“We have our party back!” That expresses exactly the feelings of all former Revolutionary Socialist Party comrades after a year of unity with Socialist Alternative.

Jon Lamb, a former RSP comrade from Brisbane, made this point at the December 2013 Socialist Alternative conference, referring to one of the themes we were fighting for in the factional struggle in the old Democratic Socialist Party, from which we were expelled in 2008. We wanted our revolutionary Marxist party back, but the Socialist Alliance/DSP leaders dissolved the DSP in 2010. (And now they have also dissolved their youth organisation Resistance!)

Red Flag builds on a long tradition of socialist publications. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin drummed into his supporters in “Where to Begin?”, written in 1901, the role of the newspaper as “scaffolding” in building an organisation:

“The role of a newspaper … is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator; it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour…

There have been “broad parties” aplenty in the past claiming to represent workers, or broader classes, or “progress” in general – parties that are sometimes mass, mostly with electoral ambitions, but with programs that are social democratic, or left liberal, sometimes “all-inclusive”, but non-Leninist and non-Marxist. Such parties are not able to bring about fundamental social change; they cannot break the state power of the capitalist class. For that we need a revolution. We know a revolutionary party is necessary to carry that out, a Leninist party.

Vladimir Ilych Lenin was the founder and, until his death in January 1924, the central leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party, the first party in history to lead a victorious socialist revolution. In doing so, the Bolsheviks proved for the first time in history that it was possible for the working class to forge out of its own ranks a revolutionary socialist party that was capable of organizing the workers and their allies to overthrow the political rule of the capitalist class, establish a working people’s government and to use this government to begin the construction of a socialist society.

In M’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program he states that, “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

At the February 12 National Executive meeting I stated that while I agreed with the general political line of the report that was orally presented by Comrade Stuart Munckton, particularly as summarised in the “conclusion” section (and thus voted accordingly), I had reservations about some of the points made and formulations used in the report. Most of these reservations have been eliminated after reading the printed version of the report (Activist Vol. 17, No. 2). Nevertheless, there are a few passages in the report that I think need further clarification:

In his article on “Determining the class character of the state” (Activist Vol. 17, No. 2), Comrade Simon Butler argues that we should use a modified version of the method that Trotsky first proposed in 1937 for determining the class character of the state. In his November 1937 article “Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?”, Trotsky argued that the class nature of the state is “determined not by its political forms but by its social content, i.e., by the character of the forms of property and productive relations which the given state guards and defends”.¹ Comrade Butler modifies this by proposing to add to the criterion of the property forms the state “defends”, the property forms it “introduces”.

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.

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.