in the future.

Another problem when a tactic gets elevated to a permanent principle is that you get blinded to the possibilities of other tactical opportunities that might open up. You miss new chances through being stuck with old tactics. Despite all the hype about SA opening up contacts and support for us, an objective comparison would show that we had more contacts, more GLW subs, more supporters at our GLW dinners, more comrades involved in campaigns and committees in the years before we put on the SA straitjacket.

Conditions that would enable us to transform SA into a new broad socialist party don’t exist; the project has clearly failed. Those who subsequently became the majority tendency in the DSP discussion had invested a lot of energy and hope in the effort to build SA. It proved too difficult to abandon, or change course when that was needed. So a further change in the rationale for SA was developed.

The “any party worth its salt” justification was coined, claiming that revolutionary Marxist parties always need a halfway house to attract workers:

“Any revolutionary party worth its salt has to chart a course of both recruiting directly to itself, as well as an orientation that can win people who are looking for a political alternative to Labor (and in some cases the Greens, for disenchanted Greens members) to a class struggle workers’ party, even if it is not yet revolutionary.” (Sue Bolton, The DSP, Socialist Alliance and rebuilding the DSP cadre, The Activist, Vol. 15, No. 8 – October 2005)

This line has been entrenched as a “necessary” tactic in the majority resolution for this Congress:

“15. The DSP sees the struggle to build a broadly based anti-capitalist party as an important tactic in the struggle for a mass revolutionary party in this country. The creation of a serious anti-capitalist alternative, whatever its particular form of presentation (“red-green”, “real people’s party” etc) but founded on a complete break with class-collaborationism, can open the way to working class and broader social movement victories in the struggle against the capitalist imperative to make working people bear the costs of the system’s survival. The tactic is necessary in order to develop the forces needed to challenge the domination of the Australian labour movement by the ALP and the trade union bureaucracy as well as other bureaucracies within the social and environmental movements.”

There’s a danger that many little half-way houses are established, fail to  win the masses, and remain scattered around like gravestones, obstacles to really building revolutionary workers parties with a base in the class.

In France the remnants of the unitary campaign around Jose Bove play that role, an obstacle that trips up Marxists who turned the broad party tactic into a principle.

In Britain there are already several stagnant, tiny remnants around – Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance – and the Respect split could leave a few more.

In Australia the Progressive Labor Party is a skeleton but still outpolls SA in Newcastle.

A danger – substituting and masquerading

The Socialist Alliance in Australia might have become a permanent half-way house/dead end like the PLP, but there were far too few active independents in proportion to the DSP, so that everyone else on the left knows exactly what it is – the DSP putting on SA’s clothes. It’s a masquerade – pretending to be the broad left, pretending to be left reformist/class struggle/anti-neo-liberal/anti-capitalist, when you’re a Marxist revolutionary.

We’ve become so convinced of the broad party tactic that it’s now our permanent strategy, which we apply even though the objective and subjective conditions are not conducive to it. SA as our short-cut to the masses hasn’t worked, but we persist.

Then, to satisfy ourselves (or to defy the uncomfortable predictions of dissenting comrades), we substitute. In this regard, we’re the worst offender that I’m aware of on the international left. We masquerade publicly as SA when nearly all the energy and initiative and leadership are supplied by the DSP.

We have to indulge in hype and exaggeration and outright lies to maintain the fiction, but it has limited effect, although it might con a few newcomers to politics or be swallowed by a few  international collaborators who don’t check too closely, or individuals who are also pushing the “broad party strategy” fallacy.

There are several such fake parties, for example the SP’s one in Britain, but at least they just call it a “Campaign for…”, not a new “party,” when it’s clearly not, not an “alliance” when there’s no other group involved.

When our turn towards dissolving the DSP in Socialist Alliance was first publicized internationally, it brought welcomes but also some warnings. Jose Perez on the Marxmail list stated that he believed the DSP leadership were genuine, but referred to the dangers:

“The comrades in the DSP executive are experienced enough to understand that, in revolutionary politics, those kinds of cheap swindles and maneuvers aren’t going to bring any lasting gain. Were they to try it, they would capture themselves and a handful of others who probably would have joined the DSP anyways; but the nature of the maneuver is such that they risk confusing, disorganising and scattering a lot of their existing forces.”

This masquerading has ongoing disastrous consequences.

There’s the danger of entrenching a mistake. There’s social pressure in this direction. For example, the SA line has catered to and encouraged and facilitated a number of DSP members to a less active, non-cadre, political life. They adjust. They think this is all that’s possible (or what suits them, and therefore the Australian working class). And they adjust their theory, as well as their expectations.

It’s a dynamic that could be shaken if the political situation turns round, if there’s an upsurge. And we will try to broaden the horizons of such comrades, urging them to take an international perspective (where the relatively backward Australian political situation is put in perspective) and a historical perspective, in which a better understanding of the past might make them more optimistic about the future.

Our comrades get used to permanent hype and falsification. Events are always reported to puff up SA. Comrades are mistrained and miseducated. The cadre crisis increases. More hype and exaggeration are required to keep the Potemkin village propped up. It’s a vicious cycle.

The masquerading permanently weakens Resistance, decreases the possibility of rebuilding, no matter how hard the Resistance comrades run. It’s a disservice to them.

It prevents us doing effective international solidarity work, especially with the Venezuelan revolution. We’re hampered, both because the “broad party” has a different attitude to revolutionary solidarity than a revolutionary party, and because we have to expend time and resources propping up the SA façade, building two parties.

There’s also the danger that political errors are induced through persisting in the mistaken strategy. We were desperately looking for a mass upsurge to justify the course (as argued in the initial projections), so the anti-IR demos were over-assessed and the role of the demos as an election tactic for the ALP was downplayed. It leads to an alliance with the Cameron and Oliver leadership in the AMWU, glossing over the actual decline and retreat of Workers First.

Some wise words ignored

In December 2004, Francois Sabado, the pen name of a central leader of the LCR and the FI, wrote a very sharp article on these issues. He was contributing to a debate on “Building broad anti-capitalist parties – a necessary step” that included Alex Callinicos of the British SWP, Murray Smith, and Alan Thornett, leader of the British FI group.

Many of the dangers and dead-ends outlined above were clearly warned against. We printed Sabado’s article in the Activist in 2004. We would all have done well to study it more closely at the time. We should read it now anyway, together with the rest of the debate. He concludes:

“The axis of a new party will probably be exterior to the old traditional organizations. Its social and political base will rest on the new generations, experiences of struggle and social movements. It will take up the red thread of revolutionary history while expressing above all a revolutionary policy for the 21st century. But this new party will not be established by decree. It should result from a whole process of political experiences marked by events or the convergence of significant forces which create the conditions for a reorganization of the workers’ movement and the construction of a new party. In Scotland, it is the specific combination of the social question and the national question which has made possible the emergence of the SSP. In Portugal, it is the convergence of several currents originating in the CP, the UDP (ex-Maoist), the PSR (section of the Fourth International) and independent personalities which has given birth to the Left Bloc. It is decisive that the revolutionaries organize this process on ‘class struggle’ bases, but they can only constitute this new party on the basis of a dynamic that largely goes beyond the current framework of the revolutionary organization. A new party cannot be a self-disguising of the revolutionary organization. The new anti-capitalist force must broadly transcend the revolutionary organization. Without this added value, the new force can only appear as a projection of the revolutionary organization or one of its fronts. In France, while the LCR has for some years taken initiatives for a new political force, it has not proclaimed a new party that would only have been an enlarged LCR, but without its history and without its programmatic bases….

“And this pursuit of the construction of a revolutionary leadership through a broad party in unfinished contours can only be done if the new party is much broader, much more extensive than the revolutionary organization. If the conditions of a real transcendence of the revolutionary organization do not exist, if the forms of a new force are less significant than those of the revolutionary organization, and we hurry the rhythms and modalities of construction of such a party, we lose in substance – programme, history, and revolutionary experience – without gaining in political and organizational breadth. Thus, inasmuch as the conditions for a broad party do not exist, the accumulation of forces for a revolutionary leadership in the broad sense is done essentially through the construction of the revolutionary organization and by initiatives favouring the conditions for this new party, rather than by the proclamation of a new force on the cheap.” (The Activist, Volume 14, Number 5, December 2004)