[The following talk was presented at the launch of Resistance Magazine on August 22, 2003.]
We’re here to launch and welcome the new Resistance Magazine, and I’m here to talk about the old – Resistance magazine’s precursors, our publishing traditions.
Our heritage takes in all the best traditions of radical and socialist journalism. Internationally, there’s Lenin’s Iskra of course, even back to The Red Republican and the Friends of the People, * which published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto in 1850. There’s the US Militant in its healthy days, and Intercontinental Press * (library files). In Australia, we can look to the newspaper Direct Action * published by the Industrial Workers of the World early last century, and the publications of the Communist Party in its early years, and the Australian Trotskyists’ Militant *.
But our specific tradition begins in the mid-’60s and is located in the youth radicalisation that flourished here and in other countries, and the enormous opposition to imperialism’s war against the people of Vietnam. It begins here in Sydney, with the birth of our political current and the formation of Resistance in 1967.
In 1965 the first demonstrations against the Vietnam War were held in Sydney, and a large number of newly radicalising students at Sydney University joined the Labour Club. In 1966 I was elected secretary of the club, and that year we produced two issues of Left Forum * , the club magazine (now renamed the Socialist Club). The September issue contained an editorial, headed Results and Prospects, which argued the need for an off-campus youth organisation.
In 1967 Resistance was formed, (for the first few months calling ourselves SCREW, the Society for the Cultivation of Rebellion Everywhere). It was an instant success, drawing in campus students, high-school students, young workers and unemployed. We had a hectic schedule of political, social, and cultural activities at our headquarters in Goulburn Street in the city.
In these early years we had no party, just a loose collection of people grouped around some former members of the old Trotskyist group that had split in 1965. These supporters of the Fourth International published an occasional roneoed journal Socialist Perspective.* Six issues appeared in all.
During 1969 and 1970, Resistance published the Resistance Bulletin*, an A4 roneoed magazine with news of our activities, and lots of reprints from overseas. It was the first real attempt at a somewhat regular magazine, although it was still largely for members and supporters.
In 1968-69 we also published Student Underground, as the news-sheet of High School Students Against the War in Vietnam. It was a spectacular success.
As well as the Sydney-wide Student Underground, we began getting out news-sheets for individual high schools, with names like The Spark, Super Rat, The Yellow Submarine, Out of Apathy, Bleah, The Sydney Line.
Eventually Student Underground graduated to a 4-page printed tabloid format for its last two editions in 1969 *. This was the immediate precursor of Direct Action, the precursor of Green Left Weekly, and it gave us training in producing a newspaper.
From mid-1969 to mid-1970 an intense factional battle took place within Resistance, finally leading to a split. In May 1970 our tendency in Resistance started publishing the magazine Socialist Review *. We were known as the “Socialist Review Group”, the precursor of the DSP.
At the end of August 1970 we held the first national conference of Resistance at the University of NSW, attended by 45 comrades, with delegates from Sydney, Canberra, and Adelaide, where we had expanded to in the course of 1970. We adopted a range of documents and reports which codified the political victories we had won in the course of the previous year. We had a functioning national organisation at last, which we renamed the Socialist Youth Alliance, and Jim Percy was elected its first national secretary.
We also launched our newspaper Direct Action, borrowing the old IWW name from the time of WWI. The first issue appeared in September 1970, as a monthly 12-page newspaper, published by Resistance, selling for 10 cents. *
To quote from our first editorial: “Direct Action… will attempt to present the position of the Socialist Youth Alliance in a clear and coherent way.
“To publish a paper without an organisation to build and be built by it is political irresponsibility. It is to play with politics. Only when a paper has an organisation to build, and that organisation has a programme to guide it, does a little left-wing venture such as ours take on any meaning.”
When Direct Action was launched, the Vietnam War was at its height. The movement against Australia’s involvement had mobilised hundreds of thousands of people around the country. In May of 1970, 100,000 people had poured into the streets of Melbourne – one of the largest political demonstrations in Australia’s history. The first issue of Direct Action was sold at the second national Vietnam Moratorium mobilisations in September 1970, and the demand for such a new left paper surpassed even the expectations of our enthusiastic young paper sellers. People queued up to buy. At the Melbourne rally, where we were just getting a foothold with four supporters there, more than 600 copies were sold, with one comrade selling 450 on the day.
The early Direct Action was produced under very trying conditions, a far cry from the computerised DTP setup we have today. Copy was typed on an IBM proportional spaced typewriter. Headlines were set letter by letter with Letraset, which most of you wouldn’t know what it is, but it was a tedious, time-consuming messy process. Pages were laid out with scissors and paste. And just to make things extra difficult, the office was a shed open to the elements on one side, where at certain times of the year the ants or termites in the roof would swarm, scattering wings and dead bodies over the layout pages.
Our party group, the Socialist Review group, held its founding conference in January 1972 in Sydney. 100 people attended. We adopted the name Socialist Workers League, adopted a program, constitution, and documents on other political issues, and Direct Action became a joint paper of Resistance and the SWL.
In April 1972 SYA held its 3rd National Conference, in Melbourne, attended by 170 people, and Direct Action went fortnightly.
Unfortunately before 1972 was ended our new party had split, under the pressure of a factional struggle in the Fourth International, the international Trotskyist organisation we’d become a part of. The minority split to form the Communist League and published a paper The Militant *.
In July 1975 we decided to launch a separate paper for Resistance, called the Young Socialist *. (We’ve been campaigning against uranium mining for a long time! And against education cutbacks.) Direct Action became just an SWL paper. So Resistance members had two papers to sell.
During the [Whitlam dismissal] political crisis at the end of 1975 we pushed Direct Action to a weekly schedule. The Socialist Workers League conference in January 1976 changed our name to Socialist Workers Party, and also took the decision to produce Direct Action as a regular weekly.
In 1978 we were finally able to overcome the split that had occurred in 1972, and in several stages were able to reunite into the SWP. As preparation for the unity, in 1977 we actually pioneered then the idea of a two-in-one paper. For 11 issues from October to December The Militant had four pages at the back of Direct Action. * (The comrades from the Communist League saw it as Direct Action having 12 pages at the back of Militant!) There was a joint editorial, and by the January 1978 fusion conference had cemented a unity that serves as a model for others on the left.
In 1978 Young Socialist changed its name to Resistance * (still campaigning on uranium!), and in June 1980, the Socialist Youth Alliance national conference changed our youth organisation’s name back to Resistance also. The separate Resistance magazine had generally appeared every two or three months, in tabloid format. In 1983 we produced a special A4 magazine format anti-nuke issue. The separate magazine was suspended in 1983.
We restarted it in 1988 *, again appearing roughly every three months.
In 1989 we changed the party name from SWP to DSP, and the last issue of Direct Action appeared at the end of 1990, and we launched Green Left Weekly at the start of 1991 *.
Since then we haven’t felt the need for a separate Resistance publication. Green Left Weekly, as well as being a paper able to respond to all the campaigns and draw in many independent activists, has been an excellent paper for Resistance as well as the DSP.
But with the huge number of high-school students and other young activists drawn around Resistance as a result of the anti-racist walkouts in 1998, Resistance members felt the need for a more identifiable Resistance magazine for these new activists to write for and distribute.
And with the hugely increased profile for Resistance as a result of the walkouts, with countless TV and radio interviews and features, innumerable press articles, columns and features, we felt that having Resistance magazine as part of Green Left Weekly would be immensely beneficial to Green Left Weekly and the DSP as well. So again we had a two-in-one paper, until the 400th issue of GLW in April 2000.
Now, with the development of the Socialist Alliance and the prospects for greater unity on the left, Resistance again sees the importance of having its own separate magazine, Resistance. Resistance of course will continue to give 100% support to Green Left Weekly, writing for it, selling it, and using GLW to build Resistance.
But this new Resistance is a fantastic and necessary step forward in today’s world, with imperialism on the rampage, and for the current political situation in Australia. Let’s welcome it enthusiastically, and make sure it reaches the thousands of radicalising young people out there who need it and are waiting for it.
[Editor’s note: The asterisk points most probably indicate the publications that the DSP current drew its political inspirations from as well as the various incarnations of publications that it has produced or was closely associated with in its various stages of development.]