Revolutionary Socialist Party

By Shua Garfield

Imagine if the Australian government provided all education, from pre-school to post-graduate level, and all medical care, free of charge. Imagine if factories that were to be closed down by their owners were taken under public control and put under the management of their workers to produce for the benefit of society, rather than having the workers thrown onto the scrap-heap of unemployment and the machinery lie idle. Imagine if, rather than stealing East Timor’s oil and gas, and sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to prop up unpopular US-imposed puppet governments, the Australian government sent doctors, teachers, and sustainable development engineers to help lift neighbouring Third World countries out of poverty?

What we stand for

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems. Such a transformation requires the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism — a classless society based upon a worldwide system of democratically planned production to meet human needs.

In fighting for revolutionary change, we base ourselves on the scientific theory of social development developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and further developed by subsequent generations of revolutionary socialists. We seek to learn in particular from the experiences of the Russian, Vietnamese and Cuban socialist revolutions, and from the Bolivarian socialist revolution now unfolding in Venezuela.

Announces publication of Direct Action

The Leninist Party Faction, a dissident minority expelled from the Democratic Socialist Perspective on May 13, and Direct Action, an organisation established by former DSP members in Melbourne and Geelong after they left the DSP in June 2006, have united to launch a new party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), with members in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Geelong, Adelaide, Newcastle and Cairns, and others currently residing overseas.

This is a principled unification of our two organisations. Both the LPF and Direct Action support the Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, a program that the DSP remains formally committed to but which it is abandoning in practice. Together, LPF and Direct Action members waged a common struggle against the degeneration of the DSP until June 2006, when six LPF members decided to leave the DSP to establish Direct Action.