DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

How to make a revolution in the United States

By Peter Camejo

Peter Camejo was a longtime leader of the United States Socialist Workers Party. As a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group associated with the SWP, Camejo was a prominent activist in the student movement at the University of California in Berkeley and in the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was the presidential candidate of the SWP in 1976.

Introduction

On August 17, 1985 the National Committee of the Democratic Socialist Perpective (then named the Socialist Workers Party) voted to end the party’s affiliation to the Fourth International, the international organisation founded in 1938 by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his supporters around the world.

Click here to download a pdf of the DSP's internal bulletin The Activist, Vol 18, #1, which reprints all the reports adopted by the DSP Congress in January 2008 and all counter-reports presented to the Congress by the Leninist Party Faction (LPF). All votes for each report are also noted.

The following three articles are drawn from the Resistance Books pamphlet Change the System, not the climate! It is available from <http://www.resistancebooks.com> for $5.50 plus p/h. The first two article were presented to the Democratic Socialist Perspective's January 2007 Socialist Summer School.

Two of the authors, John Belamy Foster and Dave Holmes will be speaking at the Climate Change/Social Change conference in Sydney, April 11-13. Visit <http://www.greenleft.org.au/conference.php> for more information

Revolutionaries and Parliament The Bolshevik Experience

By Maurice Sibelle

Statement by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, September 17, 2007

The Democratic Socialist Perspective offers its solidarity to the people of Bolivia and the government of Evo Morales in the face of the campaign by US imperialism and the local oligarchy to overthrow the Morales government and destroy the process of change it is leading. We wish to draw attention to this threat and urge the widest possible expressions of support to help the Bolivian people defend their revolution.

The Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) is now calling for the immediate withdrawal of the Australian troops from East Timor. The September 9-10 meeting of the DSP national committee resolved to investigate the prospects for building a public campaign around this demand. Peter Boyle, the national secretary of the DSP, explained the reasons for this decision:

"Since May 2006, our position has been that the current Australian military intervention into East Timor – unlike the intervention in 1999 which we campaigned for because it would advance the national liberation struggle in that country – would not solve the underlying social and political crisis and marked a setback in the struggle.

Click here for the Spanish version of this talk

[The general line of the following report was adopted by the DSP National Committee meeting on April 29 2007.]

This report seeks to reaffirm the general line and positions on the current phase of the Bolivarian revolution in the February 12 report adopted by the DSP National Executive. Subsequent events have shown the general analysis, of the opening of a new phase in the class struggle since the December 3 presidential elections, to be correct. The report contains more information on some of the analysis and formulations raised in this report, that comrades should refer in order to complement and flesh out this report.

By Dave Holmes

The following is the text of a talk presented to the DSP/Resistance educational conference on the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, held in Sydney in January 1998.

As we know, the essential instrument of socialist politics is the revolutionary party. And the most essential weapon or tool of such a party is its newspaper. A history of left political parties — in the West at least — is also inescapably

By Lisa Macdonald

Introduction 
A middle-class political phenomenon 
An opportunity for the left 
Influence of the progressive movements 
State of the organised left