Red Ant National Conference 2024: Socialism - Anti-Imperialism - Liberation

Capitalism has created a world of staggering inequality, of wars and genocide, of looming environmental catastrophe. Only a fundamental change of that system can address these global threats.

Join Red Ant for our 2024 conference to discuss capitalism’s exploitation of the Global South and working people, its military conflicts and genocide, its racial and gendered oppression, its ecological devastation, its unparalleled divide between the rich and poor, and lessons from the history of resistance to these horrors.

This conference will focus on the problem of socialist organisation. What sort of forms of collective organisation are needed TODAY to fight oppression and destruction and how do we build them?

Program at a glance:

SATURDAY DECEMBER 7
10:00 am    Climate Crisis and the Capitalist System of Profit
12:00 pm    The Womens’ Movement in Australia Today
2:15 pm      Social Movements and the “Mass Action Strategy”: from Anti Vietnam War to Palestine Solidarity
4:00 pm      What is a Leninist Revolutionary Strategy?

SUNDAY DECEMBER 8
10:00 am     What Was It Like When Australia Had a Revolutionary Party?
12:00 pm     Australian Imperialism, AUKUS and Anti-China Panic
2:15 pm       Building Revolutionary Parties Inside Imperialist Societies: Practices from Australia, the U.S.A and Belgium
4:00 pm       The Australian Political Situation and the Next Steps for Revolutionary Organising

--Detailed Program--

SATURDAY DECEMBER 7

10:00 am
Climate Crisis and the Capitalist System of Profit
Andrew Martin and Rjurik Davidson
The capitalist system can’t stop destroying the environment. Capitalist production is for private profit, where businesses and countries compete against one another for their own survival. There is no prospect of ending environmental destruction within this competitive system, which resembles a war zone. Revolutionaries argue that if we are serious about saving the planet we have to be serious about replacing the system of capitalist production for private profit with a society that puts people and the environment first — socialism. For this to occur, we must build a powerful mass-based movement to replace the international and Australian governments with ones that can lead the transition to renewable energy, to environmental repair, and to the eradication of global inequality and injustice.

12:00 pm
The Womens’ Movement in Australia Today
Ana Cavalcante, Madeline F. & Nandini Shah
When asked about the feminist movement in Australia today, many would find it difficult to explain exactly what it looks like. The movement exists in the form of neoliberal feminism, NGO feminism, and recent reactive campaigns to the realities of oppression - regression in reproductive rights and healthcare, alarming rates of feminicide, sexual violence and family and domestic violence. Why are these forms of feminism unable to change the overall position of women in society? Why does womens’ oppression continue? We need to have this conversation and reflect on the history of the womens’ movement in order to understand the challenges which exist and propose key strategies for overcoming these.

2:15 pm
Social Movements and the “Mass Action Strategy”: from Anti Vietnam War to Palestine Solidarity
Harley R, Hugo M & Rjurik Davidson
History shows that social change occurs through mass action, in which people take their lives into their own hands and organise together. This democratic strategy can be contrasted to two other approaches: the reformist strategy which focuses on winning positions of power and the ultra-left strategy of direct action by a minority. This panel examines why mass action is the most effective strategy, using the historical example of the Vietnam war and the current-day campaign for Palestinian liberation. It discusses the mass action approach, the role of the united-front tactic, direct action, election to positions, mass organisations and institutions - and all the components of winning permanent social change.

4:00 pm
What is a Leninist Revolutionary Strategy?
Nandini Shah, Brendan Duncan-Shah and Sam Coleman
The class interests of working people lie in the complete abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the regimes of gender and racial oppression that support it and are supported by it. Lenin defined ‘socialist consciousness’ as consciousness of this fact: of the irreconcilable nature of the interests of working class people and the capitalist system as a whole.
But how does the consciousness of working people become socialist consciousness, consciousness of the antagonism between their own interests and the system? If it doesn’t arise spontaneously, then how does it arise? How do people come to the conviction that the whole system needs to be abolished, and not merely reformed?
Lenin’s theory of revolutionary strategy proposes an answer to this problem, and proposes an organisational form suited to solve it in practice: a party of a particular type. Against those who would say the party form is in some way outdated—a moribund form of political organisation only suited to the early twentieth century, if ever—this panel will outline the specific meaning of Lenin’s concept of the party and make the case for its continued relevance and, indeed, necessity.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 8

10:00 am
What Was It Like When Australia Had a Revolutionary Party?
Max Lane and Barry Healy
Since the decline of the Communist Party of Australia and the demise of the Democratic Socialist Party in the 2000s, there has been no revolutionary party in Australia. During this period, class and social struggles, where they did occur, have been spontaneous, small in scale, fleeting, and often directionless. This panel will offer reflections on the experience of being in a revolutionary party, on what a revolutionary party was able to achieve when one existed, and on the lessons to be learned from this legacy, both positive and negative. Its aim, above all, is to make the history of revolutionary organising in this country more well-known and usable for us in the present.

12:00 pm
Australian Imperialism, AUKUS and Anti-China Panic
Nick D, Daehan Song
Australian foreign policy has always been determined by its membership within a small club of imperialist powers that dominate the world economy, as well as by its ‘junior’ status within this club. Although a ‘junior partner’ of the larger imperialist powers like the US, Australia remains a powerful and constant source of imperialist oppression over non-imperialist nations in Asia and the Pacific.
After years of escalating hostility, anti-China hysteria is now peaking. The resulting cold war atmosphere is being used to justify massive military spending and silence dissent. In a context of the Australian ruling class taking us down a path that could easily lead to war, how should anti-imperialists work to oppose Australia’s war-mongering? How can we build regional solidarity to fight the US-led imperialist bloc and their aggression against China?

2:15 pm
Building Revolutionary Parties Inside Imperialist Societies: Practices from the USA, Belgium and
Australia
Brian Becker (Party for Socialism and Liberation), Workers Party of Belgium (TBC), and Max Lane (Red Ant)
This panel considers the practice of building revolutionary socialist parties in imperialist societies like Australia, the United States and Belgium. We will hear from leaders of important revolutionary projects inside imperialist countries. Brian Becker was a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in 2004. The PSL is now the most important revolutionary group in the USA. The Workers Party of Belgium has long been exceptional in the imperialist world in that it remained a large and powerful party through an epoch of widespread retreat and decline. Max Lane was a founding member of Red Ant collective. These are very different projects, each from different historical traditions that exist in very different situations. They are united by a struggle to build up revolutionary consciousness and struggle behind enemy lines - inside the imperialist core countries. The discussion will examine key experience and lessons for revolutionaries operating in this context and help to bring our struggles closer together.

4:00 pm
The Australian Political Situation and the Next Steps for Revolutionary Organising
Sam King
Australia is among the most politically stable imperialist countries. Yet even here large numbers of people – especially young people – are questioning or rejecting the Australian contribution to genocide in Palestine and increasing economic insecurity at home. These issues are accelerating the longer term trend of eroding support for both major parties and increasing political openings for struggle and opposition. Left social-democratic projects like the Greens and revolutionary socialist groups are growing in this context. To organise effective interventions that can force open the situation further, socialists need to have a clear picture of the national political situation and work out strategies and tactics on that basis.

SPEAKERS

Brian Becker is the National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition. He is a founder of and a central organiser for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Max Lane is renowned internationally as a writer and translator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer – a leading Indonesian dissident intellectual during the military dictatorship. Max was a key leader of the international solidarity movement against the Indonesian dictatorship and helped unite socialist opponents from Indonesia and East Timor with those in Australia. His latest book is Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship. He is a founding editor of red-ant.org and has been a socialist activist since 1981. He is a Fellow of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. See maxlaneonline.com

Rjurik Davidson is a novelist, editor and literary and film critic. His two acclaimed novels are Unwrapped Sky and the Stars Askew. He is winner of the Ditmar Award as Best New Talent and the Aurealis Award for his short fiction.

Dae-Han Song is a writer and campaigner from the International Strategy Center in South Korea. He is the author of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s May 2024 dossier The New Cold War Is Sending Tremors through Northeast Asia.

Sam King is a founding member of the Red Ant Collective and the author of the Marxist theoretical work Imperialism and the development myth: How rich countries dominate in the twenty-first century (Manchester University Press, 2021), Is China Imperialist (Red Ant Publications) and other works.

Ana Cavalcante is a Brazilian-Australian activist working mainly in the area of Violence Against Women. She was a member of the Socialist Democracy (DS) group in the Brazilian Worker’s party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) and an organiser in its youth group (Kizomba) in projects such as the World Social Forum. In Australia, Ana has been involved in Pro-abortion and Anti-violence Against Women campaigns and work, particularly in the struggle for the rights of survivors of violence on uncertain visa status.

Andrew Martin is a rank-and-file union militant with two decades of industrial experience in four Australian states. He has held delegate positions in the AMWU and MUA. He fought to initiate the industrial action against the sell-off of Queensland Rail in 2009. Andrew was the key leader of strike actions against 12-hour night shifts at the Port of Melbourne in 2018. He joined the socialist movement before the Iraq war in 2003 and has also been active in the refugee rights campaign in Western Australia.

Barry Healy is a life-long socialist activist, beginning with involvement in the Vietnam Moratorium Movement as a teenager. He has been active in many tumultuous struggles, such as the fight for civil liberties against the repressive Bjelke-Petersen Queensland government, anti-uranium mining and other environmental movements. Currently Barry is active in community projects against climate change.

Nick D is an Asia Pacific solidarity activist and Indonesian language speaker currently working as a writer and translator. He has been involved in Cuba solidarity and climate justice movements in Sydney as well as campaigning to link left and socialist groups in the region. 

Harley R is a Melbourne based communist primarily involved in trade union solidarity, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ activist campaigns.