Recently I was glancing through Jim Percy’s copy of Leon Trotsky “The challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-1925)”, and happened to notice the sections that he had marked in the margin. This book by Pathfinder contains Trotsky’s “The New Course”, and it was from this text that Jim had quoted Trotsky in his October 1982 NC report, “Preparing the party to meet the crisis”, that I requoted in my party-building counter-report to the May 2006 NC.

At its first meeting after the DSP congress (on February 1), the majority of the national executive adopted a statement on the formation on the last day of the congress of the Leninist Party Faction. The statement declared that the “fact that NE minority platform supporters met during the 22nd Congress as an exclusive caucus led the Congress delegates to pass the following motion:

The Democratic Socialist Party was formed in 1972 by leaders of the revolutionary socialist organisation Resistance. In forming the DSP, they set out to build a revolutionary Marxist party that could win the Australian working class to the perspective or a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule and the organisation of a classless, socialist society.

The reasons why we need a revolutionary party, and Lenin’s outstanding contributions on this question, was thoroughly covered by Reihana’s talk yesterday. The aim of this talk is to look at the sort of party we’re building and some of the basic concepts and methods of our party-building approach.