BY DICK NICHOLS
[This is an abridged version of a talk presented to a panel discussion on the Socialist Alliance at the 31st Resistance national conference, held in Melbourne, September 27-30. Dick Nichols is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
In the time I have I would like to outline how the Democratic Socialist Party's national executive envisages some ways our proposal to cease operating as a public organisation after the DSP's next congress would actually work to strengthen Socialist Alliance as a site of left unity and as a stronger voice for socialism. In part I will do this by addressing some of the misinterpretations and fears about the proposal that are doing the rounds of the left.
Our experience of working together with other affiliates in the Socialist Alliance has reinforced our conviction that the alliance's political core is an alliance of revolutionary socialist organisations and individuals, whose political approach has been consistently socialist and Marxist.
The alliance's founding platform is "only" a series of immediate demands, but its practice and the responses it has made to the challenges of national and international politics have only been possible because of a much larger community of program and outlook than that explicitly expressed in this platform.
Unavoidable conclusions
So if we ask ourselves the question: "Who are the revolutionary socialists in Australia today?", the answer has to be "the Socialist Alliance affiliates", but also, of course, organisations like Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party who still lie outside the alliance. This is true, irrespective of the many differences of analysis and tactics that still inevitably prevail among us. This reality produces, like it or not, a number of unavoidable conclusions.
The first is that we all have to revise any view of our own organisation as embodying "the real revolutionaries". That is, we have to reinvestigate the very raison d'etre of our separate currents. What was absolute and perhaps justified splits and a separate existence becomes relative, raising the question of whether our separate existence, or our actual minimalist form of collaboration, can still be justified.
This truth is well expressed by British Socialist Workers Party leader Alex Callinicos when he writes: "Rather than simply reiterate old arguments we need to judge, in the light of the demands of a new period, what differences, old and new, really matter today."
If we find ourselves, in general and not without hiccups and problems, collaborating in anti-war and refugee work and beginning to collaborate in union work, then this very fact reweights our differences. As a result, when people ask us in this new context the old question "why can't the left get together?", are we really sure we can answer them convincingly?
This is not an easy adjustment to make. When we have spent, as so many of us have, decades standing behind stalls and on windy wet corners trying to win people to our particular view of what revolutionary socialist politics should be, then the pressure to regard our differences as still the basic determinant of how we can and should relate to each other remains very strong.
Saying otherwise can even seem like an admittance (false) that all those years, all that energy spent building separate organisations was a waste of time, a waste of a life.
The second unavoidable conclusion we have to face if our practice is consistently socialist is that the path forward to realising the potential for greater unity is something objective, standing outside us all and waiting to be discovered and developed by our collective analysis and action. That is to say, the growth potential for the left and socialist movement is not decided by our will or any pet schemas we may have, but by that specific course of action which actually will draw as many people as possible into active socialist politics.
The course may not correspond to our preferred view of how left and revolutionary unity is going to come about. But we can be certain that if we try to impose our own "preferred model" for left collaboration against the grain of real potential and real opportunities, then we will actually retard and even extinguish the chance of realising that potential. There is treatment that can grow the tree of unity and treatment that can stunt it.
This thinking is what led the DSP NE to its proposal to our party and our September 3 letter to the Socialist Alliance NE. We're convinced that continuing to build the DSP as a public organisation undermines the potential for building Socialist Alliance as the site of socialist advance in this country. Because we're confident that the alliance isn't suddenly going to nosedive into opportunism or reformism, we're convinced that swinging the DSP's accumulated resources into building the alliance is the best way forward for the socialist project in this country.
Obviously, there's a challenge here to all other affiliates, to individual Socialist Alliance members, and to all socialists, whether organised in formations outside the Socialist Alliance or not. Do you share our view of the way forward? If not, and you think you know of a better way to strengthen our common socialist cause, tell us about it.
That should be the core of our discussion within the Socialist Alliance over the coming months.
Objections
I next want to address a few of the objections that have already emerged in the discussion stimulated on the left by the DSP NE proposal.
The first is that any attempt to equip the Socialist Alliance with a revolutionary program must be self-defeating. If the program were to be revolutionary nobody much beyond the existing Marxist left would be interested. The corollary is that for people to be drawn to the Socialist Alliance our program must be explicitly non-revolutionary.
First, a clarification. The DSP NE is not proposing to the Socialist Alliance that it leap from having a platform of immediate demands to adopting an exhaustive revolutionary program at its May 2003 conference, thereby converting itself into a "revolutionary organisation" in one hit. That would be a recipe for blowing the alliance to smithereens.
Rather, what we are proposing is that the alliance adopt a socialist "vision statement" that makes explicit the foundation on which the alliance has actually worked in the real world, an articulation of the basis on which we have been able to collaborate, usually by consensus, sometimes by large majority.
Any development of the program beyond this level should proceed on the same basis as that on which we have worked to date in the light of increasing levels of practical collaboration in building the movements and democratic, class-struggle currents in the unions.
When the DSP NE talks about the alliance as a revolutionary organisation, we mean this as a perspective, a goal through our interventions and discussions progressively advancing the process of collecting, organising and educating a bigger socialist leadership for the ongoing class struggle.
False argument
I think there are two types of error in the argument I am addressing here. There is a misjudgement of the actual state of consciousness and potential level of interest in socialism "out there" both among young people involved in the movement against neo-liberal globalisation as well as in a small but precious section of the working-class movement. There is also a misconception as to how a program actually functions of its real, material role in a period of upturn as opposed to one of ebb of class conflict, typical of the period that gave birth to the Trotskyist movement and various currents within it.
Take the first point. It's certainly true that a lot of disillusioned Labor voters long for a return to "true Labor", a return that is generally impossible in a world where capitalist politics is driven by the imperatives of global competitiveness. That's why, for instance, left Labor's dreams, say, of including an increase in company tax rates in a federal ALP election platform is so much pie in the sky.
It also follows, then, that the Socialist Alliance should be alert and quick to pick up those planks on the "old Labor" platform that the ALP has abandoned, simply on the basis that all gains of the welfare state, be they ever so minimal, have to be defended.
But it emphatically does not follow from these points that the alliance should restrict itself to presenting "old Labor" demands in a purely electoral way. That was recognised right from the beginning of the alliance.
Why? Firstly, because every affiliate in the alliance knows that the only way any of our demands are going to get on the political map is through building mass struggles and campaigns. That means that the alliance's politics have to be different from "old Labor" politics to even stand a chance of winning "old Labor" demands.
The "immediate demands" of our platform were never purely for elections. They constituted a summary action program based on the principle of making the rich pay.
But our approach here implies another task we have not yet taken up to provide a popular explanation of what socialism is and how it can be achieved, of how immediate struggles to make the rich pay yield anticipations of the society of equity, solidarity, democracy and sustainability that socialism is. The alliance has to think about how, in building campaigns of resistance, it also becomes an instrument for creating socialists.
The argument I have just covered here means that the DSP NE envisages the Socialist Alliance after May 2003 as still being an alliance a pluralist organisation of socialists within which some may agree with and follow our example (i.e., not seek to build themselves as a public organisation) while others will decide to retain their public face as independent parties.
The real political content of that alliance what elaborations of program, what steps towards higher degrees of unity will be possible all that will be determined by the alliance debate itself and by the alliance's own democratic culture and functioning.
DSP takeover?
Here we move directly to a second fear that is in circulation about the DSP NE proposal that it's a "DSP takeover". This fear persists and is being stirred up by some who believe in the "original sin" of the DSP, despite the simple fact that the DSP is a small minority on the alliance national executive.
Some comrades are afraid that if the DSP congress votes for our party to become a tendency within the alliance there will be a period from January to May 2003 when Green Left Weekly will be the de facto paper of the alliance, but will not be under the control of any elected alliance body.
This fear is unfounded. If the DSP congress votes for the DSP NE proposal, one option we are discussing is that DSP will immediately approach the alliance to negotiate an agreed form of representation of the alliance on the Green Left Weekly editorial board, as well as for ways in which alliance members as a whole might participate in the production and distribution of the paper.
At the same time, should any other alliance partner wish to discuss the entrance of their paper, say Socialist Worker, into a united publication, then that could be negotiated appropriately.
How would DSP assets like Resistance centres become available to the alliance? While detailed proposals have still to be worked out, the DSP political committee's view is that Resistance centres could become multi-tendency bookshops for alliance affiliates places where any interested person could find out what the alliance and its affiliates think and activist organising centres where everyone can feel at home.
Of course, people who are determined to find a sinister manoeuvre in everything the DSP proposes will not be placated by my words here. They will be determined to view any proposal as bait under which there must be a hook, even if no-one has yet managed to locate it.
To any Socialist Alliance member who is doubtful and suspicious we say: "Hold each and every proposal that comes from the DSP up to the light. Scrutinise it as carefully as you can. Raise your doubts in all forums the Socialist Alliance discussion bulletin, Green Left Weekly, Socialist Worker, wherever. We are totally confident that you will discover in our words but most of all in our deeds that the DSP's proposed turn is simply what we say it is, a move to strengthen the alliance as the face and reality of socialist unity in this country. And remember, such a result can only come about by making our tendency a proportionately smaller current in a bigger, more active Socialist Alliance."
From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.
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