It’s been a busy year, and many of us are feeling it. There’s been a wide range of issues we’ve fought on and campaigns in which we’ve intervened. Check Green Left Weekly, check our calendars. With this National Committee meeting it’s time for reflection and assessment. It’s time to do a stocktake of the immediate past and to set the next tasks, but also it’s sometimes useful to do a stocktake of our strategic perspectives, toss up problems, questions, for us to chew on collectively. This report will raise a number of those, for us to discuss here, and for comrades to think on over coming months.

On July 30, two bomb blasts in a crowded marketplace in west Jerusalem caused the deaths of 14 civilians. The Israeli government’s use of this terrorist act as a pretext to tighten its repression of the Palestinian population living under Israeli colonial occupation has again highlighted the ineffectiveness of acts of terrorism carried out by small groups as a means of combating oppression.

By terrorism, Marxists mean attempts by individuals or small groups to achieve political or social change by carrying out acts of violence (political assassinations, taking of hostages, blowing up of buildings) against individual representatives of the ruling class. The purpose of such acts is to exert pressure on the ruling class to change its policies.

The lack of financial accountability of MPs revealed by the “Colston affair” highlights the fact that — contrary to the myths perpetuated by establishment political commentators in the capitalist media and in academia, as well as bourgeois politicians themselves — the parliamentary system exists to thwart rather than implement democracy (“rule by the people”).

As revolutionary Marxists, our internationalist outlook is fundamental. It’s not just being aware of international events and struggles, but totally identifying with the oppressed of the world, and willing to be part of their struggle.

It is widely asserted by bourgeois economists, social scientists, management gurus, journalists and politicians of every stripe that we now live in a new historical era in which national economies, national cultures and national borders are being dissolved and superseded by a rapid and recent process of “globalisation.”

The collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the USSR is undoubtedly the most significant development in world politics since the Second World War. In immediate terms, it has provoked widespread ideological confusion and demoralisation within the international workers’ movement, and on the other side, gloating by the capitalist rulers and their apologists.

Since the late 1970s the US SWP has degenerated into a bizarre political sect, which justifies its abstention from involvement in the mass working-class movement with the shibboleth that it is building a ‘communist party of industrial workers’, ie, of blue-collar workers.

In my opinion, Greg Ogle’s review of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham’s book The End of Capitalism in GLW #256 concedes far too much to the drivel of these “post-modernists”. For example: He writes, “many on the left abandoned such economic reduction long ago [i.e., the Marxist understanding that “society is structured by class, of people and institutions being constrained (if not positively formed) by material conditions which ultimately relate to a particular production dynamic”], not least because of powerful feminist criticism that gender oppression could not be reduced to class.”

Comrade Chris Slee’s answer to the question of whose policy was confirmed by the October Revolution – Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory or the Bolsheviks’ policy of a “two-stage revolution” – seems to be that both were partially proved right and both were partially proved wrong.