The ISO, the second-biggest group in the Alliance, has been in a permanent state of crisis for about 18 months and probably now has about 80 members nationally, well down on its numbers a couple of years ago. There is a constant, enervating factional struggle between a national leadership that has the support of the British SWP leadership and a slightly smaller, rather heterogeneous group with a more independent orientation. A by-product of this factional struggle has been a series of departures, including most of the active students in Sydney and Melbourne who joined a couple of years ago, and recently almost the whole of the Perth branch.

Several of the significant figures who have left the ISO recently have joined the Greens, part of a very large movement nationally into the Greens of disenchanted former members of far left organisations. The ongoing battle in the ISO has been around three questions. The first is the apocalyptic perspective of the British SWP, the second is what relationship the ISO should have with Socialist Alternative, and the third is what orientation to adopt towards the Socialist Alliance in the face of the DSP's implacable manoeuvres to establish hegemony in a new Socialist Alliance party essentially built around the hard skeleton of a basically unreconstructed DSP.

The internal atmosphere in the ISO is one of constant tension and war between the two broad camps, and it's hard to see how a final split can be avoided, although it's equally hard to predict in what circumstances such a split will ultimately take place. In the short term, however, the conflict is contributing to the rapid departure of members from the ISO.

In The Communist Manifesto Marx remarked on the likely "the common ruin of the contending classes" when no force can muster the strength to bring class struggles to a decisive conclusion.

In the political sphere of small Marxist groups, a similar problem can arise, which can be characterised as the possibility of the common ruin of the contending factions, and it seems to me that's the point that has been reached at this moment in the Australian ISO.

Developments in and around the DSP, and the future of the Socialist Alliance

The internal conflict in the DSP between the leadership and what I have dubbed in the past the Loyal Opposition came to a head at the January conference of the DSP.

The opposition was overwhelmingly defeated, which was entirely predictable given its lack of a realistic perspective in the Australian political environment. The DSP leadership could point very effectively to the relative weakness in Australia of the movement against globalisation, of which the opposition had, and has, such high hopes.

One of the leaders of the opposition left the DSP just before the conference and two other leaders left fairly soon afterwards. Their resignation letters and the leadership's responses are of some interest because of the questions they raise about the DSP's political functioning and culture.

Some of the younger adherents of the opposition who stayed in the DSP have been persuaded to move, in traditional DSP fashion, to cities other than Sydney.

In the middle of last year, a group left the Darwin branch of the DSP over disputes that seem unrelated to the issues raised by the Loyal Opposition. More recently, a group in Tasmania has left the DSP and that departure may have been influenced by the issues raised by the Loyal Opposition. Both the Loyal Opposition in Sydney and the group have that has left the DSP in Tasmania have flagged their intention of remaining in the Socialist Alliance.

The internal discussion in the DSP with the Loyal Opposition was sharp and intense. The oppositionists raised serious questions about the tradition and political culture of the DSP, but they suffered from the unreality of their own basic political perspective. The DSP leaders, rather piquantly, singled out the fact that one of the opposition leaders who was now questioning the functioning of the DSP had been, as a younger bloke, a bit of a "Hammer of the Goths" in the conflict with an earlier opposition, led by Steve Robson in the early 1990s.

In that struggle this young man had been presented by the DSP leadership as one of the authentic leaders of the youth against the "clapped-out" old oppositionists of that time, a common device in some "Leninist" organisations. (Gerry Healy was the classical practitioner of this arcane craft of using youth against troublesome "clapped-out" older leaders.)

The leaders of the Loyal Opposition, who have now left the DSP, actually were in their time among the most talented members of a group of intelligent middle-class youth who joined the DSP in the late 1980s and early 1990s, swimming against the stream, so to speak, during the period when the bourgeoisie was busily proclaiming the end of history and the total bankruptcy of the socialist project.

Since leaving the DSP, this group has taken the initiative in an anti-globalisation project, and they have linked up with a similar group of former ISO members in a discussion group called Spectre.

A rather interesting aspect of the pre-conference discussion in the DSP was the emergence of a couple of individual expressions of opposition to the leadership. The most striking example of this was a rather far-reaching written contribution by CW, a long-time member of the DSP and for a considerable time in the past a member of the leadership and an associate of other long-standing members and past members of the leadership.

CW's contribution is a sweeping critical balance sheet of the culture and traditions of the DSP. The DSP leadership appears to have made no attempt to respond to it, and as far as one can tell CW is still a loyal and committed member of the DSP. The questions raised in CW's contribution and in the Loyal Opposition letters of resignation seem of such importance that we've decided to publish them, along with the leaderships' replies to the Loyal Opposition, for the information of the far left.

Ozleft doesn't intend to make a regular practice of publishing internal material but these documents are exceptionally significant and their widespread dissemination is of some importance, as was the widespread dissemination of Peter Boyle's sharp National Committee report about the DSP's perspectives for the Socialist Alliance a few months ago.

It's possible that CW's document may reflect some sort of internal discussion within the DSP leadership, but it's in the nature of the DSP's Zinovievist organisational arrangements that the world at large, including most members of the DSP, are unlikely to find out about such a discussion until some time down the track.

The DSP and the Socialist Alliance

The DSP currently has just over 300 members, which is quite a drop from the 380 or so claimed at the time of the January conference. In addition to this, it's important to try to assess the independent, or former DSP, membership of the Socialist Alliance.

The claim that the Socialist Alliance has about 2000 members only has political meaning in the sense that getting 2000 people to sign up to register a socialist organisation electorally is in itself no mean achievement. It's no secret, however, that many of these members are members on paper only and it's a more difficult exercise to work how many of these members, over and above the members of the affiliated groups, are in any sense active.

With considerable effort, the new independent caucus has persuaded about 100 people to sign up as official independents. It therefore seems not unreasonable to assume that there are possibly 150 active independents in the Socialist Alliance nationally. Anecdotal evidence from people who attend Alliance local branch meetings around Sydney suggests that few independents regularly attend and most of the regulars at meetings are members of the DSP and Resistance.

The DSP leadership's push to make the Socialist Alliance into a new kind of revolutionary party, which it will essentially control with its existing Zinovievist structure unmodified, has taken a new turn recently.

The DSP appears to have collaborated with a number of leading independents to make a proposal for the Alliance to become a new, multi-tendency revolutionary party on a vague and rather unclarified political basis, with the independents having great weight in the organisation.

The composition of this group of ostensible independents, and Alan Bradley's recent response to my comments about developments in the Socialist Alliance on the Green Left Weekly list, underlines the point that this initiative has clearly been made in some kind of collaboration with the DSP leadership. A large number of the independents in each state pushing this proposal are ex-members of the DSP who are clearly DSP "non-party Bolsheviks" such as Alan Bradley, Dave Riley and a number of others, who defend the DSP leadership at every turn.

On the other hand, some of the independents clearly do aspire to some independence from the DSP, and some people in this group who've been in the DSP before are a bit chary of behaving like DSP "non-party Bolsheviks" in the way Bradley, Riley and some others do.

There's little doubt that the DSP leadership/independents' proposals will go through the Socialist Alliance conference in some form. What matters most to the DSP leadership is that most of the independents advancing these proposals share the DSP's deep-rooted sectarianism towards the mass labour movement and are mostly quite comfortable in being less active members in a slightly broader organisation, the essential spine of which is the DSP.

From the point of view of the DSP leadership, it's obvious that it does actually hope to develop some intermediate formation in which less active people and sympathisers may engage in activity at the level that they wish to participate. It would be short-sighted to view the DSP leadership's experimentation with new forms of organisation as totally cynical.

Nevertheless, the DSP's new venture is bedevilled by its Zinovievist internal arrangements and conceptions, and its deep-rooted sectarianism towards the mass labour movement.

The discussion in the Socialist Alliance about a new party formation to replace the existing groups clearly does reflect a powerful sentiment for socialist unity. The DSP leadership for its part is clearly experimenting to find some organisational formula that can create a broader, more effective organisation from its point of view, while however retaining its core Zinovievist, monolithic, homogeneous conception of organisation.

The DSP is a fairly resilient, rather long-lived group, and it's not difficult to envisage that in a year or two there will only be two major groups left standing on the far left: the DSP and the Socialist Alternative, with a few more tiny groups. The problem with any formation that is constructed with its iron spine being the DSP with its present organisational conceptions, as the new Socialist Alliance party looks like becoming, is that it may repeat a number of the fairly bad experiences associated with the DSP in the past.

Among the smaller groups in the Socialist Alliance some have had previous experience with the DSP. The Workers Liberty group as a whole and central individuals in Socialist Democracy have been involved in past fusions with the DSP and remember unpleasantly the experience of having almost no impact on internal developments in the DSP because, primarily, of the DSP's "team leadership" Zinovievist structure and atmosphere. As well, quite a few independents in the Socialist Alliance have had similar experiences with the DSP in different contexts.

Almost all of the smaller groups, including the half of the ISO that looks to the British SWP for leadership, are distinctly uneasy about the prospect of DSP hegemony in the new organisation, but there's not a great deal they can do to prevent such a development in the face of the DSP's very intelligent manoeuvre with the independents, and in the face of the DSP's very powerful and effective organisation. The opposition group in the ISO now favours immediate departure from the Socialist Alliance.

All the smaller groups, and the group in the ISO that looks to the British SWP, are at this point willing to give the DSP the benefit of the doubt because they think that in the current situation some kind of regroupment of the far left is necessary.

It may also be the case that the DSP leadership is actually considering some change in its organisational approach. That has still to be tested.

It's worth remembering that in the early 1990s the DSP changed the name of its weekly newspaper, Direct Action to Green Left Weekly in the quest for broadness, and for a few years adopted an ostensible structure for GLW in which a large list of 80 or so independent sponsors were presented as being in control of the paper. The overwhelming majority of that generation of independents associated with the DSP have disappeared from the political scene and the paper has reverted to its real function as the organ of the DSP. At the same time as the change of name for the paper, the also changed its name, from Socialist Workers Party to Democratic Socialist Party to emphasise its distinction from the Stalinist past of most of the left. The submerging of the DSP identity into the new group, called the Socialist Alliance, involves yet another change in direction in terms of names.

Unfortunately, the weakness that unites the DSP leadership, most of the smaller groups, and many of the independents in the Alliance, is that most of them share the visceral sectarian hostility towards the mass labour movement that the DSP has cultivated for a considerable time.

In this context, it's useful to contrast the pedagogic, almost fawning tone of Dick Nichols' draft resolution on the Greens in Socialist Alliance discussion bulletin Vol 3, No 5, on the one hand, and the ferociously, anti-labour-movement posture adopted by Lisa McDonald in her balance sheet of the Socialist Alliance's recent NSW election campaign in bulletin Vol 3, No 4.

McDonald's balance sheet is refreshingly concrete (which makes me eat my recent words on the email discussion lists that the DSP is unlikely to make a sensible balance sheet) except in relation to mass labourism, where her assessment drips with sectarian animosity. One example is her mention of the supposedly deep hatred of the masses of NSW voters for the Carr Labor government, when she is in fact discussing a state election in which Labor achieved its biggest electoral victory ever, and she repeats an inspired and self-interested DSP urban myth about some Labor booth worker somewhere who is alleged to have called antiwar campaigners traitors.

Lisa McDonald and other DSP commentators switch between alternative versions of the mass phenomenon of ALP booth workers giving out leaflets supporting the antiwar movement, and ALP placards appearing in a mass way in antiwar protests. On the one hand, they present it as a simple conspiracy by the Labor Party to win antiwar votes (some conspiracy, given its mass character!), and on the other hand they have a contradictory self-serving version in which the Socialist Alliance, in particular, shamed Labor booth workers into handing out antiwar leaflets.

This sectarian animosity towards mass labourism is at the core of the problems inherent in the DSP's approach to its Socialist Alliance project.

There's no doubt in my mind the Socialist Alliance project in the new form advocated by the DSP and the independents will continue for quite some time, and it will involve perhaps 60 per cent of the organised far left in Australia, and from that standpoint it's an extremely significant formation.

It corresponds to a widespread sentiment for unity and for socialists experimenting with new forms of organisation, but it's bedevilled by a deep sectarianism towards the broader labour movement.

The May 9-11 national conference of the Socialist Alliance will clearly be an interesting and important event, and the details of how it will all pan out are not entirely pre-ordained.

A not unreasonable question many people ask is: why does Bob Gould, who has such fundamental disagreements with the DSP-Socialist Alliance project, spend so much time arguing with people about it? Well, the reason I argue the point with the DSP and others on these matters is that my preoccupation is with the struggle to construct an alternative, socialist leadership in the broader labour movement, the ALP and the trade unions, and to influence the large leftist mass formation that has newly emerged, the Green movement. The sectarianism of the DSP and many on the far left is a very considerable loss of a very major political opportunity.

The problem is that the forces in the DSP and the other far left organisations are some of the best, but not all, of the comparatively small numbers of people in Australian and world historical terms, who still struggle for the socialist project. My conception of regroupment involves a serious, open, public discussion among all the socialist forces, which for me includes the far left, both in and out of the Socialist Alliance, the left in the Labor Party and the trade unions, the left in the social movements and the left in the Green movement.

Such a sensible and realistic public discussion about tactical questions and about what a socialist society might actually look like, is necessary, and I intend, as I have for quite some time, to continue my modest but energetic campaign for such a far-reaching discussion.

One indicator that some things may be changing for the better in the DSP-Socialist Alliance milieu is the slow but clear development of the beginnings of a discussion on the Green Left Weekly email list and the beginnings of a discussion in the Socialist Alliance discussion bulletin. We should try to have all these discussions in a calm, comradely tone while recognising that deep strategic and political disagreements genuinely do exist among socialists, anarchists and other left-wingers.