We can be very proud of the votes for the Revolutionary Socialist Party candidates, Van Rudd in Lalor (Vic) with 457 votes, and Hamish Chitts in Griffith (Qld) with 485.

At the Byron Bay Writers Festival in August, a popular ideologue of the environment movement, Ian Lowe, told a packed-out marquee, to a round of applause “and someone is shovelling coal into the steamer to get us there faster ...”: “The only responsible thing for citizens to do is organise a mutiny”.

The Revolutionary Socialist Party’s campaign to run Van Rudd against Julia Gillard and Hamish Chitts against Kevin Rudd was a clear step forward for the profile of revolutionary socialist ideas among working people in Australia.

In their 1977 book The Emergence of American Political Issues, Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw argued that the “the most important effect of mass communication”, i.e. the media, is its ability to “mentally order and organise our world for us.

Yogyakarta – The beach-side town of Parangtritis, on the southern coast of Yogyakarta, is currently the site of a protracted and bitter struggle over land between the local government and people.

Van Rudd for Lalor (Vic)

Van Thanh Rudd was born in Nambour, Queensland and is currently working as a visual artist in Melbourne's west. His involvement in the arts over the last 15 years included his early obsession with landscape painting around Nambour and Brisbane. Once moving to Melbourne in 1995, he studied figure drawing in various community venues around Melbourne.

[This is an abridged version of Cuban President Raul Castro’s speech to the closing session of the Ninth Congress of Cuba’s Union of Young Communists (UJC) held in Havana, Cuba, April 3-4. The complete text can be read at Agencia Cubana de Noticias].

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”.

An Sydney Morning Herald 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.

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.

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.

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 as

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.

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

in Jayapura – On November 3, a small group of left-wing activists met in Jayapura, capital of Indonesia’s Papua province, to form the Papuan Democratic Peoples’ Movement (Garda-P).

“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.

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.

As workers filed out from their shift at the Buana factory in western Jakarta, they were greeted by members of the Solidarity Alliance for Workers Struggle (GSPB) who handed them leaflets demanding wage rises and improvements to working conditions. Very few of Indonesia’s mostly women industrial workers are unionised.

Sam Wainwright, the Socialist Alliance candidate for the Fremantle City Council (FCC) ward of Hilton, was elected to the FCC on October 17 with 33.4% of the vote. Wainwright received 438 out of 1310 valid votes, 100 more than his nearest competitor, Dave Hume, a member of the Australian Labor Party. (The election was first past the post, not preferential.)

One aspect of the Democratic Socialist Perspective’s course of dissolution into the Socialist Alliance, analysed by John Percy in Direct Action #15, is the DSP’s increasing unwillingness to discuss politics, particularly with others on the left.

The Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) has decided to press ahead with the final stage of liquidating itself into the Socialist Alliance (SA), which claims to be the largest socialist organisation in Australia.

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. For Marxists, this has a precise scientific meaning. Capitalists take for themselves the monetary values created by or belonging to other people – usually workers, but also small farmers and, to varying degrees, small shop owners and nominally independent tradespeople. This value is what their capital consists of.

The National Network for Women’s Liberation (Jaringan Nasional Perempuan Mahardika – JNPM) is an Indonesian women’s liberation organisation consisting of local women’s committees, coordinating bodies and women’s sections of labour, student, peasant and urban poor organisations committed to the liberation of women.

For 17 years, from 1990 through to 2007, I regularly contributed articles on Indonesian politics to Green Left Weekly, a newspaper published by the Democratic Socialist Party (Democratic Socialist Perspective since 2005).