Left Politics

By Allen Myers

An Australian Associated Press report a few months ago unintentionally pointed out one of the absurdities of modern capitalism. This is that a good part of the so-called wealth of capitalist societies doesn’t really exist. According to the report (as printed in the October 1 Sydney Morning Herald), the outbreak of the international economic crisis in 2008 caused personal wealth (excluding housing and self-owned businesses) in Australia to drop by 27%. It quoted the multinational Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as saying that Australian personal wealth fell by more than $600 billion from the year before. And — shed a tear for them — 32,790 households stopped being millionaires (leaving only 49,452).

By Doug Lorimer

The first issue of the Socialist Alliance’s Green Left Weekly for this year, dated January 20, carried an article headlined “New period of left unity and struggle launched”. The article quoted SA member Dave Kerin as saying that the seventh national conference of the SA, held January 2-5, with some 220 participants, signified that “the Socialist Alliance becoming a true alliance of a very broad cross-section of views that are of the historic left”.

By Marce Cameron

Since becoming Cuba’s acting president in August 2007, Raul Castro has called for a nationwide debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist revolution. This debate has been taking place in workplaces, neighbourhoods, Cuban Communist Party (PCC) base committees and informally in bars, cafes and on the streets. Increasingly, a free and frank debate is also taking place in the island’s pro-revolution media, in particular the two daily papers Granma and Juventud Rebelde.

By John Percy

The Revolutionary Socialist Party gained a good start to the year with its Marxist Education conference in Sydney on January 2-5. In addition to the high quality talks on Marxist theory, history and politics today, the conference provided a boost to RSP members’ morale.

By Allen Myers

Marx and Engels’ establishment of the scientific basis of socialism was indispensable to the struggle for a better world because the fight against capitalism must be a conscious one in a way that capitalism’s fight against feudalism was not.

During an International Meeting of Left-wing Political Parties, attended by members of 55 political organisations from 31 countries held in Caracas on November 19-21, 2009, Hugo Chavez, the central leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and president of the country’s revolutionary working people’s government, proposed the formation of a new, fifth international association of socialist parties. At its meeting on November 29, the national executive of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Australia endorsed Chavez’s call. Below are excerpts of his remarks motivating the call for the Fifth Socialist International to the PSUV’s first extraordinary congress.

By Allen Myers

“Socialist Alliance structures remain too loose and weak to win, educate and train new socialist activists and the Socialist Alliance caucuses and working groups have only partially begun to organise united interventions into the movements.” This statement was made in a resolution adopted by the 22nd congress of Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), held in January 2006. Since the end of 2003, the DSP, formerly the Democratic Socialist Party, has described itself as a “Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance”. The SA is no stronger today than four years ago; indeed, in many respects it is weaker, but the DSP leadership has decided that from the next DSP congress, to be held on January 2, the DSP will “merge” into the SA, thus handing to the SA the tasks of winning, educating and training new socialist activists. What has changed? Only the DSP leadership’s perception of how best to keep reality at bay.

By Allen Myers

From its very beginning, capitalism has always created resistance in those it exploits and oppresses. Well before capitalism had overrun the rest of the world, in Western Europe, where it originated, it was engendering opposition, at times quite fierce: sabotage of capitalist property, illegal workers’ associations, local rebellions. These indications that something was wrong led thoughtful people to seek solutions to the social evils they saw around them such the increasing dispossession of peasants, mass unemployment and petty crime.

The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the 21st Century
By Iain Bruce
Pluto Books (2008), 240 pages (pb), $52

Reviewed by Chris Atkinson

By Allen Myers

When industrial capitalism developed in Western Europe in the 19th century, the great majority of businesses were privately owned. That is, they were the property of a single individual, or sometimes a family, or sometimes two or three partners with defined shares. There was no normal mechanism by which some outsider could become a part owner of the business.