Articles & Discussion

The Activist – Volume 10, Number 7, August 2000
By Doug Lorimer

The Communist Party of Australia has recently published a pamphlet by David Matters entitled Putting Lenin’s Clothes on Trotskyism which claims that the DSP’s rejection of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is really a cover for its support for Trotskyism. However, the real purpose of the pamphlet is to criticise the DSP’s position on the 1998 waterfront dispute.

The Activist – Volume 10, Number 2, February 2000
By Doug Lorimer

During the first imperialist world war, a trend began to emerge among the Russian revolutionary Marxists that argued that since national oppression could not be abolished without an economic revolution against imperialism and capitalism, Marxists did not need to concern themselves with the problems of a political revolution to achieve democracy. Instead, the “nascent trend of imperialist Economism” (as Lenin characterised it) argued that all that was needed to abolish national oppression was the anti-capitalist economic revolution, i.e., the socialist revolution.

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 8, November 1999
By Doug Lorimer

“From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half way… we shall bend every effort to help the entire peasantry achieve the democratic revolution, in order thereby to make it easier for us, the party of the proletariat, to pass on as quickly as possible to the new and higher task – the socialist revolution.” (V.I. Lenin, Social-Democracy’s Attitude to the Peasant Movement, September 1905)

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 8, November 1999
By Doug Lorimer

Phil Hearse’s polemic against my pamphlet (Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution: A Leninist critique, Resistance Books, Sydney, 1998) proceeds from a fundamentally false assumption, i.e., that my pamphlet “attempts [to give] a general strategic view” of revolution in “the semi-colonial and dependent semi-industrialised countries”. He alleges that my pamphlet presents Lenin’s policy of carrying out the proletarian revolution in semi-feudal Russia in two-stages (a bourgeois-democratic and then a socialist stage) “as a general schema for the ‘Third World’ today”. Nowhere in my pamphlet, however, do I make such a claim.

The Activist – Volume 9, Number 7, October 1999
By Doug Lorimer (Sydney West branch)

In her discussion article “Can Men Be Feminists?” (Activist Vol. 9. No. 6, October 1999), Comrade Mary Merkenich poses the question, “Why is it such a big deal for men to be called feminists?”, without even seeming to realise that the reason is because she herself has made the claim that men cannot be feminists and therefore they cannot be members of the independent women’s liberation movement. Furthermore, she claims that her view is, or has been, the party’s policy.

Green Left Weekly #376 – September 15, 1999
By Doug Lorimer

The Democratic Socialist Party has called on supporters of democracy in Australia to mobilise to demand that the UN and/or the Australian government immediately send troops to East Timor to help the East Timorese people resist and defeat the Indonesian occupying army’s genocidal campaign to physically extinguish the East Timorese people’s struggle for liberation from Indonesian rule.

Green Left Weekly #346 – January 27, 1999
By Doug Lorimer

At its 18th congress on January 5-10, the Democratic Socialist Party adopted a document which concluded that China, like Russia and the other former Soviet republics (as well as the former “Communist”-ruled countries of Eastern Europe), is ruled by a capitalist state. The adoption of the document, entitled Theses on the Class Nature of the People’s Republic of China, marked the conclusion of a 14-month discussion within the DSP on the class character of the Chinese state.

Links No 13 – 1999
By Doug Lorimer

Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question is a collection of essays written over the last 24 years by Michael Löwy, director of research in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. The book was published under the auspices of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education, founded by Ernest Mandel and other leaders of the Trotskyist Fourth International.

The Activist – Volume 9, No 4, 1999
By Doug Lorimer

Peter Taaffe’s pamphlet on Cuba (first published in 1978 and reprinted in 1982) consists of three articles taken from the paper of the British Militant organisation (now called the Socialist Party), of which he was, and still is, general secretary. The first article presents an analysis of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba up to the expropriation of capitalist property and the establishment of a planned economy. The second article analyses the character of the group which led the Cuban socialist revolution, the central conclusion of which is indicated by the article’s title: “Power in the Hands of [a] Bureaucratic Elite”. The third article is an attempt to substantiate this view in the light of the foreign and domestic policies of this leadership group.

Green Left Weekly #287 – August 27, 1997
By Doug Lorimer

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.