There were a considerable number of misrepresentations of our party’s positions in David Glanz’s article in the IST discussion bulletin. In this response we will take up only the most politically important of these.

This pamphlet contains the text of two reports adopted by the DSP National Committee which provide an outline of some of the results of this process of rethinking.

The first is a report adopted by the DSP National Committee in October 1984, in which Jim Percy, then the national secretary of the party, outlines the DSP leadership’s criticisms of Trotskyism as a distinct ideological and political current in the international working-class movement. The second is a report adopted by the DSP National Committee in August 1985, in which Doug Lorimer motivated the decision to disaffiliate from the Fourth International.

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.