At Thursday’s meeting, speakers Oscar Grenfell and Cheryl Crisp, as well as chair Max Boddy, presented a Marxist analysis of the May 3 federal election.
The election was marked by a mass repudiation of Trumpism, but within the framework of parliamentary politics, the outcome is a pro-business, pro-war Labor government that will collaborate with Trump.
The key ministers who prosecuted the previous Labor government’s militarist and socially regressive policies retain their posts but changes to the ministerial line-up signal a further lurch to the right.
The much diminished party-room was split down the middle, presaging further ructions.
Support the SEP in the Australian federal election! Build a socialist movement of the working class against war, austerity and dictatorship!
The Socialist Equality Party is standing candidates in the Australian federal election to build an independent movement of the working class against Labor, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Greens and capitalism itself. and increasing authoritarianism, supported by every other party.
Australian electoral authorities reject Socialist Equality Party’s registration, despite it meeting membership requirements
The decision was made as the looming election is characterised by mass hostility to the official parties and a growing desire among workers and young people for a genuine alternative.
All the parties of the political establishment, including the Greens, are doing everything they can, with the assistance of the corporate media, to bury all mention of the historic crimes being committed by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
While the media and politicians have pilloried two young nurses for making stupid and politically backward comments about Israel, another incident last week pointed to the manufactured character of the purported “antisemitism crisis.”
Politicians have made inflammatory interventions, prejudicing the legal rights of the nurses involved and using their backward comments to crack down on civil liberties.
Labor is signalling its support for ethnic-cleansing, colonialism and unbridled imperialist criminality, under conditions of war developing globally.
David North addresses book launches in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia
David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the United States, spoke at book launches in Sydney and Melbourne over the past week. The events were part of a visit by North, who has played a leading role in the world Trotskyist movement for more than 50 years, to the SEP in Australia.
The fraudulent charge of treason brought against Syrotiuk is aimed at intimidating and suppressing growing opposition among Ukrainian workers and youth to the imperialist-backed Zelensky regime and the escalating war against Russia.
Six months after his arrest, Bogdan Syrotiuk, the courageous Ukrainian socialist arrested for opposing the war, remains in prison awaiting a drumhead trial in a legal travesty.
This report introduced the discussion and vote on the resolution "Free Bogdan Syrotiuk", which was passed unanimously by the delegates of the Eighth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US).
“We need to stand with Bogdan now, because it’s easy to imagine the alternative: if Ukraine is able to imprison socialists and ban the WSWS without protest, what’s to stop the UK, Germany or the US, from doing the same?”
Phone: (02) 8218 3222
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Capitalist breakdown, the fight against war and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
This resolution was adopted by the Seventh National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), held from October 3-6.
Nine months of intense scrutiny, by the media, state and federal police task forces and inquiries launched by governments and the administrator himself, have unearthed virtually nothing.
The CFPE calls on teachers and school workers to join our ranks to fight for decent conditions and wages for all educators, and a public education system that provides the highest quality schooling for all students.
The carefully orchestrated state-federal operation reflects the strategic importance of the 60-year-old facility to the Australian ruling class, amid escalating plans for war against China.
The more-than-four-month suspension clears the way for a sell-out deal to be cooked up by the Labor government and the union bureaucracy, which has already been boasting for weeks of being “excruciatingly close” to agreement.
Put the SEP on the ballot! Become an electoral member of the SEP! Take up the fight against genocide, war and inequality!
This campaign is essential to ensure that the Socialist Equality Party’s name appears on the ballot papers for the next federal election, as the only party fighting for the socialist alternative to capitalist barbarism, war, inequality and dictatorship.
The IYSSE is the only political tendency that advances a genuine socialist perspective based on the lessons of history and the interests of the working class.
Under the guise of a new privacy policy, the administration of the university in Melbourne is seeking to control all political interactions among students.
The Labor government is seeking to impose budget cuts and further narrow the curriculum in line with big-business demands for a pliant and readily employable youth workforce.
The pseudo-left group combines multiple strains of bankrupt middle-class politics, including open support for imperialist war, the promotion of the anti-Marxist Frankfurt School and of the Pabloite Spartacist League.
This report includes videos of speeches delivered by SEP members at the October 27 meeting, explaining the Labor government’s administration of the construction union and outlining a perspective to fight it.
The past three months have demonstrated that the fight against Labor’s administration of the CFMEU requires a rank-and-file movement independent of the ousted union leadership.
The scrapping of Best Practice Industry Conditions in Queensland was enabled by the federal Labor government’s action in August, placing the construction division of the CFMEU into administration.
While the two previous strikes were national events, this time, workers in Sydney marched alone, cut off from the majority of building workers.
“The government is going for the strongest section of the trade unions on purpose, for strategy. I think the goal is just straight-up austerity against the working class and this is part of it.”
Beams pointed to the roots of the pseudo-left in tendencies that broke from the Trotskyist movement and rejected the revolutionary role of the working class.
Notice of a Chinese live-fire naval exercise in international waters between Australia and New Zealand set off hyperbolic warnings about the “Chinese threat” and demands for greater military spending.
Three years after the start of the Ukraine war, the narrative used by the imperialist powers to justify their provocation and escalation of the war is being exposed as a pack of lies.
The meeting, bringing together representatives of the four largest militaries in the Indo-Pacific, was a clear signal that the Trump administration will intensify military preparations and threats directed at China.
While seeking to lock China out of the Pacific, the Australian-led operation establishes a rapid deployment force for police-military interventions against unrest in the region.
A rank-and-file meeting voted unanimously in favour of a resolution calling for a campaign throughout the universities and working class to defend the victimised Macquarie University academic.
The sudden decision to dump the acclaimed artist and curator occurred soon after the Albanese Labor government’s arts minister phoned Creative Australia’s chief executive officer.
This is a test case for the defence of all those, including academics, journalists, students and workers, being slandered and vilified as antisemitic for opposing the ongoing Zionist atrocities throughout Palestine.
This case is a major attack on basic democratic and legal rights, seeking to set a wider precedent to suppress any dissent against the escalating Israeli mass killings in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon.
Book launch with David North and Evan Blake: Two works, on Trotsky and the pandemic
At an event in Sydney, Australia on Thursday, May 25, World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North launched his new book Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. He was joined by Evan Blake, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, who presented another new title from Mehring Books, COVID, Capitalism, and Class War: A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic.
On Monday, Julian Assange walked out of the UK’s Belmarsh Prison a free man, following five years of imprisonment and nearly 15 years of persecution by a cabal of imperialist governments led by the United States which hounded him for exposing their crimes.
The Australian government's involvement in the plea deal arrangements was the result of mass popular pressure. It followed years of Labor actively assisting the persecution of Assange.
The complaints have a pathetic character to them, but also underscore the fact that the assault on democratic rights associated with the persecution of Assange persists and deepens.
In a press conference, Stella Assange hailed a global support movement for creating the conditions for Assange's freedom, while warning of an ongoing assault on press freedom that had to be fought.
Entering the sixth year of the pandemic, Australian governments continue to maintain a “let it rip” policy, amid rising infection numbers.
The report, riddled with lies and misinformation, is a crude justification for the subordination of public health and lives to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.
The developing avian influenza panzootic and the growing possibility of a pandemic bring to the fore the existential questions for humanity of climate change and the destruction of public health, both of which must be stopped in order to control the growing threats.
This is a direct product of the conscious and planned abolition of virtually all public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID, including the removal of mask mandates in hospitals.
Socialist Equality Party assistant national secretary Max Boddy calls on workers and young people in Australia to sign up as an SEP electoral member.
The SEP has launched an energetic campaign to register with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as a political party. This will enable us to field candidates with the party name on the ballot paper in the next federal elections. We are currently excluded from this basic right due to anti-democratic electoral laws jointly rammed through the Australian parliament by the Labor and Liberal parties on August 26, 2021, which tripled the required membership number to 1,500. This is to block ordinary people from choosing to vote for a socialist candidate.
The working class must have a conscious political voice. Join the SEP today.
Our party fights for:
● Social equality for all!
● An immediate end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
● An end to all militarism and war.
● A scientific program to eradicate the coronavirus pandemic. No to the mass death policies of the ruling elite.
● Against nationalism and racism. For the unity of the international working class.
● Quality, free education and healthcare for all. A decent, full-time job with permanent conditions for those able to work.
● A workers’ government and socialism—democratic control of the wealth that workers produce, for human need, not corporate wealth.
There is no solution to the crisis confronting the working class except by ending the capitalist system. The slaughter being carried out in Gaza is the latest and most bloody expression of the drive by imperialism to World War III. We advance a socialist program that calls for the abolition of a society based on corporate profits, the establishment of democratically-controlled public ownership over big business, and the dissolution of the vast military-industrial complex.
Fill out this form to apply to join the SEP as an Electoral Member.
Membership is free.
In a blatant act of political censorship, the Socialist Equality Party has been deregistered. Nevertheless, the SEP will stand candidates in the federal election, if and when it is called, and conduct the broadest possible campaign for a genuine socialist alternative.
What is required is the struggle for socialism, based on a turn to the working class, the social force whose fundamental interests align with reconstructing society to address the climate crisis.
The SEP has received an important initial response, amid widespread hostility towards the major parties and an anti-war politicisation fuelled by outrage over the ongoing US- and Australian-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
“The Socialist Equality Party are the only ones presenting an alternative to capitalism, imperialism, genocide and the normalisation of mass death.”
A retired nurse and longtime Labor Party member explains why he has quit that party to join the Socialist Equality Party as an electoral member.
The Voice voting patterns demonstrate the intensifying hostility of working-class people to the entire political establishment.
An open letter, issued by a privileged layer of indigenous figures who led the Voice Yes campaign, further highlights the immense class chasm shown in the referendum’s overwhelming defeat on October 14.
Socialist Alternative’s analysis of the referendum is an attack on the working class, exposing this organisation as a rightward moving representative of privileged layers of the affluent upper middle-class.
“The Labor government is not working class, it is an elite group of people, setting up a puppet called the Voice.”
“The criminal ‘let it rip’ pandemic policies of governments—invariably enforced by the labour and trade union bureaucracies—have exposed the brutality of capitalism, and its readiness to sacrifice lives for corporate profit and private wealth accumulation.”
“The same contradictions and crisis of world capitalism are also propelling the working class into struggle, providing the basis for the building of an international anti-war movement.”
A mass network of interconnected rank-and-file committees can and must serve as the foundation for the fight for the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government based on a socialist program.
The ongoing persecution of Julian Assange is bound up with imperialist war, escalating online censorship and a broader turn to authoritarianism.
The program of the Socialist Equality Party is of a principled, not a conjunctural and pragmatic, character. It is based on an analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and an assimilation of the strategic revolutionary experiences of the working class and the international socialist movement.
The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party was adopted by the Founding Congress of the SEP in Sydney in 2010. It traces the historical events and strategic experiences of the working class and Marxist movement spanning more than a century.
Membership in the Socialist Equality Party is based on agreement with its Statement of Principles. The principles of the SEP incorporate the essential experiences of the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century and the corresponding struggle waged by Marxists for the program of world socialist revolution.
The lectures, now all available online, reviewed some of the fundamental lessons of the protracted struggle by the Trotskyist movement for socialist internationalism.
Crisp was a founding member of the Socialist Labour League, the forerunner of the SEP, in 1972, and has played a leading role in the Trotskyist movement in Australia for more than four decades. She was elected National Secretary at the Fifth National Congress of the SEP in 2020.
Max was elected to the position of assistant national secretary at the 2020 SEP National Congress. He writes regularly for the WSWS on issues facing asylum seekers and their inhumane treatment at the hands of Australian governments. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Newcastle, majoring in Aboriginal Studies.
Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.
