Australian left in crisis
The largest activist group on the Australian left, the Democratic Socialist Party, is in crisis over its policy towards the Socialist Alliance. At the DSP congress, in the first week of January, its long-time leader, John Percy, and its longstanding chief theorist, Doug Lorimer, were ousted from key positions, defeated by the supporters of Peter Boyle, who argues that the DSP can build the Socialist Alliance, and a network of trade unionists more or less sympathetic to it, into a big force in the Australian labour movement. According to Bob Gould, a hostile but often well-informed observer...