Building the Revolutionary Party

Jim Percy Selected Writings 1980-87

This volume of writings and speeches by Jim Percy, one of the founders of the Democratic Socialist Perspective and its longtime central leader until his death in 1992, spans the years 1980 to 1987.
This was a period of considerable ferment in Australian and world politics. In 1978 and 1979 anti-imperialist revolutions took place in Afghanistan, Iran, Grenada and Nicaragua. At home, the March 1983 federal elections resulted in the ouster of the Fraser government and the beginning of more than a decade of ALP rule under Hawke and Keating. Labour's general neoliberal orientation and the experience of the ALP-ACTU's wage-restraining Accord produced significant disillusionment.
Through this period the DSP (or Socialist Workers Party as it was then) remained a small cadre organisation but it was extremely active and reacted with considerable dynamism to the political openings that presented themselves.
It also engaged in some significant rethinking — on Trotskyism and the Fourth International, its international connections, the Labor Party, and how to build a mass socialist party.
This collection provides a fascinating insight into the thinking of a talented and committed revolutionary leader and the problems of building a militant socialist organisation in a developed capitalist country.