Last year there was a split in the Democratic Socialist Perspective
(DSP) in Australia, a group that was originally modeled after the
Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. but went its own way rather than
drinking the SWP’s workerist Kool Aid in the 1980s. The DSP’s break with
sectarianism was not total, however. To this day it retains a belief
that the writings of SWP founder James P. Cannon remain valid even
though there are clear indications that the SWP’s batty turn in the
1980s was a natural outcome of Cannon’s own wrongheaded understanding of
Leninism. An early symptom was the remarks of Morris Stein, Cannon’s
chief lieutenant, to the party convention in 1948:
"We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any
competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the
revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the
lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history
since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out
to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of
being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct
program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception,
treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists."
But if you are going to break with this kind of madness, you have to go
all the way. Unfortunately, the DSP’s problems in the Socialist Alliance
reflect its failure to make a clean break with sectarianism. Like the
RESPECT Party in Great Britain, the Socialist Alliance was hampered by a
contradiction between its own narrow goals and those of the broader
left. While it was careful not to advertise its goals, the DSP clearly
had the intention of using the Socialist Alliance to achieve hegemony on
the Australian left. Perhaps they were not even fully conscious of this
goal, but it was almost predetermined so long as you embrace the
Cannonite party-building model.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-democratic-socialist-perspectives-dirty-laundry/
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