[Marxism] A public debate in the DSP

[Louis Proyect]

A lifetime ago, when I was a new member of the Socialist Workers Party 
in the U.S., I attended my first convention in New York City in 1967 at 
a small run-down hotel. I don’t remember much about the discussion but I 
do seem to recall party leader Harry Ring getting up during one 
discussion and explaining emphatically that it was not wrong to describe 
the Vietnam war as “illegal, unjust and immoral”, words that some party 
members apparently considered a concession to the middle-class left that 
it was working with in the antiwar movement.

The other thing I remember vividly was the need to keep “internal 
documents” out of the hands of non-party members. It was explained to me 
that this was part of the norms of “democratic centralism” that had been 
handed down since 1903 or so, like your grandfather’s antique pocket 
watch. The party had free-wheeling debate and discussion in the months 
leading up to the convention, where delegates would finally vote on the 
resolutions and counter-resolutions. Once that vote was taken, the new 
“party line” would become the official position of the party and 
henceforth its public face.

We understood that it was necessary to keep our debates a secret from 
the outside world, because the outside world was a transmitter of “alien 
class influences.” It was only within the party that a germ-free, 
sterile environment could be maintained. After the party had decided on 
its new positions at the convention, it could henceforth go out into the 
world and defend them before the masses. This, we understood, was how 
the Bolsheviks operated.

There were obvious differences between “Leninist” functioning and that 
of the bourgeois parties. Unlike us, the Democrats and Republicans used 
their quadrennial conventions to air out their differences before the 
public, just as they are doing now. Ron Paul makes no secret of his 
opposition to the war in Iraq, while Mitt Romney defends it openly; etc. 
You can go to the candidates’ websites and see all their primary 
platforms. Unlike them, Leninists were bent on keeping their differences 
a secret. During one pre-convention discussion, our branches were 
instructed to number a resolution under debate and return at the end of 
the meeting, just to make sure that it wouldn't get smuggled out like 
somebody making a video copy of a new movie at the local Cineplex for 
sale on the street. At the time, I found this process quite exhilarating 
as if I had joined some kind of leftwing version of the CIA, which also 
liked to stamp documents Top Secret.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/a-public-debate-in-the-australian-dsp/