At its April 2003 plenum, the DSP national committee adopted a report on the international political situation which made the observation that “[t]throughout the 1990s one of the greatest factors bearing down on the morale of the Cuban revolutionaries was the Cuban Revolution’s isolation in Latin America – the fact that there was not a single other revolutionary government in the hemisphere. Today, however, the Cuban Revolution has an ally in Latin America – the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, which has made significant progress in dismantling the institutions of capitalist power in an oil-rich, partially industrialised country with a population more than twice the size of Cuba’s”.

For all the hypocritical crusading rhetoric of US President George Bush about his “war on terror”, in practice he is promoting and sheltering real terrorists – the right-wing Cuban emigres who have been waging a terror war on revolutionary Cuba for decades.

Laurie Aarons, general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia in the crucial years 1965-76, died earlier this month at the age of 88. The Aarons family played an important role in the CPA: Laurie’s grandparents were members, his father Sam was a national leader, his brother Eric was general secretary in 1976-82, and his son Brian was later a national secretary.

In Links No. 26, Murray Smith, a former leading member of the Scottish Socialist Party and now a leading member of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International), made extensive comments on my article “The Bolshevik Party and ‘Zinovievism’ Comments on a Caricature of Leninism printed in Links No. 24., focusing in particular on the issue of the public expression and debate of political differences within the Bolshevik Party.(1)

The anti-communist Vietnamese group calling itself the Vietnamese Community in Australia (VCA) has been rebuffed in its scheme to have the flag of the US-imposed Saigon regime – overthrown by the Vietnamese national liberation movement in 1975 – officially recognised in Australia.

In his otherwise well-argued article “The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat Peasantry: Permanent Revolution Vietnam” in Activist Vol. 14, No. 4, Comrade Mike Karadjis wrote: According to Siegelbaum (Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, Cambridge Uni Press, 1992, pp. 43-44), the ‘poor peasant committees’ had been a failure; there had been no second stage of the revolution in the countryside. I think this is probably correct, judging both by what happened next and what has happened elsewhere in the world...

A major diplomatic incident could be triggered by a diehard right-wing Vietnamese group in Sydney, with the naive complicity of the Fairfield City Council.

Dot Tumney, a long-term member of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), passed away on December 25. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer a few weeks earlier.

January 2004 – Embarrassing details of an extensive scam being operated against left-wing organisations surfaced in the Ukraine in mid-2003. At least twelve, possibly up to twenty, small left groups, mainly in England and the United States, were conned by an enterprising group of Ukrainian politicos pretending to be supporters of each of these parties or their “internationals” setting up their Ukrainian “sections”.

The disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union opened an important debate within the Marxist movement about how to evaluate the history of the socialist movement, and especially of the Bolshevik Party, the party that led the world’s first successful socialist revolution. One of the central aims of Links has been to provide a forum for such debate.