We’re here to launch and welcome the new Resistance Magazine, and I’m here to talk about the old – Resistance magazine’s precursors, our publishing traditions.

Our heritage takes in all the best traditions of radical and socialist journalism. Internationally, there’s Lenin’s Iskra of course, even back to The Red Republican and the Friends of the People, * which published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto in 1850. There’s the US Militant in its healthy days, and Intercontinental Press * (library files).

Comrades, this has been a very good conference, especially the liveliness and the seriousness of the discussion. At the end of most sessions there’s still been a of hands unable to get the call to speak! I think this reflects both the international political situation, and the keen interest sparked by the DSP’s proposals regarding the Socialist Alliance (SA). Certainly for next Resistance conference you’ll have to consider changing the agenda, to allow longer sessions for discussion.

”The three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy [are] to prevent collusion and maintain security among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”¹ This statement was not made by an official in the ancient Roman imperial bureaucracy. It was made by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a central figure in the US foreign policy elite, national security adviser to us President Jimmy Carter and chief architect of Washington’s policy of creating a network of fanatically anti-communist Islamic terrorists to spearhead the counter-revolutionary war against the Afghan workers and peasants’ government in the late 1970s.

Capitalism is in crisis, and you’d have to be blind, or a particularly gross and stupid billionaire, not to know it. Just look around the world and you’re faced with the squalor of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, exploitation, and environmental devastation. And you also see the obscene wealth, the luxury for a few. In Indonesia the crisis is very visible, in your face.

Nearly two weeks later we’re still in the middle of the United States election farce! Who’s won?

Bush? The illiterate idiot?

Or Gore? The wooden idiot?

And what does it say about democracy in the US?

We’re all here because we’re fed up with the rottenness of this capitalist society, fed up with the exploitation and inequality, the discrimination, the lies, the hypocrisy and the crassness. Young people here and around the world are the ones most likely to rebel: against the racism rampant in Australia under the Coalition’s Hansonite regime, against sexism, especially the aggressive push to get women back into the home as mothers and housewives; against war and militarism (John Howard wants to throw away $110 billion more in military spending), and against capitalism’s corporate tyranny.

As we celebrate the first May Day of the new century, the glaring inequalities, injustices and contradictions of global capitalism appear more acute than ever. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Every day on our TV screens, images of obscene wealth and disgusting luxury and waste contrast with pictures of starving populations. Can those bourgeois apologists still claim that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds?

As we celebrate the first May Day of the new century, the glaring inequalities and injustices and contradictions of global capitalism appear more acute than ever. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Images of obscene wealth and disgusting luxury and waste contrast with pictures of starving populations on our nightly TV screens.

As we reflect on the tumultuous twentieth century – “wars, revolutions, crises and constant technological change – we have to reaffirm that socialism, now more than ever, is necessary for the future development of humanity. In fact, it’s necessary for preventing society’s collapse into barbarism and the ecological destruction of the planet. Marxism not only has continuing relevance; it’s more applicable than ever. Society continues to be divided into economically opposed classes. Capitalism expropriates the wealth created by working people through their labour.

A lot has been written, and will doubtless continue to be written, about how Marx’s theory of capitalist development is a relic of a bygone era, irrelevant for understanding the complex dynamics of the “globalised”, “post-industrial”, “financialised” capitalism that is supposed to have emerged only at the end of the 20th century. Contemporary capitalism, however, can only be scientifically understood using Marx’s theory of capitalist development.