Successes and good prospects for the Australian Fourth Internationalists
Australia has the reputation in English-speaking countries of be- of the more militant traditions in the English-speaking world.
one of the last countries of unli- The Australian section of the Fourth International,
In fact, it has been one of Socialist Workers Party, is a young section, formed out of the the last hit by the international capitalist crisis. youth radicalization of the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam war
But as another article in this issue describes, Australia's spe- movement. But in recent years, its activity has been centered cial position in the world also includes some particularly sharp in the trade-union movement. The following article, by an SWP structural problems, which are now combining with the world activist, describes the successes of the SWP in establishing itself
The Australian labor movement also has one in the Labor movement in particular.
ing one of the last frontiers, mited horizons and opportunities. economic crisis. Jonathan WEST SYDNEY - The Socialist Workers Party held its largest-ever national conference here from January 5 to 11. With almost 300 people in attendence, the conference was able to record some important successes for the party over the last two years and chart an ambitious course for the coming year.
The theme of the conference was optimism: optimism about the party's prospects and about the struggles of workers in Australia and around the
In the last two years the SWP has grown significantly. In 1981 it grew by 16 per cent and in 1982 by 35 percent.
The party's optimism reflects new openings for socialists in the Australian class struggle.
the SWP took the decision several years ago to base itself in the industrial working class, the overwhelming majority of its members have been industrial workers. This has also been the party's major area of work.
In his report to the conference on the political resolution "The capitalist recession and the fight for socialism", SWP national secretary Jim Percy made the assessment that Australian workers were becoming more open to radical ideas and solutions as a result of the that the party should throw itself into this opening and take every opportunity to link up with working-class forces moving into action, and to help them see the way forward.
The reason Australian workers are not engaging in the determined fight needed to defeat the bosses is not that they have been beaten, but that they do not yet have confidence in their unions to win. The primary reason for this is the timidity of the class-collaborationist official leadership of the trade unions and Labor Party.
Much discussion at the conference centred on new work for the party that opened up in the trade unions after the party reassessed its view of this work last
Whereas in the past the party held the view that revolutionaries should seek to take leadership positions in the trade unions only after a significant rise in the consciousness of workers, in September of last year, the party leadership decided that this view had been incorrect and that revolutionaries should participate actively in the trade unions, up to and including struggles for control of the
These struggles can be important in forward for workers in the fight to defend their living standards against the capitalist
By removing the conservative leaderships wherever possible, they can also push aside a major obstable to
The conference adopted a resolution entitled "Revolutionary strategy and tactics in the trade unions" that outlined this new approach.
Discussion after the report on this document to the conference by National Executive member Sue Reilly centred on SWP members' participation in strug gles and union election campaigns in the car and steel industries, and on the
In the steel industry, SWP members joined with a group of steelworkers called the Militant Action Campaign in an attempt to overturn the right-wing leadership of the main steel union, the Federa-
Ironworkers' campaign received an average of around per cent of steelworkers' votes in the national union ballot late last year.
car industry, SWP members with the shop-stewthe six-week strike in 1981 at the Melship of the auto workers' union that
La significant the vote, even though much of its base the had been ruled ineligible on a union-rules technicality. SWP members participated in this challenge, including in one case as
The conference also the party's work in the growing anti-war movement demanding an end to nuclear weapons. It resolved that the party should step up its participation and fight to have the movement adopt an anti-imperialist, class-struggle approach, including demands to break all ties with the U.S. war machine, and oppose the wars imperialism is waging today against liberation movements in the semicolonial
To help the party take advantage of the new receptiveness of Australian working people to socialist ideas, the conference also decided to run 8 candidates in this year's federal election. This will be the largest-ever socialist election campaign for the House of Representatives (lower house of parliament) in this country's history and will cover one-third of the federal constituencies including all major centres of the industrial working
To finance this and other expansion projects, including the purchase of a new three-storey building for the Melbourne branch, the conference decided to launch the biggest fund appeal in the party's history: for 80,000 Australian dollars.
A feature of the conference was its internationalism. presented on the class struggle in the United States, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong, by guests from those countries.
One of the highlights of the conference was to have been three talks by Pedro Camejo, a fraternal member of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International. However, prevented from attending conference by the Australian ima visa until it was too late for him to fulfill his speaking com-
The conference decided to campaign
against this undemocratic exclusion and, if possible, tour Camejo later this year.
As well as considering the Australian political situation and mapping out an ambitious schedule of activities for the coming year, the conference also included rich discussions on big international issues such as the Cuban, Grenadian, and Central American revolutions, and Poland labor-movement solidarity
The final report to the conference was on the theme "Building an international revolutionary leadership," by National Executive member Larry Douglas.
The report traced the history of the Marxist movement's attempts to build a world party of socialist revolution through the first three internationals, focussing on the methods employed by Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders to build the Communist International.
explained that Leon used essentially the same method in his attempt to build a fourth world organisation of revolutionary parties:
"The problem facing the dramatically different. For the first time since the years 1917-23, there exists a country in which state power is in the hands of a revolutionary internationalist leadership that consciously uses that state power to aid the extension of the world revolution
This revolutionary current and the central role it is playing in world polities today means that enormous steps forward are being made in the single most important task facing the world working class: rebuilding the kind of revolutionary leadership that is needed for victory.
Douglas summed up:
"How to take advantage of such historic opportunities, to link up with revolutionary working-class currents will emerge increasingly from the new
Tom Kerry,
rise of the world class struggle, is at the heart of the discussion we are having in the Fourth International today.
"Our job is to approach these new revolutionary currents with the same openness, honesty, enthusiasm, and confidence with which Lenin and Trotsky before us set out to build the Third and Fourth Internationals.
"The issue is not whether we are to form a new international party today with other revolutionary currents. This is not on the immediate agenda. The issue is whether we orient ourselves today so that we will be marching on the road to a new mass Leninist International."
The conference concluded by expres sing the party's willingness to take that path.
faithful to the end, movement in the 1930s was similar to that confonting us today: how to link up with new class-struggle forces faithful to the future that could transform our small cadre organisations into mass revolutionary working-class organisations."
Douglas described how The following message was sent by Ernest Mandel for the United Secretariat Trotsky's energy from 1933 of the Fourth International to the memorial meeting held in New York on Januwas devoted to turning the International ary 19 for Tom Kerry, longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party of the Left Opposition outwards towards mass United States, the American Trotskyist organization. Tom Kerry was a head of work in the labor movement. the SWP fraction in the maritime unions from the late 1930s until the early was the approach needed to win 1950s. He was one of the central national leaders of the party from the mid-1950s over those working-class forces that under until the mid-1970s when he retired. He was 81 when he died and remained polithe impact of the capitalist crisis were the influence of Social In the name of the Fourth International, I want to express our feelings of Democracy and Stalinism. deepest sorrow on the death of Tom Kerry.
"Trotsky didn't approach this task by Tom symbolized for the entire International the exemplary generation of insisting on full agreement with the prog- founders and builders of American Trotskyism who worked under the leaderram of the International Left Opposition ship of James Cannon and the guidance of Trotsky himself. and excluding those who disagreed with This was a generation who knew how to combine ironhard firmness in the defense of our program with tactical flexibility in intervening in the mass strug-
"He began by distinguishing between gles of the working class and its allies. They knew how to firmly root the party hopeless centrists and both in the American working class and in the world revolution, in the fight for independent working-class action and in internationalism. even potentially were the foundations of their theory and practice. revolutionary. He sought to unite those
To these principles Tom remained