We mourn our friend and our comrade Gail, who lost her valiant battle against cancer on July 2. It’s so sad, a life cut short. But it was a life well-lived, a proud life, a productive life, a life on the side of the poor and oppressed of the world. Gail was such an inspiration to others, with her 40 plus years of struggle. She never gave in. She never accepted the injustices, the crimes, the rottenness of the system.

For those who believed that the overwhelming demonstration of US military power in Afghanistan and Iraq would “shock and awe” the rest of the world — and particularly Washington’s foes and aspiring rivals — into accepting its goal of making the 21st century a “new American century” of US political and economic global domination, 2006 was not a good year.

This is the second of two volumes of key writings by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published by Resistance Books covering the birth of Bolshevism as a political trend and a party organisation. The first volume contained the main works written by Lenin from 1899 through 1902 in which he polemicised against the opportunist “economist” current then dominant among the adherents of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The second volume covers the period from the second congress of the RSDLP in August 1903 to the setting up of the Bolshevik party organisation (officially called the Bureau of Majority Committees) in December 1904.

New York – Memorial meetings were held on November 11 in Oakland, California, and on November 18 in New York City to celebrate the life of revolutionary socialist and union activist Caroline Lund. She died on October 14 from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Caroline Lund, a lifelong fighter for socialism, workers’ rights and women’s liberation, died at her home in Oakland, California, on October 14, aged 62. She will be sorely missed by her friends and comrades in the US and around the world, especially her lifelong partner and comrade Barry Sheppard.

The proposal that the Socialist Alliance can in any way start along the path towards becoming a real mass-based class struggle party is wrong. The objective conditions, i.e. a radicalisation producing new partners for such a project, do not exist. Deciding to become purely an internal tendency in the SA was wrong and is even more wrong today. We have dissolved the public political presence of the DSP for a project that has no basis.

At its first meeting after the DSP congress (on February 1), the majority of the national executive adopted a statement on the formation on the last day of the congress of the Leninist Party Faction. The statement declared that the “fact that NE minority platform supporters met during the 22nd Congress as an exclusive caucus led the Congress delegates to pass the following motion:

Sydney – Fairfield City Council has caved in to pressure from the right-wing Vietnamese Community in Australia (VCA) and agreed to the group hoisting the defunct flag of the old Saigon regime on council land on three occasions each year.

At its April 2003 plenum, the DSP national committee adopted a report on the international political situation which made the observation that “[t]throughout the 1990s one of the greatest factors bearing down on the morale of the Cuban revolutionaries was the Cuban Revolution’s isolation in Latin America – the fact that there was not a single other revolutionary government in the hemisphere. Today, however, the Cuban Revolution has an ally in Latin America – the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, which has made significant progress in dismantling the institutions of capitalist power in an oil-rich, partially industrialised country with a population more than twice the size of Cuba’s”.

Comrades, the main task for this DSP congress is to correct the mistaken line we began to implement in 2002-03 and formally adopted at our last congress two years ago. The clear choice before us is – to maintain or abandon that false perspective.