Conference & Internal Party Reports

The Activist – Volume 12, Number 6, June 2002
By John Percy, National Secretary

This is a report that tries to take a long-term look at building the party, as well as addressing our current party-building tasks and perspectives. It’s in the context of a significant change in the world situation, where although imperialism’s offensive against the people of the world is just as fierce, just as irrational.

The Activist – Volume 11, Number 5, May 2001
By John Percy

Our party congress was held not much more than three months ago, and discussed thorough reports on perspectives for our work in Australia and for our international work. But some matters were left unresolved, with question marks over them. For example, we didn’t make firm projections for our election work. And we raised the question, “Let’s wait and see if the ISO here follows the line of the SWP in Britain.” We didn’t have long to wait. Certainly there’s been a rapid resolution on that front, with big developments in Australia.

The Activist – Volume 11, Number 1, January 2001
By Doug Lorimer

Comrades, a spectre is haunting Europe – and Australia, Asia, Africa and Latin America – the spectre of a US-led global economic recession. The end of year mood of the capital owning class was summed up in the headline on an article in the “Money & Business” section of the December 30 Sydney Morning Herald. It read: “After the cold snap, the big breeze”.

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 2, 1999
By John Percy

The year 1998 has been a very eventful and successful year for the DSP. It’s been memorable enough to say that we’re in a new period. But what are the period’s new features?

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 5, 1999
By Doug Lorimer

On Wednesday March 24, 1999, the secretary-general of NATO, former Spanish social-democratic minister of culture Javier Solana, told a press conference: “I have just given the order to the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, United States General Wesley Clark, to begin air operations against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 1, 1999
By Doug Lorimer

Since 1993 our party has held the position that the ruling Chinese bureaucracy has been presiding over the restoration of capitalism in China. However, our policy toward China has been ambigious: while taking an oppositional stance in our public press toward the ruling bureaucracy’s restorationist course, we have left it unclear as to whether we continued to believe that China is still a bureaucratically ruled socialist state.

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 1, 1999
By Doug Lorimer

For orthodox Marxists, as Lenin explained in his 1917 book The State and Revolution, the state is a centralised organisation of force separated from the community as a whole which enforces, through special bodies of armed people and other institutions of coercion, the will of one class, or an alliance of classes, upon the rest of society.

The Activist – Volume 8, Number 5, 1998
By John Percy

The title of this report refers to the party having entered a “new period”. But what are its new features? Firstly, we all have to understand – even here in firewalled, comfortable, Lucky Country Australia – that we are now in the middle of a global economic crisis for capitalism.

The Activist – Volume 7, Number 9, 1997
By Doug Lorimer

In his report to the 15th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, held two weeks ago, CPC general secretary Jiang Zemin said that the theme of the congress was to “hold high the great banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory for an all-round advancement of the cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics to the 21st century”. Indeed, the official title of his report was “Hold High the Great Banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory for an All-Round Advancement of the Cause of Building Socialism With Chinese Characteristics to the 21st Century”.

The Activist – Volume 7, Number 9, 1997
By John Percy

It’s been a busy year, and many of us are feeling it. There’s been a wide range of issues we’ve fought on and campaigns in which we’ve intervened. Check Green Left Weekly, check our calendars. With this National Committee meeting it’s time for reflection and assessment. It’s time to do a stocktake of the immediate past and to set the next tasks, but also it’s sometimes useful to do a stocktake of our strategic perspectives, toss up problems, questions, for us to chew on collectively. This report will raise a number of those, for us to discuss here, and for comrades to think on over coming months.