Dear Red Ant Supporters!

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.

When: December 7 to December 9, 2024

Where: Market Hall, The University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria Australia + Google Map

Cost: Registration is free

Socialism – Anti-Imperialism – Liberation sessions at a glance

• Climate Crisis and the Capitalist System of Profit: The session will argue that environmental destruction is inherent to capitalism and advocate for a mass-based movement to transition to socialism and renewable energy.
• The Women’s Movement in Australia Today: This session will explore the current state of feminism in Australia, its forms, and why they fail to change women’s societal position.
• Social Movements and the “Mass Action Strategy”: from Anti-Vietnam War to Palestine Solidarity: The panel will discuss the effectiveness of mass action for social change, contrasting it with reformist and ultra-left strategies. It will use the Vietnam War and Palestine solidarity as examples.
• What Was It Like When Australia Had a Revolutionary Party?: A panel will discuss the impact and lessons of Australia’s past revolutionary parties, aiming to make this history relevant to current organising efforts.
• What is a Leninist Revolutionary Strategy?: This session will explain Lenin’s theory on how working-class consciousness becomes socialist consciousness and the relevance of the party form in revolutionary strategy today.
• Australian Imperialism, AUKUS and Anti-China Panic: With speakers from South Korea and the Philipines and Australia, we ask the question, 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?
• Building Revolutionary Parties Inside Imperialist Societies: Practices from Australia, the U.S.A. and Belgium: This session will examine practices from revolutionary parties in Australia, the USA, and Belgium, discussing key experiences and lessons for organising within imperialist societies.

The program in more detail

Day One – SATURDAY DECEMBER 7th

11:00 am: Climate Crisis and the Capitalist System of Profit

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 eradicate global inequality and injustice.

-Lunch-

1:40 pm: The Women’s Movement in Australia Today

When asked about the feminist movement in Australia today, many would find it difficult to explain precisely 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 women’s oppression continue? We need to have this conversation and reflect on the history of the women’s movement to understand the existing challenges and propose key strategies for overcoming these.

3:40 pm: Social Movements and the “Mass Action Strategy”: from Anti-Vietnam War to Palestine Solidarity

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 with 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.

-Dinner & Live Music-

6:30 pm: What Was It Like When Australia Had a Revolutionary Party?

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.

DAY TWO – SUNDAY DECEMBER 8th

11:00 am: What is a Leninist Revolutionary Strategy?

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 a case for its continued relevance and, indeed, necessity.

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.

-Lunch-

1:40 pm: Australian Imperialism, AUKUS and Anti-China Panic with speakers Daehan Song from South Korea and Virginia Suarez from the Philippines

After years of escalating hostility, anti-China hysteria is now peaking. The resulting Cold War atmosphere is used to justify massive military spending and silence dissent. In the 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?

3:40 pm: The Australian Political Situation and the Next Steps for Revolutionary Organising

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 accelerate the longer-term trend of eroding support for both major parties and growing 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 the situation to open further, socialists need to have a clear picture of the national political situation and work out strategies and tactics.

-Dinner & Live Music-

6:15 pm: Building Revolutionary Parties Inside Imperialist Societies: Practices from Australia, the U.S.A. and Belgium with speakers from the US Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Workers Party of Belgium, and Max Lane from Red Ant.

In 1920, Lenin wrote, ‘the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism [is] a concrete analysis of concrete conditions.’ Only on the basis of an analysis of this kind, he argued, can revolutionary activity succeed. However, a concrete analysis of Australian society today must reckon with Australia’s position as a rich, exploitative country in world capitalism, for this fact influences every aspect of Australian society and the economy. Accordingly, if revolutionary organising is to succeed in Australia, it must be attentive to this: Australia’s imperialist nature.

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. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (formed in 2004) is already the most important revolutionary group in the USA, while 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 experiences and lessons for revolutionaries operating in this context and help to bring our struggles closer together.

International special guests include a leading member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Dae-Han Song oversees the Contents Team at the South Korea-based International Strategy Center. 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.

Bert De Belder is a member of the National Council and head of the Department of International Relations of the Workers Party of Belgium (PTB)

With more guest speakers to be announced.

Click here for the full and up-to-date details on our Red Ant website!

Come along to Socialism – Anti-Imperialism – Liberation, join Marxist Leninist socialists and discuss the importance of addressing capitalism’s global threats, such as staggering inequality, wars, genocide, and environmental catastrophe. Meet others who agree on the need for a fundamental change in the system to tackle these various aspects of capitalism’s exploitation and the necessary steps to build collective organisations to fight oppression and destruction.