In the leadup to the annual conference of the Australian socialist group the Democratic Socialist Perspective currently taking place in Sydney, an interesting debate has been taking place in the organisation over the DSP’s continued involvement in the broader left regroupment the Socialist Alliance.
Basically the division in the DSP is between those who want to continue building the Socialist Alliance as their number one priority despite dwindling numbers of activists and resources, and those who want to pull back and focus primarily on building the avowedly marxist DSP while still maintaining the Socialist Alliance as an auxiliary electoral vehicle.
While I am very much a believer in the need for regroupment on the anti-capitalist left, I tend to agree with the minority faction in the DSP who argue that
“Until today’s conditions of continuing working class retreat change, a broad left party of anti-neoliberal resistance is simply not on the agenda. The necessary partners for such a party, substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders, do not yet exist and will not come into existence until there is a sustained mass upsurge of working class resistance…”
Underlying both the majority and minority perspectives however is in my opinion a flawed assumption that the “broad left” conception of regroupment is the only option available.
This is the same wrong view being put forward by the promoters of RESPECT in the UK and also by the Resident’s Action Movement here in New Zealand (although the Aussies to give them credit are at least still prepared to openly identify themselves as socialists).
What nobody seems to be seriously considering though is the possibility that instead of pursuing alliances with non-existent left social democrats they could be working towards the unification of all revolutionary marxists in a single party.
This would mean learning to accept that there can be no one universally agreed “line” on such questions as the class nature of the former USSR or the current regime in Cuba, but would prioritise instead agreement on the practical tasks for socialists downunder at this present point in time.
As I’ve previously argued, while it may not seem to promise the same rewards in terms of success at the ballot box, at a time when the class struggle in most advanced capitalist nations is still at an all-time historic low, revolutionary marxist regroupment seems much more realistic than trying to build a broad left party the forces for which simply don’t currently exist.
This is the approach being pursued by the Workers Party here in New Zealand, which has succeeded in bringing together marxist cadres from several different revolutionary traditions and is continuing to grow (albeit modestly) by avoiding the dual pitfalls of narrow sect building and opportunist “get rich quick” schemes.
We may not agree on everything, but we still find that we have much more in common as revolutionary marxists than we do with the non-marxist left.
January 5, 2008 at 7:50 am
In the USA we don’t have anything as a labor party. The Democratic Party is a bourgeoise party.
If you have a labor party, or a mass party that worker’s belong to, I would caucus.
January 5, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Yes we have a Labour Party in New Zealand but it has long since ceased to be any kind of workers’ party.
In the 1980s it was the NZ Labour Party – not the Tories – that oversaw the implementation of the neoliberal agenda in this country including selling off or corporatising all state assets, introducing tuition fees for teritary students and removing free access to healthcare. As a result the NZLP’s working class membership base evaporated almost overnight so that now only a handful of unions are affiliated to it and numbers attending branch meetings struggle to rise beyond single digits.
The remaining principled social democrats split from Labour in 1989 to form the Alliance Party, which was represented in parliament until the 2002 election when it failed to win a seat due to a damaging split brought on by the Alliance leadership’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan.
When I was 17 I was briefly a member of the Labour Party, however I found out very soon that socialists attempting to caucus inside the party would not be tolerated and denied any chance to speak at party conference etc
The problem with the Labour Party is in many ways the same one that IMO also dooms the current vogue on the marxist left for “broad left” regroupment (i.e. a Labour Party mk II) – namely that working class consciousness has been thrown so far back under the hammer blows of neoliberalism and the collapse of Stalinism that there is no material basis for a viable left social democratic or reformist party.
Of course the situation is not identical in every country – in some Western European countries for instance social democracy did not suffer defeat on the same cataclysmic level as it did in New Zealand, while in Latin America social democracy was never a big force to begin with.
But in the Anglophone world at least for the time being there are no mass working class parties for socialists to orientate to and caucus in, even if we wanted to.
Instead we have to recognise that between the marxist left and social liberalism there is at present nothing in terms of conscious political forces, meaning that there are no easy short cuts in terms of building a revolutionary party.
Instead a serious orientation to the trade union movement and close attention to developing marxist cadres are the only realistic options.