About the library
The files are mostly historical. They have been included because they represent some of the key issues or debates of the times. Inclusion does not indicate agreement with the politics expressed.
There are three socialist groups from Australia whose papers are included here. The first is the Communist Party of Australia. This was the main communist grouping in Australia, with a history back to the 1920s. By the 1970s it could best be described as Eurocommunist.
The International Socialists (Australia), part of the International Socialist Tendency, whose founding organization is the Socialist Workers Party (UK). This political grouping has a state capitalist analysis of the world. It argues that the 1917 workers’ revolution in Russia, while initially successful, was defeated by 1923 when Joseph Stalin rose to power and from that point on, Russia was a state capitalist society.
Socialist Alternative and the ISO in the USA share the same political analysis. More recent articles from Socialist Alternative magazine are included in this library. Socialist Alternative split from the Australian ISO in 1995.
The Socialist Workers Party was a Trotskyist group, part of the Fourth International. In the late 1970s it merged with the smaller Communist League. The party dropped its Trotskyist politics and renamed itself the Democratic Socialist Party in the 1980s. It was aligned with the SWP in the US and the International Marxist Group (IMG) in Britain.
Documents from Canada, Britain and the USA have been included, in part because they are hard to get in Australia (though increasingly on the net now) and also because the gay liberation and left politics in these countries were very influential in Australia. There is a complete history of the Canadian journal Body Politic at http://www.rbebout.com/oldbeep/beepint.htm