On the split in Democratic Socialist Perspective

The DSP split reveals a deep malaise in the politics of the Trotskyist tradition, writes Mark Kelly.

“Because the path to socialism is uncharted, wide differences of strategy and tactics can and should exist in the revolutionary party. The alternative is the bureaucratised party or the sect with its ‘leader’.” Tony Cliff, Trotsky on substitionism, 1960

On one level, the recent split of Democratic Socialist Perspective (formerly the Democratic Socialist Party, previously the Socialist Workers Party) and the resultant emergence of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (formerly the Leninist Faction inside the DSP), was over the continuation of the Socialist Alliance tactic being pursued doggedly by the DSP. On this issue, one must feel sympathetic to the RSP’s position: that the tactic has been a failure and must be abandoned.

The Socialist Alliance period has led to an absolute and relative decline of the DSP and Resistance (DSP’s youth group), even before the split. The alliance itself has been in decline, with the departure of most of the allied groups that originally constituted it. Electoral results have been derisory. Thus, on any possible measure – the possible measures being building the DSP, encouraging left regroupment, or spreading socialist consciousness – the effort has thus far failed abjectly.

Of course, tactical disagreements should not result in splits in Leninist organisations. The point of democratic centralism, Lenin’s organisational model that both sides accept, is that minorities should abide by majority decisions. The DSP minority deliberately defied the leadership, knowingly precipitating their expulsion.

Why, then, did they do this? One reason is the tactical question, but why did this tactical question assume such importance? The RSP contains most of the old guard, the founders and old leadership of the DSP. In the dispute over the tactical question, the old leadership lost power. The old leadership cannot tolerate being in a party that no longer listens to them and no longer pays due deference towards them. Moreover, the old leadership surely imagines that they are the vital force behind the party, not the rank and file – hence they can leave without damaging the party, but rather thereby preserve it. So much for the democracy in their conception of democratic centralism.

We now have a preposterous situation of two organisations with the same beliefs and constitution, differing only over this one tactical question and in personnel. Despite my belief that the RSP is correct on the tactical question, it has no tactic of its own to offer – it offers only a return to the previous tactic of the DSP, namely sect-building. True, in a narrow sense this was more successful for them in the past than the SA tactic. Nevertheless, there are no shortage of groups engaged in sect-building in Western countries, without evident success at anything beyond reproducing themselves as sects and achieving hegemonies within niches such as the coteries of student politics.

Thus, to some extent I can sympathise also with the majority, who, in the face of the condemnation of their leaders, have chosen to stick with the tactic of regroupment. Moreover, the underlying motivations for the split indicate that it is the RSP, not the DSP, that is the one that has the more unhealthy attitude towards democracy, that is the more cult-like. Nevertheless, there is no indication that the rump DSP has made a break with the attitudes that have led to this pass.