RSP Perspectives Resolution 2009

The capitalist system’s multiple crises remind us that we are living in the epoch of decline and decay of the global capitalist social order. Capitalism’s contradictions are profound, insoluble and explosive. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism – a global society of common ownership of productive resources and democratic planning to meet social needs – offers the only hope for the survival of civilisation. But such a revolutionary transformation of society will not happen spontaneously. It requires conscious revolutionary socialist leadership.

Building the Revolutionary Socialist Resolution adopted by First Congress of the RSP, June 6-8, 2009.

Contents:

Imperialist decline and socialist renewal
Working class retreat
The radicalisation today
Left regroupment
Campus Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity clubs
Direct Action
International collaboration
Party spirit

Imperialist decline and socialist renewal

1. Planet Earth may have already crossed the threshold of catastrophic and irreversible climate change, due to the capitalist system’s pollution of the planet’s atmosphere with massive amounts of carbon dioxide since the capitalist Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. As higher average surface temperatures reduce crop yields, tropical rainforests are razed and more farmland is devoted to growing fuel for cars, staple foods have become increasing unaffordable for hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people. Since late 2007 the capitalist world has been also hit by the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. As a result of the deepening global economic slump and rising food prices, the number of chronically hungry people will exceed 1 billion before the end of 2009. Furthermore, the post-9/11 drive of the US imperialist rulers to dominate the world has been stymied in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US military is bogged down in unwinnable counterinsurgency wars.

2. The capitalist system’s multiple crises remind us that we are living in the epoch of decline and decay of the global capitalist social order. Capitalism’s contradictions are profound, insoluble and explosive. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism – a global society of common ownership of productive resources and democratic planning to meet social needs – offers the only hope for the survival of civilisation. But such a revolutionary transformation of society will not happen spontaneously. It requires conscious revolutionary socialist leadership.

3. The most radical political and ideological challenge to capitalism today is the socialist revolution unfolding in Venezuela, led by revolutionary socialists in close collaboration with socialist Cuba’s outstanding Marxist leadership team. Beginning with the successful April 13, 2002 revolutionary uprising of Venezuela’s working people, which brought to power a working people’s government, the Bolivarian Socialist Revolution has continued to advance toward the consolidation of a socialist state. Efforts to forge a mass party of the revolution, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), are a critical step forward in this revolutionary process.

4. The Venezuelan socialist revolution is giving besieged socialist Cuba some much-needed moral and material reinforcement, as Cuba gradually emerges from the post-Soviet “Special Period”. The Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is showing with deeds – sharing the oil wealth, wiping out curable blindness on an entire continent – what socialist collaboration on the scale of whole peoples can achieve if the working people have state power. With the Cuban and Venezuela socialist revolutions leading the way, Latin America is the continent in which the struggle against capitalism and for socialism is most advanced.

Working class retreat

5. Australia continues to be one of the most politically stable imperialist countries. The impact of neoliberal attacks on working people’s living standards since the 1991-92 recession was softened by a 15-year period of uninterrupted economic growth, driven by a mining boom sustained by China’s thirst for raw materials and propped up by ever-higher levels of household debt. While corporate profits soared during the 1993-2008 economic boom, strikes fell to historically low levels. With the complicity of the class-collaborationist Labor Party careerist officials who dominate the trade unions, over the last three decades the capitalist class has been able to considerably weaken trade-union consciousness and organisation within the working class. The union bureaucracy knows that any sustained campaign of industrial action in defence of even the immediate interests of the working class will require the emergence of a significant layer of class-struggle militants within the union structures — a development that could pose a serious challenge to its control over the unions.

6. Defeat after defeat for the working class without a real test of its potentially enormous collective power is punctuated by only sporadic outbursts of active dissent and dispersed defensive struggles – and even such sporadic mobilisations are at a low ebb today. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the rulers of the imperialist countries, including Australia, launched a new ideological offensive aimed at undermining working class solidarity by stoking racist xenophobia against the Muslim peoples of the Third World and clamping down on dissent in the name of national security, sending a chill through the progressive dissenting constituency.

7. The enactment of the Howard government’s Work Choices legislation in March 2006 was a significant defeat for the working class. While militant unionists were able to exert some pressure on the union bureaucracy to organise mass protest actions, the militant current was too small to compel the ACTU bureaucracy to launch a campaign of crippling national strikes that could have forced the Howard government to retreat. Instead, the Laborite trade union bureaucracy channelled the opposition to Work Choices into a successful campaign to elect the federal ALP to government.

8. The election of the Rudd Labor federal government in November 2007 has not ended the decades-long retreat of the labour movement. The Rudd Labor government was not elected on the crest of a mass upsurge of independent working-class mobilisation or radicalisation, but as a result of an electoral campaign by the pro-capitalist Labor politicians and the union bureaucracy that featured a series of bureaucratically controlled mass protests against Work Choices that were suspended in the year leading up to the November 2007 election. As a result, the Rudd government has been able to replace Work Choices with its only slightly less repressive Fair Work laws with only the most token protests from the trade unions.

9. Despite some symbolic tinkering around the edges in Aboriginal affairs and climate change policy, Rudd Labor pursues essentially the same pro-big business agenda as the Howard government. Its response to the end of the mining boom and Australian capitalism’s slide into recession this year under the impact of the global recession has been a turn to Keynesian deficit spending aimed at providing even more government subsidies to capitalist businesses. Slightly increased taxes on the “rich” are to be used a means to sell big cutbacks in social welfare spending. The pro-ALP union officialdom has responded to the onset of the recession, not by seeking to defend the immediate interests of the working class, through for example, launching a national campaign of mass education and action for a law to shorten the work week with no loss of weekly take-home pay, but by falling in behind Rudd Labor’s Keynesian “save capitalism from itself” business subsidies policy, supplemented by appeals for partnerships with the employers to implement nationalist “Buy Australian”-based industry plans.

The radicalisation today

10. The default of the Laborite-dominated trade union movement in mobilising its members in mass actions around a range of socio-political issues affecting the lives of specially oppressed sections of the working class (e.g., women workers, Aborigines, asylum seekers, imperialist aggression against oppressed nations such as Afghanistan. Iraq and Palestine) has led to a proliferation of single-issue campaigning organisations that oppose specific policies of imperialist capital. However, these single-issue campaigning organisations cannot provide an overall view of crisis of the capitalist system and project overall solution. Furthermore, lacking an organised mass base in the working class they are unable to organise sustained mass resistance, particularly when the trade union movement is dominated by a class-collaborationist officialdom that subordinates mobilising the organised power of the unions to the electoral needs of the ALP.

11. Promotion of bourgeois electoralism is one of the most prominent aspects of class-collaborationism practised by the union bureaucracy. The class-collaborationist union bureaucrats reinforce the hold of bourgeois electoralist illusions on the workers. They do not explain that the relationship of class forces — which is decided by the clash of class forces in the workplaces, in the streets, and on the battlefields of war — determines what the bourgeois politicians must respond to. Instead, they preach that bourgeois elections and lobbying bourgeois politicians are what politics is all about. When all is said and done, they argue, what determines the course of the government and the society is which bourgeois politicians are elected. As a result, the class-collaborationist union bureaucracy presents the political importance of the unions and mass actions by workers primarily in their ability to help elect those parliamentary candidates most likely to promise concessions to working people.

12. As a result of the pervasiveness of bourgeois electoralism within trade union movement and the weakness of the organised base of the single-issue protest organisations, working class protest and mobilisation is today at a very low ebb. However, the declining moral and ideological credibility the capitalist ruling class’s policies among growing numbers of working people provides the most important political opening for revolutionaries in Australia today. The popularity and impact of progressive documentaries such as Sicko and An Inconvenient Truth point to a search for explanations fuelled by growing awareness of the glaring contradictions of capitalism in decline, from Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction to alarm at the looming ecological apocalypse. The explosive growth of the internet over the past decade has made a much wider range of information, including the full spectrum of radical critiques, readily accessible and more easily shared. A significant minority is relatively open to anti-capitalist ideas and explanations.

13. The strategic goal of the RSP is to build a mass revolutionary socialist party capable of leading the Australian working class and its allies to overthrow capitalism and build a socialist society, but we recognise that we are not such a mass party or anything approaching it. We are only the propaganda nucleus of such a future mass party; propaganda being the dissemination of socialist ideas and explanations to those who are most receptive to such ideas and explanations. All our activities are propagandistic in their goals, that is, aimed at reaching out to radicalising workers and students with our ideas and winning them to our ranks.

14. While we are far too small to directly alter the objective political situation by calling into being mass struggles, this does not mean that our role must be limited to commenting on events from the sidelines. Working with others, we can help initiate or build modest-sized actions that set an example of how to struggle to broader forces.

Left regroupment

15. While our strategic goal is to build a mass revolutionary workers party, we recognise that we are not the only revolutionary socialist organisation in Australia, and that a mass party capable of leading a socialist revolution will not be built solely through the incremental growth of any of the existing far-left organisations. Building towards a mass revolutionary party will require a variety of tactics, among them efforts to unify the existing far-left organisations. However, in today’s conditions of continuing working class retreat the creation of a broad-left party of anti-capitalist resistance is simply not on the agenda. The necessary partners for such a party – substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders – do not yet exist and will not come into existence until there is a sustained mass upsurge of working class resistance.

16. From its formation in May 2001 until early 2003 the Socialist Alliance achieved modest success in facilitating greater practical collaboration and constructive dialogue among its revolutionary socialist affiliates and unaffiliated membership. Since 2003, however, the trajectory of the Socialist Alliance has been a progressive decline while the left unity dynamic has dissipated. Given the formal or de facto abandonment of SA by all its affiliates other than the Democratic Socialist Perspective, the Socialist Alliance is no longer a genuine alliance of socialists but simply the public face of the DSP.

17. The only practical steps we can take towards the eventual emergence of a broad party of anti-capitalist resistance are building our own party, the RSP; explaining the desirability of such a broad-left party as a step towards the creation of a mass revolutionary socialist party; and our participation as a public Marxist party in various united front-type campaign coalitions with the aim of achieving maximum unity in action.

Campus Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity clubs

18. The Venezuela-Cuba axis of solidarity and socialist renewal is inspiring millions of people around the world as the real story gets out and more people are able to experience these revolutions first-hand. We support the work of all organisations building solidarity with the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions.

19. These living revolutions, in all their concrete richness, contradiction and emotional appeal, can inspire youth to become dedicated lifelong revolutionaries and to absorb Marxism into their bones. We know from experience that radical-minded youth drawn around us through this solidarity work tend to be very open to the ideas of revolution and socialism.

20. While the student radicalisation is at a very low ebb today, the university campuses are where the relatively small numbers of radical-minded youth are concentrated. We need to build a solid political base for the RSP on campus. Through this base-building work we aim to educate and train a new generation of Marxist cadres. To achieve this goal, we need to concentrate our party-building efforts on the campuses, consistently reaching out to radical-minded youth with our ideas and recruiting them to the RSP. In particular, we need to expand the regular readership, profile and influence of Direct Action on campus.

21. In addition to the distribution of Direct Action, our major party campaign priority is to establish a network of self-sustaining Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity Clubs on the campuses. We aim to establish a club on one campus in each city where we have an RSP branch. Our aim is for these clubs to develop a life of their own, cultivating constituencies of awareness and support for the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions and among students and staff. This requires persistent attention to developing a core of club activists who can ensure the continuity of the clubs.

22. We prioritise this work because those who are won to supporting the socialist revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela are going to be our key audience in winning a hearing for our socialist ideas. Building an independent network of solidarity clubs allows us to work alongside campus students inspired by the living socialist revolutions in Venezuela and Cuba by who are not yet convinced of the need to join and build a party that aims to lead a socialist revolution in Australia. As such, the clubs provide us with a useful “bridging project” on campus that will fulfill some (though not all) of the functions of a revolutionary youth organisation.

23. The Palestinian people have been the terrible victims of imperialist- backed Zionist colonisation of their national homeland, and have been struggling against it for nearly a century. Each new atrocity by the state of Israel, such as the recent mass slaughter in Gaza, can give rise to a new international surge of solidarity with the Palestinian people. We have been involved in this solidarity campaign, and will continue to be involved in the solidarity committees and the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. However, building the Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity campus clubs is our main priority, and the Palestine solidarity work we do will depend on the state of the campaign and our resources from branch to branch.

24. Our other campaigning activities (eg. other anti-imperialist solidarity campaigns, anti-war, women’s rights such as abortion rights, etc.) also need to be decided on a branch by branch basis in accordance with the state of these campaigns and our cadre resources. We seek to take all our campaign work into the trade unions, especially those unions in which we have members.

Direct Action

25. As a small Marxist propaganda party facing the difficult task of rebuilding in a period of protracted downturn in working class struggle, we need to return to Lenin’s conception of building the party around the paper. Direct Action is our primary outreach, campaigning, recruitment and educational tool. The paper must profile and promote the party and its revolutionary Marxist ideas systematically and explicitly. We are not seeking to hide the party behind the paper.

26. At the same time, we seek to establish DA as an authoritative and widely read publication among the Australian and international left. To achieve this, DA cannot be a party paper in the narrow sense. It must seek to engage a wider audience than those who are already won to the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. The paper must explain and popularise the party’s views without compromising its broader appeal. DA will seek to encourage and promote constructive debate on the left and will seek contributions from a broad range of radical commentators, activists and organisations.

27. RSP branches should seek to organise monthly DA public forums. Each forum should have at least one party speaker who can present the party’s views on the topic in question to facilitate a more regular dialogue with our supporters. Building up these forums into a real institution on the left in each city can complement a rich and varied program of Marxist classes, seminars, workshops, camps and discussions in party branch meetings.

International collaboration

28. The working class in this country will not be able to rise to the level of class consciousness needed to overthrow capitalism until decisive numbers of workers have overcome the petty divisions, narrow parochialism and racist nationalism cultivated by the capitalist ruling class to secure its ideological domination. For there to be a socialist revolution in this rich, imperialist country it won’t be enough for the working class to have more confidence in its own strength. It must also come to identify not with its own relatively privileged position in the global division of labour but with the struggles of the working peoples of the Third World and those of other imperialist countries. For the RSP, international solidarity and collaboration are not just add-ons to the task of intervening in Australian politics. They are at the very heart of how we intervene to win the battle of ideas.

29. The RSP seeks international collaboration based on the principles of mutual respect and non-interference in the internal affairs of other parties. In particular, we seek to facilitate ongoing collaboration and the exchange of views among revolutionary parties from the Marxist tradition in the Asia-Pacific region. We declare our political solidarity with the revolutionary socialist leaderships of the Cuban, Vietnamese and Venezuelan socialist revolutions, and we seek to develop ongoing collaboration with these parties.

Party spirit

30. We must strive to cultivate the spirit of revolutionary comradeship in the RSP. We need a party spirit that can sustain us through the ups and downs of the struggle, that takes from each of us all that we are capable of giving and that gives each of us, in return, something infinitely precious and beautiful – a tiny glimpse of the communist future of humanity.