DSP caucus expels dissident WA Socialist Alliance member

It's not goood that someone is expelled without disclosures to this person and without natural justice but I am confused.

I thought the Socialist Alliance, led by Alex expelled a number of people some years back who went to form or join the DSP (don't understand how it all came about, but I know Alex did coordinate the expulsion of a number of SA members on the allegation they held views that were 'dissident' to the SP).

So if this is the case how is it possible that an ex-DSP membership is the caucus of the SA?

Is there something I am missing. The whole miniscule socialist movement (predominately of youth) is so fractious and territorial - the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Party, the Marxist Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Australia, the Solidarity Party, the Socialist Alternative, and on and on that each of these parties, at loggerheads with each other, are no more than half a dozen people for the most part in each state and it's a sad they can't get together to at least be some small voice in the hard left wing voice, which because of them fractious and pompously territorial doesn't exist. If they did they have people who would listen - The Occupy movements have proved this - they are looking for a voice, not a babble of small voices.

Can someone from the DSP or SA clarify some of the confusion in the post about the expulsion by Alex of Graham and about the caucus allegations and the process used to expel Graham which too sounds sad?

The DSP does not exist and has not done so for over 2 years. - thus there is no DSP caucus.

In the article above I described the ex-DSP grouping within the Socialist Alliance as an 'informal caucus'. The issue of how to define the relationship of the old DSP, after that grouping decided to dissolve itself into the Socialist Alliance in 2009, was canvassed in an exchange that appeared on the original WA SA discussion loop late that year. A January 2010 DSP Conference (the final one held) ratified a proposal from the national leadership of the DSP to not completely dissolve their grouping into Socialist Alliance but instead to remain a 'non-caucusing tendency of opinion' within SA.

Although in theory the ex-DSP tendency does not today act as a disciplined caucus in the Socialist Alliance, it is perfectly clear that in practice a cabal of ex-DSP leaders and members maintains a network within SA that undoubtedly constitutes an informal caucus. Furthermore, this grouping has overwhelming political and organisational preponderance within Socialist Alliance, both nationally and regionally. In WA the two co-convenors of the Socialist Alliance, Alex Bainbridge and Sam Wainwright, are both long-standing leaders of the DSP.

According to its constitution, the Socialist Alliance is a multi-tendency party. In practice, however, the ex-DSP informal caucus controls the whole outfit; lock, stock and barrel. Just about every dissenting voice has by now been driven out of the organisation: I seem to be one of the last individual dissidents to be chucked out. This situation casts a tragic reflection on the fate of the left in Australia. There is now more than ever a desperate need for a mass revolutionary party, equipped with a Marxist programme, to provide the necessary leadership for the social forces that can transform Australian politics and point the way forward to socialism. The Socialist Alliance was the best nucleic formation on the Australian far-left that could have provided the beginnings for such a mass-revolutionary party. The decline of the Socialist Alliance into a sectarian sideshow on the Australian left, at the hands of the ex-DSP cabal, is a tragic and telling commentary on the profound political limitations betrayed by these people.

I should perhaps provide some historical background to the above posts. I joined James Percy's Sydney-based political outfit (the 'Socialist Workers' League' and its youth cohort the 'Socialist Youth Alliance' - formerly and subsequently 'Resistance') while travelling through, and then living in, Sydney in 1973. I was from Perth in Western Australia. The Percyites had no branch in Perth at that time; they had only a couple of supporters derived from a small discussion group that had adhered to the Healyite tendency internationally. I returned to Perth in early 1974 and enrolled the following year as an undergraduate student at the University of Western Australia. I was a member in 1975 of an SYA (Resistance) club at UWA, alongside Peter Boyle (who is now national convenor of the Socialist Alliance), and two other student activists. There was no branch at that time of the SWL or SYA in Perth.

In late 1978, after returning from an overseas trip consequent to completing our BA pass degrees at UWA, I rejoined and my partner Anthea Parker joined the fused group (Socialist Workers Party) that brought together the two political groupings in Australia supporting the Trotskyist Fourth International. A branch of the SWP, along with a branch of the youth cohort (SYA) was chartered and established in Perth. After returning from Europe with Anthea Parker, I spent a brief period in hospital and was diagnosed with a bi-polar condition.

I worked in various capacities for a year and a half in 1979 and 1980 as a member of the SWP and SYA in Perth: some of that time I spent working on a tractor assembly line in a factory in Welshpool, in accordance with the SWP's and the Fourth International's 'turn to industry', a schematic policy adopted a year or two before the party branch in Perth was chartered.

Towards the end of 1980 I transferred from Perth to Sydney branch (where the SWP national office was located) and I was invited, after a six week delay, to work as a journalist on the party paper 'Direct Action'. Someone should write a satirical play about the SWP/DSP national office and the Percyite circus that existed in it at this time. The opening scene could have 'DA' journalists and technical staff formulating a log of claims for award wages to present to James Percy and his older brother John. As it was, we 'DA' staffers were expected to subsist on unemployment benefits, 'topped up' with a 'stipend' of about $30. More than that, the chief headkicker in the N/O, Douglas Lorimer, made it known to me very rapidly after I commenced work on the paper that 'DA' journos had to 'write the line'. I found the atmosphere in the SWP/SYA national office so fetid and claustrophobic, and found that the political relations in the N/O expressed to such a bizarre degree the peculiar nature of the circus-like character of the Percyite apparatus, that I had a fairly-serious breakdown in my health and was hospitalised for a while.

After being discharged from hospital in Sydney I returned to Perth. The following year I moved again to Sydney and wrote feature articles for 'Direct Action', although as an independent journalist and not as an employee on the paper. In early 1982 I returned to Perth. I attempted to get involved in the Perth branch of the SWP/DSP but I was excluded by the branch executive. Although it wasn't directly stated by the branch leaders, the reason was clearly focused around my bi-polar disorder. The SWP/DSP (and subsequently the Socialist Alliance) has always had a policy of opposing discrimination against people with disabilities, including psychiatric disabilities. The Socialist Alliance in its current programme claims to have a policy of promoting or offering affirmative action to those members of the organisation who have disabilities.

The facts about the SWP/DSP's practical policy towards myself as someone with a disability, as I have encountered it since the early 1980s, could not be more starkly at variance with the claims I have outlined above. Ever since I arrived back in Perth from Sydney in early 1982, I encountered a wall of prejudice and active discrimination from practically every member of the party and its youth organisation in Perth. I tried every which way to clarify and sort out the question of my membership of the party, which appears to have been arbitrarily suspended while I was in Sydney in 1981. I still retain among my papers a thick file of correspondence relating to this issue. I got nowhere with these characters. Because the international organisation that the SWP/DSP was affiliated with (the Fourth International) had a statutory requirement compelling the International's leading bodies to communicate with supporters only through the national sections in their countries, I was cut off from the international movement I identified with, and I was unable to gain access to FI internal documents and other literature. The irony was that the SWP/DSP by this time didn't give a flying fuck about the Fourth International, and no doubt it gave Percy and his confreres some satisfaction to know that they could act as a 'dog-in-the-manger' in this way and destroy any possibility of my being able to participate in the internal life of the world movement I identified with politically. Later on the SWP/DSP severed links with the Fourth International and carried out a scorched-earth job on the section in Australia, thus ensuring that its reconstruction would be almost impossible.

One of the more peculiar features of the whole affair of this attempt by the SWP/
DSP hierarchs to quash my claims to membership rights of the party is the fact that the party bookshop in Perth, which in 1982-3 was situated in Barrack St., at that time contained books for sale on its shelves by such libertarian writers on psychology and psychiatry as Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing. Yet the attitudes of the party members running this bookshop were utterly bovine, bigoted and backward on the whole question of psychiatry and its misuse as a mechanism of repression by the bourgeois order. By the mid-1980s, a new branch organiser arrived in Perth. This character, David Holmes, a long-time Percyite stalwart whom I had known quite well in Sydney in 1973, announced soon after arriving in Perth, when I broached the subject of the renewal of my party membership to him, simply observed, after rejecting my claim to membership: 'You have a medical condition'. I must admit that I was stumped by this bare-faced prejudice. Had I been aware of the legislation that existed even then outlawing discriminatory practices in the community against those like myself with psychiatric conditions, I would immediately have initiated civil proceedings under that legislation against Holmes and his wretched party.

In 2003, at the time of the second Gulf War and invasion of Iraq, I reengaged with what had devolved into the multi-tendency Socialist Alliance, of which the Democratic Socialist Party was the largest component. I remained a member of SA until the recent expulsion. It is my belief that the local leadership of SA (which was and remains essentially in the hands of the DSP) possibly liased with the national office of the DSP, having not succeeded in preventing me from joining the organisation, to effectively 'quarantine' me from within it. I was a member of SA for nearly eight years. During that time I was barred from selling the party newspaper, 'Green Left Weekly', despite protestations against that ban from myself. At no time was I ever nominated for, let alone elected to, any position on any leadersip body of the organisation, either at a branch or a State level. Neither was I ever selected as a candidate for any election; Federal, State or local. During my time in SA I never chaired any meeting, or conference, or any session of a conference. I was asked to present an educational talk only once. Because I was indisposed due to a physical complaint and thus unable to present this talk, the situation, although no fault of my own, was used as an excuse by the branch organiser in Perth to effectively exclude me from presenting any further educational talks.

My belief is that the membership and the leading cadre of today's Socialist Alliance, which is now essentially simply a rebadged DSP, is riddled with backward prejudices concerning mental illness. I have to say that the prejudice and discriminatory practices that I have encountered over decades of involvement or contact with the Percyite current on the Australian far-left, far outweighs proportionally anything I have come across in the general community. Members of the general community may be relatively ignorant about mental illness. They might even fear it to some extent. But members of the general community do not normally politicise hostility to those who suffer from established psychiatric conditions such as bi-polar disorder.

The hypocrisy and double standards of those in charge of the Socialist Alliance, in claiming to champion the rights and interests of oppressed groups in general, and those with disabilities, including psychiatric disabilities, in particular, while in practice they actively and deliberately exclude or marginalise them, make a mockery of that organisation's claim to have anything to do with socialism.

Graham I'm sorry mate but your claims sound pretty suss. In Brisbane we have many comrades with mental illness and disability who play an active role in party life. None of your claims hold any water with reference to my branch, and having been in SA from the start, I've never come across anything like what you claim. Having never visited Perth branch I can't speak for it, but I'd be curious to hear the other side of the story.

I'd be glad to hear some comment from others in the Perth branch of Socialist Alliance too. But I'm not holding my breath. The WA regional leaders and members of Socialist Alliance have said nothing about the systematic discriminatory practices against me that have been a feature of my period of membership in SA. The account I have provided above is honest and accurate, as far as I can make it.

Other Socialist Alliance branches might have had different experiences. I am in a position to draw only on my own experience. That experience leads to clear conclusions: the DSP/Socialist Alliance's claim to be non-exclusionary with respect to persons suffering disabilities (including those of a psychiatric character) is false. Furthermore, the DSP/SA's contention that members with disabilities are the subject of 'affirmative action' within SA is a grotesque inversion of the actual reality facing such members. In my case I was quarantined from within the organisation and then spat out when I raised a policy difference.