Democratic Socialist Perspective
|
|
---|---|
Leader | Peter Boyle |
Founded | 1972 |
Dissolved | 2010 |
Merged into | Socialist Alliance |
Headquarters | Sydney |
Ideology |
Socialism, Marxism, Anti-capitalism |
International affiliation | Fourth International |
Website | |
http://www.dsp.org.au/ | |
The Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) was an Australian Marxist political group, which operated as the largest component of a broad-left socialist formation, the Socialist Alliance. In 2010, the DSP voted to merge into the Socialist Alliance.
The DSP was a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organisation and not affiliated with the Democratic Socialism movement. The name arises from the DSP's advocacy of democracy in the socialist movement, in contrast to the practices of Stalinism.
The DSP started as the orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Workers League, founded in 1972 by members of the radical Socialist Youth Alliance (previously, and also currently, called Resistance) which grew out of the student radicalisation surrounding the Vietnam War. The SWL affiliated to the reunified Fourth International, under the influence of the American section, the Socialist Workers Party. It was also undoubtedly due to this influence that the SWL itself took the name Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
In 1986 the SWP broke with orthodox Trotskyism and disaffiliated from the Fourth International. While maintaining Leon Trotsky's critique of the USSR, the party replaced Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution with the view that socialist revolution in Third World countries (countries in which, according to Marxist theory, the development of capitalism has been distorted by colonialism and imperialism) will take place in two connected stages. In the early 1990s it was renamed the Democratic Socialist Party. It contested the 1998 federal election as part of the Democratic Socialist Electoral League.