Green Party's Marxist Links, Demand Explanation

The NZ Green Party, for many years, has been closely linked to the Australian "Democratic Socialist Party", (now Democratic Socialist Perspective).

Party leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons, International Affairs spokesman and MP, Keith Locke and 2005 campaign manager and probable next co-leader, Russell Norman, all have close ties to the DSP. So what?


The DSP, despite its name, is a communist party. It has extensive ties to some of world's most radical socialist parties including the communist parties of Cuba, Vietnam, South Africa, the French Revolutionary Communist League, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the Refoundation Communist Party of Italy, the Palestine Liberation Organisation and it has also re-established ties with the world wide grouping of Trotskyite parties, The Fourth International.

The DSP describes itself on its website as; "Leninist, but not Stalinist and not Trotskyist, the DSP is enthusiastic about Cuba and Third World revolutions"



From Wikipaedia

"The Democratic Socialist Perspective, is a Marxist political group, which operates as the largest component of a broad Australian socialist formation, the Socialist Alliance.

The DSP started as the orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Workers League, founded in 1972 by members of the radical youth group Resistance. The SWL affiliated to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, particularly associated with the American Socialist Workers Party, later changing its own name to the Socialist Workers Party.

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 90s it was renamed the Democratic Socialist Party.

In 2001, the DSP, along with several other socialist parties, formed the Socialist Alliance. In 2003 the DSP became the first (and so far only) Socialist Alliance affiliate to become an internal tendency within the Alliance, changing its name to the Democratic Socialist Perspective. While the Alliance does contain members of other Marxist and Trotskyist groups, some of them very small, the extent to which the DSP dominates the Alliance is a matter of dispute. Some see the Alliance as the latest in a long line of SWP-DSP "fronts."

Why do the Greens associate with such people? Would Jeanette Fitzsimons dare state on national TV that she had attended a gathering of 800 communists organised by the DSP?

Would she boast to middle class NZ that she had rubbed shoulders with some of the most hardened communists on the planet?

Would she proudly state that two of her most senior party members, namely Keith Locke and Russell Norman, have longstanding ties with Australia's largest communist party?

If the Greens are really the upfront and honest people they claim to be, will they explain these links to the NZ public?

Perhaps someone from FrogBlog would care to comment?