DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

Speech to the opening rally of the 7th national conference of the Socialist Alliance on January 2, 2010, by Peter Boyle, former national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective:

This report and summary, presented by Peter Boyle on behalf of the DSP National Executive was adopted, by the 24^th DSP Congress on January 2, 2010.

1. Politics of the new party

I wanted to start by showing you this picture of the spontaneous mass rally that greeted the coup-ousted President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras upon his recent return. This is Fidel Castro's reflection on the tumultuous process in Honduras since the coup:

Resistance faces the huge task of trying to unite radical young people in a revolutionary socialist movement in Australia. This means that we need to grow in such a way that we move closer to this goal; being able to assess the political situation, recognise campaign openings and having the organisational tasks and perspectives to get us there.

The economic crisis and its effects are being borne disproportionately by women.

Women workers are highly concentrated in low-wage, less-unionised sectors of the workforce – retail, manufacturing, hospitality and services for instance. According to the International Labour Organisation the labour market projections for 2009 show that the global unemployment rate could reach between 6.3 and 7.1% this year, with a corresponding female unemployment rate ranging from 6.5 to 7.4% (compared to 6.1 to 7.0% for men).

The DSP and Socialist Alliance are fighting against capitalism’s destructive environmental practices, its drive for profit at the expense of working people, its attacks on the rights of Indigenous Australians, its attacks on the civil liberties of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, and its attacks, via the so-called anti-terror laws, on minorities such as the Tamils and Somalis.

Comrades, I’d like to begin with the major world news of the day. In an international opinion poll of the Third World, which the International Olympic Committee essentially is, the winner was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the outright loser was Chicago. This is an indication of the standing of Latin America in relation to the USA in global opinion today.

It is time for the DSP to make a decisive turn towards building the Socialist Alliance as our new party. We’ve been held back for far too long already, first, by the hesitations of former Socialist Alliance affiliates and then by the former minority in the DSP. It was the responsible thing to take some time to deal with the destructive factional split in the DSP but that is behind us now and it is time we moved forward to build the Socialist Alliance as a bigger, more influential and more working class-based socialist organisation, than any currently in existence in Australia.

Since our last DSP NC report devoted to this issue the prospect for the planet has worsened quite considerably.

The latest bad news was a report on May 19 by a group scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based on their studies they concluded that the previous worst-case scenario for global warming by the end of this century has been underestimated by about half. By 2100 the Earth could be an average of about 5 degrees hotter than today, and possibly as high as 7 degrees, on a business-as-usual scenario. This was the first study of its kind to take into account the global cooling effect of an unusually high amount of volcanic eruptions in the 20th century – hence the higher warming prediction for the 21st century.

The January National Committee (NC) discussed the triple crisis that confronts us: climate change, the economic crisis and capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy. This report will focus mainly on the economic crisis, as the area in which there have been the most developments since January, and which increasingly informs the state of the class struggle today.

The January NC international report concluded: “The coming year we will see how bad this crisis is for capitalism. How far can the ruling class go in shifting the burden on the workers and poor?”