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Australia: Socialist Alliance Sixth National Conference, December 5-7, 2008, Geelong, Victoria
Socialist Alliance
Sixth National Conference
Friday, December 5 to Sunday,
Geelong Trades Hall
127 Myers Street, Geelong
Australia’s Socialist Alliance urges a 10-point plan to cut atmospheric CO2
Sydney climate emergency rally, October 3, 2008. Photo by Alex Bainbridge.
Climate action now!
September 25, 2008 -- The Australian federal government’s climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, has released his recommendations for medium-term cuts to Australian greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
He calls for reductions by 2020 of just 5% if there is no comprehensive international agreement on emissions reductions, or reductions of 10% if there is an agreement. At the Bali climate summit in December 2007 many developed countries expressed support for goals of 25-40% reductions.
Financial crisis: working people will pay
By Dick Nichols
September 20, 2008 -- “Will my superannuation [pension] fund be next?” “Are my savings safe?” As working people in the developed economies watch the assets of one financial institution after another vaporise into nothingness, tens of millions are asking these dreadful questions.
Yesterday’s AAA assets are now junk and yesterday’s “risk-free” investments are losing money. No-one, not even the world’s central bankers, who are spending sleepless nights arranging rescue bailouts and emergency injections of trillions of dollars into a financial system frozen with fear and distrust, can answer them with 100% certainty.
The ALP and the fight for socialism
Resolution sections
The formation of the ALP
A party of the trade union bureaucracy
A liberal bourgeois party
Parliamentarism
The ALP in office - a capitalist government
When and why capitalism favors Labor governments
Why the ruling class prefers conservative party governments
Reforms and reformism
The further cooption of the labor movement during the postwar capitalist boom
Recent changes in the ALP
The Labor left
The false perspective of reforming the ALP
Preparing defeats
An anti-capitalist political alternative
The working class and progressive movements of labor's allies
Support for all progressive breaks with Labor reformism
The role of Marxist organisation
A history of the Australian Labor Party, 1890-1967
Conrick's History of the Australian Labor Party originally appeared in Direct Action (the precursor to Green Left Weekly), newspaper of the Socialist Workers League of Australia, between December 21, 1972, and June 14, 1973, and was published as a pamphlet by the Socialist Workers Party in 1979. The SWP is now the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP). This digital version was created by Ozleft. The pamphelt reflected the DSP's attitude towards the ALP at that time, however significant changes were introduced to this viewpoint in the 1980s. This document should be read in conjuction with The ALP and the Fight for Socialism. See also The ALP, the Nuclear Disarmament Party and the 1984 elections.
Socialist Alternative gets the balance wrong on propaganda and action
Reviewed by Ben Courtice
From Little Things Big Things Grow: strategies for building revolutionary socialist organisations, by Mick Armstrong, Socialist Alternative, 2007.
As official politics
continues to move to the right, a growing gulf is opening up between the hopes
and aspirations of millions of working people and the agenda of the ruling
capitalist establishment and its parties… Much of the time that disenchantment
and discontent finds no outlet, but then it explodes in massive mobilisations
like those against the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003, or the repeated giant
rallies against Howard’s WorkChoices.[i]
Forests and climate change – examining the spin
By Susan Austin
Tasmania, Australia -- It’s easy to get confused about the issue of forests and climate change. Climate scientists say that preserving our forests is a quick, easy and cheap way to prevent further global warming, and Australia’s previous federal government allocated A$200 million towards preserving forests in South-East Asia. Yet both the federal government and the Tasmanian state government are overseeing the continuing destruction of Tasmania’s old-growth forests to feed a profitable wood-chip export industry and a soon-to-be-built pulp mill. And what’s more, they say that the industry is carbon-positive and sustainable. What’s really going on?
Pope's immoral stance a death sentence; protest the unholy father
By Tony Iltis
July 12, 2008 -- The visit to Sydney for World Youth Day (WYD), July 15-20, by Pope Benedict XVI and 300,000 Catholic pilgrims is set to become the scene for protests. Ironically, the protests are being fuelled by the clumsy efforts of the NSW state Labor Party government to suppress them — passing laws making it illegal to “annoy” pilgrims and defining “annoy” broadly enough to include having signs, or even wearing t-shirts, with messages that the doctrinally rigid pope or his followers disapprove of.
* * *
No to Pope Rallies, July 19, 2008
The DSP and the Fourth International
Introduction
On August 17, 1985 the National Committee of the Democratic Socialist Perpective (then named the Socialist Workers Party) voted to end the party’s affiliation to the Fourth International, the international organisation founded in 1938 by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his supporters around the world.
Nationalise big oil, enemy of the planet and its people
By Dick Nichols
June 17, 2008 -- The latest surge in the spot price of crude oil (to US$139 a barrel—87.4 cents a litre) dramatises the urgent need for society to wean itself off “black gold”. The longer we remain hooked the greater the devastation both to our environment and to the living standards of billions, especially the poorest peoples of the planet.
The challenge is huge. The response must combine defence against the threat to livelihoods from price rises with a plan to restructure economies and ways of living so that oil-intensive production and transport becomes a thing of the past.
BHP-Billiton: a corporation founded on apartheid plunder
BY NORM DIXON
In late March, newspaper headlines hailed the announcement that giant Australian-owned mining, oil and steel corporation BHP and the huge Anglo-South African mining and base metals conglomerate Billiton had agreed to merge, forming the world's largest mining and second-largest resources corporation. The new monolith is worth A$57 billion at current stock market prices.
None of the capitalist “market analysts” who have churned out thousands of words on the merger thought it necessary to point out that Billiton's accumulated capital is the product of decades of collaboration with the racist apartheid system in South Africa.
Billiton's parent company Gencor formally came into being with the amalgamation of two companies formed in the late 19th century, the General Mining and Finance Corporation (later known as Genmin) and the Union Corporation.
Resolutions adopted at the Latin America & Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum in Melbourne, October 11-14, 2007
International Solidarity Forum resolution: Statement of Solidarity
http://solidarityforum2007.org/?q=node/32
We came and met together from many different countries.
We came because we are some of those who have to struggle.
We have to fight the capitalists. We have to fight and win.
To fight we need to meet, and talk about our problems.
The ways we get defeated, the ways in which we are winning.
We have to talk together about our common struggle:
The issues that unite us, and where we don’t agree.
We need to make a plan that is a clear way forward.
The world is really ours. But capitalists have stolen it.
Climate action now! Socialist Climate Change Charter
Climate action now! Socialist Climate Change Charter
It happens to be an emergency...Climate action now!
SUMMARY:Warnings that can’t be ignoredClimate scientists have been warning us about global warming for Oppose the US war plans for Colombia and VenezuelaStatement by the Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network DSP Congress reaffirms commitment to broad left regroupmentBy Peter Boyle The Congress noted that a new political terrain was opening up with the Australia: Conference builds left alliances and international solidarityTwo articles reporting the October 11-14, 2007, Latin America and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum, held in Melbourne. The first written by Lisa Macdonald from Australia's Green Left Weekly and the second by Roger Annis from Canada's Socialist Voice. *********** Conference builds left alliances and international solidarity By Lisa Macdonald The labour aristocracy and opportunism in the history of Australian working-class politicsBy Jonathan Strauss The theory of the labour aristocracy argues that opportunism in the working class has a material basis. Such class-collaborationist politics express the interests of a relatively privileged stratum of workers who receive benefits supported by monopoly superprofits. Karl Marx and, especially, Frederick Engels, first developed this theory. It is most closely associated with V.I. Lenin, however, for whom it became “the pivot of the tactics in the labour movement that are dictated by the objective conditions of the imperialist era”.[1] The Democratic Socialist Perspective and the Socialist AllianceThe following resolution was adopted by the DSP's 22nd Congress in Sydney, January 5-8, 2006, following extensive internal discussion about the experience as a leading force within the Socialist Alliance since its formation in 2001. *** Work Choices: a huge challenge for organised labour in AustraliaBy Graham Matthews Work Choices is the Orwellian name given by the Australian federal Liberal-National (conservative) Coalition government to its second wave of industrial relations legislation, passed through parliament on December 2, 2005, and proclaimed as law on March 27. Socialists in the Australian women's liberation movement
By Margaret Allan
IntroductionTo understand the development of feminism in Australia, it is useful to briefly recap the political situation that gave rise not only to the women's liberation movement, but to the whole range of social movements that sprang up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the Second World War, women were drawn into many non-traditional areas of work, such as making ammunition and ships. These were much higher paid jobs than women were used to, and many women who did not previously work for pay experienced life as working mothers for the first time. There was some public child-care provision, and the ideology that women were incapable of metal work and similar trades conveniently disappeared as everyone was urged to “do their bit for the war effort and the boys at the front”. When men began returning from the war in large numbers in 1945, women were forced to give up these jobs. It was the start of the “baby boom”: women were encouraged to have babies to repopulate. This was also the start of the economic boom of the 1950s. Conference reaffirms Marxism in the 21st century
By Margaret Allum
"In the world, the tendency today is to bury Marxism and communism. The equation is simple: the collapse of the European socialist bloc is the end of the ideology and the theory that inspired their existence. But Marxist and communist ideas have today, perhaps more than ever, the possibility of demonstrating their viability.” With these words Maria Luisa Fernandez, the Cuban consul-general, opened the Marxism 2000 conference in Richmond, just outside of Sydney, from January 5 to 9. Her speech followed a welcome by Colin Giles, a representative of the local Darug Aboriginal people. Marxism 2000, initiated and organised by the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), was the second Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference; the first was held in April 1998, also in Sydney. Unfinished business: the struggle for abortion rights
By Kamala Emanuel
Why abortion rights? What is the importance of this issue? For us, it may be obvious, but it's necessary to reiterate the importance of the right to abortion because of the attacks it continues to face, and because in Australia and elsewhere a generation of women have now grown up with relatively straightforward access to abortion, who may not appreciate the significance of this right. The role of Australian imperialism in the Asia-Pacific regionDemocratic Socialist Party This is the text of a resolution adopted by the 19th Congress of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, held January 3-7, 2001. Except where specified otherwise, dollars in this article are Australian dollars. At the time of writing, A$1 was approximately US$0.55 Resolution on work in the Socialist Alliancefrom the Democratic Socialist Party This resolution was adopted by the Twentieth Congress of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party [DSP], held in Sydney from December 28, 2002 to January 1, 2003. For an explanation of its background, see Peter Boyle's article in this issue. This Twentieth Congress of the Democratic Socialist Party:
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