New Zealand Alliance leader Jim Anderton outlined a bold plan to rescue the country’s remaining unsold pine plantations at the party’s national conference, held in Wellington April 6-7. A week prior to the conference, the National Bolger government had announced its intention of selling the vast North Island forests off to the highest bidder.

The following two letters – to Melbourne branch member Chris Slee and to Green Left Weekly contributor Phil Shannon, respectively – were written in response to comments made by them in letters published in Green Left Weekly last year.

This report has to set forth our immediate party-building perspectives for the rest of this year, and also prefigure the perspectives we are likely to be presenting to the national conference in January to guide us internationally and in Australia for the following two years.

What is our balance sheet of the year, internationally, and in Australia, from a party-building perspective? Our fundamental assessment of the period, that we’ve analysed and discussed at recent party conferences and National Committee meetings, hasn’t basically changed.

Our strategy for achieving socialism is to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party on the Bolshevik model, which can imbue the working class with revolutionary consciousness and thus lead the masses in carrying out a proletarian revolution and the construction of socialism. Without the leadership of such a party the workers, no matter how massive or militant their struggles, will not be able to achieve decisive victory over the capitalist rulers.

Dear Phil,

I thought it would be helpful to follow up the brief comments in my letter in this week’s Green Left with a direct letter to you on the points raised in your letter in GLW 211.

Rather than begin by responding to the specific arguments you raised in your letter, I think it will help clarify the issues if I begin with a general presentation of how I assess the differences between Lenin and Trotsky on the relationship between the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions. I will then take up the specific arguments raised in your letter.

The Communist Party of Australia developed a strong base in important industrial unions during the 1930s. As the depression eased, CPA members recruited from the unemployed and trained in action through the struggles of the Depression, had got jobs in industry. This working class base, which became the core of the CPA, grew and was consolidated during the 1940s.

The Communist Party of Australia experienced its most rapid growth in the years 1930-1934, going from 300 to 3000 members. The misery and desperation of the depression years, with up to one third of the work force unemployed, pushed many to look for radical solutions.

Ten years after the Russian Revolution that was the inspiration for the formation of the Communist Party of Australia, much had changed in the Soviet Union. Bureaucratism was rampant, Lenin was dead, and Stalin was rapidly pushing aside many of the old Bolshevik leaders. The first workers state had survived, but at a cost.

On October 30, 1920, the Communist Party of Australia was founded at a meeting in Sydney attended by 26 men and women. They represented the most radical of the small socialist groups, militant trade union activists and officials and former members of the Industrial Workers of the World. Their direct inspiration was the Russian Revolution of October 1917 led by Lenin’s Bolshevik party, the first example of workers overthrowing capitalism, taking power in their own hands and setting out on the path of constructing socialism.