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| Why we left the DSP |
| Marxist Solidarity Network |
Gill Davy, Camilo Jorquera, Jorge Jorquera,
Roberto Jorquera, Trisha Reimers, Jo Williams  Jorge Joquera When we left the DSP we kept our initial resignation comments to a minimum. This understandably left many DSP members who we had worked with for years confused and dissatisfied. This was a conscious choice on our behalf and the motivating factors remain pertinent: 1. The DSP has gone through at least 6 months of intense discussion, nothing we could have written in one letter could have added anything substantial to the hundreds of pages and hours of internal discussion already had; 2. We firmly believe that at this stage of the discussion and given the trajectory established by the majority leadership of the DSP, there is no constructive way of continuing the discussion inside the DSP. By engaging in constructive political activity in the mass movement and continuing to engage in the broad discussion of the "organisational question" among the far left, we believe we can contribute far more to the discussion that the Leninist Party Faction has tried to raise inside the DSP. These two points, however, leave one important question unanswered, a question that we in the MSN hope is still open and for that very reason are not willing to be categorical about: How bad is the internal situation in the DSP and how could it have got to this stage? How has a tactical difference over Socialist Alliance been elevated to a winner take all factional struggle? From day one in the internal discussion the issue of the party regime was put on the table, hearsay took over from informal collaboration, and since the formation of the LPF, comrades who joined the faction have been slowly but no less systematically marginalised � their "weaknesses" suddenly became their defining features and their political authority was gradually worn down by the national leadership clique. It became increasingly clear that the majority leadership was not prepared to seriously engage in a discussion about the political differences raised, but rather was more interested in engaging in a campaign of slander against the LPF. LPF comrades were not trusted to take on political assignments without a majority supporter looking over their shoulder, attempts were made to hack into the LPF email discussion list, violating basic membership rights, and there was an ongoing campaign of threatening LPF members with disciplinary action without charges being laid. By generating an atmosphere of complete distrust amongst the membership of the DSP, the majority leadership buried the political discussion. For its part, the LPF has centred its approach to the factional struggle on a critique of the political perspectives that underpin the majority leadership's continuing tactical emphasis on the construction of Socialist Alliance as a "broad" left party: the sometimes, although not consistently hyped characterisations of the political period and the potential of the trade union fight back. In our opinion, however, the LPF's analysis is too narrow and has lent itself to unnecessarily exaggerated characterisations of the current period, sometimes the mirror opposite of those made by some in the majority leadership, overemphasis of the difficulties of the period. The DSP has many a time had greater variety of opinion over the tempo of the class struggle in this country. You cannot explain the internal situation of the DSP, any more than the degeneration experienced by the US SWP, purely and simply by the tactical errors made. It is one thing to make a tactical error that can send you down the wrong track, it is another to pursue and deepen that error. The DSP has made countless tactical errors in the past but it did not head down the sort of sectarian and liquidationist road it's now on. In our opinion, the current trajectory of the DSP cannot be explained outside of a number of important factors that preceded the factional struggle and provided the fertile ground for a section of the DSP leadership to go looking for a political short cut and bank everything on it, with SA seen by these comrades as the "last chance" for the DSP. The most important of these factors include: 1. The lack of youth recruitment and the increasingly peripheral role played by Resistance in the political work of the tendency over the last 5 years. 2. The progressive development of a sectarian approach to the mass movement, with interventions in campaigns reduced to "monitoring" and "networking" rather than actual practical leadership in campaigns. The only partial exception in this respect being in trade union work, which in any case has been increasingly hived-off from the general work of the DSP. 3. The growing number of comrades in the DSP who for years have been removed from any practical struggle politics and have preserved themselves in administrative capacities, exactly those comrades who now unsurprisingly don't want to hear about the debate. This thoroughly administrative approach to politics has been increasingly characteristic of many though not all of the newer full-timers of the DSP, comrades no longer emerging from the youth in struggle which had previously been the fountain of DSP cadre. We would like to make it clear that while we have been compelled �
by the questions posed of us and the slander that has already started
against us from some quarters inside the DSP - to make some of our (incomplete)
assessment of the situation in the DSP public, we are not interested
in further pursuing this, as was suggested clearly by our brief comments
in resignation from the DSP. Rather, we are interested in constructive
political activity and working with all and any on the left who are
open to collaboration. |