Revolutionary Marxists are internationalists. Our goal is the unification of the working people and oppressed of the world in the complete overthrow of the capitalist system and the ushering in of a classless, socialist society. But capitalist power is concentrated at the level of state power in national states, so the instruments we need to overthrow that power are nationally based revolutionary working class parties.

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 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.

Marx and Engels were not the first to develop and advance a vision of a classless society. As they themselves noted, earlier thinkers had developed “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the eighteenth, actual communistic theories… [in which] it was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves”.

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.

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.

Since the late 1970s the US SWP has degenerated into a bizarre political sect, which justifies its abstention from involvement in the mass working-class movement with the shibboleth that it is building a ‘communist party of industrial workers’, ie, of blue-collar workers.

The National Executive’s draft perspectives resolution has two major elements to it. The first part of the resolution presents an analysis of the Australian political situation, focusing in particular on why there has not been a generalised fight back by the working class against the Howard government’s Thatcherite offensive. The second part concerns the party-building perspectives and main tasks for the party that flow from the Australian political situation and from the stage we are at in building a revolutionary workers’ party.

We are now in a new period, blessed with a conservative government, led by Neanderthals like Howard, Costello, Vanstone, Reith and their gang. After 13 years of ALP government and Accord politics, this is certainly a new period. It’s the type of period, the type of government, that the majority of our membership, even the majority of our leadership here, would not have experienced.

This report has to set forth our immediate party-building perspectives for the rest of this year, and also prefigure the perspectives we are likely to be presenting to the national conference in January to guide us internationally and in Australia for the following two years.